1st page of Google is easy - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 8

Hi, welcome to the eWebStyle podcast. Yes, welcome back. Thanks for joining us for another fun-filled edition of the eWebStyle podcast. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. And this is Paul Hanson, sales manager of eWebStyle. We are having a peanut-free podcast. How about a salmonella-free podcast? That's a good call. Yeah, there we go. It's an interesting story that it looks like they were on the brink of insolvency already. And they ship the peanuts anyway. Man, somebody's going to jail for that one. Come on, gosh. I mean, times must really, really be tight if you're going to send out some salmonella peanuts to your suppliers. Come on. That's crazy. Speaking of tight times, what do you do as a business owner when times are tight? You grow your business. That's what we like to do here at eWebStyle and for our clients. We want to grow your business. Yes, search engine optimization and a good website are obviously a great, cost-effective, great ROI way to do that. So we're here talking about search engine optimization and how we can grow your business. And here's what else you do when times get tough. You stop listening to the news and thinking that the economy is going bad. You can still grow your business. Yes, absolutely. We're growing our business here at eWebStyle. We're excited about that. And the reason is because we're helping other businesses grow. So you can do it. Speaking of do it, just to cover what we covered last time, we covered do's and don'ts of SEO outsourcing. If that's a subject of interest to you, make sure you go back and listen to our previous podcast. If that's a subject that's not of interest to you and you want to voice your opinion, don't. I just don't. You can always contact us at podcast at e-webstyle.com. That's W-E-B-S-T-Y-L-E.com. And we always look forward to your comments, all the positive ones. We look forward to throwing the bad ones in the garbage. So keep those emails coming and keep listening to our podcast.

The other thing that we touched on last time was search engine optimization sabotage. So if you are in the market for a new SEO company and you're not happy with your current SEO company, make sure you call us first. We'll help you through that process here at eWebStyle. But also make sure you go back and listen to the previous podcast because there are some measures you need to take to make sure that your old SEO company, as it's going out the door, doesn't do any sabotage. It's the proverbial, deliver the pink slip with the security guards so the guy can't go postal as he's leaving your office. At Friday at 4.45 p.m. Before Christmas. No, no, no, that doesn't happen. But definitely listen to the old podcast. It's a great example, a perfect example of SEO sabotage. All right, so the next line on our sheet here, what does that say here? SEO is a slow process. For those of you who don't know, SEO does not, just because you start SEO, does not mean you are going to have overnight success. And we can take a few moments here to answer the question, why is SEO a slow process? That's a great question. It takes time. I mean, there's a lot of things involved in SEO, and we've covered those, link building, keywords, and all those things take time to develop. So it's not, and I have clients, since I deal with a lot of clients and we're pitching SEO, that they think, oh, I'll be on the first page of Google tomorrow. And that can be true. Yeah. It actually can be true. It can be true. If you're selling blue one-armed widgets, I promise you I can get you on the first page of Google really fast. I quit selling those things a while. Yeah, because the arm-free widgets are so much better. Yeah, they really are. And we know somebody's going to listen to this podcast, and they're going to go out, and they're going to make a web page for

blue one-armed widgets, and somebody's going to Google it. They're going to say, you said I could get on there on the first day, first page of Google. And the reality for that is if it's a term that there's not many web pages or no web pages out on the Internet regarding that particular subject, then, of course, it's going to be pretty easy to get on the first page. The slower process happens when you're dealing with the more interesting keywords. You know, if you want to choose, you know, we were dealing with one of our clients who's an attorney who does mass tort cases, and they're looking at what's Zyprexa. Yeah. Zyprexa. Digitech. And Digitech. Those are, you know, huge class action lawsuits are there. There's a lot of money to be made by the attorneys. I mean, you know, to be returned to the people who are unrightfully wronged. And consequently, you know, attorneys, out of the goodness of their heart, want to make sure that money gets to those people. So they're spending a lot of their own money to make sure that those dollars get back to their clients. Nice cover-up, Chris. Thank you, our client. So there's an example where there is literally a lot of money there, so you can get some really expensive keyword terms in terms of pay-per-click, and a lot of efforts going on for those keyword terms in terms of search and optimization. So with the right SEO company, such as eWebStyle, and with some patience and time, you can get to the first page of Google for those very expensive or very challenging keywords, if you will. Even attorney is a very challenging keyword to get to the first page of Google for. It gets a lot of searches. That's going to be tough to do. And it can be done. It takes time, and it takes a, that actually, something like that takes a bigger SEO strategy. We usually don't have to get in that kind of strategy on our day-to-day SEO client

