SEO Consultant Ireland

The Search Marketing is probably the most misused term in the marketing industry in general. At least 50% of the marketers use the term incorrectly! Why?

Half of marketing people would define Search Marketing as buying paid search listings. The other half would with the paid listings within the search marketing realm include the natural search results listing within the term of search marketing.

Half of them must be wrong – but which half?

The split is actually really down to the middle. While even the top online marketing institution: Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) includes search engine optimization (SEO), most of the Marketing Agencies who are providing the service to the customers would do a very basic onsite SEO, and pour the clients budgets in the paid search advertising. Google AdWords Pay per Click (PPC) program, would in most cases take at least of 80% of the search marketing budget.

So although in theory the Search Marketing should include the SEO, the reality is that if the client doesn’t specify exactly what they are looking for – most of their money goes to PPC. This is excellent for any short term, once off publicity campaign. It is great for a rock concert ticket sales or political activists in a month before the election (and silent for the next 4 years). But for a site where you need a constant stream of new web site traffic, and you plan to run the site for more than a month or two – Google AdWords or any other PPC is probably your worst enemy. It is quick and seductive because it delivers within hours. But it will also drain your budgets if not planned properly, and leave no funds left for the SEO.

The Search Engine Optimization on the other hand is extremely slow (in Interment marketing time). Some search agencies will tell you that you have to wait for months for the results! It is not measurable up front, and a lot of SEO experience is required to properly plan the SEO budgets.

So next time you think of ordering the search marketing services, think about what your goal is (long term or short gain), and ask your search marketing company where in the SEM will they spend your money in – Is it PPC or SEO?

First there was Marketing.

Then they invented the Internet, Google, and the search engine optimization was born!

Marketing people felt under the threat. Is SEO going to replace the need for marketing in general? Where we are today in the evolution of the online marketing is that the SEO is the key ingredient of most of marketing campaigns online.

Why SEO Marketing?

Why would I bother with SEO, when I can just purchase the traffic via Google AdWords? Both SEO an d PPC have their advantages. PPC is instant, and that’s why people love it! SEO is long term investment, and is far less transparent.

SEO Marketing is unavoidable if your PPC campaign cost is getting higher and higher. Historically almost every search keyword is getting more and more expensive. There is a point where a cost per click (CPC) becomes so big that it eats up all your profit of an online sale.

When SEO Marketing?

When CPC costs overflow! Your cost of sale should be (far) below your margin, so that there is some profit at the end. Your margin is not likely to increase, but with the cost per click rising – any business gets to the stage where the cost of the visitors is simply greater than the margin – in it becomes unprofitable business model. PPC is a short sighted marketing planning. SEO Marketing is what builds sustainable long term online businesses.

If your online business is depending on the constant flow of fresh web site traffic, your best choice is the SEO marketing. If you have a once off event, like opening of a new cinema, and you need to fill it for the opening night – PPC is your best friend.

You can read a ton of eBooks, guides, or whatever else, but none of them will describe what is Twitter really, and how is it used better than the Scott’s cartoon:

Scott Hampson: “Twitter Bird In Real Life”.

How do you use Twitter for Business?

There are three basic stands you can chose when it comes to Online Marketing.

I don’t care about the Web!

You can simply chose to ignore it. Here are the reasons for it:
Your target market might not the using the Internet.
Your product or a service might not be applicable to be advertised online.
The scenarios above are less likely as days go by. So sooner or later you will have to face the fact. Internet is here!

I am monitoring it all!

Cybersleuth is by definition a person who searches the Internet for information about a company, both positive and negative, to keep abreast of public opinion by using the Web, Blogs and Social Networks.
This defines the ‘Passive’ activity on the Web. Cybersleuth absorbs information, cybersleuth is not a publisher.
Understanding your digital footprint is the core and the first step before you start managing it. You need to understand where you are, what the starting point is. You need to set your media marketing goals, and define a path how to get there from where you are.

Online Media Marketing Manager

Online Media Marketing Manager replaces the Cybersleuth with active publishing. Online Marketing is not just monitoring the media but actively publishing. Blogs, and Social Networks, Forums, Directories and all related web sites are the publishing tools. Your own web site is the main one tool an Online Marketing Manager has. Search engine optimization has the major role since it will help drive the publish to your site – traffic landing on the marketing messages you control and serve to your visitors.

Managing Search engine Results Pages (SERP) positioning of your site via the search engine optimization (SEO) most important task.

Online marketers around the globe (particularly in the UK) are increasingly turning to search marketing tactics.
Fifty-five percent of respondents said they planned to raise spending on SEO, and 45% said the same of paid search.

