It All Begins with Keyword Research

If you target the wrong keyword search term, and rank #1 on Google, Yahoo! and Bing for that keyword, but nobody is actually searching for that keyword term, you’ve wasted a lot of time and money. You won’t receive any traffic from that top-5 ranking. Keywords with high search volume represent the ways your target audience is searching for information about your product or service.

We take a reverse engineering approach to build the keyword lists we target for our clients. Once we know what your customers are looking for all we have to do is target those keywords in your content, article distribution, press releases, pay per click advertising and link building strategy.

» Need some help with keyword research?

What Happens If I Discontinue My SEO?

One of the most popular questions I’m asked is, “What would happen to my rankings and traffic if I discontinued my SEO plan?”

Most of the sites we work on have never had great rankings before, and most have been inactive, without any new content, for a long time. With the addition of fresh new SEO article content, on-page SEO for existing content, a new blog, social media marketing and link building, search engines will often respond with a very favorable ranking increase within the first 90 days. After that initial peak we work on developing steady sustainable growth in rankings and traffic.

The explosive initial increases won’t continue over the long term and the steep angle on the graph will level off somewhat. It’s common for website owners to consider discontinuing the SEO program when the slope of the curve levels off a bit.

We’ve tracked the rankings of clients with a short term agenda and those who stayed the course with a long term strategy for over eleven years. After aborting the program, the work done in the previous months will continue to yield dividends for a while longer. Rankings will often increase for a while. Web site owners will therefore feel they made a sound business decision, but with no further SEO, new content or online marketing the inevitable decline in rankings and traffic begins. For very competitive industries websites can lose their rankings very rapidly. For certain niches, or for sparsely populated regional keywords the first page rankings may last for many months.

» Vancouver SEO services

The Ideal Web Site – Part 6 of a Series

The Ideal Website Converts Visitors into Customers

At the end of the day, the reason for having your website is to increase sales. It’s not about winning design awards (except perhaps for the designer ). It’s not about about developing a large internet audience. If you can’t convert your visitors into customers, or develop revenue from your traffic by other means, your site has failed to provide a return on investment.

Does your website even have a conversion strategy?

Does it provide unique and valuable information? Is your site worth bookmarking for return visits? Do you offer an RSS feed to enable your visitors to subscribe to updates?

If you’re selling something, or wish to achieve a visitor response, do you have effective ad copy? When you change your copy, do you monitor the response?

Does your website take the visitor by the hand and lead them through your content with a planned traffic flow strategy? Are you asking for a response at each step or hoping your visitors read their way through all the pages in the process before taking action? Many of our clients are amazed to discover that their visitors were already sold on page one or two . All we had to do was provide a ‘take action now’ button to dramatically improve sales.

Do you have analytics installed? Are you evaluating your stats each week? Do you tweak your content constantly to provide better results?

We believe that:

Design + Traffic + Conversion = Sales

» Request a free internet marketing consultation and proposal

The Ideal Web Site – Part 4 of a Series

The Ideal Website is Attractive Enough

Effective Internet marketing follows the 80/20 rule; where 80% of your investment is ‘Super SEO’ (promoting the hell out of your website and brand online) and where only 20% is the website itself.

• A pretty website without top rankings on Google, Yahoo! and Bing/MSN is pretty much useless.

• An award-winning website without traffic just plain sucks. They cost more money and take more time to design, so without traffic (sales)  they become a bigger liability.

• A drop dead gorgeous website that does not convert visitors into qualified leads or customers has failed as an advertising and marketing medium. Period.

An attractive website is only worth a damn when it provides a positive return on your investment.

Are we against sexy design and design awards? Absolutely not! My own epiphany came about seven years ago when one of our clients received a beautiful award for the website we developed for them. My customer called me to congratulate me on the design achievement, but then lamented over the site’s poor performance on the bottom line. I reminded him that we had proposed an aggressive SEO and online marketing campaign but he had declined. On further reflection I realized it was my fault. I’m the internet marketing professional, I know what really matters when it comes to ROI and I hadn’t absolutely insisted on a program to drive traffic to their site. I had allowed the client to invest their entire online marketing budget on an award-winning design and there had been nothing left for assuring the site had traffic or the ability to convert traffic into customers.

