DG’s Roundup Summary: What SEO or PPC Advice Would You Give Yourself?

, , , ,

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Delta Growth (DG), a big boy in Toronto’s SEO & SEM industry, specializing in e-commerce. Eugenia, DG’s SEO/PPC Implementation Specialist reached out to some of the industry’s local brainers to ask a SEO/PPC question that few of us ever ask ourselves during our careers:

What advice would have changed your SEO or PPC career?

It’s the kind of question that encourages us to reflect on our business moves of yesteryear. But it also makes us want to nail our thumbs to the floor for the dearth of knowledge our brains now overflow with. If only a DeLorean time machine were as accessible as a Zipcar.

But alas, DG talked to leading SEOs, so we did something right even back then! As a SEO Specialist in Whitby at Logical Mix I was humbled to be regarded in this mix and appreciated the opportunity to reflect on the ghosts of SEO past.

Whether you’re a blogger, consultant, strategist, or a newbie copywriter, Delta Growth’s Round Up about SEO/SEM career advice from leading industry experts may surprise you. It seems success lies in some good old-fashioned values and technical know-how.

Make Great SEO & SEM Relationships

Relationship building is the cornerstone of success in any business. Regardless of how great we are at the technical stuff, there is a person behind every move we make and that person is either going to trust us or bounce. We don’t want bouncers. Stoney Degeyter, Founder and CEO at Pole Position Marketing urges us to always, “focus on the customer, not the algorithms”.  Make the user’s experience your priority. It’s not enough just to know SEO. A grasp of marketing fundamentals is essential to reaching your audience and garnering the staying power that will bump up your conversion rates. What is the crux of Marketing 101? Know your customer. So, know your customer.

Tor Refsland says that if he could go back in time he would have told himself “to grow some b*lls and become uncomfortable much sooner!” He would have started getting new clients right away, face-to-face. So get out there and show face.

Check in with industry peeps too. Nobody gets very far alone. The e-comm community is huge. Learn from as many people as you can. Garner good quality links by offering something of value. Bump up your social media presence.

Give TOFu and BOFu Equal Opportunity

We want to pay attention to everybody at every stage of the conversion cycle so we’ve got to know how to structure our content appropriately. The experts give a few suggestions here. Nail in on long-tail keywords to reach the BOFu kids. Stick to one topic at a time. Create pages to rank for individual head terms and focus on the low-competition keywords in your niche.

But the awareness phase is critical and you can’t gain interest unless you give people something useful. Steve Wiideman insists on links to free tools, guides, and checklists as a marketing strategy for garnering tons of TOFu interest.

Invest In Yourself

It’s easy to forget about our own brand when we’re focused on making it awesome for our clients. John Rampton and Michael Cottam urge us to take the advice we give our clients. Clients come and go with their millions. “What will stick with you is your own brand and assets. Build those and invest as much resources (sic) in those as you would your clients’ sites” (John Rampton, Founder and CEO, with over 1 million Twitter followers). Capitalize on what you practice everyday and know one or two things really well – this is your expertise. And study what you’re not practicing everyday to maintain an edge in the industry.

Craft Awesome New Content Every Week

The demand for high quality content won’t change anytime soon so unless you’re a blackhat you’ll want to maximize your content and repurpose it – a ingenious hack from Oleg Korneitchouk. Several experts commented on how they wished they’d known the value of investing in a marketing campaign, with regular, meaningful content at the top of the priority list. Josh Steimle, Founder of MW1 says it’s simple: “High quality work will attract high quality links. It’s a lot of hard work to create great content, but it’s a simple recipe.”  Good quality content helps the customer alleviate their pains and achieve their goals. This points back to relationships and making our brand trustworthy. But it has to be ongoing. Fresh content each week is essential to high organic ranking and traffic.

Get Your Hands Dirty

We’ve gotta be ballsy in this industry. If we want to know what it feels like to jump out of a plane, we’ve got to jump out of the plane. Take risks with what we know. Research. Experiment. Learn from the results. Experiential learning is the key to forming a knowledge base that will compound over time and support innovation. According to the experts, research and risk are our most profitable investments. Know how to code. Use PPC as a learning mechanism for SEO. Don’t be afraid to try and share with others – remember relationships? Eric Enge sums up SEO & PPC advice the best: “Establish yourself as knowing one aspect of it very, very well. Then, when you’re ready, work on adding a second area of expertise, and get to the point where you are recognized as an expert on that. Keep expanding on those things over time.”

Logging out,

Logical mix

*Full article here: Round Up: What Advice Would’ve Changed Your SEO or PPC Career?

/by

6 Years In The 6

, ,

Today is the 6 year anniversary of Logical Mix.

It has been an awesome ride. Helping small to mid sized businesses grow their online presence has been one of the most rewarding things our company has offered the world. We pride ourselves on customer service and reliability, and that is what has kept us alive and well. Spending our clients money like it’s our own is our secret to success.

The online marketing world is an ever-changing one. We are constantly reading, listening, educating and going to conferences to learn about the digital world. We pass this knowledge on to our existing and new customers. We don’t focus as much as we should on our brand, because we are so focused on your brand. If your brand grows… Logical Mix grows.

