How to do SEO and search engine optimization. Search optimization tactics and SEO tools, all of the proven basics of the best SEO strategy.

How Much Does Your Free Organic Traffic Cost?

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The Real Value Of Free Organic Traffic

Any business that depends upon free organic traffic for customers or clients must recognize the value of their organic traffic. That means the vast majority of business owners that either do organic optimization in-house or employ a vendor or agency to optimize their organic presence, know that your FREE TRAFFIC IS NOT FREE.  Treat your organic traffic with the same level of intensity that you use for your paid traffic, because organic traffic has value too!

Why Organic Traffic Is Not Free

What is your time worth? If your time is valued at $50, $75, or $250 an hour, can it be better spent doing something other than optimizing your web site? Average business person spends 8 to10 hours a month on their web marketing meeting, writing, tweaking, reviewing their internet strategies.  At $100 an hour, that’s $800 to $1000 of time invested to drive “free” traffic.  When you review your return on investment to find that your $1000 of time investment delivered client sign ups of $10,000 then you enjoyed a 10 to 1 ROI, which is great if that was your target. But if you signed up only $2,000 of new clients and the 2 to 1 ROI is not enough to keep the lights on, then maybe it’s time to rethink how your handle your free organic traffic.

Free Stuff Is Easily Discarded
Many studies have shown that perceived value of items correlates directly to how that item is treated.  The difference between your evaluation of the benefits and costs of the item when compared with other costs and benefits becomes the perceived value. If you are given a “free” roller ball pen, you may use it every single day, but if you lose it, no big deal right? Now you are given a free Acme roller ball pen that you use every single day. If you lose this pen, will you feel the same as losing the plastic pen? Not so much. Even when both are free, the perceived value to you differs.  Knowing the value of your organic visitors by source is a metric most successful online businesses monitor frequently.

How To Calculate The Basic Value per Visitor

The simplest way to calculate the value per visitor is to start with your desired outcome, in most cases profit.  Then all you do is divide the total online profit by the total number of your visitors.

Simple Example:

Profit / Visitors = Visitor Value
An e-commerce retail website
$150/1,000 = $0.15 per visitor value

Professional Services Example:
A personal injury law firm with a 2% closing rate on auto accident cases.

$150,000 / 1,000 = $150 per visitor value

In the professional services example when you assign the visitor value to the 200 “free” contacts (form submissions and emails), that value of those contacts is actually not zero but $30,000. Will you handle your $30,000 of opportunity differently than you would handle free? Of course you will. So stop burning up contacts or leads, build a process to handle your valuable free organic traffic opportunities!

When you use visitor value data to make smart informed business decisions, then assigning the right focus to these business opportunities is the correct course of action. With a renewed focus on the value you are receiving, defining a processes to maximize your conversion of these opportunities, your business will flourish.

lead nurture

How To Get A Fast Start In Lead Generation

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Fast Track Your Lead Generation

Want to increase your bottom line with lead generation but don’t know where to start? Lead gen fundamentals are often nothing more than a simple math problem; thoughtful tracking of the numbers yields results when done correctly. As only one part of your overall digital strategy, lead gen can be a welcome boost to profitability, just don’t lose sight of the rest of your business. Take a step by step approach to the part of your marketing by starting with a clear definition of your customers or clients. Develop this user persona as a first step.

Step #1. What do your potential customers want?

Remember that zero potential customers wakes up in the morning and screams loudly, “Please market to me today!” No client thinks of themselves as a “lead” for your organization. The key is to understand these individuals and discover what they truly want or need. Start out by answering questions that drive them to seek solutions, questions like:

  • What are their pain points that keeps them awake at night?
  • What do they want to avoid so bad that they are willing to pay others to do?
  • What are the goals or objectives that they want to achieve?
  • What problem are they trying to solve?
  • How are they trying to change their current situation?
  • Where do they go to seek help or solutions?
  • What is there sense of urgency to resolve a problem or change their life?
  • How soon do they need to act?

Fortunately there are many different avenues to go to uncover this information. Effectively monitoring social media, client interviews, discussions with customer facing groups, posts from industry thought leaders, surveys, white papers,  are just a few of the ways to learn and better understand  what your potential customers want. The success or failure of your lead generation efforts hinges right here at the start by answering the question – what do my clients and customers want?

seo whiteboard

5 TIPS FOR WRITING GREAT WEBSITE COPY

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Making Pandas Smile With Great Website Copy

When writing quality natural web site copy, use this handy website copy roadmap to ensure that your content is written to maximize your search engine rankings and provide quality content for your visitors. Target 250-275 words per page minimum.

