It can be a case of mixed feelings when you hear the news that one of your competitors have closed down. On one hand you fear the worst – that the same might happen to your business if the demand for your products or service is slowly drying up with the current state of the economy. On the other hand, you’re feeling that this means there should be more opportunity for you to gain a bigger market share. So how do you grasp that opportunity through your online marketing?

Gain instant traffic with pay-per-click adverts

As soon as you hear the news, you could set up a new campaign in your PPC account to target those searching for the closed down company’s name. Add variations of their company name to your keyword list and create adverts that inform searchers that the company has closed down, as well as displaying your key USP. Let’s make an example, let’s say you have a website that sells football socks and your company name is ‘Red Socks United’. Your competitor that’s closed down is called ‘Blue Socks City’. Here’s the type of PPC advert I would run along with keyword variations of ‘blue socks city’ to target those searchers:

Attract traffic to your site with a blog post

To target people searching for your competitor’s brand name through organic search, you could write an article or blog post to publish the news online. Using their name in the title could help you pick up organic traffic, and with Google’s recent freshness update, your article may just appear on the first page of results for a few days after posting. Obviously you don’t want to be seen to be taking pleasure in them closing down, so keep it non-biased and informative like a proper news post. However do make sure you have a call to action of some sort at the end of the post which encourages readers to stay on your website.

Improve your organic rankings with broken link building

This is an SEO link building technique I’ve been reading about more and more recently, and is one which I feel brings a fresh lot of link opportunities for those who have become a bit stuck and are running out of ideas. The concept is basically that you find broken links on a website that you want to gain a link from, kindly tell the webmaster that you have found the broken link whilst browsing their site and just wanted to point it out to them, with the aim that they will agree to link to your site instead, since you have content which is suitable enough to replace the previous content they linked to.

Whilst doing some competitor analysis the other day, I came across various links to a site of a company which I know went into administration last year. As they would’ve been a competitor of my new start-up client, a lot of the links that they have to their (now dead) site could link to my client’s site instead as they sell the same products that their competitor did.

Gain more revenue from your existing customers

Knowing that one of your competitors have gone bust might make you re-evaluate what you’ve done to stay successful and what you’ll probably find is that an important factor is – without a doubt – your customers. Now is a better time than any to thank your customers and businesses can always do more to gain more revenue from their existing customer base. Why not send out a newsletter/email to everyone on your subscribed list and offer them a brilliant discount, free delivery or a free gift with every purchase – whatever you think your customers will appreciate, what you can afford to give away and still make a profit on.

Don’t let a competitor’s misfortune get you down, instead adopt these positive online strategies to try and increase your share of the online market. If you need any help with putting these strategies into place, call Creare on 01788 551 591.

Many businesses have realised that they need to be online in order to be seen by potential customers. With paper-based directories diminishing in size and with people becoming more mobile and being able to search on the move it is only getting more important to ensure you have a place online and are doing everything you can to be as visible as possible.

For those that are thinking of getting online or for those that want to push their online presence here are just a few tips that every small business owner should seriously consider if they are to be taken seriously in the online world.

Buy a Keyword Rich Domain

This isn’t the be all and end all with Google, but keyword rich domains tend to do much better. With a little bit of work and a well-made site you can soon find yourself at the top of Google.

If you owned a plumbers merchant in Leicester and you managed to grab plumbersmerchantsleicester.co.uk you’d be ideally placed to pull in some great quality traffic to the site and are probably one of the few URLs that people will remember instantly, give or take the exception of a few well-known brands.

Use WordPress

Most SEO companies will tell you that WordPress is a great platform for SEO. Easily customised, clean coding, constantly updated and search engines love it. Plus it’s easy to use and pretty much anyone can set it up.

If there’s one thing you do to your site to improve it, move it over to WordPress and you’d be doing yourself a huge favour. If you’re thinking of setting up a new site – make WordPress your first stop.

Blog Regularly

Following on from the last point, blogging regularly is key to showing the search engines that your site is up to date and relevant to visitors and it will be rewarded with more trust and better positions as a result. Google loves fresh content and it’ll be a matter of minutes before it’s running over to check out what’s new – it’s like waving a CurlyWurly in front of a chocoholic’s face.

Look to Your Suppliers

Have a brief chat with each of your suppliers or other industry leaders and see if they’ll place a link to your site. Not only does this help improve your site’s authority as a whole but will also help Google to see that you are a known and trusted resource – suppliers won’t link to just ‘anybody’, after all.

Although there are many other elements that help a website gain success online, these are some fundamental things you should look at to help establish your site online and can be used as a fantastic base to start a hard-hitting SEO campaign.

With the massive increase in popularity of social websites like Twitter, Myspace and Facebook it is becoming obvious that the trend of blogging and of people going to the internet to read about subjects is massively on the rise. People are checking out the blogs they have subscribed to more frequently to see what’s new in their subjects of interest more frequently and the new generations of young adults are joining more and more social networks to interact with what’s current in the world.

People love sharing information online and that essentially is exactly what blogging is! Anyone can set up a blog and there is usually a subject for everyone no matter what your interests are.

