Hubspot has been in the news these past few weeks due to the $32 million investment of Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures and Salesforce.com into the HubSpot company. Hubspot has been in the forefront of the inbound marketing trend. Inbound Marketing is a marketing strategy where in a website/company gathers information about themselves, their product/services, and any other social news and information, optimizes them for search engines and finally share them via social networks (eg. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Social bookmarking), blogs, forums, etc to generate interest and leads which will also generate website traffic. Why is Inbound Marketing the latest trend in online marketing? The mere fact that Google (the company) itself has invested millions of dollars into a company that specializes with inbound marketing is reason enough to take notice. There is no doubt that inbound marketing produces good quality website traffic and leads. This only shows the growth of the market in giving importance to good unique content and creating value for users. In all of these latest development, early adopters of online marketing and inbound marketing like The Northern Office - Innovative Marketing Support, can rest on the fact that the market is becoming more mature and seeing the value in online marketing, SEO and social media strategies.

Google analytics is probably the single most comprehensive tool that any webmaster can use to monitor the ongoing success of their site.

The fact that it is free does not detract from its overall value. But it is still only a tool; the value comes with the person that knows how to use it. To most people the graphs, charts and figures will give a basic idea of how well your site is doing. What these figures don’t do is tell you where you could improve, what’s working on your site and what isn’t. To find these answers you have to know how to interpret the data.

Where to find the answers? Bounce rate: The best place for many of us to start is with your site’s bounce rate, it’s the easiest element to understand and is often the easiest to rectify. To start, list your landing pages with the highest bounce rate, once this is done put together a list of the keywords that were used to get to these pages. Do the keywords used correspond with what is on the page? Did the searcher find what they wanted on this page; was it clear for them to see?

The keywords used and what the searcher finds on the corresponding landing page is often the highest cause of bounce rate, redesigning these landing pages to focus directly on what the searcher in looking for can have an immediate effect on your site. Other factors that may cause your landing pages to have a high bounce rate is a slow and clunky load time, over cluttered pages, poor navigation away from your landing page, or an unnatural progression away from these pages.

Goal, conversions and funnels: Analytics makes it easy to track your goals and conversion. If you’re not currently tracking these then you are essentially blind as to how well your site is doing. What is important about these elements of Google analytics is not necessarily the completion of the gold, but the steps and pages that led to the conversion.

By reviewing the click paths of any converted customer you can get a much better idea of what convinced them to take the action you wanted them to. Was there something special about the content they consumed or were you running a special campaigns that may have led to this conversion? You will find the answers in Google analytics you just need to follow their click path backwards.

Segments: Looking at the raw data can be a daunting task, aside from the fact that you could be looking at hundreds of different keywords from searches all over the world. It will also be extremely hard to try and discern any useful and actionable data.

To overcome this Google introduced segmentation which will allow you to break your traffic down by segments based on your requirements. If you want to review the search trends of the traffic coming from a specific country it will take two minutes to get a clear picture of this data by creating a new segment.

Site search: Basically site search will tell you what people search for on your site, but once you start to look at the data you will realize that it does so much more than just this, it gives you a clear idea of what your traffic really wanted from your site and what they wanted to find, the question should now be where they able to find it? Looking at the search refinement column and % if it sites exits after searching will tell you straight away if your site really provided them with the answers they were looking for.

Once you start to track your sites with Google analytics the amount of user data that will build up can help you make decisions that will have a positive effect on the future success of your site. Analytics can help you with your content strategy, competitor research, landing pages and the overall conversions of your site. SOURCE

Google recently released an update to its search results ranking algorithm more popularly known as the “Farmer Update” because of the clear focus on removing or demoting content farm websites. The update is internally known as the “Panda” update. Everybody wants to know exactly what happened, who was affected, and what can be done to retain legitimate rankings and avoid being removed from search engine results.

Here's what you need to know to be successful in your SEO efforts with regards to this recent Google update.

1. High Quality Content It has always been Google’s goal to point users to high quality content and high-quality websites. This update basically emphasizes this objective further by penalizing websites that basically copy-paste content from other websites and those sites with numerous ads surrounding the content. Always make sure to have unique authoritative content in your website that provides value to your users. This builds brand trust and increases traffic and usage as well.

