There were three Online Marketing Objectives discussed:

Goal 1: Increase Visibility on Search Engines

Goal 2: Build Traffic to Site

Goal 3: Maximize the Revenue Opportunity

Increase Visibility on Search Engines:

Studies show that 68% of search engine users only look at the first page of results. In addition, if you’re ranked number one on the first SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), you’re ten times more likely to get a click than someone who is ranked number ten (42 vs. 3% click through rate, respectively).

The first step to getting the most possible sales from SEO is optimizing for the right keywords. That means narrowing down a short list of ideal key phrases that your sales prospects and customers use to find your product.

•        Keyword Expansion Tools: Wordtracker, Wordze, Keywordiscovery, Google’s SK tool

•         Competitive Analysis : Scour competitors sites for missed keyword opportunities

•         Customer Terminology : Talk to your sales team. What terminology do customers actually use?

•         Analyze paid search data: Analytics data, internal site search, web logs

Which keywords bring the best (most qualified) visitors?

•         Stages of Sales Cycle: Evaluate keywords by stage of sales cycle

•         Keyword leverage analysis to determine which keywords are at a critical inflection point

in your rankings

The number of, and competitiveness of your keywords will then help you determine the optimal SEO strategy for your site.

Build Traffic to Site:

Once keywords are selected, they need to be targeted in the site content. Site content is very important because not only do search crawlers read it to index your site, but it is what customers see when they get to your site. For visitors, site content must be informative, engaging and compelling. For search engines, different aspects of site content must signal relevance.

You need to have keyword-rich content on each of your site’s pages, especially your homepage. Keep in mind; if you don’t write about it, you’re not going to rank for it–include essential keywords, keep your message simple and relevant. Most importantly, make sure it makes grammatical sense. Search engines can identify gratuitous keyword placement.

There is a simple way you can see what Google can read on your webpage. The easiest way is to go to the text only version of your cached page. This will bring up all the content that Google can read. You will notice that although your site may be visually appealing, Google can’t read pictures or fancy flash animations. That is why it is so important to have text, targeting your specific keywords in a fashion that makes sense.

Maximize the Revenue Opportunity:

If you have the bandwidth, then this is the ongoing analysis you need to do SEO correctly.

•        Benchmarking in Place

•        Track Spider Crawls

•        Move up in Ranks

•        You should see consistent upward movement on SERPS

•        Tweak the site

•        If you are not seeing that upward movement, then you need to adjust the key areas that we’ve discussed in the “5 pillars”

When measuring the impact of Search Marketing, look at:

•        Organic (Non-Paid) Traffic

Non-paid best represents SEO efforts as all visitors arrive at your site through organic search

•        Non-Branded Traffic
Brings you new customers who do not yet know about your company, but are looking for the products and services you offer

When measuring ROI of your Search Marketing efforts, first define what you consider a conversion. Is it filling out a form, downloading a whitepaper or completing a transaction on your shopping page? Analyze which keywords are leading to the most conversions–utilize those keywords and stop using the ones that are not driving qualified traffic. Also, determine where visitors abandon your site and improve the functionality of that area. By maintain, analyzing and reporting on your customers and qualified leads- you can make an immensely positive impact on your company’s bottom line.

-@SarahShakour

1) Keywords are the most important aspect of SEO and if they’re not researched properly, they can be one of your biggest problems.

A keyword is typed in by a potential client so be sure you’re using consumer vocabulary and not company jargon. Another point is that the best keywords to invest in are usually phrases, as illustrated by this graph:

Shown above, the one-word phrases are likely to have high competition from other sites and a high search frequency. The more descriptive phrases that are upwards of five words long are going to have low competition and a lower search frequency.

At Webmarketing123, we have found that the Keywords with the best ROI will be three to four words in length. These more descriptive terms will have a higher conversion rate than the single keyword searches. People who search using three to four word key phrases will generally be further along in their sales process, more informed and therefore more likely to make a purchase.

2)      Missing Keywords in content and text links.

Once you have the correct keywords, you want to make sure that they’re visible to Google spiders. Including Keywords in more places than just the written content of your site will improve your raking for those keywords. Here are a few places to include your keywords:

• Title tags
• Headings
• Paragraph titles
• Keywords in body copy
• Anchor text in links
• Image alt text

Pages can have as little as one to two keywords but should not have more than seven to ten. Too many keywords on one page will overload the user. Pages should flow nicely and make sense. You need to decide what the preferred landing page for a given search term will be. These could be called the blueprints of your site.

