“Why am I not Ranking #1!!!???”

If you only knew. But more importantly, you may be asking the wrong question in the first place.

Wait. Does Ranking Well Even Matter?

Well, of course it does, but not in the way that you may think. Many people become focus their attention on ranking for 3 broad keywords they think are most valuable to their campaign. The logic is flawed. For starters, we know that people search in hundreds and thousands of different ways for the same thing. It is the nature of search. It is narrow minded to assume that ranking well for such a small number of keywords will be the driving force behind your campaign. The real value comes from the consistency of your Page 1 visibility for as many search queries as possible. In other words, you should focus more on how many keywords your site is visible on Page 1 for instead of the rankings for individual keywords.

With that in mind…Why Aren’t I Visible on Page 1 for Anything?

I don’t want to make any assumptions. But I can state confidently that it is most likely some combination of the following factors:

Google is Having Trouble Crawling Your Site

First and foremost, if you are ever going to rank well, than Google’s search engine spiders need to access and crawl your site with ease. Efficient crawling is what allows the search engine to acknowledge your site exists. It also determines how the engine understands what your site is about, and can give an engine the confidence in your content needed to return one of your pages at the top of the search results for the keyphrase in mind.

You may be making the spiders' jobs harder.

Here are a few specific things that may be holding your site’s performance back, technically speaking:

• The site architecture is weak.

• Improper use of robots.txt.

• Improper use of sitemap.xml.

• Improper use of 301 redirects.

Your Content Isn’t Valuable Enough to People Searching Online

In times past, you could create content without being entirely cognizant of actual humans and rank well in the search results. Times have changed. Google is smarter and their ranking algorithm has matured. If you haven’t developed content specifically for people reading it, and with the intent of providing those people with the valuable information they were originally looking for, Google isn’t going to reward you with high ranking positions. For anything.

Don't tempt the Panda. In the wake of Google's ongoing update, #1 with spammy content isn't an option.

It is important to remember that Google’s primary objective is to return the best results for humans, not something crafted for the sole purpose of ranking well in the search results. Knowing that, there may be other problems with your site’s content, namely:

• Pages with no valuable content.

• Pages lacking valuable content.

• External duplicate content.

• Internal duplicate content.

Your Backlink Profile is Less than Impressive

Online, when a webmaster links from his or her site to yours, that counts as a “vote” in the eyes of a search engine. How strong a vote depends on the quality of the voter’s site (and the quality of the sites voting for the voter’s site, and so on). The more quality links you have pointing to your website, the more likely it is that your site will perform well in the search results. But for individual search queries? Again, there are many factors involved, but it is important (yes, even now, after all of the recent algorithm changes) that some of the links pointing to a page have keyword rich anchor text related to the content of that page.

Voter confidence. Do you have it?

The following are common issues related to backlink profiles that may be negatively affecting your site’s performance:

• You have no backlinks.

• You have weak backlinks.

• You have no anchor text backlinks.

• The backlinks you have are from spammy sites that Google isn’t fond of.

Your Competitors are Bigger, Badder, and Have More Money to Spend

We can safely assume that there are other companies competing for the same real estate online with more money to spend on their search engine marketing campaigns than you. Overall, their presence may be too strong to compete with, unless your company and the strength of your website grow significantly.

This kid is going to need some help.

This is a reality that many have to face, and the earlier it is acknowledged, the less painful it will be over time. When matching up with larger, search engine savvy competitors, here is what you may be up against:

• Bigger brand.

• Bigger budgets.

• Better content.

• More links.

• Better links.

Recap

So, to recap. There are many factors that will influence your site’s visibility in the search results. For optimal performance, these pieces must be in alignment. Once they are, the focus should not be on individual keywords, rather, how many keywords your site is actually visible for, and how long you can maintain that visibility. Understanding how much time and money should be invested in the process will depend on how many technical, content, and backlink related pieces are missing, and of course, what competitors your site is stacked up against.

Do you feel that your site is lacking in any of the areas discussed above? Learn more about Digital Third Coast’s SEO services, including website audits, link building, and consulting.

This post came about recently when I was discussing the differences between print and digital advertising with a former co-worker.  Prior to my career in SEO, I worked in the print industry (both newspaper and magazine) so it’s been interesting to witness these differences first hand.  However, like any comparison, there are positives and negatives with each avenue.  So here are a few insights so that when the time comes to market your brand you can make the right choice and set your business up for success.

