I went on and open up both Google and Bing webmaster tools as well as Google Analytics.

My first reaction was certainly a “what on earth is that!” moment . A scary chart to look at:

Top queries impressions dropped by 54%

Top Pages impressions dropped by 70%

Top Queries impressions on Bing remained the same 

A piece of relief for me, my client’s website is not automatically going down the sink for whatever reason.

Google Analytics Organic traffic stable

Here as well, everything seems normal. Better than before actually, but only marginally

So what happened?

Trawling the web, I found a mix bag of items ranging from Panda updates to brand recognition factor to potential errors on Google Servers. All of this didn’t quite fit the bill. Why did my traffic went up when the site’s visibility collapsed on the SERPs?

I realised that some of this loss, given over an extended period could neither be a penalty (traffic doesn’t drop) nor a site issue (Bing/G. Analytics values are stable)

The only thing I was left with was potential change in attribution/Data or SERPs behaviour.

I recalled reading an article about Google Webmaster changing the rules of its average search ranking position. While the timing was better and the topic closer to what I was looking for, it wasn’t still quite right as it was only affecting the numbers displayed and not the possible visibility in SERPs.

What all of this means for marketers?

The first lesson is to take a deep breath.

If you are doing your job correctly, you know your site is working fine and  you are confident your link profile is solid, then relax, think through your methodology and analyse the situation before rushing into actions.

The second lesson is to always be careful about the numbers you are using to analyse your SEO.

Has this drop can cause an overall loss of performance? Obviously not. Yesterday my client recorded the highest traffic day in 6 months.

But I could have very well used a composite number looking at the impressions as a base line to evaluate my longtail keywords work.

While I developped some pretty niffty tools over the years, I often found that the most important values are often the most classic ones.

1. Traffic
2. # of pages
3. # of kwds
4. kwds per page yeld
5. Split between your type of traffic/queries (Head vs Body vs long tail)*

*: here is a nifty way of doing keywords segmentation on Google Analytics . Thanks to John Doherty for that

In Marketing We Trust - SEO, E-commerce, E-Marketing & the rest

On Wednesday, Google presented its new layout for their homepage, replacing with a hover over pop-up list their not so pretty black bar.

“Instead of the horizontal black bar at the top of the page, you’ll now find links to your services in a new drop-down Google menu nested under the Google logo,” writes technical lead Eddie Kessler — whose Google profile identifies him as a “cat herder” — in an official announcement blog post. “We’ll show you a list of links and you can access additional services by hovering over the “More” link at the bottom of the list. Click on what you want, and you’re off.”

Described as the roll out of the Google Redesign, Google is experimenting a very bulky display, almost as if Android started invading PCs. No wonder this occures, those days everything should be though as a mobile first in Google.

Interesting that the aestehetic is not the best and is almost built as if the Google was creating a statement of their simplicity and usability. Perhaps a way to differentiate from Apple, even if they tend to use more and more similar shade of gray

In Marketing We Trust - SEO, E-commerce, E-Marketing & the rest

The main reason why?

Brands, from medium to humongous all have large search teams, working on an every day basis trying to optimise both their paid traffic and their organic ones. Working with clients who are ready to spend fortunes on adwords and display. Any Google move is closely watched and analysed.

My observation over the last few months is that Google has become increasingly more agressive to push big brands with slow and unreactive process to shy away from SEO (organic) non-branded traffic
On the other hand Google ensure that any branded traffic and Paid search provides max exposure for such brands.

The latest 2 search algorithm + Analytics update for organic traffic are very likely to scare large corp away from heavy investment in SEO:

1. Panda forces you to push better quality content
2. Freshness forces you to refresh such content often
3. Google stop providing you keywords info on Analytics for free Google traffic

It’s interesting that the latest freshness index comes around time where most corporation are working on their 2012 budget allocation. Coincidence? I can’t be certain.

Deprive big brands from clear ROI for organic traffic as large organisations/sites are slow to update to change but at the same time flatter them with paid proposal or traffic that should anyway belong to them, you surely have a winning case for Google’s paid campaigns.

