Infoserve Group

Another no-nonsense guide to Infoserve’s products to try and make everything as simple as possible for businesses looking to increase their online presence.

We started with Infoserve’s KeySite product, now let’s look at City-Visitor.

In essence, this is one of the most used business finders on the Internet – or an online directory as most people like to call it.

Someone searches for Hotels in Durham, for example, and you can bet a directory will pop up, because it provides the exact information that person wants – a list of hotels.

Infoserve’s City-Visitor website is a really powerful opportunity to help your business get to the top of search engine results. It has 12 million number one positions and 22 million first page positions on major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo!, so if you’re listed on here with Infoserve, potential customers can easily track you down.

Infoserve offers free listings, but to get ahead of competitors there are also enhanced and priority listings so people spot your business first.

Infoserve’s City-Visitor website basically does all the hard work for you, getting you top rankings.

What are you waiting for: contact Infoserve to find out more about how we can help get your business found online.

Here at Infoserve, we speak with hundreds of companies every day and there is a huge amount of confusion about what online marketing can do for your business.

We just want to prove to you exactly what can be done through Infoserve’s portfolio of online local search marketing solutions.

So we’ve decided to write a no-nonsense guide to Infoserve’s products on this blog to really make everything as easy as possible.

Let’s start with Infoserve’s KeySite offering.

This is a really simple website that ranks highly in major search engines for chosen search terms.

The ultimate aim is to get your business on the first page of search engine results when someone is looking for your product or services in your local area.

Let’s play that one again. Would you like to be on the first page of search engine results when potential customers are looking for you?

An Infoserve KeySite can perhaps be targeted at a new product you want to push, a special service you offer, and it can either link back to your existing website or be a stand-alone website promoting your business.

And it can be written, built and be ranking in the search engines within a few weeks.

Just give Infoserve a call to discuss what search terms you want to rank highly for.

Or take a look at some examples we’ve already done for customers wanting to rank highly for garden maintenance in Coventry (click here to see KeySite), or car servicing in Dunstable (which you can find here).

You may have noticed a change in the way Google has been searching for your results. In the past month Google Instant has been predicting your search as you go, ‘faster than the speed of type.’ Researchers found that people type slowly but read quickly and this new innovation modifies the displayed results as you type, saving you time every time you search.

The creators claim that Google Instant could save you between two to five seconds whenever you search, and they even say that if everyone used Google Instant around the world, it would save 3.5 billion seconds a day, which could mean that 11 hours could be saved every second. That’s a lot of time saved for both businesses and their customers.

Now you might be wondering what this means for Search Engine Optimisation, and why Google Instant is important for your company. The changes to Google have meant that webpage optimisation is vital; if the key terms that a customer is searching for are being predicted by Google, it is essential that a company’s webpage has as many of those key predicted terms as possible. In the UK where 90% of searches happen on Google, tailored, effective SEO is a must.

Customers will view their Google results as more accurate due to Google Instant’s predictions, so a listing on the second page just won’t cut it, and accurate, professional search optimisation is essential. Our City-Visitor product has 12 million number one positions and 22 million first pages on major search engines, including Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Infoserve’s SEO service offers your company results that are tailor made for your business and your requirements, and our goal is to help your customers find you as quickly and easily as possible.

Our products include a Keyword Management Report: the equivalent of an SEO health check for your website.

If you want to see your website ranking higher in the search engines and want to make the most of innovations like Google Instant contact Infoserve.

The latest internet advertising results are out, which provide really clear evidence of the direction of online marketing.

(They are particularly relevant given they are UK based stats rather than a lot of US information which is circulated, and secondly, they are the results for 2009 so are bang up to date)

The stats are from the Internet Advertising Bureau, in partnership with PricewaterhouseCoopers, and shows a growth in online spend despite the difficult economic conditions.

Key figures are:

• Spending on internet advertising grew by 4.2% year-on-year on a like-for-like basis.
• Paid-for search listings (the adverts that appear next to search engine results) were up 9.5%, display adverts down 4.4% and classified adverts down 5.3%
• The number of people online grew to 39.7 in Feb 2010, representing an increase of over four million active internet users in just 12 months

So what does all this mean?

In a nutshell, more and more people are spending time online and businesses are gearing their advertising towards appearing next to search engine results.

Ah, but aren’t paid-for search listings expensive I hear you cry?

It’s one of the biggest myths in online marketing. Tailored, relevant paid-for search adverts can in fact be a very cost effective way of securing more business. You can find out exactly what gives you the best ROI and you can analyse which keywords are attracting the most number of click throughs to your website. Win win.

Don’t forget though, there are many other cost effective strategies for appearing on the top pages of search engine results, such as search engine optimisation (SEO) to help improve your website’s natural rankings, or getting a listing on a business directory that features on the first page. You can find out more on all these approaches here

The award-winning Hovis commercial about the boy going for a loaf of bread and journeying through the decades until he arrives back in the 21^st century began a nostalgic trend.

The cleverly reworked Milky Bar Kid and Persil Mum showing the commercials through the ages quickly followed.

