Posts Tagged ‘Pole Position Marketing’

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Every year as the entertainment industry gears up for the Oscars, movie studios, directors and producers put out “For Your Consideration” ads in attempt to influence the voters. OK, maybe influence is the wrong word here. No, it’s not.

But before I put out my own For Your Consideration blog post/ad for my fellow teammates, let’s talk about what the heck The SEMMYs are. The SEMMYs are the brainstorm of our buddy M². While there are plenty of awards already for the blogging community, most honor the blog in total, rather than individual blog posts.

Mr. McGee has created the following award categories:

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Audio feed[audio:http://www.polepositionmarketing.com/emp/blog-audio/usability-guidelines.mp3]

Sites that are designed to sell products and/or services must go the extra mile to enhance the visitor’s engagement with the website. Shopping cart abandonment (shoppers abandoning their carts before deciding to pay for the “items” they’ve added to their cart) can result in a significant loss in potential sales. But much of that can be reduced when the shopping process is streamlined and geared for shopper satisfaction.

The selling process–from initial interest to the very last checkout page–must be able to grab shopper’s attention and proceed to drive them through to the finalization of the sale. But even after the sell, you must deal with customer service issues in order to keep the sale finalized. Good customer service will bring your purchasers back for another and another and another. Here are fourteen general usability guidelines that will enhance your shoppers overall experience on your site.

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Being a recent transplant from the advertising industry, I can’t lie and say I don’t miss the glitz and glamour that was part of our daily workload. So I was overjoyed to read 11 Reasons Why You Should Consider a Job in Search Engine Marketing, by Kalena Jordan, which reminded me of the unique benefits to being in our industry. I’ve summarized her article below as a fun reminder for all of my new friends in SEM, as well as for those that may be considering Search Engine Marketing as a career.

• The Search Industry is HOT
  You can’t deny that businesses are falling all over themselves to get seen by online searchers…and they’ll pay big bucks to search engines for the privilege. Search giants like Google and Yahoo! can’t fail to make money because everybody wants a bit of the search action.

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Stoney has a relatively hands-off policy regarding what the team blogs about on (EMP). Occasionally he’ll give us some general direction or guidance (Titles, people! It’s all about titles!!!) and he tell us to always keep it relevant to business and marketing, but other than that we pretty much have free reign. And while he doesn’t like to write negative posts about other small businesses, he’s never specifically said we can’t, so I’m going to vent a little and, well, if a particular local web hosting company gets in the way, that’ll be their problem, not mine.

Some of you may have noticed that our CodeMonitor tool has not been working properly for several weeks (actually it’s been over a few months now!). A while back we started having some issues with our web host. At the time, it was on the same account (1and1 Hosting) as our client reporting suite, task management system and this blog. Our site’s started going down periodically and the customer support we received was less than stellar.

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I am looking forward to 2008 – looking forward to increasing the number of PPC clients we manage.

I started with Pole Position Marketing in May 2007 with 5 clients. I’ve added 4 clients since and while we still don’t have a huge client list, the services and products they promote are quite varied.

To name the interesting clients, I currently manage campaigns selling baby products, bathroom fixtures, online testing services, pet caskets and plastic card manufacturing. That’s quite a diverse assortment. Each of them has very specific needs, different budgets and different constraints.

I’m ready for more … Bring it on 2008!

The crew here at Pole Position Marketing wishes everyone a very Merry Christmas! We hope your holiday is cheerful, bright and hopefully white…we’re all keeping our fingers crossed for snow here in Reno.




From the Pole Position Marketing family to yours, Happy Holidays!

Audio feed[audio:http://www.polepositionmarketing.com/emp/blog-audio/visitor-trust.mp3]

Trust is a key usability issue when it comes to running a successful online business. Most people automatically view web businesses with a bias against them compared to their brick and mortar counterparts. Your ability to convince your visitors that yours is a trustworthy business is one of the key components to getting visitors to convert into customers.

Creating a website that conveys trust can be tricky. There are rarely any answers that are always “right” for every visitor. There are, however, several factors that have universal appeal to the weary shopper.

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I often over hear Stoney on the telephone, describing to a prospective client, exactly what Pay-Per-Click entails. These explanations vary from one call to the next of course, depending on how familiar the person already is. Sometimes the explanation will be quick as “yes, we manage PPC accounts.” Other times the explanation goes much deeper into what are often overlooked as very basic description as to where the paid sponsored ads display in the search engine results.

Last week the Pole Position Marketing Team went to Las Vegas for Webmaster World PubCon 2007. While sitting in the Major PPC Engines: Vendor Panel presentation, there was a slide that showed screen shots of ‘ad placement’ and it suddenly occurred to me how brilliant of an idea that was. Pictures of ad placement.

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Last February, when Stoney told me of his diabolical plan to become a household name in the SEO community, I scoffed. Here was a guy who has been in SEO for almost ten years and remained a relative unknown. Sure, he made a few friends here and there and has been slowly building his reputation, but who would of thought 12 months ago that Stoney would be able to snag an interview with one of the biggest names in the SEO. And that’s not Stoney interviewing the big name, mind you… that’s the big name interviewing Stoney.

Here we are, nearly twelve months later and I can hardly believe that yes, ladies and gentlemen, Stoney has become a “name”. Ok, so maybe he’s not Rand Fishkin. Or Jennifer Laycock. Or Jill Whalen. Or Aaron Wall. Or Andy Beal. Or Brian Clark. Or… OK, you get the point. Stoney has not become that much of a household name, but still I bet many of you hadn’t heard of him 12 months ago!

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The purpose of a search engine optimization marketing company is to carefully craft webpages and links in order to “optimize” the chance that their client’s pages will appear in the first few pages of search engine results; preferably on the first page. The truth is readers rarely look past the top 10-20 URLS found. SEO companies also look over their client’s webpages and give them a list of ideas to make their site more user-friendly and content relevant. SEO methods will not reach their full potential if your website is less then par and cryptic. SEO can get them there but your website has to make them stay and buy.

Google is one of the top search engines that Pole Position Marketing and other SEO’s will go after using their PageRank thesis, patented by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998, that states that a webpage is important if it is pointed to by other important pages. Put simply a SEO’s link building strategy focuses on finding other relevant page ranking sites and asking them for a link on their site. With the right site this is like handing in a job application with a reference from the President or Donald Trump. Without having other important webpages linking to your various webpages your website is sitting in the cafeteria by itself and Google is the popular kid who won’t make eye contact.

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