A few years ago Malcolm Munro, a business professor (now retired) at the University of Calgary, approached us about writing a case study on Anduro Marketing. We were happy to oblige.
Malcolm co-wrote the case study, entitled “Anduro Marketing: Internet Services vs. Software Sales“, with Sid L. Huff. Sid is a Professor and Head of School at the School of Information Management, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand.
The summary of the case study as list on HBR.org is:
“Anduro Marketing is a Canadian company that sells technical services to companies wanting to improve their search engine website rankings. Though small, Anduro has attracted several major clients in both Canada and the United States, and expects steady profitability and growth. Anduro believes it can generate substantial additional profit by developing and selling a suite of software products that automate its technical service offerings.”
The case presents the conundrum that we had to either develop a technology suite related to SEO tools or focus on expanding our service offerings. I won’t tell you in this blog post what we decided to do. But you can contact me directly and I’ll let you know. Please contact Jeff Nelson via our Contact Us page.
Tags: Search Engine Marketing, Strategy
Posted in Industry News, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
I’ll admit that I watch quite a few videos on YouTube. Here a link to a video that trashes outbound calls in favor of using your website and social networks to generate qualified prospects to call to your company: You Oughta Know Inbound Marketing. The song produced by Hubspot is based on an Alanis Morrissette tune.
Excellent video and fun to watch.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Have a listen to Andrew Warner’s interview with Rahul Sood. Rahul and his team started Voodoo PC years ago and sold the enterprise to HP in 2006. Click here for a link to the MP3 file.
I have heard Rahul give this presentation live a few times. It is a classic story of a young guy starting a company doing what interested him. The company morphed into making high end PCs for gaming while the rest of the industry was focused on driving the price of PCs down.
The company has been profitable since day one. Typical of his business acumen, he bought a heritage home near downtown Calgary for $700,00o and sold it for $1,000,000 in 2005. He and his co-workers changed the focus of the company because they loved playing online interactive games but were annoyed at the performance of existing machines. They cut $1,000,000 in revenue in unrelated work (hosting and networking) in order to build a brand that focused on high end performance PCs.
His keys to success: focus on the customer and build excellent quality products. Sounds simple but Rahul had the perseverance, energy and smarts to execute this game plan.
Have a look at the latest PC from Voodoo, called Firebird.
Great story. Excellent entrepreneur.
Tags: Entrepreneurs
Posted in Industry News | 1 Comment »
George Michie of The Rimm-Kaufman Group has posted results of an excellent research study of the importance of long tail keywords. See How Important is the “Tail”? An Emperical Study. The findings from the study are valuable as summarized in these 5 points:
1. The importance of the tail varies tremendously
2. People search differently for different types of services/products.
3. The importance of the tail does not depend on the size of the search spend.
4. The tail is most important for SKU-based commodity retailers.
5. The tail is critically important for some advertisers.
I love the way Damon James in our company summarized the article. His conclusion is, “For bigger websites (lots of pages) and companies with lots of discretionary funds, the long-tail is a good thing. For smaller websites (limited real estate) and companies with limited dollars, (unless they want to do it themselves), not so much.”
One of our strategies is to use SEO techniques to go after keywords that are in the middle of the tail and pay-per-click campaigns to catch keywords on the long tail.
The bottom line is that most companies have to look at the value of keywords in the long tail and determine the value. More often than not setting up a pay-per-click campaign is the best way to go.
Tags: advertising trends, AdWords, Fundamentals, Google AdWords, Keyword Research, long tail, Pay Per Click, PPC Campaign, Search Engine Marketing
Posted in Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
One of my favorite blogs is Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik. Recently he published a post called, Analysis Ninjas: Move Beyond The Top Ten. In the post Avinash argues that looking at the top ten items on any list has limited value. What lies beneath the top ten is often more important and valuable. The problem, he states, is that analyzing below the surface is difficult and time consuming. What is needed are tools to make the task easier.
He lists a variety of tools but the one that caught my eye was the Keyword Tree developed by Juice Analytics. To used the tool you need data in a Google Analytics account.
This tool combines the value of tag cloud and relationships. Very quickly you can see which combinations of keywords people are using to get to your site. The menu of keywords at the bottom of the screen show a list of all the keywords – it is so easy to use.
The Referrer Flow Tool is also interesting and valuable.
The purpose of this tool is to answer 2 questions:
a) What pages are visitors viewing?
b) Where are they coming from (referral page)?
The tool takes a bit of practice to understand but in about 5 minutes you can gain an appreciation for which pages are valuable and where referrals are coming from.
When you have a bit of idle time, try out these tools.
Tags: diagnostic tool, Google Analytics, SEO, Technology, Tools
Posted in Improving Website, Industry News, Search Engine Optimization, Search Tools | No Comments »