August 10, 2009 | 1 Comment

GarrettGoogle’s Caffeine Update and SES San Jose

Posted by Garrett (@garrettgillas)

ses2It’s Monday night and the Envoca team is out in full force on the first official night of SES San Jose.

Deborah has been our navigator for the trip, navigating us from the airport to the light rail to the hotel with little to no injury. Ryan has spent the evening running around downtown San Jose looking to buy clothes to work out in…of course packing them would have been too easy.

I spent the flight coming here listening the screaming two year old sitting next to me. She was trying to get her mom to let her listen to her iPod which had been turned off due to FAA regulations. Yes, you heard me correctly. The two year old is addicted to her iPod as well. No wonder Chris Pirillo calls them Apple’s “gateway drugs”. Now I am sitting in the lobby of our hotel blogging, tweeting, and listening to some guy play jazz piano and drinking ginger ale. It totally makes up for earlier.
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August 5, 2009 | 3 Comments

GarrettGetting Ready for SES San Jose

Posted by Garrett (@garrettgillas)

SES San Jose 2009

The confirmation email for my SES registration came in the email today. The plane tickets are purchased and I think we have come up with a plan to stay on top of managing our projects currently in development from the hotel in California. As of next Tuesday, Envoca will be fully immersed in one of the largest and most prominent search conferences in the world.

For those of you who are not familiar with search conferences, I will explain. Aside from designing and building beautiful and functional websites for our clients we are also heavily involved in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). What this means is that in addition to building websites for our clients, we also provide services that help them get better visibility and traffic from search engines such as Google.
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June 20, 2009 | 2 Comments

DeborahGoogle Adwords Advertising Professional

Posted by Deborah (@envoca_design)

We have been managing PPC campaigns for a couple years now and with big changes in the works, I finally decided it was time to take the Adwords Professional test.  I feel pretty good about passing the test on the first try- which is not bad whose main bread and butter is hyper-local search marketing.

The test is not particularly difficult if you have been using Adwords, but there were several questions which you just have to save time to look up, like, “If you are a pre-pay account can you pay your account with western-union or cashiers check.” Since this doesn’t apply to me I had to look it up. So anyone looking to take the test, keep your Google help open.

I noticed for my test, that there was a large section on new ways a site marketer can integrate with the Google Local Business center within their adwords account.  Since I had attended Google’s launch of these features in 08/09 in San Jose I had already been testing conversion when adding this association. But this was really one of the few times I had noticed a strong push for Google to start monitoring Google Local business and maps.  More on the Adwords / Local Business integration at a different time.

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