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I’ve been getting a LOT of new customers still reeling from the effects of a large “search engine marketing” company that has been hammering this area hard for a while now. They make big claims, but show little results; all the while charging much more than they should. People are getting locked into contracts, and by the time they realize they aren’t getting what they paid for, it is too late.

PLEASE take precautions!

• Read contracts carefully.
• Do Internet Research to find if others have had bad experiences. “name-of-the-company scam” or “name-of-the-company sucks” are good ways to start… If a company has been making enough people angry, chances are you’ll get some results! You can use this strategy for almost anything.
• Ask around and compare prices.
• In the Bethesda area, I’ve even heard of one “expert” claiming he is Google’s exclusive partner! Don’t be fooled!

Vansant Creations has been doing search engine optimization and marketing since 1997 – you don’t have to hire us, but at least get a quote. We’ll let you know if other companies’ promises are borderline fraud.

If you are doing Google Pay-Per-Click or other advertising or even print advertising, be sure to use specialized landing pages for those ads, so you can make the most out of every visit. No sense paying to have people click thru to your site if they are lost/turned off by what they see when they get there.

What is a Landing Page?

In online marketing a landing page, sometimes known as a lead capture page, is a single web page that appears in response to clicking on an advertisement. The landing page will usually display directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link.  Landing pages are often linked to from social media (Facebook, etc.), email campaigns or pay per click (PPC) campaigns in order to enhance the effectiveness of the advertisements. The general goal of a landing page is to convert site visitors into sales leads.

So for instance, if you ran an ad in a local paper for a band playing at your pub, the link in the newspaper ad might be myrestaurant.com/bandnight  instead of just going to your home page. That “bandnight” page would probably talk up the band, and hopefully have some call to action, like a link for people to sign up for reservations that night or buy tickets.  You could include some sort of promotion — 10% off for web visitors! — to sweeten the deal.

By analyzing activity generated by the linked URL, marketers can use click-through rates and Conversion rate to determine the success of an advertisement. Code can be placed on this landing page to keep track of visitors, making it possible to gauge the effectiveness of any ad – even a print ad! This way you can see if advertising in that particular newspaper is even worth the money, or if your money might be better spent elsewhere!