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SEO caught up with PPC!

Posted on November 17, 2008 by SEO Consultant (admin) in SEO 5 Comments

SEO vs PPC

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.


Keyword Analysis

Posted on November 9, 2008 by SEO Consultant (admin) in Google, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, SEO Consultant 4 Comments

Wordtracker:

People use different words when they search for your products online. Use these ‘keywords’ in your website copy and people will find your site when they search.

Sounds simple this Keyword Analysis, doesn’t it?

But in the reality this is it. You need to use the words you want to be found for on your own web site. Google is the Indexing Service in its essence. It reads web pages and answers the users searches based on the search phrases. Yahoo, MSN or any other search engine is the same.

So what is and how to do Keywords Analysis?

Keyword Analysis is the process of finding the keywords you should use on your site. There are number of tools that can help you expand your original list. The list can actually start from the one word. For example let’s say that this site is about ‘SEO’. The aim is that people who are looking for SEO in the search engines find this site. The most obvious way to do it is to use the keyword SEO a lot around a site. But not everyone will just type SEO in the search engine. People might type a search phrase like ‘SEO Ireland’, or ‘SEO Dublin’. Someone else will type ‘Best SEO’ or ‘SEO Company’. Someone will type ‘Search Engine Optimisation’. There are numerous ways one cal search for the topic, or something in particular about that topic. This is where Keyword Analysis comes in. Use the tools to suggest you the lists of keywords related to yours. Then put the synonyms in the tools and request suggestions for those as well. Include in your list of keywords ALL the ones related to your original term.

Keywords Analysis will give a list of thousand or more keywords. If you repeat the steps above multiple times, you will end up with a number of thousands. It is good. But what is the value of each keyword?

The value of a keyword is defined by the number of web sites competing for it (the less the better since it is more likely your site can get on top) and the volume of the searches performed for it. The more searches are made each day for that keyword the more traffic the keyword brings to the top ranked sites. Use this Keyword Value calculation to determine what are the most important keywords and take a special attention to those. Those are the keywords you will want to use a lot on your site, and most likely create a separate page dedicated to each one of them. That page will be used as a Landing Page for the search traffic for that keyword.


Google Analytics Motion Chart

Posted on October 29, 2008 by SEO Consultant (admin) in SEO 2 Comments

Google Analytics Motion Chart lets you can take advantage of advanced data exploration and visualization. If picture says a thousand words, a movie says ten thousand!




This Google Analytics Motin Chart displays the number of the pages visited by the Returing Visitos (green) and the New Visitors (Blue). The display perios is 30 days, and each dot displays one day.

You can use the visualisation of your web site visitors data to analize and understand the visitors trends. Not only can you see that the New Visitors see more pages on your site thatn the Returning Visitors, but by playing the Motion chart you acn asctually see the trend in time as well.

How to get a Motion Chart like this for your web site?

Just open the below URL and replace the ID (red 1234567 in the URL below) with your ID. Where will you find you Google Analytics Property ID?

Profile ID
The profile ID of your account can be found in the URL of your reports. For example, if you select a profile from an account and view your reports, you may see a URL string that looks like this:

https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/?reset=1&id=123456&pdr=00000000-00000000

The profile ID is the number that comes right after the &id parameter. So, in this case, your profile ID would be 123456.

https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/trend?id=1234567&rpt=VisitorTypesReport&cmp=average&ts=%7B%22showTrails%22%3Atrue%2C%22sizeOption%22%3A%22visits%22%2C%22stateVersion%22%3A3%2C%22iconKeySettings%22%3A%5B%7B%22trailStart%22%3A%222008-09-16%22%2C%22key%22%3A%7B%22dim0%22%3A%22Returning%20Visitor%22%7D%7D%2C%7B%22trailStart%22%3A%222008-09-16%22%2C%22key%22%3A%7B%22dim0%22%3A%22New%20Visitor%22%7D%7D%5D%2C%22iconType%22%3A%22BUBBLE%22%2C%22xAxisOption%22%3A%22bounce_rate%22%2C%22duration%22%3A%7B%22multiplier%22%3A1%2C%22timeUnit%22%3A%22D%22%7D%2C%22xLambda%22%3A1%2C%22yAxisOption%22%3A%22transactions%22%2C%22yLambda%22%3A1%2C%22colorOption%22%3A%22revenue_per_transaction%22%7D


Google Analytics Custom Reporting

Posted on October 28, 2008 by SEO Consultant (admin) in SEO 1 Comment

Google introduced Custom Reporting (beta) to the Google Analytics.
Here is what Google says about the new Custom Reporting:

Design a custom report to display the dimensions and metrics you want to analyze. For example, you can build custom reports to help answer questions like:
• How are my keywords performing in different countries?
• Should I target my site to Spanish users?

There is also a short video from Google:

Google Analytics Custom Reporting

Google Analytics Custom Reporting


If you are serious about understanding your traffic the Custom Reporting is exactly what you need. Then again if you do not truly understand your current traffic, you are not really in the best position to start increasing your web site traffic.


Search Phrase in the Domain Name

Posted on October 19, 2008 by SEO Consultant (admin) in SEO 1 Comment

http://www.irishjobsinireland.com/

How important is a domain name for your web site?
Hat impact will the presence of the important search phrases within your domain name have on your web traffic?
Is it important to have a search phrases in the domain name?

All interesting questions. The SEO gurus disagree completely on this, so here are the findings of the real life test of the site: http://www.irishjobsinireland.com/.

Here is a site that has a very descriptive domain name: Irish Jobs in Ireland. It contains the phrases Irish Jobs, and Jobs in Ireland. A site is published about a year ago. The site has some content as well. The number of sites are linking to it, so both Google and Yahoo visit it from time to time.

After a year the Google PR is still 0.

For the phrase: Irish Jobs in Ireland it is only on the 8th spot in Google.ie. For the Irish Jobs or Jobs in Ireland… it is not on the first page.

The concussion is that the search phrase in the domain name helps, but alone cannot do anything meaningful to your web site traffic from the search engines.


Internet Advertising Revenue 2008

Posted on October 12, 2008 by SEO Consultant (admin) in SEO 2 Comments

Despite an economic turndown, online advertising–and search marketing (SEM) in particular–is managing to keep its market intact, according to reports on Tuesday by an industry trade group and Wall Street analyst:

IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report Shows First Half of ’08 Up 15.2% From Same Period ’07.

The following data highlights key first six-month revenue data breakouts; dollar figures are rounded. ($ millions if not indicated):

Internet Advertising Revenue

Internet Advertising Revenue

Search engine marketing (SEM) companies such as Didit and Reprise Media report that third-quarter search budgets were up, mainly due to a shift from more traditional marketing to search advertising.

Will the economic downturn put a stop to this? Google that is by far the leading channel for search marketing saw its shares halved in price last week, from their top ever value (bask in 2007). Interesting times ahead!


Yahoo Web Analytics

Posted on October 9, 2008 by SEO Consultant (admin) in SEO 1 Comment

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.


Search Engine Marketing in Ireland

Posted on October 5, 2008 by SEO Consultant (admin) in Search Engine Marketing, SEM 1 Comment

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.


Search Engine Optimization Cost

Posted on October 3, 2008 by SEO Consultant (admin) in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, SEM, SEO, SEO Consultant 5 Comments

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.



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