Before you send out a promotional or educational email to your customers, how much time do you spend on the headline? It’s probably not enough, as one recent email marketing survey showed that every word in the headline of your email can have a significant impact on if the recipient opens it. A leading email marketing company analyzed 24 billion emails delivered with 22,000 distinct words in the headline. The results showed that:

Personalization Is Important. Using a template or macro to automatically include the name of the recipient meant that it was far more likely that they would open the email. This was true for just using the first name or the last name, but the open rates were two to four times higher if both the first and last names were used.

Time Sensitivity Drives Open Rates. When emails used terms like “urgent,” “breaking” or “important” that implied a time sensitivity, open rates increased significantly.

Free Isn’t the Perfect Solution. Many email marketing experts assume that including the word “free” in any email will entice people to open. While it’s true to a small degree overall, in some industries such as travel and transportation, real estate and medical, using “free” actually reduced open rates. Interestingly, the word “freebie” appeared to be much more powerful than “free.”

Donation Requests Get Ignored. Words directly associated with charity such as “donation” or “fundraiser” caused open rates to fall dramatically. More ambiguous words such as “helping” also reduced open rates but only by a minor amount.

Announce Things to People But Don’t Remind People. When a headline “announced” something or “invited” someone to do something, open rates were high. They fell when the email “reminded” a person of something. It was even worse if the email threatened the reader with “cancellation.”

Word Pairs Matter. Some combinations of phrases, such as “Thank You,” made open rates go up. Other word pairs weren’t so powerful. Phrases such as “sign up” and “last chance” made open rates plummet.

Capitalization Can Help. One of the quirkiest findings of the research was that the capitalization of the email headline appears to have a correlation with open rates. Specifically, people were slightly more likely to open an email if all of the words in the headline were capitalized, but were slightly less likely to open an email if just one of the words was capitalized.

When you start a pay per click advertising campaign, what you are really doing is beginning an engagement with customers that you hope lasts for a long time. You aren’t just trying to get them to click on your advertisement on time; you want to convert their click into a purchase or action. But it can go even deeper. A well planned PPC campaign can lead to building long-term relationships with customers.

A pay per click advertising campaign should ideally have a limitless life cycle. Within this life cycle, there are four key stages that will mark the relationship you have with a customer who is initially engaged by the campaign. And within each state, there are several metrics that you can use to determine the effectiveness of the campaign:

Attract: This is about getting initial eyeballs for your advertising and is measured by total impressions. This tells you how effective you were at picking the right PPC outlets. You’ll want to pay special attention in this stage to targeting the right keywords and identifying your target audience.

Capture: This is the “engagement” process when someone takes the action of clicking on your link. You’ll track this by measuring the total number of clicks along with the click-through rate – the clicks divided by the total impressions. This will give you an idea of how effective your ad is at getting people to click on it.

Convert: At this stage, you want to take the potential customer who has clicked on your ad and take them to the next step. If you are an eCommerce site, this would mean closing a sale. If you offer a service or a product that you don’t sell online, this can mean setting up an appointment or getting information for further follow-up.

When you reach this stage of your pay per click advertising campaign, you’ll want to install Conversion Tracking and Analytics software tools on your site. This will allow you to perform a wide range of analysis including conversions, costs, costs and revenue per conversion, return on investment and average Cost Per Click and position.

Retain: Once you have converted a click, you want to turn them into a recurring customer or, if they didn’t convert, find out why. You can track both the number of returning visitors and the revenue they generate to get a sense of how well you are retaining potential customers. You can also analyze the clicks they took on your site to see if there were any stumbling blocks that kept them from converting.

As you move from one PPC campaign to the next, you’ll want to remember the lessons you learned through previous campaigns. The more data you are able to gather and analyze will help you target and build effective advertising campaigns.

Local search sites such as Google+ are a key element of modern small business Internet marketing. But you need to make sure you are taking the right steps in order to maximize your local search visibility. Here are some of the basic things you need to make sure you are doing with your local search page:

LOCATION

Physical Address: You need to let people know where your business is located but this can get tricky if your business is located just outside of a major metropolitan area that you would like to target (such as being in a suburb of a larger city). Your best bet is to create local pages on your site for that city to boost search results. Google can also see where a user is located and often will cater results to their location.

You can also add a city and state to the title tag on your main landing page and other site pages to give sites like Google a clue to your business’ true location.

Listing Citations: Citations are mentions of your business’s Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP). You want to make sure that these are always consistent from listing site to listing site. Using slightly different business names, addresses or phone numbers will hurt your rankings. This is especially true for the NAP you have listed on your local search page versus the NAP listed on your website.

You also want to make sure that you are only listed on high quality sites. Use a tool like GetListed.org to find the leading local search directories. You can also do a web search for your business category in your area to find top results or go to Whitespark’s Local Citation Finder. Locally-relevant citations like Chamber of Commerce listings are positive, as are citations from sites relevant specifically to your industry.

Phone Numbers: Always use your local area code instead of a toll-free number in a local listing.