base where, you know, it's the more traditional link building, keywords, meta tags, all of those good things. And the other thing that can take time is link building. So if you want to go out there and you need to do link building and Google gives you, you know, significant credit for having high-value inbound links, you know, it takes time to build those and put those together. So that's why it takes time. So the next question is, okay, Paul, this is going to take a long time before I can get my website up there, but I want customers today. What should I do? Now, I'd say the next thing you should do is set up a pay-per-click campaign to get immediate results. And can you guys help us with that? We can certainly help you set up, help manage your pay-per-click campaign, do all of your, all of the legwork. Because pay-per-click is not, I don't want to say it's hard, but it's not, I don't want to say it's not easy. Help me find out a better word. It's time-consuming. That's exactly what I'm looking for. It's laborious. It's laborious. It is definitely time-consuming. And you're a business owner. You don't have the time to do that. And frankly, the people who are, you know, would be talented at doing that, you don't, we recommend that you spend an hour, maybe two hours a day. So you're not going to go out and hire somebody to come in who's a pay-per-click expert to, who only needs to be working an hour a day. That just doesn't make sense. And consequently, the people that you can get for an hour a day aren't going to be talented enough in pay-per-click to properly manage it. So it's a great example of where you really should outsource that labor. Yeah, and you know, it's, you could do it, but, and you know, a lot of clients come to us because they have to run their business. And they should

be running their business. Yeah, they have to be a physician or a, you know, office supply company or whatever it is they do and then come home at night and manage a pay-per-click campaign after they make dinner and do all this other stuff in their life. So it is definitely a time-consuming process, and a lot of our clients come to us like, hey, I just don't have, I just really don't have time to do this or just, I don't want to do it. And then they learn our price and say, wow, that's really cost-effective, so, Take it. We're definitely going to, we're definitely going to do that with you. One of the things that people ask, you know, we may recommend a $500 a month pay-per-click campaign. And when I say $500 a month, I'm talking about the amount of money that goes into your escrow account, which is to be spent on clicks. And then our charge for pay-per-click campaigns can vary. It's usually between $375 and $475. And people are like, okay, wait a minute. So I'm paying as much for your management of the campaign as I am for actually spending on the campaign. That doesn't necessarily feel right. And there's a reason for that. You can get significant, if you just go in and nonchalantly set up a pay-per-click campaign and you're not monitoring it and you're not tracking it and you're not taking care of it on a daily basis like we do, then some of the things you can run into is you can spend your whole $500 in the first day. Or you can spend it on the wrong terms or, you know, it may be sending traffic to the wrong pages. If you aren't cognizant of what's going on and keeping track of that, then literally that $500 can disappear quickly. What you want, the value of having somebody monitor that can actually, you know, triple, quadruple, turn that $500 investment into the actual pay-per-clicks, into, you know, thousands of dollars in

return. And that's where, okay, if I tell you, look, you're going to spend $500, you're going to pay us, we'll just say $500, and in the course of a month you're going to get eight customers that to you are worth $1,000 a piece, well, it's a no-brainer. I'm spending $1,000, I'm getting $8,000 of business, that's a no-brainer, I'm going to do it. So, you definitely need to consider having somebody manage your pay-per-click campaign for you, and we'd love to talk to you about that here. We'd love to have your business with that. So, in general, we want to talk today about pay-per-click campaigns and what it is you want to look for, what it is that you want to do in order to succeed in your campaign. You know, I'd say the very first thing, or one of the most important things, you need to have a strategy. Have an online strategy before you start a pay-per-click campaign. I mean, I think you should have goals and a strategy before you do anything, but, you know, you definitely need a strategy before you start it. You know, define your purpose for your online marketing campaign. It could be to, obviously you want more clicks, but are you trying to make sales? Do you have an e-commerce website? Are you trying to get more people to fill out a contact form of some sort? I mean, so know exactly what your strategy is, what your goal is for your pay-per-click campaign. Don't just jump out there and start a pay-per-click campaign and say, oh, I can't wait until the hits come in. That's absolutely true. And, you know, you're right. In some sense, that sounds unbelievably obvious. And there's also, this phrase also sounds unbelievably common, which is, hey, let's just throw a couple hundred dollars at pay-per-click and see what happens. Does that sound like you have an online strategy before you begin your pay-per-click? It sounds like you don't know what you're doing. Exactly. And you specifically have no strategy. You're just throwing money.

