Know-How Exchange : SEO/SEM

It's a dicey area. Customers have little knowledge and people who really know what they are doing are few and far between. SEO is, however, one of the most important elements of a web marketing strategy.

Here are some quick suggestions:

1) use paid seach advertising to test your offer.
>> You want to make sure your site converts for your chosen keywords before you put a whole lot of time and effot into SEO.

2) take time to do some rather extensive research on your targeted keywords
>> Overture (Now Yahoo! search) has a great keyword suggestion tool that will give you a good idea about which keywords have the highest volume. There are other tools out there as well.

3) focus on one keyword at a time
>>strategically, successful SEO consultants know that you can only really target one keyword (or keyphrase) at a time in terms of what you are focused on. So -- target your best keyword for your home page and work it like a dog until you get that page into the top 10 for that keyword. If a consultant starts telling you that you will target over 3 keywords for your homepage -- if you get the idea that they are trying to load your homepage up with a pile of keywords -- then DON't work with them, they don't understand how much time and effort it takes to get one good results for one keyword).

4) Educate yourself.
>>It is important to have a strong basic level of knowledge in this area, or you will waste a lot of time and money. I think the best way to do this is to purchase and listen to "Stomping the Search Engines" by Brad Fallon and Andy Jenkins. Go to https://www.marketingpathway.com/marketing-toolbox.php to find it.

5) Consider this an ongoing effort
>>It takes a long time to get results. Sometimes things happen overnight by luck but, SEO should be thought of as an ongoing part of your promotional efforts. Patience is truly a virtue when dealing with Google. It will take 3-8 months to see ANY results in most cases.

6) Look for documented results.
>> If you hire someone to do your SEO, they should be able to show you several clients and document their results.

7) Do they have skin in the game?
>> The best SEOs have figured out that they can make a lot of money by selling their own products. Think about it, if you knew how to get tons of traffic from Google, wouldn't you want to benefit from that knowledge by having your own website.

Hope this helps :-)

Doug

earthdoggy,

I want to build on something Doug mentioned. e-marketing/SEM/SEO are long term or big picture items that need to be in your business plan. The campaigns or specific measurements inside of them can be short term, but you really want to make sure you consider this a long term investment and don't get frustrated because two weeks into it you aren't making your millions.

Consider creating a budget for this type of activity inside your business plan. When you go shopping for help you will know before hand how much you are willing to spend and can make an educated choice when considering multiple options.

Also, after your budget is established, you may want to post it as a project on this board under "Hire an Expert" to help you find some of us that may be willing to help you with your e-marketing plan.

Hope that helps.

Also note that Marketingprofs is currently working on a vendor selector for SEO firms, like the one they did for the email marketing.