As a teaser to the report, they have also released an excerpt, highlighting several key SEO findings within over 1500 organisations.

Main reasons people Engage in SEO

The top reason people are investing in SEO is to increase traffic, which in a way is what you would consider to be the most important element of a website. In reality the most important reason to engage an SEO firm is to increase the leads and conversions through your website.

Even if your site is only attracting a few 100 visitors per month, if your campaign is highly targeted within your industry and you’re getting business through your website, then I would call that a success.

We recently started SEO’ing a site that attracts over 50,000 visitors a month, but the conversion to lead or customer was very low. By implementing a few on-page conversion strategies, we are slowly converting their traffic to leads to customers.

SEO Tactics to Rank

If you are new to SEO or you are considering DIY SEO this will give you an insight and may help you to understand why you should outsource this service. The graph below indicates the SEO methods in use and the level of difficulty through the use of each technique.

Keyword research is the second most commonly used tactic and rightfully so. Your keyword research will determine the success of your overall strategy.

A point of interest is that content creation is the most commonly used strategy and considered to be the most difficult strategy. This really does hit home that ‘content is king’, especially in light of the recent Google Panda updates.

SEO growth over the next 12 months

The following graph is broken down into 3 different sections; Trial, Transition and Strategic. It shows the level of investment expected in SEO over the next 12 months. Businesses within the Trial phase using SEO are generally run in-house, spending money on wages and staff salaries, with Transition and Strategic outsourcing either all or components of their SEO.

Further more, Transition and Strategic companies are continuing to increase their SEO budget, understanding the solid Return On Investment (ROI) in relation to dollars spent.

This also rings true with a number of our clients either previously performing the SEO tasks themselves or assigning the task to one of the members of their staff. Due to the nature of SEO, many of these tasks can be performed on a larger scale and with more consistency at a lower dollar investment.

ROI for SEO – Do the Maths

Really think about this last point and do the maths. Consider assigning an admin person with 10 hours a week of consistently performing SEO tasks (article writing, link building etc). If you are paying this person $45,000 per annum based on a  40 hour week, then you’re essentially investing just under $12,000 a year on SEO.

For a similar (or lower in many cases) level of investment you’re able to outsource this service, and have a dedicated team of people working on the strategic direction of your site working close to double that amount. They are also specialised in the art of SEO and have their finger on the pulse of all current and future trends. Hmmm… A No brainer?

As you would expect, a large number of our long term clients sit within the Strategic section and are constantly looking at increasing their ROI through other mediums like email marketing campaigns and social media.

SEO and the Wild West

This report shows that SEO is still in it’s infancy, with a lot of opportunity and growth available for many small to large business. It’s still the ‘wild west’ online and this report shows SEO’ers are taking positive steps towards standardisation.

The investment for the report is $397 for the .pdf version and is a good read for anyone that has an interest in SEO trends.

To download the report for a $100 discount, download the excerpt and fill out the form on the last page. You can download the excerpt from here – https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=31953#

It shows the strength of social media, especially when comments are re-tweeted and in certain circumstances, shown in the Search Engine Results Pages.

Sounds like a good idea for a person searching on a certain topic? If a particular subject is trending at any given time and the social world is interested then Google will tell you about it in their results. This is great!

On the 3rd of July they decided to stop using Twitter as a factor in social media trends with no real explanation. As you can read in this post by Cyrus Shepard in SEO Moz the theoretical intention is to start using Google+ as the social medium to replace twitter. Here’s the article here – http://mz.cm/owXtfx

In Cyrus’ article it shows a few examples of social media and its direct influence to the Search Engine Results Pages. The image below from this article demonstrates an example of pre 3rd July.

Will this impact my SEO and should I panic?

While this certainly demonstrates the importance of social media in any online campaign it doesn’t mean you should go out and set up a million campaigns and get a tonne of Google +1’s to your homepage. Aside from the fact that this is ‘black hat’ you’ll eventually get caught.

What it does demonstrate in some instances the importance of a solid social media profile and that it can potentially influence your position in the search engines. If you are serious in your online presence should you ensure you have a solid social platform? Maybe… in reality it could be overkill and you could end up spending a lot of time and money with your BDM or team member performing tasks that won’t actually give you any real measurable results.

Truth told, we are certainly recommending to certain clients that they look at their social media presence, especially if their SEO competition does the same and is doing it well.

Take a look at your competitors and see what they are doing. Like most Search Engines, in order to rank you don’t have to ‘do it all’; you simply have to do it a little better than your competition. By ensuring you’re keeping an eye on your competition (using social monitors) you’ll understand if now is the time to react, or if you should invest your time in other activities that offer a better return on investment.

