A properly executed SEO campaign will target keywords based off of the content of your website. Doing it any other way is risky and will likely get you penalized now or in the future.

SEO is based off of two primary factors:

1. Content on your website
2. Links to your website

Step 1: Focus on the content
What keyword do you want to rank for? For each keyword you want to rank for, you need a page for it. Write a really good article on each keyword. Don’t have time to write an article for every keyword you have? Hire an SEO copywriting firm like iCopywriter or the like.

Step 2: Link to that article
The next step is easy (at least from a description standpoint). Go out and link to the article you wish to rank for the keyword you are after.

I know I put this in simplistic terms, there is a little more to it than the above detail, however, the moral of the story is 2 fold:

1. Don’t ask “how many keywords will I rank for” you are setting yourself up for failure with your SEO. Instead, make sure you have the content and your SEO knows what your priorities are.
2. If your SEO states how many keywords they are going to rank you for, hang up the call, change your number and never talk with that company again.

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In a recent study on shipping from Compete.com on e-commerce behavior, respondents favored free shipping as the primary driver for doing business online. In fact, they favored free shipping 2/1 over free returns. This doesn’t surpise me at all. All of the e-commerce sites I own have free shipping.

How do you offer free shipping and stay competitive on price? I have 2 ways of answering this and it all depends on whether or not you have a unique product or a sku that many other websites have.

Unique Products - If you have a unique product that no one else has or is hard to find, then you should simply build shipping into the cost of the product. Find an average shipping cost (you will win on some and lose on others) and build it right into the price of the product. If you sold Widgets that no one else has, as an example, and shipping is $500, then put that price right into your product. You may think I am crazy here, but I have a lot of data to back this up. I have a website that sells Outdoor Furniture. The standard retail on our product is $2000. We have a really good product, only a few other stores have it, so I can get away with a little more. The minute I took the $350 average ship price, added it to the price of the product (which now retails for $2350) my conversion went from .025% to .04%. That might not seem like much, but when you are dealing with a $2350 product, that is literally $80,000 more sales a month.

Sku-based products - this methodology gets a lot more complicated when you sell a non-unique product that a lot of other websites offer. Do you compete on the price level, offer free shipping, or possibly, is it a combo of the two? It really all depends. Here are some scenarios that I would use in different circumstances:

1. You offer a product that is $100. Standard shipping is $20. Everyone else offers the product at $100 plus shipping. I would sell the product for $110 and offer free shipping. You will make up in conversion (more sales) for the $10 loss in margin.

2. You offer a product that is $30. It is really heavy, and shipping costs $30. This can get really complicated. You are dealing with a couple of problems here. No one wants to pay shipping costs that equals the product cost. Most likely they will leave your site and try and find in locally.  It is the psychology of it, nothing to really do with the price. This might be the one time I would not offer free shipping, but something that is close to as good. Flat rate shipping. If the average shipment costs $30, then I would offer flat rate $15 shipping and splash it all over my website. If you do this, you need to imply that this is a great deal, a huge promo, and it is going to end soon.

The moral of the story is try to get creative when offering shipping. Understand the “win some / lose some concept” but as long as your bottom line at the end of the month shows you are making more money, then let that be the driver.

Consumers don’t want a complicated shipping scenario. If you cannot tell them what your shipping is in a single sentence, then your conversion rate will suffer. Guaranteed.

Seo consultants

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So, I clicked the most logical choice, “Shop Now” as I wanted to see what kind of great deal I was about to get. This is the body of the landing page that I landed on:

Do you see what the major problem here is? No where on this advertisement does it get me to start shopping for my TV. Great, you sold me on the offer in the newsletter, I click on the offer, and you simply list the boring details of the offer, and gave me no link to the TV’s or packages that fall under this offer? Really?

This could have been a HUGE success with a simple “Shop for this Offer Now” Button and then display the packages, with easy links to purchase. Instead, they have made it too diffcult to understand what you are getting and where you are getting it at.