3)      Using content that search engines can’t read.

This is a common mistake because Google bots cannot read certain content and thus cannot give your site credit. Flash and images are not variables that go into a search engine’s algorithm.

4)      Not creating fresh content.

If Google bots don’t see any new content they’re not going to visit your site regularly. An easy way to avoid this, especially for B2B companies, is to have a blog and regularly post keyword-rich content with links back to the primary website.

…and make it easy for others to link towards your site by utilizing some of these tools:

• RSS
• Twitter
• Facebook & LinkedIn status/groups
• Networks & Media
• Digg
• Delicious
• StumbleUpon
• Flickr
• YouTube

5)       Being Activity-focused, not outcome-focused.
Set goals for keywords with high conversions. Google analytics and Webtrends are just two of the programs that you can use to determine conversion rates on your different keywords.

Be outcome-focused, not activity-focused. Focus on what matters—outcome!

Finally, here is a graph to help you keep your site SEO Friendly.

This Wednesday from 11:00 a.m. (Pacific) to 12:00 p.m. we’ll be hosting our next webinar, How to Succeed with SEO During the Holidays–click here to register!

On-site Blog:

Having an on-site blog makes it easy to maintain a simple URL, such as: www.mysite.com/blog

Here are some pros to having an on-site blog:

• Great for internal linking
• Builds deep links = increased crawlability
  
• Helps add content to the site—websites with strong, crawlable content receive more traffic
• Helps build a greater theme to your site–search bots feed on this
• Great content silos—they allow you to store rich written content as well as multimedia
• Add pages to your site, creating stronger domain & authority
• Allow URLs to be increasingly keyword-rich and statically generated by title
• Beneficial for your website’s Google Universal Search results–blog search

Off-site Blog:

Having an off-site blog will require you to have a separate URL, for example: www.onsiteandoffsiteblogs.com—sometimes that’s not a bad thing, especially if it makes more sense to label your blog differently than your primary website. You can also use a sub-domain for your blog to maintain your site’s name–example: www.blog.mysite.com

Here are some pros to having an off-site blog:

• Having a blog that is contained outside of your primary website is a great way to give your site some free inbound linkage!
• If your site is built with a specific backend, your blog may not be compatible with that same server

On the flip-side, here are some of the cons to having an off-site blog:

The Rule of Diminishing Returns – Think about the links between your blog and your site like a basket of oranges on a hot summer day. You’re feeling parched so you take an orange—it tastes pretty good and is quite refreshing so you take another, and another, and another. Pretty soon you don’t want any more of those oranges. My point? You want inbound links coming from all over the place, not just from one direction–having an off-site blog that points to your site, or vice versa can result in this limiting effect.

If the purpose of your blog is to get people to visit your website, having a different domain makes it that much harder for people to find what you want them to find—having this external domain may ultimately deter users from finding your website.

In conclusion, an on-site blog is ideal for most sites unless there are specific restrictions or goals that are being targeted.

-Ben

Some Key Takeaways:

• 70% of Social Media websites affect purchasing decision in the buying cycle.
• 50% of social network users, factor information shared on their networks into their purchasing decision.
• Social Media users are 3 times more likely to trust their peers’ opinions over advertisements.

The Importance of Social Media Today:

Social Media marketing is not about talking to different generations–it’s about creating a community based on common interest that thrives on user support.

Social Media for B2B Companies is about:

• Building loyalty and trust for your brand.
• Increasing community following and brand awareness as well as increasing traffic to your site.

Social Media is becoming increasingly integrated with customer service and influence on purchasing decisions. However, direct sales are difficult to track with Social Media. Social Media can offer direct sale opportunities, but without a defined metric for success, it will be difficult to determine its rate of return.

Integrating Blogs, Web Pages & Social Media for Optimal Search Results:

As with any form of communication, it’s important to have a plan for integrating your blogs and websites with your social media initiatives:

• A little planning goes a long way when starting a Social Media campaign.
• Map out what your marketing goals are – What does your company want to accomplish?
• Identify and understand your audience – Who are they, what Social Media platforms do you they use?
• Do not limit yourself to one Social Media platform. Determine which ones your target market use the most then establish your brand accordingly.
• Utilize/optimize Social Media profiles fully to reach your marketing goals.

