Category: Marketing

SEO For Business

Posted by admin – 15/06/2010

Seo For BusinessThe business world is firmly embracing the art of SEO like a long lost, much loved relative. Of course SEO is another way of marketing a business. It is like traditional advertising but at the same time its totally different.

In the past

In the past,seo was all about being number one. The top spot was the prised position as there could only be one top spot. Competition was fierce and in the early days a lot of the returned results were pages designed to gain rankings not to entice visitors. Spamming was rife. Meta tags held a large sway with the then search engine algorithms, they would be stuffed with words in the hope of getting traffic. I must even admit to using some of these tactics in the early days. Using software such as web position gold in the hope of it telling me the magic numbers to make me an SEO God

Business SEO has Matured

Like all things, SEO has aged, looking back on it’s past and reminiscing how silly it used to be. The modern online marketing consultant is no longer just interested in rankings , now he or she is interested in helping you the business owner.

SEO has gone all holistic

As I said previously SEO used to be all about the position. Now from my point of view I want to get your website and online marketing working seamlessly together. Using the term  SEO is a little misleading as search engine optimisation is only a part of what a good internet marketing company does.

So what does a “good” internet marketing company do

SEO is still a major part of the mix but for it to be done properly you need your SEO involved from the conception stage of the web design process. By having them involved they can advise the web designer on how to structure the site so it is search engine friendly. The other option would be to hire an SEO web designer with the skills in place to build a search engine friendly website.

Keyword Research

One of the most important parts of an SEO’s job finding good high traffic keywords and phrases relevant to your business.

Ditching Keywords

Once your SEO has built his list of key phrases he or she will “ditch” the ones with to much competition (new sites) or not enough searches to be profitable.

Copy writing

Your website copy could mean the difference between making a sale or not, your SEO will help you with your copy giving you pointers to improve the wording or take on the project themselves using a good SEO copywriter .

Calls to action

Call to action is a common phrase in the world of online marketing simply put it is asking the customer to perform a single or set of actions these may be as simple as using the phrase “buy now” or using your phone number as a focus point with “call us now”

Converting visitors to buyer, website conversion rates

The ability of a website to make sales or enquiries is measured in its conversion rate. A conversion rate of a page or a site is calculated in the number of sales divided by the number of visitors. An example would be a websites gets a thousand visitors a month and from that thousand 35 people go on to buy the product or service we would have a conversion rate of 35/1000 = 0. 035 or 3.5 %.

things that can decrease or increase conversion rates are headlines, copy, site design, colour and calls to action. For the bigger budget projects your SEO would undertake some split testing of different layouts, wording, headlines,colours and images. A quick way to get some results for the conversion rates would be to use PPC (pay per click) sending half the clicks to one page and the other half to the other modified page and compare conversion rates.

Off Page Optimisation

Off page SEO is a whole subject in it’s own right. To give you an idea it mainly involves link building and the way link building is done is dependent on the SEO. It could be blog commenting, article marketing or the creation of micro-sites to feed traffic back to your main site the list goes on.

SEO Meta Tags

Posted by admin – 16/05/2010

SEO meta tagsHere’s short post on SEO meta tags. For the majority of search engines the meta tags have zero relevance to ranking a page in the search engine algorithm. It hasn’t always been like that in the past the main ranking factor was the meta tags, like any thing that can be humanly changed we had the years of the meta tag stuffing where keywords would be placed in the description and keyword tag area often not relevant to what’s on the page. This would lead to higher ranking but made for a crap user experience with pages returned that were not relevant to what the person was searching for. Today it’s all about relevancy and user intention.

So should you use the SEO Meta Tags

Yes you should, let me explain why. The keyword meta tag is all obsolete for the search engines. There is a but, Some social bookmarking sites read the keyword tag and use it to auto generate tags for bookmarking and sharing. This will save any user bookmarking the page time and effort. Thus making the process of bookmarking more striate forward.

