Quantity or Quality Traffic!
Kick-start your SEO Campaign with an Analysis Report!
How to optimize your press releases
How important is strong internal linking?

This article is provided by Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.

More users increasingly employ local search, but many companies are not adequately budgeting for it and are opting to go with traditional, ineffective media. As more industry players enter the local search landscape, search engines need to promote it more and companies need to become better educated about it.

Local search has sharply increased over the past few years, but many local companies still do not appreciate what a powerful and cost-effective tool it can be. The numbers show lots of online users employing local search, but few businesses making room for it in their online marketing budgets. Many companies are still spending valuable effort and money on traditional, ineffective media, with less than desirable means of measuring campaigns.

Some analysts believe that companies need to be better educated on the potential of local search, while others claim that search engines need to more effectively promote it. Many business enterprises still perceive local search to be complicated and expensive, and think that there is a lack of adequate local expertise to devising effective search plans. The truth is that several knowledgeable and talented players have already entered the local search industry, so let’s consider some important ones:

* Major search engines: Leading engines such as Goggle and Yahoo have separate entities in individual countries for dealing with local search efforts (i.e. Google.ca, Yahoo.ca)
* Local directories sponsored by traditional media, such as local newspapers: companies usually appear in a listing with fellow competitors, and as such pay a higher cost-per-click. These companies should consider the top paid listings of these directories, allowing users to find them more quickly
* Other local directories, such as Citysearch and CityGuide: again, companies are advised to consider placements in the top paid listings
* Local, regional or national professional directories for various services (i.e. accountants, dentists, doctors, lawyers, mortgage professionals, real estate agents): These directories gather leads, and then re-sell them to local service providers. Providers are receiving leads secondhand, however, and would increase their conversion rates by collecting their own prospects
* Local Search start-ups (i.e. ReachLocal, LocalLaunch.com), which offer local advertisers comprehensive local search marketing services. Campaign management, ranking reports and free template web pages are all provided, but at relatively high costs; the general web pages do not differentiate between each company’s individualized needs.

Companies doing lots of online business need to better appreciate how local search marketing might be more cost-effective and relevant than traditional venues. Once they fully understand the utility of local search, then the real challenge starts – finding an experienced, talented SEO provider who understands how to properly do it.

If you have any questions about this article, or wish to offer suggestions, please contact us at Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.

Leave comments >>

This article is provided by Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.

Several factors need to be considered when hiring an SEO firm. Costs can be substantial and results are not guaranteed, so it is always a good idea to start with an Analysis Report. Trust your SEO provider since they have access to your company’s internal systems and will set up their own portals. Find out how your SEO firm approaches doing work for competing companies, and also if it does Web Analytics.

There are several steps which probably should be taken when your company hires an SEO firm, with the basic one being to educate yourself. Other measures include obtaining objective information on potential SEO providers, discovering if an SEO firm is a good fit for your company goals, and then conducting interviews before choosing from among the candidates.

There are also several factors you should keep in mind when hiring an SEO firm. Here are some significant ones:

1. SEO can be expensive, since each website page requires optimization. Companies functioning in a big industry with lots of competition may pay even more, since more keywords will be involved.
2. Good SEO firms never guarantee that they can realize specific search engine rankings for your company, but will show a sincere commitment to improving your engine standings. Be leery of those providers that do guarantee engine results.
3. Experienced SEO firms usually charge a fee for developing a detailed Analysis Report of your website, often the first step towards site optimization. This report should be prepared before any contract is signed, and will enable your company to understand the type and scope of SEO work to be done. It will also help your company to better discover the strengths and limitations of your SEO provider.
4. Contact SEO firms which specialize in your company’s particular industry or field. Find out if they would do work on a competitors’ site, and how they would approach that issue.
5. An SEO provider optimizing your site will need to have access to your internal systems, particularly your website servers. It is important to hire SEO people that you really trust, but in any even find out how much access these people will have to your servers, and what they plan to do.
6. SEO providers often establish SEO portals on their servers. Ask your SEO people about these portals, and from the start find out who owns those pages – your company or the provider.
7. Many SEO firms include Web Analytics services at part their optimization services. Web Analytics may be defined as “the objective tracking, collection, measurement, reporting and analysis of quantitative Internet data to optimize websites and marketing initiatives”. Confirm that your provider offers analytics; if not, enquire about how this important aspect of SEO can be included in your package.
8. Many SEO firms include website design as part of their optimization services. Ask your SEO people if their company is handling this task directly, or if it will be outsourced to a third party. Find out if website design is part of the original contract, or if there are additional charges involved.