Again, you know, we've all heard business owners do it, say it, whatever. I tried pay-per-click, it didn't work, whatever, because they just threw a couple hundred dollars at it to see what would happen. And that's not with a strategy. That's not how you make that happen. That's not how you make that happen properly. Yes. One thing is you can do it. You can do that. You can just throw money at it. But, you know, you might be throwing money away. If you're planning on just throwing money in general, and this is Chris Burris talking, not the owner of eWebStyle, you know, you could just throw it at me. I'll catch it. Yeah. I'll catch every dollar, I promise. I'll probably even give you a little bit of good advice, you know, about other things that you might want to do with other money that you want to spend. And I do want to give props. We're cutting some of this information out of WebsiteTips.com, so we want to make sure that you visit them. Awesome place for information. Yeah. So we're getting some of our information from there as well as some other locations and, of course, our own expertise. But this was a, Barbara Fisher has put together a great, succinct document, and we're using that kind of as a guideline for our discussion today. I don't think that's Barbara calling you, Sam. You better give me props on your podcast. Yeah. Like I said, we're in this podcast to give back to the SEO community, and certainly this is a great document. So, Barbara Fisher, good on you. WebsiteTips.com, make sure you guys visit them. They're a good source. One thing, we talked early on in one of our first podcasts about the difference between SEM and SEO, search engine marketing, and search engine optimization. And just to kind of reiterate, pay-per-click is definitely an aspect of search engine marketing. Yes. Search engine optimization is the process of focusing on organic search placement. And some of the things that we're going

to say as we go through and talk about pay-per-click, SEM is, pay-per-click is part of SEM. We're really going to be talking about search engine marketing as a whole because all of this, the effectiveness of your pay-per-click, the effectiveness of your search engine marketing in general, the effectiveness of your search engine optimization depends on your strategy. So, it's fitting that we started off with have an online strategy. And one of the things that you always want to identify, and, in fact, that was kind of the genesis of this discussion, is SEO is a little slow. So, have a long-term goal. Have a short-term goal. Maybe your long-term goal is to only be doing search engine optimization and only organic placement because statistics say that you get significantly more clicks from organic. And there's at least one study, unfortunately, I can't quote what that study is, so you're going to have to trust me on this. There's a study out there that talks about how people actually have more faith, give more credibility to links that they click when they click in the organic section. If I'm confusing you with the difference between organic and pay-per-click, go back and listen to our podcast because we do discuss that. Was that the golden triangle study? I think, well, no, it wasn't. Okay. It wasn't that one. That's a great study. A lot of SEO people reference it. And that talks about the fact that you actually get more clicks in what's called the golden triangle, which is typically the first three positions on page one of Google. And that was in contrast to what kind of clicks do you get for pay-per-click. The one I'm talking about, I read it once. I didn't bookmark it. I obviously should have because it's a powerful piece of information. If it's true, I'm just being honest, guys. Good point. Good point, though. I'm just being honest. Very good point. Hey, I read it on the internet. It can't be more true than that.

So it must be true. Unless it was on Wikipedia or Wikipedia or whatever, however you want to pronounce that. And, again, that stat is that people actually give more credence, they have more belief in the organic placements. And, you know, it kind of makes sense because you know someone's selling you something. There's this part of your brain that says, oh, they're trying to sell me something, so they may be lying. Yeah. So we want to talk, so when we talk about, you know, short-term, long-term, SEO and pay-per-click are all combined in that. So it's not, in that situation, again, that's all part of your search engine marketing, not just your pay-per-click. So next thing you want to talk about is set a realistic monthly budget. I think a lot of companies go out there and they just kind of have that approach. So we're just going to throw money at the wall and see what sticks. And they take that same approach with their budget. Oh, we'll just, you know, $100, $2,000. Okay, why? You know, where are these numbers? And set your budget realist. If you sell blue one-arm widgets for $1,000, a $10,000 budget, you know, maybe not be a realistic budget for your company. And, of course, that's an extreme example. You think more than $10,000? You know, if I'm doing it, I'm going to say $20,000. You know, just have a realistic budget for, you know, think about your product, your cost in the product, your profit margin on this product. And it's going to differ company to company, budget to budget, product to product. Exactly. And, again, that comes down to, you know, your search engine marketing company should be working with you to help you kind of define those goals. You know, you don't want to throw too much money at it. And, really, again, this all comes down to managing the campaign properly because you can stretch $500 a long way if you're doing the right con, if you've got the skill. And you can watch