What’s coming up?

I had the opportunity to be presented with what I believe will be the biggest move for Google in order to boost its revenues and sit its adwords program as a turnkey marketing spend.

Keywordless ads and campaigns.

This allows advertisers to set and forget adwords campaign optimisation as Google. This would allow small players to avoid burning their small budgets on mistakes such as bidding on high traffic, high cost kwds. All optimisation, including keyword selection is done for them.

What Google doesn’t tell is their selection algorithm is not very accurate. When one of my client trialed the beta version we found an approx 20% under-optimisation rate. 20% is a lot even for a beta product.

20% underperformance rate X every search query displaying a paid advertisement X Millions of Advertisers= very big $$$$$

Best opportunities for small businesses

Panda update (quality)- This was coming and any small businesses who are still in existence must be selling a product or a service of high quality

Best Answer: Use all Material available within your company to create great content (YOur sales activity and brochure can be a good start)

Freshness update- SEO can no longer be a set and forget, make sure you create an editorial calendar, review, add, update information about your products as frequently as possible.

Best Answer: Again, start with internal resources! Your customer support, what questions do they handle? Write it down as they become meaningful and numerous enough to be published

Google Analytics update (loss of keywords info) – Google, in a way, is giving you a favour by forcing you to stop being focused on 1 specific keyword, by pushing only for a ROI per keyword you risk over optimising your page.

Best Answer: Look at an entry page level, consider the # of keywords per page and how much total traffic, bounce rate and result you get from that page. Look first at on-page optimisation, then outreach/advertisement/linkbuilding, then Conversion rate optimisation at a page or page type level.

In Marketing We Trust - SEO, E-commerce, E-Marketing & the rest

Twitter, Facebook, Paid Search, Organic Search and even Foursquare, LinkedIn and iAd help the in house advertisers, consultants and ad agencies to convert leads. Their tracking tools will help you see how many times the users accessed your ads. Users see your commercials on a social networking site, go on Google, search for your business and get to your site. At this point they may not make any purchase, but they can also click on paid search ads and eventually make the purchase.

Now the questions are: whether or not the entire profit goes to that paid search ad? Do the Facebook ad and the Google list deserve some revenue?

About Cross-channel analytics

Cross-channel analytics shows the interaction between various channels and their impact by performing with different marketing programs. Comparison Shopping, Organic Search, Paid Search, Display Ads and many more are included in this report.

Cross-channel analytics and its advantages

Your marketing strategies can be improved by Cross-channel analytics if you use some of these methods:

Time impact / Latency. Identifying the latency prototype for each visitor and channel can be done by investigating the online advertising channels and their user level data.

Funnel Attribution and Analysis. The right approach of the online marketing channel is to give credit to every advertising channel that brought the user to your site. This shows the marketer which channels combination is more effective. This method will optimize your budget allocation and will maximize the return.

Measuring the Sites/URL/Domain. The URL data coming from the online advertising channels helps the marketers adjust their strategy by following the low/high ROI placement.

Information about user demographic / behavioral leverage. Desktop vs. mobile visits, geographical information and a lot more can be captured by the cross-channel analytics. So, this program helps you track the user level behavior and target dependent on this aspect.

Most Common Attribution Methods

First Click: Through this, all the credit from the sale goes to the first visit, because it’s the one that helps the user form an opinion.

Last Click: This other method helps the final click gather the entire revenue, because it’s the one that really influenced the user to make the purchase.

Linear: This is the fairest method, because it gives equal credit to all the visits and advertisements the user has gone through.

Weighted: This gives each advertising instrument a value. The most effective gets, of course, the biggest value or weight.

Usually, the online marketers are using the Last Click method. But, lately, understanding the effect of each and every channel has become much more important. Your business rules will state what percentage of the profit shall be given to every channel. However, you still need to record the effects of every advertisement, because each has its own potential customers.

Will the weighted model become the most popular now that more and more channels tend to be successful marketing tools and the tracking methods develop? Can a new model be created?

Thoughts and Challenges on the Future

Finding the adequate goals is one of the most important challenges that advertisers have to face.

