SEO

Can Google AdWords improve your business?

Google is a complicated little creature. Most of us know that it somehow reads and indexes our sites in order to deliver results when people search for certain topics. Google is also big business – and has tools available for purchase to increase your chance of being found. Today, we delve into the complex world of AdWords. Increased traffic to your website may increase sales, but only if that increased traffic is from the right avenues and are genuinely interested customers. If the goal is to increase business, there is little point attracting views from people who are not interested in your products or services. Great content on your site should always be your first priority, but Google offers a number of ways to improve visits to your site or increase your page ranking. Many businesses shy away from using these tools and miss out [...]

Catching clients in a funnel

As a business, the world of marketing can be daunting, with numerous channels and limited time and budgets. And if you’re not a marketing expert, it’s more confusing trying to understand how to best market a company for optimum results. The other day I was searching the internet for a specific business on Google and noticed that one of their competitors came up on top in AdWords. They must have been paying to use the company I was looking for’s name as one of their keywords. But I didn’t want to hear from them at this point. By this stage in the purchasing process I already knew what I wanted and the company that I wanted to buy from. It felt a bit like someone jumping out when I was already at the cash register and trying to force an alternative product into my hand. [...]

SEO scams: the house always wins

SEO is a little like blackjack. And if SEO is blackjack, an SEO scam is like counting cards. And the house always wins. Say you’ve got a weekend in Vegas and decide to try your hand at blackjack. You know a little bit about basic strategy, and you do ok – coming out slightly ahead – but you wish you’d done a lot better. So, instead of just forgetting about blackjack and going back to your normal life, you rent a dank, darkened room with deteriorating amenities and obsessively study everything about the game. You want to get an edge, so when someone on scamgamblers.com offers to sell you the book Counting Cards for Dummies, you have only one partially pop-inspired thought in mind: ‘hit me, baby’. But when you go back to Vegas to try out your new edge at Casino Googale, you find [...]

What really happens when business buyers do a Google search?

If you’re running a local plumbing, appliance repair or other similar business, then Google Adwords are a powerful tool. But how effective are they for business-to-business searches? They key is to look at your customers’ behaviour. If your toilet breaks and you need a plumber fast, you search for plumber, and you’ll probably click the first result, regardless of whether it’s a paid ad or not. But in my business we often deal with engineers in utilities, or major projects and plants. These guys undoubtedly use the internet to research, but it’s a slower process. Instead of clicking and buying the top result, they are looking for quality information, and answers to their questions. Ads that come up top are not so appealing if they don’t appear to contain the required information. This is why b2b businesses, particularly those that supply engineered solutions that are [...]

SEO’s dirty little secret

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) experts are everywhere, spamming your email inbox daily, calling you on the phone, crawling all over LinkedIn trying to sell you their services. But there’s one thing that almost none of them will tell you. The secret truth of SEO is that most people don’t know what they talking about. It’s actually very simple, but by pulling out as much jargon as possible, they can muddy the waters and make you feel you must be getting something valuable. In reality, the technical side is very simple and only a small part of it. Google go out of their way to be clear and open about what you need to do technically. And these days with most sites it should be a simple matter to ensure they comply with these best practice guidelines. Google’s only goal in the end is to ensure that [...]

Getting smarter with keyword content

In our obsessive drive to maximise SEO, too often I see companies become fixated on their performance for a couple of keywords and in doing so miss the forest for the trees. Last time I checked, the ultimate goal of SEO, like all marketing, is to increase sales. There needs to be a stronger focus on capturing and converting qualified browsers, not just topping the search results. In technical and trade industries, buyers will often conduct extensive research online before making a buying decision. They will seek useful technical information, case studies and independent endorsements. If your site doesn’t offer this info, then your top search result will get you a quick visit and an even quicker exit. Instead, give a bit of thought to which of your customer problems your products actually solve, and what information your customers might be searching for when they [...]

Now you’ve got them, what are going to do with them?

I posted recently about the pitfalls of attracting traffic to your site with bad SEO then disappointing them once they get there. But even when you impress with your genuine and quality content, if you’re not the sort of business selling products off your website then it’s not enough to simply get them there. Many B2B companies sell high value, long lead time items that customers don’t simply buy straight away, or they may sell solutions that customers only need at certain times. So even if you can attract them to your site, you still need to go a step or two further to result in a sale. The next step is to capture their details, which can be done via a sign-up form. But you need to give them a reason to do so. Offering an email newsletter or whitepaper can be a great [...]

SEO: a means to an end, not the end itself

Like any new industry, SEO has quickly attracted its share of charlatans and dodgy salesmen. Before proceeding with an SEO consultant, it’s probably wise to ask them about their history and experience; if they’ve previously been involved selling solar panels, and before that double glazing, it’s probably best to keep looking! Whether it’s a consequence or a cause – this means that it is an area rife with misinformation and misunderstandings, and perhaps one of the biggest misunderstandings you can come across is the belief that SEO is the ultimate goal, i.e. get the top search spot and you’re done. Taking it back a step, for most businesses, their end goal is going to be maximising profit. To do this, businesses need to sell their products or services (with a good margin). With this is mind, for most businesses, SEO should be aimed at making [...]