Calling All New Small Business Owners…

So you’re a small business owner. You have your idea. You know what your business is about. Next step is to buy a domain that will represent your business on the web. This is probably by far one of the most challenging options you have. With billions of domains already purchased; is there a chance that the one you want is available? There are many options to buy a domain such as through Host Gator, GoDaddy, or Rapid Domain as just to list a few registrars where you can purchase your online real estate. Most of the time domains can run you an average of $10 per year depending on options or how many years you choose to buy them for.

Domains come in many varieties such as a .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info and many more. Which one do you buy? More than one domain? Different variations of your business name? According to Hubspot it is recommended to buy more than one domain extensions if you are looking to completely brand your business. However if you are thinking of using the extra extensions for additional traffic then it will not help you. Here is a link to Hubspot’s recent blog post on How to Choose the right website domain(s). This post goes in-depth on what to consider when you are ready to make this move for your business.

If you are not familiar with how to purchase a website domain you can contact a web design company such as Be Identified Marketing whom can assist you with making that purchase as well as securing website hosting and get a website up and running for you at a minimal cost. Your website can be as small or as big as you want it to be. The creativity is between your imagination and your designer.

Go large and dream big; the web as unlimited possibilities! 

Keyword Data Gone Bye-Bye

9/23/2013 was a sad day for online marketers. Google announced a 100% secure search for its users who search using the Google search engine. What this means is there is no keyword data from this day forward that is being shared freely. The only way to get this data is to run Google Pay Per Click ad campaigns.

You may ask what does this this mean for your clients? Marketing just became more expensive. If you are performing SEO services for your client then you may want to suggest they run a paid ad campaign as well so you have all the data available to you to do the best job marketing for them.

You may be new to online marketing and may not be familiar why this is a big deal for us online marketers. Back several years ago Google used to provide the exact keywords to online marketers through Google Analytics which allowed us to fully see how they found out website. We were able to see how many times we showed up in search, down to the click-through rate. Then a couple years ago Google started placing these keywords into a “not provided” category where it should you the number of visits but no other data. So you used to see 50% of your data in this not provided category and it was hard to tell what to improve on within your marketing efforts. Well now it is a 100% reality of not seeing this keyword data unless you run the Google Paid ads.

Here are a couple of articles from reference to this decision. When days like this become reality I am sure some of us had Big Bertha available to knock Google upside the head.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2296351/Goodbye-Keyword-Data-Google-Moves-Entirely-to-Secure-Search

http://searchengineland.com/post-prism-google-secure-searches-172487