Yearly Archives: 2014
Social Media Madelaine Kellman27 Mar, 2014
How Not to be an #EPIC Social Media Fail
Alright, we all know which brands are nailing it when it comes to social media. I’m lookin’ at you Uber, BuzzFeed, Seattle PrideFest, Oreo, Nike, NO H8, and Coca Cola. These names represent a variety of businesses, brands and events. But despite their differences, every one of these companies has achieved great success by being… Read More
PPC Chad Kearns21 Mar, 2014
Exploring the Potential Impact of Google AdWords Online Video Ads
Last December, PPC Essentials, Portent’s pay-per-click service offering designed for growing small businesses, took a leap of faith in positioning ourselves as an entity offering services separately from Portent’s enterprise-level internet marketing services. One essential element of this transition was to create a new website for ourselves that would completely separate us from Portent’s main… Read More
SEO Ian Lurie20 Mar, 2014
eigene-homepage-erstellen.net: Under manual penalty
This is an hour-by-hour, day-by-day narration of Portent’s time in the Google Penalty box. If you want to read in order, read from the bottom up. While our time under penalty was very short, the lessons are good ones. We did the same work for ourselves that we’d do for other clients, with the exception… Read More
Random Ian Lurie19 Mar, 2014
Why I changed jobs
When we announced my job change, I figured it’d just slip by. Who’d care if I shuffled leadership at Portent? I’m just some guy. Man, was I in for a shock. I got literally thousands of ‘congrats,’ and hundreds of ‘WTFs?!!’ Which was flattering, and a little intimidating. Hopefully this explains the why, what and… Read More
SEO George Freitag19 Mar, 2014
Old School Keyword Research with Google Webmaster Tools
“Not Provided” is old news by now, and most SEOs have learned lots of different keyword discovery strategies. There are costly solutions like mining paid traffic and using third party tools, or just plain complicated tactics like correlating ranking data with organic landing page traffic. These are all great and people absolutely should continue using… Read More
SEO Marianne Sweeny12 Mar, 2014
UX is the New SEO
Unlike Orange is the New Black or 60 is the new 40, this adage is true. UX is the new way to optimize sites for search engines because Google said so. Yes, that benign search giant has decided that links are no longer as important as they once thought. Out of deep concern for its… Read More
Design & Development Jarrod Medrano11 Mar, 2014
How to use Intention.js for Responsive Design
When developing responsive websites, you will inevitably encounter designs that require some kind of HTML reordering. Often this arbitrary reordering can be achieved through clever CSS tricks, but if that is not possible or practical, you may end up having to do some kind of javascript to sniff for browser widths. Enter Intention.js. Intention.js is… Read More
SEO Ken Colborn10 Mar, 2014
Rankings Aren’t All That: How to Really Track SEO Improvements
There are LOTS of people out there that don’t understand what SEO is and how you do it. I wish I had a dollar for every time I was told to go do my “SEO magic” by a client. These same people are hungry to see results to make sure that you are actually doing… Read More
PPC Timothy Johnson7 Mar, 2014
Bing’s Automated PPC Solution for Small Businesses
Running paid search campaigns takes time, money and experience that many small businesses don’t have. They may have heard of PPC before and have thought about whether it can help their business, but who has the time or knowhow to run an AdWords or Bing Ads campaign? AdWords Express is Google’s automated PPC solution for… Read More
Internet Marketing Isla McKetta5 Mar, 2014
Internet Marketing Lessons Learned from Walking the AWP Book Fair
A writer at a book fair is a lot like a teenaged girl loose on the Internet with her mom’s credit card. The wonder! The excitement! The expense! When that writer is also a marketer, you can be sure she’ll be looking at the displays! The giveaways! The opportunities to build brand awareness! This is… Read More
Michael Wiegand27 Feb, 2014
Portent Webinar Recap: Next-Level Segmentation
Here’s a link to the segmentation deck: Portent Webinar: Next-Level Segmentation from Ian Lurie And the link bundle mentioned throughout Michael’s presentation today: http://portent.co/nl-segments Check back soon for video!
PPC Kiko Correa27 Feb, 2014
Are You Optimizing Your PPC Campaigns To Death?
Ok ok, now that I’ve gotten all the link bait title out of the way, let’s get down to actual business. Now, I love my coworkers but they also set pretty high bar. When I inherited a major cosmetics account from my colleague Michael Weigand, I knew I had my work cut out for me,… Read More
Design & Development Blake Scott20 Feb, 2014
What Does a Degree in Architecture Have to Do with Web Design & Development?
Information Space has a conceptual mirror... Physical Space Having recently worked my butt off to earn a Master of Architecture, I often come across those who are curious about my decision to channel my design education into the wonderful world of the interwebs. Basically, I'm regularly asked what capital-A Architecture actually is– as in, physical… Read More
Blog Steve Gahler19 Feb, 2014
Advertising Will Soon Reach a Digital Tipping Point
While television continues to have its strong hold on ad dollars, digital is a rapidly growing category and there are no signs of it slowing down. Take for instance Google’s $3.2 billion cash acquisition of Nest, with many reports suggesting it’s a play to better target ads in the home. These investments are increasingly putting… Read More
PPC Ryan Moothart6 Feb, 2014
Google Shopping Campaigns Get Results
For the past few months, we at Portent have been trying out Google AdWords’ new Shopping Campaigns format for a couple of our clients. We had been eager to try it out and finally got the opportunity last November when one of our clients was accepted into the beta program. After 2 and half months,… Read More