Posts Tagged ‘search engine optimization’

5 Completely Affordable Social Monitoring Tools

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

I am so thankful for innovators like The Plum Tree Group.  They bring me comprehensive and interactive marketing through MarketPointe. They understand who it is important for me to have a social media tool to help monitor my online activity and maximize my results.  Here are five of the least expensive social monitoring tools out there.

1.  Ubervu is a free social monitoring tool.  It has some great features.  I found you can log in to see your saved searches and I love that.  You can use a full range of social media information with it too.  Ubervu handles Tweets, comments, posts, and videos.  The things that concern me with it are the occasional issues with the interface in Chrome and some glitches in the default settings in the daily mentions.

2.  For $1.00 per month you can use BrandsEye.  If you are looking for a tool for social monitoring it is a bit lacking.  A majority of its features work well with the older management tools though.

3.  Social Mention is a pretty decent free monitoring tool.  It is visually appealing and easy to use.  I see its only major shortcoming come from its search ability.  You cannot save a search and come back to it later.  That can end up being pretty inconvenient and potentially wastes time.  I am not happy when my time gets wasted.

4.  Viralheat is a very affordable monitoring tool at $9.99 per month.  I found it a bit difficult to learn the navigation.  Once I did, the information I had access to was awesome.  I found graphs, statistics, activities, and countless other bits of information.  It is great to have all your pertinent information in one central spot.

5.  A free trial is a nice incentive and I like that Trackur gives us that option.  After the trial you are looking at about $18.00 per month cost.  The basic account is named correctly – it is very basic.  If you like more jazzy features to go with the straight forward format you could be disappointed.

For more information about how you can leverage social monitoring tools, call Plum Tree Group at 800-540-4165

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Posted in Online Marketing, Social Networking | No Comments »

Keyword Research: How to choose the right keywords for SEO

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

Keyword Research is one of the most important pieces of an effective Search Engine Optimization strategy. Selecting the right keywords will have a great influence in several aspects such as brand image, merchandising, site traffic, conversion rate and search engine ranks.

The first step that the Plum Tree Group takes is to conduct a comprehensive market research on your industry, including market structure and segmentation, target costumers, competitors, product brands, product trends, and social media analysis. Once we come up with a list of hundreds of keywords, we evaluate them according to the following criteria:

Search volume
This metric indicates the number of people searching for a given keyword. Although this information is pulled from Google, the numbers are not completely accurate, and therefore it is important to weigh them relatively to the search volume of the other keywords in our list.

Relevancy
This refers to the degree that the keyword connects with your goals. In other words, how would a searcher feel if they searched for this term and found your site? Would your site satisfy the searcher’s need? Once we have determined the most relevant keywords, specific landing pages should be developed for them.

Competition
The competition level represents the number of sites targeting a given keyword. There are two primary sources to determine this level: the number of sites competing for the keyword advertising space on Pay Per Click networks, and the number of sites optimized for the term.

Final Keyword Evaluation
The most valuable keywords will strike a balance between search volume, relevancy and competition. There are three combinations that hold a high value:

Higher competitiveness and higher relevancy: Sometimes there is no choice but to fight for a competitive term. If this is the case, we have to make sure that the term has a high degree of relevancy.

Higher search volume, lower competition and higher relevancy: Keywords that have high search popularity, are targeted by a reasonable number of competitors, and are related to your site conversion goals represent the ideal balance and must be on our keyword list.

Lower search volume and higher relevancy: Even if the number of people searching for the term is small, the people that do execute this query are more likely to land on your site and ultimately convert.

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Posted in Online Marketing | No Comments »

The Importance of Continuous Online Marketing

Friday, December 11th, 2009

If you’ve never visited our site or blog before, allow me to give a brief introduction and explanation of MarketPointe:

MarketPointe is a division of The Plum Tree Group (PTG), an integrated business solution provider that focuses on solutions for emerging businesses. The PTG focuses on Information Technology, Business Process Outsourcing, Marketing & Communications, Consulting and Micro Venture Support Services.

Our mission at MarketPointe is to help small- and e-merging businesses target and build their growing online marketplace through custom interactive campaigns and resources.

There, introductions aside, now to the Pointe:

We are priveleged enough to provide our online marketing services to myriad clients in multiple industries. That being said, our marketing goals, strategies and tactics also vary as widely as our clientele. However, several overarching tactics remain the same, such as social media networks and engagement, e-mail marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO).

I came across a very informative SEO post earlier today highlighting the reasons why it’s important not to merely spit out what you’re going to do for your client and do it once, but to continuously update and stay current with your online marketing and consultative services.

The post brings up several terrific reasons about leaving SEO to the SEO pros: The lack of implementation by the client, consistently participate in and increase link building, staying current with search engine changes, the downturn of employees due to this downward market, and the importance of utilizing in-house analytics.

MarketPointe proudly stays on top of these robust and dynamic tools and methods. Don’t believe me? See for yourself and give us a ring.

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Posted in Online Marketing | 3 Comments »