A good website is ‘attractive enough’ that visitors feel they are dealing with a solid, reputable company. When search engine rankings and other sources of traffic are in place, and the site is generating enough sales to more than offset the cost of additional design, it may be time to revisit the design with a facelift. If your site isn’t in the top ten ranking positions for all of your primary keyword search terms, put your money into SEO, social networking and link building, not a flashy media presentation few people will ever see.

» Need a website makeover?

The Ideal Web Site – Part 3 of a Series

The Ideal Website is Search Engine Friendly

Over 80% of the traffic on most successful websites will come from being listed on the first page (top-10) on Google, Yahoo! and MSN. The rest of your traffic will typically come from PPC (pay per click) advertising, inbound links from theme related websites and being listed on the second or third page of the top three engines. If your site isn’t listed in the first three SERPs (search engine results pages) your site should be considered ‘invisible’ to the Internet.

Most sites aren’t search engine friendly. They don’t rank well because they don’t deserve a top position. They have very little content and the content they do offer isn’t considered of much value to searchers. Typical ‘toot your own horn’ ad copy on the home and about us page, tables of prices, forms, Flash photo galleries, JavaScript widgets, most short description shopping cart pages, etc. are not good content.

Search engines love fresh unique content that is rich in naturally occuring keywords, internally linked to other theme content in the site. Content should be added at least weekly or even daily. Great content encourages naturally occurring links from other theme-related websites and trackbacks from blogs. Over time a website or blog will accumulate hundreds or even thousands of posts and/or articles.

Developing quality content involves a commitment. Many companies have several bloggers or a designated writer. If your company does not have anyone with the time to create content on a consistent basis, there are SEO copywriting services and web content writers that will help make your site search engine friendly.

» Need some help with SEO?

The Ideal Web Site – Part 2 of a Series

The Ideal Website Targets the Right Keywords

One of the biggest mistakes website owners make is targeting keywords that are unlikely to provide a return. Achieving a #1 ranking on Google for a keyword search term nobody is searching for is a waste of time and money. For search engine marketing, keywords fall into two major categories: broad generic (head) keywords, branded and regional (tail) keywords. The stiffest competition is in the short head keywords.

If you entered the head keywords ’storage products’ into Google today you’d see over sixty-one million pages indexed. That’s a lot of competition. In the top five you’d find Rubbermaid. For a company with almost unlimited marketing resources very generic keywords may be worth pursuing. We have a client in the Vancouver area. By choosing regional (tail) keywords we have been able to secure the top position on Google for ‘vancouver storage products’. The amount of traffic received for their SEO dollars has proven to be a good investment. Pursuing top rankings for ’storage products’ with the budget we had to work with would have been a poor investment, with little or no returns. If you entered ’spacesaver storage canada’ today you would discover that these branded (tail) keywords also returned a #1 ranking for our client.

Whether you’re pursuing organic rankings or pay per click traffic, selecting the right keywords can be one of the primary decsions that determine your online success. Keyword analysis is the starting point.

The Ideal Web Site – Part 1 of a Series

Last week a client asked me to define the ideal website, based upon my 11+ years in the web development and SEO business. I don’t always include all of these components in a proposal or even include them in our own sites. However, if I had to describe a site that would be perfect, where client budget and their personal design tastes and requested features weren’t a factor, here is my definition of the perfect website:

The Ideal Website Delivers a Solid Return on Investment

As a business marketing investment, your website is not on the world wide web as a cultural art experience or to provide free information resource; it’s advertising. Advertising that is effective generates plenty of sales, and it represnts a solid business investment. A business website should bring in more than one dollar in profit for every dollar invested. If it doesn’t your Internet marketing sucks.

Developing a ‘web presence’ without revenue and a positive cash flow is ridiculous and bad business.

The Ideal Website Has Plenty of Qualified Traffic

The greatest myth in Internet marketing is: If you build it they will come. I think that only worked in Field of Dreams . Web design, without a solid marketing strategy, perfectly executed, is only going to produce a business liability. (What else would you call an advertising project that costs more money than it ever generates in revenue.) Over 90% of all websites fail. They have little or no traffic. And the few visitors they receive do not convert into customers.