The description tag , although this tag is not used for the ranking of pages this text is displayed under the page title in the search engine results page. This gives you opportunity to write attractive and enticing copy to increase your click through rates

How to write meta tags

Description tag

<meta name=”description” content=”your descriptive enticing copy”>

Keyword tag

<meta name=”keywords” content=”keywords or phrases,that,relate,to,your,page”>

Remember to choose the keywords as if your were tagging the document .

A word From Google on the subject of tags

Recently we received some questions about how Google uses (or more accurately, doesn’t use) the “keywords” meta tag in ranking web search results. Suppose you have two website owners, Alice and Bob. Alice runs a company called AliceCo and Bob runs BobCo. One day while looking at Bob’s site, Alice notices that Bob has copied some of the words that she uses in her “keywords” meta tag. Even more interesting, Bob has added the words “AliceCo” to his “keywords” meta tag. Should Alice be concerned?

At least for Google’s web search results currently (September 2009), the answer is no. Google doesn’t use the “keywords” meta tag in our web search ranking. This video explains more, or see the questions below.

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SEO Pricing

Posted by admin – 14/05/2010

Woman holding the words SEO Pricing in her handSEO is very important to the online business with on average the number of leads the search engines produce being anything from 60% – 100% of the visitors to a website.

So as an SEO how do you work out your SEO pricing. I find this part of the job one of the hardest. Search engine optimisation and pricing, it is a minefield. Price too low and the client thinks your unskilled at your art, price too high and your run the risk of pricing yourself out of the job. So where’s the middle ground.

SEO is a two stage process the first being the on page optimisation where the structure and content is optimised to take full advantage of how the search engines rank a page / site. The second stage is off site optimisation this involves building links to the site from relevant sources across the internet. Pricing should always reflect the amount of time that is going to be spent on the optimisation process. A rule of thumb is an newly trained SEO’s time is worth £25 per hour and an SEO at the top of their game can be worth up to £175 an hour. So you should be pricing for your SEO service accordingly.

Word of warning, if you are a new to the world of SEO, know your own level. You don’t have to tell your customer, but if you price according to the the results you expect, then you shouldn’t go far wrong. There is nothing more irritating then an SEO who is over confident and under skilled, they give the whole industry a bad name.

Method one: Price on performance SEO

This sounds simple, you get the customer on first page and they pay you. This method is problematic especially with the introduction of personalised search. You may find yourself educating your clients on the search engines so they can validate the data you send over in your monthly report. I’ve talked to business owners who have used this type of service and it seems to turn into a pay us if you want to relationship. With the client only paying when they think the seo company has done enough. This may seem the fairest but its often the SEO company that is left out of pocket.

This opens the system up to abuse by not having a set metric. I normally see this sort of SEO pricing at the lower end of the market with uncompetitive phrases and localised search. Price wise you are looking at £50 – £150 a month on phrases with moderately low level of competing sites.

Method two: Fixed monthly fee

You agree with the client a fixed monthly rate no mater what the performance is in the serps. This is a risky situation for the customer as they have no regress if the performance is not up to standard. Most customers will need to see your past victories to make them feel comfortable with this pricing module. You may need to educate your client that SEO is not an overnight process and the monthly fee needs to be considered as an investment in the long term success of a website

Method three: Pay Per Action

this method is the most risky for the SEO company as they will only get paid on the event that a pre defined action is taken. This action can be someone signing up for a newsletter, a customer making contact with the client or directly making a sale of a tangible product. Normally this is worked out as a percentage of the sale normally ranging from 10% – 15%. At this point you start to leave the SEO world and merge with the affiliate marketing fraternity. I would only follow this form of seo pricing if you have total control of the website design. Leaving it down to a third party to implement conversions is not a good idea. A lot of work but the rewards could be good especially if it’s a large company with lots of customers

