There are four points to organic seo – keywords, source materials (this is the site that is actually going to be ranking in the search engines and where we want visitors to go), links and manipulating user metrics.

Keywords:

Researching keywords is key to cover all aspects of the broader spectrum of searches people will do looking for what your site offers. This is generally done by looking at a cross section of competitors (at least 5) and tabulating every keyword that is relevant. From this list source materials can be generated. It will take about 30 minutes to do this at a basic level and get you broad keywords and any interesting secondary keywords you can use in your article titles for ongoing content. Anything above 5 main competitors starts to get samey.

Source materials:

By the far the most important aspect of successful organic SEO is having sufficient high quality content to link to. Every possible concept, especially current ones, needs to be explored with content for your product or service. This includes all information or questions a potential customer may have whether a beginner or a veteran shopper.

I have done exacting tests on the importance of ongoing content – especially for new sites. Here are the maximum effect for minimal effort results – 1) new article/posts added weekly, 2) 1-2 static pages updated monthly, social media content streamed in real time with 4-5 various updates per week, 3) Add links monthly from your content to external review content  and other social mentions to help them get crawled sooner.

Links:

The subject of links is best broken down into 3 types when it comes to organic SEO (there is a lot more to links than just organic SEO as high value links on popular and relevant pages can bring in more converting customers than all of your organic rankings combined): High value links, high relevance links and low level links.

High value links are those that give ranking power to your site. These are researched and built. Get 1 a month and link it to your home page – mainly it is worth taking your best article for the month and getting it guest posted on a major industry specific site – you can even get high value sites to link to your guest post and have it feed back through that way.

High relevance links are links to suppliers, authorities and web 2.0 sites specialising in your industry. These can be requested and sometimes bought (although when bought they will usually be less valuable). Get 1 a week and link it to your homepage.

Low level links are generally links that you can easily build from the multitude of social media, forums, article directories, social bookmarking, RSS sites and other smaller or up and coming web 2.0 sites. Link to pages within your content rather than home pages and category pages. The vast majority of the pages with these links on them will not be visited by people more than a few times. These links are generally used to help index your site in to the search engines and to show that there is regular promotion of your content occurring. These links generally lose their ranking power over time and need to be replenished regularly. Unfortunately, because this methodology does some small amount of good, it is required to get to the top of moderately competitive and above industries. Automating the process as much as possible is recommended – many programs take an hour or so to set up and you can just repeat the process monthly from then on with different links within your site and a new broad article on your industry. Do this once a month.

Manipulating User Metrics:

This is a very controversial topic as it involves promoting sites through creating an initial impression to the search engines. We are not talking faking it, we are talking about using who you know to get the ball rolling so you people and businesses that do not know you can subsequently find you.

The principle of presence and profit vs presence and problems – think about this: if you searched on Google for ‘best bank account’ you would probably get 500 different banks listed in 10,000 web pages. Only one of them (or perhaps none of them) will be the best – Google doesn’t try to just give you one answer even to a black and white question as the answer is seldom black or white.

One thing is for sure: the average visitor is going to pick the one on the first page in the top 10 listings or in the top 6 paid advert slots.

Really, the search term ‘best bank account’, probably shows bank accounts for the ten biggest banks on the first page. The order of which depends on the quality and expense laid out for the best organic SEO team and the highest bid on Google adwords (the paid advertising system that gives Google its revenue).

If those bank account pages were not present and visible would they be successful bank accounts? Probably not.

I’ll give you another example that has a negative effect with presence – a client of mine once had a related search for the company name followed by the word “scam”. This is a serious problem – beforehand nobody ever searched to find out if this company was a scam – but after some negative press generated by a rival had got high enough to leave a related search on Google, the searches started happening to find out if the company was indeed a scam. Nothing else had changed, the business was still doing a good job for all of its satisfied customers – the damage was that new customers were being put off.

If the scam link was not present would there have been a negative effect? No.

With that out of the way let me explain user metrics. You basically show the search engine that you have a great site, it is very popular and very well visited for long periods of time with lots of happy visitors interacting with the site, reviewing the site and recommending people visit it. You show that the business deals with all of its interactions rapidly and you do it all under the watchful gaze of the search engine so it cannot be mistaken – you have an amazing site, excellent content and incredibly happy visitors.

What if all of that was done for the single and initial benefit of the search engines so you get to be present to profit? Immoral? Possibly. Not best practices? Depends who is asking.

Does this mean you can have a site with poor content, aesthetics and quality and still get it to the top? Yes. Will it stay there? Not for long.

Does this mean that you can get an exemplary site to the top with excellent content, continued updates and constantly improving and expanding value fast? Yes. Will it stay there? Yes!

It is the combination of 1) keywords, 2) source materials, 3) link building that keep a site at the top and eventually get a site to the top and it is by manipulating user metrics that you can take a site rapidly to the top where it will then be visible enough to maintain its own user metrics naturally.

So how do you go about this?

Get your friends, colleagues, connections, family, suppliers, customers, potential customers and any networking peers to promote you – ask them to do specific things online to increase your size and your appearance. Offer them all incentives for doing so, after all in today’s online world – we need to talk the talk so we can show everyone that we can walk the walk, otherwise they will not be looking – they will be watching Coldplay live on youtube or whatever is the next big buzz.

Social Media, Review Sites, Facebook Likes, Retweets, Recommendation Sites and Rank promotion.

Make yourself look big and popular and people will want to check you out.

