There has been a lot of talk in the marketing community lately about how marketing has evolved in recent years. Here are ten of the most amazing stats on inbound marketing that Hub Spot collected from all over the community of inbound marketers.

1) Blogging and Lead Generation

According to Social Media B2B, B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads per month than those that don’t. This should make a lot of sense. If you have an active blog, you have a better chance of making a connection with your website visitors. With educational content delivered in a conversational tone, your prospects get to know your business in a more personal way.

2) Online Readership

The Content Marketing Institute reports that 8 out of 10 people identify themselves as blog readers, and 23% of all time spent online is spent on social media sites. The numbers don’t lie. More and more people are reading blogs, and when they find blog articles they like, they are sharing them with their social media networks. To leverage this new buyer behavior, you need both an active blog and an active presence on all the relevant social media networks.

3) Blogging and SEO

ContentPlus published that blogs give websites 434% more indexed pages and 97% more indexed links. Indexed pages and indexed links translate into higher rankings with the search engines, and that means more website traffic to your site. Also, an additional benefit blogging brings to search engine optimization is content freshness. Google is looking for new and fresh content. The more you blog, the more likely your site will rank highly on the search engines.

4) The Decline of Paid Ads

The people have voted, and Search Engine Land shares that up to 80% of people ignore Google-sponsored ads. This is not surprising, and with Google making changes to their ranking algorithms and presenting more educational content like blog posts and videos instead of simple website urls, expect this number to continue to climb in the future.

5) The First Page Wins

HubSpot’s research shows that 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results. This statistic is also not surprising, given how quick we are to scan our results, click a few links and be on our way. Now, more than ever, it is vital to continue creating compelling, educational content that people love and share. This is how you end up on the first page of Google results in 2014.

6) Inbound vs. Outbound Leads

According to Search Engine Journal, inbound leads cost 60% less than outbound leads. Considering the amount of waste associated with traditional, impression-based advertising, inbound marketing provides a much more focused program that matches today’s buyer behavior.

7) The Bounce Rate

Microsoft Research reports that people spend only 10 seconds on your homepage before leaving if they don’t immediately connect with your marketing messages. Consider this in terms of your own browsing behavior. How quickly do you jump on that back button if the site is too complicated, too slow to load, too hard to read or too difficult to navigate? You only have one chance – make it count with strong, emotional messaging and powerful educational offers.

8) The Effectiveness of Webinars

Two educational powerhouses, the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs, teamed up to report that 61% of B2B marketers rate webinars as the most effective content-marketing tactic. Best practices around inbound marketing dictate that you need educational offers for the top, middle and bottom of your sales funnel. Webinars are great educational offers for that middle-of-the-funnel prospect who has started the research phase of his or her buyer journey and is now getting into the consideration phase, looking for more information.

9) The Importance of Imagery

Jeff Bullas writes that articles with images get 94% more views over those without an image. Most people are visual learners. In fact, up to 60% of the population consists of visual learners, meaning they prefer watching over reading. Images appeal to visual learners; therefore, it’s important to feature images on your blog posts and articles if you want to garner more visitors.

10) Content is King

Content Marketing Institute recently reported that 80% of business decision-makers prefer to get company information in a series of articles versus in an advertisement. The bottom line: We don’t want to be sold to, we want to be educated, and articles deliver the kind of information your prospects are seeking in order to make smart, well-informed decisions.

Source: http://blog.hubspot.com/insiders/inbound-marketing-stats

You’ve probably spent heaps of time, energy and money building a great website for your company, so it is mandatory to take a few steps to ensure that your website is being properly indexed in search engines like Google. Below we’ll show you some necessary steps in order to improve your search rankings and get an edge on your business competitors.

Can search engines access your website?

Making sure your site is accessible by the search engine bots is extremely important and simple. Checking your robots.txt file of your website to ensure no content is being blocked from Google’s sight. Sometimes a simple oversight can make a huge difference in driving web traffic to your website.

Google’s Webmaster Tools interface makes it real easy to verify your website and submit your sitemap (a text file outlining all your web pages) so the web crawlers can easily index your website content and include this content in search results so your customers can find you!

Is your website properly optimised for SEO?

This is most times referred to as on-page optimisation. Having unique content that is relevant to your business is the most important on-page SEO item. Google stresses quality content over anything else these days so this is your primary goal, Content that is Unique and Relevant. You never want to repeat words and phrases over and over again just to emphasise your products or services, as this is considered spamming and Google will penalise you for this. As long as you keep your content aimed at your potential customer and not for search engine bots you will be fine. Long gone are the days where you can trick the search engines with spammy techniques.