1. Select a Primary Keyword

Determine the primary keyword that your content will be optimized for. This will be the primary theme of your page’s content. You can position your primary keyword into the page content 3 to 5 times to improve primary keyword density.

2. Pick out semantic theme keyword(s)

Create a list of theme keywords, called semantic keywords, that suit your page subject matter. For example, if your primary keyword is: digital photography, pick a few (low competition) theme keywords that you can lightly introduce into your web copy such as: digital camera with printer, Kodak easy share digital camera, etc. When your content is well optimized for your primary keyword, you will also get traffic from semantic keywords. Use your theme keyword (s) 1 to 3 times per page. Since the search engines are perpetually evolving, it is better to diversify your content rather than follow the exact same plan for every piece of web content.

3. Use keyword synonyms

When writing about a particular topic, it’s easy to get carried away and include the primary keyword too many times throughout the article. That’s where synonyms come in, use them.

4. In your first paragraph – Include your primary keyword

The first paragraph of your content is critical. Include your primary keyword as near to the beginning of the first paragraph as possible. Also, it is a good idea to include one theme keyword somewhere within the first paragraph as well.

5. Prominence – aim for good keyword coverage including semantic keyword

If your keyword density is too low, you may not get the search engine rankings you may want. Remember, you always need multiple pages with the primary keywords and semantic keywords to gain a higher position in the search engine rankings and beat out your competition.

seo for mobile

6 Ways To Ignite Mobile SEO

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Supercharge Your Mobile SEO Strategy

mobile_300x201The number one focus of mobile SEO is to start with speed. Investigate all actions of mobile engagement and find ways to make things happen faster. Focus on speed to get the lead, speed to get the order, or speed to submit an email or form. Understand where people are in the process and how to get them to the next step in that process as quickly as possible. When you find an obstacle that slows that process down, remove the roadblocks!

6 Mobile SEO Tactics To Help ROI

1. Know where the mobile user is coming from. All referrers are not created equal, many don’t end up triggering your business goals. If you know where the mobile user referral started, you can better understand their motivations and where to direct them. For example, many mobile referrals from social may not be interested in direct sales or lead actions, they be more interested in a service function.

2. Recognize the engagement funnel. Next step in mobile SEO includes some basic mobile analytics. A great tool to use here is a mobile engagement funnel to highlight where mobile users start and where they are trying to go. Mobile visitor actions are key. Follow their actions.  What steps do they take and when do they take them?

3. Success rides on simple navigation. Get rid of useless scrolling, large imagery, multiple steps and excessive navigational options. If there are multiple steps in the process, clearly state that upfront. Limit your links, make it easy.

4. Know the device, know the platform. Simple, align the experience to the devices and platforms. Period. Done.

5. Speed up task completions. If you use a check out or lead intake form for mobile, consider simplifying the form. Ask for additional information to complete the transaction on a confirmation email. People are typing on a smartphone, give them the opportunity to use a larger keyboard for detailed information.

6. Clickable Call-to-Action. Click to call is where the speed is, allow the user to view the CTA without having to scroll down. Increasing impressions on your call to action will only benefit your business. Highlight your CTA visually and significantly increase your mobile engagements.

These are a few simple ways to improve your mobile SEO strategy. Mobile search is a much different landscape than desktop or laptop. Mobile visitors have different objectives and motivations, and they all focus around action.  90% of mobile search results in an action taken (call, form submit, directions), with more than 70% of those actions completed in less than 1 hour. Respect your mobile audience and your mobile visitors to get more accomplished quickly. Focus your mobile SEO tactics on speed to win more business.

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social media

SEO Scare Tactics Versus Today’s Reality

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Here are 6 SEO myths perpetuated by less than ethical professionals and lazy optimizers that does not fit play well in today’s digital marketing environment. These six SEO scare tactics can hold your business back from potential growth and valuable ROI.

Scare Tactic #1 – SEO Is An Event

SEO is a process, not an event. You cannot just SEO the site, launch it, and think optimization is done. With constant changes that evolve the digital landscape, being stuck in the past is dangerous and downright foolish. Many business do not keep up with the changes either in thoughts or actions, and do not embrace the change as an opportunity to be better than competitors. These businesses create systems and process that strongly cling to what use to work, a last grasp at the past. Looking forward to the future is not done by looking backwards. Effective SEO demands forward thinking and flexibility to engage with new ways of doing optimization. This does not mean that your business can skip the fundamentals of search engine optimization, rather it assumes that the SEO basics are in place as a solid foundation to build on. If your business is simply doubling-down with commitment to last years tactics, then you are exposing yourself to many missed opportunities that best in class SEO offers.

