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 on your site from any Wikipedia type listings (don’t worry about no follow, this is about traffic)

Comment on blogs and article that are on page one (don’t worry about no follow)

Create partnerships with applicable sites

Identify key associations and organizations to join

Target the sites for your ads to display on via Google’s content network

Buy display ads on these sites

Since many searchers check out a couple of sites before being fully satisfied, this gives you many opportunities for exposure for each keyword phrase – increasing your presence and credibility with each exposure.

2) Paid Search

Now for some successful strategies for a strong presence with keywords you can afford.  Many keywords in today’s paid search ad space have moved out of the budget range for many small companies.  But don’t give up – there are still lots of cheap keywords out there to be had.  Here are some ways to uncover paid search traffic that you can still afford:

Mine your analytics data for keyword queries that brought you traffic.  Look only at five-plus word phrases.  This can be a great beginning to a long-tail search network campaign.

Bid on your competitor’s brand and product keywords.

Bid on your partner’s brand and product keywords.  Use your ad copy to clarify how to fit in and benefit from using them both together.

Promote yourself for everything you will be attending- conferences, charity events, etc.  Bid on the keyword names of the events and highlight your presence at them.

Promote your blog posts individually using longer-tail terms (5+ words again) from your posting.

Go beyond Google into Yahoo and Bing.  Also look at further expansion into Facebook, LinkedIn, Business.com, etc

3) Highly-targeted Content Network Campaign

The rock bottom CPC’s of the Google Content Network attracts many small companies.  However, if the campaign is not highly targeted it is just another waste of money.  Here are some tips on how to enjoy the lower CPCs while getting actual brand and click results from the Content Network:

Use managed placements only. Select prominent websites in your industry – places your target customer goes to for their news.

Set ad groups of keywords.  For the content network you use those popular 1-2 word phrases in thematic ad groups.  Just enough information to help Google relate to the type of content on the managed placement site that your ad is most relevant to.

4) Display Ads – One at a Time

Buy prominent space (rotated through different sites) on the most predominantly viewed authorities in your space and on the most widely read newsletters in your space.  Doing one at a time will enable you to spread your presence on a smaller budget and avoid ad fatigue.

5) Re-targeting Campaign

These are the campaigns which can be run through Google which will show your ads to previous visitors of your website as they cruise around other websites that are a part of Google’s content network.    You’ll need to place a snippet of code onto your website in order for Google to start tracking visitors.  You’ll need to get to 500 cookies before Google will show your ads.  Some small companies are turned off by this number, but just be patient – you’ll eventually get there and the rewards will be worth it.

Previous visitors will be impressed as they cruise the web – “wow, these guys are everywhere!”

Be sure to limit how many times a previous visitor sees your ads in a day or week.  While you want to project a big image, you don’t want to become irritating noise.

Check out the sites that your visitors are frequenting – these may be good managed placements for your content campaign, or great link building opportunities.

6) Blog

A blog can be your free way to demonstrate your helpful expertise and get a natural search presence for longer tail terms.

It’s also great material to push out through more social avenues such as Facebook , Twitter, Digg, Reddit and others.

Great content can gain you popularity on Facebook and Twitter and also will have people show the article to their friends so you can experience viral growth.

7) Newsletter

Having a professional regular newsletter projects the image of being big.  It helps remind people about you and is your chance to become a regular helpful source to potential and current customers.  There are many very affordable email systems out there that can help your emails to look professional and help you maintain your email list with ease.

If your newsletter contains truly valuable content – people will share it with their friends and you will experience viral growth.

8 ) Enlist Bloggers, the Media, Customers and Partners

Small companies can’t go it alone, so leverage every single person out there that can help you.  Here are some tips on who can help and how to engage them:

Find influential bloggers and get them interested to blog about you, or think about you for certain topics.  Providing them with interesting data that you have from internal studies or leveraging them as an expert can be a great way to build the relationship.

Reach out to journalists (whether from your local newspaper, or national industry publications) and make sure they know about you.  Again – offering unique and interesting data or topic thoughts can be a helpful way to them that can start the relationship.

Get Noted / Awarded – whether by an analyst, a publication, or an annual reward – get your name in the hat.

Partners – build some partnerships –whether it’s with the owner of the jazz bar across the street from your restaurant or a technology consultant who helps to implement your software – have them mention you on their site, in their blogs and link to you and recommend you.  Referral fees are often good motivators here.

Enlist your customers.  Offer incentives for reviews on local listings.  Offer contests on Twitter and Facebook.

9) Free Listings

Get list for free wherever you can and make the listing as complete as possible.  Listings can include:

Google Merchant Feed

Local Listings

Topical industry directories

Employ these strategies and in no time, you will be projecting an online image of a larger, professional organization that is knowledgeable, reputable and here to stay.

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, it must be stated that most often we find that this one is mostly paranoia. And it can be tough to prove.  However, if you are sure this is happening to you, there are some proactive measures you can take. For example, you can exclude specific geographies or even IP addresses from your pay-per-click campaign to prevent competitor from viewing your ads. Just be careful not to lose out on new leads due to worries about competitors.

Competitors writing false negative reviews.

This one is always heart-breaking for us to hear, but desperate competitors have been known to do this quite aggressively. What can you do? Comment back. Try to address the issues as if they are real to see if they stop. If not, try reaching out to the site where they are being posted. Some sites will work with you on removing false reviews. Also, try to get your customer base incentivized to post positive reviews about you, so that good and real customer feedback is much more prominent than your unethical competitor’s words.  Customer loyalty will always overwhelm unethical competitive behavior.

Competitors using your trademark in their ad copy.

