Expectations. Set them too high and a relationship can sour, set them too low and you may not get business. There is another way to think about them though. Having an online presence for your company, products and services today is essential.
There is a phrase I’ve seen that says, “Speed Costs Money”. It’s true in computing and it’s always been true in the world of motorsports. When considering your SEO, it boils down to answering the question “how fast would YOU LIKE to go?”
If you want it done fast, plan to explore online advertising. With an online ad, you can appear on just about any page for any relevant search term within days. Good enough – except 90% of most clicks on a search engine results page are made on the organic listings. Click through rates are in the sub 5% range – but you will be seen in many impressions and it’s a numbers game with enough searches buyers will find you.
Funding an ad campaign that constantly delivers prospects can be expensive and again, organic results matter. While paying for ads, you should probably look at improving your organic search results too. With successful organic campaigns, you can enjoy a mix of paid ads and content driven keyword search engine results.
In a hyper competitive online world, successful companies all trying to enhance their SEO strategy so that their identified keywords and phrases to rank on page 1 for a given keyword
search engine result. This has the effect of driving up prices and competition from other companies who want to be found for the same keywords and phrases that you do. Paid ads are driven on a bid system though – you CAN simply outbid the competition or be content to appear on the search page for most searches vs. every search.
In any case, the way forward is to begin by identifying the keywords and phrases you want to the search engines to recognize for your company. Write them down, prioritized them. Research them. Depending on your company and products. You may begin with between 5 – 100 keywords and phrases. Think in terms of what it would mean to your company if you came up on the first page of a search and if you ranked number 1 for all your keywords and phrases. What would that do for your business?
That brings us to...Budgets
Budgets are always limited. When it comes to buying ads, we have to make some difficult decisions about which keywords and phrases will have the most desired impact on our business. Organic keyword ranking is also expensive because we have to develop a lot of specific high value content and deploy it in such a way that the search engines recognize its value and begin to get us better organic rankings.
This is why it is so important to do your research for each keyword.
Keyword Research Topics may include:
• How many searches per month are done for a keyword?
• What is the average price for an ad?
• What geographies would we like to target for a keyword?
• What are similar keywords?
• What other related keywords are recommended by the search engine providers?
• What keywords are used by my 3 biggest competitors
• Are there any low hanging fruit keywords that we could quickly dominate?
• What are going to be the more difficult keywords to rank for?
• Which keywords will get our Paid Ad Marketing SEO budget?
• Which keywords will get our organic content SEO budget?
• Are there keywords I should use for SEO vs. an ad?
It is important to note that most people go way overboard researching things that don’t produce results. We limit the time spent on initial keywords to improve efficiency but add in tracking and reporting so that we are in a mode of continuous process improvement.
Research Tool Kit and Process
Below are a few of the tools that we use to research the best Keywords for you and a few of the steps involved in providing them for you.
• Find Keywords Using Ahrefs' Content Gap Tool
• Find Keywords Using Google Keyword Planner
• Find Keywords Using UberSuggest
• Delete Duplicates
• Get Search Volume, Difficulty, Traffic and CPC for All Keywords
• Finalize the highest value top 5 - 10
Tracking Advertising vs. SEO – ROI, traffic or KPI’s?
Once we have finalized our keywords campaigns, goals and budgets we need to discuss how we are going to track and measure the success of our spending and SEO towards the desired results of each campaign. Given that our crafted SEO plan only takes us to the point of getting a “qualified prospect” seeing our company, we will then need to measure the performance of our campaigns. How many prospects have seen and/or clicked on our paid ads verses how many have seen or clicked on our organic content and ads? Which campaigns are providing the best key performance metrics and traffic for the investment we are making?
Tracking these results is critical. Getting a debrief bi-weekly and using the time to make adjustments as needed will help you spend budgets wisely.
Coming Up
In our next blog “Constant Content” we will discuss how we take our SEO traffic and divert it to a website and landing pages to maximize our interactions with a new prospect on the road to purchasing our products and services.
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