Search Engine Marketing – Conversion Rate Optimisation – Consultation

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO): Watch this (12 minute) video to learn how to improve your Return on Investment in Online Marketing.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Watch this (14 minute) video to learn about the advantages of Search Engine Optimisation for your Website to attract new customers to your business.

Get practical advice that you can put into action immediately.
Get new customers finding your website on Google, Yahoo and Bing
Get your website visitors to take action - contact you, purchase, tell their friends.
Get your return on your investment from your website.

Don't hesitate - Take action today and get started as soon as possible.

Phone me on 085-7089335 (you can leave a message after hours and I'll return your call to schedule your consultation)

Here is my process:

1) Identify your business niche (properly) and understand your business model

You want to move your business from where it is now, to a more profitable future - so you would like an "online marketing travel agent" to organise the multiple, sequential or simultaneous, forms of transportation (PPC, organic SEO, high traffic links, Social Media) to get all of your disparate potential customers to the same destination - putting their hand into their pocket to make a payment to you - in the most efficient manner possible, without any mishaps along the way.

I've been in IT for over 20 years, and have worked for giant multinational computer corporations including Sun Microsystems, Iomega, and EDS - but also for a range of other businesses and academia: an office supplies distributor with multiple outlets in New Zealand, a car and truck dealership chain, a retail, wholesale and transport company, a biological research institute attached to a University, and had over a hundred small business customers for my own computer consultancy in Zimbabwe in the 1990's.

So I was involved in several process improvement projects, and more change of technology and infrastructure projects than I care to count. The largest was the Six Sigma internal software lifecyle project at Sun Microsystems (in my role as a project manager for test and quality assurance for software and infrastructure changes to the Sun global WAN), and the most challenging was the change from manual and paper operations to complete computerisation of the motor dealership chain - a two year project which encompassed every facet of their business, and touched every employee - from workshop mechanics, spares salespeople, accountants, car salespeople, and all levels of management. This means I have learned a lot about how businesses function, how the parts fit together, and what is important to you, the business owner, and also what is important to your prospective customers.

I'd be grateful for the opportunity to discuss your business to get a better understanding of your product and service offerings, and who you believe your ideal clients are.

2) Finding high value keyword search terms that your prospective clients are using during their decision making process

This is not just "keyword research" as the obvious keywords around your niche will often not be enough for the real visibility needed online in your market.

Your prospective customers may be looking for a solution to a problem that they do not yet know is solved by your industry - so they are educating themselves over time, and a series of increasingly more focused searches. Often they will never reach the stage of finding your solution, because their business has been poached early in the process by one of your competitors.

To build a credible online presence you will need to be found as an authority site with content relevant to those initial searches. The earlier in the decision making process the prospect discovers you, the earlier you can educate the prospect about your services.

Getting the prospective client from "research" to "buy" faster is only possible if you educate and pre-sell them during the "research" phase. If they only find you when in "buy" mode, and have never encountered you before, the chances of them choosing you over a competitor, who they have already seen several times, is slim.

So building visibility and the associated authority with the right keyword targeted content for each phase of the prospect search "natural history" is important.

3) Finding out which web pages of your website currently rank in the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) for each of these keyword phrases

This helps to identify the low hanging fruit - it is easier and faster to move from page 7 of the search engine results to page 1, then to get ranked from nowhere.

4) Identifying the main competitors for each of the high value search phrases, looking for their common authority incoming links, and evaluating the required resources to rank against them, so as to prioritise the low hanging fruit.

Search engine results page rankings are based mainly on the number and quality of incoming links - so trying to compete against Googles top 10 results webpages when they all have thousands of high quality incoming links is a long term project.

Within the keyword list will be high value terms where it is easier to compete - because the competition are not as well connected. Information gathered from those highly ranked, well connected competitors will provide a list of potential trafffic sources, and which websites to target for incoming links to build Page Rank (hub analysis).

I look at what your key competitors are doing right - in terms of content, page layout, offers, linking strategies, social media and on-site interactivity - that encourage the visitor to stay on the page, click through to other links on the same site, and to form a relationship - and I distill the data down to the essential areas to target first for testing.

5) Looking at your current on page SEO (title tags, meta tags, etc)

This is a simple technical process, and is where most SEO starts, and a lot of SEO ends. It will of course make a difference to the ability of the search engines to categorise the page, but is often misinterpreted as being the top priority.

Just like a CV is an important tool in the job hunting process, it is not the most important or only component. The on-page SEO should be coherent with the rest of the marketing strategy.

6) Identifying premium traffic sources

Google analytics provides the best tool for understanding the different traffic sources and which ones to invest resources in building.

The most obvious website traffic sources are PPC advertising on Google and Yahoo, and these should be used in any search engine marketing strategy as a quick way of bringing traffic to a test page to see how well it converts - however it is important to understand that traffic from PPC is not the same as traffic from organic search, and will not always convert at the same rate.

Organic traffic via the search engines will typically bring the majority of visitors to a website, but not necessarily the most profitable visitors.

Social media traffic from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc will need to be segmented and compared for quality.

Without seeing your analytics data, I cannot offer any insight, and do not like to speculate - I base all my decisions and advice on data, industry defined or de facto "best practices", and what (multiple or the leading) successful websites in the targeted niche are doing.

The other "tool" for identifying traffic sources is the competitive analysis in step 4 above.

Understanding where you fit into the competitive landscape and who your competition are getting traffic from (via backlink analysis) will help to identify potential strategic partners. To recycle my earlier analogy: Two competitors in the travel/transport industry - an intercity bus company and an airline - can form a partnership where it makes sense to transport people from towns without airports to those that do. So both profit from the same customer, even though they may provide directly competing services between the same cities on several routes. It is in both their own, and their mutual customers interests, to cooperate. This is often overlooked in competitive analysis.

7) Setting up split tests (or multivariate tests where appropriate) to optimise conversions from traffic source -> visitor -> opt-in lead -> customer.

My opinion, and that of any else is just that - an opinion. Only testing will validate or invalidate even the most qualified opinion.

This is where my scientific training, IT infrastruture troubleshooting experience, SEO skills, and data analysis abilities converge. I am a technical problem solver - I understand what to measure, how to measure it, how long to test to get valid results, and how to analyse the results.

Don’t leave this page without taking me up on this limited time offer. Time is the one thing neither of us can ever replace. So use yours wisely, and call 085-7089335 now!

I look forward to helping you get your website working for your business.

Salvatore McDonagh
Search Engine Marketing Consultant