Moral of the story is this. Email newsletters convert at a very low rate. You have too many filters:

Filter 1: Get them through the Spam Filter. If it gets through their spam filter -

Filter 2: Get them to open the damn thing. If they do this….

Filter 3: How do you get them to click on an offer? If you get them to get past step 3, then you are looking good on conversion. Unless you did what Best Buy did above.

Filter 4: If you get them to click on the offer and hit your landing page….THEN YOU BETTER SELL THEM!!! Make it easy for them to locate the offer they obviously liked. Get them to purchase it.  If purchasing is too complicated and requires assistance, then make it easy for them to fill out a lead form, contact button, etc.

Follow those rules and your email marketing newsletter will convert!!

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Myth 1 – White Space in Code Will Hurt You - This is a great sales tool to scare you into believing an SEO knows what he is talking about. The white space in your code will not prevent a search engine from indexing your page. Come on now, Google can index and categorize billions and billions of pages…you don’t think they figured out how to ignore the white space on your page?

Myth 2. Google Changes Every month – Google does roll out small updates all of the time, but 99% of them never effect your business. I hear over and over again from other SEO Consultants / firms that you have to “stay on top of it” as every month the Google algorithm changes dramatically. Major changes occur 1-2 times a year tops, and most people are never effected in these either as long as they are doing SEO correctly.

Myth 3. Meta Keywords Help ranking - if some pitches to you that a meta keyword tag increases your likelihood of ranking, run for the hills. They are worthless.

Myth 4. Content is the most important - maybe for Usability, but for SEO rankings, Links outweigh content 10/1. I believe this is changing in the near future, but for now, as of the date of this post, Links are about the only thing that matters.

Myth 5. Unique Keyword Research Tools - most SEO’s will say they have some unique and crazy, custom built tool to identify keywords for your campaign. It’s B.S. They use the same tools you do. The Google Keyword Tool, Wordtracker and maybe Keyword Spy will give you all the information you need.

Myth 6. Google indexes Flash - I have been hearing this lately. Maybe they CAN index flash, but they are not ranking it worth a crap. Be like Steve Jobs and stay away from flash at all cost.

Myth 7. No follow links are worthless – This is crap and I have proven it over and over again.  Google will decide a links relevance, and they do ignore no-follows. Google only cares about relevance and if a link from the home page of The New York Times has a no follow, I assure you it will provide a lot of SEO value. Sure, you might not see it in a back link report, but I assure you it is going to help.

Myth 8. Google Penalizes Duplicate Content - in most cases, you will not lose rankings because you have the same content as someone else. You may not get credit/rankings for content on your site if it is duplicate, but you are not going to get hurt or penalized for it. Think about how many people sell the same products online and all use the manufacturers description. You think they are going to get hurt for that?

Myth 9. Reverse Algorithms - I hear this a lot when I shop competitors. The pitch usually goes something like “We have reversed engineered Google” This is total crap. Google is a hell of a lot smarter than an SEO, and they are always one step ahead of manipulative tactics. Sure, there are things that can help your SEO campaign and linking campaigns that will give you a push, but there is no secret sauce that some consultant came up with that has beaten Google’s robust platform of determining the rank of a page. If they did, Yahoo would have hired them for a billion dollars.

Myth 10. Keyword Density Matters – I cannot believe this one is coming up again, it is likely some sales guy trying to close something. Keyword density is how many times a keyword shows up on your page versus all of the other words on it. If I had 100 words in a post, and I put in the word ‘SEO consultant” 4 times, it would be a 4% keyword density. This USED to count a lot, in fact, it was Alta Vista’s primary algo 12 years ago. It is not relevant anymore. Just make sure your content is relevant to the keyword topic you are trying to optimize for and you will be fine.

Let me know in the comment below or email me if you think I am incorrect. I am pretty sure I am nails on all of these, but am happy to keep an open mind.

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If you purchased a domain today, and wrote a 400 page paper on how to cure cancer,  it would not rank in Google unless other sites with authority linked to it. No SEO in his right mind can contest this fact. Ranking in Google still largely depends on link votes (page rank) as the main factor.  However, without content on the other side of a strong link campaign, you will be hard pressed to get the rankings you are after. In my mind, content is a necessary ingredient for links to get you ranking. It is like the garlic in a spaghetti sauce, without it, it is just tomatoes.

