Tag Archives: Search Engine Marketing

Google’s One-Stop Shop for Nonprofits: What is Google Analytics?

In this blog series, we’ve gone over the Google for Nonprofits suite of free or discounted apps and websites available. Now we’ll discuss what Google Analytics can do to help your nonprofit organization reach its goals.

Google Analytics is a free service that offers measurements tools for your website. It presents a dashboard of tools that allow for creation of real time, customizable and sharable reports. Content analytics will tell you how often people visit each page of your website, how long they stay, and how often they convert. The Google Analytics conversion suite goes beyond page views and visitor counts to track sales, downloads and video plays to help you truly understand visitor behavior. Learn which social media sources refer visitors and whether you gain the most traffic from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google +.  If your nonprofit organization has a mobile-friendly website, mobile analytics is available to monitor the performance of apps and tell you where mobile traffic comes from.

Understanding this valuable data will help you to improve your website and increase marketing ROI. You’ll be better able to manage your online advertising dollars as you make smarter bidding and keyword choices on Google Adwords. Google Analytics has proven to be a powerful tool for many companies, such as PBS, which unlocked data and insights to see a 30% increase in visitor traffic. Switching to Google Analytics helped the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art gain new efficiency in performance measurement and realize a 15% gain in traffic accuracy. Using Google Analytics, nonprofits can learn which online marketing initiatives are cost effective and see how visitors actually interact with their sites.

If you have any questions about setting up Google Analytics, Blue Interactive Agency can help. We are a Florida web design company specializing in search engine marketing and search engine optimization to help companies increase their online visibility. We take a holistic approach when helping companies develop a ROI conversion strategy. Contact us today.


Google’s One-Stop Shop for Nonprofits: What are Google Grants?

Google Grants are part of the Google for Nonprofits program aimed to help nonprofit organizations achieve their goals. Google Grants have helped over 6,000 organizations by promoting their websites via free advertising on Google. Once an applicant is accepted, they receive an online advertising account of up to $10,000 a month to spend on Google Adwords. The ads can be used in a variety of ways, from general outreach to fundraising and recruiting volunteers. Google Grants have proved to be immensely helpful for nonprofits. Using Google’s advertising program, UNICEF’s ecommerce site experienced a 43 percent increase in sales, and children’s charity CoachArt saw a 60 to 70 percent increase in volunteers. To take part in Google Grants, complete the all-in-one application form at Google for Nonprofits.

Qualified nonprofits spend their monthly issued allowance by opening a Google Grants Adwords account to create and monitor text ads. By creating relevant ads and choosing the best keywords, nonprofits can draw increased traffic to their websites. Google insists on these basic rules:

  • You must have a website, and your ads must link to a page on your website.
  • The keywords you target must be relevant to your programs and services.
  • Your website cannot display revenue generating ads, such as Google AdSense or affiliate advertising links, while participating in Google Grants.
  • The on-going, active management of your advertising campaign is your organization’s responsibility once your account is active.

Note that grantees remain in the Google Grants program so long as their account is active and they adhere to guidelines, so it is important to continue monitoring and making the most of the online advertising benefit. A trick to making the most of the $10,000 per month advertising budget is to set the maximum bid to $1 per keyword and the daily budget to the maximum $330. To reach your target audience, choose specific ad text and keywords. You can use the Google Adwords keyword tool to generate suggestions. Go after long tail keywords that have less competition. Track your performance on your AdWords account to see how many clicks, donations, newsletter signups, and volunteer registrations you’ve attained. It is important to monitor performance regularly so you can remove or edit poorly performing keywords.

Blue Interactive Agency helps companies develop search engine marketing strategies to increase their online visibility. Offering a wide range of interactive marketing services including search engine optimization, email marketing, and link building strategies, Blue gives companies the tools they need to successfully promote their programs. For more tips on how to use Google Adwords or for any online marketing questions, call us at 954-779-2801.


