Best use of a marketing budget of $500
One of the most difficult things to do when starting out in SEO is to determine how to allocate the resources you have to guarantee the best ROI (return on investment). Ecommerce store owners have a harder time of it as they are trying to spread their marketing dollars out across literally hundreds of keywords for all of the products on their stores. Many times clients send us lists of hundreds of keywords and want to know how to best narrow the list down and how to best allocate the resources they have. Here is what we tell them.
1. Narrow your keyword list to 5 keywords. With a budget of $500 per month, it is best to focus on a short list of 5 keywords. You can much easier track your results and get results quicker which will in turn open up your budget to focus on more keywords. To avoid getting a penalty from google you will want to have 5 keywords but only 2-3 urls. This means that you will need to have some of the keywords be variations of the main keyword. First step is to narrow your list to a short list of 20-40 keywords. Organize them by search volume. The second step is to check the all in anchor ranking for all of the 20-40 keywords on your list. For any that you already have an all in anchor ranking in the top 20, then put those on your shortlist of keywords to choose from. If a keyword has an all in anchor ranking in the top 20 it is going to be easier to push it to the top 10 or top 3 in the search engines than a keyword that you are not ranking in the top 100 for according to all in anchor.
2. Article writing. For article writing you can choose to get a few high quality articles from a US writer or a lot more articles from a Philippine writer. My advice is that if you are going to be placing the articles on your website, then always use US writers. If the articles are going to be used for link building and you are not YET a Fortune 5000 company, then Philippine writers are awesome!
3. Article Marketing. Now that you have the articles, what to do with them! My recommendation is that the first place to always start is article marketing. You can create accounts on the article directories or outsource it. There are also some distribution services such as isnare.com and submityourarticle.com that will submit your article over multiple websites. The monthly fee for sites such as these range from a few dollars per article to about $47 per month. You can put a project on odesk.com for someone to submit your articles to the article directories and provide them the article and a list of sites and your work is done!
4. Blog commenting. Although thought of as a spammy link building method by most, when done correctly, blog commenting is one of the best ways to build up a lot of backlinks to your site on unique ips. You can either do the blog commenting yourself or outsource it.
5. Reporting. Before you begin you will either want to run a report on the allinanchor rankings and number of backlinks according to open site explorer or outsource the report.
There you have it! The above is pretty much the exact strategy we recommend and implement for a budget of $500.
Keyword Competition Report
People are asking so we thought we would explain exactly what is included in one of our newest services: Keyword Competition Reports
A keyword competition report is a report that clearly shows you exactly where your site is weak and how you need to improve to dominate the search engines for a specific keyword.
What we do is we analyze your site and compare it against your top 10 competitors for a specific keyword. We take over 20 different factors into consideration and allow you to see how your site stacks up against your competition for each of those 20 factors. Each item that we compare your site with tells us exactly what types of links we need to build to get your site into the #1 position in the search engines.
Have you been building links for a while but feel like you are just not getting anywhere? Have you hired other SEO agencies and are frustrated with the lack of direction and the cookie cutter approach to link building? Would you like to know exactly how many links and the potential cost analysis of what it will take to achieve top rankings? Does your boss need to know exactly how much investment is required before you start to see a return on your search marketing investment? Order one of our basic or advanced keyword competition reports today and stop wasting your money on links that are not helping to improve your sites ranking in the search engines!
Call 760-494-7883 to place your order.
Basic reports are $1000 and Advanced reports are $3500. With the advanced reports we compare your site with 20 of your competitors and analyze with over 40 different factors. We also provide a detailed SEO strategy that you can implement or hire us to implement for you.
Allow 6-8 weeks for report delivery.
10 Quick Tips to Increase the Conversion Rate of your Website
Want to see how to quickly improve the conversion rate of your site? The easiest way to see if your site is measuring up with your competitors is to take some screen shots of specific features that are on your site and on your competitor’s sites and to paste them all together into a word doc side by side. You can then easily see what others are doing in your same market and get the creative juices flowing to do what they are doing even better!
