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After three densely-packed days at SMX West in Santa Clara I’ve come away with some overall impressions to share. Needless to say this info is far from exhaustive, but it provides some insights regarding what is getting talked about and what has traction in the search space!

Networking time at conferences allows one to meet folks you’d likely never encounter in your usual environment. I spoke with a sixth generation Texan the other night who is the CEO of a new solar power business. In Houston, Texas – the heart of the oil and gas industry. This man has tremendous confidence in his new company’s technology, and recognizes that just as solar power is “new school” marketing has moved toward new methods for generating attention for a new business. Thus, he is attending SMX West to learn all he can about search engine optimization (SEO) and online marketing.

Many people don’t realize it, but staying organized can be one of the keys to your small business success. For instance, let’s look at your personal file storage. Do you keep team files on your hard drive? If so, I’m sure it takes up a lot of space, slows your computer down, and can only be accessed by one person – quite an inconvenience. One way to address this problem is by backing up your files on the internet through websites that provide online storage. There’s a variety of websites that provide free accounts and come with a minimum of 2GB of storage space. They are basically a virtual hard drive that you can store and share files. And, it’s usually fairly straight forward way to sync your files with the added benefit of being able to access them wherever you have Internet access. Plus, you can also use some as a “drop box” for distributing large files that would otherwise clog a recipient’s email inbox.

In February 2009, it was widely reported that the Local Business Listing service provided by Google had been compromised. Apparently, individuals were hijacking local listings by masquerading as a local business, yet driving web traffic to another site altogether. How could Google let this happen!? Who has the sophistication to get to the heart of Google’s infrastructure at such a business-critical level? And how could the tech giant be infiltrated by some hacker stealing your prospects and the hard work that was driving them to your Web site?

Owning a small business in this economy can be brutal. I keep driving around my community only to notice another business has closed without warning . . . paint store – empty, local market – closed, favorite dry cleaners – gone. With all this retail space, you could hear your voice echo. How are small businesses surviving? What kind of chance do they have when there are larger corporations in the same industry? What can these local owners do to make customers remember them? These are some of the concerns I continually hear from business owners. Can marketing make enough of a difference to help these businesses stay afloat in this economy – even thrive perhaps?

This week, WebVisible will be at the Greater New York Dental Meeting http://www.gnydm.com at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York, New York. With over 50,000 attendees the GNYDM is the largest dental meeting, convention, and expo in the United States.
WebVisible will be exhibiting at booth #3911, located toward the front of the [...]

WebVisible is excited to announce the availability of the first in a new series of quarterly reports: State of Small Business Online Advertising. Our first edition focuses on search, examining trends through a sampling of the company’s small and medium-sized business (SMB) clients collected in the third quarter of 2009. Among the findings, a couple [...]

As online Internet marketing continues to gain market share, the passion for click metrics and following the latest trends are at the top of every marketer’s mind.  According to WebVisible Chief Marketing Officer Kevin Ryan, writing this week for iMedia Connection, “Online doesn’t get its fair share. Ever. What can we do about that? Everyone’s [...]

If the future is local and hyper-local, then the future is search
By Kevin Ryan, CMO WebVisible
New research from Unisfair finds that for 2010, 60 percent of online marketers will be focused on new customer acquisition. The same study found that toward this goal, 75 percent of marketers will be increasing spending in social media, while [...]

If you didn’t believe me that SEM can be a more valuable endeavor for small business marketing online than SEO, there is new data that shows visitors arriving on a site via search engine PPC advertising are more likely to purchase.
According to according to a new study by Engine Ready based on traffic to e-retail [...]