What if you “have no tech savvy friends”, “are embarrassed to ask”, or any of the other multitudes of comments people say to me? Find someone who will do it for you – and pay them for it.

Notice you still have to put in a lot of work, provide good content and a great user experience. You are just accelerating and making possible high visibility. It is the ongoing content that makes your site one that Google comes back a recrawls regularly. But it is these user metrics that make Google sit up and come over in the first place.

Suddenly you find you have spent a lot of money on your online marketing yet no major business growth is forthcoming. We take a look at some basic points to consider and ensure get added to the online marketing mix for your company.

1.    Creating Want

The subject of marketing has not changed a great deal. Marketing is about creating want for a product or service and to sell it. The technology of creating want has not really changed in the last 50 years – you show someone how your product answers a question, solves a problem, explains the cause of a symptom, or proves you have the specifications or part numbers in stock for a specific product.

You can create want in everyone but it is always at different levels – a person needs to know about a product before he can buy it. Generally, unless impulsive, a person likes to learn about the different options available once he knows about the product type. Then he needs to find a supplier and then, in order to actually buy he will need to be convinced to greater or lesser degree to buy it from that supplier.

Some people call this the buying funnel:

1.    Become Aware of a product or service industry
2.    Gain Interest in the product or service industry
3.    Learn about the options available (in the past, current and future)
4.    Shop between suppliers (large online, national, or local)
5.    Buy from a supplier (you hopefully!)

It is described as a funnel as lots of people can fit into category 1 and as you go down to category 5 there are less and less that make it through to actually buying.

2.    Constant interest generation

You maximise the number of people that make it from becoming aware of your product or service to buying your product or service by continuing to interest the person.

The only way to drive through from aware of your product to buying your product is by keeping the person interested – constantly.
Notice that I do not say “focused”. In today’s age of any information being available by typing three words into a search engine you need to provide enough information and make it easy enough to navigate that the person finds what keeps him interested all the way down to buying from you.

3.    Marketing at all points of the buying funnel

Millions of people are nearly getting sold to by your competitors every second. It is probable that your stronger competitors are making headway with potential clients, making them aware of the product, getting them interested in the industry, telling them about the options available, and pushing all of the best benefits for buying from them.

Take advantage of your competitors’ weaknesses and pick up where they left off and get the sale.

At every point on the buying funnel you can give the potential client the best experience that will interest them all the way to buying from you.
The further down the buying funnel the more likely the prospect will interact with you more. They may subscribe to your blog, follow you tweets or strive to contact you for more information.

4.    Offering a choice

Nobody likes not being able to choose. People want to feel in control of their destiny, of their decisions, of their purchases. Successful salesman know often from hard won experience that if the prospect feels he has no choice he will make the choice between buying or not – and it will normally mean “No thanks” or “Thanks for your time then.”

To keep prospects moving down the buying funnel you must offer them a choice. Online marketers often stop someone on the buying funnel by demanding something from them – an email address, a survey answer, call now for more information, sign up for access, and so on.

You must always offer your prospect a choice. This keeps them happy to carry on going down the buying funnel – do not make it so they can only go one way – as they will often turn around and go back the other way as it is the only choice they can make.

5.    Making your product or service familiar

Many businesses feel they need to offer something different, a unique selling point. This is good and can be used to promote your product or business as “A breath of fresh air” or “Our Innovative new service model”.

However, it is important to understand how a potential buyer thinks. If you are too far out of touch and they will not feel comfortable and will go elsewhere.

If you told a CEO of a major corporation in the 1920’s  that your company can provide video conferencing from each board member’s home across 6 continents with 10” touch screen tablets in you would have missed the boat. They would have thought you were mad – they would need at least a hundred people to maintain it, it would cost more than the country was worth, never mind the 100,000 square yards of warehouse space for the machinery or the thousands of miles of cable.

However, if you told them they could send a communication on your lines and it would arrive across the Pacific in 12 hours. You would have to show them how it could be of use to them and compare it to something familiar. Perhaps getting information across the globe before the newspapers could print and using that data in playing the stock market as an example would gain enough familiarity to make the sale.

You make something new communicate to your prospect immediately through comparing it to something they are familiar with.

6.    Providing enough information so that the prospect can make a decision

There are many things that a person needs to know to buy. It can be as obvious as seeing a business card design without a phone number or a sales pitch without a price tag.

Sometimes it can be more subtle, such as “only available in the US” or a delivery estimate.

Generally, to sell anything, a person needs to know what it is, what it does, where to get it, how much it is, how it will benefit him, the product’s features and how long it will take to get it.

You would monitor this depending where your prospect is at on the buying funnel and your specific industry.

I am amazed at how many businesses do not get these points covered in their online marketing efforts. However, it is good for me as my clients get to benefit from those visitors to their competitor sites who got almost all of the way down the buying funnel only to find out they could not find out how much it was. They then went on to the search engines, put in a highly specific search and bought from my client!

7.    Testimonials

In my experience word of mouth is the most valuable form of marketing. It will garner more conversions than anything.
In the world we now live in, people may still talk to each other, but for recommendations more than a good movie, TV show or album, a fantastic way to ensure you are your visitors supplier of choice is volumes of testimonials all over the internet and especially on your site.
Some of my clients have hundreds of testimonials and it is this one, undeniable fact that hundreds of people before them have benefited from the product or service that produces the greatest percentage of buying funnel conversions no matter which point of the funnel they arrived on.
Keep in mind to provide sufficient information and interaction to drive the person through interest down the buying funnel but it a large testimonial resource can and will make your conversion percentages sky rocket.

