SEO Consultant Ireland

Here is a short checklist for creating your online marketing budget. Print it and try to set a figure next to each of the activity listed below:

Copywriting

• Web site copy
• Blog
• Press Releases
• Whitepaper
• Newsletter

Link Building

• Related Industry Directory
• Geographical Directory (your Local, or your  target market’s Local)
• Link exchange with related sites
• Blog commenting
• Forum participation

Branding

• Social Networking activity
• Company blog comments maintenance

Paid Advertising

• PPC
• Banners
• Link Purchases
• Blog or blog post sponsoring

As a general rule the best results are achieved if the budget is evenly spread between the marketing activity groups above. The tasks should be performed more or less in the sequence as listed above.

Each online marketing plan is specific to the companies activity on the web. It will contain clear goals and targets to be achieved. Make sure your online marketing budget is adequate to achieve your online marketing goals.

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?

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.

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

Blogging is the extension of a company marketing department or a public relations department.
There certainly is a need for a dedicated resource to mange not only the company blog, but the whole plethora of the social media sites and online networks.

How to structure and organise your company blogging?

Create a new position. Call it a ‘Chief Blogger’ or however your companies position titles are structured. Do not make it report to the Marketing manager, but to the same head where the Marketing Manager is reporting. Allocate a percentage of your marketing budget to the Blogging Department.

What should a Chief Blogger do?

Company Business Blog
The first step into the blogging world is to create a company blog under the company domain. Structure your blog based on the type and amount of the content you intend to publish, and the participation (content contribution in the form of comments, etc) you are looking for. Publish your initial ‘static’ articles about your company, services or products. Start blogging!

Social Networking
Search for the blogs related to yours. Leave comments, contribute in discussions. Develop the ‘Trust’ and the feeling of the ‘Authority’, associated with you and your company name. Trust and respect will help you bring visitors to your blog. Some of those visitors are partners and some your future clients! The sales process is far shorter if they see you as an authority in your industry!

Matt Cuts is a good example of a Business Blogging for Google: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

Online Marketing Budget:
Search Engine Optimisation vs. Search Engine Marketing

Any web site owner wants to get visitors on their web site. Therefore the web site owners are competing for the same visitors. There is a definite total number of people surfing the web. The number of web sites is growing relatively faster than the number of the new surfers. The majority of the new visitors to most of the web sites are brought by the search engine.

The search engines realised long ago that not every web site can get to the top of the searches for their relevant keywords so they invented the Search Engine Marketing to enable the web site owners to pay for the inclusion in the listing on the right hand side (and sometimes even above!) the natural search engine results.

There are therefore two ways of getting your site listed in Google. One is to optimise your web site and wait for Google to index it and rank it higher, or you can just pay and get listed as high as you want instantly! The problem with the SEM approach is that the moment you stop paying to Google, you have stopped the flow of the new visitors. The problem with the SEO is that it is far less transparent, the results are far from instant. The majority of the SEO Consultants use the month as a measurement unit to describe the best case scenarios of your future ranking increases.

That brings us to the conclusion that both search engine Marketing and search engine optimisation have it’s place in increasing the visitors numbers on your site. It purely depends on the web site goals. If you are in the game for a long term, and are ready to wait for months for the results, but are dedicated to get the majority of the traffic for a set key phrase, the SEO is for you. If ou have a need to get as much traffic as you can ASAP, the SEM is the definite way to go.

The real life examples:

Search Engine Optimisation
If you are a site that sells a product or a service, where there are number of sites selling the same in your market, the SEO is your best friend. In the long run it will deliver far better return on the investment.

Search Engine Marketing
If you have a new product or a service that no one else has jet in your market, and you want to capitalise on your unique but probably time limited position SEM is the way to go for you. SEM sill instantly start delivering, and the cost per visitor is very transparent and manageable. The SEM budget is probably the easiest marketing budget to manage, since it the transparency if the costs. That is why marketing people just love it. Instant setup and delivery and no minimal investment required. In the marketing world the search engine marketing is truly unique.

The attractiveness of the search engine marketing compared to the search engine optimisation made it win many battles. It is far easier to put X% of your budget against SEM that you know what (and when) to expect from, but SEO that is as undefined as …. well, probably nothing a marketer has encountered jet. SEO to be performed on the web site involves editing the web site itself. That means that either the IT department or an external web development company needs to get involved, and the complexity of the project is just growing out of hands or a marketing person who controls the budget.

Search engine optimisation is a strategic decision that has to be made above the marketing department to be able to function. It involves higher management whose time is precious, and since this is a new task for them, it is not likely they will get involved. They will fail understanding that the SEO should not be left to the marketing department to manage, or especially the IT people. SEO consultant will require the IT department to perform a serious of task, so if the IT manages SEO consultants who then delegates back to them – it is a guaranteed formula for troubles and nothing done in the end.

For all those reasons far more companies have invested in search engine marketing than in search engine optimization. The result of that is that there is more and more competition in the SEM. Since SEM operates as an auction, the more the interesting parties, the higher the (bids) prices. The hike in the prices for the important keywords driven by the volume of the advertisers is now making advertisers rethink their online marketing strategies. Search engine optimisation is of course the obvious way to go for those who are in the online marketing game for a long run.