Check the URL of your posts and pages to make sure you are not using random numbers or words that make no sense. Words are good, however numbers are not helpful at all. Including a nicely worded phrase summarising what the page contains is the best way to structure your URLs.

For example if you are a plumber in Melbourne serving the eastern suburbs you could use a page URL structure like plumbing-services-in-east-melbourne.html for the Services page of your website.

What websites are linking to yours?

Websites that are closely related to what your business does are great for pointing links at your web pages. The more inbound links you have from high authority and high link juice sites the better. See our article about Link Juice for more details. This however is not to be confused with link farms and other spam techniques which will get you on Google’s bad side and ultimately off their search results altogether.

The steps above are only a few of the many steps that you need to follow to keep your business website competitive on the internet. Consult Netwizard SEO about a complete Site Audit and our Content Marketing program.

Optimising your website for mobile users has become even more of a crucial task.

Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team was recently quoted as saying, “Mobile is going to surprise a lot of people. Be sure you look at how your site looks and performs on mobile.” Google also has stated that a big part of how well a site ranks in search will depend on how well a website is optimised for mobile devices.

Mobile websites and responsive design are not new, and up until now, the reasoning and value behind making sure that your website offers the best possible mobile friendly experience has mostly been based on the steady up-tick in mobile traffic, which tripled in just 2 years from 2010 to 2012, however has now become also about Google search rankings and how you could be affected by running a not so friendly website for mobile users.

Google always reminds us that they look at search from the perspective of the user. If your web content is not optimised for the viewport of a mobile device or your content is full of large image files that take a long time to load on mobile devices you need to address this now.

Properly configuring your pages for mobile devices, Google says, “will improve the mobile web, make your users happy, and allow searchers to experience and experience your content fully.”

Ultimately, if you are providing a poor mobile experience and your competitors have great responsive sites offering an easy to use and intuitive interface, Google is likely to use these factors and list your competitors’ sites ahead of yours on certain devices.

In closing, think about your users first and then Google. “Google wants what users want.” Says Matt Cutts. Take a look at your web strategy from the eyes of your users and you will be fine.

Who doesn’t want their website to be highly listed on the first page of Google search results? Below are a few tips that small business owners can use to help their company get more business and to look more credible online.

You absolutely have to have a Google Places listing for your business

In most cases if you search Google for a basic type of service in a city or town you will get a map with pin points on it along with a few businesses listed beside it.

Since local listings are shown before organic or “regular” search results, not having a Google Places listing is losing you money and free advertising.

If your local business is not listed on Google Places, stop reading this article and do it now. Potential customers may be looking for you right now. It is a very simple process and will not take much time at all. Create and verify a local business on Google.

Create, maintain and monitor your local business listings

Directories such as reachlocal.com.au, truelocal.com.au, yellowpages.com.au and hotfrog.com.au should be maintained and monitored. Many companies move locations or change phone numbers and never update their information listed on the local business directories resulting in confusion and disappointment for customers trying to get in touch with your business.

Customers might also leave negative reviews about your business that may be false, fictional or otherwise detrimental to your reputation. Monitor these reviews and make sure a competitor or past customer is not tarnishing your reputation with unwarranted bad reviews.

Monitor your company’s primary email address

Although this tip is not related to SEO, we thought it was important to bring up as we have recently run across this issue with our clients. Believe it or not, there are small business owners who are still stuck in the 1980’s and do not use email communication at all or on a very limited basis. If your website displays an email address or you have a contact form, you must monitor your email inbox so not to miss important business enquiries. This may sound very elementary and obvious, but many owners still do not check their inboxes regularly.

With the number smart phones, tablets, internet enabled TVs, and every other gadget that has internet access growing, the need to stay on top of your email becomes just as important as turning on the shop lights when you open for the day.

If a potential customer sends your company an enquiry and they do not hear back within a reasonable amount of time, you can bet they have moved on and enquired with you competitor and at worse shared their frustrations about your lack of communication to their friends or co-workers.

For most of us who spend most of our time online, the debate of what is more likely to get most views, long articles versus short articles, doesn’t appear on face value to have much validity if going strictly on number of views since the article that has the better tags will get more views. In trying to get more views which is the goal of search engine optimization goals, the length of an article doesn’t have much import. However, if looking to get in depth attraction from viewers, the short article will usually get more viewers to stay and get involved in the article.

