Blogs can provide a valuable, cost efficient and effective way to market your products and services and to keep customers informed and coming back for more.

What exactly is a Blog?

Put basically, a blog is a website (or section on a website) where an individual or group of people record information, opinions, articles of interest, news items etc. on a semi-regular basis.

A blog could read like a journal of daily or weekly activities, such as a travel journal telling stories of someone's travel adventures or it could be a collection of articles and news items.

How can a Blog help your business?

• Communication and customer service. Blogs provide a way to communicate with your customers, sharing information about your business, your products and services.
• Keeps customers up to date and encourages traffic to your website and return of sales.
• Builds a community following.Some blogs can enable commenting from visitors to the site to respond to blog articles, provide input and feedback.
• Get found on more searches in Google. Keeping content on your website unique, fresh and full of relevant key terms plays an important role in improving the search engine ranking of your website.

What could you write about in your business blog?

• When it comes to your business, no-one knows it better than you - writing articles of your knowledge and experience is often the easiest content to put together and provides a friendly personable approach for your readers.
• Provide tips and tricks of your trade (without giving away too many secrets of course!) encourage your readers to contact your business for more information.
• Write articles on your latest companies developments, products and services this will help to keep customers informed and encourage sales.
• Write articles on local news or relevant industry news this will help to incorporate key terms to assist in the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) of your website.
• Blogs can also contain other media like videos or links to your presence on social media networking sites (such as facebook or twitter).

So why not start blogging today and see how it can help your business grow.

GemStar Interactive can implement a blog component into your new business website, enabling you to easily add new articles, images and content.

Contact GemStar Interactive today to discuss your website needs.

What is Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?

After hitting the 'Search' button in search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing, for any particular keywords you are taken to the search engine results page (or SERP) where you can see a list of results matching the terms you typed.

The 'organic' search results are the results for websites that are ranking on particular keywords without paid advertising for their SERP placement.

Sitting to the right-hand side of the organic results, and sometimes above them are paid advertisements or PPC (Pay per click) ads. The paid search results are bid on in an auction system, and the position of each ad is determined by a combination of relevance, the amount the advertiser bid, and the ad copy used.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) such as Google Adword campaigns can be a very effective way to gain more traffic to your website and for your business to get found on relevant searches.

Google Adword Campaigns

Google Adwords are the pay-per-click advertisements you see for businesses when you do a search on Google.

Every time someone clicks on one of those ads a small fee is charged to the ad holder’s adwords account. The more competition a keyword has the more the pay-per-click rate is.
In order for Google Adwords to be effective, keyword research and analysis is required with on-going monitoring of the ads to make appropriate changes to ensure campaigns are successfully hitting target markets.

For any SEM campaign it is essential to start with thorough keyword research and analysis to find out what terms you should focus on, what your competition is and how your campaign ads should be written. Selecting the right keywords significantly influences the results of SEM campaigns.

Can I do keyword research myself?

Sure, there are loads of great tools available to get you started such as Google's free keyword tool   https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, this tool is essentially created for Google Adword campainging so you can enter a list of key terms and compare the competition and cost per click rate to build up your Adword campaigns. You can also use this tool as part of your keyword research for developing copy on your website to increase organic search results.

Note: the competition results you see using the Google Adword keyword tool is the competition in Google Adword campaigs itself - not the direct competition for organic search results - this requires further investigation and analysis.

However I must warn sometimes it is really worth investing in the services of a professional, unless you really know what you are doing or have the time learn, you may not achieve the results you were after.

GemStar Interactive takes an integrated approach to Search Engine Optimisation - offering our clients a complete SEO solution - a combination of best Organic SEO practices to ensure your website is search engine friendly and othe option of PPC (Paid Per Click) advertising campaigns to significantly improve their online presence. You may like to ask about our 'Ultimate grow your business online' packaged bundle.

Contact GemStar Interactive today to talk through the web and SEO needs of your business.