That article lead to a series of debates and ‘the Google argument’ arose frequently. The term digital is often linked, in the minds of many marketers, customers and Web users, with Google – as in, “digital is the future, traditional is the past.” So, with that in mind, “how important is it to be on the first page of Google?”

It’s impossible to argue against the power of Google. The numbers themselves are just amazing. In the US alone there were over 2 million searches for “white and gold dress” in just one day! (Haven’t heard about the dress that nearly broke the Internet? Check it out here). Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average (visualize them here), which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide. Seriously, wow!

Google is certainly massive and, like traditional media, it is here to stay. People talk about a decline, and perhaps there will be, but until there is a different way to quickly and efficiently search the Web, Google is likely to stay number one. I’m aware of ‘in app searches’ and how this challenges Google in the long term, and how they’ve recently lost contracts with Mozilla and Apple to be the default search engine, but I think it will be long time before any other mechanism closes in on the power of Google in digital.

When considering Google rankings, it helps to take a look at Page 1 search results. Choosing the city and business type at random, I’ve done a search for “Plumbers Charlotte.” The results page is home to a range of paid adverts, located at the top and down the right hand column, one organic result and the ‘local 7 pack’ of map related listings. Each listing situated above the fold is monetized, with the exception of the single organic result. Below the fold, there are 9 organic results, including Yelp, Yellow Pages and Angie’s List. 6 of the organic results are Charlotte-based plumbing businesses. Page 2 has 8 plumbing businesses listed in the organic results.

Google suggests that there is, on average, just over 1,000 searches for Charlotte Plumbing. This number is relatively high, making it worth ranking for. However, it is important to remember that dedicating a large percentage of your marketing budget to Google AdWords and search engine optimization tactics is a very risky strategy. These days, it is both difficult and expensive to land on the first page of Google’s search results, as well as difficult to achieve. Research has shown that click through rates drop off rapidly after the first page of search results (they fall from an average of 36.4% for the first spot to 2.2% for the 10th result). On Page 2, click through rates are even lower.

Meanwhile, there are many other ways to generate traffic online, from social media to blog posts, referrals, local search engines, Internet Yellow Pages and review sites like Angie’s List and Yelp. Another great method is to have your traditional media, such as newspaper and radio ads, reference your website.

Yes, Google is big. It’s (perhaps) growing. It’s important. That said, it is certainly not the be all and end all for most businesses and it pays to think outside the “Google Search” box.

Image Credit: SEO by India7 Network, via Flickr, CC License

Since different platforms require different ways of thinking—Facebook posts are longer than those for Twitter, which have a different voice than LinkedIn status updates —there’s no real cut and paste. We have, however, put together this toolkit to help you create better content, faster. Bookmark this Online Marketing Toolkit for templates, tips and tools that you can use over and over again to enrich your social media accounts, your business blog and even your company website.

Building an Editorial Calendar

Where are you in your business blogging journey? Whether you’ve just started or have been blogging for years, it’s helpful to create and refer to a well-thought out editorial calendar. However, there’s no need to re-invent the wheel – check out the Blog Content Planning Guides and Editorial Calendar Templates by B2BInbound to get you started.

Creating the Title for Your Blog

Need help filling that calendar with ideas? While the content is up to you, there are many scientifically proven ways in which to effectively present your ideas. Are you going to be doing a case study this week or just covering the basics? This list, brought to you by Freelance Writing Solutions gives you great templates for possible blog titles that will catch a reader’s eye. No muss, no fuss.

Writing a Blog Post

As important as your business blog is, the more time you can save while still creating quality content, the better. B2Binbound suggests using their blog template that takes you through a checklist for creating valuable but concise articles, consistently. Creating your own template can be a great way to maintain your voice when inviting informed colleagues or guest bloggers to write a piece.

Downloading Images Quickly and Legally

We’ve talked in the past about the importance of images in breaking up wordy text and visually representing ideas. There are tons of places online such as Free Images and Google Image Search that allow you to search a single keyword and receive great quality images for free. Google Image Search now has the option to search images by usage rights and is a leading site to find free stock photos for your blog.

Resizing Images Without Photoshop

In order to maximize space, it’s important to be familiar with the image sizing guidelines pertaining to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and other platforms. Socially Stacked’s The Ultimate Social Media Template Guide offers interesting tips and tricks and lays out the recommended dimensions for a wide range of social networks.

Now that you know the right sizes, upload your image into iPiccy and either resize or crop the photo. You can also apply beautiful photo effects and filters, all within seconds and completely free.

Sending Your Content to Different Channels

Now that your blog post is done, marketing it through your different channels will be a breeze with these helpful social media templates that offer effective options for building your statuses faster.

The Next Web’s templates will help grow your Facebook Page, while HubSpot is ever helpful on Twitter and all other social media sites.

