Why is Aggregate Conversion Rate not important?
Aggregate Conversion Rate is not important because you will always be willing to sacrifice your conversion rate for increased revenue.
For example:
Say you are paying $1/ visitor and converting at 5%. You get 100 visitors a day.
I tell you that there is a potential stream of traffic that you have not taken advantage of. This stream costs $.10/visitor and converts at 1%. (Both customers spend the same amount).
Would you want the traffic?
Would you be happy with increased revenue and decreased conversion rate?
Yes, of course. This would be great.
Could this ever happen? Yes, it happens all the time. Each revenue source (or channel) converts at a different rate and will change your aggregate conversion rate if you decide to incorporate that channel. The content network might convert at a different rate than the search network. As long as they are both profitable, they are worthwhile investments.
Never focus on the conversion rate, focus on profitability and maximizing conversions.

*Number #2 has something to do with abandonment rate. That is, conversion rate + abandonment rate will always add up to 1 (or 100%). We do not have a good term for conversion rate #2 (that I can think of) so we refer to its opposite term, the abandonment rate.

The other similarity is that both services are often performed by the same agency or individual.

SEO

Are you looking to invest in the long-term success of your company? Are you patient enough to wait for results?

If the answer is “Yes” then SEO may be your choice.

PPC

Do you need results now? Are you prepared to spend more money to get the results you want?

If the answer is “Yes” then PPC may be your choice.




The Strengths and Weaknesses of SEO and PPC

SEO

Strengths:

The effects of good SEO are relatively permanent.

The upfront cost of SEO is less than PPC.

Weakness:

It may take two months to see results.

PPC

Strengths:

Very quick results compared to SEO

You can bring traffic/customers to your site instantly.

Weakness:

PPC is more costly than SEO.

PPC does not help the sites’ development for the future. If you stop spending you will stop seeing the positive effects.




Which is Better for my Business: PPC or SEO?

The answer is “it is unique for every business”.  It depends on your goals and budget. Often a business owner will know for certain which service she wants to try, sometimes they will ask for input from us.  If you have a question contact us and we’ll answer any questions.

1) Is there a hot product that you haven’t noticed because you’re too busy trying to run your business?
Did you not know that people were already selling model X-2011 already?
Competitive Intelligence can help fill that gap: Order model X-2011

2) Do you sell a great product but people refer to it by another name?
Are you selling “horses” and calling them “mounts”?
No one will find you; no one searches for ‘mounts’ when they are looking for a ‘horse’.
Competitive Intelligence can help you with that: Change your copy.

3) Is there an area you have not explored that your competitors have?
Are you only selling gold jewelry and your competitors thought to sell beaded jewelry? Your customers would never buy that!
They are already buying it. From your competitor! Perhaps you should stock it.

There are endless examples.
Competitive analysis can help you fill the holes in your research and get a leg up on the competition. Don’t reinvent the wheel- learn from others.

For marketers and businesses, Google Maps is an extension of SEO. For businesses whose customer base is primarily local, Google Maps may be a more important source of traffic than traditional organic SEO or pay per click marketing.
Lawyers, doctors, hotels and restaurants are all examples of businesses that need a presence on Google Maps to stay competitive.
E-commerce companies, wholesalers, and warehouses usually do not need Google Maps to stay competitive

local search results

Google Maps and Universal Search
Google maps is an aspect of what is called “universal search”. Google maps attempts to identify businesses close in location to the searcher. If I need a lawyer and search for “lawyer” or I want a pizza and I search for “pizza”, it is likely that a business down the street will be much more relevant than a lawyer in New York or Ukraine.
For certain searches, local results are better.

How does Google know I want a Local Business?
There seems to be at least two conditions that need to be satisfied for Google Maps to be triggered:
1) The search phrase must contain a city name: e.g, San Diego Lawyer, Surgeon in Minneapolis, etc.
2) The search is for a business-related item. You can’t just search for “San Diego X” or “X San Diego”. X has to match a database of words. Lawyer, surgeon, pizza, hotels are all business-related, so Google-Maps triggers if you enter one of these phrases. “San Diego Rattlesnake” does not trigger Google Maps.

What Does This Have to do With My Business?
Submitting your business to Google Maps can help you gain visibility when people perform these “local searches”.

If people see you on Google Maps, they could clickthrough to your website and end up as customers. This has to be the easiest search optimization technique to use to help market your business. Obviously, the “trick” is to do it right.

You only get seen if you are in positions A-J (the top 10).

The Problem
Google has not resigned to the fact that Google maps is the domain of marketers.
As such, they have enforced very strict rules against attempts to optimize Google Maps. More than any other area of search marketing, it is better for you to be conservative- no keyword stuffing.