The Major Differences

As I mentioned earlier, not every business is going to fall in a particular path, it really depends on what your business sells, where your customers are coming from, and who you’re looking to target.  For a business that is considering digital marketing, it’s vital to remember that your website is your salesperson.  Now more than ever, it’s important to have a quality website that delivers good content, has a user-friendly navigation and a compelling call-to-action.  If a potential customer lands on your site, does it represent your brand effectively?  Search engine marketing is a medium where people are actively searching for your services, so if you are in a new industry or have created a new concept then it may be difficult for people to find you.

Print advertising, on the other hand, is a better tool for explaining what your service/product is about and is meant more for human engagement.  There’s more creativity involved and in most cases, it’s a platform to bring the customer inside your store – making you the salesperson.

Budgeting

The first thing to take into consideration is your monthly budget – the dollar amount you are willing to invest each month towards marketing.  Not only is this overall budget important but how much you are spending per lead is a number you should consider when choosing a tactic.  Depending on your product or service, the cost per lead could fluctuate dramatically based on your competition, the cost of your service, and the overall market need.  Here are some numbers I have pulled from SEOmoz that highlights a few popular avenues.

As you can see, organic search is at the bottom of the list averaging $15.00 per acquisition – a far cry from print media standing at $180.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean that SEO is the best fit for your company just because it has the lowest cost.  An art gallery, for instance, is an industry where the customer’s presence is necessary for the sale.  Therefore, their best option may be investing in a magazine ad where $180 for a lead is still going to return a good profit margin if their average sale is around $2000.  But on the flip side, say you own an ecommerce store.  Ranking well in the search engines may be your top priority for bringing in revenue, so an investment in SEO would be the most profitable solution.

Measuring your return

Instead of making your marketing decision solely based on price, familiarity, or convenience, you need to assess your goals, the results you are likely to acquire, the true costs and the potential gains.  This step of the process is extremely important, because after you find out your cost per acquisition then you have to take a step back and look at the overall campaign over a course of several months or years.  For example, those new customers that you pulled in through your marketing efforts, have they returned since?  Do you see your revenue, visits, conversions, etc., growing over time?  These are the types of questions to consider because if you just see a spike around the time of the marketing campaign and numbers drop back to where you originally started, then that tactic may not be sustainable over time.

There are ways to track both print and digital campaigns.  Phone call tracking is the perfect example of a method used by some of our clients who engage in PPC, SEO and print.  Each phone number is different depending on the campaign, so that when a customer calls, the company can see which phone number was used and which medium they came from.

Print:

From my experience, print is harder to justify by numbers.  Magazines and newspapers base their ad pricing off their “reach” – the amount of people who are reading the publication.  This inflated number is calculated based on their distribution (number of copies circulated) multiplied by the number of people in a household who read that same copy.  For instance, a magazine can claim it has a readership of 100,000 but only circulate 25,000 copies.  So of that resulting number, after taking into consideration that people don’t read from cover to cover and not everyone is in the market for your product, how do you really know the number of people who saw and responded to your ad?  During the time of the print campaign, are you going to ask each person who enters your door if they came because of the ad? Probably not.  As a result, unless your customers are telling you, you have no way of knowing if your marketing is working.

Digital:

My favorite part of working in internet marketing is the fact that we can directly tie our work to results.  For instance, if we change title tags on a website, a week later we can see a jump in rankings which then leads to an increase in visits.  Finally, that increase in visits results in more conversions.  With Analytics, you are able to track down where people are coming from and how they are searching for your brand.  That knowledge is priceless!  You can use this information to build a stronger campaign, add new pages or services to your site, and grow your web presence.  The last thing I’ll say about digital marketing (because I could talk about this all day) is that when you view the graphs in Analytics over the course of your campaign and you see the numbers all trending upwards for non-branded organic search, you know for certain that you can attribute it to your internet marketing.  No other marketing strategy can provide that feedback.

Bottom Line

Marketing is a vital facet of every business, which is why it’s important to find the strategy that works the best for you.  If you start measuring your results, quantifying the investment, and seeing a continual growth then you will set your business up for long-term success.

And in this corner, Trying to make an easy buck! The sultan of shortcuts! The spammer! The jammer! THE WEBMASTER!!!