With more people looking to blogs for what they want to read rather than reading newspapers they’re an ideal place for you to promote your internet marketing campaign. In comparison to newspapers blogging is a lot more light hearted and the freedom to write about anything often brings some interested articles out there.

The facts are simple though. If people don’t like what they read they won’t often read your work again, but if they do like it they can subscribe to your news feed and may become very loyal readers of your blog.

Building up this kind of reputation within your blog is an excellent internet marketing strategy as with more returning visits to your blog you build trust in your business brand and build a good reputation with the outside world and essentially your website visitors.

Trust in the company is one of the top reasons why people buy or agree to take on a service from a company and done the right way blog writing can help to achieve this trust in your business.

Some top blogging tips to improve your internet marketing strategy and make it bring success to you and your business are:

• Be dedicated to writing quality content every day. Sounds like a lot of hard work but it’s essential particularly at the start to ensure that you build the trust and popularity to make your blog a success.
• Persevere!!- It takes time to build a reputation and it takes time to get noticed out there. Most people’s blogs that fail are due to the fact that they simply gave up….you may not realise how valuable your blog is to the first few who subscribe to your feed.
• Write and add articles online. Add the blog articles to article sites and socially bookmark them. This will help others to see the articles you write and help you to gain more readers
• Go to other blogs and make comments on them. This will help others to see what you are interested in and to see the opinions you hold too.
• Keep your blogging natural. This is often what makes people prefer reading blogs over newspapers as when you let your personality shine through in your blog your readers will be attracted to this too.

These few tips and a dedication to ensuring your blogs have quality content within them will support your internet marketing strategy and boost your online business.

It is well known that Twitter is a great way to connect with millions of people worldwide, and there is no doubt that if you can master it, it can be an effective way to promote your brand and your company. Social media and SEO do go hand in hand in many ways although not in the conventional sense we would imagine when talking about SEO. If you choose to use Twitter as an online marketing tool you need to earn your respect and build trust. You will be the voice of your company. This is not easy as anyone who has been involved with a forum will know. Online “relationships” are more difficult to build than in real life and equally as hard to maintain.

The first and possibly the most difficult step is to build up a following for your company. This is going to be the tricky part. A good place to start is to make a list of suppliers, clients and retailers you offer your products and services to, if they are on Twitter follow them and it is likely they will reciprocate. If you use Facebook add a link to your Twitter page, equally add a link in your email signature, many people out of curiosity will click on the link and then it’s down to the profile being engaging enough for them to follow you.

Use your Twitter account as if you are a real person, make your Tweets interesting and if so inclined there is no harm in adding a touch of humour. Ensure your blog is linked up to aggregate your latest post, make the effort to engage with your followers and those who follow you, you never know who might be reading it. Try search.twitter.com to see if someone has mentioned your company name, if so acknowledge that, it will go a long way. Try and tweet once a day and re-tweet anything you find interesting, flattery goes as far online as in real life, knowing someone has read something you have written and found it interesting makes it all worthwhile!

Twitter is very similar to SEO in the sense that it takes time, but it is free and nothing worth having comes easy. Twitter won’t help your rankings improve but it can give you a greater presence, and therefore more traffic and more people visiting your site, these factors combined will go a little way towards helping your SEO.

How the rise of Twitter could spell the end of the PageRank Algorithm

I watched an interesting video on Web Pro News, where Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz discussed the possibility that Twitter is ‘cannibalising’ traditional SEO practices such as Link Baiting. He expresses a very convincing argument.

More WebProNews Videos

Fishkin says that you can calculate PageRank from the twitter graph in the same way as you can on the web.

Why are links going to be less important?

Reading more of Fishkin over at SEOmoz I came across a supporting article from him where he elaborates on this subject. Read it here. Basically, he suggests that Blogging is more about building your own authority and is less popular than it once was, so those still blogging are doing it for themselves and not to share knowledge with their peers, and so rarely link out.

I can only surmise from this that:

a.) blogging for yourself becomes introspective to the level that it not only becomes dull and difficult to think of new things to say and,

b.) the popularity of blogging has decreased because linking out has proved to be unsuccessful for SEO purposes so people are less inclined to do it, and therefore have less to say. And,

c.) if linking to fun or interesting sources can be achieved much quicker on Twitter than on your own blog then this is what people will do.

Having said this I do think there is merit in linking out from your blog but only if you go to interesting and informative sources. It’s a way of connecting what you have to say with what your wider community has to say on the subject.

Why follow when you can lead?

Personally, I think that using blogs to talk about your own products, services, industry relevant topics and your own opinions is a better use of time than randomly re-publishing or re-writing other ‘more interesting’ posts written by other people. As well as this, I really think the place for a blog is to talk about your services in a way that cannot be done on a static brochure style website, as the nature of a blog is comfortable, friendly and much more personal.

The purpose of a corporate blog should not be to regurgitate the same tone and language as the static site would have, but to connect with your customers on a more personal and engaging level. Of course it’s still all about sales, it has to be because that’s the nature of the beast, but you can do it in a more creative and engaging way.

Fishkin goes on to say that this trend may well spell the end of backlinks as the main ranking factor. I can’t help think, that although this remains to be seen, it could liven things up, eh?