Recycling Old Content

You don’t need a skilled graphic designer to recycle existing content into something exciting and new. When the time comes, Simple Booklet lets you turn your existing marketing collateral into web-based booklets that you can then post across social networks, email and embed on your website.

Checking for Spelling and Grammar

Even the work of the best copywriters and content creators requires a second look. Save time by slipping your content—whether it be a lengthy blog post or a short Facebook status—into Online-Spellcheck.com to ensure it is polished and typo-free.

Voilà!

Instead of re-inventing the wheel, visit these resources for help creating an editorial calendar outline, writing blog and social media posts, downloading and resizing images, breathing new life into old content and proofreading. Save time and enrich your content with this Professional Online Marketing Toolkit and send it to your friends!

What are your favourite tools to use? Let us know in the comments or on Facebook.

1. Looking for a definition? Type “define” into the search bar, followed by the word in question, and Google will retrieve the meaning for you. Quicker than a dictionary.

2. To search within a website, type “site:” followed by the URL. Follow this up with your search terms.

3. Optimize your 404 pages with internal links, a clever image and amusing copy. This helps users get back on track, and user-friendliness is a search engine fav.

4. Taking a catnap at your desk? Type “set timer for” into the search bar and set the Google timer that pops up. The timer will beep when nap time is over!

5. Packed inbox? Search for that one specific email you need, in the proper folder, by typing your keyword into Gmail’s search bar and adding “in:sent” or “in:primary” at the end.

6. Work on your website loading speed until it is under 4 seconds. Google favours sites that load in no time, as many users won’t return to a site that takes longer than that.

7. Upload great content. Valuable, engaging blog posts and the like boost traffic organically – keep ’em coming, Google will notice.

8. Use the ‘minus’ sign to exclude search terms and get where you’re going faster. For example, if you’re looking for a digital agency located outside of Toronto, you would type “digital agency -Toronto”.

9. Search for web pages with similar content to a site you’ve already visited by inputting ‘related:’, followed by the URL, into the search bar. What’s one more Tumblr account to follow?

10. Grab a friend and type “do a barrel roll” into the search bar and hit enter. You’re welcome.

From dictionary definitions to optimizing 404 pages, reducing your website’s loading speed and creating fantastic content that your users (and Google!) will love, these tips are guaranteed to make life a bit easier, and search engines a bit less confusing. Do you have a favourite trick that isn’t listed here? Contact us on Facebook or Twitter!

Sources: Huffington Post, Social Media Today, Maximum PC, Telegraph

Image Credit: google-tips-tecnomovida by Tecnomovida Caracas, CC License

Unlike with Facebook P.P.C., the clicks/interactions resulting from a Google AdWords campaign originate exclusively from keywords, the corresponding phrases of which are chosen by you, the campaign manager. This offers you the ability to cast an incredibly wide net of search terms relating to how you think your customers are looking for you, then cull the ones that turn out to be ineffective. Google’s Keyword Planner tool (a free service that’s part of the AdWords network) can even help you discover keywords pertaining to your business that you might never even have thought of otherwise.

You Only Pay For Results

One of the biggest selling points of P.P.C. advertising is that your credit card is only billed it people actually click on your ad. What this means is that Google affords you an essentially unlimited trial and error period to fool around with different keywords and demographic targeting options until you get it right. It’s a very compelling case on Google’s part: Despite having a more expensive average cost-per-click ratio than Facebook, the AdWords network offers exposure to a much wider range of users (ie. everyone in the world who uses Google) and allows you to direct them to specific pages within your site. The same performance-based billing applies to the Google Display Network, which is the section of AdWords that allows you to showcase full image ads on an extensive range of popular websites that your potential customers could be browsing.

Campaign Segmentation

Let’s say, for example, that you work for a creative firm which offers an array of different web design and online marketing services, and that you want to market them separately under one campaign in the AdWords network. Not only does Google allow and encourage this, they make managing multiple ads quite easy. You could create one about web design, one for social media management, one for back end development (etc.), then track their respective performances both individually and in the context of the whole campaign. You can also assign different budget for different ads within a campaign, focusing the bulk of your spend on products and services that you’re trying to push more than others.

The simpler and cleaner a page layout your website has, the more seamlessly it can be accessed and indexed by search crawlers. Stick to short URLs where possible and avoid separating words within them with underscores (“_”) in favour of hyphens (“-”) or no formatting at all (Google will still be able to detect the individual words). Every single page should have some form of link back to the homepage, and should also link to as many other pages within the site as possible where it makes sense per the content (but don’t force it). Put simply, the more robust your internal link structure, the easier it is for search crawlers to get around and make a judgement as to the subject matter of your website.

Individual Product/Service Pages

If your website features a moderate to large number of products and/or services being offered, it’s ideal to have individual, fully-descriptive pages for each one of them. Though this can be a time-consuming task both writing and development-wise, it pays dividends in terms of Google exposure because it means that every page is optimized for at least one keyword associated with the product/service in question. As an example, let’s say you’re a real estate agent who advertises homes for sale on your website: If you feature all of the available properties in one scrolling page without offering an option to click through on each one of them to “find out more”, Google will lump all of them (and their associated keywords) together and make your website less likely to be found for a broader number of important terms.

