Sunday, June 01, 2008
Essentials for Search Engine Optimisation for Your Given Niche Market (Final - Part 5)
In this post I continue with the final set of essentials about performing Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) when targeting your niche market.
So let’s get started:-
So let’s get started:-
Miscellaneous Strategies
Tell a Friend – Viral Marketing.
One of the best ways to spread word about your business is through viral marketing. Unfortunately, it is also one of the hardest to implement.
Basically, you have to provide the best product/service possible, and have great staff. If you do these two things, people will most likely refer their friends to you.
Basically, you have to provide the best product/service possible, and have great staff. If you do these two things, people will most likely refer their friends to you.
Offer visitors a compelling reason to choose you.
We are going to get into this in a bit, but I wanted to point out that each and every new visitor to your website is a potential customer. You need to give them a compelling reason to choose you among all the other competitors out there. Not only are they looking for better deals, but also for great websites, often a good office, and personable staff. That’s all stuff that you have control over – the same as with any business.
Bring some of those incentives to the table for these new customers. Give them special introductory deals, or offer free downloads on your website. Make their trip memorable, and if they can print something out or interact with your business in any way through the site – you just solidified their business.
Bring some of those incentives to the table for these new customers. Give them special introductory deals, or offer free downloads on your website. Make their trip memorable, and if they can print something out or interact with your business in any way through the site – you just solidified their business.
Use an effective multimedia squeeze page
Squeeze pages are the bane of Internet existence, but they are mandatory. I don’t care how many times you hear people say they don’t like squeeze pages, they won’t be going away…
Squeeze pages take on many forms. Some hover up over the page and make you either sign up or click the really small X to get out of them. Others are pages that don’t let you use the ‘Back’ button. Still others are just one page that almost makes you take the action they want you to. Usually you sign up for a newsletter or a free product.
Squeeze pages take on many forms. Some hover up over the page and make you either sign up or click the really small X to get out of them. Others are pages that don’t let you use the ‘Back’ button. Still others are just one page that almost makes you take the action they want you to. Usually you sign up for a newsletter or a free product.
Paid Advertising Strategies
None of the approaches described above is "free," since each takes time and energy. But if you want to grow your business more rapidly, there comes a point when you need to pay for increased traffic. Advertising is sold in one of three ways: (1) traditional CPM (cost per thousand views), (2) pay per click (PPC), and (3) pay per action, otherwise known as an affiliate program or lead generation program. Do some small tests first to determine response. Then calculate your return on investment (ROI) before spending large amounts. Here are some methods:
CPM Ads:
In a nutshell, cost per thousand views advertising is just that – a banner that you pay $5.00 or so for every thousand views it gets. It doesn’t matter if 500 people or 1 person clicks on the banner, you will be paying the same amount.
This sort of advertising makes sense if you have a banner that converts a high amount of traffic, meaning a lot of people click on it and do what you want them to – whether that is signing up for a newsletter or scheduling a session with you. If the banner doesn’t convert as well, you might look into some of these other methods.
PPC Ads:
We are going to go into this one in more detail below because it is the best starting point for paid advertisement, but Pay Per Click advertising is when you pay an amount of money per click of the ad.
For example, if you set up your campaign with the keyword “Dog training” and it cost $2.50 every click, that is how much you will pay each and every time the ad is clicked.
The most popular PPC program to date is Google Adwords, located at http://adwords.google.com. More on this program below, though.
PPA Ads:
PPA, or Pay per action, is when a user clicks and follows through with the action you want them to. For instance, if you have a banner promoting your business in Brisbane, with the text “Schedule your next training session today,” you only pay when someone actually schedules a session. The payouts are higher than either of the other two advertising options, but you only pay when you make money making this an interesting choice of advertising.
Some popular PPA programs are Commission Junction at http://cj.com and Linkshare at http://linkshare.com.
Purchase Pay Per Click (PPC) ads
As stated above, PPC ads are ones you pay for each time someone clicks on the ad. One word of warning though, if you just set up your campaign and don’t manage it – it will cost you more money than what it is worth!
The ads appear on Google and Yahoo to the right and on the top of the normal search rankings, allowing you to get a leg up on the sites who have a lot of indexed pages. The difference is you pay to be there!
Basically, you set up the keywords you want your advertisement to show up with, and you input your ad text and where you want the ad to take a user. This is all pretty easy once you sign up for an account.
Then you monitor the results and change what isn’t working! There are a couple things to know before you get too deep in PPC advertising though…
One thing to understand is each keyword is driven by bid prices. You might set up your campaign for the keyword you want e.g. ‘Dog Training’ which commands a bid price of say $2.00, meaning each time a user clicks the ad, it costs you $2.00. Say someone else comes in and wants to pay up to $5.00 each time someone clicks (increasing their rank on the page so that it appears above yours), it will increase your bid price as well. Now, you are no longer appearing at the top, and you are paying more money per click.
