WSI Internet Marketing

Conventional wisdom is that your best customer is the one you are talking with at any given time. Why? Because unlike your next prospect, this one has at least shown some interest in your products and services…otherwise why would they be in front of you at all?

The modern interpretation of that is the prospect who took the time to seek you out and go to your website or blog or any number of other web properties. They didn’t get there by accident. They either searched for you, or clicked on an email, or interacted through some social medium. In any case it was most likely through an effort that cost you money or time.

So let’s go on the premise that they were interested enough to check you out, but like the vast majority of initial web interactions, they weren’t ready to take any action. The reality is that they will probably check out your competitors…and do nothing with them either. At least initially…

Thus the reemergence of a technology called “Remarketing”, or the process of marketing specifically to people who have recently shown interest in what you offer.

Here’s how it works:

When a consumer visits your website via a search engine result, pay-per-click add, email link, or even an off-line advertisement, all of which you undoubtedly paid for in one fashion or another, we “tag” them. As they go about their business across the Internet over the next hours, days, weeks or months, we show them your custom banner ad. Your brand literally follows your best prospects around in the places they surf for mere cents per impression (literally a fraction of a penny).

Call us for a demonstration and an analysis to see if this technology can make even better use of your advertising dollars: (949) 481-0728

Our over excited associate Baltej Gill from SocialMindz breaks down how important it is for businesses to have a mobile version of their website in this EXTRA cheesy video explanation!

Contact us directly and we will evaluate how a mobile optimized website might apply to your business.

The best part is you only pay for the actual lead…nothing else.

At its best, the internet simulates the human experience… a tough job with one-way conversations typically being the only recourse.

So how then can you fully engage your visitors in “Real Time”? Actually, with a new program we are offering, you don’t have to…we will do it for you. It’s called Total Live Chat.

Here’s how it works:

• A visitor goes to your website
• A live Chat widget bounces into place right in front of them
• If they are truly interested, they just click on it and one of our Chat Agents engages them in a conversation.

Our Chat Agent’s goal is to collect their contact information, and find out what they need and then send the lead directly to you. Not only is your site monitored in actual time, you get detailed reports and an email summary of each conversation so you can act on your leads as they come in.

What are the benefits of Live Chat?

• Internal analysis indicates an increase in leads from online advertising by 30%
• Immediately connect with your most engaged visitors
• Higher conversion rate of your precious traffic
• Reduces website abandonment

Here is a quick video that explains it all in about one-minute…

Don’t worry about your rutabagas, your garden is safe. That isn’t the type of farmer I’m talking about. The ones that are in trouble with Google are “content farms” that flood the Internet with a never ending stream of low quality content.

Why? Well one of the major components of search engine optimization is content. So like everything else in the SEO industry the “black hat” optimizers immediately started flooding the internet with hastily produced, keyword laden, recycled content in an effort to drive up the page count for their clients.

Did it work? Well sort of….  The techniques for writing search engine friendly copy are the same whether the copy is redundant and valueless to the human reader, or if it provides insight and original thought or news or any number of virtues to people seeking information.

Unfortunately this prompted the rise of the “content farming” industry. Companies and individuals who “scraped” content from other websites, rearranged it a little and spit it out as though it was new. If done cleverly the search engines would treat it as original content and reward the website with higher search rankings.

Google counters Bad SEO tactics

Google actually makes hundreds of changes to its search results ranking algorithm each year in an effort to stay a step ahead of black-hat optimizers who use dubious tactics in an effort to “game” the system rather than produce useful content. We knew this change was coming… we just didn’t know when.

Google’s’ “Farmer” algorithm went into effect towards the end of February and affected some 11.8 percent of Google search queries in the United States. The update was presumably aimed at content farms that produce low-quality or recycled content for the purpose of achieving higher search results.

Caught in the fallout?

Certainly anyone who employed an optimizer who relied on dubious shortcuts took a hit. Unfortunately that includes legitimate well intentioned business people who were simply trying to market their services on the Internet like everyone else. They trusted SEO companies that relied on dubious tactics, or off-shore optimizers with a poor command of the English language who simple scraped and assembled content for other websites.

