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Case Study- More Than Doubling Lead Conversion Rate

February 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Scott Desind and Mike Klijian are traffic ticket attorneys based in southern California. They were referred to us from TicketKick, a client that we manage SEO / Google rankings for that is also in the ticket services business.

The Traffic Ticket Attorneys (TTA) were in need of a new website in addition to development and management of an effective SEO / Google rankings strategy as part of their 2012 growth plans for the firm.

We worked with The Traffic Ticket Attorneys to launch an updated website with a professional design, integration of SEO best practices, and lead-generation focused layout. In addition, we helped TTA develop and integrate effective online traffic / lead reporting in order to ensure that the profitability of all online marketing efforts over time.

Immediately after launching the website, the rate of visitors that turn into leads (i.e. conversion rate) increased by more than 100% resulting in a higher volume of leads produced from the same amount of website traffic. In addition, we’re working with TTA to increase the traffic they receive through SEO / Google rankings over time.

Filed Under: Case Study

Questions to Ask Before You Hire That SEO Consultant

February 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

These days, SEO is a must in nearly every business. With that said, there are multiple providers that your business can go to for SEO services, so it’s getting harder and harder to make a choice that you’re still happy with 6 months down the road.

When considering which SEO agency or consultant to hire, there are a number of questions that you should ask. This is important due to the nature of SEO- it’s a specialized skill set that requires years of “in the trenches” experience to know how to get results for clients.

Below are 4 questions to ask and answers to watch for when evaluating an SEO consultant…

Question- How Does Google Rank Websites?

Even if you’re already familiar with how SEO works, it’s important that you ask this question to gauge the prospective consultant’s knowledge in SEO as well as their ability to communicate this knowledge in a clear way.

We explain that there are 3 factors that determine whether your website gets ranked on Google:

  1. Can Google access your website, in terms of how it’s technically structured
  2. Does Google understand your content, in terms of what topics you write about
  3. Does Google consider you an authority on the topic(s), in terms of how many other websites online refer to you about this topic (i.e. websites linking to your website).

Every SEO provider is going to explain Google rankings differently, but if the provider has trouble explaining this basic question then that’s a read flag…there are going to be communication problems down the road.

Question- Will You Optimize My Meta Keywords?

Meta keywords are keywords that you can input into the website code of any webpages. While they’re easy to update, they’re not influential anymore for Google rankings.

In short, meta keywords used to be a must in an SEO project but they are no longer important (see it straight from a Google employee here). If a potential SEO provider doesn’t know this, then that’s a red flag in that they’re not up on the times regarding what works in SEO (Google debunked meta keywords in 2009…).

However, a more common situation is when an SEO provider knows meta keywords don’t matter but they don’t try to explain this to you…instead, they say “yes, we’ll optimize each webpage’s meta keywords” or something along those lines. This is a red flag that shows the consultant may not be able to truly drive the project from an expertise perspective…you’re paying for SEO expertise, so make sure your consultant is willing to communicate that to you.

Question- How Will You Build Links to My Website?

In order to increase the authority and ranking of your website on search engines, you need to be sure to get links from other websites on the internet. There are numerous ways to do this, but only some are effective in increasing your search engine rankings.

A good rule of thumb is that if the link building tactic builds 10’s or 100’s of links within a matter of 5 days and can be repeated anytime, then it’s most likely not effective. This includes blog commenting, article syndication, press releases, etc. The reasoning for this is that Google knows that you and not the market are the one building links, so they diminish the authority signals that these links send.

A good link building tactic is one that leverages a unique aspect of your business (i.e. expert content creation, connections to other businesses or associations, etc.) and is baked into your business to be leveraged over time. For example, we work with clients to create multiple guest blog posts per month that are then published to influential industry blogs. This tactic has proven effective in acquiring highly competitive rankings for our clients.

If your SEO consultant talks about submitting your website to directories, syndicating online articles, or commenting on blogs or discussion forums, then this shows that they most likely do not have a strong link building strategy in place and will have difficulty increasing your rankings.

Question- What Metrics Are You Trying to Influence?

In SEO, it’s not about getting rankings…it’s about driving website traffic and leads / sales. Although rankings are a piece of that puzzle, they’re not the end all be all of a successful campaign.

The most direct metric that SEO impacts is non-brand organic search traffic. In short, this means (a) traffic that comes from non-paid search engines, such as Google (b) the keyword typed on the search engine doesn’t include brand terms.

You SEO provider should be focused on increasing non-brand organic search traffic, but also be monitoring other deeper metrics such as conversion rate of this website traffic, and more. Check out our blog post on short and long term SEO metrics for a more detailed explanation.

If your SEO provider is focused on increasing rankings, than this can show that they’re not going to connect their work all the way down to the bottom line of your company.

 

Any hiring decision in a company should be a careful decision, but hiring an SEO consultant is usually a bit more complex due to the nature of the industry. We hope that these questions will help you make the right decision.