Having discovered that nostalgia reinforces strong brands and sells products it won’t be long before others follow suit.

But this approach will not work for everyone, especially those companies overtaken by technology.

Take Yellow Pages for example. As brilliant and memorable as the commercials were, we are unlikely to hear the ‘Good Old Yellow Pages’ strapline being repeated.

Although it is accurate, as online marketing has all but consigned paper directories to the bin, Yellow Pages will not want to bring attention to the ‘old’ method of business search.

Re-running the cult JR Hartley commercial would only serve to demonstrate the time consuming method we once used. Today, Mr Hartley would not have to ring countless bookshops to ask if they had his book. A quick search on the internet and he would have found it in a couple of clicks.

Business marketing in paper directories was fairly straightforward in those days. Pay a lot of money for a large advertisement and the perception is that you are a successful and trustworthy company. The bigger the advertisement the more likely you were to be chosen.

The consumer of today is much savvier. They can do a lot more research about a company via online local search now. Not only can they find the product or service they need quickly but by clicking on enhanced listings in an online business directory or a well optimised website they can take a look at the company’s website and find out much more about them.

Mind you with Government statistics suggesting that nearly 50% of SMEs do not have a website, even though an effective one can be produced for less than £100, it demonstrates a lot of companies are still missing out on potential customers.

Perhaps some are still clinging on to listings in paper directories. But even Yellow Pages must have realised the writing was on the wall when they brought out the TV commercial of the small boy standing on one of their directories to kiss a girl. The pay off line explained that there were so many other uses for Yellow Pages than looking for a plumber to repair a leaky tap.

Having said that, one part of their marketing campaign still holds true today.

You can still ‘Let your fingers do the walking!’… Except now they are more likely to be using a keyboard rather than thumbing through a paper directory!

With the vast majority of business searches now made online and the success of paper directory and traditional local newspaper advertising methods in decline, more and more companies are beginning to recognise the importance of search engine optimisation (SEO) to help them improve the natural ranking of their website within the major search engines’ results pages (SERP’s).

In 2008 the number of local searches for goods and services performed online increased by 58%, reaching a total of 15.7 billion searches for the year, whilst total online searches for 2008 reached 137 billion and today that figure is higher still.

The search engines list over one billion websites, the majority of them fighting for the top positions in their industry sector. This makes it vital for online companies to employ the services of a search marketing expert to help potential customers find them on the internet. Very few searchers go beyond the first two pages in the results, often not even to page 2, and the need to rank prominently on page 1 has driven this demand.

The constant review of multiple websites ranking positions is incredibly labour intensive and so many companies choose to automate their search queries. This can - if done abusively - impose stress upon a search engines resources and result in a ban being imposed upon the IP address of the user.

Infoserve’s SEO strategy combines the use of search engine friendly querying tools, techniques used to make a website more accessible to the search engines and users and the constant review of a website’s performance in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages) in order to increase the visibility of a website in major search engines.

One such tool is the Ranking Report Software by Caphyon, which has been developed to emulate a manual search, therefore saving the user the inconvienience of incurring a search engine’s wrath and being denied the service.

With the help of the Advanced Web Ranking Tool you can choose to track the ranking of multiple websites through over 1000 search engines and generate monthly reports making it easy to get a quick overview of the evolution of a particular website. The Advanced Web Ranking Tool’s project management system can manage hundreds of different site results at once, using scheduled updates to avoid the task of manually updating each individual project.

The Advanced Web Ranking Tool can also help with the all important task of keyword research, helping you to find the most used keywords that people use on a daily basis to find the products and services you are hoping to market. It helps you to research and analyse new keyword ideas, identify search trends and get more information on finding niche market related keywords, by bringing multiple keyword research tools together in order to make your research much easier and more accurate.

Another important aspect of a successful SEO campaign is link building. The search engines view good quality inbound links to your site from sites with related content as a recommendation of your website. The more relevant and authoritative inbound links your site has from other successful sites within your industry sector, the more relevant and authoritative the search engines will deem your site to be. Successful link building strategies are based on establishing your competitive position in the online marketplace that already exists around your specific industry sector.

So monitoring these links on a regular basis is crucial, and the Link Popularity Software by Caphyon is a great tool to help you keep track of your websites inbound links. You can utilise this tool to find out who is linking to your website and which keywords they are using to link to you, you can also check on your competitors websites and find out who is linking to them.

Being able to keep a tab of paid for links can also save you money, if a link is broken or has been taken down the Advanced Link Manager Tool will notify you, it can also tell if the page rank of a linking page has dropped giving you the opportunity to renegociate the cost of your link. The Advanced Link Manager Tool can also help with the difficult task of finding new link partners, the Potential Refferers Wizard allows you to search all of the available search engines, using advanced search criteria to look for future partners who you may wish to exchange links with, listing them in order of page rank. So you can choose to eliminate any low ranking websites from your list of potential link referrers.

Infoserve’s SEO capabilities have expanded rapidly with the help of such tools, giving their SEO experts more time to spend on the one aspect of SEO they have not yet developed a tool for - good, old fashioned, human analysis.