It will probably also affect distributers of products that rely on manufacturers descriptions to advertise the products in their catalogues and in their shopping carts. In many cases there are hundreds of the same descriptions across hundreds of different websites. Google is not going to rank them all for the same thing. Did they do anything wrong? No, but now they are going to have to do it right.

There are no short cuts. There never have been…

Gamming the system has never worked for any length of time. Trying to circumvent Google’s algorithm is short sited and ultimately builds your web presence on a house of cards that collapses the moment Google makes a change.

There are certain things that work, and will always work. A Professional Digital Marketing Firm knows that Google is happy to reward optimizers that play by the rules and consider that the end game is to serve up the most accurate, meaningful and varied results to the person searching for information.

What’s the upside?

Well if you are just a person searching for something on Google, your chances of finding good quality results just increased. If you are a business who employed a skilled “white hat” Search Engine Optimization Company then a lot of the noise on the Internet just cleared out of your way to the top of the results.

And by the way, good quality content is not only original, well optimized by search engine guidelines, but is actually meaningful to the human audience. What good is it to rank high in the search engines for something that reflects well on your company?

A personal friend of mine…an attorney, told me that he contracted with a search engine optimization company, (let’s call them the “Mellow” Pages) because they claimed to specialize in search engine optimization for personal injury attorneys.

6 thousand dollars later he was asking me why he was getting top rankings on the search results pages, but no additional business.

It didn’t take a forensic pathologist to unravel this mystery. After reviewing the keyword phrases that he contracted for verses the actual results, it was evident that he was simply the victim of a classic bait and switch.

Let me emphasize that my attorney friend…a VERY intelligent guy and a top attorney had absolutely no reason to suspect what would be painfully obvious to an Internet Marketing specialist.  He is a very competent attorney…not a digital marketing professional.

Here is how it went down:

He contracted for the following phrases:

• Accident Attorney Irvine
• Car Accident Lawyer Irvine
• Car Accident Lawyers Irvine
• Car Accident Attorney Irvine
• Personal Injury Lawyer Irvine

Here are the keyword phrases that were actually optimized:

• Accident Attorney Irvine California
• Car Accident Lawyer Irvine California
• Car Accident Lawyers Irvine California
• Car Accident Attorney Irvine California
• Personal Injury Lawyer Irvine California

Did you notice the difference? Simply by adding one more word (California) to an otherwise legitimate long tail keyword phrase, it turned a very competitive, highly searched on phrase into something easily achievable, but with no discernable ROI.

Let’s take a look at his actual results:

Notice that virtually each phrase with the word “California” at the end of it ranks higher than the same phrase without the State name. Why is that?

Well, by simply searching on both phrases in Google and comparing the amount of search results, I could quickly see that the phrase “car accident attorney irvine California” was approximately 370% less competitive than the version without the word “California” tagged onto the end.

Is that a good thing? Actually your SEO consultant should be looking for less competitive words; that is an essential ingredient to good keyword selection. However those less competitive phrases must also represent a fair amount of searches. At the end of the day I would rather show up for 20% of a thousand searches than zero percent of a Million searches.

If the research showed that by adding the State name at the end of all those phrases resulted in reduced, but significant traffic, then it would have been a sound strategy. In this case people who live in Irvine rarely search on a phrase like “car accident lawyer Irvine California”, however they do search on a phrase like “car accident lawyer Irvine”. The “Mellow” pages simply made it easy on themselves at the expense of their client.

Let’s put this into perspective; every successful business person is good at what they do. There is no reason for anyone to be good in an entirely different industry like digital marketing. I would never review my own contracts, or do my own accounting. Why would I expect a lawyer to be able to interpret the results of a search engine optimization campaign?

So how do you safeguard against unscrupulous Internet marketing practitioners?  The same way you would when referencing any company or individual; “Reputation Management”. My best advice is to simply search on: “reviews” + “the individual you are working with” to see what other folks have to say about their experience with that SEO specialist you are considering.

Remember, ethics and skill are mutually exclusive. My instincts tell me that the “Mellow” Pages should have been more trustworthy and accountable, but that was clearly not the case.