Which ever method you use for your Search engine optimisation pricing you must have a clearly defined contract. Your contract should be in plain English with in detail definitions of the criteria that is to be met. After meeting those goals you would expect to be paid by the client a pre agreed amount. SEO is not like a normal service it can be hard work. Some clients don’t want to pay the amount you quote. Sure, negotiation is part of business but always have a bottom pricing line that your not prepared to cross. This will save you from taking on unprofitable jobs

Why Can I not find you online

Posted by admin – 07/05/2010

I’m frustrated, in fact I’m really frustrated. Part of the reason is my washing machine is on the blink and I’m down to my, only in the house cloths. The second and main reason is, I can’t find the contact details for the washing machine repair man.

I don’t want to just call anybody out of the paper due to a bad experience with a rouge trader type. The reason I want to use this guy is I trust him not to rip me off and to charge me a fair price. I know the search engines better then most and I know how to lever every ounce of search power out of them but I still can’t find any mention of his details on line.

You need to make it easy for people to find you

If I’m having difficulty finding him who else wants to use him and cant, Like me they have lost the slip of paper that was stuck on the fridge with his contact details on it. How much business is this guy loosing due to not having any sort of listing online (even a free one).

If you have any sort of business you need to have a web presence. New businesses see it as a must. If you have been in business for a while you may not see any reason for changing. The reason to change is if you have built a loyal customer base who are happy to recommend and use you time after time you need to make it easy for them to find you.

If Internet marketing is war is this battle worth fighting

Posted by admin – 25/04/2010

Face facts if your an SEO or a web marketer you are at war, you are at war with the guy who’s targeting the same phrase’s and keywords as you. The other person may be nice or nasty, they may even be your most hated enemy or best friend ether way they are trying to take the food from your children’s mouth and thy must be stopped.

Before you go off to battle this foe in the search engine rankings, you need to figure out if the battle is worth fighting. Firstly do you have a chance of winning without wasting large amounts of your resources. Secondly is the battle worth your time. By choosing your battles with a clearly defined criteria you can save your self many hours of wasted effort.

Is the term you are targeting profitable
Are your competitors well established in the market
Is your target term specific
Are you being led by ego

Lets deal with the fist on the list “Is the term you are targeting profitable”. Profitability is a major factor in your keyword decision in regard to SEO. A key phrase is profitable when its product or service led, non generic and hints at the user intention. In plain English, the end result is money changing hands

The phrase “health and safety consultant” is a prime example of a phrase that hints at what the user is looking for when they search via the search engines. The intention being that they wish to find a person to help them with health and safety. If the user had typed in just “health and safety” then the intention is not that well laid out.

A well established market can be hard to compete in if your a late comer to the party. To establish how entrenched the top ten sites are here are a few points to look for.

High PR(page rank)
Lots of indexed pages (found by typing in the search engine “site:thedomain.com”)
Domain age (old domains rank better then young ones)
Dmoz listing
Yahoo directory listing

If you find a few sites in the top 10 that are young with little or no PR then you should be able to compete.

Are you being specific in your target, similar to profitability a phrase that is more specific will convert to a sale better then a generic term.

Ego is a flew in the competitive SEO or web marketeer. We like to be number one and the search engines are the place to do it. I have fallen into this trap of targeting a competitive term with little profitability value to prove how good I am. Don’t do it it is wasted effort. Its just ego, your ego doesn’t put food on the table. To be a web marketeer you need to be pragmatic and look at the bigger picture.

Once you have the habit of looking at the bigger picture and only take on projects that are winnable you will find you have more time for the more important things.