In addition, 31% of SEO and 32% of paid search users said they intended to maintain their budgets.

The PPC Market in Ireland is as the most industries hit hard in the last months. The bit price (CPC) for the huge range of keywords is just gone wild. The clicks are either

Extremely expensive (CPC)
That is a sign of many advertisers biding for the keyword they think is important for their business. In some cases it might be just the two advertisers having their private price war.

Unexpected big drops (in CPC)
Some keywords show huge cost per click drops, and become cheep. That is mostly the result of the big player (the big AdWords spender or a number of them) leaving the marketplace, usually with their marketing budget all spend for the period, and the keywords CPC price drops drastically.

The overall size of the Irish PPC market seems to be shrinking during early 2009. Both Google AdWords and Google AdSense publishers can see it clearly. Recession is here, and is here to stay with us for some time. It is having the impact on the online marketing and the PPC budgets are suffering in this volatile market.

It is quite easy to spend you marketing euros in the offline world. You just go to any of the leading advertising agencies and let them create the advertising campaign and let them run it for you. They will create it, and purchase the media (for a better price that what you can since they buy in big volumes) and run the campaign. You as the Marketing Manager just sit back and enjoy. Actually you also get pampered with all kinds of gifts, etc.

If by a chance your product is purely online product, or is sold online only, you are going to get into the problems. Why? Because your advertising agency that you count on is running advertisements for clients in the offline world. And the conversion rate from the offline advertisement to the online shop is as we know quite low. So what should you be looking for then?

The Online Advertising Agency creates the campaigns, and purchases the advertising space (or sometimes just traffic) from the online resources – web sites. They are the people who will get your name and logo on Hotmail, Yahoo, and all national web sites of your interest. They will also find private blogs and blog networks, that have traffic relevant to your product and place your advertisements everywhere where people potentially interested in your product ‘Hang Out’ on the web. Forums, social networks, or anything else you can think of. And yes they will also do the search engine optimisation of your own web site to bring you the natural ‘organic’ traffic from the search engines. Of course they will also manage your pay per click search engine marketing.

Have you seen an Online Advertising Agency like this in Ireland? A one stop shop for:

Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Optimisation
Link Building
Social Networking campaigns (promoting you in LinkedIN or Facebook)
Corporate Blog Management

Is Ireland simply too small for such a Online Advertising Agency to exist?

Search Engine Marketing in Ireland is in fact almost exclusively Google Search Marketing, simply because Irish usage of the search engines is dominated by the Google.ie. Yahoo in particular and MSN have a far biggest clients share in US than in Ireland. This makes Irish search marketing market much simpler, since the web users are using almost exclusively one search engine Google.ie.

Google has the Advertising program called Google AdWords. It is extremely easy to use and instantly starts delivering results – and therefore spending your advertising budget. Google enables you to publish your adverting on the right sidebar and above the search results on the relevant Google search results pages.

Google also have the program for the web publishers canned Google AdSense that enables them to resell advertising space on the number of other sites that are the part of the Google AdSense program. Google shares the generated revenue with the web site publishers that publish your ads.

Since with the Google AdWords program the advertiser is charged only when someone actually click on the ads, and a brought directly to the advertised web site, the program and the model is called Pay Per Click or simply PPC. Again since this is the only widely used service often is the Search Engine Marketing in Ireland reoffered to as just PPC.

Irish Online Marketing Market

Online marketing in Ireland is be divided in the three sectors:
1. Search Engine Marketing
2. Organic Search Engine Optimisation
3. Purchasing of the banner advertising space and various image advertisements
4. Affiliate Schemes
5. Buying links or buying web site traffic (can be a part of SEO)

1. Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing or just ‘Search Marketing’ takes the lion’s share of the Irish online marketing budget. Again, within it the majority of the budget goes to the Google AdWords pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns. A number of Irish marketing companies provide services of managing Google AdWords PPC campaigns or the end clients.

2. Organic Search Engine Optimisation
Organic Search Engine Optimisation usually called just SEO is got its name in the ‘old ages’ when one could pay search engines for prominent placement of their web site in the search engine results pages. The search results therefore consisted of Natural and Paid search listings. Google decided to separate the listings into the Natural (Organic) results, and the paid ones that it shows on the right hand side column (Google AdWords).

3. Purchasing of the banner advertising space and various image advertisements
A number of web sites sell banner space or various other shapes of the advertising spaces on their web sites. Those are usually sold by number of impressions of the banner image.