Why is the cross-channel data needed and what can you achieve if you use it? The answer to these questions is very important, because they define the goal. It helps you prioritize the large amount of data and target your success.

Extracting quantifiable insights from the data is what analytics does. Its purpose is to help you develop your business goals.

Below you have a common data analysis flow:

Many of the analytics providers didn’t overcome the stage of reporting, so it requires a lot of work in extracting the right and actionable data from the raw information.

If you ask us, inadequate ads can be removed only if you have a large amount of data. The developing of the cross-channel analytics will help marketers to quantify their traffic and revenue impact and make great optimization.

In order to perform conversions and to identify the Multi-Channel Funnels you can use the recently updated Google Analytics tool.

In Marketing We Trust - SEO, E-commerce, E-Marketing & the rest

In order to have a successful SEO campaign, you must choose the right keywords for optimization. Do not choose the wrong ones if you don’t want to lose money and time. Look into what web users are looking for, find out what the competition chooses, and then decide on the keywords you want to optimize. The words must represent best your website, so the research you previously make should be very detailed.

How to target the Top Keywords

Make a list of the keywords that are searched daily. Do not choose only popular words, but also words that could be positioned higher with a minimal effort. If the competition is rough concerning the chosen keywords, then it is likely that you won’t make it in succeeding to place your website among the first ten.

If you can’t get your site on Google’s first page, rethink your keywords

You can’t count on the fact that sites situated after the first 50 sometimes get decent traffic. You must try getting to the top, and then thinking how to stay there as long as possible.

Don’t quit if the best keywords are taken. You can choose some that aren’t so lucrative, thus having less competition.  SEO experts sustain it is possible to obtain great results even with low volume search keywords. But to do this, you should estimate how hard it will be to rank well for some words.

Come back on Earth

Make sure to use the best tools to see how difficult it would be to rank well for the keywords you want. These kinds of tools can be found on the web. You can choose some of them to help you, like the Cached’s Keyword Difficulty Tool or the Seomoz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool.

Before starting the optimization, make sure you choose at least two tools, so you can double check the keywords. check keyword phrases make sure that everything is in order. You will be amazed to see how different the difficulty for similar keywords can be. For example, if you optimize a financial site where words like money, banks or credits are often used, percentages or scales of the difficulty of these words are very diverse.

Be sure to remember bookmarking the tools you use more often, as they can be very useful in the future. After optimizing the site for the selected keywords, remember to check the difficulty of them from time to time, as percentages and scales may change.  If you need help with the keyword selection, fell free to contact us and we will help you find the best opportunities for you.

In Marketing We Trust - SEO, E-commerce, E-Marketing & the rest

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In Marketing We Trust - SEO, E-commerce, E-Marketing & the rest

The bread and butter of your business is your product detail page

An eCommerce website needs to have exceptional content to boost traffic and improve sales. Hence, a product description is critical because people like to post reviews, look at pictures and read specifications. After reading the product’s description the individual will decide if he should buy or not.

On-site search, as well as links to external sites are also recommended because people like to find out everything about the product they’re about to purchase. When creating an eCommerce website, it’s best to have an appropriate categorization like brand name, model, number and name. People like hierarchic pages where products are listed after color and size.

Granular queries, product comparison, feed-driven affiliate and on-site search are also important for your pages.

Optimization is critical and every detail counts because thus, you’ll ensure benefits for each and every product on the website.

How can you improve search performance for your product pages?

First of all, the description of the product and the <title> tag should work very well together. Make sure every word on every page is spiderable.

Working with developers who are fully aware of what they’re doing is also imperative because they will help you emphasize your text better and get rid of unimportant SEO elements. Avoid utilizing out-of-the-box, unaltered product descriptions and make sure that protocols are developed on smart keywords.

A product’s primary page is important because it manages upper-level brand, keywords and item structure.

Crucial Classification

A product’s classification can make or break an eCommerce website. Learn how to organize if want to provide a better browsing experience for your potential client.

