If you’re serious about online marketing, SEO is one of the main areas you are budgeting. You also have other forms of paid marketing that you’re using to drive immediate leads. I call this “short-term lead generation”. The reason for the name is because you can literally generate leads within hours of getting your ads up and running. Not the case with SEO, particularly if you’re not doing it well currently – but the idea is that as you become better at SEO in terms of driving qualified leads, you can choose to become less dependent on paid sources, particularly if the ROI is not there. SEO is a long-term strategy, and hence why I feel it is the marketer’s long-term lead generation strategy.
That’s right – I said it. SEO is more than rankings and traffic. It’s about the right traffic by increasing rankings for the right words. But how do you know what the right words are? You can mine data from paid sources who are actually converting into leads to feed your SEO activities, from premium content to link building to press releases. After all, you want to fail fast, and fail cheap. That means if the keyword(s) are not converting well after several tests, then you may be attracting the wrong customers with this keyword. You will begin to identify which set of keywords tend to drive the “researching” crowd, versus the word sets that tend to drive the “buying” crowd.
Once you have that, you can then nurture the “researchers” by offering free downloads or other resources instead of hard-selling them. For those who have already done their research and are ready to “buy,” you can present them with pricing and test your call-to-action copy, button colors, and more.
As you hone your SEO performance, you will begin to see that your cost per lead will decrease significantly compared to other paid sources. But, that doesn’t mean that you should discontinue your paid lead generation. Determine what your max cost per lead is (15% of your total cost per acquisition, or what you’re willing to spend to get a new customer) and keep your sources under that threshold.
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The two main forms of search engine marketing includes search engine optimization, or optimizing the organic listings, or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. But which will benefit your business in the long run?
Many small businesses come to us with the ultimatum that they have X dollars to spend, and will either choose to spend it on SEO or PPC, but not both. The fact is, they should consider spending in both areas. Here is why:
- The PPC ads can provide instant traffic, and simple campaigns can be set up in a matter of hours. SEO will take weeks to set up, and months to achieve noticeable results.
- Setting up your PPC campaign will provide some of the necessary keyword research to start your SEO campaign anyway (although the targets will likely be different, it’s a good starting point).
- The PPC campaign click-throughs and conversion rates can provide some intelligence back to the SEO campaign; however, be aware that PPC visitors will behave differently than an organic visitor.
- The SEO campaign will force you to develop more keyword-rich content, driving more long-tail searches. The PPC campaign will force you to create well-designed landing pages that you can A/B test for best results.
So why then is SEO more beneficial to my business in the long run?
It essentially comes down to the cost, and what stays with you after the cash is spent. Check out the graphic below. You can see the slow, gradual increase in performance of the SEO campaign, while the PPC campaign is more “instant”. Once the SEO effort performs well and you start to appear on the first page of results for some of your primary keywords, you get this area of what we call “maximum exposure” – where your paid ad and organic listing appear on the same page. It has been said that this type of exposure can lead to a higher chance of getting a click – on the organic listing – up to 7 times more likely. That’s interesting that the paid ad provided the necessary brand exposure to get a user to click on your FREE organic listing.
So let’s consider what happens after you stop spending in both areas. Maybe you are in a budget crunch, or you ran out of funding. The PPC ads come down immediately, and you are no longer visible to potential customers. With SEO, your time, effort and money will sustain itself for weeks, months, or maybe even years. This means you’re not going to lose your rankings overnight, and the SEO work will still give you exposure to new potential customers and drive more leads and sales to your business, even though you’ve stopped spending in that area.
Also consider the ROI on both programs. A click in PPC for a competitive keyword can cost you $4 (let’s say), whereas an organic visitor can cost you merely pennies (take you monthly SEO spend and divide it by the total organic visitors during the same period).
So if you only have X dollars to spend, don’t count out your SEO program. Instead, split your budget across both and get the maximum benefit for your money.
WordPress, out of the box, unfortunately is not that SEO friendly. With the help of some plugins and proper configuration, you can make it probably the most SEO-friendly “CMS” out there. So we wanted to point out a couple very common issues in WordPress that could wreck your prospects of SEO domination.
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Here’s the next post in the ‘Small Business Series’, on how a small business can better leverage its strengths. This week we are talking to none other than David Heinemeier Hansson, partner at 37 Signals, creator of Ruby on Rails and coauthor (with Jason Fried) of the bestselling book ‘Rework’. Signal Vs Noise is one of my favorite startup blogs and we are huge fans of 37 Signals. In this interview I do three quick questions with him: 
Romy Misra (Pear Analytics):First David, thanks so much for taking out the time to do this. For a small business seeking to be extraordinary, what are some tactics you would recommend to an SMB that could enhance Internet searchability and SEO?