4. Affiliate Schemes
Affiliate Schemes enable people to monetise their web site traffic with placing the link to the web site, and if the sale is made on the site the affiliate get’s its cut. Because of the number of problems associated with this way of online marketing, including the total lack of transparency, it does not have a great feature.

5. Buying links or buying web site traffic (can be a part of SEO)
If another web site has the type of the visitors your site is looking for, and you are not a direct competitors, both sites get a benefit in a link from each other. A link exchange, or just straight forward link purchase or a monthly link lease is the most common option.

The most common question I get is:

How much does the search engine optimization cost?

The cost of SEO is in most cases far greater than the majority of those who asked me imagined. For some reason there is a huge percentage of people who not only think but are convinced that they should be able to get on top of the search results in Google, for next to nothing. The majority of those who had their web site designed by a younger family member or some student for a bit of cash, really strongly believe that the cost of search engine optimization should be the fraction of what they paid for the web site.

I wrote in a post SEO Budget, about the search engine optimization costs and how to estimate it.

Search Engine Optimization Cost is Determined by YOUR Marketing Goals

Do you need 100 or a 1000 visitors to look at your web site every day? The difference is 10 times in those two examples. The search engine optimization cost will be almost 10 times different to achieve those two marketing goals.

How Many Web Site Visitors do You Need?

Calculate your web site conversion rate. Let’s take it for example that you need 100 web site visitors to make one sale. Your conversion rate is therefore 1%. Now, how many sales do you want to make every day? 50 Sales? 50 sales times 100 visitors per sale equals 5000 unique visitors a day. You can calculate it for your site with the same formula.

Web Site Revenue

Now let’s take web site revenue into the equation as well. Imagine your revenue is 100 per sale. 50 sales from 5000 visitors a day with the conversion rate of 1% is 5000 a day. Note that if you manage to change the conversion rate for just 1% higher, to 2% your revenue doubles to 10000 with the same 5000 visitors, and therefore the same search engine optimisation cost.

What is your Profit per Sale?

Let’s say that your sales costs eat half of the revenue and your profit is 50. 50 sales a day and your profit is 50 on each make the daily profit of 2500.

Now let’s look at those figures on the annual basis. We had a web site with 5000 visitors with 1% conversion rate. Each sale is worth 100, and sales cost deducted the profit per sale is 50.

1 day: 50 sales of 100 each make 5000 in revenue with 2500 profit.
1 year: 18250 sales of 100 each make 1825000 in revenue with 912500 profit.

The number of unique visitors was 5000 a day so therefore 1825000 visitors in the whole year.

What is the cost of a visitor?

The cost of a visitor in search engine optimization is a theoretical figure. The cost per visitor can only be calculated in the search engine marketing terms. In the example above where there is 912500 a year profit and we know that to make that profit we require 1825000 visitors, we can simply divide the required number of visitors by the profit (marketing budget in SEM terms) and get a cost of a visitor of 0.5. That number is a defining number if the search engine marketing can or cannot be used to drive traffic to our site. If the traffic can be bought for less than 0.5 the business will be profitable. If the average visitor costs more than 0.5, the business will be in red by the end of the year.

As well as the cost of the visitor from the search engine marketing perspective, from the search engine optimisation perspective we can calculate the value of a web site visitor. It is again the same in the sample above 0.5.

How to determine the search engine optimization cost?

In the sample above there is 1.8 mil visitors required to generate 0.9 million in profit. If spread evenly during the year this means we need 5000 visitors a day. Divide the profit by the number of visitors per day and you get the value of each daily visitor of 182.5. This means that if you can pay your search engine optimisation less than 182.5 per the single unique visitor a day you will be making profit. If you are paying more you will end up in red.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Costs Vs. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Costs

NOTE: See the post about: Search Engine Optimisation vs. Search Engine Marketing.

Let’s get back to the beginning and compare the business running with investing in SEO and in SEM. You know your market so ask yourself a question:

Is it likely I will be able to pay 0.5 per click (per visitor) for a sale worth 100?

In my opinion there are not that many examples where this is possible. Now let’s look at the SEO avenue, and ask yourself if you know of a SEO company who will bring your 5000 unique visitors for 0.9 million? Now I know many SEO companies that would do it in many markets.

And now the fun part. Year 1 ended. The second you stop paying your SEM your business is on the flat line. With SEO the truth is that on the last day of year on and the first day on year two you will make the same profit, without paying anything for SEO. The search engine optimisation investment is a long term investment. When you build you rankings and inbound links, you will not really lose that traffic that quickly. At the end of the second year, you will even without investing anything in SEO still have some two thirds or more of the traffic you started the year with.