What is SEO Web Design

Posted by admin – 20/04/2010

seo web design helps business growSEO Web design as the name suggests is an amalgamation of web design and SEO. There are some strong reasons why you should use a company that is expert in SEO as well as website design. To explain this further we need to break down what is web design and what is SEO

Web Design

For the dedicated web designer, designing a website is all about the look with considerations given to how well the design communicates the message. The use of graphics and typography is there to support the core communication. Many web designers come from a graphic design background and have a basic grasp of the code behind the design and may well depend strongly on web design packages such as Dreamweaver to help them produce the end product. Many of theses designers are able to produce designs that a visually breath taking

SEO

For the SEO its all about the traffic. Getting visitors to your site they rely on statistics and conversion rates. From a design point of view it’s all about making it easier for the search engines to crawl and index your website. The skills of good SEO’s should never be underestimated as they can help a business thrive by delivering targeted visitors, identifying search trends and even new markets.

SEO Web Design is …

When you combine these two disciplines, what you get is a web designer that can produce great looking websites while creating a design that is optimised to produce great search engine results.

On page optimisation is easer as the site structure is designed to place the most relevant content higher up in the page. As a rule of thumb, the closer to the top of a page a word or phrase is placed the more relevant it is.

Image optimisation

The optimisation of the web design images this is done by the use of file names, title text and alt tags this can be used to support the overall website theme

Linking text optimisation

Optimising the way the pages are linked by the use of keyword rich links as opposed to generic terms like “home” or “about us”

Conclusion

I have done my best to lay out the basics of why SEO web design is so crucial to long term success of any website. As you can see there is more to web design then just making things look nice or just getting traffic. For a website to work it has to appeal to the senses as well as perform well. You have to strike a balance between the search engines and the user, stray to far one way and you cancel out the other.

5 Tips To Remember While Writing Online Sales Page Copy

Posted by admin – 28/03/2010

A sales page is an integral part of an online business and there are ways to make it work. There are also things to avoid.

1. Do Not Cause Information Overload Informing the reader about the product is a good thing. No one wants to read a huge list of benefits, however. The proverbial wall of text just invites a reader to skim over it without really taking it in. Divide the information with headings and subheadings so people can find what is most important to themselves and their needs. Even scanners can latch onto something of interest, which gives more of a chance of them buying the product involved. Emphasize the headings and subheadings with bold print so anyone can find the points they wish to view at a glance.

2. Do Not Write for the Search Engine It is important to use keyword and key phrases to raise internet search engine ratings, but a search engine will never be a reader and potential customer. There has to be some kind of balance between search engine optimization and engaging writing. It is a good thing that readers can find the webpage with their favorite search engines; but once they are there, there should be some convincing and interesting writing to lead them the rest of the way into a sale.

3. Do Not Fill the Page with Text Leave some white space when laying out the webpage. As mentioned before, a wall of text just causes the eyes of most readers to glaze over. They have no desire to try and read what amounts to textual rambling. Formatting like that makes it easy to lose a place multiple times and finally give up. Spaces clearly define where one thought begins and ends, and allows the eyes of the readers to rest a bit before reading more and making the purchase.

4. Do Not Focus on the Business The readers have arrived. They are already curious enough to see what the webpage has to offer, so show them that instead of greeting them with information about the company itself. What does the product or service offer the reader? Whatever that is, highlight that, and not the company itself. The point of the sales page is to sell something, not to talk about the business, no matter how amazing the business itself may be. No one makes a purchase based upon that. Write to the reader and make a connection.

5. Do Not Use Excessive Animation Flashy animation and high tech interfaces may look great on a webpage, but they may do more harm than good. Not every computer is able to see such innovations, and others do not want to be bothered with it. More complicated interfaces and displays block out a portion of the potential market. Think about the target market before employing such devices on the sales page or anywhere on the website.

this post was written by http://www.freelancewritingdesk.com/

If you are considering writing your own sales pages you should listen to the words above they are written with common sense in mind. It’s all well and good getting great Search engine rankings but if the traffic doesn’t convert your no better off.

Small Business Marketing and Advertising for Doncaster and South Yorkshire

Posted by admin – 24/03/2010

online marketing and advertising graphWhat options are available for small businesses to get cheap or no cost marketing in the Doncaster/South Yorkshire area. In my opinion Marketing should be the number one priority for any small company. Without clients there is no business period. Getting new customers, if done incorrectly can be costly and end up costing you more then the clients are worth in terms of business.