There are a couple of reasons to still worry about content.

1. I do believe the content/link weight ratio will change with further development of the semantic engine behind Google. Links are too easily manipulated, good content is not. To better their search engine, they must have a better content/link weight ratio. So building good content now will hedge you against a major filter in the future.

2. traffic without good content is a complete and utter waste of time. Why would you drive someone to a page on your site that is gibberish? What purpose is that going to serve you?

3. Bounce rate is going to get more important with future algorithm roll outs. Bad content will make people leave your site very quickly. Remember, they can test bounce rate without you even having analytics installed. Its simple. User clicks on your listing in Google, how quickly they come back to Google to find another result can be a measurement Google uses to test bounce rate. Have good content and once again you don’t need to worry about future algorithm changes.

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Before the Internet…
Before the internet, consumers had one choice to find a business. Go into their cupboard and pull out the yellow book and search. It was a pretty simple formula for the small business, the bigger the ad, the more calls and businesses they would get.

After the Internet Explosion..
The internet has changed everything, especially the accessibility of information which has had an enormous impact on consumer behavior. Consumers have learned that they can get information from different sources. They might buy shoes based off of what someone said in facebook but then turn around and buy their shirt from looking on a search engine. Many still get their information from Search Engines and Internet Yellow Pages, some from their piers in Facebook. Others rely on review sites like Yelp and Citysearch. Micro blogging like Twitter will change the ways people go to events, view promotions, etc.

So What is a small business to do?
So given all of this, I am commonly asked by small business owners what they should do. The answer is pretty simple….you have to do it all. No longer can you going to place a single ad in a single source and expect to be successful unless you can pay an agency 6 figures a year to do so. Search Engines are great, and a great first start, but you have to follow that up with all of the other components.

The issue here is how does a small business owner do this? They were used to buying an ad in a single yellow page book that would span all of the communities within a city. To do this online, it would more than bankrupt a small company. For a small business to get strong search engine exposure in all of the communities in San Diego (there are roughly 50 communities) it would cost well over $40,000 a year. And the real problem is that they are not going to get the same call volume and customers they would have received 10 years ago from a similar spend in the Yellow pages. Consumers are too spread out in their searching, and they have too many choices. The internet has really leveled the playing field.

Small Businesses…Do this!
The best advice I could give you is to do what you can on your own, and hire a professional to do the rest. As a general rule of thumb, go by this plan:

1. Search Engine Optimization – Hire a professional firm or SEO consultant to take care of this for you. This is one of the more important forms of online advertising you are going to do and one of the more complex as well. Hire a professional!
2. Review Websites – Manage this yourself. Tap into your customers and offer them coupons if you see their name on a positive review in Yelp, Mojo Pages, etc.
3. Twitter, Facebook – this is all you. I would recommend you hire a social media consultant for a couple of hours to explain how to use this as a platform. Once you learn it, you should use this daily.
4. Paid Search – hire someone to set your campaign up and show you how to run it. A small local paid search campaign is not rocket science, but it does need to be setup correctly.

Most importantly, you cannot settle and get comfortable with what you are doing. The Yellow Page industry was dictated and formed by executives and business people. The internet will continue to change by way of the mass audience…so change will continue to occur at this rapid pace. For you to have a competitive advantage over your competitors, you need to be more aggressive and stay up on change better than him.

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This is a huge problem in the industry. The service companies that I mention above refers these things as “hooks”. Meaning, if you ever wanted to leave them, not pay them, bad mouth them, etc. You would be less reluctant to do so because they can literally shut down your entire business if they want.

