SEO Consultant Ireland

SEO Consultant in the press again. This time in the InBusiness magazine by Chambers Ireland. Here are a few snippets:

Social networking websites have been around for quite a while now, with early models emerging in the mid-‘90s. Websites such as Theglobe.com and Tripod.com sought to bring online users together to interact with each other through chat rooms and shared personal information. However, no one could have been prepared for the rapid increase and popularity of sites such as Facebook and MySpace over the course of the last five or six years. Now, marketing and advertising professionals are jumping on the social networking bandwagon and offering clients online marketing packages which include profile pages on social networking websites.

According to Ivan Stojanovic, Founder and Director of SEOConsultant.ie, a consultancy firm specialising in online marketing and search engine optimisation, companies are in danger of being left behind if they fail to implement a social media marketing plan.“Companies staying away from social networking sites are going to get into a situation where their much smaller competitors all of the sudden become more well-known brands,” says Stojanovic. “The speed and reach of online social media is unmatched by anything yet,” he added.

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.

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?

Leading the search engine listings are the sites with:
1. Good Content
2. Links to your site
3. Relevant Title tags and Meta tags on your pages

It does sound easy, but is so often forgotten.

‘Good Content’

So what do this SEO people mean when they say ‘Good Content’?!

Good content is the content that is good for the visitor and the search engine. It has to be informative for people to read it, and it needs to contain keywords for the search engines to understand what it is about. Majority of the people write this way anyway. It is hard to write about search engine optimization for example without mentioning the phrase search engine optimisation in the text, isn’t it? The search engines of today are even smart enough to ‘understand’ your abbreviations in the text so one could argue that one can use the SEO instead of the full name. Unfortunately even that the search engine understands the abbreviations for the keyword ranking those are not included. Use SEO to tank for SE, but write a full search phrase: search engine optimization if you want to rank high for it.

The good content has to be unique – you cannot take the text from a page that the search engines has in their indexes already. The content duplication issues arise and those are best to be avoided. So write the original content, your content.

Relevancy is another aspect of the quality of the content that the search engines love. If your whole site is about SEO, and you have one page about Siamese cats, that poor page will never rank really high for the term it is relevant for – the Siamese cats.

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.

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.

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.

SEO: To Outsource or Not to Outsource?

A raising number of the businesses are linked one way or another to the Internet, and with it in some way with the search engine optimisation (SEO). Interment marketing plays the more and more important role every day, simply since people use internet more and more in their everyday life. Even if you see something in your local shop, you are quite likely to go online and just check the prices in the other shops, and the user reviews, the manufacturers web site…

Companies know nowadays they need to invest heavily in the Internet Marketing. Pay Per Click (PPC) is where almost everyone starts, just being seduced by the simplicity and the transparency of it. Of and not to forget – the low cost entry to the market. Some take a few days, but the majority of the PPC advertisers require more than a year to realise the real costs of the PPC, and get to the ‘Panic Mode’ looking for anything else but PPC after realising how little they got for their money invested.

A strategically important decision is usually made then, to stop the PPC and get down the organic listing route and optimise the company web site for the search engines. SEO usually then becomes a ‘Hot Potato’ in the company. If there is a separate Marketing Department and the IT Department, they will try to pass it on to each other. IN reality, the likelihood that any of the internal resources knows enough about SEO is fairly slim, since SEO is not what the company has been doing so far. So a new type of task is now within the company, and a new skill is required. The management usually fails to understand the fact that the SEO skills do not exist within the staff of the company. Therefore the majority of the initial SEO efforts are performed ‘in house’. When no results are achieved, or the results have no impact at the bottom line, the question gets raised:

To outsource or not to outsource the SEO, the question is now….?

Management will be guided by the costs of the both options to determine what route to go. Seeing the quotes from the SEO companies, as opposed to the ‘zero’ cost of performing the SEO internally puts them in front of the simple position to decide to keep the SEO in house!