If you keep up with search engine marketing news at all, you might have noticed a lot of talk about big changes in the Google algorithm lately.  This latest round of changes is part of a series of well-known algorithm updates called “Panda” in which Google is attempting to reward the “good stuff” with higher rankings and remove the “bad stuff”.

Google’s latest series of updates have been blatantly more aggressive than ever before, penalizing webmasters for the “over optimization” tactics that they have been doling out on Google for years. Your own site might have actually been affected by some of these recent changes in a negative way (even if your site isn’t spammy). Not since Google’s “Florida” update back int 2003 when a lot of webmasters learned not to mess with Google, has there been such a shift in the search engines algorithm.

Here’s a rundown of the latest deathmatch action:

January – February

The first sign that some changes were coming, a reported 700,000 webmasters received “over optimization” warnings in their webmaster tools accounts.

Ouch!

March

At the SXSW conference Google head engineer Matt Cutts announced that Google will be targeting overly SEO’d sites in the coming weeks.

Whoa! Didn’t see that coming!

End of March

Blog networks get torched – this update targeted private blog networks such as Build My Rank and Authority Link Network that allowed webmaster to post their content (with links embedded) to their network.  These private blog networks didn’t add any value to the internet as a whole because all of the content that was added to them was very low quality and no one in their right mind would ever actually read it.  The only reason this content existed was so that webmasters could add their backlinks to it.

Vronk!

April

More Webmaster tools warnings sent to webmasters explaining that unnatural and/or artificial links have been found pointing to their sites. This penalty explains to webmasters that they will be given a chance to remove the links before any penalties will be applied.

OK, this is starting to hurt!

End of April

Another update targeting “Webspam”.  Google says this one targeted 3% of search queries and it seemed to be targeting on-site issues that “the good guys” have been complaining about for quite some time, such as keyword stuffed pages and hidden text.  As of yesterday, this update has been dubbed “Penguin” which is interesting because it means that Google has separated it (at least by name) from the Panda updates which have been going on for a year.  Not sure yet if there is any significance to this.

And he’s down for the count!

Why is Rocky…err Google doing this?  

They want to target “Blackhat Webspam” as Matt Cutts calls it.  Blackhat Webspam is “any shortcut or loophole that make pages rank higher then they deserved to be ranked”.

Google says they want to give “the good guys” a fighting chance and reward their higher quality sites.  The “good guys” are essentially, the people that have been following Google’s quality guidelines for years but have been constantly outranked by “the bad guys” who resort to spammy shortcuts and tactics.

It’s important to note that Google mentioned on their own blog that they are targeting webspam, not SEO.

Here’s a quote from their post:

“White hat” search engine optimizers often improve the usability of a site, help create great content, or make sites faster, which is good for both users and search engines. Good search engine optimization can also mean good marketing: thinking about creative ways to make a site more compelling, which can help with search engines as well as social media.

However, many webmaster are complaining that they were wrongfully affected by this latest update and their rankings have disappeared.

Google has even setup a separate form to fill out for webmasters if they feel that they have done no wrong and have been hit by the latest Penguin update.

What Google is doing?

Here is a list of some of the naughty stuff that Google is cracking down on:

• Keyword stuffing – This tactic involves simply adding dozens or even hundreds of keywords to a page with the intent of capturing as much traffic as possible.  Nobody would ever want to read a page filled with nothing but keywords so this is considered spammy.
• Link schemes – Tactics like reciprocal linking, paid links and any other linking tricks intended to manipulate rankings.
• Cloaking, “sneaky” redirects or “doorway” pages – Cloaking is when you show a visitor one version of your page (the good version) and show search engines another version (the spammy version).  This is done in order to trick the search engines that something is on the page that really isn’t.  Doorway pages are pages created with very thin content in order to try and capture as much organic search engine traffic as possible.  For example, a directory of all the states/cities/counties in the USA that has a page for each but very little unique content on any of the pages.
• Purposeful duplicate content – Duplicating content from other sites or from within your own site.  Even worse, duplicating the content and just switching out a few words to make it seem different.
• Backlink anchor text over optimization – getting links with the same anchor text too many times.
• Hidden text and links – Using a variety of tricks to make the text on a page invisible to humans but visible to search engines.  e.g. Using the same color text font and site background to make the text blend into the background and not visible to the eye.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

The important point to mention here is that many sites had previously been penalized for doing the items listed above but many others were still getting away with it.  The difference now is that Google has considerably turned up the heat when it comes to actually penalizing for using these tactics.

