We have always done our marketing from Los Angeles to San Diego and had always thought of it as our home turf. However, this new venture into central California, specifically Bakersfield, has been a broadening experience because we never thought that our web services could benefit this place. Boy, were we wrong. But first you have to understand why at first glance Bakersfield seemed such an unlikely city. The name Bakersfield in itself evokes farm land, cows, and more farm land. From the freeway, it’s difficult to imagine that business outside of agriculture and oil is possible.

So, what is a web firm like ours that focuses on web design, web hosting, and search engine marketing, doing here anyway? Well, after a few months of testing the market and researching our competitors I think we’ve found our niche in Bakersfield. We’ve discovered that our web services are greatly needed and in much demand. Our motto is to keep the human in technology, which means that being in Bakersfield is our way of putting a human face on our web firm because technology often ignores the human element. Plus, what I like most about coming to Bakersfield is that we bring something fresh and unique to the table when compared to the other web design companies in town. For my next post I’ll go into more detail about what sets Jupiter Labs apart and our methodologies.

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Ok, so here is my first official post for the Jupiter Labs blog, and as the online marketing whiz in our organization I will take care of the online marketing / search engine optimization section in our blog.

This is pretty exciting for me, I am teaching online marketing for undergraduates and graduate students here in San Diego, so I am used to talk about search engine marketing, but writing a blog is kind of new to me, and at this point I would like to take the chance and apologize upfront, as a native German it is obviously twice as hard for me, so my first couple of post about seo will probably read kind of rough, but rest assured, I’ll work on my style and write as entertaining and informative as I can - I am sure we will get there.

Ok, so why this blog? Well, we recently discussed in an internal meeting that honesty and transparency are definitely core values of Jupiter Labs, so we would like to use this blog as a medium to keep our customers informed about what we do, and share our knowledge with the rest of the world.

Why is Jupiter Labs doing SEO - Search Engine Optimization? As we see ourselves more as a service provider, we want to provide our customers the best service available, meaning we don’t want to sell just web applications, we want to help businesses to grow, and search engine marketing is obviously one of the most important parts in making an online business a successful online business.

Let me give you a synopsis of Marketing Sherpas ‘E-Commerce Benchmarks 2007′:

“2006 was another good year for ecommerce as the industry continued growth of nearly 25%, matching 2005 almost exactly. Growth in orders continued apace, with a slight shift down in hyper-growth of more than 20% toward strong growth of 10% to 20%, barely 5% report a decline in the total number of orders for 2006 compared to 2005. A drop in orders may not be a bad thing for all organizations. Some companies have restructured their offerings to reduce the overall number of orders while increasing the size of each order. The most common method is to institute a free shipping over $XX policy. For these companies, less is indeed more.

Five years ago, ecommerce represented slightly less than 1% of all retail. It has grown in every quarter, and by every measure. That growth has been about 25% every year since, and for the first time in the fourth quarter of 2006, ecommerce hit a full 3% of the total. That may sound like a small number, but it’s 3% of $991 billion, or $29.73 billion.

This data is consistent with benchmarks gathered around the industry, although it is somewhat higher than U.S. government estimates. Overall, domestic online retail grew by nearly a quarter from 2005. If there is any discrepancy, it’s likely that the research undercounts the expansion of ecommerce by auction selling and smaller sites that may elude the methodology. In other words, ecommerce may be even healthier than it appears.”

So, there is a lot of business out there, but just having a well designed website won’t bring you any - search engine optimization does the trick.

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