Scare Tactic #2 – Focus Only On Keywords To Win Business

The singular obsession with keyword phrases is too granular.  Old SEO goals focused on rankings for keywords; not only getting the phrase ranked, but keeping it at all costs. That thought encouraged all efforts to get the top spot on page one as the priority, no matter how it was done. This old SEO mentality of the past, would drive focus on one principle keyword or keyword phrase. The SEO practitioner researched a targeted keyword where they wanted to rank, and then focused on that keyword only. This singular approach exposes those types of tactics to the whims of algorithm changes and is extremely reactive SEO.

  • Keyword density is important – keyword density makes content unreadable. There’s a reason SEO’s laugh at this joke; “An SEO walks into a bar, bars, saloon, whiskey bar, pub,  and orders a drink, beer, shot, liquor, wine…”. Natural semantic phrases used in search work better in moderation.
  • Abundant redundant keywords – usually found in links, footer, page titles, anchor text, alt text, are aggressive over-optimization and once again reads and looks like spam. Avoid doing this.

This is no longer the world of effective SEO. Exceptional digital markers look beyond the keyword and into the mind of the people that are doing searches. Today’s SEO is about user intent and user engagement with the brand. Focusing on intent highlights the need to optimize for semantic phrases and long tail searches. Semantic SEO is all about understanding what the person is actually trying to accomplish with their search and how best to present your brand for that intent. Alignment of the brand and how people engage with the brand is the new focus. How your brand is viewed is the improvement that will drive organic success and ultimately more business results.

Scare Tactic # 3 – Rank As a Success Metric

bad seo strategySending this little red flag up the flagpole opens all kinds of doors.  When that long list of unsolicited keywords that your business does not rank for suddenly becomes important, it’s time to just stop. What’s the economic benefit of these terms when most have zero relevance to user intent?  Then in the next business discussion with that client, they hand you a 20 page ranking report tracking hundreds of utterly useless keyphrases?  Been there too? Then ask this question, “How are your analytics? What’s the correlation between the ranking report and your actual business results?”  Even though your business may rank for hundreds of terms, the key phrases from an unwanted solicitation become the focus and urgently require immediate action. Rarely does this fear tactic ever benefit your business. If your definition means SEO is chasing rankings, then note that SEO style is dead. Omni-channel marketing is the here and now in the current marketing environment.  Brand marketing across multiple channels offers the best chance for success.

Rankings are dangerous because they are assumptive:

  • Assumption #1- the ranked key phrase has an audience that’s relevant to my business
  • Assumption #2 – the ranked term is aligned with searcher intent
  • Assumption #2 – the searcher will actually click on the search results to my website
  • Assumption #2 – the keyword is aligned with my landing page
  • Assumption #2 – the entire engagement listed above will result in a conversion to a client or sale

These ranking reports are easy but often manipulate the truth of the business ROI. It’s always a bit awesome to for a client to say “We’re #1 in Google for bounce house injury lawyer in Tupelo, MS!” or “We’re the top of page one for Red Widgets In Wichita!!”

Rank is easy to sell, because it’s easy to understand. It’s even a bit sexy because it appeals to ego and vanity. However it’s the responsibility of professional marketers and savvy business people to move the rank conversation from the old way of thinking into a more meaningful discussion, one that will benefit the business.  Focus on measurable KPI’s for Brand, Audience, Engagement, and Outcomes. These are metrics that when improved, increase contacts, promote sales and drive real money to the bottom line. Don’t fall into the easy trap of taking the path of least resistance, plan an SEO strategy that will target the right keyword phrases that target the relevant audience, at the right time, that presents the business or brand in the best possible light. That it key to long term growth in a new SEO environment.

Scare Tactic #4 – The Sun Rises And Sets On Google

For those businesses that perpetually wear “Google-goggles”, you may not know this, but you have a problem. If you are super excited that so much of your organic traffic comes from Google and you think that means you are “winning”, please think again. It means that with all of your eggs in the Google basket, your business is actually at risk. The next Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, or other animal update can put a serious pinch on your online presence.  Just as smart investors never put all of their money into one single stock to mitigate their risk, smart SEO strategies create diverse traffic mediums with multiple inbound channels.

Progressive SEO strategies look for opportunities to promote your business or brand in many places.  Your plan needs to be as diverse as your audience, to maximize success opportunities.  Omni-channel marketing (always on, always everywhere) is the new normal to get your value proposition to the masses.

Scare Tactic # 5 Content Is King

Guess what? Content is king, but crap content is not. Developing thin, anemic content focused on ranking for a keyword is not only a bad SEO technique that just won’t go away, it can actually do way more harm than good. There was a time that using the right keywords in the correct amount, could lead to improved rankings. Google’s Panda algorithm filters absolutely loves to crush that junk content into oblivion.

