Search Engine Optimization Outline

Select Keywords

Keywords form the foundation of an effective online marketing strategy. If you don’t take time to select the most relevant keywords to your campaign, you’ll never attract the right kind of traffic.

Start with a nomination list – Don’t be afraid to start with hundreds or thousands of potential keywords. Keyword ideas can be found anywhere from keyword tools and website analytics to competitor sites and marketing collateral.

Refine the nomination list – find your most important keywords by asking how easily a potential keyword can convert into revenue, how much traffic the keyword has, and whether or not your site can compete for it.

Get Traffic

Search engine rankings can be affected by more than 200 different factors. These factors can be grouped into onsite, offsite, and technical categories.

Onsite – You won’t start gaining traction in your SEO campaign until you create relevant, keyword-rich content on your website.

Offsite – The quality and quantity of offsite links are two of the most important factors Google considers when ranking sites. Boost your rankings by earning quality links from strategic keywords.

Technical – Poor web coding not only affects usability, but it can also hinder Google from reading your site properly and hurt your chances of ranking.

Convert Visitors

Traffic is great, but unless your new visitors complete an action, increased traffic will never translate into increased revenue. A great SEO campaign places a strong focus on improving the sales funnel.

Focus on calls to action – effective calls to action tell your visitors what to do next. Know your audience and use the calls to action that speak to them directly.

Streamline forms – The more hoops your users have to jump through, the more business you’ll lose. Create forms that are as straightforward as possible.

Measure Results

SEO is not a one-time fix. To get the most out of your efforts, you should constantly update your campaign based on results. Metrics to consider are covered in ascending order of importance.

Rankings – By getting your keywords to rank above the fold on the first page, you can grow your traffic exponentially.

Visitors – Measure not only how many visitors come to your site, but how they got there and what they did once they arrived.

Conversions – Assign a dollar value to all types of conversions on your website to make tracking and measure ROI possible.

Revenue – Increasing revenue is a combination of attracting new visitors and converting those visitors into customers. Thorough analytics that tie revenue to specific actions are invaluable for evaluating and improving a campaign.

Resources

Top ten tips for local optimization

Best keyword tools

Best link building tools

Search Engine Marketing Outline

10 tips for improving online advertising results

Select Effective Keywords – keywords are what causes your ads to show up to people that are searching. If you use the wrong keywords you may pay more than is necessary for click through traffic and/or get the wrong people to visit. Be sure to spend time with the Google Adwords planner or third party services like Word Tracker to identify good keywords.

Strong Headline – you need a headline that will get attention. This should be where at least 80% of your effort is at in preparing an ad, next create a strong offer. The ad must be clicked on to have any chance of working and not be deactivated for failure to generate clicks.

Persuasive copy – your copy is extremely limited in online advertising you need to make every single word count. It must be an offer so good the prospect can’t resist. Once your prospect reaches your landing page you have the ability to use more copy, remember to follow the motivational sequence and FAB pyramid when writing copy.

Call to action – your landing page must have a call to action to be successful. Without a well-defined and easily spotted call to action your landing page and hence entire campaign will be a failure.

Enticing Offer – an offer is simply what you are promising them and what do they have to do to get it. An offer is tied to your call to action, but must be enticing to be acted upon. If your offer is dull. Boring, or has no appeal to your target market you campaign will likely fail. Your offer must be very enticing to motivate your visitors to do the call to action.

Consider video – video is a powerful tool in today’s online marketing world. Consider including a video on your landing page to assist you in selling the offer. Statistics suggest that visitors that go to a page with video will watch the entire video.

Unique Landing Page – every pay to click or campaign should go to its own unique landing page. Never re-use landing pages and never cross contaminate your campaigns. A unique landing page assures that you track all prospects from beginning to end and know the exact amount of conversions a given campaign produces.

Google Analytics – make sure your landing page has Google Analytics installed on it so that you can track both visitors and conversions. If you are also using Google Adwords for advertising you can tie the entire campaign together by using Google Analytics.

Test and Refine – Test and refine all of your ads and landing pages by using A/B splits, multivarient testing. Remember to only test one element each time you run a test. Be sure you test something every time you run an ad to insure you are always collecting data for analysis.

Measure costs – be sure you measure the cost of every click and the total cost of your campaigns so you can ultimately measure the cost per lead or cost per sale, which are vital to determining your success as a direct marketer. You have only two ways to produce more profit in any campaign, sell more stuff or reduce costs. You can’t effectively reduce costs if you don’t know what they are.

Advertising Cycle Elements Model

Be found, find business and manage your brand

Directional

Print advertisements like yellow pages and yellow book

Local online searches like classifieds, google places, and yellow pages / yellow book

Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing

Presence

Web Sites

Video Ads

Audio Ads

Text Ads

Ratings and Reviews

Social Media

Reputation Management

Awareness

Local online display

Internet Mail – email blasts

Direct Mailing

Radio

Television

Billboards

Newspaper

Magazine

Social Media

Blogging

Promotional

Texting

Direct Mail

Email

Coupons

Gift Certificates

Reward Program

Social Media

Consumers want their info available anytime and anywhere. Businesses want to be available to consumers.

Buyers know you…

Recommendations by other customers

Advertising influenced

Solicited

Passers by

Former Customers

Buyers don’t know you…

Newcomers

Emergency Buyers

Dissatisfied Customers

Infrequent Buyers

Competitive Bid Shopping

Tourists

You must target your market, create headings for those markets, display ads for those markets, landing pages for the ads to land on, and analytics to track the results.

Memories are very short

1 Day – 25% forget what they saw

2 Days – 50% forget what they saw

4 Days – 85% forget what they saw

7 Days – 97% forget what they saw

81 / 100 customers are lost in 10 years and in the first 3 years you lose approximately half of customers ( 50 ish ).

68% of people leave your services because of neglect.

Successful campaigns consist of a consultation with an expert, customized campaigns for your business and market, connecting with a landing page, AB testing and optimizing, tracking and reporting, and integrating media and interactive elements.

A display ad is a graphical advertising on the World Wide Web that appears next to content on web pages, instant messaging, applications, email, etc.  These ads often referred to as banner ads come in standard sizes that allow developers to prepare format specific pages. Ads can include text, logos, pictures, and media.

	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014
Search Marketing	15,393	17,7658	20,763	24,299	27,786	31,588
Online display Advertising	7,829	8,395	9,846	11,732	14,339	16,900
Email Marketing	1,248	1,355	1,504	1,676	1,867	2,081
Social Media marketing	716	935	1,217	1,649	2,254	3,113
Mobile marketing	391	561	748	950	1,131	1,274
Interactive total	25,577	29,012	34,077	40,306	47,378	54,956
Interactive % of total ad spending	12%	13%	15%	17%	19%	21%

*from Forrester Research – Numbers in the millions

Sale revenue increased 250% from customers exposed to both online display ads and search ads!

These ads also increased offline (in-store sales) by 18%!