Nice story by Alex Cohen,
May 31, 2012 on Search Engine Watch. Business's in Milwaukee should pay attention. To get the most out of hiring a paid search agency, you need to
understand agencies. They’re like any other business: they need to make
money, sometimes they’re the right solution, not everyone is great and
they won’t magically solve all of your business problems. Here is the full article.
More from this story:
An Agency Isn’t Always the Answer
One of the common questions I get at search conference is "Can you
recommend a good search agency?" The first thing I always want to know
is: How much do you spend every month?
Most agencies will have a minimum that starts in the $1,000 to $5,000
per month range. If you’re not spending a reasonable sum on paid search
per month, it can be hard to amortize that cost accordingly. Here’s
what I recommend by budget level:
It’s All About Trust
An agency-client relationship is a two way street and results: growth
for your business and a profitable, long-term client for the agency.
The more realistic and candid you are about what each of you needs and
can accomplish within the time, budget, product and personnel
constraints, the more productive it will be.
Disclaimer: The postings of opinions on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my clients or publishers.
Jim is an experienced Internet Marketing Consultant in Milwaukee Wisconsin. His mission is to help you increase your advertising return on investment and decrease unproductive advertising expenses through proven, online marketing strategies. He works with local businesses, agencies, and Non-Profits. Feel Free to call him at (414)699-5444 to schedule a Free Consultation.
Twelve Tips When Choosing a Search Marketing Consultant or Agency
A lot of companies these days turn to outside consultants or agencies to
help them with their search marketing campaigns. This can be an
incredibly smart decision – if you pick the right firm. Picking the
wrong firm can be a massive time suck and a financial disaster. Being
someone who has been on both sides of the search consultant/agency
negotiations (choosing the outsourcer and pitching to be the outsourced
consultant), I’ve learned a few things along the way that will help you
to make the right choice on your search marketing consultant or agency.
Jonathan Allen wrote an excellent post
covering what happened to one small business site that for two years
has been deriving its ranking by using mainly black hat SEO tactics –
from article spinning, buying links, forced anchor text, to inbound
links from link networks. The site owner hadn’t appreciated how
profoundly these spam tactics went against Google’s mission, which is
purportedly to provide the most relevant results to users. And why would
he? Until the latest update, his online sales were increasing, even
after Panda!
Recently, his website felt the wrath of Penguin.
What Allen says, which I agree with, is that “small businesses are completely at a loss as to what constitutes ‘ethical’ SEO.”
When advertising online you may choose to do it yourself thru Google adwords or Yahoo and Bing, or you may choose to have a third party manage it for you. Advertising these days have changed dramatically. When advertising on the yellowpages or TV, Radio, and newspapers you would have to take in account the audience that you were attempting to capture. What Demographics you are looking for and who covers these areas the best. After that you want to get the best bang for your buck. These days your looking at advertising online. Online search to be more specific rather then individual websites. Google is Google, Yahoo is Yahoo, and Bing is Bing. So now you have to consider if you are going to advertise on these search engines using Banners or Pay per click (PPC) thru Reachlocal , At&t, Yodle, Yellowbook360, and so forth remember that they all have access to the search engines. So you really only need to consider a few different things.
Customer Service
Having access to your account and their representative is very important, trends change and you may want to make quick changes to your advertising program. You want your service to be proactive and reactive at the same time. Changes to your text ads, target area, and keywords should be done quickly and having access to them is important.
Cost vs ROI
These companies are charging different rates due to a number of variables. But remember Google charges are no different Per Click if you go with Reachlocal orYodle or any other service including yourself. Your cost per click will change according to your quality score and your bid price, a simple search on adwords will help you determine what your per click charge would be. So you now have to wonder why One service wants me to pay $1000 per month or cycle and another service wants to charge $1500. Well looking at what the keywords they are targeting is one way to look and another is the Geography that they are covering with this. A flat fee per month is scary because if Google is able to get you $500 dollars worth of clicks in a month where is the remaining $500 of your monthly program going to? Obviously to the service you are going with. If your service is charging you on a cycle basis rather then monthly and Google is charging say $3 dollers per click and they are increasing the per click charge, now you have to see how much the service is increasing the per click charge and keeping for themselves. Looking into this before making the decision to go with one of these services is important. These companies don't do this service for free, and there is no issue with paying them to manage your online advertising, you just have to make sure that the cost is fair and that you are getting your moneys worth. If your paying $1000 per month and only getting 5 or 6 calls there will be a problem, flat fee or cycle. Again having access to your services representative to make changes and adjust your program will be important. Doing this yourself may be the way to go, but now you need to factor how much is your time worth? It works the same way as if you were installing a hot water heater, you can do it yourself for the cost of the hot water heater and parts. Boom done. But it may take you 5 hours to do it. Paying a plumber $300 to do it for you may be worth it to you.
They will also have a better chance of doing it right the first time.