What you can do to adjust?

There are two major areas where you can adjust your strategy to do better in this new ranking environment and they both surround one tactic…CONTENT.

1. The first is adding relevant and unique content to your site.  This can be in the form of a blog, beefing up your product descriptions, articles, whitepapers or anything else that makes your site more of a resource.  Google also recommends making sure your pages load quickly (although this is not a major factor) and that your site is built with users in mind (instead of search engines).
2. The second is adding quality unique content to the rest of the web aka content marketing.  Content marketing is a great way to position yourself as an authority on your topic area and also happens to be a great way to get links back to your site.  Guest blog posting is the process of writing content specifically for other websites in exchange for a link back to your website, and it can be a great strategy for adding some authoritative links to your backlink profile.

The bottom line here is that Google is finally stepping into the ring when it comes to identifying and targeting SEO tricks and loopholes.  Google’s Matt Cutts has been talking about this stuff for years and it looks like they are actually following through this time.

But that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing you can do to promote your website in the short-term. While SEO will always be a good bet for generating long-term value, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the only aspect of a good digital marketing campaign.

In fact, there are plenty of other initiatives you can undertake that will work hand-in-hand with an SEO campaign. Having worked with many third-party agencies on joint projects, I’ve got a few recommendations on strategies that can produce valuable synergies alongside an SEO campaign.

1. Getting a better website

I’ve said it before and I will say it again, your website is your digital salesperson and you want the best one that you can afford to have on your payroll. If you need more conversions, one of the best things you can do is invest in a new site. Search engine marketing only gets users to your page, your site has to convert them from visitors into leads/sales. If your website looks dated, disorganized and sloppy, first time visitors may associate those qualities with your actual business. However, if you have a smooth and clean site that functions flawlessly and engages users – people are going to think you have your act together both online and off.

2. Creating Linkable Assets

Active link building refers to reaching out to other sites and persuading them to link to yours, passive link building focuses on creating awesome content that will naturally earn links over time. A piece of content that earns natural links is known as a linkable asset. It is never too early to start producing amazing content that the web will want to link to and share. This doesn’t mean you need to start blogging about the day to day happenings in your office, or shooting random YouTube videos that feature office shennanigans – it means you need to answer the questions people have about your industry by creating informative and engaging content. Some examples of linkable content are awards, infographics and data visualizations, webinars, high quality videos and fun or useful tools and widgets to name a few.

3. Engaging in Social Media

A few years ago, I wrote off social media… oh how wrong I was. The main thing I have come to learn about content is that, if it’s shareable, it’s linkable. If your business can afford to hire a rock star social media consultant, it’s highly recommended. Social media is all about building relationships and it centers around sharing and promoting content. If the people that see your tweets happen to run websites they may choose to cover your content on their site. Although it isn’t the main purpose of social media, it has the fringe benefit of creating relationships that often lead to natural links further on down the road.

4. Working With A Public Relations Expert

The links that PR teams get and the links that SEOs get are fundamentally different, but if you want to see quicker returns it can help to invest in both. Link builders can schmooze with blog owners all day, but I know few solid link builders that have fantastic editorial connections at top industry publications. Another added benefit of PR teams is that they really round out your backlink profile to make it appear more natural. Most of the links I see that are acquired by PR teams use branded anchor text (i.e. Digital Third Coast as opposed to Chicago SEO) which is crucial for a natural looking backlink profile.

 Most of these suggestions require a significant investment, either of time or money – but each one of them is worth it.You can work with an agency to just do SEO and have that be your only marketing channel, but it goes so much more smoothly when your SEO team can work in a synergistic fashion with other marketing initiatives. Additionally, each of these  initiatives wont only help your SEO, they will help your overall business.

John-Henry Scherck is an organic web strategist at Digital Third Coast that specializes in link building. Catch him on Twitter.

Several weeks ago I spoke to a VP at a large manufacturing company, a client of ours, and I asked him a question: what is the biggest problem at your company? What keeps you up at night?

His answer wasn’t at all what I expected. I expected something about rising costs or a tepid economy. His answer was different…lead leakage.

He indicated that leads escaped from his pipeline too often. These leads are never heard from again.