Summary:

In order to create want for your product or service you need to know and understand the buying funnel.
In order to maintain the prospect’s interest and generate trust you need to provide sufficient industry information that is easy to navigate.
In order to minimise back out you need to offer a choice.
In order to make them want your product you need to compare it to something they are familiar with.
In order for them to decide to buy you need to provide sufficient information on the specific product or service.
In order for them to actually make the conversion (purchase or enquiry) you need to provide a final push of trust in volume testimonials.

An average buyer chooses a supplier that is 1) trusted 2) convenient 3) knowledgeable 4) is good value and 5) has positive customer service feedback.

The following ensures that your average buyer does in fact buy:

1.    A professional and sufficiently impressive online marketing image all over the web
2.    Large quantities of valuable information for all prospects on the buying funnel
3.    High quality customer service
4.    Competitive prices
5.    Highly optimised buying and delivery process
6.    Having a choice of products
7.    Lots of well publicised testimonials

A competent online marketing company will cover all of these points with you, hopefully in your initial meetings and consultations. Ethical online marketing professionals will not take on the job unless they feel they can create a great deal more business and profits for you than it will cost.

Find one and work with them!

Anyone can do online marketing.

You pick up a book or read someone else’s blog post (like this one) and you get started. Everyone likes to have an opinion and generally, the least opposition to your opinion is on your own web site!

Every other type of marketing generally leads to a person going online to find you.

Think about it: you give someone your business card then what? They go online. The less tech savvy contact proceeds to type in your web site address into the Google search box and comes up in the search engine results page with you at the top and perhaps some other pages from your site but also pages that link to your site and possibly good and bad reviews. They will probably click on your paid ad that so many businesses put on Google Adwords for their company name. It is inevitable that they will glean some sort of first impression.

The results of your online marketing strategy will have a major influence on your contacts’ first impressions.

It is the same for all other offline marketing techniques – fliers, TV, radio, word of mouth or face to face networking. Apart from rare occurances all of these marketing strategies simply get someone to look online.

Many clients I have done work for have had an old, error filled or incomplete web site that has caused repulsion of potential new business. What can often happen is that a number of people hear of a good reputation and do a lot of brand specific searching online. This can be put the potential client off at the final hurdle before turning into an enquiry. One client was getting 300 searches a day for his company but his web site was not even in the top 10 results when people searched specifically for the company name!

Companies that have some heritage and have a solid reputation in their field are often relatively non-existent online.

Frequently, entrepreneurs that have been in business 30+ years tell me that their business is successful becuase of testimonials and word of mouth. Customers just find them and that is how the business ticks over. Now you can do better than that. People are looking for your business through testimonials and word of mouth? Great! Take full advantage of it and ensure it converts into an enquiry or sale through the web. Guess what? Millions of people are looking for a business like yours and they have not heard of you! Put your testimonials on your site, make it able to be found for searchers looking for your industry and reel in the new business from a whole new sea of potential clients.

A common question I get asked when I explain this to clients is “Shall I stop my normal forms of marketing?” to which I say “No!”

Many potential clients still respond to fliers, networking and of course word of mouth.

However other forms such as Television and Radio are losing their appeal as they are very expensive compared to online marketing and can often have a subtle effect where there is no verifiable direct response. It is also a good idea to come up with a very efficient way of getting fliers out, networking happening and building word of mouth locally.

Our company is based in Birmingham City Centre and we have found efficient means to distribute business to business fliers around the city centre. We also ensure our happy customers spread the word to their contacts and offer mutual networking opportunities to any suppliers of client suppliers we come across. That is it for our offline marketing.

Printing costs are kept to a minimum with 10,000 fliers and 2,000 business cards. Distribution costs are less than the printing costs. Time taken up on offline marketing – nothing. It is all done on the fly. Designs and printing are done in-house. Distribution is outsourced. Offline marketing costs are 0 hours and £1,200 per year.

For the price of less than 3,000 stamps we reach thousands upon thousands of potential clients.

What does this change of operation mean for you? Does it mean cutting your marketing budget? No not at all. It just means you move your marketing budget online and learn about efficient online marketing or contract an online marketing company.

Online marketing is so much cheaper than offline marketing and work done can be built upon forever.

It also works as a qualifier for potential business. The potential business clients come looking for you. You just need to make yourself able to be found and provide a good enough impression between the point of initial contact and the sale and delivery of your company service or product.

There are so many things to consider that it is normally worthwhile to meet with a consultant and find out what they can offer.

If they just say they do “SEO” or search engine optimisation be wary. There is Pay per click management, online public relations, online reach and reputation management, social media marketing, conversion rate optimisation and of course building web sites with these subjects in mind and creating a site that can be fully analysed for how many visitors you are getting and what each one is doing when they get there.

Pick a company that does everything in regards to online marketing services.

Why pay double for a web site designer to make the changes the SEO says need doing after you have bought the web site in the first place?

The online image industry is new but very valuable. In history, there has never been such an opportunity for exponential company growth from initial start-up to established enterprise. Billions of people are online and, out of the billions some percentage are looking for what your business provides.

It is worth working with a consultant or doing it yourself for at least 30 minutes every day so there is some new, valuable contribution to your online image made every single day.