$500 go down the tubes really quickly. In a couple hours. Exactly. If, you know, depending on the keywords that you're working with and depending on, you know, if you know how to set up the campaign. It's a matter of expertise. Next, we've got prepare your website. Why would you want to prepare your website before doing pay-per-click? Because, obviously, you just throw money at it, people are going to click on you, and then that's a sale, you know. And that seems so obvious. And we really get this where people will come to us and say, hey, I'm ready to do search engine optimization or I'm ready to do pay-per-click. And you pull up to your website, and your first thought is, no, you are not. I'm going to say most of the people that come to us are in that same boat. They have to do some sort of preparation. So, in general, at sales here at eWebStyle, your focus is search engine optimization. And so, how many of them, of the clients that we get for search engine optimization, how many have to do a website first? All of them. Every single one of them. Every single one of them. Has to do something. I mean, and their site, and they may not think that, but their site may look pretty, and it may look very nice, but it's, and the preparation that we're talking about may not be just how it looks. It's a whole lot more to that. Maybe this is a good time to throw in that office supply company we were talking about the other day. Oh, you know, I think that's a perfect example. So, here's an example. Prepare your website. There's an office supply company in the Houston area that we've been talking with, and they have a very nice online shopping cart website. When you go there, it's not done yet. They're still finishing off the details, but you can see that it's going to look like a very good website, and you can purchase products there. And

when we started analyzing, okay, how are we going to prepare this website to support their sales process in the Houston area? And here's why you want to work with eWebStyle, or you want to work with a company that has the entrepreneurial experience that eWebStyle has. Because they, you know, the first company, SEO company you talk to may look at that and say, oh, wow, well, you know, we want, you should just, you know, market, optimize for CDs, because you sell CDs, or you should optimize for paper, because you sell lots of paper. Or, you know, we do ask two questions, what do you sell the most of, and what makes you the most money? And people might say, oh, we should just optimize for what you sell the most of, and what makes you the most money. But here at eWebStyle, we get a little deeper into this client, and we start understanding, okay, so why would somebody go to this client, we'll call them Joe's Office Supply, versus Office Depot, or Office Max? And the reason boils down to customer service, well, really it boils down to customer service. Some of the pitches is that they can have same-day delivery, which is customer service. And so their sales force, when they knock on a door, they're not selling paper, which they sell the most of, or CDs, which makes them the most money. They're selling a service. And currently, the website doesn't support that service at all. It supports a shopping cart. Yeah. Well, let me, you know, at all is a little rough, because if they're in the door, and they're saying, this is our service, and we've got a great website, yes, it's a great website, so it at least looks professional. But it doesn't pitch to the customer on the website, or the potential customer, hey, here's why you should be with Joe's Office Supply. You should be with us, because we've got great customer service, we've got a great sales force, and you're going to know Mary on a first-name

basis. And you're going to be able to pick up the phone and say, hey, Mary, how you doing? How are the kids? How's the husband? And I need a pack of paper. Can you get that to me today? Yeah. That's why people want to do business with Joe's Office Supply. And the website doesn't represent that. So that's a great example of prepare your website. So we put together a proposal, we're saying, look, you need to work on these first, you know, put together five, ten pages up front that are about you, and on the back end, provide the ordering system, which is the shopping cart. Because your intention is not to compete with Office Max and Office Depot, because you're not going to win that. That's just not going to happen. Unless it happens to be somebody who used to use your service, and they see you and say, oh, I want to use Joe again, or, you know, whatever it may be. So somebody in California probably is not going to use you unless you're beating them on price. And even then, it's questionable because they just don't know who Joe's Office Supply in Houston is. Yeah, and that's a perfect example of how to prepare the website for SEO, or, excuse me, for our pay-per-click campaign. And it also is SEO, but yeah, since we're talking about pay-per-click, we'll say pay-per-click. The other thing is, you know, in general, what does the website look like? Like, in that case, that website looked good. It had some nice slogans. Cosmetically, it was really nice. Yeah. It was appeasing to the eye. It had, you know, some images there, and it looked nice. Yep. And on further investigation, when you really start to understand the business, you realize that it doesn't support the salespeople, which is really, you know, when he comes to us, when we're talking to him, our value-added proposition is that we're going to bring you customers and sales. And that's going to happen because of what they do, because of the

