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Posts Tagged ‘online marketing’

Making The Case For Organic Search Marketing

Sunday, October 3rd, 2010

Search Engine Marketing

SEO stands for search engine optimization.  The focus is on removing impediments within your web site while at the same time making improvements to your site that will allow the search engines to increase your site’s visibility within their search results.  Optimally, placing your site on page one of the search engine results for an unlimited number of keywords and phrases that are directly related to the products and services your company offers.

Organic Search Marketing versus Pay Per Click

Pay per click or sponsored ads are wrapped around the organic search engine rankings.  Searchers have become savvy on knowing the difference between organic (perceived to be unbiased) versus clicking on an ad.  The old adage of people wanting to buy something instead of being sold to shows up when you look at research showing that 85% of the searchers will click on organic over the sponsored ads.  Why then is 88% of the budgets for businesses based on pay per click?  It’s the easier softer way for companies to know that they are on page one.  However, when you look at that type of thinking, the flaws become obvious.

Clicking on the sponsored ad means you incur a cost per click.  If your site is listed in the organic, there are no charges per click for search conversion traffic. 

Pay per click is based on all the keywords that your PPC manager can think of or obtain within the SEO tools - limited only by your monthly budget. This is a fairly straightforward, in control type of situation that is by far easier and more expensive than organic search marketing.

In control is not all it’s cracked up to be however since the control is really tied into the cost of each keyword.  There are a number of other factors, but for now suffice it to say that buying your way onto page one has never been the cheapest way to obtain business online!

Because it is easier, web developers, ad agencies and most local search marketers seem to be in love with pay per click for their clients.  Why?  It’s easier and they don’t have to manage the expectations of their clients as much when you can point to the ad and say, “see you are now on page one for search!”  It’s also easier to throw on free analytics and have the client follow the summary reports that don’t dig into things such as traffic patterns and usability.

On the other hand, our clients have typically paid for some type of optimization with their web site.  Web developers usually have some “add-on” SEO services that are questionable, at best.  When the client complains that they are not showing up for any of their keywords, these web designers just shrug and tell them that they did the optimization but they can not control the search engines.  Anyone who says that - walk the other way because they don’t understand that organic search optimization is about the web site, not controlling  the search engines.

Do not let anyone tell you that organic search is not a worthwhile investment.  Talk to a company who understands organic, has a successful track record.  It is the longer road, no doubt.  But at the end of it, your company will dominate the search results for an unlimited number of keywords and you can effectively target a PPC campaign that will allow you even greater coverage than if you were to use it without organic rankings.

Bottom Line

To effectively market your business online, business’ must take a fresh look at organic search engine marketing.   If you tried optimizing your site in the past, try it again only this time work with a company who knows what they are doing and can show you the results.

Be patient.  Setting the right expectation going in will help you and it will help us to get the work done.  Organic search marketing does take time, that is the takeaway, which is why it can co-exist with your pay per click campaign.  Eventually organic should provide you with relief from the daily click costs and allow you the freedom to use PPC ads in your most important business keywords.  Budget for organic search, it’s one of the best investments you can make.

Top SEO Marketing is the leading organic search marketing company in Dallas TX.  Our fully managed search marketing program is a proven plan.  For smaller businesses, find out about our organic based local search marketing service where we get proven results within 30 days.

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SEO Lessons on YouTube

Monday, May 11th, 2009

One of the latest features you might find on web sites is a link to a company’s YouTube instructional videos and presentations.  Here is an example taken from Alan Wall’s SEOBook

The above example is basically a net meeting, presentation that shows you how best to bid keywords on a pay per click campaign.  Interesting in that we also utilize YouTube when our clients want to gain the most visibility from a video.  Rather than embedding the video on their site, we now upload the video to YouTube (space limitation equal to roughly ten minutes) and then embed the YouTube code onto our client’s site.  This way we can optimize the video within YouTube which will hopefully expose our clients information to a larger interested audience.  We can also add it to several sites should they have multiple domains, without worrying about duplicating any content.

If you have a video, you may want to direct your webmaster to upload the video on YouTube optimized with very specific keywords that are directly related to what is discussed on the video.

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Posted in Online Marketing Tips, SEO | 1 Comment »

Oh The Expectations Of Online Marketing…

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

Online marketing has become a bright spot for businesses in this time of cutbacks, layoffs and government bailouts due to it’s high ROI.  On the other hand, the expectations given to the customers by some nefarious SEO companies looking for a quick buck…or those web designers who don’t want to lose the revenue but don’t want to take the time to learn the right way to manage organic and throw unknowing customers under the PPC bus.

I ran into a situation a week ago that still has me frustrated over what occurred.  The “web design company” (and with skepticism, the full service marketing company) I ran into takes the grand prize.  We had done a local (geo targeted no more than 15 mile radius) for a client about a year ago.  They were happy, we were happy and we have the documentation to show that the impact increased their business by a very signficant margin.  Almost a year later, their placement was still high and the traffic was still translating into revenue.