1. Online Marketing Strategy
2. Online Marketing Project Management
3. Keyword and competitor research
4. On-site SEO
5. Off-site SEO
6. Online Traffic Building
7. Social Media Marketing
8. Online Branding
9. Pay Per Click management
10. Paid traffic management
11. Content generation and copywriting
12. Online Reputation and PR
13. Ranking Penalties Remediation
14. Online Buzz and Viral Marketing Management
15. Analytics and Conversion Rate Optimisation
16. Ongoing Website Design

Without any doubt online marketing is where the majority of your promotional budget should be going. Every business should be looking closely at all of these subjects, scrutinising carefully the work being done in these areas currently (if any) and how to start reaching their commercial potential by pushing on these marketing levels heavily.

Below are descriptions of the 16 key subjects that you need to know about in order to reach your business potential. Each subject is succinctly defined, described as to its scope and implementation and then searching questions for your potential online marketing firm are offered to ensure you pick the right one.

Keyword and Competitor Research

Defined: Finding out potential customer search phrases that you need to rank highly for and use in your online campaign and looking into what successful competitors have been doing to gain online insight into your industry.

Scope: Analysing your industry and successful online competitor strategies is a key part of gaining initial online success for your business. You need to find out what are the most searched for terms specific to your industry that are worth targeting. Also, if you were disappointed with an online campaign that you did previously, it is probably down to not having figured out and successfully getting found for the correct keywords. Competitor research gives you an immediate insight into what has been successful and what has not been successful. Often, competent competitors have started their online campaigns before you and have gone through the motions figuring out what works and what doesn’t. Obviously, you do not copy them exactly, but you can gain the valuable insight by having a professional online marketing firm report on a successful competitor’s actions and work your campaign with that valuable information in stock.

Questions to Ask:  What percentage of your initial fees is for keyword research? What competitor analysis methods do you employ? What reports do you provide? What ongoing keyword analysis and research is done? How often do you check in on the competitors?

On-site SEO

Defined: Based on keyword research, this is making all possible technical changes to the site and copy so as to get the maximum long term search engine benefit from your web site content.

Scope: Many sites are not even listed on Google for the keywords they should be. A competent SEO should be able to give a detailed report of specific technical changes that should occur and break them down into varying degrees of importance. There is usually a great deal that can be done to get a site to follow current best practices. This can be part of an ongoing contract as best practices can change frequently and sometimes dramatically. In a competitive market, high quality on-site SEO that is maintained can make a great deal of difference.

Questions to Ask: How do you keep up with SEO best practices? How do you verify the value of keyword research? What do you provide as part of the initial fees? How do you get the findings implemented? What are the ongoing costs and what services and reports do you provide to document the work done and progress made?

Off-site SEO

Definition: (slightly controversial but nevertheless true) Building links and other methods of increasing search engine rankings that are not applied directly to your web site.

Scope: The difference between this subject and the later subjects is the intention behind the techniques. With Off-site SEO the intention is to increase rankings on the search engines as it primary focus.  All other subjects are focused on increasing number of visitors directly. Off-site SEO is the most frowned upon subject in the list as it is the most frequently abused through spam (99% of all online content and emails are spam). Ethical off-site SEO is based upon providing good content and links to your sites around the web in such a way that the search engines respond favourably and rank your sites highly because they deserve it and have been competently marketed online. Be very wary of an SEO company that frowns upon the use of Off-site SEO techniques – if your industry has any worthwhile competition these techniques are being used by them. Stay ahead and follow suit, just do it better and, when possible, sooner.

Questions to Ask: How do you go about your Off-site SEO? How do you compare my site’s campaign to my competitors? How long does the process take? How do you report work done and progress made? Have you ever had a site penalised or removed?

Online Traffic Building

Defined: This is finding various important sites and adding content designed to interest potential visitors and getting them to click through to your web site. It requires a good content generation strategy.

Scope:  This is one of the most important and overlooked areas of online marketing. Your SEO team will put loads of valuable content on the web with the direct purpose of having the search engines crawl it and decide to move the site higher in the rankings. But your online marketing team should be thinking also with putting valuable content that has as its purpose fulfilling people then and there and getting them to enquire or search for you as a result of reading your valuable content in commonly visited web sites such as blogs, forums, and a number of specific high traffic social media and web 2.0 sites. In our marketing analyses we have seen that this factor can bring in the most enquiries dependent on the type of business and the industry it is in. I suggest at least a 20% spend in this area.

Questions to Ask: What are your techniques for online traffic building (not from search engines)? In your experience what percentage of traffic can I expect from working on this?

Social Media Marketing

Defined: Pushing your business through high traffic social media sites as a company, through employees, suppliers and customers and being in full communication.

Scope: Businesses can do well with Facebook pages, Twitter and many other social media and web 2.0 sites. The real benefits come when you get your employees, suppliers and customers to start pushing your business for you. Making your business into a developing social enterprise will set you up for the future and keep you ahead of your competition.  Start thinking outside of the box – who else do you want to connect with? If you had major leaders in your field interested in what you are doing? How about critics, politicians, regulatory bodies, celebrities, charities, journalists and so on?

Questions to Ask: What exactly do you do in your social media marketing campaign and what input is required from us? Do you strive to involve our employees, suppliers and customers?

Pay Per Click Management

Defined: Researching, testing and managing advertising services that you are paying for that charge per visitor click to your site.

Scope: Often this is only look at from the major search engines Google, Bing! And Yahoo. However, there are other pay per click providers such as Facebook (especially) and Miva which do produce results, often at a better cost to sales ratio. A marketing strategy should always have some Pay Per Click budget and plan. Perhaps this is a bold statement, but experience has shown that the most effective marketing strategies have always had some pay per click advertising and management.