And don’t forget to contact us, as we’d be happy to answer these questions and more.

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Image Credit: via @gangplankhq on Flickr.com

Filed Under: Common Errors

Case Study- Helping Non-Profit Leverage Their Huge Network

February 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Invisible Children (IC) is a San Diego based 501(c)3 public charity focused on ending conflict in Northern Uganda. Their story and work is incredibly inspiring and we encourage you to learn more at InvisibleChildren.com.

While IC had a website in place and (a lot of) buzz online from their network around the world, they had not integrated SEO best practices into their business. This meant they were not getting all of the exposure that was possible on Google and other search engines.

IC reached out to us to help them leverage all aspects of their organization to increase the exposure they receive online (in search engines specifically) in order to spread their cause.

Our initial work involved:

  • Ensuring their website was technically accessible to Google, through conducting our extensive SEO Audit and guiding their technical team in implementing recommendations
  • Identifying the types of keywords people search for online that could indicate a connection to IC’s cause, although the searcher may not already be aware of IC specifically.
  • Integrating keyword targeting throughout their website to ensure that Google understood the relevance of IC content to highly searched keywords

In addition to the website SEO and keyword targeting work described above, we conducted an extensive discovery process to understand all aspects of how IC currently interacts online. Using this information, we conducted a thorough training session with multiple departments within their organization to help them integrate SEO into their day to day activities as a means of exponentially growing their website authority over time. This philosophy of integrating SEO into all aspects of the organization leads to an extremely effective SEO strategy.

By ensuring their website is accessible to Google, utilizing the keyword targeting recommendations, and integrating SEO authority building into their day to day activities, IC has been rapidly growing the exposure they receive for their cause online.

Filed Under: Case Study

Case Study- 35% Traffic Increase with $1,000′s in Monthly Revenue

January 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

TicketKick is a legal document preparation company that helps drivers get their traffic tickets dismissed through the trial by written declaration process. After just a few years in business, TicketKick is rapidly growing their San Diego team and expanding the legal document verticals that they service.

While the company was aggressively marketing their services through online pay-per-click advertising, they reached out to us as a means of growing their website traffic and sales through rankings on search engines such as Google. While online advertising traffic was profitable, it became apparent that a large amount of traffic could be acquired with a higher return-on-investment using SEO over time.

Initially, we worked with TicketKick to ensure that their website effectively targeted high volume keywords within their market. After the keyword targeting was in place, we began to build the SEO rankings of TicketKick.com over time using our unique link building services.

Over the last 6 months of 2011, the following milestones have been achieved:

  • Traffic from SEO-specific efforts has increased by 35%
  • $1,000’s in revenue per month directly from SEO-specific website traffic is the norm
  • Achieved a 15,000 visit day with $1,000’s in sales due to PR opportunity acquired
  • and the volume of “free” SEO visits is rapidly approaching the amount of paid online visits

By ensuring effective management of the ongoing SEO campaign, we look forward to continuing to be a partner in the growth of TicketKick.com.

Filed Under: Case Study

Measuring SEO Value- Cost Per Leads Generated

December 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

When running a business division or an entire company, it’s important to know how effective each of your marketing dollars are. After all, each dollar needs to be held accountable for producing revenue or it may need to be diverted to another marketing channel that is measurable.

Some web marketing channels, such as online advertising with Google Adwords, are pretty straight forward to measure:

  • $### in ad costs produces ### visits
  • which turns into  ### leads or sales
  • which means each lead or sale costs $###).

However, when pursuing search engine optimization to increase the rankings of your business on Google (and therefore your website traffic / sales) it may seem more difficult to connect the cost of your current SEO company to a specific financial outcome.

Measuring SEO’s Value is Possible…

While understanding how SEO affects your entire organization and marketing initiatives is important, it’s also important to be able to tie your SEO budget to financial metrics.

This blog post series explains a few of the ways that we work with clients to report on SEO’s impact on their business. While each situation is unique and usually requires a conversation to cater it to a specific business, this should be a good start to help you quantify the value of SEO in your organization.

Measuring the Value of SEO Using Cost Per Lead or Sale Generated

If you’re doing any other online marketing, such as Google Adwords, you’re more than likely already measuring the cost per lead or sale generated from online ads. SEO can be measured in a similar way and oftentimes ends up producing leads and sales for a much lower cost compared to other online advertising campaigns.