Enter the web designer.  No problem, we had recommended that they get a fresh look for their site.  However, the client calls me and is incredibly unhappy with them after realizing that the contract included online marketing as a part of the package.

After taking a look at the new site, it was immediately apparent that they’d been sold a boatload of kewpie dolls.  Let me give you a few examples:

  • When updating the “new” site, they kept none of the local geo targeted optimization of the site.
  • As the site was live, it seems that they forgot to do 301 Redirects so that all the listings that were in the organic went to a page not found.  They claimed later, this was just an inconvenience and told the customer that this was not a problem.
  • They added on more charges than our fully managed SEO campaign with nothing to show for it.
  • They designed the new site, eliminating the footer with contextual linking - which is an important element in maintaining critical focus of keywords and pages.

The client was duped.  I became the bad guy in pointing these things out, but yet everyday we talk to clients and potential clients about what they went through with these types of companies in the past.  A very real part of what we do is to reset the expectations and provide concrete evidence that online marketing is not for the faint of heart and or those looking to make a quick buck because the client doesn’t understand redirects, the difference in geo targeting etc.

In the end, my guess is that like many companies out there, they will be told that the only way to achieve first page rankings is to pay for it in ads.

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Ways To Increase Productivity with SEO / SEM

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

With belts across the business world tightening,  we have redoubled our efforts to educate clients to be in more control of their marketing spend dollars.  We talk to concerned business owners every day about ways to improve usability, productivity of their web sites and to increase conversion performance.  Here are a few helpful tips that apply to just about every business trying to leverage the power of online marketing to increase revenue.

  1. Add content that uses terms searchers or new potential clients understand.  You will have the opportunity to convert them over to the way your terminology later on specific product or service pages.  But if you are a telemarketing company, but prefer to be known under demand generation and fill the content with everything but telemarketing…it makes it much harder to get those pages ranked under telemarketing.
  2. Utilize Your URL In All Business Advertising. It surprises me when I see businesses advertising their businesses and omiting their URLs.  Even if you are passing out pencils - your domain name should be prominently featured.
  3. Testimonials.  We can not emphasize the importance of communicating your customers experience working with your business enough.  Actively solicit customer testimonials and continue adding them to your web site.  Ask customers to provide you with a review in Google local, Yahoo Local or MSN Live Search (local).  This plus word of mouth advertising is shown to increase business.
  4. Press Releases. Included in our services for search engine optimization campaigns is submission of press releases on a regular basis.  Keeping our clients names out there is a great way to increase branding, traffic and revenue.
  5. Blogs. Does your company have a blog? Does someone in your company monitor blogs to see what’s being said about your business?  Your business blog provides potential customers with fresh up to the minute content and provides an easy way for you to share industry insight and knowledge.  Blogs can also be a good way to build credibility and expertise in your industry.  We integrate blogging into our clients sites and make sure that the blogs are updated on a regular basis.  It’s a great way to keep in the forefront of your business market and attract new qualified visitors to your site. 
  6. Linked In. Are you linked in?  If not, then take a minute to join, (it’s free).  Linked-In has developed into a nice social networking site that can be useful and potentially productive to businesses.  You can find background information on potential clients, join groups in your area of expertise, find former colleagues and associates, easily request recommendations for your business or yourself.  You will be amazed at how many people are connecting to this social media platform. 
  7. Control your dependency on PPC. There are other ways to get your company on page one of search engines other than buying ads via pay-per-click.  Work with your search engine marketing company to get a balance between short term objectives (PPC) and long term gains (organic search marketing).  If your PPC company does not offer organic search, then find a company that specializes in organic or natural search.
  8. Monitor click fraud. Google tied up with Click Forensics trying to further address this issue. The latest reports say that the fraud levels on Pay per click campaigns have come down by 0.2 percent in this quarter of 2008, the bad news: Click Fraud Index calculated the fraud rate at 16.2 percent in September 2008. 
  9. Free Analytics. Watch out for so called “experts” in search marketing that provide you with only the free Urchin type stats. A quality search marketing company should be  Investing in good analytics programs which today are critical in order to dig down and understand visitor patterns, seamlessly integrate PPC and organic statistics and provide vital information for their clients to understand the best ROAS and maximize their ROI.
  10. Expect Business Via Your Web Site.  At Top SEO Marketing Inc. we are committed to bringing our clients new business as a result of our efforts.  We are transparent in our process and exacting in our collection of data that helps us manage our campaign and helps our clients build better web sites for user experience and conversions.  If your web site is not providing you with a significant revenue stream, you should think about changing the way you manage your web site.  The lack of productivity can be fixed before you spend money getting visitors to your site - take the time to make sure that you have the right information and calls to action to capture those visitors. 

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Posted in Online Marketing Tips | 5 Comments »