Conclusion
Submit a map, or hire someone to submit a Google Map for you. If you still desire more visibility, and wish to be aggressive in your marketing, look into altering your SEO and PPC efforts.

There are three primary metatags that we are concerned with-as far as SEO goes- the keyword metatag, the title metatag, and the description metatag. Notice these are three separate things. They serve different functions. They also have different levels of importance to search engine optimization.
In level of importance:
1) The Title Tag
2) The Description Tag
3) The Keywords Tag

The Keywords metatag is a distant third.

The Title MetaTag
If you look across the top of your browser, you will see the Title Metatags I have filled out for this page. On the homepage of RoseOspreyMarketing.com the title tag reads:
Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click, Adwords Consultant
These are the primary keywords for the content on this page. This is where you put your best keywords, as this has the most bearing on SEO. It is okay to separate them with a comma, or a |. The goal is to get as many important words in there as possible without overflowing off the screen.
Each page on your site should have unique title tags. Also, you do not need to put your domain or brand name in your title tag. That is wasting valuable real estate.

If you are new to SEO, and you want to fill in your Title tags, how do you choose what words to put into the title metatag field: Look at the page you are editing and look for themes, or categories or products that are unique to this page. Stick those in the title tag.
Or, if there is a special word you’d like to rank for, and you’d like this page to be the landing page, put that special keyword in the title metatag on your page.

The Description MetaTag
The description metatag is used by certain search engines (like google and yahoo) to provide a “blurb” about your site on the search results page. Sometime search engines will show you an excerpt of text from the website, but often it will show the description metatag.
This is an opportunity for the savvy marketer to write some keyword rich copy that encourages searchers to click-through to your website. So, the description metatag will never be a list of keywords separated by commas. It has to actually be a sentence.
Other considerations:
Every page on your site needs to have a unique description metatag.
It should be 2-4 sentences. Too long or too short is not optimal.
The content of the description metatag should relate to the content of the page.
Add as many keywords in the copy as possible- but keep it readable.

The Keyword Metatag
The keywords metatag is a distant third in terms of importance to SEO. Many top SEOs ignore the keyword tag because they feel it is not cost effective, from a time-management perspective, to focus here. Time would be better spent on link building or developing content.
I would not recommend spending much time researching keywords for the metatags, but I do believe they should be populated with words relative to the content on the page.
Another good use for the keyword metatags is to put frequent misspellings of your topic in list form.
If your page is on leveling in Warcraft (the videogame) a good word for the keywords metatag might be “worcraft”(sic). In this way the search engines can know you have that content, but you don’t have to show your customers ugly misspellings.

The List

1) Common sense-This one is often overlooked. If a grocery store solicited my help I know a ton of their keywords because I have seen a grocery store.

2) Keyword tools- Google Adwords Keywords tool and Yahoo both have free keyword tools with real data from searches people have performed. There are also good paid alternatives.

3) Website analysis. Look at the content of the webpage. There are also tools that can extract that data. The navigation and breadcrumbs can be helpful.

4) Competitors- Look at the content of the webpage of the competition.

5) Yahoo’s search home page- do a couple “bad” searches and Yahoo will show a list of related searches. Those are keywords.

6) Analytics-In your analytics. You are running analytics right? It will send you the keyword people are searching for when then used a search engine to get to your site.

7) Internal search-what are people searching for on your site? Those are keywords.

8 Competitive intelligence reports-Companies like Compete.com sell information on you and your company that may be useful.

9) The company-I listen to the language the stakeholders and employees use in our correspondence. Also, it never hurts to ask them if they thought I missed anything, but that is always at the end of the keyword expansion phase and campaign building phase.

Perhaps a new product might come in or a new corporate trend might develop that is outside the scope of analytics.

10) My experience-I have built umpteen campaigns and I have a certain feel for it.

(You may only recreate portions of this list if you keep the text and links unchanged and attribute the list to RoseOspreyMarketing.com.)

Smart move?

Yes.

Systemax also owns CompUSA.com and TigerDirect.com. It is currently number twenty one on the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide. Rankings are based on revenue generated from online channels in 2008.

Systemax competes with NewEgg.com (#9) and BestBuy (#10).

In 2007 CircuitCity.com generated 1.4 billion dollars of revenue putting it at # 16 on the Internet Retailer 500 list. It had been reported that the online channel had been profitable at the time that Circuit City filed for bankruptcy in January.

If Circuitcity.com, CompUSA.com, TigerDirect.com, BestBuy.com, and NewEgg retained their 2007 marketshare (2007 was the last full year of data I have), Systemax would have a bigger percentage of market then both NewEgg.com and BestBuy.

