We all want our website to be the first (top) position on the Google search engine. No doubt that any site that is in the first few coveted positions is going to get a lot of visitors and potentially a lot of business.
The whole business of working to get websites to these top positions is called Search Engine Optimization (or SEO), and the industry is filled with many firms that offer these services. Unfortunately, most of these firms prey on naive customers, guaranteeing 1st page results, and delivering very little. Their business model is based on aggressive sales and high turn over. It is because most people don’t really understand how the search engines work that they end up buying services and believing the promises from these rouge companies. The goal of this article is to shed some light on the mystery of Search Engine Optimization. Read the rest of this entry »
You might ask, what in the heck is ORGANIC SEO? Can’t only food be considered organic? Well I can relate to the confusion, but was intrigued by the outcome of my research.
What is Organic SEO?
Organic SEO is the process of optimizing a website to increase its rankings in unpaid search engine listings.
Goals of OSEO:
- Improve business brand visibility
- Expand market share
- Attract larger targeted volumes of Search Engine users
Read the rest of this entry »
Marketing a website is generally divided into two categories called Paid Search (aka PPC, CPC, Pay Per Click) and Organic (aka SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Natural Listings). Currently, I run a Paid Search marketing campaign for you (which we really need to discuss soon). Current, you do not do any Organic marketing (but I have discussed it with Courney in the past.
Paid Search is basically buying positions on the search engines for specific search terms, like “medical malpractice”. You set a price your willing to pay each time someone clicks on your ad and comes to your site. Your position (top, 2nd, 10th, etc) is based on the amount you bid relative to other bidders for the same term. To get a Paid Search marketing campaign pay off, you need to manage these keyword bids very carefully so that you don’t over-bid and waste money, but also so that you don’t underbid and simply get nothing in return. The entire system is pretty (no, very) complex and I am happy get into details and explanations with you via a teleconference call any time you like.
Your new website – once complete – will have no direct bearing on the costs of running a campaign or the costs of getting the clicks. However, because the site will be high quality, it will have a much higher rate of “return” (more people will call you after coming to the site), so that the actual costs leads you get from the clicks will be reduced. In essence, you will save money because your advertising is much more efficient. That goes back to my argument that a well designed site will save money in marketing because it does a better job turning marketing dollars into real clients.
The amount you decide to spend on Paid Search is very controllable and measurable and we can adapt it, and experiment until it works in a way that justifies the expense.
Organic is a completely different approach. Every search engine will show two categories of results: The Paid sponsors and the regular listings. The goal of Organic is to “convince” the search engines to list your company, for a given search term, at or near the top of these free listings. They are free – you don’t pay the search engines for them – and they bring in a lot of traffic. However, there is no direct method of getting your site to those coveted top positions. That is where SEO/Organic marketing comes in.
The way search engines work is that they send out these programs called “spiders” that visit every website in the world, and revisit them, on a continual bases. These programs collect the information they find on the websites and store that information in a database so that when a user does a search on a term, like “medical malpractice”, the search engine can then just query its database and display all the websites that contain information about those words. The complexity comes into play on the “ranking” or the order in which the search engine decides to display these websites. Their goal is to present the most relevant, or “on topic” sites on the top. They keep their algorithms under tight wraps so no knows exactly how to get their website on top.
However, through experience and trial and error, SEO experts have figured out how to design websites, position the sites and manipulate the organic search results to get their listings ranked high. This processes is called Search Engine Optimization and is an on going process of manipulating things under our control to get higher rankings (which are not in our direct control).
Marketing a website is generally divided into two categories called Paid Search (aka PPC, CPC, Pay Per Click) and Organic (aka SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Natural Listings).
Paid Search
Paid Search is basically buying positions on the search engines for specific search terms, like “medical malpractice”. You set a price your willing to pay each time someone clicks on your ad and comes to your site. Your position (top, 2nd, 10th, etc) is based on the amount you bid relative to other bidders for the same term. To get a Paid Search marketing campaign to pay off, you need to manage these keyword bids very carefully so that you don’t over-bid and waste money, but also so that you don’t underbid and simply get nothing in return. The entire system is pretty (no, very) complex typically requiring daily, hands-on management. Read the rest of this entry »
