DIY B2B Direct Marketing and SEO

Research plurals and singulars

Some people search Google and co for goods and services using plurals, others use singular words and phrases.

Here’s an example. Say you sell bathrooms. One of your most popular search terms might be bathroom suites. But it’s also worth finding out how many potential customers search for bathroom suite.

If your main competitors are busy fighting over a singular key word or phrase, focusing on the plural alternative – and vice versa – can give you a useful competitive edge in the search engine results pages.  

If you’re neck deep in DIY SEO and want to find out your latest positions in Google’s search results, don’t forget to disable the personalised search option first!

What are personalised search results? In the interests of improving your search experience, unless you tell Google not to it’ll return results based on your previous searches and the sites you’ve visited in the past.

Why disable personalised search results? As a normal punter they’re harmless enough. As a marketer they’re misleading.

If you want to check your positions for various keywords you want clean data. You need to see what the rest of the world sees, not results that have been skewed to take your own tastes and behaviour into account. 

So how do you avoid getting personalised results from Google searches? Simple.  

Go here and download this excellent plug-in, which works for both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Thanks to Drayton Bird for these two small but perfectly formed little gems:

• The golden rule of marketing is – give your customers what they want
• The golden rule of targeting is – go where your customers go

Perfect. If you’d like to get a regular email from Drayton, each packed to the rafters with the best in direct response wisdom, just register on his home page here.

Research by http://growsmartbusiness.com/ indicates a recent increase in social media marketing by small businesses:

• one in five of the 500 US small business owners questioned confirmed they use social media for marketing
• 69% post status updates, news and links on social networks
• 61% claim they use social media to find and attract new prospects and customers
• 57% have built a network of new prospects via social media websites
• 39% run an industry-specific blog
• 50% of small businesses who use social media for marketing say it takes up much more time than they’d expected it to
• 17% feel that social networks are negative, just encouraging consumers to criticise their business
• 6% said using social media has done their business more harm than good
• 45% expect social media to break even or turn a profit in the next year
• overall social media marketing is the third biggest investment small businesses are planning to make over the next two years

There’s still no sign of social media marketing giving birth to new revenue streams. So far it seems to be working very much like offline ‘above the line’ advertising, slowly building brands and reputations rather than driving direct sales. It’ll be interesting to find out exactly how businesses will make social media marketing profitable in the next twelve months.

I flounced out of Facebook at the weekend.  

Why? Because recently, Facebook has delivered more pain than gain. I’ve always enjoyed it but the last two interface relaunches have found me struggling to find stuff, people, messages… 

As a rule when I encounter something new it only takes a couple of goes to get it. But for some reason the latest generation Facebook baffles me anew every time I visit. I’m beginning to feel like a bloody goldfish.

So much for a logical, intuitive, simple, common sense graphical user interface!

Facebook updates regularly so I might re-register one day if things improve. Until then I’d rather be lonely.

Alternatively perhaps it’s time to defect to Google’s new social network offering, Buzz.