Results
Running ads online will work for you, and it will get better the longer you do it. Monitoring your results on a regular basis will help you decrease the cost as you will be able to determine the key areas that are working and you will be able to point your dollars to those areas. There are tools provided by Google and Yahoo that help you track what your spending and also will show you what keywords and Geo areas are performing best for you. If you have a service they also will have tools to show you this. Keep an eye on your results to show that your money is well spent. Now if you are noticing that your are getting a ton of traffic to your website and still no customers you will have another issue. If you are targeting the correct customer to your site, your issue may be the content on your site. Be sure that you are able to keep their attention on your site and that the information on your site is relevant to what they are there looking for. Hopefully your service provider will be able to help you with this right away and guide you to getting the content on your site as customer friendly as possible. It will also help determine your Per Click cost as the content on your site being relevant to your PPC ads will help determine your quality score which again gets factored into your cost per click and also your ad placement on Google. Again, Customer service. A click to your site is just that, a click. Once they are on your site it is up to the content on the site to get that customer to decide to contact you or not.
Factoring these options will help you in determining if it is cost effective for you to go with a specific company to manage your online advertising programs and help you determine which is best for you.
Here is a quick reference to how Google determines its quality score and so forth:
Here is a deeper look at quality score
Jim is an experienced Internet Marketing Consultant in Milwaukee
Wisconsin. His mission is to help you increase your advertising return
on investment and decrease unproductive advertising expenses through
proven, online marketing strategies. He works with local businesses,
agencies
Dear At&t,
Thank you for the call 2 weeks ago asking me if I wanted to have internet service bundled with whatever else you wanted to sell me, I thankfully replied no. Thank you again for the call the next day asking me the exact same thing, again thanks, but no. Hey thanks again for the call the next day, the answer is still no. Ok day four, again, no and please don't ask, my mind isn't going to change. Alright day five, not 1 but 2 calls, no and no. Day six no call from At&t great they finally got the hint. Opps day 7 comes along and another 2 calls, I just answer Hi At&t I'm not interested, I get a reply "but don't you want to hear about how I can save you money on your services?" I reply, listen I have heard your pitch 7 times in the last week I'm not interested and stop calling me. This paragraph can go on, lets just say day 8,9,10,11,12 all have the same results. Heres the thing. I understand that you took a HUGE loss this year with that Tmobile flop, like a 4 billion dollar oops, but hounding me like a 3 year old asking for candy is not going to help. I'm sure your employees who are over seas calling me and even the ones here in the US are not to thrilled with all the no's they are getting because I know way too well that there is a manager telling these people that they need so many sales or they can look for a new job. But really, land line in 2012? dsl at your cost and reliability? Really? Yellowpages? They still print that thing? I know you only own like 57% and sold it for like pennies of what it was worth 5 years ago. But come on. Please, if I want something I'll call you back. I have to go now my phone is ringing, I wander who it is.
Many webmasters have been desperately trying to fix poor SEO work done
to a site thanks to the recent Penguin update targeting webspam and the bad link warnings sent from Google. The only current way to discredit a link is to have it removed as reverse nofollow functionality for
webmasters simply doesn’t exist. One recent example of a link
removal request was particularly concerning as it claimed that the
webmaster was partaking in illegal action against the company. May 15, 2012 at 9:59am ET by Greg Finn Search engine Watch. Click here for the full article
By Gerry Shih | Reuters Twitter will honor requests from users who do not want their online
behavior tracked, the company said on Thursday, in contrast with Web
companies such Google Inc and Facebook Inc whose business models rely heavily on collecting user data. Full story
Pinterest is one of the fastest growing online social networks. If your a business looking to be found through social networking (of course your doing more then that). Pinterest should be included. Here is a great article from Search Engine Land explaining why. Click here
You have a business page on Facebook but nobody seems to be engaging with you on it. How do you get things going? The good ol' Coupon. Here is the article from Mashable. Click here
Jim
is an experienced Internet Marketing Consultant in Milwaukee
Wisconsin. His mission is to help you increase your advertising return
on investment and decrease unproductive advertising expenses through
proven, online marketing strategies. He works with local businesses,
agencies, and Non-Profits. Feel Free to call him at 414-699-5444
Nice article from Mashable. Using Social Reviews to leverage you company online is an important part of maintaining your web presence.
You want to be able to look at all your referring keywords and directly
connect them to revenue. To do this you will need your SEO, traffic and
sales data to reside in the same system.
Jim
is an experienced Internet Marketing Consultant in Milwaukee
Wisconsin. His mission is to help you increase your advertising return
on investment and decrease unproductive advertising expenses through
proven, online marketing strategies. He works with local businesses,
agencies, and Non-Profits. Feel Free to call him at 414-699-5444
In order to understand the impact your SEO efforts have on your
business, you first need to make sure you are collecting the right data
and attributing it to the right sources. This is why it's important to use visitor intelligence to analyze your SEO performance and ensure your SEO efforts are producing the right results. Erez Barak,
Jim
is an experienced Internet Marketing Consultant in Milwaukee
Wisconsin. His mission is to help you increase your advertising return
on investment and decrease unproductive advertising expenses through
proven, online marketing strategies. He works with local businesses,
agencies, and Non-Profits. Feel Free to call him at 414-699-5444
Trying to get your air conditioning business in Watertown Wi or Milwaukee Wi found locally online. Here is a video from google to help.
