The web is a huge marketplace for promoting and selling your products and services. If you’re not already utilizing the internet to its fullest extent in regards to sales and marketing, you’re missing out and in a huge way! Just having a website can increase sales, grow your customer base, service your current customer base and increase your brand presence and awareness.

Whether or not you’re ready to engage in an in depth internet marketing strategy, there are plenty of free tools available that you can start using today to set goals and plan growth strategies for your site.

The following tools can help you be found on top search engines like Google and Google Maps, especially for local searches that relate to your company. You are able to identify and track specific search trends for relevant keyword or phrases over several months or even years. You can also track and analyze your web traffic, but more importantly, where the traffic comes from and to see what pages are visited the most. You are also able to discover what keywords people are searching for online related to your business while analyzing how many backlinks you obtain. Lastly, you can monitor mentions of your company and how people are talking about your company, both positively and negatively.

So the free tools you ask? Check them out below:

Google Places

With the great emphasis that Google has put on local search, you want to create a free business listing on Google Places so you can engage customers with photos, offers, testimonials, etc.

Google Insights

This tool is a great way to determine if there’s a hot keyword out there that seems to be getting more and more searches. You can compare search volume patterns for keywords related to your business across specific regions, time frames, categories, etc.

Google Analytics

You are able to analyze direct traffic, organic keyword traffic, most popular pages of your site, track goals, and more for free. This is one tool you can’t live without. If you don’t have some sort of analytics tracking installed in your site, how are you able to monitor what’s working and what’s not?

SEMRush

Determine out how much search volume a relevant keyword is getting – or spy on the competition and see what keywords they’re ranking for!

MajesticSEO

Get a cumulative look at how many sites are linking back to yours month over month – or check the same for a competitor! Backlinks are one of the major factors in getting your site ranking for a ton of keywords in the search engines.

Google/Yahoo Alerts

You can sign up to receive weekly, daily or “as it happens” emails from Google and Yahoo whenever someone mentions your brand or products online.

Many of the tools have both free and paid versions. If you’re a beginner, sign up for a free account and determine for yourself if it’s worth paying for the full monty!

We all know that LinkedIn is a great networking tool used to get connected with past and present colleagues and classmates. The outlet is often referred to as “Facebook for professionals” because business leaders can power their career and obtain inside connections for job searches or new business ventures as well as having the ability to share and obtain advice from other industry leading experts.

What most professionals fail to recognize, however, is that you are 40 times more likely to turn up in search results if your profile is a 100% complete. Having a 100% completed profile is easy, with a few basic additions to your profile:

•    Upload a Photo
•    Add Current Position
•    Add Past Positions (2)
•    Include Education
•    Provide a Profile Summary
•    Describe Specialties
•    Get Recommended (3)

Once you have a completed profile, you may also want to continue searching for contacts within your network and become more involved in groups and associations. Updating status updates and integrating web based applications adds greater value to your profile. The more activity you present as a professional employee of your company, the better you and your company appears, since after all, your company profile on LinkedIn is comprised of all employee statistics.

Another helpful tip, from an SEO perspective, is optimizing your website listings on your profile for the keyword you wish to rank for in search engines. To do so, “Edit” your website and select “Other.”

For “Website Title” include the title of your website, category or keyword you wish to rank for. From there, simply enter your URL string.

It’s that simple! Now get out there and stir up some industry leading conversation.

Due to the ever evolving world of technology, people are looking to the internet to find business recommendations locally. Businesses that appear in the local search results are found on several online business listings. Submitting your business online can help with your companies search engine optimization. So don’t wait to be found! Submit your business information to get listed on some of the free directories including:

Google Places

As the number one search engine, it’s critical that your business has a local search page. In doing so, your business can be found and you can physically verify your information. Google also allows your business to stand out among the crowd. You can make the public aware of what types of products and services you offer and upload photos, videos, current offerings and more. The best part? You can get insightful information about your listing and make sure you’re making wise businesses decisions moving forward.

Bing Local

Bing Local allows your business to appear in the results when users are looking or are near your location. Bing Local gives you the opportunity to improve or update your business listing at any time. If you have more than one business location you can manage those listings as well. A thorough verification process further enables you to protect your account and authorize your changes.

Yahoo!

Yahoo! Local listing permits you to customize your business listing by selecting a basic or enhanced profile that is easy to manage. The basic option lets you display your business contact information, store hours along with your products and services and it’s free! With the enhanced feature, you will have everything the basic listing includes in addition to your business logo and tagline, photos, and a detailed business description.

Yelp

Yelp allows every business owner or manager to setup an account to post products and services, hours of operation, offerings, photos and even message their customers. Users can rate and provide comments on your business as well as forward the listing to a friend for more information. You also have access to see who your competitors might be of those viewers who viewed your listing.

Best of the Web Local

Best of the Web Local allows you to provide your business contact information including website and email as well as driving directions, photographs and payment options. BOTW Local Premium offers you more visibility and detailed information that can ultimately drive greater foot traffic to your location.

