With belts across the business world tightening,  we have redoubled our efforts to educate clients to be in more control of their marketing spend dollars.  We talk to concerned business owners every day about ways to improve usability, productivity of their web sites and to increase conversion performance.  Here are a few helpful tips that apply to just about every business trying to leverage the power of online marketing to increase revenue.

1. Add content that uses terms searchers or new potential clients understand.  You will have the opportunity to convert them over to the way your terminology later on specific product or service pages.  But if you are a telemarketing company, but prefer to be known under demand generation and fill the content with everything but telemarketing…it makes it much harder to get those pages ranked under telemarketing.
2. Utilize Your URL In All Business Advertising. It surprises me when I see businesses advertising their businesses and omiting their URLs.  Even if you are passing out pencils - your domain name should be prominently featured.
3. Testimonials.  We can not emphasize the importance of communicating your customers experience working with your business enough.  Actively solicit customer testimonials and continue adding them to your web site.  Ask customers to provide you with a review in Google local, Yahoo Local or MSN Live Search (local).  This plus word of mouth advertising is shown to increase business.
4. Press Releases. Included in our services for search engine optimization campaigns is submission of press releases on a regular basis.  Keeping our clients names out there is a great way to increase branding, traffic and revenue.
5. Blogs. Does your company have a blog? Does someone in your company monitor blogs to see what’s being said about your business?  Your business blog provides potential customers with fresh up to the minute content and provides an easy way for you to share industry insight and knowledge.  Blogs can also be a good way to build credibility and expertise in your industry.  We integrate blogging into our clients sites and make sure that the blogs are updated on a regular basis.  It’s a great way to keep in the forefront of your business market and attract new qualified visitors to your site. 
6. Linked In. Are you linked in?  If not, then take a minute to join, (it’s free).  Linked-In has developed into a nice social networking site that can be useful and potentially productive to businesses.  You can find background information on potential clients, join groups in your area of expertise, find former colleagues and associates, easily request recommendations for your business or yourself.  You will be amazed at how many people are connecting to this social media platform. 
7. Control your dependency on PPC. There are other ways to get your company on page one of search engines other than buying ads via pay-per-click.  Work with your search engine marketing company to get a balance between short term objectives (PPC) and long term gains (organic search marketing).  If your PPC company does not offer organic search, then find a company that specializes in organic or natural search.
8. Monitor click fraud. Google tied up with Click Forensics trying to further address this issue. The latest reports say that the fraud levels on Pay per click campaigns have come down by 0.2 percent in this quarter of 2008, the bad news: Click Fraud Index calculated the fraud rate at 16.2 percent in September 2008. 
9. Free Analytics. Watch out for so called “experts” in search marketing that provide you with only the free Urchin type stats. A quality search marketing company should be  Investing in good analytics programs which today are critical in order to dig down and understand visitor patterns, seamlessly integrate PPC and organic statistics and provide vital information for their clients to understand the best ROAS and maximize their ROI.
10. Expect Business Via Your Web Site.  At Top SEO Marketing Inc. we are committed to bringing our clients new business as a result of our efforts.  We are transparent in our process and exacting in our collection of data that helps us manage our campaign and helps our clients build better web sites for user experience and conversions.  If your web site is not providing you with a significant revenue stream, you should think about changing the way you manage your web site.  The lack of productivity can be fixed before you spend money getting visitors to your site - take the time to make sure that you have the right information and calls to action to capture those visitors.