Of course, there are exceptions

If an online article has a thesis laid out clear in the title, the longer article stands a good chance of getting read clear through if the outline of points is successfully handled to entice the reader to continue reading all of the article to get the writers conclusion on the thesis. The development of outline ideas is very important if the writer is looking to get his content marketing views read and understood by his readers. A short article can make its marketing pitch almost like headlines and no opinions which is a successful means to getting viewers to quickly appraise the content of the article and to reject or to accept the product or the service which is, after all, the goal of all content marketing and of all SEO programs that are geared to getting a large part of the Internet buying population. Getting a larger share of the Internet money is the aim of content marketing and seo stratagems.

The debate then, between long and short article has little relevance to SEO stratagems whose aim is to get more viewers to the website. The debate between long and short articles in content marketing favors the short article since the long article requires a more specialized audience who is willing to spend more time in reading the long article since it is their specialty. If a seller had a choice between a short article or a long article, his decision should be based on what his interest was and the reason for his online article. If the reason is selling a product, a short article is preferable. If the reason is selling some psychological tool that appeals to people needing some king of therapy, a longer article is, of course, the best choice.

Attracting customers and getting the attention of potential clients is the ultimate goal of any type of advertising campaign done in various methods. Lucky for those who can afford to pay television ads, they can easily reach out to their target consumers. Same applies to companies that spend money in advertising through brochures, magazines, radios and the like. However these methods of advertising can only reach out to local community (except television ads) and are expensive that most often only large companies avail these types of services.

Nowadays, many entrepreneurs have come to realize that traditional ways of introducing their business to the public such as word of mouth, referral, signage, and posters are only effective to some degree. With the advancement of technology, both regular and potential clients are looking for a much convenient way to locate a company that provides the products or services they need. This is one of the reasons, why having a website for the business has become one of the well-known advertising campaigns in the market. However, does having a website is enough to help your business grow?

Of the thousand websites that can be accessed through the internet, it is a must to make yours stands out and much quicker to find. This is how Search Engine Optimization (SEO) works. To better understand it, try to picture a mom who wants to find a store that sells baby stuff. The easiest and most convenient way to do so is to explore the internet. The very first thing the mom will do is to access a specific search engine such as google, yahoo etc. Once the result is up, the mom is more likely to click on the very first website link that will be shown as it appears to be the most related among all the links that came up. In other words, SEO increases the chance of your website to be accessed. It enables your website to be ranked as the most related link based on the searches made by the users on major search engines thereby increasing the number of visitors. Later on, these could translate to greater chances of acquiring more clients and eventually higher sales. Is it not one of your main goals?

In order to achieve this, it is imperative that you entrust your goal to the experts. A Search Engine Optimization Expert is a person who knows how to go about maximizing your websites’ potentials to become one of the most displayed links on major search engines. An SEO expert is someone who is very familiar with the tools being used to analyze your website. Many may be familiar on how to do search engine optimization, but only experts have been there done that so you’re guaranteed they could analyze and eventually identify all possible means to make your website not just be seen – but as well as be heard by potential clients all over the globe.

The whole idea of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is getting your website to be among the top results on search engines. If it comes up on the first couple pages of Google or Yahoo more people are likely to visit your site. “Link juice” is a term used in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and has recently gone viral and gone into widespread usage.

Link Juice Explained

When another website links to your site or when you internal page links, the link improves PageRank. These links must be relevant to the content being linked to or Google’s new algorithm “Panda” will penalise you. This improvement of PageRank by the method explained above is commonly referred to as “link juice.”

The amount of link juice passed depends on a couple things. First, the PageRank of the web page the link came from and, second, the total number of links on the web page that are being passed. Each time a link is passed Google will award PageRank points. These points add up and web pages can earn an overall PageRank of 0-10.

Simply put, every web page has a limited amount of link juice it can pass along, and the limit is the total PageRank points that particular page has received. Thus, a web page with 20 points cannot pass more than 20 points of link juice. If a page with 20 PageRank points links to another page, that one link will transfer the full amount of link juice to the other web page. However, if a page with 20 PageRank points links to five web pages whether they be internal or external), only one-fifth of the link juice will be transferred.

Essentially link juice is the very thing that you are looking to achieve in SEO. The more people that provide links to your pages the better PageRank you will achieve. When you link to relevant high PageRank web pages your visibility and web page rankings become higher.

Getting your own link juice

Link juice can come from a number of sources. One could be generated by yourself by submitting to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, and LinkedIn. Another could be by asking people with relevant pages to provide links to your web page. One method that is gaining traction is content marketing . Writing quality, relevant content and posting links to it on various Social Media sites has proven to be an effective medium to long-term strategy that works.

