Hi everybody. Last week I went over the pros and cons of using pay per click advertising. Today I will go over the pros and cons for of going with an SEO Firm.
The first thing you need to look at is how much demand there is for your product/service. You can go to overture and use their keyword tools or you can go to my companies website and use our tools. We get a live feed from wordtracker for keyword counts and from overture for the PPC bids. If their is a large demand for your product then pat your self on the back for choosing a good business to get into. Now what you need to look at is your conversion rate for your site. What Im talking about is the percentage of people that go to your site and actually become a customer/client. Then what you need to look at is the average conversion for your keywords. Thats the amount of traffic you could expect getting to your site for each keyword if your site is in the top 10. Now that youve done this you just need to see if the increased income of getting this traffic to your site justifies hiring an SEO Firm to work on your site.
In some industries you cant go wrong. A few examples would be real estate, mortgages, lawyers and law firms, plastic surgeons, and laser eye surgeons. There is a huge demand for these services and if you get a couple of extra sales every month then the money you would make would more than offset the cost of going the SEO route. Other businesses need to really look at what they can expect to get out of having this service.
If you need help figuring out if SEO is for you I am more than willing to do a full site analysis to see if you would benifit from SEO or not but with the tools on our website and a calculator you should be able to get an idea if this would work for you.
Jeffrey Henderson
Director of Marketing
ViP Search Engine Marketing
I am the Director of Marketing for VIP Search Engine Marketing, an SEO/SEM Firm in Burbank, CA. We have been in business for seven years, specializing in SEO/SEM for the last three years. We provide a very comprehensive service that we back up with a money back performance based guarantee. I cant say we are the best at this but we are definitely one of the best. We believe in building strong partnerships with our clients. Our business is based on the belief that when we take on a client that we become a part of their business, throwing in our lot with theirs so to speak as our success is based on theirs.
When a user enters a search term, or keyword phrase, at a search engine, regardless of whether it is Google, MSN, Yahoo! or AltaVista, the engine runs through the billions of pages in its database and awards each page a relevancy score. The higher the score, the higher the listing will appear on the results page. If your site doesnt contain the keyword used by the searcher, the only score its going to get is a zero. Your first task then is to make sure you know which keywords are most relevant for each of your sites.
There are three ways to figure out which keywords work the best for your particular site:
1. Check Your Competitors
2. Check the pay-per-clicks
3. Use specialized tools
Checking your competitors is the easy way to find out what ranks them higher than you for your particular niche. Simply do a search on one of the search engines for your best keyword, and go to the top five sites on the results page. When visiting, check the page source by going to View-> Page Source. This will open up the HTML file of the site you are visiting. In the head portion of the page (itll be the first thing youll see) look for the phrase meta=keywords content=their keywords here (It will be enclosed in <>) and this will give you a list of their top keywords. Keywords should be listed in this meta tag with the highest ranking keyword first. One very big advantage of doing this research is that it gives you an idea of how your competitors have optimized their pages, and if not done properly, you have the advantage in doing your own pages in the proper fashion.
Checking the pay-per-click sites such as Overture or FindWhat will also let you see what keywords people are bidding on. The downside is that they require you to open an account, and it may cost a few dollars, but it is worth the extra expense to be able to check bids on PPC. Googlefight is also a good resource to find which of two keywords are more relevant. Although limited in use, it is rather fun to play with, and gives relevant reports.
Specialized tools are the best way to check keywords for popularity and competition. Wordtracker, a paid subscription site, is an invaluable resource for researching top keywords. At $250 USD a year, it is not cheap, but the time saved and excellent returns are worth the investment. Wordtracker has a free trial search that can be used, although it is somewhat limited in return of relevant keyword phrases. You can also purchase a subscription for monthly, weekly, and daily. Daily fees are about $8 USD, and is a worthwhile investment. A lot of research can be done in 1 day, and if you are prepared with basic keyword brainstorming, you can get a lot done in a days time.
As you build your keyword list from your root keyword, be mindful that when people search for product to buy, they generally use two to three phrase search terms. If they are doing research, they will search with the root word. For example if I wish to research flowers then that is the term I will input into the search engines. If, however, I am looking to purchase, I would use the term buy red roses or buy cheap bouquets. With careful planning and taking the proper amount of time to research root keywords, you can be successful with the proper optimization of your web pages.
Alden Smith is an award winning author who has beenmarketing on the internet for over 7 years. His site, , is loaded with articles andinformation for the beginning blogger and internetmarketer. Articles are posted daily, addressing everything from CSS to blogging for the beginning marketer.