Another area of concern is with conversion. You have to figure out what it is you want your users to do. Once you get that straightened out, you need to create a landing page that facilitates that action. For example, if I want users to sign up for an email newsletter, then I need to make it stupid simple to do say after then click that advertisement. Then, I need to monitor how many people actually sign up for the newsletter compared to how much I am spending each month. If the results don’t stack up with the expense, you need to restructure your campaign!
Basically, the end result of a well run PPC campaign is you are investing less than you are getting out of it. That seems pretty simple right?! That is basic business strategy! Well, the fact of the matter is PPC has run a lot of small businesses into the ground because they didn’t feel they needed to manage the campaigns. After all, Google doesn’t care how many people you convert. There job was just to get the person to your site! The rest is up to you…
CPM Ads:
In a nutshell, cost per thousand views advertising is just that – a banner that you pay $5.00 or so for every thousand views it gets. It doesn’t matter if 500 people or 1 person clicks on the banner, you will be paying the same amount.
This sort of advertising makes sense if you have a banner that converts a high amount of traffic, meaning a lot of people click on it and do what you want them to – whether that is signing up for a newsletter or scheduling a session with you. If the banner doesn’t convert as well, you might look into some of these other methods.
PPC Ads:
We are going to go into this one in more detail below because it is the best starting point for paid advertisement, but Pay Per Click advertising is when you pay an amount of money per click of the ad.
For example, if you set up your campaign with the keyword “Dog training” and it cost $2.50 every click, that is how much you will pay each and every time the ad is clicked.
The most popular PPC program to date is Google Adwords, located at http://adwords.google.com. More on this program below, though.
PPA Ads:
PPA, or Pay per action, is when a user clicks and follows through with the action you want them to. For instance, if you have a banner promoting your business in Brisbane, with the text “Schedule your next training session today,” you only pay when someone actually schedules a session. The payouts are higher than either of the other two advertising options, but you only pay when you make money making this an interesting choice of advertising.
Some popular PPA programs are Commission Junction at http://cj.com and Linkshare at http://linkshare.com.
Purchase Pay Per Click (PPC) ads
As stated above, PPC ads are ones you pay for each time someone clicks on the ad. One word of warning though, if you just set up your campaign and don’t manage it – it will cost you more money than what it is worth!
The ads appear on Google and Yahoo to the right and on the top of the normal search rankings, allowing you to get a leg up on the sites who have a lot of indexed pages. The difference is you pay to be there!
Basically, you set up the keywords you want your advertisement to show up with, and you input your ad text and where you want the ad to take a user. This is all pretty easy once you sign up for an account.
Then you monitor the results and change what isn’t working! There are a couple things to know before you get too deep in PPC advertising though…
One thing to understand is each keyword is driven by bid prices. You might set up your campaign for the keyword you want e.g. ‘Dog Training’ which commands a bid price of say $2.00, meaning each time a user clicks the ad, it costs you $2.00. Say someone else comes in and wants to pay up to $5.00 each time someone clicks (increasing their rank on the page so that it appears above yours), it will increase your bid price as well. Now, you are no longer appearing at the top, and you are paying more money per click.
Another area of concern is with conversion. You have to figure out what it is you want your users to do. Once you get that straightened out, you need to create a landing page that facilitates that action. For example, if I want users to sign up for an email newsletter, then I need to make it stupid simple to do say after then click that advertisement. Then, I need to monitor how many people actually sign up for the newsletter compared to how much I am spending each month. If the results don’t stack up with the expense, you need to restructure your campaign!
Basically, the end result of a well run PPC campaign is you are investing less than you are getting out of it. That seems pretty simple right?! That is basic business strategy! Well, the fact of the matter is PPC has run a lot of small businesses into the ground because they didn’t feel they needed to manage the campaigns. After all, Google doesn’t care how many people you convert. There job was just to get the person to your site! The rest is up to you…
And Finally …
So that brings to an end our series of tips about SEO. This was a category I have spent a lot of time presenting in this blog because of the popularity of the topic and the number of requests I received to cover it. I am sure if you apply the things I have discussed here it will provide you an enormous advantage over your competitors.
So good luck with your SEO and until next time, as always I wish you every success with your business.
Kev
http://www.biztoolz.com.au
So good luck with your SEO and until next time, as always I wish you every success with your business.
Kev
http://www.biztoolz.com.au
Labels: marketing on internet