One of the main points of the book I recall was discussing the structure of a
Google employee’s week and how they are encouraged to develop their own projects
one day a week.

Over time if you project was interesting enough it would be integrated into
Google’s overall offerings.

I have no doubt Google Maps, Froogle (now Google product search) and a multitude
of other offerings from Google were as a result of this method of encouragement
and development.

One of the latest projects just released is ‘What Do You Love’ (can be found at
www.wdyl.com), which is a cool way of showing many different online mediums in
one summarised area on a particular topic.

You can see the full story on their blog here –

http://bit.ly/nLJUIl

They explain it to say ‘A while back, a few of us wanted to make a little tool
that we could use to show just about anybody more of what Google makes. That led
to some simple ideas, and then a few more ideas and ultimately, to a challenge:
how we could connect people to products they might not know about and may find
useful, but make the discovery relevant to them and keep it fun.

Playing about with that challenge produced a website—What Do You Love?—that we
hope meets at least some of the challenge by demonstrating how different Google
products can show you different things about any particular search query.’

This tool reminds me of iGoogle, which is the tool that you can customise to
bring back specific information when you are signed into your Google account.

The difference with this site though is it’s offering of other interesting
snippets of information including Blogs, Patents, Images, 3D, Books, latest
news, and many other cool features.

A useful add-on? From an SEO perspective, visit the site and type in your
business name. This will give you a nice cross section of what’s out there in
relation to your business. Even better, type in your product or service and see
what comes up.

Could you could use this as a cool tool to track your competitors. Hmmm

Resource – Official Google Blog – http://bit.ly/nLJUIl

This is the re-design in preparation of a big add-on feature Facebook are running in combination with Microsoft.

Skype, recently acquired by Microsoft are teaming up to offer video calling from within Facebook.

This will add another dimension to the social environment of Facebook and offer it’s members another way to stay in touch.

This is due to be launched in the next few weeks, but if you don’t want to wait you can get it now here – http://on.fb.me/qqebdp

You will see here – http://selnd.com/qgSSUb that the recent Google+ announcement will also offer group video conferencing, which they will call “hangouts”.

I think Microsoft are creating a nice niche for themselves and a way to move several brands forward. I was a little sceptical about the acquisition of Skype by Microsoft, but in hindsight it was a very smart move.

We really do live in great times. We have 3 of the world’s largest online presences fighting for our attention… Oh Joy.

This means each time you implement a change to your Internet marketing campaign you should evaluate the results of the change to determine whether or not it generated a greater profit for you. Just by doing this 1 step you can maximize the impact from your marketing efforts.

Evaluating the response of your Internet Marketing can be done in a number of different ways. Two of the most popular are customer surveys and embedded HTML code. Customer surveys can be as simple or as complex as you like depending on the amount of feedback you would like to receive. However, one of the most effective ways to find out how well your different marketing tactics are working is to include a question asking your customers where they originally heard about your products or services.

Embedding code into your advertisements for the purpose of receiving feedback is also a popular method of evaluating the response to your Internet marketing strategies. Advertisements can be coded so the business owner receives feedback each time an Internet user clicks through a particular advertisement.

This is useful for letting the business owner know which of his advertisements are attracting the most attention. If the business owner is using two different designs for his advertisements he may discover one design is attracting more attention than others and may make the decision to convert all of the advertisements to a more effective style.

Finally, the response to an Internet marketing campaign can be evaluated by reviewing website traffic statistics. This information is useful because an unusual spike in the amount of website traffic immediately after implementing a stage of the marketing campaign can provide positive feedback that the change was well received by potential customers.

While this method of evaluating the response to an Internet marketing campaign can be effective it is important to note implementing multiple changes at once will make it difficult to determine which changes were the most effective. Therefore if you plan to use website traffic as feedback for how well your marketing strategy is working it is important to only implement one major change at a time so they can each be properly tested and measured.

There are many factors involved in making this happen for your business, but here are a few of the simpler processes;

Informative Articles

Articles are a fantastic platform for educating an audience about your products, service or industry. You can discuss things based on your expert opinion, your interpretation of facts & figures or even your personal ideas about a topic. One of the greatest positives about articles is that you can publish them for free on many sites on the internet so this process is free save your own time and writing savvy. You should always include links back to your website, at least from the “bio” boxes the article houses allow you to include with your article upon publication.

Press Releases

Writing press releases is one of the best ways to improve your position in Google while at the same time promoting your special events, offers, and company information. They are a very clear marketing tool and should be used to promote and improve your branding, create “relationship” positions with potential customers and let readers know who you are. Ensure you include links back to your website from keywords within your text. This will strengthen your internet position.