Plugins

Plugin issues fall more on the development side of SEO diagnostics, but they’re prevalent enough to warrant checking for them if you use plugins on your site. Old plugins, whether aesthetic, functional or otherwise, feature outdated lines of code that can confuse search engines and cause ranking penalizations if you don’t update them frequently. Additionally, you’re running the risk of giving hackers a figurative “unlocked door” into your site since most plugins don’t automatically update themselves.

At first it may seem obvious: “Why would I pay someone else to write my content when I’m the one who knows my business best?”. The answer to this question is more complicated than you may expect: In order for your site to be ranked favourably by Google and appeal to the widest possible audience, your content must be both engaging and strategically written with keyword phrases relevant to your business and location.

What does this mean? Essentially, there’s a style in which you can write your text that will give your site a higher likelihood of being indexed by Google. Known as “on-page optimization” in search engine circles, this method relies on the strategic dispersal of keywords that are related to your field of work, both in the body text and the various “tags” that lead people to your site. If you write your content passively in the style that you would write anything else, you may not only be missing opportunities to get discovered on the search engines, but could be unknowingly provoking Google penalizations. Here are the fundamentals of on-page optimization:

Title Tags

A title tag is the blue clickable hyperlink that represents your website on a search results page, and is arguably the most important piece of real estate in terms of attracting traffic. Whichever keywords you use in your title tags help search engines determine what your site is about, and are cross-referenced with your body text to ensure that they’re relevant to the site’s overall subject matter. Google tends to truncate any title tags longer than 65-70 characters, so it’s important to use the real estate wisely with properly researched keywords.

Meta Descriptions

A meta description is the blurb of text that appears below the title tag on a search results page, essentially acting as a free advertisement for your site. You have approximately 160 characters to describe the content of the page you want the searcher to click on, and if you choose to leave the field blank, Google will automatically populate it with text from within the body of the page. Since Google doesn’t index text within meta descriptions, you have a bit more freedom to write in an unrestricted way.

Keyword Density (Within Body Text)

This is where things get slightly tricky. Google imposes strict penalties on any site that they feel is trying to game the system, with one of the most classic offending tactics in their eyes being “keyword stuffing” (overusing a keyword repetitively). If you create your content yourself, you run the risk of unwittingly using a keyword too many times, even if you’re writing naturally. You also must write each page in a way that is relevant to its corresponding title tag, so if you happen to accidentally go off topic in the body text, this can also result in penalization.

Outsourcing your website’s content writing is a wise decision that goes hand in hand with the design process. If you’re at all skeptical of your ability to adhere to the rules of search engine optimization, it might be a good idea to seek outside help.

SEM is very similar to SEO, the key difference being that you’re paying the search engines directly to get your website seen as opposed to optimizing the site yourself so that it’s likely to happen naturally. It’s worth mentioning that SEM is how Google makes the vast majority of its profits. Put simply, you choose a set of keywords that Google thinks you’re likely to get found for (given budget and location), then they gives you a rough estimate of how much your credit card will be charged every time someone clicks through to your site.

Like anything in life, there are pros and cons to SEM, particularly on a local level. Pro: you’re getting hyper-focused data from the world’s largest search engine; Con: the smaller and more specific your desired market, the less likely Google is to know how to target it. Take the island of Bermuda, for example. As one of our target markets, we’re constantly perplexed at the lack of search marketing attention paid to this location. As it stands, the only type of Bermuda businesses currently getting indexed on Google Places are restaurants and hotels, with other fields being unable to set up a listing. Basically, if you run a small business in what Google deems to be an obscure location that falls outside of those two fields, you might not be able to leverage the full benefits of SEM.

Another thing working in SEM’s favour is Google’s recent decision to encrypt all of their keyword data for organic searches, meaning they’ll soon be taking away free access to specific statistics, i.e. our ability to see how many people are searching for given keywords on a month-to-month basis. With this development, any small business owner who currently uses the Google AdWords keyword tool to sniff around as to what his/her potential customers might be searching for will now have to either choose a different strategy or bite the bullet and start paying for local SEM.

If you plan to start an SEM campaign for your local business, there are a few things to consider. First and foremost: it’s complicated. Despite Google giving you a trove of data and search marketing tools to tinker with, there’s still a trial and error period where you’ll have to test which ads/keyword combinations work, and which don’t. Without the proper guidance, you’re likely to end up wasting money initially. Secondly, just like with SEO, SEM requires an ongoing time commitment that many business owners are unable to commit to, and don’t feel comfortable delegating to one of their employees for lack of experience. If you understand the importance of web traffic but are unable to commit your time to increasing it, it might be time to enlist professional services to make use of this fantastic tool.