He said that this was happening because leads were not properly tracked during the lead gathering process and his team had no firm system to manage leads once they were in-house.

I offered a few words of advice and some recommendations.

Lead Leakage: A Common Problem

My friend’s manufacturing company is not alone in dealing with lead leakage. It is very common. Marketing Sherpa reports that 80% of leads are never worked on by sales. They also say that 73% of companies have no process for engaging with and nurturing leads after the marketing process is complete.

So whether you’re a retail outlet, a B2B tech company, a hotel or a manufacturer—you probably lose some leads.

Now, while there are no silver bullets in the quest to stop lead leakage, there are a few things you can do to slow the flow:

The first way to alleviate lead leakage is Multi-Channel Tracking. Basically, this means that you can track the ‘path’ each lead takes. You can track when a lead left the process and when you lost track of them. Was it after a phone call or after a web visit? How many phone calls and web visits did the person make before you lost them?  If you use Google Analytics you can track every step in the ‘path’ of every single web visitor.

The second way to avoid lead leakage is to use a customer relationship manager (CRM) of some sort. These are applications that help you manage the entire lead process to completion. Your industry has specific CRMs that are built for you. There are specific CRMs for auto dealers, restaurants, hotels, auto repair shops and everything in between. Examples of ‘name brand’ CRMs that work across a variety industries are Zoho and SalesForce. With these CRMs you can create individual ‘records’ for leads and add notes and status updates. This helps you keep track of where someone is in the buying process, when you need to follow-up  and what next steps need to be taken.

Additionally, most CRMs can integrate with call recording and call tracking solutions, so you can actually hear every phone conversation with every customer.

The third way to avoid lead leakage is to have agreement between everyone (management, sales and marketing) about exactly what a lead is. Is a sales-ready lead someone that downloaded a White Paper? Does the title of the White Paper matter? Is a lead someone that requested a demo? There needs to be broad and firm agreement on what a sales-ready lead is.

Remember that the number one cause for lead leakage is sales reps failure to contact leads. Why do sales reps fail to contact these people? In most cases it is because they don’t view that lead as ‘hot’ enough to warrant a phone call. This problem is disappears where there is agreement on what a lead is.

The next way to reduce lead leakage is to develop a nurture campaign of some sort. What happens to the leads that are not sales ready? Are these leads contacted again? Are they ‘nurtured?’ You should develop an email nurture strategy to reach out to these leads again.

Step-by-Step:  Nurturing Leads

-          Leads that are not sales-ready should be placed into a nurture email campaign of some sort. Email marketing platforms like MailChimp or Constant Contact are relatively inexpensive and simple to  use.

-          Send 2 to 3 emails a month to these prospects

-          These emails should contain useful content, articles, blogs and videos. If you don’t have the time or capability to write and produce this content, you should consider making that a priority. Or, you can ask other companies if you can use their content in your emails. (Again, with their permission and links to their site, of course).

-          The email platforms mentioned above will show you who is opening multiple emails and reading articles. If someone opens every email for 3 months, for example, perhaps they need a phone call from a sales rep. Remember, the statistic we shared above, 37% of customers are from leads generated over three months ago.

Stopping Lead Leakage is Possible

I had another conversation with that VP at the manufacturing company a few days ago. He said that his lead leakage problem is virtually gone. While there are still leads that fall through the cracks, he insists that the problem is better now. Every lead either receives a phone call that is automatically recorded and appended to a CRM prospect record, or, that lead goes into a nurture email campaign.

So, regardless of the business you’re in you can lose less leads too.

Jason Wells is the CEO of ContactPoint. Their new product, LogMyCalls, represents the future of intelligent call tracking, lead scoring and call analytics.

Jason recently spoke at SES New York on mobile marketing. His expertise has been featured on marketing sites like Search Engine Watch, Mobile Marketer, Thoroughly Modern Marketing, Small Business Branding, ReveNews, 1to1, and a variety of others.

Prior to joining ContactPoint, Jason served as the Senior Vice President of Sony Pictures International, where he led the creation and international expansion of Sony’s mobile business line from London. Prior to Sony, Jason was Vice President of Sales for Handango, Inc., where he managed relationships with clients like Microsoft, Motorola, Sprint, and Verizon.

Jason is an avid climber and an Ironman. (yes, a real Ironman)

Jason holds an MBA from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

So you sign a contract, and your campaign gets started. You start seeing some results, and you feel like you might be on the cusp of something great. Yet this is all still new to you, and you’re not really sure how well the process is coming along.