Blogging

Creating a blog and submitting regular interesting posts is another great method of increasing your brand awareness on the net. Each post should be about a topic directly related to your business or can tie into your business in a relevant way.

Social Media

Facebook and Twitter are the most well known platforms for social media marketing and it’s free to setup an account, so take the time to do this.  Most businesses these days are making use of this mode of marketing and many consumers use these platforms to find products and services for themselves. Social media can be great for business branding so make sure people “like” you on Facebook and you develop a list of people to market to.

These activities are just a few of the things you could be doing to improve your position on the internet and with Google. We know that this can sometimes seem like a daunting activity to undertake (and it is!) which is why we recommend that this isn’t taken on lightly. Just as each individual business owner is an expert in their own field of work, Online Specialists are the experts in our own field of Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation. Online Specialists include all of the aforementioned activities and many more intricate functions within our programs. This gives our clients the highest possibility of get to the front page of Google, plus we GUARANTEE to make this happen. Contact us today for a free overview on what can be done to improve your websites position in Google.

There are many SEO tips that I could share with you to help achieve this result but the biggest tip of all is that making big changes in ranking is primarily done by what is called “off-page optimization”.

Off-page optimization really makes a HUGE difference in your site’s ranking. Properly planned off-page optimization will make the difference between your website not ranking in the top 100 pages and ranking #1 on Google!

So, what is off-page optimization anyway?

Off-page optimization basically consists of all of the ranking factors that are NOT located on your webpage, that the search engines look at when ranking a website.

These include:

• Which websites link to you
• The number of websites linking to you
• The page title of the website linking to you
• The Google page rank of the site linking to you
• The anchor text used in the link linking to you
• The number and type of links linking to the website that’s linking to you.
• The number of outbound links on the website that is linking to you
• The total number of links on the website that is linking to you
• Whether or not the websites linking to you are deemed by Google as an authority website.
• The IP Address of the websites linking to you.

More Off-Page SEO Tips

In order to optimize your website for any keyword you need to analyze the off-page optimization techniques of the top 10 ranked websites for your keyword. The goal here will be to copy exactly what they’re doing, and then do things slightly better.

You want to give Google exactly what they want, by making your off-page optimization as close to the top ranked websites as possible, but as I said, if you do slightly better then you’ll edge them out and rank higher.

So just how do you do this? Well, it’s actually not as easy as it sounds. The reality is that you need to use a bunch of software programs that allow you to ‘reverse engineer’ the off-page factors of the website(s) you are wanting to outrank. My advice is your better off leaving this to a trained SEO professional unless you are an internet geek that is technically orientated.

Final Off-Page SEO Tips

Off-page search engine optimization comes down to basically one thing, which websites are linking to your websites and how they’re doing it.

This includes the anchor text used in your link, the title of the page your link is on, the page rank of the page your link is on and the “theme” of the website your link is on.

By now, I’m hoping you see how important the off-page SEO factors are that will get your website to the top of the search engines. Yes, it is a lot of work and it something you need to work on all the time, not just once. Because once you get to the top of Google results you want to make sure you stay there. This means that the link building and content creation work on your site must never stop.

If you would like to get a free SEO analysis and report of your site done then click here now.

There are many reasons why marketing strategies vary in their levels of effectiveness. This can depend on the businesses geographical location, the target market, type of business and so on.

My Journey To Finding Art Classes

Let me give you an example. I like to draw and paint. In actual fact, I think that I am pretty good at it however; I haven’t picked up a paintbrush since I left uni (and without revealing my age, that was quite a number of years ago). A few months ago I decided that perhaps I should find a hobby which would allow me to relax a bit away from the business and the family so I decided to take up art classes.

I was however quite disappointed as I could not find any local art classes in Google, so as many people would do, I put that idea into the back of my head and eventually forgot all about it. Interestingly though, a few weeks later I was throwing out junk mail out of my letterbox when I noticed a small leaflet advertising local art classes.  As this leaflet literally fell into my lap, I thought that it was meant to be and joined up.

The Cost Of A Customer

When I arrived at my first session, the instructor (aka business owner) was telling us proudly about the success of the letterbox drop. In all honesty, I thought that it was purely a coincidence that I had actually picked my up so I started asking him more questions about its effectiveness. It turns out; he paid $3500 for the drop. The interesting thing is that he filled six classes with an average of seven students per class. This worked out to be an average acquisition cost of $73 per student. Considering that most students paid around $300 for the course, this drastically reduced the amount of profit made.