If you have any questions about this article, or wish to offer suggestions, please contact us at Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.

Leave comments >>

This article is provided by Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.

Various measures need to be taken early on by a company looking to establish a baseline SEO budget, such as selecting and expanding on a list of search terms and calculating the revenues additional SEO traffic might bring in. When you have determined your budget using this information, you need to then treat SEO as an ongoing budget expense since the process itself is continual.

If you are a company looking to outsource your SEO services, you definitely need to educate yourself about site optimization first. Another immediate task is to determine your own baseline SEO budget, give or take a few dollars. If you have never done SEO before and do not have any test results to work with, then you probably need to do some research and talk to some industry folk before developing your own budget. It’s an inexact science, but here are some guidelines:

Step #1: Pick a list of search terms

Brainstorm a list of terms prospective visitors and potential customers might use to search for your site. (Big hint: If you’re already investing in paid search, don’t ignore the knowledge you gained there.) While you can include your brand name and company name on the list, it’s important to focus on words and phrases someone might use to describe you when they don’t use the brand name. A relatively small percentage of searchers use brand names when searching.

Don’t expect to find every term or every best term – that’s something you’ll pay your SEO firm to help you with. Your immediate goal is to make a quick list of obvious terms. Some marketers ask their customer service or sales department to help with this, by asking incoming callers what words they would use to describe the products or services. The results, invariably, surprise everyone.

Step #2: Use Wordtracker to supplement your initial list of terms

Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com) is an independent service that has been around since 1999. You can take part in the free trial or for a nominal price sign up for short-term subscription (a day or even week).

After you input your search term list, Wordtracker will offer suggestions for more related search terms, together with an estimation of the amount of traffic each term gets over the course of an average day across the major search engines. It also will tell you roughly how competitive each term is (i.e. how many other sites are listed under it).

Make a rough estimation for yourself. If you were in the top 10 rankings for each of your search terms and achieved a moderate 1% clickthrough rate, how many visitors would you get? With that number in mind, it’s onto the third step.

Step 3: Do the math

Remember how we said you need to have a metrics system in place before investing in search marketing? Not only will it ultimately help you determine how effective your SEO efforts are, it will help you calculate how much to budget for.

Multiply the additional potential traffic you could receive by the average value of traffic you now get from search engines.

If you’d don’t know that value, consider that, in general, search engine traffic tends to convert fairly well into sales, compared to other online advertising such as banner ads. Higher conversions are related to the fact that searcher are generally further along the sales cycle thanthose who impulsively click a banner ad or other non-search promotional campaign.

Step #4: Create a budget

Treat the dollar value you arrive at for additional SEO traffic as a baseline for your projected budget. A good SEO firm should be able to return a much higher dollar value than this budget because:

* The firm will be able to find many more appropriate search terms for you to optimize for
* An SEO specialist will be able to significantly improve on your current rankings, which leads greater increased traffic per search term than you may have expected
* By rewriting your page’s title tags, your site description will be so much more compelling to search users that you’ll get more and better qualified traffic than you currently do – even for terms for which you rank well already
* The SEO firm may be able to offer you advice or services to improve your site’s conversion rate
* High-presence organic rankings can help you raise brand awareness, as well as the click rates of your other ads on the same page. These are benefits you can’t always count through direct links or immediate site traffic, but many SEO firms can present data proving these benefits exist

Once you’ve created a baseline budget, you can make sure it covers the costs of critical element of an SEO campaign. For details on this, please read an article I wrote, to be found in our Information Centre:

All great budgets are built from both the top down (what we can make) and from the bottom up (what are the detailed cost elements) to arrive at a final number.

If an SEO firm pitches far above or below your adjusted budget, be sure to ask why. They should be able to justify additional costs with estimated additional Return on Investment (ROI) or be able to explain why your site isn’t complex enough to require very many hours of SEO work.

Step #5: Consider the ongoing investment

If you’re budgeting for SEO investment, assume you’ll need at least an initial month’s outlay as the SEO team does intensive research, initial optimization work, training and submissions. Plus, you’ll probably also want to budget for monthly reporting on your rankings. You can use this for review to determine when it’s time to renew your optimization campaign.

