Being able to reach and focusing on an international market is one of the advantages of having an effective online presence. Because of the nature of the web people anywhere have had the opportunity to access any website. This meant that my website in Tasmania was searchable and viewable by someone in UK, America or Russia. This has led to the notion that the web really is borderless.

As Google and other search engines place more emphasis on local and personalised search does this still hold true?

Looking at some Hitwise data for search engines in UK, Australia and New Zealand there seems to be a trend that search engines are forcing more people to use their local search engine. For example Australia is google.com.au as opposed to google.com. Driving people back to their local search engine allows the search engine to provide more tailored search results for a particular region.

What does this mean when thinking about the borderless nature of the internet?

A website will get tagged as specific to a region and will appear in one country’s specific search engine results for a particular keyword and not in another country’s search engine results for the same keyword. A website desiring international traffic from the internet will need to worry about rankings on each individual search engine e.g. (New Zealand )google.co.nz (UK) google .co.uk (Australia) google.com.au. It means that to reach an international audience a website will have to work at getting indexed by each different country search engine.

This is not a new phenomenon, but the extent that Google is implementing this seems to have increased a lot over the last six months. Unfortunately the old web where a site will appear in google.com and allow connectivity around the world is starting to fail with distribution of a websites message via search engines where the website is not country targeted.

Hitwise data for Search Engine Analysis
74.61% of Australian searches happening on google.com.au – 2% increase swing
78.62% of New Zealand searches happening on google.co.nz – 2% increase swing
87.27% of United Kingdom searches happen on google.co.uk – 11% increase swing

This trend is growing but will be subject to the staged roll out of personalization to the different countries.

If you are a small business there is a lot of demand on your time. One important trick is the swapping of roles as task and deadline necessitate. Marketing your business is one of those roles. It is essential, and it tasks a fair amount of time.

As a small business owner you are always looking for the most efficient way to market your business. The aim of minimum resource and maximum return on investment will lead you into unfamiliar and uncharted territory.

Internet marketing is one of those new areas that we have come to understand as being essential for the survival of a business. Internet marketing can be very daunting to a business owner unsure of the ins and outs of the web. If you spend any time listening to internet marketing advice a lot of it centres in getting online. The advice starts with create a website, get a blog, be involved in social media, create viral content and so the list continues.

The problem with all this advice is that it can suck up your time and may leave you neglecting other important tasks. Much of the expert’s advice makes sense and promises to lift business and generate great internet return on investment.

But when have you spent enough time online? When is it time to change hats and do something else?

I have attempted a very basic internet diary as a guideline. It is only a starting point but like everything, internet marketing needs a plan. This plan does not consider time spent in learning or getting the knowledge required to market online effectively.

Creating an internet diary is important and will help manage your time spent online doing internet related marketing. Along with a diary an action plan should be created for each individual element that you include in your diary. This element action plan will outline objective, knowledge acquisition, tools required and the tasks that you will be doing during the allotted time slot in your internet diary.

INTERNET DIARY

Daily Tasks

Online Sales and Customer Service		–
Email respond		–
Telephone and SMS		–
Direct Social Messages and Questions	More & more customers will contact you via different media and you may need to respond to a booking request over twitter as well as email or direct bookings. Twitter will take a daily bit of attention	– 10min

Weekly Tasks

PPC – Adwords Review	Review Click through and adjust adverts, keywords and budget (small campaign)	30 min
Google Alerts for Business Name & Branding	Set up a weekly search for your business name and any Branding that is relevant to you. Review the email that comes in and take action as appropriate	2 min
Social Media Friends Management	Add new friends Accept / Reject friend invitations	10 min
Post Content – Blog Article	Check that scheduled content has gone live	10 min
Update Social Profiles	Select the three social media sites that you believe are going to work for you	10 min
Seed Twitter Content – schedule	Paste in and schedule the tweets you have created in your content creation time.	10 min

Monthly Tasks

Keyword Research	Keyword research to identify short tail and actionable keywords that you can market to.	30 min
Write Content	Write Content Blog Posts Twitter etc	12 hr Spread out over Month
Schedule Content or new blog posts	A lot of the blog software has the ability to schedule when content will go live. This feature is very handy in cutting down on the time spent posting new material to a website.	15 min
Website Analytics		30 min
Search Engine Rankings		15 min
Industry Trends Online		15 min
Partner Distribution Effectiveness
Google Alerts for Opportunities	Set up a monthly search for opportunities that is relevant to you in your niche. Review the email that comes in and take action as appropriate	2 min
Link Building	Whatever you decided to do for link building during strategy planning now is the time	30 min

Six Monthly Tasks

Brand keyword research	Update and make sure that your brand keywords are still working.	20 min
Website Analytic Goals		2 hr
Industry Trends & Goal Alignment		15 min
Social Media Trends & Goal Alignment		30 min
Your Social Network & Plan		3 hr
Webmaster Tools	Identify Errors, crawl stats	15 min
Feeds & Sitemap submissions	Make sure feeds are working	5 min
Conversion Element Testing		1 day
Link Building strategy		4 hr
Competitor Review		1 hr
You Tube or Photograph (Flickr) additions	Not factoring in time spent in taking pictures or making video	2 hr

Team Tasmania is a program that helps tourism operators in Tasmania who are targeting international visitors work with Tourism Tasmania on a number of international marketing opportunities.