The interesting thing is that the business owner never considered online marketing. If it weren’t for the accidental leaflet, I would have never found his business. Considering how few people read junk mail nowadays, I wonder how many others also missed out.

So this brings me back to the point of the effectiveness of various marketing strategies. As I mentioned above, these can vary depending on the type of business you may have, your geographical location, the target market you are attempting to capture and so on. Although there is no set rule, one simple principle applies and that is, to test and measure whatever method you are using.

Effectiveness of Test and Measuring

Testing the effectiveness of a marketing campaign is something that can be very easily introduced into just about any type of business. All that is required is one simple question ‘How did you hear about us?’ This simple question can be asked at any point of the customer interaction.

Whether it’s over the phone, during a physical face-to-face transaction or during an online purchase.  The type of information gathered can also be extremely beneficial for example; some businesses may want to capture their client’s postcodes. They may have only targeted certain regions with a marketing campaign so capturing postcodes will easily provide them with a snapshot of the campaigns effectiveness.  Other businesses simply ask the question ‘how did you hear about us’. This may help them to understand how much or how little business they are receiving through their phonebook advertising, their website, or any other medium used such as newsletter drops, radio or event TV.

Over the past few months I have recommended capturing this type of data to a few of my clients as I noticed though their website reporting that they were receiving very few hits from a well-known, yet expensive advertising medium. After a couple of months of testing and measuring their marketing dollars, the business owners were extremely surprised with their findings. A few of them realised that the cost of acquisition actually made the strategy unprofitable instead of increasing the businesses bottom line. A number of these businesses dropped this well-known advertising medium and reinvested their funds into more profitable mediums – that predominately being online advertising.

Test And Measure In Everyday Business

So going back to my little experience of art classes… Although using a letterbox drop was overall a profitable experience for the business, highlighting the importance of testing and measuring the effectiveness of a marketing campaign made the business owner rethink his future marketing.

When the instructor asked the class, the majority initially tried to find local classes online without success.  Although moving forward he will still continue to use letterbox drops (as it did actually work) he is also going to invest the time in making sure that his website is up to date, that it clearly demonstrates what the business is about and to ensure that it can be easily found online.

The Attractiveness Of Online Marketing

Unlike traditional methods of offline marketing, online marketing allows businesses to track the trends of their potential clients. Using tools such as Google Analytics, businesses are easily able to determine where the potential clients are located, how they are finding your site, what time they are accessing it, which pages they are looking at and for how long and other essential buying patterns. This is why, when tailored correctly, online marketing far outperforms any form of offline marketing.

The bottom line is, whether you chose to use online marketing, offline marketing or a combination of the two, in case you should use every tool available to you to measure its effectiveness.

To get a free SEO and Google Places Analysis for your website and find out where your site is currently positioned in Google then…

click here now and simply fill in the short form at the top of the page.

Not only does it prove you know what you are doing as an SEO professional, but more importantly, you’re making the online world a better place by ensuring people browsing Google are finding the most relevant results. It’s sort of like you’re assisting in creating a Search Engine Results Utopia.

As I write this I can picture the comment from the movie Miss Congeniality when they asked each of the contestants ‘What does the society needs most?’ as each entrant replied with the same cliché line ‘World Peace’. Although world peace would be great, imagine an online world where people searching for their keywords are presented with exactly what they are after, first time round. This in my mind would be the online version of world peace.

World Peace Can’t Happen Overnight

Just as I understand world peace doesn’t happen overnight, I also understand creating a ‘Search Engine Results’ utopia also takes time and persistence. Google are constantly updating how they measure website rankings and although the basics are still the same, it’s safe to say the easiest way to get your website to the top and to stay there is through good old fashioned elbow grease.

This elbow grease I mention is in the form of a consistent series of repeated actions that you implement in a most boring repetitive fashion. At times it’s as exciting as watching grass grow, yet if you complete these steps you will slowly see your site emerge at the top.

These steps are the important and ensure the industry continues to grow and the Search Engines are able to refine their processes to give the end user the best result possible.

Can I Just Snap My Fingers And Appear At The Top Spot ?

In simple terms, there’s no magic pill when it comes to SEO. You may have heard that you can just waive a magic wand and appear at the top, but in all seriousness anyone who promises that kind of tom foolery will end up causing more long term damage than good. In other words; when on holiday you may experience a brief oceanfront visit as your concierge takes your bags to your room, but ultimately you’ll end up with the crappiest room at the back of the resort. Make Sense?

It simply takes Time!

How Long is Too Long?