It’s fairly simple to make your site appealing for buyers. Try to keep things as simple as possible by opting for product category display (taxonomy) on pages. Afterwards, make sure you consider organizing your product in a hierarchy (ontology). The end result will be a breadcrumb website, well organized and easy to browse through.

The internal linking architecture will be the outcome, where lower-level pages will support main keywords in upper-level pages. When the linking is correct, keywords like “17inch laptops” and “14inch laptops” will both support the same keyword, namely “laptops”.

In addition, a classification after a specific model will also be required. “Dell Laptops” for example will all be labeled under the same brand name.

A hierarchy for a categorized product can be extremely elaborate. When it comes to simple categorization, keywords are elementary. Keyword and synonym variation should be taken into account for every category level.

When the page contains valuable support content, an upper-level category will be ranked so much better. If you’re thinking to use product URLs in your product creation method, you might want to be careful because sometimes even a correct classification can seem dangerous.

You can opt for the following 2 examples Nikon D-7000 camera if you want to find out more:

/Camera/DSLR/High-Res-Video/Nikon-D7000/

/Camera/DSLR/Nikon-D7000/

Having a product live under a single URL is your best option. One category and one page will avoid duplicate content tremendously. Our preference lies with the following format:

http://store.inmarketingwetrust.com.au/Nikon-D7000-Camera/

Duplicate content is everywhere

eCommerce websites are frequently flooded with duplicate content because of the category-based URLs on products.

Category-based URL addresses are one way of duplicating content on an e-commerce website. Fundamentally, duplicate submissions are triggered because product detail pages are used several times especially for on and off-site locations.  Duplicate content is also spotted when 2 pages with different categories have similar product listings.

Check out these 2 examples about content duplication. Moreover, you’ll also have some great strategies meant to help you avoid duplication.

1. URL Parameters

If you want to assign a source attribution to your product make sure you add an URL parameter. When an external link from an affiliate is direct, duplicate content happens almost instantly. The main job of parameters is to track down internal click paths, promotional banners and on-site search results.

When the content management system is not checked, it can come up with moulds of duplicate content through parameterized URLs.

If you can deny parameters do it because the probability of duplicate content is extremely high if you choose to work with them. In situations when you are obliged to utilize parameters make sure you take into account a 301 redirection, <link rel=”canonical”>. or check out some handling dashboards of Yahoo and Google.

2. Product placement on affiliate websites

Most eCommerce websites think it’s fairly common to provide feeds to other affiliate websites with their products. Despite the genius marketing idea, you’ll risk having the exact same product page display on several sites, thus leading to duplication.

You can opt for alternative descriptions of your product so as to ensure the uniqueness of the main website. However, it’s perfectly true that 2 versions of the same product description and title take time and money.

A useful strategy would be to opt for user-generated content like reviews which will guarantee genuineness for product pages. You should constantly stay up-to-date because there are numerous ways to end up with duplicated content. Verify main webmaster tools of search engines and always have your very own analytics methods to reduce copied content.

On-site search engines are still search engines

It’s just incredible how terrible on-site search engines can be. Even major eCommerce websites don’t pay too much attention search engines. Nobody seems to care that if you want to find a product on a certain website you can’t even if you hit the on-site search button. This strategy can be extremely pricey and marketers are just not willing to invest.

Whatever the cost, on-site search is critical because it makes the website active and keeps it on top. A, optimal internal search engine comes with the eCommerce website and it’s not that complicated to understand.

A solid search engine doesn’t come cheap but it’s worth the money if you want to enjoy a successful business in the long run. You can convince your superiors that an adequate on-site search engine is necessary with utilizing some analytics strategies. But remember, It’s never a good idea to opt for cheap search engines.

Conducting simple queries is the primary maintenance task of website, weather good or bad. Great results are only produced when search engine results are tweaked and observed.

There should be a sample set made up of keywords seen from exterior search engines, brands, products, SKUs and queries taken from website search analytics.

Sometimes you might experience slow traffic to your website, as well as poor classification that might lead to performance changes in external engines. What you can do is to modify back settings and come up with greater results. For some people this technique might seem useful practice because it allows you to manipulate the algorithm.