Questions to Ask: What is your biggest Pay Per Click client’s monthly spend? How often do you monitor the pay per click costs? What variables is your management fee based upon?

Paid Traffic Management

Defined: This is researching and finding the potentially lucrative paid directories and advertising sites that are paid to list your site in some manner.

Scope: Many start-ups can really benefit from finding the right paid advertising – it can be cheaper than initial pay per click campaigns and cheaper than organic SEO work when in a highly competitive industry. Apart from initial research you will only find successful high traffic advertising sites through trial and error. Put a percentage of your budget towards this and try out a few monthly trials once your analytics are in place to confirm whether or not you are getting valuable visitors from them paid sites or not. A competent online marketing company will have resources to find the good paid sites.

Questions to Ask: Which paid sites should I go on? How do you go about researching them? What percentage of my budget should I put into paid sites?

Content Generation and Copywriting

Defined: Strategising what is required for initial and ongoing content and getting that content written in a professional and current manner that offers value and compels readers to contact you.

Scope: The best copywriter in the world will not get anywhere unless you have given him sufficient details as to what you are trying to achieve. This is one of the few points of online marketing where collaboration rather than surveying your potential customer is the better practice. A competent marketer is very interested in his client: what they do, how they did it, how they became successful, what services are provided, current industry, company history, and so on. A comprehensive content generation strategy is absolutely key to successful online marketing. It needs to cover all the key points of the industry itself as well as good information on the company. Then it needs to continue to generate content that is relevant, very much up-to-date and exceedingly high quality. No online marketing strategy will succeed in the long term without this in place. Do not use a company who even suggest that you do not need to put this into your long term marketing strategy.

Questions to Ask: What about content generation and copywriting? Do you outsource the copywriting? What is the level of collaboration on this? Do you think that content generation and copywriting should be an important part of our online marketing plan?

Online Reputation and PR

Defined: This is working to remove lies intending to damage your online reputation and to make bad reviews or criticism less visible on the web. It includes pushing positive information about your company as well as giving working best practices to online behaviour to employees.

Scope: The last thing you need is for some high ranking bad review, or worse, black propaganda about your company from a disgruntled ex-employee or shady competitor showing up when people search for your company directly. If your company is large in revenue and online dependent it could cripple you and hold you back for years. An important part is in broad promotion of good works but just as importantly, you need to push down the bad reviews and the lies. If you have been unfortunate enough to have suffered from them. Warning! This is one of the least understood subjects in online marketing and must be done 100% ethically to ensure long term success. Do not take on someone you are not confident in for the work as it could end up costing you more to get it done right after more damage has been done.

Questions to Ask: What experience do you have in online reputation and PR? Exactly what are your methods? How can I monitor what is going on? What best online practices for my staff do you recommend?

Ranking Penalties Remediation

Defined: Sometimes the reason for not doing well in the search rankings is down to having been penalised in the past or even removed from the search engines. Getting this sorted out is where this subject comes in.

Scope: If you have a strong domain and/or you have many positive links to your site it is sometimes worth trying to fix up the situation. A good remediation objective is to ascertain what it may take to address the problem and then decide which way to go.

Questions to Ask: What successes have you had in the past? Do you recommend this or starting out with a new domain? Why?

Online Buzz and Viral Marketing Management

Defined: Creating an online whirlwind of excitement and publicity or your company

Scope: Generating online buzz and making something go viral is a very hit and miss affair. You cannot guess what will go viral but you can make sure you give your content and software every chance of doing so. Care must be taken to ensure you do not create negative buzz – companies never really recover from a negative incident that goes viral. Finding a company to work on your buzz and viral efforts should not really depend on past efforts – it takes just one idea well implemented and often marketing firms come up with only one in their entire commercial lives. The main thing is to ensure that you give yourself the best possible chances of making the buzz list and going viral.

Questions to Ask: What do you with content designed to go viral? What major sites do you advertise on in efforts to make it viral? What online buzz ideas immediately come to mind for my company and industry? Who are we trying to create online buzz with?

Analytics and Conversion Rate Optimisation

Defined: Measuring what gains conversions and testing new options to increase efficiency of visitor to enquiry or visitor to sale depending on the business model.

Scope: Many companies are wasting their budgets! Only sites that have a direct sale can really measure what benefits their online marketing is having directly. For example with analytics you can measure which visitors are buying from you. This means that you can measure where those visitors are arriving from. It is harder to do so with enquiries especially phone enquiries. For this I recommend setting up a call-logging system and multiple contact numbers for each mainstream online marketing avenue. This will give an eye-opening picture for some. I remember the first time I proved to a company that their £10,000 per month pay per click strategy was not bringing in a single enquiry. As I said – eye-opening.

Questions to Ask: What software do you use to analyse the data? What conversion rate mechanics do you test? Do you work with a company that can provide multiple contact numbers? What do you suspect based on our current marketing strategy?

Ongoing Website Design

Defined:  Continuing to develop your web site for repeat visitors and to offer more and more value to new visitors.

Scope: I am amazed at the number of businesses that get a swanky new website, pay for an online marketing campaign getting loads of visitors to their site but yet do not continue to develop their site. Your site should be growing rapidly and providing a huge amount of value to new customers and also to be such a huge and constantly updated information resource that visitors will know to keep on coming back regularly to get the latest information. When these visitors are ready to buy you will get the business. So make sure a part of your marketing budget is for ongoing website design. Watch out for designers who charge the earth for small edits or who do not make easy to edit websites. Most website content should be easily editable so ensure this is part of the deal before you sign up for the web site.

