Inbound Marketing Blog

Well I certainly got more than I had planned from the Sydney Hills Chamber Annual Sales and Marketing Boot Camp. I expected to leave with a list of action items to help me with lead generation and conversion tactics – but this years event went over and above my imagination.

SEO, or search marketing, for small business owners and marketers is necessary for survival and long term success. But for many it's frustrating, confusing, and just when you think you understand SEO – search engine optimisation, Google announces a new update to their search algorithm, the latest being Penguin 2.0.

With Google continually making changes to their search algorithm, it’s difficult for marketers to know which are the best tactics for SEO. And as a marketer the last thing you want to do is spend your time studying SEO and changing tactics every time Google makes a change to their algorithm.

As part of your marketing for 2013 showing up in search results, for the keywords your prospects' search is important. Knowing how to do this, is a frustration that many small business owners, and marketers experience.– so they hire an SEO “expert” to help them without really understanding what the SEO “expert” is doing.

The purpose of this article is to help small business owners, and marketers understand enough about SEO so they can implement an effective SEO Strategy as part of their lead generation for 2013. Or at the very least know what their SEO consultant is doing, or should be doing.

Are you spending too much money on marketing your business, with poor results - but you keep doing the same thing because you're not sure what else to do?

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. If you feel you fall into this category when it comes to marketing your business then it's time to change the way you market.

Google does it again - more changes to it's algorithm in an attempt to reward quality, reputable sites and penalise poor quality and spammy sites. Learn more about these updates here.

With SME marketers hungry to learn as much as they can about social media, and how to best use social media as part of their lead generation strategy - thankfully there are social media studies being done on a regular basis so you don't have look too deep to find a free ebook on the latest research. The latest ebook I stumpled upon is 47 Handy Facebook Stats by HubSpot.

A couple of days ago I sat in on a webinar by Rand Fishkin CEO of SEOmoz (@randfish) and Dharmesh Shah CTO from HubSpot (@dharmesh), where they revealed the findings from an SEO Industry Survey, and shared their thoughts on the future of SEO, in The State of SEO and Internet Marketing 2012.

Google is actively improving it's algorithmn to improve user experience. Maybe you've heard about Google's Pengiun or Panda updates of recent. In essence they are encouraging marketers to focus on the user experience rather than trying to "trick" the search engines with low quality links, link farming and other tactics that are now penalised by Google.

My parents and in-laws are all well over 60, some over 70 years of age, and all of them use the internet for research. So I wasn't surprised when Smart Company revealed the Sensis eBusiness Report that over 65 year olds are the fastest growing age group using the internet. According to the research, 89% of over 65's said they accessed the internet last year, up from 59% the year before, and now 1 in 5 own a tablet, up from 2% the year before. To read more about this research click here.