For boarder SEO support, site search is a gold mine. If with external metrics you can only observe key phrases, with internal search you’ll have the chance to see a range of user queries. Here’s what you can find:

• what are the most utilized keywords by your website visitors
• which keywords are the most active and which ones provide paid search efforts and messaging on landing web pages.
• which keywords lead to exists ( what kind of product do you have, what’s the value, etc)
• The amount of time invested to experiment with on-site search engines

Social eCommerce

Social eCommerce is all about media advertising, marketing activities and exploit opportunities meant to benefit marketers. The keyword universe of a web page can be enriched with reviews and comments from others.

Constant content maintenance will make a website seem reliable and high quality for major search engines. When a website is spidered frequently, chances for better ranking will grow tremendously. The most important feature of a website is to have fresh articles.

You content can be easily broadened with the help of social medial locations. Make sure to consider inbound links and you’ll manage to increase traffic through interlinking. A first approach to create inbound links is through social media activities that concern your brand directly. Additionally you can generate legitimate links to websites with similar products without having to pay them.

Make the sharing of reviews and products on your webpage plain and simple. Bring direct links from other locations to your site through forums and blogs, widgets and other sharing mechanisms. don’t make an obsession over links with 302 redirects and try to make people talk about you in order to boost traffic and increase sales.

SEO can be maximized tremendously when you have a social media team who is dedicated to the business. The value of search optimization will be increased.

Keyword stuffing is not in trend anymore. Keep the content fresh and easy to read. Thus, the product will seem even more appealing.

It’s critical to make use of meaningful keywords as anchor text that leads to others sites. Don’t give an external link to words like “view” or “more” because nobody will click that. However, If you offer a hyperlink to the “view more about..” people will get curious.

Don’t forget about image optimization. Now images are popping in standard SERPs and thus, they need to be optimized as well. Alt texts attributes for every product is elementary. When you populate your content with your product’s name people will want to know at some point more about the brand.

Internal Search optimization is required for eCommerce SEO. When someone finds your site in Google for example, they will also want to find an easy product within the internal search engine of your web page.

Brand Landing Page Creation will guarantee an optimized landing page for each and every single one of your products.

Link Title Attributes must be used for your site’s anchor text. Proper title attributes like “<a href=”page.html” title=”keywords here”>” will give search engines information concerning the content of your pages.

Yield Track Page will determine your site’s effectiveness. All you need to do count your unique keywords and divide them with the web pages that are indexed in Google. The yield of a page is a metric that measures you’re your “tail”.

eCommerce is commonly linked to search engine optimization, URL rewriting, product description and product names. However, you should also pay close attention to internal site search.

After you’ve struggled for so long to bring people to your site, why not ease their job and also give them a simple search site for a better location of your products?

Returned results need to be relevant. When people want to find something on a certain website, let’s take Amazon for example, they need quick and satisfactory results from the first time. Otherwise, they might move on thinking that the product wanted is not listed.

Relevance is compulsory and nobody likes to search something numerous times because it gets annoying.

The Amazon system is extremely smart regarding its on-site search engine. After I’ve typed “Ricky Gervais” the system has immediately offered to correct my spelling. And even if there were 0 results on the Amazon website, they still provided me with extra options. Everything is automated and thus, the possibility of dropping out and looking someplace else is reduced.

You must never forget the purpose of your business. Selling a product should be your first priority. Although, on sites like Amazon displaying a high ranking product first is common, when you’re specific enough about a product the website will not hesitate to display exactly what you want, even if that item has bad reviews.

Can you use this for your personal SEO campaign?  When utilizing PPC make sure to advertise only products that are in-stock. Thus, you’ll immediately observe which of your items are best selling. When you don’t have a certain product, or you have it but it’s outdated, try to send a converting URL to a relevant web page. New URLs to original content is a great marketing strategy.

These strategies can be applied in numerous ways, but you should always remember your goal. Bring organic traffic to high converting products and generate more sales instantly.

Mind your users and make sure your landing pages are of the highest quality. Otherwise you’re not going to convert your organic traffic effectively.