There have been fewer searches for “circuitcity.com” in the three months since Circuit City filed for bankruptcy.

I anticipate that this will be a good purchase for Systemax that will quickly pay for itself. The domain name, the brand, and the incoming links all have significant value.

Systemax has not announced how they are going to incorporate CircuitCity.com into their business plans. At the time of publication the site is down.

No! We don’t want exposure in itself (since we are paying for this exposure); we want exposure to potential customers.
There are really two challenges here:
1) limiting the exposure of your ads so as to save money
2) Only showing your ads to potential customers.
While you may not have experience in the pay per click field with this strategy, you have experienced it in your everyday TV-viewing life.

Filtering by Language and Location
The first large filter in advertising is language. When I am watching TV, I never receive ads from pepsi in Farsi. It is in English. Or your Lingua-Franca. The second large filter is location. I don’t see commercials for British restaurants. Though they speak the same language as I do, the physical distance is too great for me to be considered a potential customer.
This level of filtering in advertising is as simple as it gets. The same rules that apply to TV advertising apply to ppc advertising.

In many cases, you can go right now to your campaigns and click the “off” button for non-English languages, and countries outside the U.S. (or wherever you live). Your conversion rates will improve instantly. Check your settings now.

Filtering by Using Negative Keywords in PPC
Have you ever been watching a football game and there is a commercial for tampons? It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it is pretty entertaining. This is an example of advertisers wasting money by targeting the wrong audience. This happens ALL THE TIME in ppc advertising.
One of the more difficult aspects of ppc advertising is deciding who I should block from seeing my ads.
I am currently running a campaign for a hotel in Minneapolis*. How would I describe it if I were to be honest with you: It is a small hotel, not luxurious or expensive, not what I would call a 5 star hotel or suite. It is not the type of hotel you would find valet parking or limos.
Notice that I listed several qualities that the hotel lacks. That is not because I am (necessarily) a negative person, it is because this is a tool I use in ppc.  I can now take that list of qualities that my product does not have and add them to the negative (also called excluded) keyword list.
-limo
-expensive
-luxury
-suite
-five star

Now if anyone does a search with any of those words, my ad automatically cannot appear. So if someone searches for “inexpensive Minneapolis hotel with limo” I don’t want to show my ad.
But I have so many of the desirable qualities this person is searching for. Maybe we should show them the ad just in case.

No.
They will find an inexpensive hotel with limo services or they will perform a different search. Perhaps our ad will show up then. We do not want people clicking our ads for services we do not sell.

Conclusion
So, do your campaigns have negative keywords? Think of all the words that DON’T describe your product or business and write them down in a spreadsheet. Add them as negative words. Your conversion rates will improve, your quality scores will improve and you will be spending less.

*Details changed slightly

One of the primary factors in most first-tier search engines’ algorithm is external links. You want links from other sites. Preferably one-way links, but reciprocal links have value also.

There are many web-directories on the internet- both broad and specific. In fact, before Yahoo was a search engine, it was (and is) a web directory. A web directory works on a business model similar to the Yellow Pages. You submit information to the directory, the directory hosts ads, advertisers pay money to the webmasters.

Some more “enterprising” webmasters have come up with a different business model to support their web directory. Everyone values incoming links to their site because of the SEO value. What would you pay to get a link to your site from the Google homepage? Obviously Google does not sell links, but you can imagine the value to your company.

A small web directory can provide a similar value on a much smaller scale.

However, there is a problem.

This practice of buying links is against Google’s terms of service and can get your site removed from the SERPS altogether.

Of course, it is not against Google’s policy to buy advertising on a site as long as you state that you are an advertiser. You can also buy “memberships” in organizations and “receive” links.

The practice is not as black and white as it appears. However, if your business is flagged by Google, and removed from the search engines, the results will be very black and white. It is best to err on the side of caution with your business.

Here are some examples of legitimate directories I have worked with. I will try to add to the list as I find more:

Web Directory List:

seo resources

dmoz.org

Why?

We are offering to our customers a chance to get over that initial hurdle towards developing a successful internet marketing program. In the process, we gain exposure to the fine people who need our service.

When?

We anticipate running this promotion indefinitely, though it will depend upon the response.

How do I sign up?

Click for: free Google Analytics installation.

I have five goals I want to track. Will you configure them all for free?

No. We will configure one for free. Advanced configurations and connecting the account with Adwords may be purchased; or it can be done on your own.  (Please inform us if you have already purchased a PPC, SEO, or Analytics package as advanced configuration is included at no additional cost).

Do you install Omniture or Webtrends for free?

Not at this time.

 *Please do not use this service if you are getting paid by someone else to set up their account.*