How to Look Big On a Small Budget

9 Ways Your Business Can Cast a Long Shadow

1) Natural Search

Get the benefits of “page one” without actually being there! Many small companies don’t have the expertise or time in order to get and maintain a page one ranking on Google for the most popular short keyword phrases.  If being on page one isn’t feasible, then make sure you are only just one click away from every page one listing.

Use the most popular, relevant short keyword phrases for your offering and then comb through the websites on the first page.  Except for websites of competitors, you should be able to get a presence on all of these pages.  And since 70% of traffic goes to the natural listings on page one – this means a lot of exposure for you!

Put a link to helpful content…

Ethics in the Search Marketing World

…and How to Keep Your Nose Clean

The search marketing world creates interesting situations where ethical lines can get stretched quite a bit. For instance, in the search marketing world information is public. Yet unscrupulous actions can be taken anonymously — a scenario too tempting for many a desperate competitor. We run into many clients who have been unethically pursued by a competitor. Unfortunately, there are no comprehensive policing capabilities out there, and complaints about suspected competition fraud are frequently ignored.  Still there are things you can do to protect yourself and you should never stoop to the level of an unethical competitor to retaliate — in the long run, there are always consequences for unethical behavior.

First, let’s look at some all-too-common non-ethical examples. These just don’t pass the red-face test:

Competitors clicking on your pay-per-click ads.

First,…

Can a PPC Ad Change Your Mind?

Tips for Gaining Clicks on “Stretch” Ads

I like search engines – they quickly find what I am looking for and don’t talk back.  I can visit them when I like, ask about as many search terms as I want and the search engine responds in a speedy fashion with more information than I could ever find the time to read.

Because the search engine is such a trusty sidekick, we quickly forgive it when there is the occasional irrelevant result.  We have become so accustomed to irrelevant results spattered about, that our eyes are actually trained to quickly glaze over anything that doesn’t exactly match.  Search engines even help us with this by bolding the results that parrot our requests.  Even if we accidentally click on an irrelevant link, we can immediately bounce back to the…