Often times you might think search engines are not that fond of eCommerce sites. And in certain situation they have all the right in the world to reject them especially when products don’t have descriptions or the internal linking is poor. Numerous eCommerce websites provide copied content and little information about their products.

Thus, it’s perfectly normal for search engines to reject them. Check these tips to optimize an eCommerce website properly:

1. Stay Away from Company Description of a Product

Although it’s tempting to copy/paste a product’s description from its company’s site, don’t do it.  The best you can do it to re-write the original content and make it unique.

2. Keyword Field Creation for Product SEO

Come up with your own database. Build a keyword field and include it in the meta tags, title tags and body. And remember, people don’t always search by brand, they also search by keyword.

3.  Concentrate on Singular Term Keywords

Choose a keyword and oscillate around that word to build a strong SEO field just like in step 2.

4. Category and Product URL

Don’t insert useless ID’s in your URL and stick to mandatory keywords that will help your website rank higher.

5. Page Rank Source

Don’t bury your product’s catalog and use friendly SEO rollovers to increase products on a certain page.

 6. Title Tags Must be Unique

Don’t repeat your keywords over and over again, and try to use them in a different way. For example, a titled tag looks so much better when you only use “XYZ Travel” and not the full keyword “XYZ Travel Agency and Vacations”.

7. Meta Tags Uniqueness

Every product should have a unique description on each page. Thus, you’ll stay away from duplicate content.

8. Unique Meta Tag Description

Place product description in meta tag to ensure unique content.

9. Reviews for your Products

Generate content from your customers because they’re all unique and they will contribute to your site’s originality.

10. Wise PR

Main SEO pages should receive the most PR flow by restricting less important links. Use Javascript links or you can form submission links.

11. Contextual Link Usage

Search engines are not that familiar with page information. Thus, you should link a paragraph from your site to a relevant web page using an anchor text that’s properly optimized.

12. Stay away from Session IDs within URLs

Numerous eCommerce platforms make use of session IDs that are intended to create infinite duplicate content. You can avoid this by utilizing a certain type of cloaking meant to spider URLs without session IDs.

13. RSS Feed Creation

A product feed is critical for a Google Base because it grabs free backlinks that will go straight to your product page.

14. Tag your Product

Tagging has become pretty common in social media. Let your customers tag your products and you’ll manage to build keywords you’ve never considered before.

15. File Name Page

Keyword rich file page names are ideal. For instance, www.yoursite.com/keyword-phrase-here.html offers a lot of useful information for Googlebot.

16. iframes is great for Duplicate Content

Placing a product description that is not unique within an invisible iframe boarder will not get you penalized for duplicate content.

 17. Project Description Links

Link two products and make up rich keyword links for smart product discretion.

18. Navigation must be Crawl-able

Navigation structures based on CSS or JavaScript are to be avoided because they don’t allow spiders. Additionally, they’re not dependent on form based navigation and SEOs cannot chase after them.

In Marketing We Trust - SEO, E-commerce, E-Marketing & the rest

Things to consider and questions that you should put to a prospective SEO company plus some questions they should be asking you too. We have also included links to some valuable and respected resources to help you brush up on, or keep ahead of, the ongoing changes in SEO…

5 Steps to follow

10 key Questions to ask

10 Questions to expect

Some Resources to help

1. Start with Your Goals

Connect with your team and make sure you have a good idea of what you want accomplished by working with an SEO.

Sometimes it’s as simple as an audit to make sure you’re following best practices; other times its training for your marketers and content builders to get up to speed on how to actively promote the site. If you have a solid list of things you want completed at the end of an engagement, you’ll be better able to judge the eventual results.

We’ve worked with several companies who didn’t really know what they wanted in the past. This is OK, but it does make our job a little less structured, and it means you need an exceptional level of trust in your SEO.

What we’ve done is to actually go in, establish the goals, and clear them by management – this works, too, but I worry that sometimes they don’t always end up with exactly what they wanted, but rather what I think they wanted.

Quick aside – sometime the SEO will know what you need better than you will – to get the best of both worlds, you can ask them for what they think your goals should be and combine those with your own list.