How To: Research and Analyze Keywords

You understand the importance of getting your website to rank on the first page of search engine results. To get targeted traffic to your website, the first step is keyword research and analysis. Keywords are crucial to any online marketing campaign, and you will be able to find the right keywords by using the right tools. Here are some tips and guidelines for choosing keywords that will increase your search engine rankings.

  • Keep it simple. Remember your target audience probably does not know industry-specific terms, so don’t get too technical when choosing keywords to describe your product or service.
  • On the other hand, don’t be generic. Keywords and phrases that are too general (such as “house” for real estate) will be difficult to rank so they will not drive as much quality traffic to your site. Creating long tail keywords between three to five words in length that specifically describe your product or service will attract the right customers and produce desired results.
  • Look for patterns in the way people search. Are they looking for a type of something, specific characteristics, or is there a location component? As you sort keywords, group them into categories. If you aren’t completely sure about a keyword, run a Google or Bing search to see if the right type of results comes up.
  • Use free SEO tools to help you with suggestions. The Google Keyword Tool and Wordtracker are some helpful free services.
  • Once you have your selected keywords, naturally incorporate them into the content of your website. If they are not used on any existing pages, make an editorial calendar of new relevant, interesting, keyword-rich content to create over time. Remember to add any new webpages to your sitemap as you go!

Keyword research and analysis is not a one-time procedure, but a process that should be refreshed periodically because people gradually change the way they search over time. If your company adds a new product or service, you should repeat the technique every time to stay competitive. If you have any SEO questions, Blue Interactive Agency has been helping companies for years with a wide range of services in search engine optimization and search engine marketing including keyword analysis, link building, and search engine submission. Contact us today to see how we can help.


Google Warns Against Artificial Links

This year Google has become more vocal in regards to warnings against artificial or unnatural links pointing to your website. While in the past these bad links have been silently distrusted, the company is increasing its messaging via Google Webmaster Tools, sending out over 700,000 messages in January and February 2012 (more than all of 2011 combined.) A portion of these messages are concerned with link violations.

The warnings from the Google Search Quality Team suggest, “Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.” All companies should be weary of artificial links that do not improve ranking or indexing. On March 19 Google took down blog/link network BuildMyRank.com on account of artificially manipulating its search results. Google has always warned against paid links, and continues its longstanding battle against companies that sell them. Continue reading “Google Warns Against Artificial Links” »


How To: Put Social Media to Work for You

An effective social media marketing strategy is multi-faceted, and spread across different types of platforms such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, so on and so forth. Wouldn’t it be great to have a service that automates all social media activities for you? Thankfully there is a service that accomplishes exactly that – doing the drudge work and saving you time and energy.

Your solution may come in a service that’s been around for just over a year called ifttt (which stands for “if this, then that.”) The purpose of ifttt is to connect your online accounts so you can create triggered events. Once you set a trigger from one account, a task will be activated automatically. With ifttt, you can set your blog’s RSS feed to automatically post updates on your social media accounts. You can automatically post items from other RSS feeds to create a steady stream of shared content. Continue reading “How To: Put Social Media to Work for You” »


“Four Screens to Victory” Helps Campaigns and Businesses Alike

On Wednesday Google launched the “Four Screens to Victory Initiative” aimed at helping political candidates run a successful campaign. The strategy involves taking full advantage of television, PC, mobile, and tablet technology – a method useful for businesses as well.

Google has been working with presidential campaigns for years, and is now ready to share some key learnings and best practices for harnessing the power of the web. Four screen ad campaigns are more effective in driving campaign awareness and engagement. Google breaks down the four steps to victory: Continue reading ““Four Screens to Victory” Helps Campaigns and Businesses Alike” »


Questions to Ask Before Your Website Redesign

Website RedesignWhen redesigning a website, people often seek to imitate another company’s site they admire or go straight to a design expert for help. However, those are steps that should be taken much further down the road. The first issue to address – before paying any attention to aesthetics – is what the actual goal of the new website is. Planning accordingly will set the stage and make the process much smoother with desired results.

Continue reading “Questions to Ask Before Your Website Redesign” »