We finally got around to getting a video for our online reputation management services like we teach and provide for our clients. We know better but are finally getting caught up. Enjoy the vid and let us know if or reputation management!
One of the core values of our business is to ensure our clients can and will see a higher than expected ROI on their marketing investment. Unfortunately that means that some businesses are simply not good candidates for SEO services. There is a lot that goes into this analysis but here is a down and dirty method to see if you are a good fit for Search Engine Optimization or if you should be looking for at a different marketing channel.
Although no one can fully trust the numbers that Google releases, they are a reasonable estimate of the search volume of different terms. To see the search volume for various terms you can do a simple search for the Google Keyword Planner and then login with your gmail login information. Now you can start looking at different terms and the way that different people search for your services. Now that you have an idea of the search volume you need to look at the second part of the equation, Lifetime Customer Value. For this you need to know on average what every new customer or client is worth to you. Now is the time for a little estimation.
Take the total search volume and multiply that by the percentage you can get to your website. For reference, 42% of searchers select the #1 organic listing and 8% go past the first page. Now you have to multiply that number by the percentage you think will convert to customers. If you are in a service industry it is usually best to break this into two parts. First, estimate what percentage will convert to a call or visit and second factor in what percentage of those will convert to customers. You can play with the numbers but this is a good rule of thumb to get a conservative idea of what your return will look like from an SEO company. This also lets you factor in different prices to see what your return will be from different investment levels. Just keep in mind that like everything else in life you get what you pay for so getting SEO services that do not work will not provide a positive return.
We try to be very conservative in our numbers to ensure every possibility for a higher ROI so we usually estimate lower for the volume of customers you will get to your site and then low again for conversions. Because over 90% of searches never make it to page 2, SEO has become a game of digital real estate. Just like monopoly, there are only so many blocks and people are going to land on one of them. If you have several of the spaces on page 1 for your business then you are in a position to get the most possible traffic. Our methods of getting multiple first page rankings help us to deliver the highest possible value to our clients and as a general rule, they see a vastly higher return than we estimated. If you would like to know more please visit our website, AlanMorganGroup.com, and fill out our discovery form or give us a call at (866) 805-3494.
The biggest on page issues we are seeing with our new SEO clients are URL structure and content.
URL structure is usually a problem in one of two ways: they are trying to keyword stuff it, or it is just gibberish that does not help the SERPs understand what the site it about. Think about the URL structure as the pairing to the title of the page. If the page is about blue widgets with a title such as all about blue widgets and your URL is website.com/cat&1234/glkjaglkj/, it doesn’t really correlate for the SERPs when they crawl your site. At the same time if your page is everythingwidgets.com/widgets/bluewidgets/lightbluewidgets it looks like you are trying to stuff your keyword in the URL string and you can get hit for over optimization. Make it reasonable but supportive and it will help.
Content is another animal altogether and one we discuss in the next post.
