Spring is here! Spring forward with a comprehensive marketing strategy that focuses on your local target market. Whether you have an online storefront or a brick-and-mortar store, local search marketing solutions are great for increasing the exposure and visibility of your business as well as generating more traffic to your website. Here are a few marketing tools every business owner needs to have in their marketing flowerbox: Google Places Google Places local maps optimization puts your business listing above organic search results, making it stand out among similar listings and creating an easy way for customers to reach you. A handy listing that ...

With the release of Google Instant, search marketers are going to be figuring out exactly how this affects their pay-per-click marketing strategies and search engine optimization.   Personalization If you are signed into your Google account, then search results will be personalized to your search history. This means that different users searching the same phrase may see different search results. This means that it is important when using SEO to see the opportunities available on any content that can be searched on (digital asset optimization) and presented to searchers. In the end SEO is about creating quality content, understand the words people use ...

Conversions on paid search advertisements for small businesses have increased over the past year, according to the “State of Small Business Online Advertising Q2 2010” report from WebVisible. In the second quarter of 2010, small businesses were seeing 43.3% of clicks resulting in website conversion and 6.9% in a phone call, a significant increase over the same time last year. [caption id="attachment_1849" align="alignnone" width="536"] Source: WebVisible, "State of Small Business Online Advertising Q2 2010," provided to eMarketer[/caption] Also, search ad spending slightly increased from the first quarter, but has more than doubled from 2009. Search ad spending in quarter 2 of 2009 was ...