So you think that if you bid more for a certain keyword than your competitor you will show up higher in the paid search results? Makes sense, but It’s not that simple.

Let’s start off with the premise that the lower your quality score, the more likely you are to pay for a click and the lower your relative positioning on the search results page.

The Google Quality Score is determined by a variety of different factors but I want to focus on only one for now: Click-through-rate (CTR). That is the percentage of the times that your ad has the potential for being seen on the search results, verses the actual times it is clicked on.

Note that I said the “Potential”. That means if you bid too low and are on page 3 of the search results, technically your ad has the “potential” of being viewed… but it is unlikely it will ever be seen or clicked on. Your quality score is updated often. In fact every time your key word has the potential for being viewed that fact is recorded and your score is ultimately recalculated.

Why does Google do this? They tell us it is their way to help serve up the most relevant results. Since CTR is only one factor in the Quality Score that affects user experience, I’m certain this is valid. However I believe there is also an economic component to this.

Let’s do the math:

Suppose your competitor is paying $2.00 per click for a certain keyword, and on average they get about 100 clicks each day. Google would make $200 per day.

Suppose you are also willing to pay $2.00 per click for that same keyword, but you only average 50 clicks per day. You only made Google $100, whereas your competitor makes them $200. Google likes them better…

Suppose that you are willing to pay more per click to show up above them in the search results, but you still only get 50 clicks per day. How much more do you have to raise your bid before the economics work out in Google’s favor?

What are some of the factors that affect CTR?

1. Positioning on the search results: Generally the higher you show up in the search results, the more clicks you will get. That does NOT necessarily mean that you are getting a better ROI.
2. Relevance of the ad to the keyword being searched on: If you are using an “all purpose” ad for a bunch of seemingly unrelated keywords, less people will click on your ad because it doesn’t appear to meet their search requirements.
3. Quality of the ad: The more intriguing the ad, the better chance you will spark the searcher’s interest and earn a visit.
4. Brand recognition: If your brand is more recognizable, you stand a better chance of getting that click.

Remember, every time that you search on your keyword to see where you rank and you don’t click on your own ad, your quality score just suffered a little bit. I’m not suggesting that you actually click on the ad yourself (you don’t get a discount from Google because it’s your ad). I am suggesting that you trust your reporting metrics, or enlist a PPC management professional to monitor performance and make adjustments accordingly.

It’s no secret that Search Engines evaluate who is linking to your website to establish how important your website is within your own industry. WebPages that are linked to more frequently are weighted higher by search engines and are more likely to be visited.

Inbound links or “back links” are considered a vote of confidence for your website. Therefore getting “quality links” is an integral part of ranking higher than your competitors on the search engines.

Quality Links:

• Come from popular websites in a related industry.
• Links from higher ranking pages are worth more than miscellaneous links.
• Links that appear higher up in a page are more valuable than links that appear on the bottom of the page in the footer.
• Pages that have large numbers of links may be diluted and less authoritative.
• “Anchor Text” matters. The actual words that link to your webpage are important. For example, linking the phrase “internet marketing orange county” to my website is more effective for me than linking the words “Click Here”.

Where do Quality Links come from?

Sadly there is no silver bullet. A certain amount of links will develop naturally over time, but unless you have a very popular site to begin with, playing the waiting game won’t work. Buying links for a link farm typically doesn’t work well either. Those links are typically low quality and can get you into trouble over the long run due to their dubious source.

The first step (the only step I’m going to cover in this post) is to locate sources of quality links. I want to focus on the low hanging fruit:

• Websites that already link to you
• Websites that link to your competitors

In each case it is safe to assume that websites that link to you or your competitors probably link to sites that are relevant to you.  Because those sites are relevant to your market, it is safe to assume that sites that link to THEM are also relevant to you and are probably also good link prospects.

There are a variety of methods for tracking down specific links to your site and to the sites of your competitors. The most efficient method is to use professional software that is designed for that specific task. Two that we user are Wordtracker and Web CEO. Keep in mind that there is a learning curve to use them correctly. There is also the associated expense of purchasing the tools, and the time to follow through with the results. I’ll cover that on an upcoming post.