I attended an SEO conference a while back and one of the speakers opened with, “A butt ugly website with a lot of traffic and effective conversion strategy will always outperform a drop dead gorgeous Webby-winning site with little or no traffic. Some of the ugliest sites on the planet have generated millions of dollars in revenue.”

Bounce and SEO

High bounce rates can hurt your search engine rankings. A bounce is a visitor that takes a quick look and then returns to the search engine to try the next search result. A high bounce rate is an indication that tweaks need to be made in order to more effectively engage the visitor. Google and other search engines take bounce rates into consideration in their algorithms. Why include a website into the top 10 search results when the visitors come right back to try again? The relevance of the site for the keyword search terms comes into question when that happens.

Your ultimate goal is to convert a visitor into a loyal visitor or customer. A loyal visitor or customer is someone who visited your website, likes it and found the information they were looking for. They then returned more than once, probably bookmarking the site in their Favorites. After a few visits they made a purchase, requested information or clicked through on an affiliate link, and they will probably do so again in the future. To accomplish this the site must be user friendly. It must be easy to navigate, easy to search and demonstrate to the visitor that they will find what they are looking for from the home page forward.

Real customers are already actively searching for what you sell on search engines. They are looking for information to help them make a quality purchase decision. They need to be converted into a customer. Effective analytics can provide the conversion ratio information needed to tweak your web site for improved results you can see on the bottom line.

Get your FREE first SEO consultation.

[Posted with MacJournal]

Increase Your Rankings With Long Term Domain Registrations

Google and other leading search engines rank websites that are registered for long terms higher. A five or ten year domain registration represents a higher level of commitment to providing quality content. If your domain is up for renewal you may consider the five year term renewal. Besides you save money.

Tossing the Dog a Bone – Death of a Website

Want to fail in Internet marketing? Just ‘toss the dog an occasional bone’.

Most website owners will spend big money on their website. That’s like paying out top dollar for a pure bred dog with papers. It’s a beautiful site with matching branding, pretty graphics and maybe even an award or two. They paid good money for it and they’re justly proud.

After site launch they’re surprised when the site doesn’t bring in a stream of new business… sales… profit. Their web designer mentions site submissions and optimization, so they throw one or two hundred dollars after it to get the traffic they hoped for. That’s just like tossing a bone to a dog that doesn’t seem to love you in appreciation for how much you spent to buy it.

If all you do is toss it an occasional bone you’ll be burying that pedigree dog very soon. The same goes for the many ‘dead’ websites that stink up the Internet.

How do you gain your dog’s undying love and reap the rewards for your investment? You select quality nourishing food and put out fresh filtered water twice a day. You groom your dog. You get all its shots and make sure it is protected from fleas and other parasites. If it’s sick you take it to the vet. You buy it toys, a leash and collar, a dog house or basket… and the list goes on. You hate to see your dog so alone, so you put it in doggy day care when you’re at work. In no time at all the cost of your dog is many times the original purchase price. You take it for daily walks and spend time playing with your pet in the park. Your reward is an energetic, healthy dog that jumps out of its skin with happiness to see you. People compliment you on what a fantastic dog you have.

Apply the same devotion to your web site and you’ll have a flood of visitors and a large percentage of them will convert into customers. SEO (search engine optimization) and Internet marketing are very time consuming disciplines.

You can learn to do it yourself, but expect to invest a staggering amount of the time you currently put into your business and personal life. SEO training and keeping up to date, plus day to day marketing, tracking results… it’s a big job. Or instead, you can leverage time by hiring seo professionals. The life of your online marketing and business are in their hands, so this may not be the place to look for a bargain.

If you give your dog two weeks of intense love and care and then neglect it for a year the results will be less than satisfactory. Websites also respond best to ongoing love – analysis, tweaks and fine tuning by an SEO. Search engines look for regular articles, posts and page additions and an ever increasing list of theme-related sites that back link to your site.

The purchase of a dog is only the beginning of the investment. If all you do is toss it a bone after the purchase, it will die and stink up the neighbourhood. Continue to invest into it and you will reap the benefits for years to come. Web site owners who realize that the original design of their website is only the beginning and continue to invest into their site each month with will receive the results they were hoping for.

Related Post: How Much Should You Pay for SEO?

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[tags]bad seo, ineffective seo, internet marketing failure[/tags]