David Heinemeier Hansson (37 Signals): Our primary technique at 37 Signals is to be interesting. You can try all sorts of tricks or hacks to try to game the search engines, but the most basic is simply to be undeniably good and interesting. Share tips, tricks, and lessons that others want to read and they’ll link to you. Nothing will keep you high in the Google rankings over the long term than having tons of people link to you.
Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): Rework focuses a lot on productivity and how a small business can maximize it. What are the basic ways in which a small business maximize it’s productivity?
David Heinemeier Hansson (37 Signals):First, avoid interruptions. Nothing will blow up your working day faster than having meetings and phone calls sprinkled all over it. Second, cut out 90% of all planning. Planning is mostly guessing and worrying about what your business is going to look like 5 years from now is a useless exercise when you should be worrying about how to grow your business next week.
Romy Misra (Pear Analytics):What do you feel are the core principles which have gotten you where you are today?
David Heinemeier Hansson (37 Signals):
Do less: We try to underdo the competition and I personally try to restate all our hard problems into easy problems.
Don’t grow: Managing people is hard, managing many people is much harder. We’ve tried to keep our headcount unnaturally low for a company of our revenues. It’s really paid off.
This is our fifth post in the ‘Small Business Series’ which features where we feature industry leaders on how small businesses can better leverage their strengths. This week we are talking to Matt McGee, a contributor for Search Engine Land, specializing in local search. Search Engine Land is one of my favorite SEO websites, which I read to keep myself up to date with SEO news.. Matt’s interest in local was fueled just by the fact that all of his early clients were small, local businesses that wanted to connect with people in his hometown. In the following interview I have focused on businesses who have a local clientele and how they can maximize the value of local search.
Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): First Matt, thanks so much for taking out the time to do this.Let’s start with the most important question for anyone with a small business. Why is it important for small businesses to focus on local search?
Matt McGee: It’s not important for ALL small businesses — but it’s a must for those who offer products or services to local customers. The answer to ‘why’ is that search engines are becoming the default way consumers find local information. Stats show that yellow page usage is on the decline and search engines are on the rise for finding local information. This is particularly true for a site like Google Maps, which has grown to surpass Mapquest as the number one site in the Travel/Maps category that Hitwise tracks.
That said, there are plenty of small businesses that offer products or services nationally, or even globally — if they’re not interested in finding local customers, they don’t really need to focus much on local search.
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This is our fourth post in the ‘Small Business Series‘ which features where we feature industry leaders on how small businesses can better leverage their strengths. This week we are interviewing Hiten Shah, the founder of three successful s
tartups (Survey.io, Crazy Egg and Kissmetrics) on understanding metrics that a small business should focus on. I have been using Crazy Egg for a while now and its a great tool to understand click patterns, and just yesterday tried out KissInsights (a new product as part of Kissmetrics). KissInsights is one of the best feedback tools I have seen, I am not a fan of the pop-up technique of inviting people to participate in surveys and love the widget you have to install.
Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): First Hiten, thanks so much for taking out the time to do this. Why is it important to develop metrics for success for small businesses? How does one develop these metrics?
Hiten Shah: I believe that the metrics for success are important in any business, because they can be used to help the whole organization focus on a single goal. If you pick the right metrics for success, you will be able to significantly improve the focus of the whole team and thus improve your business. Developing these metrics should be done first by making hypothesis about your business and validating / invalidating these hypothesis. From there you will have a good base understanding that will allow you to determine what metrics to focus on and how to define success for your business.
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This is the second post in our “Small Business Series” where we are interviewing a few industry experts on how small businesses can better leverage their strengths. Today we are interviewing Ken Hilburn, from Juice Analytics, one of my personal favorite data visualization companies, on how to create awesome surveys. Surveys are traditionally one of the best ways to understand your customers, but at the same time getting your customers to participate and engage in surveys is a huge challenge. I thought of interviewing Ken when I took a survey Juice Analytics sent to me by email, and it was the most engaging survey I had taken in months.
Note: As a bonus, Ken has generously shared that survey with us.
Romy Misra (Pear Analytics) : First Ken, thanks so much for taking the time to do this. The importance of surveying your customers has been repeatedly talked about. Why do you think it is important to survey your online customers/visitors?