Off-line advertising

Newspaper Advertising

Pros: A range of advertising opportunities starting at classified ads to adverts on the front page.

Cons: Can be costly and the adverts have a short life span.

Directory Advertising

Pros: People only look in the directory if they are looking for a product or service, so conversion to business should be higher. More popular with the older generation. Adverts have a 12 month lifespan

Cons: can be costly, if you spend less by having a smaller advert the response rates drop dramaticly. Response rates are decreasing over time as the internet becomes the first port of call for a lot of potential customers. See
Is Yellow Pages and Other Paper Directory Advertising Dead

leaflets

Pros: Tight area targeting by demographics

Cons: Low response rates for most

Business Networking

In Doncaster we have a range of networking events with groups like the BNI and and 4Networking. We have a fantastic chamber of commerce in Doncaster extremely professional and pro active and I would advise any business in Doncaster to see what it has to offer.

Tap Your happy Customer

Happy customers can be great for business two ways to build on your success is firstly ask for referrals do they know of anybody who would benefit from your product or service. Secondly don’t underestimate the power of a positive testimonial that you can place in your marketing material.

Marketing ideas box

if you run a company that employs people, have a marketing ideas box so that staff can suggest ways to get new business. This not only get you now idears but also makes people feel that they are part of the team.

You could go one step further by placing the box in your reception and offering a prize to the customer that suggests any ideas that you use

Online Advertising and Marketing

The online world is full of opportunities for the small business to compete with the big boys all you need is a talented web designer and SEO like me . Having a website is a must for most businesses but if you have zero visitors seeing your site, its wasted money.

WebSite

Pros: when done correctly can produce large amounts of business for many types of industries. can be updated in a very short time so it can display your product offerings bang up to date .

Cons: Like anything it requires work. If you just place your site online and expect business then your going to be disappointed. you need to keep it up to date or get a web professional to do it for you

SEO

SEO or Search engine optimisation is the skill of getting your website up the search engine rankings for when people search for your product or service

Pros: Gets you qualified leads as we know having a lead pre qualified makes it a lot easyer to convert them to a customer

Cons: Takes time, like wine SEO and Websites get better with age.

PPC

PPC or Pay Per Click is paid advertising in the search engines. You only pay when someone clicks on your link

Pros: Quick, you can have qualified traffic to your website within hours.

Cons: Unless you know what you are doing you could find yourself with lots of clicks but no new customers.

Email Marketing

Pros: Cheap, the cost of DIY email marketing is only your time. If you have a good email list you can get lots of good business from it .

Cons:You need to build your list by an opt in process, meaning the recipient has to give you permission to send them the email. You have to include a way for them to un subscribe from your list. There are laws in place to stop spam so be careful that you don’t fall fowl of theses

Social Networking

Social networking is a way of communication with friends or perspective customers online. Sites such as Twitter and Facebook allow you to add friends, the friends then see your status updates (or your marketing message)

Pros: Like email if you have a focused friends list you can keep customers abreast of your latest offers

Cons: very time consuming

Is Yellow Pages and Other Paper Directory Advertising Dead

Posted by admin – 10/03/2010

Yellow pages is synonymous with business advertising and has been for many years, but are its days numbered. Ten years ago you may have got some return fo

If you have ever advertised with Yellow pages, the process starts with a sales person coming to visit you to book your money making advert. For more and more of the advertisers the book is a money loosing proposition.

Normally the sales person tells you to expect lots of enquiries a week, that you will be rushed off your feet and the small monthly payments of 3 – 4 hundred pounds will be easy to meet as you will have so much business that this amount will be small change.

The reality is normally a lot different. I first advertised many years ago, fresh faced out of university after completing my degree in Media production, specialising in multimedia design.