ORGANIZATION

Domain Authority and Links: Your site will rank higher in local search results if it has a high “Domain Authority.” This metric is based on a website’s age and quality. Doing solid SEO work with local SEO services like eVisible also help. Having high quality links to your site provide a strong signal to search engines about your site. Also, make sure the link you publish on a local search site is your home page or another page with high Page Authority.

Site Verification: When you create a local listing on a site, they will typically ask you to verify it before it goes live. This could be through a link or a verification code sent via a postcard or email.

CONTENT

Business Categories: It’s critical that you take the steps to make sure your business is categorized correctly. If you are setting up a Google+ Local listing, you’ll have to give your general business type and then be able to drill down to specific subcategories.

Reviews: Having a lot of positive reviews for your business is a great thing. However, Google will be concerned if they see a high volume of reviews come in too quickly — this is a sign that the reviews are fake. Encourage customers to give positive reviews but don’t try to “buy” reviews. Having positive third-party reviews (such as from newspapers and blogs) can also improve rankings.

Business Name: If you are starting a new business, you might rank higher more quickly if you include the service you provide in your name. But don’t rename your business or use a different name online – this will only hurt your rankings.

The rules of search engine optimization have changed dramatically in the last few years. Google responded to the glut of low-quality content with Panda and Penguin, algorithm updates that placed an emphasis on quality content and organic search engine optimization rather than keyword-stuffed articles and manipulating site code.

The most important thing to think about when creating an SEO strategy for your website is the visitor experience. This wasn’t always the case; until recently, Google wasn’t concerned about the user experience when determining site rankings. This has changed, as Google is smarter about reviewing sites in a way that mimics how users interact with the site. In short, the best way to improve your link popularity is to have a website that provides useful content and information to visitors.

Adapting to the new SEO landscape means rethinking old tactics that were considered to be the industry standard just a few years ago. Here are four examples of how SEO strategies have shifted recently:

Build Blog Relationships Instead of Buying Links

While Google still places a high value on having your site linked on other sites, the concept of “buying” a high volume of  low quality links via a link network is no longer considered to be a good SEO strategy. In fact, if done incorrectly, you might get punished by Google for this. Instead, you should focus on doing outreach to blogs that are a natural fit for your site. Reach out to them and try to enter into a mutual relationship where you provide their readers with interesting content in exchange for links.

Focus on the On-Screen Design of Your Website

It’s still important to have a website that has a common sense architecture and that has a solid internal structure. But it’s now just as important to have a site that looks great and has content that flows naturally. Google’s spiders can read sites to analyze where and how content is displayed and you need to have a website design that takes advantage of this.

Expand Beyond a Limited Set of Keywords

Until recently, the prevailing method that search engine optimization consulting services used to increase a site’s page ranking was to focus on a limited amount of keywords and use them in the page content, title tags and header tags. Google is now smarter about how it evaluates keywords for rankings. It’s better to come up with keyword groups of related words and use them organically in your on-site content.

Concentrate on Branding

Google frowns on paying for anchor links on unrelated sites. Instead, it wants to see your company’s brand have strength. If this occurs, the power of your brand will give an extra boost to your related page rankings.

Doing SEO efforts, building social media platforms and other online marketing activities are useless unless you have a plan. Just like how you wouldn’t go for a hiking trip into the woods without a detailed map, you shouldn’t do online marketing tactics without establish your marketing plan first. Developing your marketing plan helps you to get the most out of your small business Internet marketing and maximize your ROI.

It takes time and effort to develop a cohesive and successful marketing plans. Here are seven steps you need to take in order for your marketing plan to have a chance at succeeding:

1. Identify Your Position in the Marketplace

Customers are drawn to businesses that they consider to be leaders within their industry. Just as importantly, if they feel that your company is made up of experts in their industry and are people who spread reliable and useful information to customer, they will be very receptive to your marketing efforts. Your marketing plan should include ways to interact with people within the industry to build your credibility.

2. Strengthen Your Brand Positioning

At its core, your brand is really a summation of the way that people feel about your company when they hear its name. Ideally, you want people to have immediate positive associations with your brand regardless of the situation. Engaging in brand reinforcing tactics such as charitable campaigns or non-product targeted advertising can give people a good feeling about your brand.

3. Build Long-Term Awareness of Your Brand

Many people ignore a company or their brand if they have no need for their services at that exact minute. But subconsciously they might remember the brand if it is reinforced. When they are suddenly in need of what your company has to offer, the building of long-term brand awareness pays off and you have a new customer.

4. Attract New Customers

Performing web analytics on your current customers is one of the best ways to develop tactics to attract new sales leads and turn them into customers. Do research to find out how customers decided to purchase your goods or services. This can be as direct as sending customer surveys or you can track the entry points that people used to get to your site and make purchases.

5. Retain Existing Customers

It’s a common mistake to get so concerned about marketing efforts designed to bring in new customers that you end up ignoring your current customer base. Remember that any place that your current customers come into contact with your brand is a marketing opportunity. This can include your website, social media sites, ads or even the packaging on your products.