This is the list of questions that should help determining if to outsource or keep the SEO in house:
1. Do we have a resources available to allocate to the SEO?
2. Do we have anyone who knows how to do SEO tasks?
3. Do we know what tasks are actually required to be done at all?
4. Do we know how much will the training cost to get our staff in the position to do SEO tasks?
5. Do we know how much time will be required to get the staff trained, and when will the training be available?
6. Do we know what is our SEO goal (why do we do it actually) in the exact numbers?
7. Can we measure our SEO successes (and failures)?
8. What is the budget for the SEO software and online tools required to perform the SEO tasks?

The above are really just the basic questions. If you cannot answer just one of those, the likelihood of any effect of your internal SEO efforts on your business are very slim.

Is your Content management System (CMS) search engine optimised (SEO)?

Here is a short check list to help you answer the question:

1. URL Rewriting
Long gone are the days where there was gibberish in the web addresses or the URLs. Funnily enough all content management systems still work with those long and complex URLs. The smart CMS-es today have a built in URL Rewriting. What does it do? It changes your URL from the gibberish looking long one to something that looks like http://domain-name/page-title. It is nice to read to both the search engine and to human. It is also memorable as opposed to the long strings of numbers and symbols. When used properly, by placing the search keywords in the parts of the URL like the domain name itself and the title of the page, a great search engine optimisation results are achieved.
2. Dynamic Title Tag
Title is a HTML tag of a huge importance in relation to the search engine optimisation of each of your page. Notice the word ‘each’ here highlighted. Since there is very little sense in having two pages on the same web site with the same title. If your CMS does not let you create the unique title tag to every single page, your web site will not be very well optimised.
3. Dynamic Meta Tags
Meta Keywords and Meta Description are the two met tags important for the search engine optimisation. As well as the title tag, if your CMS should allow the author to define the both Meta Keywords and Meta Description uniquely for each page. Note that search engine often use the Meta Description as a description of your page displayed next to the link in their search engine results pages. Therefore it is vital to write a Meta Description ‘inviting’ the surfer to click on your listing.
4. H1, H2 Styles
Search engines assign ‘higher importance’ to words used in the top highlighted styles on the page. Placing your main keywords in those styles is crucial part of the onsite search engine optimisation. If your CMS does not let you control what text gets displayed in what style your web pages will not be well optimised for the search engines.

The list actually goes on and on. Image names and Alt Tags of the images, link structures of the internal links are also very important. The problem with the content management systems is really in drawing the line between the features that will help the user in using them quickly and easily, and allowing the user to control the code of the web site. That line is hard to place, and the result is that most of the content management system simply fail since they do not find the way how to give a lot of control to the end user, while making the user interface and the usage in general easy to learn and to use day by day. From the SEO perspective, there should be as much control as possible of the final code, but from the usability point it is the opposite. A good user interface for the CMS should be easy to use and let you control the above points easily as well.

The Content is The King! –

Everyone working in the search engine optimisation industry (SEO) is asking themselves the same question: Is onsite optimisation more important than the offsite optimisation today? Are those inbound links from other sites really crucial in determining the sites ranking? Should one invest his time to do the optimisation of the page itself at all if the ranking is determined by the number and the quality of the inbound links?

Here is a test to answer to the question:

1. Register a new domain name.
2. Install some blogging software on it.
3. Set up your blogging software so that is sends a PING to the search engines when a new post is published.
4. Setup and configure the XML Sitemap generation and automatic submission after a new post is published on a blog.
5. Setup the SEO optimisation of your blog posts page – Title, Meta, URL rewriting, H1, H2,…
6. Write your first article with a Title of your blog post as the phrase you want to rank high in Google. For the purpose of this test take an easy 4 or 5 word phrase.
7. Wait from a few minutes to a few days, make a search for the phrase that is a tile of your blog post.
8. If everything is done right – you should have your blog post listed on the No 1. In Google within a week of registering a domain.

Note: there isn’t a single inbound link to that domain at all, and jet it ranks on top of the search for the specific phrase.

Conclusion:

Inbound links are important for your web site search ranking. But inbound links, regardless of their quantity or their quality (importance of the sites linking to you, and text they link to you with) cannot replace the content on your site. The test above proves the opposite scenario – where there are absolutely none inbound links, and the content on a well optimised web page itself made the page to rank on top in the search engine for the relevant keyword.

The Content is The King!