Jim is an experienced Internet Marketing Consultant in Milwaukee
Wisconsin. His mission is to help you increase your advertising return
on investment and decrease unproductive advertising expenses through
proven, online marketing strategies. He works with local businesses,
agencies, and Non-Profits.
Jim
is an experienced Internet Marketing Consultant in Milwaukee
Wisconsin. His mission is to help you increase your advertising return
on investment and decrease unproductive advertising expenses through
proven, online marketing strategies. He works with local businesses,
agencies, and Non-Profits. Feel Free to call him at 414-699-5444
Jim – SEO – SEM – Social Media in Milwaukee! Capture your audience Searching, Surfing & Socializing.
Having trouble being found online? I will help you reach out to the potential customers that are looking for you now.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
is one of the most efficient but also most complex online marketing
channels for the acquisition of new customers. For many companies who
want to and can acquire new customers via the Internet, SEO can be the
most efficient customer acquisition channel if its particularities and
complexities can be coped with continuously. Andre Alpar,
If your using backlinks it would be nice to see what is working for you. Google announced that Google Analytics Social Reports will now
track backlinks and make link graph information accessible to
webmasters. Google already tracks links back to your site, they said;
now you can see this data, too. Good info to know. Here is the Full Story byMiranda Miller,
Jim - SEO - SEM - Social Media in Milwaukee! Capture your audience Searching, Surfing & Socializing. Having trouble being found online? I will help you reach out to the potential customers that are looking for you now.
With Air Conditioning season coming up, Heating Contractors in Milwaukee and Watertown Wi will want to get their advertising up online now for the upcoming rush. Yellowpages and all the old media that was used in the past is not used much anymore. Getting a PPC ad running can be very expensive, so you should be working on your entire web presence now so your found in time for the upcoming cooling season.
Here is a great article from Search Engine Watch writer Ray Comstock. Click here
Jim is an experienced Internet Marketing Consultant in Milwaukee
Wisconsin. His mission is to help you increase your advertising return
on investment and decrease unproductive advertising expenses through
proven, online marketing strategies. He works with local businesses,
agencies, and Non-Profits. Feel Free to call him at 414-699-5444
And Follow my blog at http://internetadvertisingmilwaukee.blogspot.com/
Ok, everyone has been worried about their SEO and what the new Google updates are going to do to their rankings, Here is a great story from Lisa Buyer on search engine watch.
It’s going to be OK... Google promises! But what does that mean
to the small- to medium-sized business owner? Especially the ones who do
everything by the "Google book" only to fearfully watch Google web
visits plummet with every ruthless update. Click here for the full article.
Jim is an experienced Internet Marketing Consultant in Milwaukee
Wisconsin. His mission is to help you increase your advertising return
on investment and decrease unproductive advertising expenses through
proven, online marketing strategies. He works with local businesses,
agencies, and Non-Profits. Feel Free to call him at 414-699-5444
If you’re a curator looking for some boundaries in what feels like the Wild West, here are five best practices to consider.
You’ve heard the buzz word — curation — being thrown around like it’s a gadget we all know how to work. In reality, good content curation
isn’t as simple as pushing a share button. It’s actually a combination
of finding great content and following some simple best practices on how
to successfully share that content. Steven Rosenbaum is the CEO of Magnify.net, a real-time video curation engine for publishers, brands, and websites. He’s also the author of Curation Nation. Click here for full story.
Jim is an experienced Internet Marketing Consultant in Milwaukee
Wisconsin. His mission is to help you increase your advertising return
on investment and decrease unproductive advertising expenses through
proven, online marketing strategies. He works with local businesses,
agencies, and Non-Profits. Feel Free to call him at 414-699-5444
What began as an experiment 10 months ago is now showing up in nearly one of every five Google search results.
A new SearchMetrics study
published this week says that about 17 percent of queries included at
least one instance of rel=author within the first 100 search results.
The company analyzed a million keywords — including a mix of
navigational, information and transactional — and found that more than
170,000 included a rel=author display somewhere in the first 10 pages of
results for each keyword.
What about on the first page, you ask? We asked that question, too,
and SearchMetrics says its study found at least one rel=author
integration showing up on page one for 3.07 percent of its one million
keywords. Click here for the full story from Search Engine Land
Jim is an experienced Internet Marketing Consultant in Milwaukee Wi. His mission
is to help you increase your advertising ROI through proven, online marketing
strategies.
Disclaimer: The postings of opinions on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my clients or publishers.
Jim is an experienced Internet Marketing Consultant in Milwaukee Wisconsin. His mission is to help you increase your advertising return on investment and decrease unproductive advertising expenses through proven, online marketing strategies. He works with local businesses, agencies, and Non-Profits. Feel Free to call him at (414)699-5444 to schedule a Free Consultation.