Questions to Ask: How do you bill me for ongoing work? Can my staff have access to the backend? Can we edit it ourselves? Can I have all passwords for access to my domain? Can I have the domain fully in our name?

Online Marketing Strategy

Defined: Working out the precise set of steps on all of the above subjects that need to be implemented for a given company’s online marketing.

Scope: This is the overarching plan to succeed with online marketing. It should include work on each and every one of the subjects above and should be worked out for at least 6 months preferably 12 months with room for changes as new developments come about. You chosen online marketing company should be able to provide a sufficiently detailed plan of what they are going to carry out that you can clearly see what they are doing and what involvement is needed from you and your staff. The most successful online marketing strategies combine your experience and drive with your staff’s and the firm’s specialist online marketing skills. The goal is a truly compelling online resource combined with a irresistible social enterprise.

Questions to Ask: How specific will your strategy be? Will it be a set of easily to check off as done points or is your strategy more qualitative?

Online Marketing Project Management

Defined: Putting your online marketing strategy into practice effectively and efficiently.

Scope: The best project management for online marketing is one where all involved are keen and willing to participate. With online marketing the level of participation can be as much or as little as you want. You can outsource all of your social media for example. You can outsource the entire copywriting of you online information resources. The only important points to consider are 1)How hands on do you want your company to be and 2) How are you going to ensure a successful level of coordination in the effort. I suggest a somewhat collaborative approach – individual employee social media should be done directly but the company itself should be coordinated and dealt with by professional marketers using quality copywriters; and of course all technical actions should be done by a technical specialist.

Questions to Ask: Do you offer a single project manager for us? Do you use professional copywriters? What similar projects have you managed before?

Summary:

Find the right people that can answer the questions to your satisfaction!

Many online marketing companies want to “revolutionise” your business. I do not like the use of that word at all. The truth is that your business has been successful to the degree that you have made the right decisions, provided the right services and products, and dealt with your customer base in the right way.

These methods, principles and standards are perhaps the most important attributes to incorporate into your online marketing strategy. We do not want to change everything, we just want to take your company values and services and make them available to people looking for you on the internet.

At Doggart Design we use the term “Evolutionise”. This communicates what we strive to do for your company in regards to its online marketing.

Today’s marketing is all about giving. People expect all the information they need to make a decision on something for free.

Our mission is to work out with you a complete strategy to market your services and products so well that the visitors have enough information to make the right decision – to contact you and start the conversion process.

Our favourite client is the business client. A company that has grown through a number of years, not too fast, but with strong foundations that requires evolutionising.

We take all the reasons why you have strong foundations and make that visible and understandable online.

We then make sure that the people that should be looking for you find you specifically and then we work to perfect the system that converts the most visitors to enquiries or sales.

The joys of modern day marketing mean that honest and exact analysis of the effectiveness of a campaign is at everyone’s fingertips. We can measure the number of people that visit and enquire from a specific advert or search term.

Today’s online marketing is all about effectiveness, efficiency and accountability.

Find a competent online marketing company that are looking out for you with the intention of doing long term business. A good consultancy will be very transparent about outside costs. Amounts paid to the search engines for pay per click campaigns, paid directory prices and they should be able to provide easy to understand data on number of visitors and enquiries and what is working and what isn’t.

I do not understand why online marketing companies do not do more of this. In our company we work the same number of hours on a given project each month, but we ensure that the ongoing strategy is made more and more effective – we stop working on ideas that do not bring in enquiries and we work harder on the successful ideas so they bring in more.

Be very wary of online marketing companies that look to change everything and “sweep clean into the 21^st century”. Many of these companies have been around for 5% as long as you have and they have no idea what it takes to make a company with any sort of longevity. We have learned well from our clients and know that we must bring their practices and principles to the web, not sully their pedigree in the name of forward progress.

In the future, there will be next to no physical evidence of any work, transaction or agreement. Not a single piece of business will occur without some interaction with the internet. Word of mouth, reputation and business acumen will be reliant solely on positioning on the internet.

The way to stay ahead is to develop your real world successful actions of the past into a visible and understandable online resource that people can learn about, decide to trust, do business with, and recommend to others easily.

Find a competent online marketing company and get it done.

My take on this is that everyone jumping on the online marketing train called themselves “Search Engine Optimisers” and online marketing has become so much more than just about optimising for Search Engines. In fact, Search Engine Optimisation has become so much more than just getting to the top of the search engines!

Back in the early 90’s more and more people were searching online using search engines. People with web sites trying to get more business worked out that if they stuffed their web pages with the main keyword they showed up top. Then search engines and their users suffered from low quality sites also stuffing words on their web sites so new algorithms came out that ranked sites  by popularity through number of links. So link farms were born. Then everything got really complicated so as to prevent people from manipulating the search engines too much without delivering quality content.

In my other articles and chapters of the various guides the most repeated concept is that of compelling content – valuable information or interactivity given to the visitor that in turn compels the visitor to trust you and want to get services from you.

You can try to bypass this and many SEO professionals do try. In fact, they make a living out of it. I have met countless Search Engine Optimisers that follow the “successful” formula of: figure out how to get to the top of Google without really deserving to, bill the client, get knocked back by the latest Google update or a site that actually does offer higher quality content,  bill the client, figure out how to get to the top of Google without really deserving to, bill the client, and so on.