1. Do a Google search for your top keyword and open new tabs or windows for the top 10 sites.
2. Open up Microsoft Word or other similar program.
3. Take screen shots or use SnagIt and copy the different sections of your site and the your competitor’s sites and paste them into your Word doc.
Areas to check:
1. Top Navigation bar. Check to see if you have too much white space. What things are above the fold on your competitor’s sites that you don’t have above the fold. Do you have an 800 number? Do you have a top navigation link map that links to the top sections on your site? Do you have an awesome Logo that your customers can identify with? Do you have a search box?
2. USP. No that is not UPS. USP is the Unique Selling Proposition. The unique selling proposition are the reasons why your customers should buy from you instead of at your competitor’s sites. First research and see if your competitors have a USP. If they do, then write down their USP. Look to find as many other sites in your market as possible and create a master list of all the USPs that you can find that apply to your market. Once you have a list, then see which ones you can also offer and which ones you can one up them on and offer a better proposition. Low price is NOT a good USP. You never want to compete on price. Think of what values you can add to your product or service that will make you stand out from the competition.
3. Guide the Site Visitor. When someone goes to your site, where are they guided to click? Is the process confusing? There should be a clear call to action. As you look at other sites, check out where your eyes are drawn to. Look at what action you are compelled to take on other sites and then see how you can improve the call to action on your site to guide your customers through the sales funnel.
4. Live Chat. If you don’t offer live chat, why not? If you are selling to hundreds of customers and your phone lines are constantly jammed up, having live chat will literally save sales!
5. Call to Action. What is your call to action? Is it clear to your customers? If your call to action is to call a phone number, then that phone number should be on each page four, six, eight or even ten times! If your call to action is to click the Order Now button, then make sure your Order button is bright and easy to find.
6. Borrow authority. Having credit cards, BBB, and Security Seals is known to improve conversion rates. Make sure your seals are above the fold and if possible in the top banner. Shipping logos such as by Fedex, UPS, or USPS are also good to have. Compare your site with the other top 10 sites and see what seals they have posted on their site above the fold and be sure to do the same!
7. Collect emails. Add a webform to collect emails on your site. When analyzing the top 10 sites see what their web forms look like. Check to see what words they are using. Look at if they are offering a freebie in exchange for email addresses or maybe a discount or coupon code. After you start to build your database, be sure to follow up and send out weekly emails!
8. Testimonials. As soon as possible, add customer testimonials to your site. Be sure to check out the new FTC regs and be absolutely sure to follow all the rules. Having testimonials throughout the site especially close to where your customers see the Buy Now button, is a great way to increase conversion.
9. Professional graphics and advertising. Who says the professional ads on the right side nav of your site has to link out to someone else’s site? Use professional looking ads on the right side nav of your site to link to other sections of your site!
10. Last but not least, be sure to have analytics installed. Google webmaster tools and Google analytics are a must. Crazyegg.com is also ideal for seeing exactly where your customers are clicking. If you have a link on your home page that is not being clicked on, then you need to get rid of that link or change it in some way so that it does get clicked on. Links are the doors on your site that open to other sections. If no one is going through those doors, then you need to either move the doors somewhere else or do something to call attention to them!
Enjoyed this article? Have another tip to improve the conversion rate of websites? Let us know by leaving a comment below!
I am a huge fan of the site Conversion Rate Experts! They have some free articles over there including a huge checklist of things you can do to improve your site.
How to find the best article marketing sites for your niche!
Go where your customers are! Ever feel like you are spinning your wheels and just hoping and praying that the SEO strategies you are doing are actually working? We already covered that one factor in determining what article directory sites are the best in terms of getting urls indexed quickly, but what if your client wants not only backlinks, but also traffic? How can we determine if a site will also send traffic! One easy way is using Google Adwords Display Network with Managed Placements. Basically you create an ad based on your keywords and main target and then set up specific sites in the display network that you want to test. Start with choosing all of the basic sites you can get content placed on easily such as ezinearticles.com, hubpages.com and squidoo.com. Set your dollar amount per click pretty high so you can get as many impressions and clicks as possible. If budget is a concern, then set the campaign to have a specific start and stop date.