It’s important to keep in mind there are a slew of other online business listings that must be completed to really make an impact and get your business found.

Google Instant Search Case Study and Explanation

We have had  a tremendous amount of questions surrounding the topic of Google’s new instant search. Most of the questions  seem to relate to expectations that the business executive should have on the impact of traffic and conversions.

Now that we’ve actually had a week and a half to monitor some phrases that we personally rank for and check the impact of instant search on those keyword phrases, we figured it it would be best to share them with our customers and, of course, you.

I don’t really have an opinion one way or the other about instant search.  It’s almost like in some areas it will be a detriment and others a positive, so it’s almost a wash.  But read below, and I’ll explain why.

How It Used To Be

Before instant search, the default by Google was to offer suggestions in a drop-down fashion as the user would type their query into the search input box. However, no results would be displayed until the user pushed enter or click the search button.

A good example, which we are using in this case study, is the phrase “home value”. As you would type “home value,” you would indeed see suggestions drop down. They would not be that great of an influence, but may give you a few good ideas.

How Google Instant Search Changes Search As We Know It

Google automatically displays the results for the phrase "home values" when a user may be trying to search for "home value."

Now, you’ll notice that by the time you get to the letter “v” in the phrase “home value,” Google has already displayed the searches for the plural term, “home values.” so, “what’s the big deal?” You ask. The big deal, for us anyway, is that our website doesn’t rank on the first page for that  plural term. It does, however, rank for the singular term. So, if Google instant search is followed by the user 100% of the time, then we’d have just lost all of our organic traffic from Google for the term “home value.” In our case, this could literally mean hundreds of dollars every day in revenue.

In this "instant search," the user could be looking for a small business that sold home products and is then distracted by "Home Depot" all over the page along with maps, etc.

Let’s think about a small town hardware store named “Home Store.” Imagine yourself going to Google and searching for, “home store.” Once you type in the first “m,” you have Home Depot staring at you in the face along with a great shiny map. I believe, this small-town store may just lose some sales as a result of instant search.

I’m not stating an opinion one way or the other, only that it’s definitely something that needs to be thought about by the small business owner moving forward about the organic search (and paid search for that matter) marketing that is being done for an organization.

What Our Data Shows About Instant Search Surprised Me

My initial reaction when I saw that Google was automatically displaying the results for “home values,” as you were typing in the phrase “home value” was one of true despair. I assumed that having the results automatically appear for a different phrase would be so much of a distraction that people would automatically flock to them.

This is not what we found out in our data however. I go over this in great detail in the video above, but here is a synopsis.

• Google instant search was launched on September 8, 2010.
• We compared two different sets of data. Both  datasets were individuals searching Google for the phrase “home value” who landed on our page that ranks for that term.
• In the national search results, we have consistently been ranked at number three during the entire time frame of our datasets.
• We compared Wednesday, August 25, 2010 through Sunday, September 5, 2010 to Wednesday, September 8, 2010 through September 19, 2010. This gave us an accurate day by day comparison, because search volumes vary greatly during different days of the week.

The results?

18.64% increase in search traffic from Google after instant search distracted users away from our tested phrase.

We found that even though users are defaulted to search results we do not appear in, we actually saw an increase in traffic from Google of 18.64%. To be honest, I can’t logically explain it.

One of the few things is happening. Either Google is showing different instant search results to different people, and the phrase “home value” is one of them or people are disabling Google instant search. The only other explanation would be that the results are simply being ignored. Maybe the average Google user, who doesn’t live in this stuff every day like we do, is almost seeing them as advertisements and doing what they want to do anyway.

We’ll see how this affects things in the future, but as for now… I’m not nearly as worried as I was 12 days ago.

As you may have heard, we here at ProspectMX are sending Matt Cutts to space.

Well, ok, not the REAL Matt Cutts… and not really into space, but…well watch the video if you haven’t heard.

ProspectMX is Sending Matt Cutts to Space! from Dave Conklin on Vimeo.

That’s right, we had a doll of Matt Cutts made and we’re going to send it on various adventures in the coming months. Hopefully, other prominent members of the SEM community will be on their own adventures, too.

Joe Latrell, a fellow employee, also happens to be a Rocket Scientist (isn’t everyone?). He volunteered to build us a 10 foot rocket to help Matt on his journey.

But there was one critical piece left that we didn’t have for the launch next week.

A name.

So, we polled the community and got a couple great suggestions as to what to call this magnificent beast of a rocket. After much deliberation, crying, voting, and tallying – we have reached a consensus. The rocket will be called…

Drumroll please…

SPAM BLASTER!

Yes, the rocket will be called Spam Blaster. And what better name for the rocket-fueled-speed-machine that will hold Matt Cutts on that fateful day? A phrase that not only encompasses a giant rocket but also Matt Cutt’s day to day responsibilities at Google?

We’re quite pleased with the name and would like to thank everyone that suggested names and voted.

So it’s the final countdown. We have a rocket. We have Matt Cutts. And we have a name.

There’s less than a week left until the launch, so we hope to see you all back here next Monday at 2pm to see how it all goes down.