Mad 4 Blog

Rebranding can breathe new life into a business and attract new customers. It can also help keep your company current with trends in the marketplace. In 2008, InterMedia became Mad 4 Marketing, so we are definitely familiar with the hurdles of designing, building and exposing a new brand. We know exactly how tricky it can be to spread the word, establish key messages and ensure client retention. But with today’s digital marketing options, rebranding is made even simpler with the help of a few key strategies.

Cost-Effective, Automated Rebranding

First and foremost, using the Internet to establish rebranding is an incredibly cost-effective way to make many people aware of the change. You’ve already got the real estate to advertise it: your own website. Naturally, you don’t want visitors to arrive at your address one day and see that there’s been a complete overhaul. They’ll probably assume they’re in the wrong place and leave altogether. So in weeks and months prior to your rebranding, be sure to let visitors know what they can expect down the line.

Changing your website address entirely? You can retain some of your presence online by setting up an automatic redirect from your old site to your new site. Or, you can leave the old website up but change the homepage to explain where you’ve moved and why. Letting readers click through manually can make an even more solid impression, while providing necessary information. Remind them to also change their bookmarks and links!

Keywords and Consistent Messaging

Today, many businesses earn referrals and acquire clients directly through their website. Naturally, you don’t want to sacrifice your strong online presence or lose incoming traffic when you change your content or location. The only way to combat this is to have an advance plan for SEO. As a large part of your rebranding efforts, remember to target words and phrases that can be used throughout all advertising efforts and tied back into Pay-Per-Click (PPC). Researching effective keywords may take some trial and error as you watch how traffic lands on your new site’s pages. Then you can adapt your PPC investments accordingly to keep your new website at the top of search engine lists.

However, by evaluating where traffic comes from and how it moves through your old website in the months prior to your new brand’s launch, you should be able to deduct which keywords should be carried over, what should be ditched and which content should be carried over directly to your new page—with a change of names, of course. Careful analytics before and after your rebranding process will help you utilize the strongest possible keywords to grab online traffic and express your new message to all visitors.

Using the Power of Links

Aside from keywords and targeted content, another quick way to loan strength to your new page is to build link connections with influential websites. By having many pages linking to your site, especially heavily populated websites, you’ll not only receive direct references from those locations but this will also cause search engines to rank your website higher by association. Once again, web analytics play a large role in this process. You can track who’s been landing on your page and from where to determine all of the major sites who link to yours. Rebranding is a great excuse to reach out to everyone who used to link to your old website and asking them to update their links–while announcing your rebranding initiative.

Of course, it’s also a good time to make new connections and develop contacts online. Figure out which websites might be interested to hear about your rebranding and provide them with all necessary information to promote you. A great way to encourage promotion is to offer a link exchange with them, so that your website is returning the favor to help strengthen them. You may want to come up with other incentives for this kind of partnership, or directly purchase a link. Powerful websites may take your offer more seriously if you begin by linking to them first as a show of good faith. Linking without reciprocation to relevant websites may make them take notice of your page organically while they’re doing their own analytics follow-up.

The most important piece of advice to remember is to be patient. As with all steps in the rebranding process, gaining a solid footing online through redirects, links and keywords may take time. But by utilizing available web analytics and other resources–including your own contacts and existing website–rebranding your business can be much more efficient and affordable.

As we’re all aware, typing a keyword into Google not only displays the most relevant information in the organic search, it also displays the most relevant ads targeted towards those keywords.  We are so accustomed to getting exactly what we are seeking on the internet, thanks to Google.

Now Google is making online advertising even more targeted by using information from the web sites people visit.  They have launched something called “interest-based” advertising on their partner sites and on YouTube.  These ads are displayed based on categories of interest.  For example, if you visit web sites about fishing or hunting, then you may see ads displayed for fishing poles or hunting equipment.  Google also allows you to choose your categories of interest, or you can tell them which categories in which you do not want to see ads.  This helps advertisers reach people who are actively interested in their products or services.

This type of customized advertising does bring up the question, “Is big brother watching us?”  Some users first reaction includes a feeling of invasion of privacy.  However, Google provides three explanations that demonstrate their commitment to transparency and user choice:

• Transparency – Ads are clearly labeled that they are provided by Google.

• Choice – They built a tool called Ads Preferences Manager, which lets the user view, delete or add interest categories associated with the user’s browser.

• Control – Users can always opt out of the advertising cookie.

At Mad 4 Marketing, we feel this will be a successful new tool for users and advertisers alike.  It will enable users to view more relevant ads, which will help generate higher ROI for advertisers.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of obtaining natural search engine rankings to drive visitors to your website. There are several important factors that search engines such as Google and Yahoo take into consideration when deciding which websites to display at the top of search engine queries:
• Inbound Links are the single most important factor within search engine algorithms and the best kind of inbound links to have are one way inbound links from websites that have a Google page rank of 3 or higher.
• Website Architecture is another key factor in search engine optimization. It is critical that websites be built in cascading style sheets (CSS). The beauty of CSS is that it greatly reduces the code to text ratio by placing the code for the page design in a separate file which allows search engine robots to more quickly read your web pages and find the text and keywords.
• Content is King. Once you have a website with clean code with a lot of inbound links, you then want to have enough content to naturally infuse all of the keywords that you want your website to get ranked for.  Many people make the mistake of thinking that being ranked for 10-15 keywords is sufficient. In the world of Search Engine Optimization, every industry has thousands of keywords that people put into Google and Yahoo to find similar services and products. To find the keywords that people put into search engines to find your particular products or services visit http://www.google.com/insights/search/#.
These are just the basics of Search Engine Optimization, there are many other intricacies to the process that I will continue to expand upon in my next blog. In the meantime if you are looking to build a new website or want to drive visitors to your website via SEO contact me today at tiffany@mad4marketing.com for a free SEO website benchmarking and analysis.