The key was simple, content was always supposed to be written for readers first. Many people chose to write content for the search engines first, and human readers second. This type of content is exactly what the search engine algorithms try to minimize. The best content is well written, filled with relevance to the search and delights the targeted audience with a “WOW’ factor that’s very engaging and highly shared.

negative SEO facepalmIt’s time to move away from creating thin content for search engines. Start developing your brand and business by writing your audience. Understand the who and the why and it’s becomes easier to create great content. Writing quality high value content for your audience does not mean it’s mutually exclusive from writing for search engines. Quite the opposite, awesome content is generally shared and can drive meaningful back links. If you are not excited about your content, how will your audience be excited?

How About Some Article Submissions?
Please no. Going hand in hand with low quality content is  generating Article Submissions as link bait. Long past it’s prime, stop doing this right now before Panda seeks you out. Article submissions consisting of thin content might be any easy way to create some quick back links to your domain, but is this really the best use of your marketing efforts? The time and effort to be consistent in article submissions might be better applied elsewhere.

For example, why not try to build some actual relationships by networking within your industry and sharing stories and blog posts that can real value to their website and the online community of your audience? What better way to build quality and authority for your own web properties?

What About Some Press Releases?
Seriously, no. Now for the other thin content tactic to never use again, press releases without real news. Please just stop. As a true method for public relations, blasting your business or name on the newswire on the slim chance to get some links from a legitimate news channel is not a sound practice.  Issuing non-newsworthy Press Releases as a links promotional tool mirrors the waste of time like article submissions.  Again, in a post Panda and Penguin world, this practice puts your business at risk when done incorrectly. How would you like your back link profile to show the submitter as the authority in the anchor cloud instead of your business? This happens more often than you may think. If you do something truly remarkable, newsworthy that adds real value to your community, a press release MAY be in order and MAY be effective to promote your brand. If this is not the case, just keep building relationships with trust over time.

Scare Tactic #6 – SEO Works The Same For Every Site

This is a big one, but clearly not true. SEO is not the same for every site. Content profiles differ, back links differ, anchor clouds differ, code base, site architecture, site design, domain tenure, all of these things differ site to site. Applying sound solid SEO principles will benefit every website, but results will vary greatly. A single SEO magic trick will not be “the silver bullet” to drive results. Search engine optimization is really a series of a thousand little details done well in context to each other that maximizes value and generates performance results.

whitehat SEOSo how do you move forward with a SEO strategy for your business? Start by understanding exactly where you are today. Use your analytics to establish business critical goals and KPIs. Make your KPIs DUMB – doable, understandable, manageable and beneficial. Focus on effective – what are the metrics that actually grow your business and creates positive ROI? Understand that search engine algorithms remain dynamic and in a constant state of refinement. With this awareness refine your focus to only do the right things, the right way, all the time. It’s not always pretty, sexy or fun, but it still works. SEO tactics must support your business goals, either economic or strategic in nature.  SEO strategy success simply comes down to working towards established goals. The goals must align with the actions that make money and have KPIs for each of those actions. Your focused efforts here helps ease concerns about Panda, Penguin or any other algorithm shifts.

local seo

Why Local Search Is Important

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What Is Local Search And Why Is It Important?

There is no question that having an easy to find website with accurate information is of the utmost importance. In the quest for greater online visibility, an increasingly big player is local search.

What Is Local Search?

Simply put, it is searches done by a variety of search engines that provide results within the searcher’s area. These search engines are not unknown small engines. Some examples include Google Maps and Bing Places. The bare minimum information for your business is usually already on these engines. Users do not have to go out of their way to perform these kinds of searches: Try entering ‘food’ into Google and see what happens. In addition to the standard list of search results you will get localized search results. Every time someone is looking for something, modern search engines are usually smart enough to show the local results.

Why Is It Important?

With millions of people on smartphones, local search is quite literally at people’s fingertips. When someone is actually walking or driving around your town looking for a business, one like yours, they are frequently going to reach into their pocket and rely on something like Google Maps to find what they need. Ensuring that the information on these apps and websites is accurate and detailed is of the utmost importance. If prospective customers try and fail to call the disconnected phone line listed online, chances are they are just going to call someone else.

What Are Local Citations?

A local citation is when your business or website is mentioned on another local site. This can include pages with listings or pages for local government institutions. These citations of your business and website are taken into account by Google when attempting to assess your webpage. For that reason, it is important to get yourself on local listings and find opportunities to get more citations where you can.

If you have been doing what you can to optimize your site for search engines, local citations and search may be what you are missing. Pay mind to this component of your business and it can only help.