If you were to find yourself in that situation, how would you know if your SEO consultant is good at their job? What signs should you look for throughout the relationship that may demonstrate the consultant’s level of expertise?

They found the Grail, eventually. A good SEO consultant will ensure your site is found in the search results a lot faster.

SEO consultants will be responsible for many different things, and can fulfill a variety of roles and responsibilities. In part due to how new the industry is, it can be difficult to make blanket statements about what an “SEO consultant” should do. That being said, the industry has matured to the point that there are a number of basic practices that every consultant should undertake with the goal of increasing the revenue generated through your website. In other words, you should at the very least expect a true expert to do the following:

Sit down and discuss your goals and objectives for the campaign. The first thing an SEO consultant should do is sit down and discuss what your goals are for your SEO campaign. Without understanding what your goals are, it becomes very difficult to properly manage a campaign, and often, it can end up going in too many different directions. Questions a good consultant should ask during this exchange are the following:

• What are you trying to accomplish online?
• How visible is your site in search engines at the beginning of the campaign?
• What market are you interested in targeting?
• What are your KPI’s for your website?
• How large of a budget can you devote to SEO?

Analyze your website and make on-site and technical recommendations that will allow your site to perform well in the search engines. After the goals of the campaign are identified, the consultant should analyze your website to identify any on-site or technical issues that may be hindering the site’s performance in major search engines. Such analysis, if executed properly, could take anywhere from several days to several weeks, depending on the size of your site and the number of problems identified. The consultant should follow this analysis up with a series of recommendations that you can implement to ensure the campaign gets off on the right foot and that search engines like what they see.

Analyze data to make decisions as to what direction the campaign should go in. Analyzing data is imperative for an SEO campaign to be successful. A good consultant will ensure that all of the proper analytics features are in place so that performance in the SERPs and user interaction with your site are being tracked. The consultant should continuously analyze the data compiled over time to identify what is working and what is not. The insights gained from such analysis should dictate much of the decision making process throughout the campaign.

Identifying flesh wounds early in a campaign can prevent full on decapitation at a later date.

Coordinate with others involved in the campaign, directly or indirectly. This may be a  PPC manager (if you are running both organic and paid campaigns), content writer, developer, or your own marketing team, for example. If the consultant isn’t proactive in working with the individuals involved with increasing both your online and offline presence, it won’t bode well for your campaign. For example, many recommendations that the consultant will make for your site must be implemented by your developer; it is the responsibility of the consultant to foster open communication with that person to ensure that each recommendation is understood. Additionally, if you are running other marketing/advertising campaigns, the consultant should connect with the individuals managing these campaigns to ensure that everyone is working in unison and that goals are aligned. Such collaboration often leads to new opportunities for each party involved.

Develop an outreach strategy to acquire links from other websites. While the on-site and technical recommendations have been implemented, the consultant should develop a formal plan for acquiring backlinks to your site. Since backlinks are still the single most important factor in search engine rankings, this plan should indicate what strategies will be used to acquire backlinks and the resources needed to execute the plan. Outreach plans will differ depending on the nature of your site and the landscape you are competing in online.

Much like high quality shrubberies, acquiring high quality links requires creativity and sound strategy.

Consult with you on questions or issues that arise related to SEO throughout the campaign. While this seems like a no-brainer, a good consultant will keep the door open for you so that any questions, concerns, or issues that arise that are pertinent to the campaign can be answered or addressed. While the primary role of the consultant is to ensure that your campaign is moving in the right direction, it is also important for that individual to communicate with you and explain why certain decisions are being made and strategies employed.

While the role of the SEO consultant will continue to develop over time, the approaches discussed above should be embraced by anyone managing your campaign that has your best interests in mind. The essence of the consultant in the SEO community is to maintain an expert level understanding of search engine algorithms, proactively analyze all data and engage other parties involved with a client’s marketing and advertising efforts, and effectively communicate the strategy behind all decisions made that influence a campaign. I doubt even the rapid evolution of search engines will change that.

While the original study provided insight into the amount of lift that paid search can provide to traffic levels, it did not address lingering questions concerning the amount of extra traffic gained when a site already ranks organically on the first page of versus when a site does not rank on the first page.