Any good SEO company will explain the process they follow to achieve your desired result. The tricky part is whether you feel confident that they’re not just pulling your leg and telling you what you want to hear. For more information on what to look for, check out Eva’s post titled – Beware of Dodgy SEO Companies.

Putting that aside, we always say to clients not to expect any results for the first 3 months. When I say results I mean a good level of traffic and an increase in rankings. After all… we’re mixing together a fine selection of ingredients to bake a website that sits at the top of the search engines.

6 months and $470,000 on the bottom line

To protect the names of the innocent I’m not going to mention names (take a peek at our testimonials page… hint, hint) in relation to one of our clients that experienced a healthy return on investment when we worked together on their SEO campaign.

This was a property management business that engaged our services as SEO specialists. Their campaign (as with every campaign) involved a lot of foundation work and took a healthy amount of time before they dominated the Search Engines.

There were a massive number of little tasks that needed to be performed and once these tasks compounded the end result was an excellent return on investment. A $470,000 return to be accurate.

As you would expect this result wasn’t immediate but once everything lined up the site took off and the rest is history.

SEO and World Peace

Although SEO can’t fix world peace it can bring us one step closer to more relevant search engine results and ensure businesses that are proactively updating their website with quality content will emerge at the top.

If you approach SEO with the intention of making the online world a better place and put in a lot of elbow grease you’ll find your website will be in it for the long haul. You never know… maybe one day when we create Search Engine Utopia you’ll to enter ‘World Peace’ into Google and the answer will show up first time.

To get a free SEO and Google Places Analysis for your website and find out where your site is currently positioned in Google then…

click here now and simply fill in the short form at the top of the page.

The Internet has now become an important medium for showcasing product and services. Almost every company that can afford print, radio and TV advertisements have also ventured into using the Internet as one of the main marketing strategy’s to drive business growth.

But with thousands of websites out there being visited by thousands of local browsers each month, how can you make sure that your website can be found by your target customers? Here are a few Internet Marketing Tips.

1. Make sure your website is optimized for visitors and search engines. The process that is most commonly known to achieve this is called SEO (Search engine Optimization). The fact is that unless you know how to make your website highly popular on the internet it will float around in cyber-space, not being seen or visited by anyone, except for a few die-hard browsers who like to do hours of research on a product or service. However, 90% of people won’t look past the first page of Google and out of those 90% on average they’ll only look at 3 websites before making a decision. That’s way it’s SO important to get found fast and frequently on the internet and SEO is the best way to make that happen.

2. Claim your Google Places listing. Google Places is another way to get your website found on the front-page of Google by local visitors. It’s free, anyone can claim one and will help drive a truck-load of targeted free traffic to your website. The other option is to get an Internet marketing company to help you with setting it up. The reason being that if you don’t do it the right way, it may not appear in Google for months, whereas an Online Marketing Specialists will make sure it get’s set-up properly.

3. Pay-per-click (PPC) is also a good method in Internet Marketing. You will only need to pay for the ad if the link is clicked. If you prefer this method of advertisement, make sure that you are using services that set limits on daily expenses. There are also services that help you determine effective keywords and monitor the PPC results.

4. Choose your domain name wisely. It is still being debated if domain names matter when it comes to search engine placement. Whether it does or not, having product related domain names help consumers remember your domain, that they can go back to your site even without the links.

5. Make sure you have useful content on your sites. While keyword density is important in search engine placement, having useless information or annoying repetition of keywords will not increase your customer’s confidence in your site. It may even affect your sites traffic and can get your site removed from search engines. So make sure that keywords are used strategically.

6. When thinking of keywords, think like your target customers. What do you think are they going to search so they can get to your site? Also, use specific keywords or key phrases. Submitting a single word or a very general phrase to a search engine will not get you to the top of the search results compared to submitting specific keywords that describe your product and services perfectly.

One final tip on marketing products and services is to sell the benefits.

It will help your marketing strategies a lot if you highlight the benefits of choosing your products and services instead of merely discussing the product specifications. Product specifications may not mean much to customers, unless they know what these stand for (how these specifications affect the quality of the product or service).

Many people say getting to the top of search engine results is difficult since millions of websites exist, which can be using the same keywords. While this is true, this doesn’t mean that your website has to stacked under your competitors’ websites when presenting search engine results. Just by using the strategies above your website can dominate the search results, leave your competitors in the dust and build a solid source of highly target leads day-after-day to your business.

These are just a few of the key internet marketing tips that will help your business to be more successful on the Internet.

To get a free SEO and Google Places Analysis for your website and find out where your site is currently positioned in Google then…
click here now and simply fill in the short form at the top of the page.