SEO Consultant Ireland

Looking for an SEO Expert?

Or are you a SEO Expert yourself?

Not? Well everyone else seems to be? So what’s wrong with you?

In reality, everyone calls themselves a SEO Expert nowadays. There are no credentials required really. Most of us think that there is no experience really required. Kind of – you get up one day and decide – today, I will call myself a SEO Expert.

And the world all of the sudden seems so different to you. You are important professional now. People are very interested to hear what you have to say.

It feels great actually to become a SEO Expert all of the sudden. It is a life changing experience. You are invited as a speaker to pretty much any conference that you can think of. If you add a bit of the social networking in the mix of your expertise – you will have to run a busy schedule! You get invited to speak and are asked for quotes from the editors of the magazines you didn’t even know existed!

You can pick the projects you want to work on. Greed clouds your judgement and you tend to choose the SEO projects with the largest budgets. Months are passing, and your clients see no benefits from their investment in you – the SEO Expert of their choice!

Problems. Project cancelations. Clients asking their money back. You of course, the SEO Expert keep on explain them that it is either their fault or that SEO takes time.

In the meantime you are also realising what works in the sales process of the search engine optimization. It really is very cool how the phrases like

• First page in Google Guaranteed
• Page 1 ranking in 30 days

Open up the check books instantly. The Guarantee works somehow as the insurance to the buyer. It can only be a REAL SEO Expert offering 100% Money Back Guarantee, right?

Clients are piling up. There is a waiting list now. You think of the expansion. I should hire SEO staff to manage the demand! If the demand slows down a bit, you can always pour a few thousands in Google AdWords, and the hungry clients will come for your SEO Services.

Soon enough, this country is too small for you…. Expansion to Europe is on the cards. Or perhaps the Far East? Or should we do the IPO first?

Such is the life of the self proclaimed SEO Expert. Not easy really. Tough choices.

Any Business Plan has to include a Marketing Plan of some sort. For the Internet based businesses our Marketing Plan will most likely be one of the main sections. When it comes to writing the Online Marketing Budget, the whole list of problems start. Why is that?

Pay Per Click Budget

Online Marketing people will like budgeting for the PPC. Why? Simply because the cost of the PPC is predictable. And the whole PPC business is accountable (if you build in the Click Fraud in your formula somewhere). There is a cost per click, and volumes, and targets and markets… lots of figures you can work with – something an accountant will love.

SEO Budget

Where is where serious question marks are raised under the accountants head! What is the budget required for the search engine optimisation? What is the units, deliverables, and values of each? With SEO it’s all far less specified and defined than with the PPC. And SEO also consists of so many areas that it might be defined very differently by various vendors. The needs for the SEO are very different by every client.

I want to be #1 in Google!

In most cases marketing people with little online experience will have serious issues when defining the Budget for the SEO in their Marketing Plan. They will ask the SEO Experts, and base their SEO Budget on the quotes from the SEO Vendors. Most likely their definition of their SEO Marketing Goals will be – We want to be #1 in Google for …! In other words, they will tell the SEO Companies nothing really relevant that is needed to create a plan of actions and analyze the market and keywords in question to be able to establish the real amount of the work required – hence the cost of it. Ballpark figures and even figures completely imagined are therefore quite common in SEO. People ordering SEO Service do not understand what part of their Marketing Plan do they HAVE to disclose for the SEO Company to give back the realistic estimate.

What’s the cost of SEO?

Marketing people with no online marketing experience usually call the SEO Companies and simply ask – What’s the cost of SEO? The tendency is to disclose as little as possible of their real needs. With a bit of shopping around – hey choose the Best SEO Offer. Not asking themselves much why do the SEO offers differ so much and why does one vendor charge sometimes 100 times more than the other. Not 100% more, 100 times more!

The reason is that the one ordering the SEO service needs to understand the exact deliverables of the SEO web site optimisation. Understanding the tasks involved in the web site optimization work also greatly helps. Understanding the whole process and timelines – well that defines the Perfect Client for SEO!