Here are the Top 3 Starting Points for Optimizing Social Media & Search–where your company should start and how:

Blogs – Generate fresh, unique Content
Inbound Links – Establish your site as an industry authority

Social Media – Build your brand image with Social Media:

• Facebook Fan Pages
• Google Buzz
• Twitter
• Yelp
• LinkedIn
• Website Resources & Content

How to Measure Your Overall SEO & Social Media Efforts:

When starting Social Media campaigns, there are many ways you can measure your overall success. Here are some tips:

Blogs  = Content:

• Search engines love content–this is the single most important aspect of Social Media for SEO.
• Write casually, as though you were speaking to someone.

Inbound Links:

• Show that your site has good content and is the “real deal”.
• Also shows that your content is relevant, which is key to being well-optimized for search.

Interconnectedness:

• Social Media is about connecting and communicating.
• Social Media will help your brand/company remain transparent—increasing its credibility.
• Your website should be constantly updated, giving search engines new content to crawl. The more current search spiders determine your site to be, the higher they will rank it in search results.

Key Takeaways Continued:

1.      64% of marketers already integrate social media into their Search Engine Marketing plans today.

2.      Social Media and SEO go hand in hand.

3.      B2B is in fact equally, if not more active on Social Media sites than B2C.

4.      Social Media is more about increasing engagement and building relationships than broadcasting your message.

5.      The role of SEO for Social Media is to directly influence discovery of social communities and content through search, boosting sales and increasing conversions (conversations translate to Share of Voice).

6.      Content is king. Start with great content on your blog to increase inbound links.

-@SarahShakour

Luckily, there is an easy way to measure your overall share of search by using web traffic tools like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.  With this tool, you can quickly find how many times your brand or your products are being searched in the previous month.

Your company can also look at non-branded keywords. These are keywords that do not contain your company name or the name of your branded products. Look for top performing keywords in your industry–they should be keywords that are being frequently searched for, convert really well and are industry wide keywords that describe your type of business.

Here are certain steps you can take to measure search volume:

1)     Keyword Analysis: Figure out which keywords are getting a decent amount of traffic or keywords that are specific to your industry

2)     Relative: Are these keywords related to your company, as well as your competitors? (i.e. Competitor A, Competitor B)

After you have compiled your list, enter your own analytics to figure out the number of visitors you receive using those keywords, then you can devise your search.

Now let’s give an example of Branded Share of Search: if companies within your industry are receiving 100,000 searches on company named keywords, and 30,000 of those 100,000 are for your company name, then your share of branded search would be at 30%.

As basic as these steps are, they can give your company better insight as to where you stack up against your competitors.

-@TravisLowSEO

How fast can you go?

Speed matters.  On the internet, it won’t get you a ticket and it’s not even a waste of gas.  Today’s webinar, The New Google Algorithm – Structuring Your Website for Optimal SEO, emphasized quickness as one of the newly important factors in how sites are ranked on search engine results pages.

(Ben, as our resident speed demon, approves.)

Speed, in this context, is not about having a lead foot or even fingers that type so fast they can’t be seen.  The first crucial speed sector is how quickly pages load.  No one likes waiting for a page to load.  Google, in this instance, feels our pain.  Slow-loading sites are now penalized for essentially annoying users who want their results and want them now.

To be fair, Google has also demanded time-trials for its spiders.  Those little crawlers have to cover a lot more territory a lot faster than they used to.  Spiders now check out more pages and pages deeper within sites.  Quick!  Get those supporting pages updated before the spiders see them!

Additionally, new content from social media sources pops up quickly on results pages.  Someone’s tweet about an embarrassing accident with your product can show up on a results page above your home page.  Getting engaged in social media and participating in the conversations that are already going on out there about your products or services can help you lay claim to those real time search results, not to mention speedily respond to praise or blame.

The clock is ticking…

Anchor

We talk a lot about links around here, both internal links and inbound links.  In today’s Introduction to SEO webinar, SEO Linking Essentials:  How to Generate Inbound Links, Travis got into the nitty-gritty of the process.