Recently researchers at Google returned to the study to answer this very question. This time they performed a meta-analysis of 390 advertiser accounts in an effort to examine the percentage of additional paid search visits when compared to organic search results that appeared throughout various positions on the page.

Logic dictates that when your ad appears in search results pages that do not contain an organic listing for your site, 100 percent of the traffic that you receive would not have been attained without paid search advertising.  Researchers first examined how often organic results appeared alongside an advertisement and found that, on average, 81 percent of the time an organic result does not appear alongside an ad. Additionally, researchers found that 66 percent of clicks from paid search did not have an organic result alongside it.

Successful SEO + Well Managed PPC = Even More Traffic

Researchers then further analyzed how many clicks would have been gained when an ad appeared alongside an organic search result on the first page and came up with some surprising findings.

When an organic result appeared in positions 5 or higher, 96 percent of ad clicks would not have been gained without paid search advertising. For positions 2 through 4 the additional traffic was 82 percent. Perhaps the most interesting finding was that even when an advertiser ranked number 1 organically, 50 percent of paid search clicks would not have been gained without paid search advertising.

How Does This Impact Your Business?

Although your website may rank competitively in natural search, there is still additional traffic that can be gained by engaging in paid search. The internet is an extremely competitive place and while a number 1 organic ranking will certainly deliver a majority of clicks, it does not necessarily guarantee traffic from all searchers.  In order to gain full exposure to potential customers and clients, it is essential to take part in all applicable forms of internet marketing, including paid search.

Read the full findings and research paper at Google’s Research Center.

The other day I met a guy at a conference who owns 20 websites and was looking for a way to increase rankings for all of them.

He couldn’t find good talent (at a reasonable price) to bring in-house that knew SEO and link building, so he was leaning towards hiring an agency to get the job done.

Not everyone owns twenty websites, but the in-house vs agency question comes up a lot.  Even if you only own one website and you are spending a lot of money every month on agency fees, you might consider hiring someone in-house as an option.  There are advantages/disadvantages to hiring an agency but at a certain monthly budget and project scope, it might make sense to hire a full time dedicated person in-house.

The question is, when is that a good idea? Also, what are the pros and cons of hiring in-house vs hiring an agency?

Hiring In-house

I’ll start off by saying, it is not a good idea to hire someone that has a traditional marketing background to handle your search engine marketing.  Search engine marketing and traditional marketing (radio, TV, print & internet display advertising) are two completely different disciplines and they should be handled separately.

In-House Strengths

Economies of scale cost advantage – larger organizations might have more than one website (or one giant website) and many internal projects at one time. Having in-house staff split their time between all of the projects can be a cost efficient way to get all of your projects the attention they need. Smaller businesses typically don’t have the same economies of scale cost advantage.

Industry – The in-house hire can focus all of their attention on the news, people and current events in the industry they’re working in.  For example, if you work in the food industry, you might have a better grasp on who the top 5 bloggers in the food industry are and focus all your link building efforts on them since they are the most influential.

Internal Processes – The in-house SEM manager also understands the internal processes and organizational structure within the company and therefore can leverage that knowledge to get things done.

In-House Weaknesses

Out Of Touch – One of the weaknesses of the in-house SEM manager is they can be sometimes be out of touch with the latest changes in the search engine marketing industry such as algorithm shifts or new Adwords policies. They have very little concept of what’s going on outside of their own site(s).  Reading is a good way to learn concepts, but actual experience is usually a much better way to learn.   They also don’t have anyone to bounce ideas off of and their theories usually go unchallenged because know one else in the company knows enough to argue them.

In addition, it is not always necessary to understand an vertical extremely well in order to effectively manage a search marketing campaign. With a little bit of research and some good tools, you can get a pretty good feel for the industry.  I personally think it’s more important to understand how search engines and ad platforms work such as AdWords. Knowing the food industry for example, doesn’t give the in-house SEO an advantage unless he really knows his stuff about search engines first.

Jack Of All Trades, Master of None – It is very hard to find one person that has thorough knowledge of both SEO and PPC. Most of the time a person is stronger in one or the other. Either that or they know a little bit about both but aren’t an expert in either. If you plan on hiring just one person to do both, be prepared for a shortcoming somewhere.