Ken Hilburn: I have to start off by saying that Juice Analytics has an awesome community and we love talking, listening and working with them. But even with such a strong group, it’s critical to talk less and listen more.
It used to be, for the most part, that customers were at the mercy of vendors when it came to communication – it was pretty much a one-way street. However, that’s changing now. With the pervasive use of social media sites, there has been a tremendous shift toward “power to the people.” It’s certainly in a company’s best interest at this point to make sure they’re in touch with their customers and how well their customer’s needs are being met. We get to choose: we can either do that proactively, or we can wait to see it on the twitter “Popular Topics” list and hope it’s positive.
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As of right now, it’s still not a great idea to mix Flash and SEO unless you really know what you’re doing. If you’re trying to rank higher on search engines, it’s probably a good idea to not overload your site with Flash. While there have been strides by the search engines to parse Flash files and grab the readable text, unless you set this up properly, chances are the Flash will end up hurting your rankings.
When to use Flash
Flash is a great tool if you have a complicated product that needs more explanation or if you need entertainment value on the website. Secondly, with the increase in mobile internet use, Flash is still not visible on the latest iPhone and Blackberry, so it’s likely those visitors will be bouncing. At Pear, we’re getting about 20% of our visitors from mobile devices, so you could be losing out on those visitors with a Flash landing page.
Alternative solutions to Flash
But now we can use AJAX and other javascript techniques, like sliders and expanders, to uniquely display content without bombarding the visitor with content, and yet it’s all still readable by the search engine. Check out how ServerBeach, a dedicated hosting company, uses javascript sliders instead of Flash to nicely organize lots of information.
Setting up proper use of Flash
If you or your developer still insist on using Flash, there are some ways that you can set up your code to optimize it for SEO, and it has to do with accessibility programming. This blog post by Jonathan Hochman is a great overview of the multiple ways you can set this up using SWFObject 2.0, or even SIFR in some cases, although I understand SIFR is more used for typography enhancements, where you would like to use a non-standard web font, but get credit for the text in an H1 tag for example.
The SWFObject method provides a way to include alternate HTML content on the page which is visible in your source code, and all it uses is a tiny javascript file. This stems from the Web Accessibility Initiative which says all multimedia content should have an alternative way of accessing the content.
On Tuesday, Google released their SEO Report Card where they did an extensive evaluation of themselves in terms of search engine optimization. The result? Well, not so good. Even Business Insider agrees that Google fails to eat their own dog food by noting that only 10% of their own product pages conform to the proper title tag protocol. Even if you type in “search engine” into Google, they come up as the 5th result, and it’s not even google.com, but a different beta product. I wonder if that’s on purpose.
So if Google sucks at SEO, why do their other products rank #1 for so many search terms? Is Google using their own algorithm on their products, or are they overriding it when it’s convenient?
Search for “apps.” Google Apps is the top listing, not Apple.
Search for “documents.” Google Docs is the top listing, beating out several government related sites.
Search for “video.” The number one position? Google Video. Who the hell uses that anymore? And where is the Google-owned YouTube? Maybe again, this is on purpose.
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The answer is probably “yes.” The search marketing business is already incredibly large and growing fast, and because of how lucrative it is, it’s attracting all types of “snake oil” salespeople. According to a Forrester Research study done in July 2009, the search marketing industry is expected to grow to a $31 billion dollar industry by 2014, with 21% of that total on advertisement spending like Google AdWords. This most certainly is related to the fact that over 85% of all products purchased started with an online search.
It’s also amazing how such a large industry is still very much in its infancy. Google launched their first version of a search engine in 1998, so the industry is really only 12 years old; yet what’s fascinating is that what you knew back then almost certainly doesn’t apply now. For instance, in the early days you used to have to “submit” your site to Google in order to let them know you existed. Today all of that is done automatically through “crawling.”
The other fascinating thing, at least in the SEO world, is how disparate the expert opinions can get. One says keyword density is a myth, the other says it’s important. One says the h1 tag matter the most, the other one says it’s the title tag. It’s enough to make a skeptic out of anyone. Who should you believe? And why do they charge so vastly different for their services? One SEO consultant will charge $400 per month, and another one won’t take you unless you spend $5,000 per month. How are you supposed to evaluate the differences between costs and expertise to make sure you get a “bang for your buck?”
Let’s look at a few basics that you should understand from your SEO:
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