2. Consider your Audience Simple but absolutely useful. Before creating content for your website, ask yourself, “is this something that my audience find useful?”If your answer is yes, then proceed and publish your content into the website. The next step would be to monitor your analytics closely and check the bounce rate of your new content. If the bounce rate is high, this could mean that your audience finds the new content to be invaluable. You will have to change it or remove it all together.

3. Stay Calm Looking at the bigger picture, nothing much has changed. If your website has unique content and is useful to your audience, you have little to worry about. If you want to find out if your website was affected in any way, visit the Seomoz website to find out how you can use Google Analytics and identify any effects of the Google update to your site. In any case, the best solution for any website is to improve the design, usability and of course relevant content of the website. If you achieve this, users will link to your website, drive traffic and basically ensure your ranking on top of Google’s search results.

About The Northern Office :The Northern Office (TNO) is a marketing and sales consultancy firm in the Philippines that caters to small to medium sized enterprises that do not have their own marketing department, but are big enough to need it. Our specializations include internet marketing, website design and development, content development, social media monitoring and sales support.

Are you new to online marketing? You might have hired someone to do it for you and you get confused by the language used? You do not have to be an Internet geek to understand the ‘language’.  Here are the top ten acronyms used in online marketing explained in a simple way.

HTML HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language.  This is the standard language behind most websites and what the search engines read when they look at/crawl your site.  It is made up of hundreds of tags which has all the content on your website and tell the search engines exactly what is in that content.  

You can easily see this by going to any website and view the page source by hitting ctrl+u on your keyboard.  Each tag opens with an angle bracket and the tag closes with an angle bracket followed by a forward slash and another end bracket (i.e.

CSS CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet and dictates the way the HTML code looks and is presented.

XML XML stands for Extensible Markup Language.  This language is more generic and is one that is read by a computer.    In online marketing, you most likely need to have a XML sitemap, which means having a map of all the content on your site because search engines specifically prefer to read this format.

CRM CRM stands for Customer Relationship Manager.  This is great at making sure that your sales team can see what revenues have increased.  It also helps identify things like who are your loyal customers and what aspect of your business is not doing too well.

CMS CMS is a Content Management System commonly used to manage the content of your website.  Examples of this are Joomla and Wordpress.  They allow you to access a private admin area where you can either add, edit or delete pages of your website.

URL Uniform Resource Locator states exactly where your content is located on the Internet.  Example: http://www.thenorthernoffice.com

SERPs SERP’s stands for Search Engine Results Pages.  If you hear your SEO telling you that your site is at position 20 in the SERP’s, this means your site is appearing around the middle of page 3.  Its best to have  you site appear to a closer position.

SEM SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing and can encompass just about anything that involves publicising your website on the Internet.  In includes things like SEO and PPC, social media, and Online PR.

SEO You would probably hear this one more, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation.  The purpose of this is to improve your websites visibility in the organic search engine results pages.

PPC PPC stands for Pay Per Click.  These are the results that appear in the paid results in the right hand side under the heading ‘Ads’.  You only pay when someone actually clicks on your ads. There are still other acronyms and marketing jargon that you might encounter later, but this should give you an idea about the basics of online marketing.

 Need help with your business’ Online Marketing? The Northern Office is a marketing consultancy firm specializing in innovative marketing support for SME’s.  The Northern Office  can provide you a complete range of online marketing strategies that will help you get concrete results out of your investment. Contact us for more details.

In the world of Online Marketing,  Search Engine optimisation is widely used and it is also  one of the most cost effective ways of advertising.  It has now come to a place where people from all ages now use search engines over the Internet to find products and services that will meet their needs.

It has grown from On Page SEO where in you have to make sure that all of your content is relevant to be able to make your search, to having User Signals where in people are now spending less time on searching, because results appear faster.  But even with this vast improvement SEO still has a lot of room for improvement. Some factors that SEO should look into: Making a website faster will surely make it better.

• SEO’s should provide users who are signed in to their services with more personalised results.
• Improve real time search
• Make search results for Images, videos, podcasts, blogs, tweets etc optimised.
• Link social media sites directly to your websites.

The Northern Office-innovative marketing support provides an array of services like sales and customer support, online marketing,email campaigns, social media marketing etc. Contact TNO for a free assessment of your SEO efforts today!