2. Connect with Your Social Network

The people who can best assist you in finding a good match are those who know you well. Talk to friends, fellow business owners, SEO bloggers and personalities that you know and trust. If you really like my personal opinion, you could start on the recommended list, but even then, there are surely hundreds of companies not listed who might be even better matches.

When you talk to your network, make sure you share a little bit about the project and the goals, not just “do you know a good SEO.” The more information about the issues you can share, the better folks are able to assist.

3. Get Advice from SEO-Savvy People You Trust

If you’re a business seeking SEO, I love the advice from Jessica Bowman on becoming SEO-savvy to at least the basics before investing in outsourced services.

“When you outsource SEO, you don’t outsource responsibility and accountability for getting the job done and driving more traffic”

As part of that, I’d look seriously into familiarizing yourself with forums, blogs and sites related to SEO (see resources at the end of this post).

It’s easy to establish a relationship by asking for advice on which SEO company or consultant to hire – I get them a few times a week and would happily recommend more fitted people or SEO firms than mine.

As a rule, SEOs are incredibly friendly about referring business to good companies and good people, and if your network has already given you a few names, running these by the professionals can get you valuable insight on potential winners vs. lemons.

4. Present a Few Initial Issues Over Email

I know some SEO consultants won’t engage in any work before a contract is signed, but you should at least get them to talk through how a problem can be approached, whether or not it’s an issue, and what strategies they might recommend to fix it (even from a broad level).

I do this with nearly every client we take on – pouring through a duplicate content problem or finding out why indexing isn’t as high as it should be long before we engage. It builds trust in the SEO’s knowledge and gives you insight into how they solve problems and what the work relationship and advice will be like down the road.

5. Talk on the Phone or (if possible) Get Together

Email is a great initial communication medium, but a phone call or in-person meeting gives you a real sense of the team you’ll work with. In the phone call/meeting, be sure to establish a rapport. If you can’t feel comfortable on a personal level, don’t dismiss it – brilliant SEOs are great, but if you can’t work well together, the project’s unlikely to succeed.

I think we can all attest to working better with people we like and people we get along with – there’s the additional pressure of not letting down someone with whom you’ve developed a relationship, and it extends subconsciously and consciously into every part of the work you do together.

The next phase after that is sit down with the provider and ask the question as suggested below:

10 key questions (and some guideline answers)

1.     What do you think about my site’s technical structure, on-page and off-page content and link profile?

Ask them to make some observations about these three key SEO factors that influence Search Engine visibility in relation to your site, especially link building.

2.      What keyword phrases do you think should be targeted for my website?

Not easy during an initial discussion but they should be able to identify the core keywords for your industry and let you know how competitive the segment is. They should discuss geographic considerations and talk about the “money keywords” such as buy, find, deals, get, compare, best, cheap or luxury

3.      What kind of changes will be required to your website and will they be noticeable?

You should expect them to talk about on-page and off-page changes. On-page will require the subtle inclusion of the targeted keyword phrases in various locations on each page; off-page will require changes to your meta data such as your title tag and meta descriptions

4.      I know that developing an incoming link profile is important, how will you develop additional links to my site?

You should be looking for them to talk about quality of links as well as quantity and a balanced link profile including free and paid directories, local websites, government or educational institutions, your suppliers etc

5.      What volume of traffic increase is it reasonable to expect and over what time frame?

There are a lot of factors to consider here but assuming your site is technically sound and has quality original content you should expect a 50-100% increase in quality traffic within about three months and potentially much more if your site is languishing.

6.      How many people on your team?

This just allows you to understand whether you are dealing with a small, medium or large SEO firm. Each has it’s strengths and weaknesses. Small or one-person firms can be great but may get busy with other more lucrative clients or they may struggle to keep up with the latest trends. Large firms can be like a sausage factory, churning out SEO in bulk.

7.     Who will be working on the assignment?

Often you may be speaking to a Business Development person or the company principal. They should be experts and probably are, but once you have signed up, you should expect to be dealing with a qualified SEO expert with at least three years SEO experience

8.      How long have you been doing SEO?

This is a general fact finding question but you might be surprised at the answers you receive and the way they answer. If it is less than three years, keep shopping around.