Here’s the breakdown of how it’s calculated:

  • How much are you paying your SEO team monthly?
  • How many leads or sales are generated each month specifically from non-brand SEO traffic?
  • The cost per lead or sale from SEO is the SEO budget divided by volume of leads generated.
  • In short, the formula is: SEO Cost Per Lead or Sale = Monthly SEO Budget / Number of Leads or Sales Generated

Things to Consider When Valuating SEO With This Metric

Here’s a few things to consider when using this method:

  • If you just started doing SEO in the past quarter (or possibly 2 quarters depending on your industry), the amount of SEO traffic you receive now is going to be relatively low compared to the amount of traffic you’ll be receiving after approximately 6 months of pursuing SEO. This is due to the time it takes for a website to get ranked on Google for competitive keywords that are going to send a lot of traffic and sales. However, once you have achieved competitive rankings your traffic will continue to grow while you can focus SEO resources on acquiring additional competitive rankings. In short, the volume of traffic and sales from SEO efforts begins to grow exponentially while the cost per SEO lead or sale drops exponentially the longer you pursue SEO.
  • You must be measuring your traffic (Google Analytics is probably the easiest solution) and you segmenting the reports so that you can see data related to the traffic you receive from SEO (called “non-brand organic traffic“). This enables you to see data specifically related to SEO instead of looking at all website traffic sources at once.
  • Many SEO consultants only report on rankings (i.e. “we got you ranked for “keyword ABC” this month- great!”) but don’t present data regarding traffic or sales generated from SEO. This is a red flag, as it either means that they aren’t confident in the traffic and sales SEO generates or they’re not familiar with how to actually measure the work they’re doing- either way, it’s not good for your company. Rankings are important, but are a small piece of the puzzle.

Real World Examples

Here’s some interesting things we found using this with clients:

  • We have a few clients working on a lead-generation model in competitive industries. It’s not uncommon for a client to be paying $500-$1,000 per lead within their online advertising campaigns while getting leads from our SEO efforts at an effective cost of $100-$150/ea. We ensure that the quality of the SEO leads is comparable to other channels in regards to conversion / revenue, so this sheer difference in cost is a big win for lead-generation clients in boosting their overall profitability.
  • We work with clients that have an e-commerce model where they’re selling some sort of product online via their web store. Oftentimes, the client hasn’t configured Google Analytics to include e-commerce metrics within the reports. In short, this enables you to see specific sales data for all of the traffic coming into your site directly within Google Analytics. If you’re running a web store, make sure this is setup as it makes reporting on granular revenue data much easier (i.e. “how much revenue was produced by keyword ABC last month?”).

How to Get Started Measuring SEO Value in Your Business

The first step to using these metrics (and others) to valuate your SEO efforts is to ensure that you connect how you measure your SEO efforts to how you measure other marketing channels so comparisons can be  made.

Feel free to leave a comment below or contact us, as we enjoy seeing clients light up when we help them establish simple metrics to measure the profitability of their business so that they can make better decisions with their marketing dollars.

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image credit: via Flickr user Brooks Elliot

Filed Under: Measurement, Quantify SEO

Photo Widget Slideshows for Link Building

November 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Getting links to your website is an important part of increasing your Google rankings- but it’s not easy to do. We’re always working with our SEO and link building clients to come up with unique ways to get links.

In some cases, creating a photo slideshow that can be shared within your market can be a great way to do this.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Link Builder

Get Links from Your Contacts with a Website Badge

November 15, 2011 By 2 Comments

In order to increase your Google rankings, it’s important to always be pursuing link building- that is, you should be constantly getting links to your website so that Google can see that you’re an authority in your niche.

The problem here is link building is not easy to do.

Link Building Opportunities Are Everywhere

While basic link building tactics like directory submissions might seem obvious, finding ways to outsmart your competitors and get unique links can be challenging unless you know where to look. When we work with our SEO clients, we take the time to look deep into every aspect of their business and develop a very unique link building campaign that leverages aspects of their business that competitors can’t duplicate.

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Filed Under: Link Builder

What Determines Google Ranking?

November 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Although you’re familiar with Google and probably use it quite a bit, you may not know exactly what determines the Google ranking for your website. This is a common question clients ask us, so we thought the blog would be a great place to provide a simple explanation.

There are really two factors that determine whether or not Google ranks your website on the first page:

  1. Does Google understand what your website is about?
  2. Does Google consider you an authority in your niche?

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Website Optimization

Google Rating Guide Leaked- No Big Secrets

October 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Google uses human raters to manually review many websites in order to ensure their search results are truly relevant and helpful to searchers…not everything can be sifted through with their almighty algorithms.

Last week, a Google document was leaked that’s essentially instructions and guidelines for rater team members to do their job. This means SEOs now have a better understanding of how Google evaluates sites.

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Filed Under: News, Website Optimization

How to Measure SEO Performance

October 24, 2011 By 2 Comments
measure seo performance

Via Flickr

When pursuing any type of marketing campaign, it’s important to measure both short term and long term results- otherwise, you won’t know which marketing campaigns are making money and which are losing money. Many new clients we meet with that are interested in pursuing search engine optimization are unsure how to measure an SEO campaign.

You may think that your website’s rankings are the most important factor, but that’s not really the case…

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Common Errors, Measurement
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