After you have it set up, let it run for a few days or a week or so. Go back and look at the number of impressions and number of clicks. What you are looking for is which sites have a higher click through rate for your specific market. The sites with a higher click through rate are the sites you want to focus on to get your content placed on! If they have a high click through rate for the ads, they will also have a higher click through rate for the articles themselves on the sites as compared to other sites. Some other factors such as layout of the ads and where your links appear in the articles will of course factor, but we are looking at general numbers to compare different sites… not an exact science!
As you are researching the backlink profile of your competitors and as you find more sites, add them to your Google Adwords campaign. Go back each week and see if any of the one’s you have added have a lot of impressions and / or clicks for your target market and then work on focusing on getting links on those sites whether it be from getting a guest blog post placed or even paid advertising.
Have a question or tip? Leave your question below in the comments area and we will do our best to answer it!
Was this article helpful to you? Get more SEO Strategy tips delivered straight to your email inbox by signing up for our newsletter!
Web 2.0 Blogging Strategy for 2010
Link wheels, web 2.0 sites, Hubpages, Squidoo… all the big craze but what actually works? Some say to use web 2.0 properties as the search engines love them and they get spidered early and often. Others say why bother as you don’t actually own them and your web 2.0 property can get banned and deleted at any time.
When to use them.
Web 2.0 properties have two purposes. Ranking and links. First for ranking. If when you do a search for a long tail keyword and a web 2.0 property shows up in the search results, then that means that there is little to no competition for that keyword and it will be easy for you to also build a web 2.0 property and also get ranked for that keyword. Second for links. There are a lot of tools that allow you to research the backlinks of your competitors. If during this research, you find that your competitors have web 2.0 properties in their backlink profile, then you should too. These are some of the easiest links to go after and most can be gotten in a few hours of work… or less if you outsource it!
How to use them.
First step is to identify the top web 2.0 sites to build links from. The best ones are the ones that get indexed quickly by the search engines. Always remember that if a url is not indexed, then the links don’t count! After you identify which sites are the best, create accounts on them using your keyword as the subdomain. Upload 2-5 articles or blog posts of 100-500 words each. In each article or blog post include 2-5 links to your web properties. It is always better to link out to a variety of web properties versus sending 5 links all to the same domain for example.
So what are the best sites? Based on our 3 months of research we have found that the web 2.0 properties that are getting indexed the fastest are the following:
- Myblogsite.com 100%
- Blog.co.in 100%
- Ugetblog.com 100%
- Wordpress.com 81%
- Blogster.com 80%
- Diarist.com 80%
- Soulcast.com 71%
- Weebly.com 70%
- Bloggels.info 70%
- Bloguni.com 70%
- Gather.com 70%
- Blogspot.com 70%
- Blog.com 61%
- Blogetry.com 60%
- Bravejournal.com 51%
- Spaces.live.com 50%
- Wetpaint.com 50%
- Weblog.com 50%
- Sosblog.com 40%
- Sites.google.com 38%
- Zoomshare.com 38%
- Vox.com 34%
- Tumbrl.com 30%
- Livejournal.com 30%
- Multiply.com 30%
- Typepad.com 20%
- Xanga.com 20%
- Thoughts.com 20%
- Quizilla.com 20%
- Ning.com 20%
- Webs.com 10%
As you can see, the majority of the web 2.0 properties have a less than 70% success rate. So is the statement that the search engines automatically love the web 2.0 properties an accurate one? We think not! For web 2.0 properties to work successfully you will need to go the extra step and promote the RSS feeds and also build links to your web 2.0 properties.
Have another web 2.0 property you would like us to test? Tell us about it in the comments section!
Was this article helpful? Sign up for our Newsletter and get SEO Tips sent directly to your email box!