Unfortunately that is almost never the case.

Those who understand SEO tend to find time to do it all themselves.

Irish web development companies are giving away a free SEO services to their clients.

Sounds like a dream?

In most cases it is not really free as advertised. In most cases it is a free SEO package offered to the clients who purchase a web site from a web development company. Another approach that web development companies take is to offer a free SEO service as a ‘Draw’. To enter a draw, they will ask you to send them an email, or fill a questionnaire online where they will ask you all about your company, and your marketing and SEO budget. A bit like the shops ask you to reveal a bit of your privacy, and take their shopping card so that they can understand your shopping habits, usually for a bunch of vouchers worth up to 1% of your purchases.

It is a nice way of collecting leads for the web development companies selling SEO services, and if marketed properly it generates good leads and business as a result.

Here is an example of Irish web development ICAN giving away a free SEO service and advertising it currently via Google AdWords in IIA web site Blog.

Free SEO anyone?

To make sure the search results are relevant and SPAM clean Google doesn’t rank well two web sites that contain the same content. This is to prevent the search results for a term being a copy of one another. Google wants to present a variety of the most relevant results – not copies of even the most relevant.

To achieve this Google, and any other search engine for that matter has to make sure it does not contain more than one copy of the same site in its index. Bear in mind that the different images and different colours and font styles mean nothing to Google since Google is a text search engine. The fact that the web site can look completely different to the visitor means nothing to the search engine as long as the text on the pages is the same.

http://www.copyscape.com is a search engine that is looking for the sites that are similar to yours. It is actually connection to the Google API to find duplicates. If you feel you have a problem ranking your site it is worth checking if there is another copy on the web.

Why is my web site copied?

Web traffic has a value. Web traffic can be monetised. Google AdSense is one of the simplest ways to do it. IF you have a web site with visitors, Google will gladly become your partner and serve the ads from their Google AdWords customers on your pages.

The content of the page is the key of acquiring the web site traffic from the natural results in the search engines. This is why people copy your content to publish it to their own web site. Is it legal? Absolutely not. Does it hurt your web site ranking – in most cases yes. Should yo be doing something about it – yes if you intend to rank your website content high in the search engine results pages.

SEO Consultant (we) also provide the service of managing the duplicate content issues for the clients. Contact us and we can help you if your content gets copied.

The world of internet marketing is changing. Where are those banners from the ’90-ies? Google made a revolution with its AdWords pay per click programme that dominates the internet advertising market. No other competitor actually ever came close to the Google’s AdWords. The predictions for the future are further growth, in this booming industry.

One thing caught my eye, and that is the comparison of the search volume of the two abbreviations the pay per click – PPC and the search engine optimization – SEO. PPC was dominant but SEO was catching up in the last couple of years. In the last couple of months it is actually hard to separate the two keywords. It just shows the growing importance and awareness of the search engine optimization in the internet marketing world.

The most important tool for any online marketer is the log analyser. It reads your web site log files and generated various reports to present the data in the user readable and understandable value. Younger online marketers, probably don’t even know what the log analyser stands for, since Google bought Urchin, and made it free and publicly available in its online incarnations as Google Web Analytics. It the ‘Learn From the Best’ fashion Yahoo bought IndexTools some 6 months ago, an today announced the availability of Yahoo Web Analytics.

Yahoo has a bit strange ‘Go To Market’ strategy in letting only a limited number of users to it. Their message printed between the lines is that if you become an advertiser with the Yahoo Search Marketing – ‘apt’.

And this is where Yahoo got it all wrong and missed a huge opportunity. Yahoo is here just chasing the direct revenue, with giving a free Yahoo Web Analytics to those who pay for advertising in their channel. What they should have done instead is to use the same carrot on the stick approach and give it free to the publishers of their ads. It would widen their ads network and made it more interesting to the advertisers.