Sites that feature just a few static pages and operate in a very targeted, small niche marketplace probably do not need as much SEO work and, as such, have limited budges.

More complex sites in larger marketplaces will require more ongoing SEO attention throughout the year in order to ramp up links campaigns, optimize changed pages, measure, tweak and add search terms, among other tasks. This is generally referred to as maintenance, which is misleading because there’s much more than that involved.

Just like PR and sales, optimization must be an ongoing budgeted item to be truly effective. Even if your Web site doesn’t change that much, other factors may require you to re-optimize including:

* Search engines change their ranking algorithms, which can cause rankings to rise and fall
* Search engine partnerships change, so if one feeds results to another they may not always do so
* The words people use to search by evolve. It wasn’t long ago that we all used laptop computers. Now they’re notebook computers. We used to have cell phones. Now they’re wireless devices. New products, names and category descriptions emerge and enter the vernacular all the time
* New site sections and sites emerge in your category that might be perfect for you to target for a links campaign

If you have any questions about this article, or wish to offer suggestions, please contact us at Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.

This article is provided by Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.

Determining timelines for SEO projects and/or work is an essential component of your company’s SEO campaign. Two important considerations here are when to actually start investing in SEO, as well as how long before the client starts to see results from a successful SEO campaign. Time-sensitive offers and campaigns and seasonal offers probably should not involve SEO, where branding awareness should. Be prepared to wait several months before seeing concrete SEO results.

Determining timelines for SEO projects and work is an essential component of your company’s SEO campaign. There are several factors which help determine when to actually start investing in SEO; here are some of them:

*
If you have a highly time-sensitive offer, such as “save 10% in the next three days”, plug that into your paid search campaign rather than make it a focus of your SEO work
*
If you have a seasonal offer to promote over a period of a couple of weeks, or if you have new product launches that you want noticed quickly, investing in paid inclusion is likely your best bet. This can guarantee that your URL will be seen by some search engines, although it doesn’t guarantee it will get listed. (Remember, Google and many other search engines do not accept paid inclusions.)
*
If you have time-sensitive news, such as a big product launch, consider optimizing the press release you post on your site and submit it to the wire services so it is picked up and posted under the most appropriate terms by Google News and others. This can happen in a matter of minutes if you have access to an SEO PR expert and your PR people are used to working with that expert. Press release optimization is one of the faster growing segments of SEO
*
If you are trying to let the world know about your brand marketing, your standard offers and your very existence, focus on classic search engine optimization. This can take anywhere from one month to three months or longer to get a highly visible rank in major search engines. Another timeline to consider involves determining how long a successful SEO campaign will take and when the client will start seeing concrete results. There is no quick fix to SEO. Paid search campaigns show up online almost instantly and only require that you have a place to link to. Optimization campaigns, on the other hand, can take much longer, and usually last at least several weeks, if not months.

Here are some of the factors which affect that timeline:

* The competitiveness of the search terms you’re targeting and your site’s true relevance to them
* Whether your site is built using programming that’s “search-engine friendly” and if the SEO firm involved has to reprogram much of it
* How prepared and able you are to work in cooperation with the SEO firm you use. The fact is, client-side delays in selecting final search terms and posting new pages are the most frequent causes of slow rank movement
* Whether your linking relationships will all have to be built from scratch or whether you have relationships with peers, news sites and related sites that could turn into linking partnerships quickly
* The number of pages on your site and how many of them need to be optimized
* Whether you employ questionable practices such as cloaking or duplication (nearly-identical pages posted on the Web), which can drop or delay your search engine ranking
* The timing of a site revamp or new launch. Too many marketers spend most of their energy focusing on the new site and only once it’s over do they think, “OK, now it’s time to get my traffic-driving tactics together.” Clearly, the problem with that approach is that optimization requires tinkering with your site itself, up to and including the actual copy on the page. Plus, great optimization campaigns are built on hours of research. Your SEO firm needs to research search terms and potential link partners before it can start. And, if you have a “living” site that changes frequently with different products, new press releases, etc., you’ll need to have your internal copywriting and technical staff thoroughly trained ahead of time by the optimization firm. This means that you need to pick an optimization firm as one of the initial parts of your site launch or redesign plans, not at the very end

If you have any questions about this article, or wish to offer suggestions, please contact us at Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.

Leave comments >>