Google is the most influential search engine on the planet. Because of this, how Google operates is very often a crucial aspect of how webmasters build their sites. Google is constantly attempting to refine its results to give searchers the best results possible because the more useful people find search engines, the more they will use them and the more they use them, the more money search engines make. To refine these results, Google constantly makes invisible minor changes to how it assesses websites, with the occasional major update that fundamentally changes how the results are calculated and with this change, also changes how webmasters build their sites to get traffic from Google.

So, just what is Panda?

Panda was the most recently paradigm changing update Google made in its search results algorithm. The result of this paradigm shift was felt around the Internet as previously successful sites found themselves buried deep in the search engine results while some sites that were struggling found themselves rapidly moving up the results because they were built on solid fundamentals.

Why did Panda hurt sites?

Previous to the Panda update, the ultimate determiner of a site’s search position was how many backlinks the webmaster was able to build pointing to the site. Because of this, many webmasters focused the vast majority of their efforts on building more backlinks from any source possible. Many of these sites had nothing in their favor but a multitude of backlinks. When Panda made other factors more relevant, the sites built with this strategy dropped dramatically and the webmasters of these sites have been scrambling ever since to try and get back to the glory they enjoyed pre-Panda.

How did Panda help sites?

Panda did two related things: It put far more emphasis on the actual content of a website, meaning sites with very little or very unfocused content were suddenly disadvantaged compared to sites with real, focused content. Panda simultaneously penalized (or stopped giving credit for, depending on how you look at things) links from pages with no complementary content. In other words, those backlinks from pages with very little content or completely unrelated content that webmasters had been working for years to build were now totally irrelevant.

As Google’s focus is creating a satisfactory experience for web searchers, it is likely that future updates for the foreseeable future will build on what Panda started, adding even more emphasis on how relevant a site and its links are and discounting the value of irrelevant backlinks even more.

As the largest of search engines, webmasters constantly endeavor to find more efficient ways to get traffic from Google. The two methods of diverting search traffic from Google are PPC advertising and organic search results. Both methods can be successful and have advantages and disadvantages. Below, we will explain what each is and what its relative pros and cons are. Note – both methods can also apply to other search engines and other sites, but the core advantages and disadvantages are the same.

PPC Traffic

PPC is short for Pay Per Click advertising. With PPC advertising, Google displays ads for the target website along with search results and on other relevant sites that have signed up for the Adsense program. The owner of the target website pays a small fee for each web browser who finds the ad interesting and clicks through to the target website.

There is one primary advantage to using PPC traffic. That advantage is that it is virtually instantaneous. Minutes after starting a campaign, it is possible to have traffic and money coming in.

The major disadvantage of PPC traffic is that it constantly requires oversight and money input. Stop paying and the traffic stops coming in.

Organic Traffic

This is using solid SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to climb in search engine results to be one of the first sites that appear. The top results have a tremendous advantage in gaining traffic.

There are a couple of major advantages to building solid organic traffic. The first major advantage is that once a solid traffic stream has been established, it will continue with very little effort and money. Because of this, a webmaster is not tied to the routine of daily assessing statistics and adjusting a campaign. This smaller workload equates to the ability to have more websites operating, multiplying profits. The second major advantage is that by building the site’s organic traffic, the webmaster is also building the site’s value. Unlike PPC, organic advertising will increase the potential sale price of a site because it has been set up to attract traffic as opposed to having traffic pushed toward it.

There is only one real disadvantage to building a strong search engine presence, but it is one that causes far too many webmasters to fail. This disadvantage is the fact that gaining organic traffic is a long term approach. Those not prepared to treat the proposition as a real business and have patience will often simply give up before any real results are achieved, leaving more profit to those few who are prepared to invest the time in building a successful site.

White hat techniques tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hat uses techniques that are banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing. Creating a nicely designed website with easy to follow navigation and relevant quality page content will produce far better results in the long run …

The biggest change over the years in how search engines see SEO efforts is their growing emphasis on content. Before, the quickest way to build SEO momentum was to take a piece of content and spam it with keywords and links that aren’t even relevant for the sole purpose of improving traffic flow and PageRank. However, today, search engines usually penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether

In a way, an ethical webmaster does not really need to worry about what is blackhat or whitehat. Since the beginning of internet time, search engines have had the same goal. That goal was to give web browsers the ability to find content they are looking for and ensure that said content links to other content that is related. Sites using unique content as both link bait and actual web site building are already pulling ahead of those still trying to use spammy techniques to get ahead. This trend will only get more pronounced as search engines improve their technology to weed out poor content.