TapLead Internet Marketing Magazine
First things first. When it comes to SEO, most businesses don’t have a fair expectation of time frames and effort go into search engine optimization. This unfair expectation stems from not only the business but from the SEO specialist not getting accurate time frames for SEO success. Right up front, it is important to know which keywords you are going for and also the keyword difficulty of each keyword seeing get a reasonable expectation of success and time frames for success.
Going After One Keyword
One mistake that I often see with business starting out with their SEO campaignsis the fact that they sometimes just go after one keyword. Going after the one major keyword for your industry or locality and obtaining a first page position could be enough to really boost your business. But, let’s face it. Doing search engine optimization for your website is a investment. You are both investing a lot of time and money to go search engine rankings escalating. If you’re only going after one keyword, all it takes is one change in Google’s algorithm to knock you from that position leaving you with no business again.
That is why it’s important to diversify. Going after multiple keywords that relate your business is important. Google is constantly updating and changing their algorithm and how they rank sites and you want to have a diversified portfolio comes to your search engine optimization as well. This will prevent you from losing all of your business should a algorithmic change happen and also gives you more clout when it comes to the way that Google will rank you for other longtail keywords that relate to your industry.
PPC vs SEO For Generating Business
So what is the difference between investing in pay per click ads versus search engine optimization? Well, there’s a few things to consider.
Pay per click campaigns will definitely get you traffic quicker and give you that boost your business that you might need right now. A word to the wise, make sure that you have a proper landing page set up for your pay per click campaigns before even thinking about running an ad words campaign or a campaign through Bing. There are many many businesses that waste thousands and thousands of dollars on their pay per click campaigns before ultimately giving up because it will have the correct keywords, the correct ads, and a high converting landing page.
Search engine optimization on either hand, is more of a long-term investment. You don’t get immediate results like you do with pay per click but ultimately, your goal is to invest in your business now and have much lower cost per click and cost per conversion ratios in the future. The difference in cost per conversion when comparing PPC to SEO fluctuates greatly depending on your industry and the keywords you select.
What Type Of SEO Campaigns.
Should you move forward with a search engine optimization campaign for your business online, I would suggest going with a company that guarantees results and allow you to pay based on performance. So for example, you might pay an initial setup fee per keyword, but you don’t pay anymore until you see results. For example, you might start paying your search engine optimization specialist once they have you ranking for your particular keyword in the top 30. As they rank you higher and higher in the search engines, you pay them more per month to get you to that ranking and maintain that ranking. Most of these types of SEO campaigns are designed to have a contractual timeframe to accomplish the goals, and maintenance plans that help you maintain your positions in search engines.
There’s a big misunderstanding with the whole “guarantee” concept in SEO services. One cannot guarantee ranks; it’s just not the nature of SEO business. How can one guarantee results in an area that they have no control over? What happened with the Panda 1 and Panda 2 updates of Google?
The reality is that we never know what Google will do, we can only anticipate. Promising results for ranks and guarantees just sets the expectations wrong for the client! The promise should always be “more business, more leads, more traffic”, not “RANKS”. Individual ranks do not mean anything when you look at analytics. However, if you can bring traffic for a client from over 10,000 different search terms on Google, now that’s something. On top of that, do you offer conversation optimization? Are you tracking the traffic that’s brought in from the keywords ranked? Which terms are performing the best?
I hope that makes sense, SEO must be a strategy, not a way to rank terms. Cliches like ROI, bottom line and profitability matter. Do you want long term clients or short term sales in SEO? If we can grasp this idea, we will all be better and richer marketers.
-Duran
Thanks for the comment Duran. I understand where you are coming from, but I am speaking from the clients side of things. There are a ton of “SEO” companies out there that take huge amounts of money from clients and never deliver the results. I think to be fair, it is best to have a pay per rank type scenario that makes it easy for clients to see what they are paying for.
I have been using this model for my clients and it seems to be a good fit for both sides. Of course, the higher the keyword difficulty, the more it is going to cost. On the other hand, some keywords are easy to rank for on the front page, so the you just have to price accordingly.