9.      Can you show me examples of your work?

Don’t bother with references, no one will provide you with a bad one. You just want to see that they can point to current examples of their successes – short competitive keyword phrases such as “computer repairs” rather than “computer repairs for left handed plumbers”

10.    Amongst all the SEO companies out there, in one minute, why should you choose them?

This is giving them the chance for their “elevator pitch”. If they can’t confidently answer this, move on…and you would be surprised how many will stumble at this question. Naturally, you should also ask them how much, for how long and whether there are any long term contractual obligations.

You should also ask for a written proposal that clearly states every action and initiative that they will be undertaking.

Questions the best seo company should ask you…

A smart SEO representative should also be asking you some questions. This enables them to evaluate you as a client. The very best SEO companies are busy and can afford to be selective when determining how reasonable your expectations are and how easy you will be to work with…SEO requires a partnership between client and provider to get the best results.

• What are some of the keywords you would like to turn up for?
• Who do you see as your major competitors, online and offline?
• How old is your URL?
• Do you have a Content Management System (CMS) to edit your site content?
• Have you conducted any SEO activities before?
• Are you using Pay-per-click advertising?
• What do you expect from your SEO investment and over what time frame?
• Can you provide access to your web stats or Google Analytics account?
• Do you have any other URL’s or websites?
• What other marketing initiatives do you undertake, online and offline?

If they start asking you these kind of questions then you know you are well on the way to choosing your SEO provider.

SEO resources

Apart from our own SEO Tips and Ideas, here are some additional resources that you may find useful in developing your own SEO knowledge…

www.seomoz.org – latest SEO articles and tools

www.seobook.com – buy the ebook, it’s worth it.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/ – a great place to follow changes to Google

www.mattcutts.com – Google’s anti-spam advocate

www.webmarketingnow.com – Jerry West’s SEO research and testing is the best

You can join their email lists, bookmark the sites and several have a Premium paid subscription that is well worth considering if you seriously want to grow your SEO knowledge.

We hope you find this article to be a useful resource and checklist and that it will aid you in choosing the best SEO company to work with. You can also download “How to choose the best SEO company for you” as a PDF.

Good luck…

In Marketing We Trust is one of Australia’s leading SEO companies. Our expertly trained SEO consultants apply best practice principles that deliver results. Our SEO company provides custom SEO services and SEO Packages to small and large businesses nationally and internationally. With In Marketing We Trust, your website Search Engine Optimisation is in good hands.

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While struggle and spend minutes, if not hours to find the right word to enpower, aspire and engage my audience; those guys got it all down right!

Learn from the chinese masters. Market it like you mean it!!

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I remember this artwork to be the most tantalising piece I ever saw in a museum. How can a 6 Year old  resist to the temptation of playing with this thing!

Thanks to Google, I am now authorised to play with Alexander Calder work most famous work.

The Doodle Let you drag each element of the mobile, moving all pieces to bring the ensemble to equilibrium

Clicking on the mobile will take the visitor to search results for Calder, whose 113rd birth anniversary falls on July 22.

Moving mobile is a type of sculpture that uses the principle of equilibrium, with rods from which weighted objects or further rods hang.

Google logo marks 113 years since the birth of the original artist, this work was supported by Calder Foundation.

Alexander Calder, American sculptor famous for his work in motion.

Calder worked as a designer, engineer and researcher at the insurance companies in New York and Ohio Misouri.

Between 1922-1924 and was educated in the artistic character StudentsLeague in New York and later at Grande Chaumiere in Paris (1926).

First spotted for his sculptural decoration of the San Francisco Fair in 1915.

Alexander Calder produced a series of figures named as  ”Circus Calder” from 1926. It was a small book in which were represented dancers, clowns and acrobats. His sculptures were brightly colored and expressed a form of surrealism.

His first exhibition took place in 1932, he produced a series of sculptures strongly influenced by avant-garde artists Marcel Duchamp and Hans (Jean) Arp.

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