Higher grade SEO’s will offer a higher quality and slightly slower burn service that will cost less and make more in the long run. Often flanked by well researched and implemented Pay Per Click or other online traffic generating campaigns, they will thoroughly analyse your site and pick up every single technical error on your site that should be addressed and either fix the problems directly or work with your developer team to implement the changes if it is a larger site or there is an in-house developer. Once this is complete he should offer a strategy to maintain the correct SEO best practices for the site and keep you up to date as the best practices change over time. Concurrently the SEO will work on off-site issues to bring your site to the top of the rankings for your chosen keywords.

The business owner needs to know that 1) this is what an SEO should be offering and 2) this is only a part of a modern online marketing strategy.

There are many other matters to take into account, here are 13 other key areas that need to be decided upon based upon the overall business strategy and budget all over and above SEO:

1. Keyword and competitor research
2. Building other traffic sources online other than Search Engines
3. Social Media Marketing
4. Pay Per Click management
5. Paid traffic management
6. Content generation and copywriting
7. Online Reputation and PR
8. Ranking Penalties Remediation
9. Online Buzz and Viral Marketing Management
10. Analytics and Conversion Rate Optimisation
11. Ongoing Website Design
12. Online Marketing Strategy
13. Online Marketing Project Management

Many businesses are moving to outsource their entire online marketing strategy. Normally, the most cost effective choice is to find a company that does most if not all of the above. A dynamic and competent online marketing company will work with you and your staff, suppliers and customers very closely and create a tight-knit, social enterprise that returns many times more than it costs to set up and maintain. Run right, this means that – without any doubt – customer, supplier and employee satisfaction will sky-rocket as will the number of new customers.

Sometimes we try to write something for Google, rather than write something that is genuinely informative on an interesting subject. I remember several years ago I was writing some copy for my web design site. I must have written 20 variations of “website design” in four paragraphs. When I read it back to myself it was practically gobbledegook!

I realised at this point that even if I did get someone to visit my site from the search engines I would only end up with idiots ordering my services based on my copywriting skills. Idiots often do not have money to pay for good design work!

So I wrote my copy on the areas I was passionate about and within a few weeks I was on the search engines. Enough people saw my site and linked to the articles and, sure enough, I started getting good business from the site directly.

The key point here is that you must compel your reader to do something.

Whether it is fill in an enquiry form, call your hotline, subscribe to your newsletter or buy your product there and then, we must make them do the action we require of them.

When I say to create compelling content I mean you need to write copy that is strongly persuasive and offers a surprising amount of value.

There are a number of common ways this is attempted but people rarely succeed at it. People use colourful statistics, bold logic, loud promises and strong “yes words” (I think these have been around for as long as salesmen – guaranteed, sure-fire, outstanding, incredible, spectacular, secret –  and a multitude of other dramatic adjectives).

I find these tiring to read and I struggle to believe most of it. In fact there is nothing I hate more than these one page sale pitches with background audio testimonials and big red writing saying “not $500 or £500 but $25 for the next 47 people who sign up for private mentoring in the next 8 hours.” And then they say “buy now and get 15 bonus items worth $57,698”. People buy this stuff all the time, and then, once payment has gone through, they get a new screen where they get a one off opportunity to buy the fancy version or some completely different product worth $92,899 for just $52 and so on. The products themselves often have very little or very short term value as they are trying to capitalise on some new loophole somewhere which is already in the process of being sewn up.

Two things to bear in mind: 1) I have never got a high ranking search term that brings in valuable traffic without creating valuable content that is what the user wants given the search they have just put in and 2) Content is only as valuable to the person as they can use it after reading it and it is only as valuable to you as it makes the reader want to utilise you in some manner.

My favourite content is where someone has done a lot of work and found the exact bullet pointed data on a given subject or area that I am trying to learn about.

I think Smashing Magazine did a “list of everything you need to know about typography” a few years back and it literally had 15 links and descriptions to different valuable articles. I learned more about typography in 3 hours than I knew in my previous 25 years.

Now that’s valuable content.

The problem with that valuable content was that it offered value to the reader but it did not compel the reader (me) to do something for Smashing Magazine or the people who wrote the articles. I read all of that data on font placement, font size, line spacing and so on and was very grateful. But I was not a customer. Why? At no point in all of those links and articles and pictures and videos was there a single “buy this amazing typography book” or “join our font club”. All they generated was good will which, if that is what you are going for, is OK; but generally, only generating good will, is not what you are trying to achieve; you want a potential CUSTOMER.

I personally believe that you need to offer all potential customers insight into what services you provide and how you provide them.

In all of my ventures I strive to offer guides, articles and resources for every single type of potential contact. For example with this set of resources, we have business start-ups, going concerns,  business owners, employees, corporate representatives, young entrepreneurs, senior entrepreneurs, students, budding start-up online marketers, successful marketers, competitors and consumers.

I also show that the business is well thought of by adding a number of testimonials – normally in big block quotes and placed within the main content of the key site articles and pages.

I try to offer value to every one of these types of possible interaction with the site. Everyone is happy and when they feel that the business can help them, they pick up the phone, write an email or subscribe to the newsfeeds. Our potential customer is on their way to becoming a bona fide customer that just requires the level of care, attention to detail, and service offered from the site content they have been reading to become a long term and loyal client who tells his contacts about how good it all is too.

This is what creating truly compelling content is all about – bringing repeat visitors that visit just to see what you are up to and offering continued high value to the visitor which is compelling enough for them to become customers.

Google LOVES compelling content and rewards those who create compelling content that is easy to find and index with top rankings and premium positions on organic as well as paid advertising.