Anchor text is a little like the outlet that links plug into.  If your outlet is poor, you’re not going to get good performance from your link because it won’t have reliable power.  Using your carefully-chosen keywords as anchor text for relevant inbound links gets the amps flowing.  As tempting as it is to write copy for your site that tells people to click here and here, it is much better to give them an idea of where they are going, say, Grand Canyon or Great Barrier Reef.  That way you don’t lose your visitors and you don’t confuse the crawlers.

Just for fun:  anchors.

What a lot of spiders! They must like it here!

Why should I bother to read your site?  There are so many sites out there and I really don’t have time to look at yours.

Good question.  Both human and crawler visitors want to know.  Answering that question with your content is the big task of content writing.  Fortunately, our latest webinar in the Introduction to SEO series, Copywriting for SEO:  The Art and Science of Content Creation, provided insight to our audience today.

To begin, you need some attention.  Great titles for your articles attract readers, but they won’t stay long if that’s all you have on offer.  Spiders, much like people, get impatient and bored with the same old stuff.  Give them a compelling subject underneath that great title, and they’ll stick around.  It’s even better if you make it funny, educational, engaging, or all of the above.

However nice it is to have folks sticking around to read the content you’ve spent so much time and energy creating, it’s not enough.  You want them to DO something while they’re with you.  Ensuring that there is a call to action—a link to click to download a white paper, perhaps—up high on the page helps to turn casual visitors into actual leads.

Finally, write like a human, but keep an eye on the spiders.  Spiders understand a lot more about context than they used to.  They will be able to get the gist of what your content is about, much like your human readers.  Using your keywords in your content makes spiders notice them and subsequently improve your rankings for them.

The answer to why I should bother with your site?  Because it’s fascinating, timely, relevant, useful, and often really entertaining.  And I don’t mind all the spiders it attracts; I don’t have arachnophobia.

Remember health class, or drug prevention week?  That was the first time I saw the webs of spiders on various mood-altering substances, distorted and holey compared to the classic orb design.  In today’s webinar, New SEO Fundamentals in a Google Caffeine World, I learned, much as I suspected, that Google spiders were not included in the experimental data.

Google spiders thrive on Caffeine, much like the rest of us.  The new Caffeine algorithm they use to index webpages works faster and more thoroughly.  Imagine a denser web that attracts more flies and catches a greater percentage of them.

The caffeinated spiders want fresh content, and lots of it.  They want to have the content grouped together with a logical flow, like a morning paper separated into sections for news, sports, and entertainment to go with their morning coffee.  Of course, they’re checking their favorite blogs at the same time, not to mention keeping up with Twitter and Facebook.  You can give them what they want by optimizing your pages to appeal to them with keyword-rich content and organized silos of information.  You can catch their attention with new posts and tweets.  They’ll reward you with higher placement in the rankings.

But, much like many folks after too many double espressos, the spiders can be a little jittery.  If your pages take a long time to load, they don’t have the patience to wait.  They’ll skip to something that they can see right now.

What to do?  Pay attention to content and architecture on your site.  Get involved with social media to get yourself placed in the real time listings on results pages and to engage others talking about your services or products.  And, perhaps, pick up a cup of coffee.

In simple terms, if you wanted to feed the spiders your great new gizmo, you might write:

Welcome to Gizmoland’s website!  We developed our great new gizmo with features you can use right now.  Our great new gizmo does more in less time for fewer dollars.  It can change your life.

Okay, so you might not write that, but great new gizmo occurs in the text in ways that feel correct, natural.

By contrast, if you write:

Welcome to Gizmoland’s website, the home of our great new gizmo.  We developed our great new gizmo with features you can use for all your great new gizmo needs right this very minute at great new gizmo time.  Our great new gizmo works faster!  The great new gizmo does more!  The great new gizmo costs less!  The great new gizmo can change your life.  Have I mentioned that we have a great new gizmo?  Just (great new gizmo) in (great new gizmo) case (great new gizmo), let (great new gizmo) me (great new gizmo) tell (great new gizmo) you (great new gizmo) about (great new gizmo) our (great new gizmo) great new gizmo…

The spiders will run screaming as fast as their virtual eight legs will carry them, screaming, “Cheater, cheater, bug eater!”  Worse, if that text made it through the spider barrier, your potential clients might actually read it, and then you’d be in real trouble.