How SEO and PPC Can Optimize Each Other

February 14, 2011 By Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

Search engine optimization and paid search marketing have always been like “neighbors” to most companies and agencies instead of “family”. Some small businesses I have worked with in the past have outsourced one function while having a in-house resource for the other. This is fine and can be very successful but the lack of communication between the two that happens the majority of the time, causes inefficiencies in optimization of both functions. If your company resembles this condition here are some tips on how SEO and PPC Marketing can help optimize each other.

Have your search engine marketing and paid search work together

Benefits of Optimization of Paid Search Marketing and Search Engine Optimization

There have been a few studies done on this topic that have shown when you combine a website that ranks high from SEO with paid search ads being displayed on the same keyword you double your overall traffic from that keyword. In 2007 a company called I Company did an in depth study called “Natural & Search Symbiosis” that showed:

92% increase in clicks
45% increase in actions taken on the site
45% increase in orders
44% increase in page views
40% increase in visitors
40% increase in time spent on site

If you think about it, it just makes sense. Your taking up more valuable real estate in which your potential customers see you more and you are also limiting the competition to be seen as well.

Share Top Converting Keywords

By sharing the top converting search engine optimization keywords and paid search keywords with each function you give yourself a great opportunity to increase your conversion rates on both sides by:

Allowing PPC to incorporate those keywords into their campaign
Allowing search to raise positioning for those terms should they already be within a specific search campaign
Give SEO more keywords to target
Give SEO valuable information that will drive a targeted link building campaign

Share Top Search Ads & SEO Titles

SEO is just not about high rankings but click throughs as well. Don’t get me wrong, you need high placement from SEO to get traffic but once you are placed in the top 10 for a specific keyword your title of the page is what drives the visitor to click similar to your paid search ad drives click as well. A great tactic I have used is to incorporate top ad titles from your search marketing ads as page titles for your SEO pages and vice versa. If you are already seeing that visitors are responding to these titles with a high click rate then why not maximize this?

By using a co-optimized method it will prove that the limitations of one discipline can be helped by the strengths of the other. This will help keep PPC costs down and drive overall conversions and efficiency up. If done correctly, this dual optimization will save you time and money by giving your team more time to test, more time to report, and more time to refine each campaign.

Small Business SEO Needs Link Building The Most

February 4, 2011 By Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

Over the past week I have had many questions sent to me from small businesses asking me about link building and how difficult and time consuming it is. I even had one person say I was mis informing the visitors who come to my site by saying that link building strategies are mandatory to your sites overall SEO health and growth. So I dusted myself off and figured I would talk more about it and convenience this one visitor on how building links is necessary to their small business success on the Internet.

So why build links?

Boosts your rankings by what other people say (link). Search engines give more relevance to what others says about your site over what you say.
You drive highly qualified traffic to you site. These visitors are pre qualified and are in a good frame of mind to react to your product or services. Links are not just about rankings.
They build trust. Any link from a trusted site will make your site more trustworthy. This is a real good thing as for every trusted site there are hundreds that are not trustworthy.
They connect you to the authoritative people and sites within your industry. Kind of think of it as the original LinkedIn.
Links attract more links. Kind of think of it as the rich get richer!
They position you as a leader in the space or industry. They also make you harder to move out of the top search engine spots and make it near impossible to receive top placement if you don’t have them.

How to find inbound links?

Let’s talk about the challanges before we go into how to find quality links. The challanges are:

Finding
Evaluating
Organizing
Analyzing

Finding quality sites is not that hard really but it is time consuming and this is what trips people up. Start with competitor sites and use tools such as Yahoo’s SiteExplorer and SEOMOZ’s Open Site Explorer to find the sites you may be able to get a link from. This types of sites linking to them would be:

Directories
Business Partners
Trade Associations
Paid Links
Guest Blogs
Article Marketing Sites
Product Description Sites
News Sites
And More.

The goal is to find relevant and authoritative sites, not just any site to get a link from. They key is to find links from different domains giving you a diversified linking profile. This is what the search engines want to see. Remember, it’s about the number of different domains linking to you not the amount of links. Another good way to find good linking opportunities is to perform keyword searches on your favorite search engine. This will give you sites that have generated a diversified linking profile and in the search engines eyes are highly authoritative. People love to write and link about high authoritative web sites!

Link building is about good links. What is the difference?

Is it related to your industry?
Is the links followed by the search engines? Links that are no followed are just not as good as followed links. There are many tools out there to help you find no followed links but one I like is the SEO Book and SEOMOZ’s toolbars that incorporate this feature.
Are the pages with the outbound links indexed in the major search engines?
Does the site invite guest articles or blog posts?
Does the site itself have a good linking profile?
Has articles from the site been published anywhere?
Does it have quality content?
Does the content attract comments?
Are the links within the body copy of the article?
Do the links go away or are removed?