Here are the primary accounts you need to have control over. Not just access, but control:

1. Hosting – Hosting is the biggest and most disastrous hook I see. Usually your web development firm will provide a cheap or free hosting. They make this look like a favor, however, unless you have a site with more than 50,000 unique visits a month, hosting is dirt cheap. Go out and get your own hosting at Godaddy.com, HostDepot.com or one of a thousand hosting companies out there and pay for it yourself. NEVER LET SOMEONE ELSE CONTROL YOUR HOSTING PLATFORM. You will soon regret it. If you ever wanted to leave them, they could hold your website files hostage and you would have to pay another company to redevelop it.

2. Domain Registrar – this is a huge mistake. If you do not control your registrar account, then you don’t control your company. It is $7.00 a year for a domain. Pay it yourself, make sure you control it.

3. Analytics – In most cases, I am referring to Google Analytics. When your Google Analytics account is setup, make sure it it under your Google ID. Development and Marketing companies will usually set this up under their account and grant you access. HUGE mistake as if you ever dump them, kiss your valuable analytics data good-bye!

4. Paid Search Accounts – If Paid Search (Adwords, Yahoo Search, Microsoft Ad Centers) is a valuable part of your business (and it should be), then you need to make sure your online marketing company is managing YOUR account versus using their own account. The history of your account is going to give you a lot more leverage when buying traffic, and if you left your marketing company, all that history would be sent down the tubes and you would be starting over. This could costs you tens of thousands of dollars.

5. Local Accounts – Most local search engines (Google Local, Bing) have you setup an account to list your business in their local maps. This is a huge source of free traffic and is growing in importance. The issue is that if you use an outside marketing company to do this, they are probably going to list you under their account. If you walk, they can simply delete your listing and you will be deleted from the search engines. Make sure that your online marketing company is submitting and listing your business in an account that you control.

When you confront your online marketing company with any of the above issues, they are going to start using words like “Proprietary technology” “Secret Sauce” “Verified Accounts”, etc. then you have an issue. If they say anything other than “No problem, we are happy to do that for you” then I would go get a good attorney and start the legal process. As if they don’t want to give you the keys to your own car, there is some mal-intent on their side.

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http://www.twitter.com/dredman

Facebook: Daniel Redman

You can see his eVisibility profile here: http://www.evisibility.com/Dan-Redman.html

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Small businesses, which in my mind are businesses that spend less than $5000 a year on marketing, are in desperate need of a service like this. The video on the website says it all, it cost too much to hire guys like me to run and operate your SEO campaign.  Further, when you hire a high-end consultant, you are going to be 4-6 months away from achieving ROI. This system could be a great first step before hiring an outside company to perform a high-level SEO strategy.  Unless you can afford my $50,000+ per website expense right out the gate, something like this is absolutely necessary. Small Businesses need some type of platform to help them do the basic fundamentals of SEO until it starts producing some local/long tail results and you can then afford to re-invest with the program.

I have not seen the software yet, however, I suspect it is like Hubspots ‘Website Grader’ on steroids. It will help you organize all of the things that you need to be doing at the times you should be doing it. I would hope it gives step by step guidelines on how to do the things correctly, which is where ‘Website Grader’ falls short.

I will sign up and give it a shot on one of my online businesses and report what I think about it. For $50/month, I cant see it being a waste of money…I am sure it will pay for itself at the level.

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1. Does the keyword appear in the paid search ad title and description? – This is a no-brainer but often overlooked. They are searching a particular keyword on purpose, make sure you deliver that keyword.

2. Does the ad copy “pre-qualify” clickers? You don’t want ad copy to totally distract visitors, however, you don’t want to falsey drive people into your website as you wont convert them. Try and be both compelling, but also, try and explain what it is you are going to offer them before they click.

3. Does the ad contain a compelling call to action? This is a no-brainer and often overlooked. Put a specific promo in your ad copy like “Free Shipping”, “Free Download”, etc.

4. Is the landing page content relevant to the keyword? This is another often overlooked issue. If someone typed in ‘Purple Widget’ are you selling a purple widget on your landing page? You better be!

5. Does the landing page employ Scenario Design practices to aid user experiences? Is the page usable? Does it have the call to actions necessary to convert a customer?

If you think of all the above items before launching a paid search campaign, and execute on them, your campaign is 300% more likely to be a successful one!

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