But then again, Google with its the largest online advertising channel AdWords, is giving Google Analytics for free to anyone? Yahoo should have a much better product to create a compelling reason to switch.

If you had enough of reading about SEO, that is supposed to be so simple and easy, and jet somehow does not happen with YOUR site, here is an easy way out! The PPC World of Google AdWords. Here is the Table of Contents of the Whitepaper published earlier this year (see About section for the authors).

I only got the short sample but an interesting chart in it already about the Irish PPC market. It is the breakdown of the industries that people are using PPC most (Does it give you an idea what your next AdSense rich Blog should be about?). If you have the full copy of the whitepaper, I would not mind reading more about the PPC, so send it on!

Ireland Search Engine Marketing Report 2008
April, 2008

The research has been supported by the Irish Direct Marketing Association (IDMA) and the Irish Internet Association (IIA).

Table of Contents

1. About E-consultancy 4
2. About research sponsors 4
2.1 About ICAN 4
2.2 About Cybercom 5
2.3 About Interactive Return 5
2.4 About RingJohn 5
3. Executive Summary and Highlights 6
4. Introduction 8
4.1 Introduction by ICAN 8
4.2 Methodology and Sample 9
4.2.1 Methodology 9
4.2.2 Turnover 10
4.2.3 Business Sector 10
4.2.4 Is search done in-house or by an agency? 11
5. Survey Results 12
5.1 Budgets 12
5.1.1 Percentage of total marketing budget spent online 12
5.1.2 Breakdown of online marketing budget by digital channel 13
5.1.3 Search engine marketing budget split 14
5.1.4 Do you expect budgets to increase or decrease? 15
5.1.5 Search engine marketing spend 16
5.1.6 How much are search budgets going up? 17
5.1.7 Allocation of paid search spending 18
5.2 Objectives and effectiveness 19
5.2.1 Primary objectives from search engine marketing 19
5.2.2 Relative importance of paid search and SEO on brand 20
5.2.3 How digital channels rate for return on investment 21
5.2.4 Return on investment (ROI) from Search 22
5.2.5 Tracking return on investment from Search 23
5.2.6 Effectiveness of ROI tracking 24
5.2.7 Use of web analytics tools 24
5.2.8 Rising click costs (CPC) 25
5.3 Search Engines 26
5.3.1 Search engines used for PPC 26
5.3.2 Best search engines for ROI 27
5.3.3 Is dominance of Google a threat? 28
5.4 Search problems and issues 29
5.4.1 Paid Search problems 29
5.4.2 SEO problems 30
5.4.3 Availability of training 31
6. Market overview 32
6.1 Market valuation and growth 32
6.1.1 Key sectors 33
6.2 Market trends 34
6.2.1 Advertisers seize opportunities as market matures 34
6.2.2 Search advertisers get more savvy as competition increases 35
6.2.3 Polarisation between sophisticated and unsophisticated 37
6.2.4 Google dominates as other search engines fail to step up 38
6.3 Barriers to digital marketing growth 41
6.3.1 Slow uptake of broadband 41
6.3.2 Traditional mindset of marketers 41
6.3.3 Skills gap and lack of understanding 41
6.3.4 Lack of transparency in market 42
6.3.5 Other barriers 42

Well perhaps not really ‘The Ultimate’ but certainly the interesting one. It is far more geared towards helping you to manage your Google AdWords campaign (or basically steal your competitors one!), but has an interesting SEO Ranking report as well.

Their SEO ranking tool is missing the Internationalisation that they support quite well in the Payd Keywords analysis, and that is the major drawback on the usage for of the KeywordSpy for the International search engine optimisation.

This is what the KeywordSpy marketing blob says about themselves:

Find which keywords your competitors are using!
Increase your Ad Campaign revenue by finding the most profitable keywords.
Get access to over a billion keywords in our database.

KeywordSpy is certainly the one to keep an eye at, since they are adding new and interesting features fast as well.