Renegade Search

Here at Digital Third Coast, we take providing measurable value to our clients seriously.  So seriously, in fact, that it's the first thing listed on our Core Values. We recognize that one of the biggest challenges facing businesses is figuring out a way to evaluate if their SEO campaign is successful. Ultimately, the only factor that determines success is the bottom-line; like any investment, we do not think that our services are truly successful unless we can provide positive ROI.

At the same time, we recognize that SEO is a long-term investment, and it simply isn't possible to provide positive ROI right out of the gate. So with that in mind, we usually focus on three distinct indicators of SEO success:

Keyphrase Ranking Improvements
Non-Branded Organic Search Traffic
Conversions

At different stages of our campaigns, we tend to focus on these indicators to varying degrees. Because search engine rankings tend to improve relatively quickly to quality SEO, we can use rankings for individual keywords to measure our earliest efforts. Later on in the process, the additional data that trickles in over time allows us to evaluate success based on organic traffic and conversions.

CONTINUE READING »

Yesterday, I was shocked to see a post on Search Engine Watch, a well-known and widely-read industry site, covering a new service called 'Local Paid Inclusion'. According to the article, LPI was some sort of a partnership between Bruce Clay, Inc (a long-running internet marketing and training agency), and multiple search engines and directories -- including Google, Bing and Yahoo. The post explained that the new service would allow companies to pay to show up in the local results section of a search engine results page.

At first glance, that might not sound unreasonable. After all, search engines do make nearly all of their money off of advertising, right. So it seems entirely possible that they might partner with a third-party agency to improve their local advertising solutions. But what really stuck out about this proposal was the suggestion that this wasn't advertising in the usual, search engine sense. Rather than placing their customers' sites in a clearly-marked 'paid advertisement' area on the site--which has been the MO of search engines since the dawn of online advertising--this new service would actually allow people to pay their way into the normal search engine results.

CONTINUE READING »

Digital Third Coast was recently featured in Crain's for starting a bonus compensation plan as part of our 2012 New Year's Resolutions.



You can read the full article about Digital Third Coast's bonus plan here.

A special thank you to Brad Farris and the Anchor Advisors team!

CONTINUE READING »

This post is meant to inspire people that aren't tracking goals on their site (or don't pay attention to them). If you're one of those people that says "well, i know that business is up, so I must be getting more traffic on my website" OR "business is down, so it must be because I'm getting less traffic on my website", this post is for you.

If you're going to do only one thing in your analytics implementation, YOU SHOULD TRACK GOALS.

CONTINUE READING »

SEO fulfills one main purpose: making an introduction. When a Google user searches for a generic keyword like "Chicago internet marketing firm" they are turning to Google to sort out all the possibly relevant websites on the web and rank them in an order of most authoritative to least. But just because a search engine user comes to your site via Google from a non-branded keyword doesn't mean they are going to become a customer or client. SEO only gets them in the front door; it's your website that has to sell them.

If you are trying to bring in business by ranking for generic keywords in Google you are relying on your website to be the initial point of contact for a potential lead or sale. You don't just need to have a website that is, "up to snuff," Your site needs to persuade the visitor to convert. A conversion is a predetermined goal of a website - it can be filling out a lead form, a download, a sale etc... and if you have a bad site there is a good chance your visitors aren't converting as much as they should be.

CONTINUE READING »