Sounds to good to be true right? Well, honestly it is not quantum physics but there are plently if things that can trip up the link builder such as:

Reason for linking not strong enough – you have got to get personal with your requests. Canned requests get you no response and no responses will burn out the people link building.
Not enough time researching link prospect – does the link builder real researching the site to see if it is owned by a sister company that shows the link as a backlink? I see this happen a lot.
Not linking to relevant websites – many link builders get see a directory or a form and run to fill it out without seeing if the linking site is a industry fit for your site.

So what does link building mean to your small business SEO?

Everything really as good rankings start and end with links and how your link profile is seen by the majority of search engines. The number and quality of links pointing into your website is one the most important factors in your online success. While on-page SEO, good spider crawl-ability, and quality content helps, it is the links that ultimately matter the most.

Filed Under: Link Building Tagged With: Guest Blogs, inbound links, link search engines, linkedin, Paid Links, quality sites, SEO, seomoz, site explorer, siteexplorer, small business success, small businesses, top search engine

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Mistakes Small Business Makes

January 13, 2011 By Frank Pipolo 1 Comment

Some of the things that small businesses make when performing their own search engine optimization:

SEO Your Home Page For “Home”

Sure, it’s your home page, but that doesn’t mean that you want it to rank for the word “home.” Unless you’re a real estate company or a homebuilder or a “home improvement” company, it makes no sense to call your home page “Home”. Actually, I would argue that you would not want to do this even if your site could be optimized for the term “home”.

Your home page is by far the most important page on your site as the search engines give the home page an extra “boost” in the search rankings. Why? Honestly, you only have one home page that sits on the root domain or the www.xxx.com. Don’t believe me? Do a search on Google and see how many pages are in the top 10 that are the home page. A search for “home improvement” showcases 7 out of the top 10 that are the root domain home page. Home pages should be targeted to the primary terms that you’re trying to rank for. For example, if you’re a homebuilder in Tampa, your home page title should target your homebuilding services in Tampa and the County of Hillsbrough.

Duplicate Meta Title and Description Tags

Your title meta tags is the most important part of your “on-page” SEO. It sets the theme for the copy that is on that page and notify the search engines what this page is all about. The description tag may or may not be used by the search engines but play a major role in encouraging a visitor to click on your listing. Your pages aren’t all the same, the content is different (at least it had better be), different topics are broached, different products/services sold. So you need to have each title and description tag be unique as well.

Yes, you may be “The premier Tampa homebuilder,” but that’s not what every page is about. Tailor your meta tags to the content of each page, target the right keywords for each page. Your list of model homes for sale should have meta tags reflecting that, while the page for each model should talk about that model as well.

Make Your Calls To Action Sing

“Read More” or “Click Here” may work OK for your visitors but for search engines not so much. The text inside a link (called anchor text) is extremely important as it tell the search engines what the link is about. If you HAVE to use “click here” make that regular text and use more keyword enriched text as the anchor text.

SEO Is Not Set It & Forget It

We live in a society that wants instant success after completion. If you believe SEO is like this you are mistaken and will become discouraged with your SEO results. What you do now in terms of your search engine optimization will reap the results in 3-12 months depending on keyword terms your are targeting.

Search algorithms (how the search engines rank web sites) change on an almost daily basis. Your competition isn’t necessarily sitting back sipping iced tea waiting for the traffic to roll in.

Even keywords change as new phrases enter the arena and may begin to outpace the ones you were initially targeting. If your corporate strategy changes, don’t you think the optimization efforts on your site may need to change? Monitoring your site needs to happen in order to continue to optimize. It’s amazing how many sites haven’t implemented an analytics solution or at least don’t have one implemented correctly. Does your analytics solution track your entire sales funnel? Do you know where in the sales process you lose the majority of your prospects? If you do not, you are not optimizing your site to it’s full potential.

The Will To Wait

We all want to wake up tomorrow and see the orders flowing and our site traffic skyrocketing. SEO is an investment of time and money. It takes some time for you to see the results and for a small business that can be extra hard but the worst thing you can do is rush for SEO success. You will end up hurting much more than helping your site and could potentially penalize your site for good. It takes time to get the new pages crawled, to get the right, good quality links into the pages, and for them to move up the rankings. All the players involved in the SEO process must understand this. So set the expectations early and frequently with clear communication.

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization Tagged With: OK, optimization, SEO, small businesses