You don’t want your competitor using your product or company name in their ads – particularly in a negative context. This one requires you to protect your trademarks. Monitor for improper or illegal usage of your trademarks and file complaints of any violations the search engines. Ads that infringe on your trademarks will be disallowed from appearing by the search engines.

Next, let’s look at some examples of ethical competitive maneuvering, but which can also be abused:

Tools focused on “spying” on your competitors.

The word “spying” makes you think you might be doing something unethical. However, most of these tools focus on providing information that is publicly available, but also often difficult to aggregate for an individual.  One other aspect to consider here is how the spy-tool company is gathering data – so make sure this is an approved method for data collection. For the most part, this is an okay strategy for supplementing your online competitive knowledge; however, much of the data should be taken with a grain of salt. We haven’t yet come across a tool that has spot-on accurate data, or data that isn’t very stale. Still, many can tools can provide general information that can help you develop robust sets of competitive keywords.

Attending competitor’s webinars, downloading white papers, taking free trials, and subscribing to feeds.

These are examples of information companies make available to the public — including their competitors. However, if you are attending an online event or downloading information using a false name or false credentials, then this crosses the ethical line. However, if you access this information, and are honest about who you are, there isn’t any problem with taking advantage of information being supplied by your competitors.  In fact, in this world of blogs and data sharing and Twitter streams, there are plenty of ethical ways you should be maintaining knowledge of your competitors — believe me: they’re staying abreast of all your activity.

Advertise on your competitor’s brand name.

Add in your competitor’s brand name and products names as keywords in your Google PPC campaigns, and have your ads show for those. This helps to make sure that potential customers give you a peak as they consider your competitor.  Just be sure NOT to use your competitor’s brands in your own ad copy — that would be unethical.

Review your competitor’s ad copy.

Check out your competitor’s ad copy. This is a great way to stay on top of their offerings and what they think their competitive advantages are. Keep up here to make sure that your offer is unique and your offers are truly competitive.  However, never copy a competitor’s ads verbatim.  Focus on your own unique points of differentiation in ad copy that’s all your own.

Review your competitor’s website (including view source).

Keep tabs on your competitor’s websites. Extensive reviews here can provide you with a wealth of information about their offerings, their clients, their management, their value proposition, etc.  If you want to know what keywords they are targeting to rank highest for on natural search, click to “view source” of their webpage. Many people have their keywords listed right in their meta keywords tag. But if the keywords aren’t there, check out frequently used words in their page title tags, H1 tags, meta descriptions and content to get a feel for where they are focusing. You might choose to go head-to-head with them, or you might choose to branch out into different words to capture searches they are missing out on.

Read your competitor’s reviews.

What are people saying about your competitors? What do they like? What don’t they like? Make sure to keep tabs on feedback trends so you can improve your own standards in areas where you don’t think you align.  For instance, if your competitor is consistently praised in reviews for excellent customer service, and you’re not, well… you know what you need to do!

It’s okay to be a fierce competitor and to maintain tabs on what your key competition is doing.  Refrain from crossing ethical lines, and you’ll always be engaged in a good, clean fight.  And when you encounter a competitor whose ethics cross the line, use established channels to put a halt to it.

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 search engine after realizing our mistake.

Since searchers have become such expert results cruisers, can a PPC ad that is not directly offering what you are looking for persuade you not only to click, but to actually consider an alternative? We continually see advertisers trying to stretch the limits here, so let’s analyze some examples.

Let’s say you are hungry for dinner and have decided on pizza.  You do a search for pizza in your town and Google includes an ad for Thai food.  You are not at all likely to click on that ad or even read it.  The Thai ad will get the “irrelevant” glaze-over.

Some advertisers argue that you could all of a sudden say, “Yeah, I’ll have Thai instead!”  But the likelihood is so low that it’s not worth it.  Too much of this “stretch” advertising can actually hurt you: garnering lots of impressions and no clicks can quickly damage your quality score. (And you don’t want a bad quality score!)

However, there are situations where “stretch” advertising is necessary.  Two typical examples are:  1) a new type of product or offering; and, 2) out-maneuvering your competitors.

These are a smaller stretch, but require careful crafting in order to avoid the “irrelevant” glaze-over as the ad will not be what the searcher thinks he is looking for.  Here are some tips for successful “stretch” advertising:

Do not use a “generic” ad. We all have them – an ad that includes your brand, its key benefits and a call to action.  This ad is guaranteed to get the glaze-over.  Instead:

First, your ad must be specific to the search term and very catchy.  Feed on your competitor’s weakness; use the keywords in your ad to get yourself bolded; ask questions that prompt further reading.

Second, once you’ve avoided the glaze-over, your ad needs to justify a click.  Why are you better?  What reward awaits the searcher that clicks on your ad?  Very strong draws are required here – much stronger than your typical call to action.

Do not use a “generic” landing page. Using your home page as your landing page is always a bad idea and in this case, it’s absolute death.  Your landing page is your only chance to seal the deal and persuade the searcher you are worth a try.  Think about where the user is coming from and clearly articulate your benefit in those terms.    Keeping with the theme of your ad a big catchy headline, short bullets and “offer completion steps” on the same page are good starting points.

Include some form of reward or guarantee in your offer.  You are asking someone to divert from their original intention, so incentivize them.  Do they get something for free?  Receive a discount?  Get some form of guarantee?  Why should they bother?

Make yourself sticky. Some of us (present company excluded) are a bit stubborn.  So even though the searcher might not change their mind on the spot, provide an easily memorable way for them to come back and find you.  Try a catchy brand name or URL and make sure you rank #1 in the natural search results for your persuasion taglines.

Just to reiterate, you should only use such tactics when absolutely necessary, and where you think you have a real chance at success. If you’re not careful, your quality score may take a fatal hit.