I was eager to join the world of small business, selling my newly acquired skills to a hungry local business community. My advert in Yellow pages was going get me business the likes of I had never known. That year went slowly, I didn’t receive one call from that advert; not one single little enquiry.

I cant blame the directory completely, my advert was small but it was the only paid advert in the section. The web was all new and shiny,many businesses didn’t know about websites or thought them just a passing fad.

I even went and did it again a few years later and thought it was the size of my advert that was the problem the first time, so I splashed out on a full colour half page ad. I did get responses to that ad but twenty times less then the directory sales people were telling me the average response rate was for an advert of that size and in that section. I covered the cost of the advertising but not much else.

The thing was I didn’t know what I know now. Paper directory advertising is dieing, then it was just in decline now it’s on its way to the retirement home.

For some; paper directories like Yellow pages can be great but for these it’s normally out of hours services like emergency plumbers or services aimed at the older generation who don’t use a computer let alone the Internet. For most, it’s a dead duck.

Advertising is changing for the first time online marketing spend is going to over take traditional paper advertising

If you want a business or service nine times out of ten the web is the place you look first not last. I, being a person who makes a living online one way or another do everything online from shopping to research to entertainment it’s all there. I suspect I may be a little extream because of my comfort level online but I don’t think average Joe is far behind me .

If you run any sort of business you need to be found online so you need to establish a web presence now if you haven’t already got one. If you main form of marketing is paper directory’s then you need to be moving at least some of your marketing spend to online marketing now , not tomorrow.

We can use Google trends to see how the interest in Yellow pages and Thomson Local had declined since 2004

Yellow Pages

Thomson Local

As we can see the Yellow pages interest has dropped dramatically over the last six years to approximately 25% of the 2004 search volume.

Where is the interest going

Online marketing is growing with the biggest gains in search volume being in SEM an acronym for Search engine marketing

SEO

SEM

PPC

online marketing trends

So as we can plainly see the interest in online marketing is growing.  I can see the growth slowing as we see with SEO (search engine optimisation) PPC (pay per click) is in a slight decline but I put that down to businesses trying to reduce costs.

Related Blog posts

Two More Studies Confirm: People Research Online, Buy Locally

Social Media vs Search Engine Marketing

Posted by admin – 05/03/2010

Social media iconsTo start with this post started off as a comment in response to MOGmartins post about Social Media, PR vs Traffic. Where the argument is,

whether social media sites, like facebook and twitter are of use to large corporations as traffic sources, or are they just vehicles for public relations and one to one, or one to many communications.

Now I both agree and disagree at the same time, let me explain. Social Media is about making connections with people which it does for individuals, but I don’t think it does for most businesses at this moment in time to make a marked increase in the profitability of a company.

Quality of Traffic

Social media like Facebook and Twitter do produce traffic. When someone clicks through what is the users intention. Is it to buy from or use the company’s services, for the most part , no. I myself see a link posted and click on it to be nosey.

With SEM or search engine marketing when a user clicks through from Google ,Yahoo or Bing you can be sure that they are actively looking for what you have to offer. The user has been qualified by the search engine. Of course some customers are more qualified then others but for the most part a user coming from a search engine will convert to a paying customer click for click a lot better then a user from Facebook or twitter.

The Flip Side

There is a flip side to this argument in that fan pages and twitter is like an segmented email list , it’s full of people who are interested in one way or another in what you have to offer. So per head, these interested people are going to convert quite well. when the right offer is presented.  These people are waiting to see the next big thing and simply have to be told about it . A well segmented email list can be a gold mine allowing you to sell to the same person over and over again. social media I see working in a similar way.

The Future

Nobody can be certain of what the future of social media and search marketing is going to be. My view is that we are going to see a total merging of the two, we see the beginning with Google and Bing showing tweets in search results. We will to have to wait and see.

Conclusion

Yes social media does have an ever increasing part to play in traffic generation for businesses we will just have to be creative in how we use these channels.