Team Tasmania operators engage in a number of networking events with an element of the event focusing on helping operators improve their international marketing reach. The following is the presentation and discussion that I was involved in where we discussed some principals of Search Engine optimization.

Areas that were talked about were

• The web is a supporting tool for a business
• Areas that a website owner should think about
• Accessibility (Hosting, Coding, sitemaps, CMS)
• Usability (Overcoming visitor obstacles, Set conversion goals)
• Analysis (Google Analytics, Free tools, Google Webmaster tools)
• Popularity (SEO, SEM, Social Media, Offline activities that need to dove tail)

The importance of Search Engine Optimization

SEOmoz SEO Pyramid developed by Rand Fishkin was used to talk about the layers involved in an effective SEO campaign. Some factors were explored around effective SEO. The SEOmoz SEO Biennial Ranking report was used to highlight some SEO areas.

Social Media was discussed.

• Any one can get involved
• Trying to cover everything takes too much time
• When thinking about getting involved in social media identify a category or type of social media and concentrate on getting it right. Dont try and tackle everything all at once.
• There is a difference in being involved in social media as a commenter or using it to understand what is being said as opposed to creating viral content that will promote your business.

Search Engine Marketing or Pay-per-click

Although it is becoming a more difficult area to obtain quick wins with higher keyword costs etc it is still an area that will help a business get exposure on the internet. It is important to get the right tools, do the right research and follow up with effective monitoring and testing.

A list of a few helpful resources

Sitemaps

http://www.sitemaps.org/

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ – Help Generate a sitemap

Usability
http://crazyegg.com/ on page interactive tracking

http://www.surveymonkey.com/

http://www.usabilityone.com/usability-resources/articles/usability-articles.php

Analytics

http://www.google.com/analytics/

http://web.analytics.yahoo.com/

Keyword tools

https://adwords.google.com.au/select/KeywordToolExternal

http://www.google.com/sktool/ Search based – find keywords from other side

Toolkits

http://tools.seobook.com/

http://www.seomoz.org/

Web master tools from Search Engines

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools

http://www.bing.com/webmaster

Competitive intelligence

http://www.google.com/insights/search/

http://www.google.com/trends

http://www.keywordspy.com/

https://www.google.com/adplanner/

PPC

https://www.google.com/adplanner/

www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor

https://adwords.google.com.au/

Good SEO Blogs (information)

http://searchengineland.com/

http://www.seomoz.org/blog

Other Tools

http://www.addthis.com/

“Money out means money in! ” – That is the way advertising works.

One of the key objectives in participating in advertising is to pay less and get more. The better this ratio stacks up the happier the advertiser. Luckily, Google and the other online advertising sites make it possible to reduce the amount paid for advertising and get more benefit by paying attention to the quality and relevancy of the advert.

The snap shot above is the way my Google account stacked up over a particular six-day period. The top graph shows Click through rate (CTR) and the bottom graph shows Cost per click (CPC). The cost of a particular advert being clicked on has a few contributing factors and as outlined by Google they are.

• Ad Click through rate: about 60% – As users click on adverts so the CTR increases and the quality ratings of the adverts increase.
• Ad Relevance: about 30% – Determined by the correlation of the advert, the keywords being bid on.
• Landing Page Quality: about 10% – The information and user action when they arrive at the landing page being presented.

Looking a little deeper into my campaigns, I had the following breakdown. The top campaign is Content search; the others are all search advertising. It is quickly obvious again the correlation between CTR and cost from this breakdown. The second and sixth campaigns have much lower CTR than the campaigns around them and look what it does to the cost per click of these particular campaigns.

Ways to increase the quality score of adverts.

Break keywords into groups

Group all the keywords that belong together into a particular campaign. Go down to the next level which is the adgroup level and group the different concepts within the campaign into relevant groups. These groups may contain as few as one or two keywords. The idea is to get as specific as possible in targeting the keywords with the most relevant advert.

Target the keyword

Using the ability to change between broad, phrase and exact gives the ability to reduce the amount of noise surrounding an advert. The more exacting a keywords target is, the less the advert will be displayed for terms that are not related. Negative keywords play a role in minimizing irrelevant phrases that an advert may be displayed for.

An example of this would be if I am advertising, a caravan park and I target the city where the caravan park is found, then I may have my advert showing up for queries that are about the city council or library. Using the negative keyword library would stop an advert being displayed for search that is about the city library. What this means is that targeting more closely the intent of the person searching, means that the person who sees the advert is more likely to click on the advert.

Produce relevant landing pages.

If a person clicks on an advert because they believe that they are being taken to a place that sells hotel accommodation and they land on a page that sells cars then the user experience is lacking. This is a very out there example but the closer an advert is tailored to what is on the landing page the better the user experience and that leads to the possibility of having the user take the desired action. The correct correlation between intent and what is being displayed then helps to raise the quality score of the advert.

Online advertising is a full time job if done correctly. The size of the overall campaign also determines how much time needs to be spent in achieving the right result. If there is a struggle with time I would suggest that an advertiser cut done on the number of terms that are being targeted and concentrate on getting those campaigns which are running the best return. Aim to increase the CTR, by improving the quality of keyword relevance, advert and landing page. This in turn will lead to a decrease in the cost-per-click (CPC) of each advert and the overall cost of online advertising while providing greater return on investment.