6. Plan for Success

The online world is filled with companies who were so successful that they saw their sales skyrocket faster than their infrastructure could keep up. This usually leads to shipping delays, unfulfilled orders and dissatisfied customers. Your marketing plan should have plans in place for what to do if you meet — or exceed — your “best-case scenario” expectations for your marketing plan.

7.  Analyze Your Results

If you don’t know how to analyze the results of your marketing efforts, there’s no way that you can know which tactics work or why certain tactics failed. Make sure that your marketing plan has clear and quantifiable goals and has ways in place to measure the success of your tactics as you work toward your goals.

The recently completed SES San Francisco 2013 was a great event for anyone interested in learning the latest trends in search marketing, PPC advertising and SEO creation. But you can take advantage of the many learning opportunities made available at the show even if you were able to attend. Many of the presentations and reports that were discussed at the show are still available for free download. Here is a sample of some of the best:

• When people come to your website, you may have as little as five seconds to engage them before they make a decision about whether or not to leave the site. The free e-book from Internet Marketing Ninjas’ Kim Krause Berg (https://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/internet-marketing-ebooks/natural-website-conversions.html) details the secrets to making sure that people stay on sites and don’t click away.
• Wouldn’t it be great to know exactly which combination of ad descriptions and ad titles lead to the best results? Now you can access this information thanks to the Ad Combination Performance Heat Map shared by Bing Ads Evangelist John Gagnon at SES San Francisco (https://www.slideshare.net/JohnGagnon) The color-coded chart shows that, for example, that using the term “coupon” in an ad title is generally powerful, but not when paired with an ad description that mentions “discounts.”

Forrester Consulting and Tealium teamed up on a survey to understand the changing role of tag management (https://tealium.com/offers/evolution.html). The results show that tag management is moving into the realm of data collection and usage.

When most people think about how public relations tactics can help their SEO campaigns, the first thing that comes to mind is to write press release. While it’s true that well-crafted, keyword-rich and interactive news releases crafted by press release writing services can help your SEO and your marketing efforts, press releases are far from the only public relations tactics that can boost your search engine rankings.

Some of these tactics involve establishing your company as an authoritative brand within the space; others involve marketing efforts that also benefit others. All of these tactics can help you generate publicity and help with your SEO:

Make Charitable Contributions: Being a good corporate citizen serves several purposes. A donation to a worthy charity helps people in need and can be a tool for your own promotion. Work with the charity to promote your donation. You can get creative and come up with a charity angle that is unique and will attract media attention.

Hold Unique Contests: Running a contest like a scholarship essay competition or product giveaway serve several purposes. They can generate social media links to serve as social signals; they can provide drive brand awareness; and they can provide reasons for media stories that will also boost your SEO. Making the contests unique and interesting — such as a food eating contest — helps.

Be a Guest Contributor: Pitch the executives at your company as “guest contributors” to local, national and industry media outlets and blogs. If customers read intriguing content with their names attached to it, they will think of them — and your brand — as thought leaders in the field. You can use ghostwriters for the content if needed and attach a name later.

Serve as Guest Talent: Many industries have TV or radio shows specific to their market. Get your executives to appear on these shows. It will help your brand and create links from the shows’ websites that will boost your SEO.

Speak at Industry Events: Getting your executives in front of convention attendees is a great tool for increasing visibility and creating links. You can host your own event as well.

One of the most important but often overlooked parts of any SEO campaign is landing page optimization. This is the process of making sure that your landing pages – i.e. your home page and other key pages on your site – are designed for SEO success as well as to convert visitors to customers. You can see why this is so important – after all, what is the point of getting customers to your home page if they are going to leave your site before they buy anything?

Even though it’s apparent that increasing your landing page conversion rate is critical to the success of your site, not everyone knows how to do this. To help you out, we’ve compiled five easy steps to help turn curious site visitors into happy customers:

Customer Validation: Potential customers want to see that people just like them have had positive experiences with your products or services. You can let your past sales work for you by aggressively seeking testimonials from your customers and posting them prominently on your website.

Make Customers Feel They Are Missing Out: The “herd mentality” is a real thing when it comes to online marketing. Customers are more likely to purchase your product if they feel like other people are doing the same thing. Call if safety in numbers or not wanting to miss out on the next big thing. You can play to this by showing how many people have recently purchased or tried out your product or offering.

Customize Your Pitch: Customers want to feel like they are special and not just one of the many people receiving a sales pitch. There are many ways that you can customize your sales pitch to reach out to customers on an individual basis. You can use software to insert a person’s name or hometown, or send a different pitch to male or female customers.

Keep Access Limited:  What’s the best way to get people curious about something? Keep it hidden from them. You can do this with your online content as a way to get customers interested in what you are offering. Give them a little taste of some interesting content but ask them to send their email address to you in order to read the rest.

Speed Matters: Don’t overlook the speed of your website. If your website is slow to load, potential customers might give up and go to a different site.