customer service that they do. So, and, you know, everything that we ever talk about websites is true relative to pay-per-click. That is, it's got to look good. It's got to have good copy. We always talk about some sort of call to action, buy something, click something, give me your email, download a book, you know, something. What is the purpose? You know, pull up a page that you're trying to get traffic to and lean back in your chair and look at the screen and say, what do I want the customer to do when they come to this page? And then make sure that your page is geared towards having them do that. Let's see, what do we got next? So, site design, that we talk in terms of, you know, do you want Flash? And again, this is true of SEO and websites in general. So, what is it, and pay-per-click, you know, what are we going to present to the client and how are we going to present it and is it going to support everything else we're planning to do in our search engine optimization campaign? And, you know, this might seem not redundant, but it might seem like this is common sense. But, you know, everyone has been to websites that don't have a call to action. They've been to websites that don't have, they're not enticing, they don't entice the customer to want to do, to buy or to do something else. So, it might seem common sense, but we've all visited websites that don't, that break these rules. Right, yeah. Isn't that what you see all the time? Yeah, all day, every day, actually. Hi, this is Paul Hanson. You're breaking all the rules. Where's your good copy? Come on. One secret that is mentioned here by Barbara is start small, choose one search engine. If you're going to do it yourself, absolutely choose one search engine. Again, we can really focus on Google because it's such, again, such a dominant search engine in the market. So, you can really focus

your pay-per-click campaign just on Google. But we'll go in there and we'll do Yahoo and others when it feels appropriate. And we say an hour to two hours a day. If you're going to spend an hour to two hours, let's say you spend one hour a day managing your pay-per-click campaign on Google. And then, you just want to fly off the handle and do it again on Yahoo and do it again for MSN. I mean, that's a lot of time that you're spending managing pay-per-click campaigns across multiple search engines. And that can get, like you said before, very laborious. That takes time. It takes energy. And that's outside of you running your business. That's in addition. In addition. In addition to you running your business. And in that hour, we like to say that there are five things that you should focus. So, everybody, get your pen out. Get ready. I got mine. There are five things that we're going to focus on. Hopefully, I can remember them. The first thing that you're going to focus on and spend time on in that hour is on your pay-per-click manager. That's the first thing you want to be spending time on, your pay-per-click manager. Paul, what's the second thing? Hang on. I'm writing, man. Pay-per-click manager. Five things. Pay-per-click. I'd say the second thing would be your keywords. Oh, keywords. That's a good idea. I almost forgot that one. The next thing that you want to be spending time on are your logs. And we'll get right back to that here in just a moment. Because Paul's going to give us our next one. Item number four is, where is, I don't know. Keywords. Keywords again. Oh, I almost forgot that. Keywords again. Again, yeah. And number five is keywords. Because the most important, yeah, we're down. So, let's just recap that for those who didn't have their pens ready. Number one is you need to be spending time on your pay-per-click manager. That's your Google AdWords software. Number two is you need to be working

on your keywords. Number three is you need to be spending time with your analytics or your stats software. That's the thing that will keep track of the statistics who's gotten on your website, how they got there, why they got there, what they do. Did they balance all that stuff? The next one is keywords. You need to focus on keywords. And we cannot forget the last one, which is keywords. Yes. Keywords are really important. We've got a podcast on keywords. If we haven't gone over keywords enough, listen to the podcast on keywords. Yes. Because keywords are really, really important. One of those, that item number two, is going to be the subject of our next podcast. Our next podcast is going to cover Webalyzer and Google Analytics. Webalyzer is a free stats viewing software. That's where you can view how people found your website, all that. So, we're going to cover some of the details of that, cover some of the information in Webalyzer, which sometimes can be confusing. And we'll do a little bit of compare and contrast with Google Analytics. We used to use Webalyzer on a regular basis. We've still got some clients who use it. So, we're familiar with it. We use it. But, for the most part, we've switched over to Google Analytics for everything that we do because it's such a powerful piece of software. And so, make sure you join us next time. We are going to be covering stats, web stats, Webalyzer, and Google Analytics. And until then, I'm Chris Burris. And this is Paul Hanson. And bye-bye. We'll see you next time on the Web Style Podcast.