Everyday, the internet is seemingly getting bigger and bigger. As it grows, web use is taking up almost every aspect of people's lives, from researching, creation, purchasing and communication. It seems that nowadays everything is digital. For many businesses that are active online, a lot of focus is placed on online communication, such as live chatting, emailing and web form submissions. However, it's important to keep in mind that phone calls are still a very active part of business. Although the days of yellow pages being a prominent source of leads are gone (for most businesses), mobile use is at an all-time high. As of 2011, there are over 5.3 BILLION mobile subscribers worldwide. That means around 70% of the worlds population is using some sort of mobile calling device. Of those people with mobile phones, a very large chunk of them are using smart phones, enabling to browse the internet and visit websites. It would be in the best interest for all online businesses to provide a phone number as an option of communication. Remember, your business should be about your customers, not about your convenience. Call Tracking is a system that allows businesses to track how many calls they're getting and from where. The basic premise is simple. You're provided with a phone number of your choice (ex. 1-800 or local number) for every traffic avenue you'd like to track. So for example, if you only have one website, you'd add your tracking number to that website. Every time someone calls that number, the system registers the call time, duration and result of call (picked up, missed, or voice mail). By having distinct phone numbers assigned to each of your traffic avenues (ex. website, social media, email marketing), you can track how many phone calls you're getting from each. This is highly important in measuring ROI for any sort of online activity you're doing. If you notice more phone calls coming from one activity, such as social media, and little coming from elsewhere, such as email marketing, you can shift resources and money to areas that are working for you. Call tracking is a relatively simple service that can be very beneficial in the long run. In the same way that you can track visitors, emails, and website changes, you should also be covering your phone calls. Contact Motoza Marketing for more information about phone tracking, and how it can impact your business marketing specifically.

Traffic. Traffic. Traffic. When it comes to internet marketing, a common belief is that if you have lots of traffic, you'll get lots of business. While this is true for the most part, it's not as simple as more traffic = more money. The fact is, you could have a massive amount of traffic and zero sales; if that traffic is not appropriate to your business offerings. For example, if you own a art supply website, and you advertise on a popular celebrity gossip blog, you could get a massive amount of traffic, however the people there aren't looking for your kind of products. The real traffic that you want is called 'targeted traffic'. This mean that people coming to your website are actually looking for something related to your product or service. So for example, you'd want to advertise your art supply store on similar websites relating to art supplies, painting, etc, etc.. Targeted traffic is usually more narrow and less populated than general traffic, however the conversion results are well worth it. You could try getting 10,000 people go to your website, and have 1% of those people purchase a product (100 sales), or you could aim for 1000 people as targeted traffic and have 5% of those people purchase a product (500 sales). The web has allowed a lot of businesses to efficiently find targeted traffic. As opposed to traditional marketing, such as TV, radio and billboards, you can decide what kind of people see your advertisements or website. Search Engines are a perfect example of a place to get targeted traffic (through specific keywords you optimize for). Finding popular blogs related to your service is another strategy of finding traffic sources. Additionally, almost all advertising networks online provide segmented targeted website that can provide you with your target visitors. Spend some time to distinguish what kind of visitors your site best provides value to. Then make sure to stick to looking for people that fit those categories. You may not get as many people seeing your business, but you will certainly get more sales.

As Search Engine Optimization becomes more complicated with more sophisticated search engine algorithms and tougher competition, the days of simply relying on optimized Page Titles and keyword stuffing are long gone. Nowadays, search engine rankings are determined by a large number of variables found both on a business's website and its outer network. While we could likely write a whole book on the external forces that affect rankings, an important, and often overlooked, tactic that can affect your whole website's SEO importance is called "Link Sculpting". Just like you can have links going to your website from another website, you have internal links all over the INSIDE of your website. For example, the connection between your homepage and your 'about' page is an internal link. On this site, ff you were to click the "services" item in our menu, that would be an internal link on the Motoza website. Link Sculpting, also known as PageRank Sculpting, is the process of sculpting your website's internal link architecture so that tells Google which pages are most important on your website. Much like the diagram shown above, Google gives a website a certain amount of 'Page Rank" (pictured as water). Your Homepage, being the center and most visited page on your site, usually gets the bulk of this page rank (PR). The PR then flows through your website via the internal links you have present. If you have "100%" page rank on your homepage, and two pages linked to your homepage, each connected page would get "50%" PR. However, imagine one of those pages is very important to your ranking (a product page, a service page, or a content rich article) and the 2nd page is less important to rankings, such as a Privacy Policy, contact page, or a links page. Since your more important page is more relevant to your business and contains more value for the visitor, you should direct more PR to that page. You do this by adding a 'nofollow' element to the links pointing to less important pages. A 'nofollow' essentially tells Google not to go to that link. As a result, no Page Rank is sent to through that link, so the remaining Page Rank flows to your more important page. It's important to do this to all websites, regardless of the size or complexity. Not only does it make your site look more efficient to Google, it's telling Google to consider your more important pages for rankings of their own. Take some time to go through your site. Distinguish pages that you believe are important to your customers and those that provide very little value. By simply adding nofollows to those links, you've successfully "Sculpting" your website!