Tag: SEM

SEO Agency For Small Business

Posted by admin – 25/06/2010

What can an SEO Agency Do for the Smaller Business

The internet is the place where, with the right seo company the smaller business can compete with the big boys. Getting the right advice is essential to success and it may not cost as much as you think. An SEO consultant can give you the tools you need to push your business forward online. If your willing to do the work yourself you may find a 2 hour session is enough to get you on the right track

What an SEO consultant will provide for you


  • Keyword Research

Identifying the right keywords is the basis of a well performing website. Choosing the wrong keywords and you may only get a few visitors or you may get hundreds who don’t buy anything. My take on this is, try to become the perspective customer, identify what they want and why they buy then tailor your content to them.

  • Improve Your Site Structure

Site design can have a large impact on your on page SEO efforts your agency will be able to advise you on how to structure your site for maximum benefit in the SERPS (search engine results page’s)

  • Off-site SEO

Your SEO agency will give you guidelines to start your off site optimisation. Off site SEO is all about gaining links back to your site with good keyword focused linking text.

What constitutes a good link

A good link is a link that contains your keywords, is within page content and is on a page directly related to the theme of your main site.

Finding Links

A short list to get you going on link building

  • Blog Commenting
  • Posting blog posts
  • Directory submissions
  • Social Bookmarking
  • Article Submissions

Smaller companies have different goals from larger businesses

SEO is the science of getting top search engine rankings, If you have a bottomless pit of money, getting top rankings is easy, you just chuck large amounts of cash at generic terms related to your business on pay per click marketing. Many small businesses don’t have this amount of cash to repeat this exercise month after month

If your a small business your marketing on and off line is your life blood. Without customers you are not in a position to continue trading. Larger companies have reserves of cash to fall back on if things are a bit slow. They will often employ teams of sales people banging the phone all day to produce sales and new customers.

SEO is Constantly Developing

SEO is in a constant state of flux. Search engines are constantly looking for the best way to return relevant results and on the whole are getting smarter at picking up on the automated drivel that once filled the search results. Although it is possible to perform your own SEO it is always best to get an SEO Agency in to help you. The cost of a few hours of SEO wisdom can pay huge dividends in the future giving you a roadmap to help your site get great rankings.

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.