SEO Consultant Ireland

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.

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.

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.

Anyone who has a web site where the traffic is crucial to the success of the web site is pulling his hairs in the last couple of months. Why? On average the total amount of the Internet traffic is falling. If you monitor the web traffic of 100 or more web sites, you cannot not to notice the negative trend. And the general trend is a decline.

What does the recession have to do with it?

It is not really the question to answer. There are a number of the scenarios one can imagine:

1. There are less people working, so perhaps less people with the internet access.
2. People are more busy since their colleagues have been made redundant and their workload is spread on the remaining staff.
3. People just do not want to be seen surfing in the office – since they are afraid for their jobs.
4. People have better things to do but to surf endlessly.
5. …I am sure there are many more reason you can think of.

It is the first time in the history of the web (I am sure you like those ‘Biggest Recession’ phrases by now) that the overall Internet traffic volume is decreasing.

But don’t despair! If your traffic is falling, there is the SEO Consultant to get your traffic growing again!

The importance of blogging for business is pretty much undisputed at this stage. Even the worst ‘hard core conservative’ marketers do admit that the blog is one of the most powerful online marketing tools in existence today. The problem with blogs is that it is not easy to start, and it is even harder to keep it going. Here are a few tips on how to make your blog successful:

1. Blog about your work
Choose a blog topic, and a perspective to the topic that is closely related to your day to day work. You cannot really blog about what you do exactly, since it is quite likely going to reveal the company secrets. You need to find and angle or the perspective that will allow you to completely open and express yourself, in writing about the topic.

2. Make Blogging a Part of Your Work
To me able to continue publishing your blog post constantly, you need to allocate time for it. You need to schedule a time when you will not be distracted by your phone, email, instant messaging, Skype, colleague inviting you for a cup of coffee. Blogging for Business has to be treated as a serious business. If you allow blogging to be low on the list of your priorities, your blog will suffer from irregularity of posting. If you do not devote your time to it, it will most likely simply… wilt.

Business success is a blog killer!

If you business blog is not about your own business, you are likely to quit blogging quickly! I just noticed I did not post a single blog post to my blog for a full 10 days. I was simply too busy. Clients ringing, requesting, demanding,… and you just do not have the time. Well it is all wrong. You need to plan, and manage the changes the blogging brings:
1. Allocate the time required for blogging
2. Allocate the additional time (resources) required to manage the increase of the new business that came as a result of blogging
3. Make sure the increased volume of your primary work does not eat up the time you allocated for blogging initially!

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.