SEO marketing in Toronto has been our bread and butter, but we do whatever it takes to get companies the exposure they deserve online. Whether it is web design, getting on local listings or directories, pay-per-click or social media…search engine marketing is what we do! (We stated that six years ago).

6 years in the 6 just sounded like the right title for this article.

This adventure has been incredible. We owe everyone we have had the opportunity to work with everything.

Thank you Toronto and the GTA (and Vancouver, USA, England, Thailand and China), for allowing us to work and build your economies.

Logging Out,

Logical Mix

/by

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

So you want the most for your business, you want it to be seen, heard, and advertised to its best capability. While competition stands at the edge with the latest and greatest technologies, you want your business to draw the public in, and for the words on your site to be read. How does one improve their internet publicity in the best possible way? While there are various ways of doing so, managing your keywords is among the most important. Keywords are the crucial words that describe what you are offering and help determine where your ad will appear.

Choosing the most accurate keyword can help draw customers to your site as it targets exactly what they want. If you use specific keywords, and they search for a specific text, your advertisement or website has a better chance of appearing; by making it more specific, you are making it more viewable to the public and potential customers.  It is vital to think like your customers when you’re creating an initial list of terms or phrases that customers will use to describe your product or service. It is critical that the list of keywords you choose are the words that your customers will be searching when they want to find what you are offering. While it is important to make your words specific, it is helpful to bear in mind that sometimes making words too specific can be negatively impacting rather than positive. By making your keywords too specific you may find it harder to reach a vast amount of people. However, by combining general words along with specific phrases, you will be able to target the largest amount of people in an online community. Picking the accurate number of keywords is also crucial to achieving the highest amount of publicity. Google Support states that, “Most advertisers find it useful to have somewhere between five and twenty keywords per ad group, although you can have more than twenty keywords in an ad group”. In addition, grouping your keywords into themes can positively affect a customer’s search as it opens variety, which can therefore open your service or product up to potential customers.
While improving keywords is a vital part to having a successful online identity, creating better landing pages can also aid to improving search optimization. Your Google Adwords Quality Score is an estimate of how relative your ads and keywords are in helping Google users find what they are looking for and seeing your ad. Achieving a high quality score is the overall intention of any company as they want keywords that are helpful and useful to someone viewing their ad. Your landing page is the page your website visitors first view after clicking on a link that directs them to your landing page. In order to improve the performance of your search results, there are a few techniques that can be used to improve your page rank and quality score. By adding your top performing keywords and merging them together onto your landing page you can increase your search optimization and thus improve your Google quality score. In addition, by changing you landing page’s meta tags and title tags you can create a keyword density that works well with your landing page, as well as it acting as an aid in producing better search engine results.

Finally, a vital step is taking full advantage of what Google calls their Site-Related Keywords Tool. This tool is used to view how exactly Google ranks your landing page in regards to the relevance it has to the keywords you are trying to target. By using this tool, you can better understand how Google distinguishes between a website whose keywords work well for their landing pages, and a website that has poor keywords that do not directly target their associated landing page. By accurately using keywords that help to best optimize search engine results, you can get the most out of using online resources as a way to advertise for your company. Online sources are one of the most effective ways to advertise, and by using them accurately you can create an online profile for your company that aids in the development of your overall client base.

Logging Out,
Logical Mix

/by

NEW YEAR’S EVALUATION

, ,

Another new year is upon us. It’s the perfect time of year to reevaluate your company’s goals and marketing efforts. You should be looking introspectively at your company’s results through marketing and make changes accordingly.

Questions to ask yourself:
1) Are we meeting or have we met the sales goal we set at the beginning of the year?
2) Are we on the first page on major search engines (For keywords & key phrases relevant to our business)?
3) How can we improve our overall exposure to potential clients or prospects?

The Answers:
1) If you said “yes” to meeting your goals, keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t mess up a good thing. You may want to add to your current efforts, but certainly don’t let them interfere with what is working.
If your answer was “no”, you need to ramp up your activity to drive new business for your organization. Let’s assume you’re happy with your sales staff (if not, it’s time to increase training or let them go), here are some tips to help increase sales:
Do a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign: Drive traffic to your website. Create landing pages to aid in improving search optimization and watch the leads role in for your sales team.
Create a New Website or edit old Website: Make sure it looks professional and has the right “call to action”.
Search Engine Optimize: More on this in the 2) section. Create an Email Campaign or Direct Mail campaign: These are older methods to drive leads for your business, but can sometimes work wonders.

2) With regards to getting your company’s website on the first page of Google, Bing and/or Yahoo, write down a list of 10 key words or key phrases you want your company to show up for. Think like your prospects would think for this list. Write down a list of 10 (or the relevant number) geographic locations you want to be found in, if applicable. Take those lists to an internet marketing expert who can get you to the top of those pages desired (wink, wink, Logical Mix). Items to make sure are accurate on your website are: Title Tags, Alt Image Tags, Relevant Text and the Meta Description to name a few.

3) In the case of not seeming redundant, do all of the the above and you will be well on your way to improving your overall exposure to potential clients or prospects. Take it seriously, your business depends on it.

Enjoy the holiday season, recharge the batteries and always be thinking of strategies to grow your company (because, we are).

Wishing your organization a prosperous 2015!

Logging Out,
Logical Mix

/by