It is time to figure out (can do this on your own or with a competent online marketing company) what your business does and what content you could offer that is valuable to the visitor and compels them to enquire or step onto the potential customer conveyor belt. Start now!

Search Engine Optimisation is a very big subject. There are many books and, these days, it seems like there are millions of people writing blogs, selling pdfs and telling people what to do to get their web sites to the top of the search engines.

Recently Matt Cutts – Google’s SEO (Spam) policeman – told us to stop trying to figure out what Google wants you to do and start figuring out what your user wants you to do.

Why? Because all Google is trying to do is to provide the content and web sites that offer the user exactly what they want from a specific search.

Are you wasting your online marketing or SEO budget?

I have seen business owners spend thousands getting ranked for competitor names. What are the chances of someone searching for a specific brand actually wanting a competitor’s product?

Some business owners I speak to are very suspicious of SEO and people purporting to offer SEO services. Many have taken a monthly SEO option with a large company for a small fee per month and have seen no gain. Others have spent thousands and seen some gain. Few seem to have capitalised on the potential business opportunities online.

I think the reason for this is that the purpose of SEO has been lost; and with the purpose lost, we miss the whole point. Search Engine Optimisation now seems to be synonymous with Search Engine Manipulation. This is all wrong!

We need to correctly define what search engine optimisation is and in turn define what an SEO (Search Engine Optimiser) is.

Optimisation is the key term! It is all about taking something and ensuring it is in its best possible state so that it gets all that it deserves in terms of search engine ranking and search engine traffic.

The correct sequence to achieve high rankings with SEO

Initially, effective SEO requires some thought and implementation of content that the user is going to want. Do you ever find yourself trawling through pages upon pages of bland content churning out the same information in different ways? I do and I am tired of it! Google knows it too and are getting smarter and smarter search engineers to stamp it out.

If you do not have something worth being on the top of the search engines then SEO should not work. And Google’s mission statement is basically “if it should not be top of the search engines it won’t be for long and it will be replaced with what should be there”.

All of the most successful companies that are truly prevalent on the search engines are there because they offer the user 1) the content they need or want, 2) a product that they need or want, and 3) a workable system of letting them get what they need or want. As they developed these concepts more and more; their competent SEOs were able to make it more and more visible on the search engines.

Follow this model and you cannot go wrong.

The one SEO action always required for permanent high SEO rankings

Save yourself the hassle and a whole lot of money by figuring out (either by yourself or with an online marketing company) what content and features your users need or want and then, with the help of a competent SEO, get the maximum – and deserved level of search rankings and traffic for it.

A competent SEO can work out how to get you to the top with good content. A good SEO will create and manage your content strategy to get you to the top and keep you at the top on a monthly basis. A great SEO will do this and more and will create at least twenty times more business for you than they cost.

When finding the right SEO ask to see if they share the same viewpoint. If not find someone else as they probably have a short term gimmick that they can use to make money from you.

There has been a 23% increase in number of searches online per month since 2007

Assuming similar growth in the subjects these people are searching for it is extremely likely that more than 90% of people now use the internet to find local businesses and around 90% of people research a product or service online before eventually purchasing offline from a local business.

Google know these statistics and they understand what they mean. The user experience is as dependent on the search terms as it is on the user’s location for the majority of commercially intended searches.

More and more businesses are providing industry information so as to compete with their online savvy peers; Google will of course strive to provide the best information that is most relevant to the user and is taking location more and more into account.

No matter what your business is, if it has had any success at all, people are looking for your services RIGHT NOW

It is critical that they can find you in the sea of competition and, when they do find you, that they are communicated with effectively enough to enquire for your services.

Many clients I have worked with (and many people I have met that should have become my clients) have been stuck in the past somewhat. The old school advertising giants of the past are now on equal footing with online savvy smaller businesses.

The majority of customers whether business to consumer or business to business have put up barriers to avoid traditional marketing techniques

We take the bills out of the mail pile on the floor each day and throw the junk away. We listen to music or talk to friends whilst walking around so we ignore billboards and can avoid canvassers in the street. We opt in for the telemarketing prevention programs in our area, we ignore unknown callers on our mobiles. We are answering our emails on public transport rather than looking at adverts onboard.  We set up junk email filters for anything that we feel we didn’t ask for. We make our own online radio stations so we choose our own music, we have video on demand, we filter all of our product searches by what we are actually looking for.

If we don’t ask for it, we don’t want it. We know everything we want to know in the world is at our fingertips by searching online. We do not want interruption.

But we do expect to find exactly what we need or want at the top of the search engines once we have decided what it is that we need or want!

Even the gimmicks of yesteryear – a charity bathtub race, a sponsored tour bus are pointless unless backed up by the right online techniques to get viral marketing exposure.

It really has become a brave new marketing world

Yes, word of mouth still has its place. But more and more frequently we will look online for that word of mouth. The information age is rapidly becoming the consumer opinion age. Everyone can have a voice in the online world in whatever capacity they choose.

It is only a matter of time before we will all just search for a product and expect to find reviews, social media, tweets, videos, Facebook popularity, pages of related content of consumer experiences on our social media sites and recommendations from our friends, family and trusty reviewers the world over. If it does not have that level of exposure, it is not worthy of our attention.

This is increasingly becoming the vastly predominant basis of whether or not to do business with a given company.

Find a competent online marketing company for your going concern or do it yourself if you are a startup or small business. Get with it now and enjoy being ahead of your local competition and start catching up with your national and international competition.