Hiring an Agency

It should be noted that search engine marketing is still a relatively young industry and there are many levels of professionalism when it comes to agencies in this space. If an agency promises you top rankings for competitive keywords for around $299 per month, that is usually a sign that there is something wrong.  IIf you could buy top rankings that cheap, everybody would do it. f it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Also, one should be careful with web design agencies that claim they do SEO.  There are different levels of SEO, typically a web design firm can help you get some basic signals in place that will help you communicate better with a search engine but more competitive arenas are better left to SEO specialists.

Agency Strengths

Efficiency – When you’re hiring an agency, probably the biggest advantage you have is efficiency. Agencies have applied the same strategies many times and know the quickest way from point A to point B. Most agencies have a process figured out that works well on a consistent basis.

Experience – Agencies leverage the experience and breadth of knowledge based on results they have achieved with many of their other clients. They are also usually the first to know the correct response to algorithm changes because they have the perspective of many client account to see patterns emerge.

Collaboration – Agencies have many people experienced in the same discipline and can leverage that to work as a team to figure out problems. 2 minds are better than 1.

Agency Weaknesses

Lack of Industry Knowledge – The primary weakness of the agency is that it can’t commit the time to learn the insides of your company and industry like a full time in-house hire can.

Control – You have more control over how an in-house hire spends his/her time. You can split their time between 4-5 websites whereas this might be cost prohibitive if you were to hire an agency.

Time – you most likely won’t have a full time person dedicated to your project. Again, you will have to determine for yourself whether this is necessary for your organization.

Cost

The big question is, at what point does it make sense to forgo the agency route and hire someone in house? Unfortunately, there is no easy answer because it’s going to depend on your specific situation and needs.  I hope the above points help you figure it out for your own situation.

One thing seems pretty clear, it doesn’t seem to make sense for small businesses to hire in-house because they don’t have the same economies of scale that a mid-size or larger company has.  For larger organizations, it’s going to depend on the quality of the talent you can hire vs the quality processes and people that the agency has developed.

In the above example, I told the guy with 20 websites to narrow his focus.  If he hired an agency to work on all 20 websites at once, that would be way too expensive and if he hired one person to focus on all 20 websites, they would be spread way too thin.  If he narrows his focus to one or two websites and works with an agency, he can learn from them and apply the strategies and best practices to his other sites with an in-house hire later down the road.

These kinds of emails are not actually sent by legitimate people operating legitimate websites. Instead, they are usually automated and sent by a ‘robot’ that crawls the web and indiscriminately submits contact forms asking for links. Taking part in these link exchange schemes will not help your site’s visibility, and could actually cause some serious damage.

The emails will usually read something like this:

Dear Sir or Madame,

I came across your site and couldn’t help but notice that your site is a quality site and I think that my visitors would enjoy seeing it.

Would you be open to linking to my site in exchange for me placing a link to your site on mine? It would benefit us both!

Just add this code,which contains a link to my site embedded in a small image, to your site and I’ll link back to you right away. Please do it now.

Thanks,
Christopher

Why would you get an email like this?
Unfortunately, as a site rises in search engine rankings, in addition to becoming more visible to potential customers, it also becomes more visible to robots programmed to crawl the web for various spam marketing purposes. One use of these robots is to fill out contact forms on websites and ask for links.

Image from Geeky Gadgets.

What are Reciprocal Links?
Reciprocal links occur when two websites link to each other. So, if site A links to site B, and site B links to site A, the links are reciprocal links. A one-way link occurs when one site links to another, but the site that is linked to doesn’t link back. So, if site A links to site B, but site B doesn’t link to site A, the link on site A is a one-way link to site B.

Google considers the links pointing to a website in determining that website’s position in its results. While this is a bit of an oversimplification, you can think of it like this: each link from an outside site is seen as a ‘vote’ for a website. The more votes a site has, the better the chances of it showing up in a prominent position in Google’s search results.

Because you are providing something in return, a link in this case, a reciprocal link is viewed by Google as less valuable than a one-way link. In Google’s eyes, a one-way link is closer to an actual vote for a site, since one site is linking out without getting a link in return. Because of this, Google’s algorithm for determining it’s search results gives much more weight to one-way links. One step beyond not helping a site’s rankings, a reciprocal link that links to a site that Google perceives as ‘shady,’ or having too many reciprocal links leading to unrelated sites can actually hurt a site’s rankings.

For these reasons, it’s best to avoid email requests looking for an exchange of links. If a legitimate website owner writes a personal email asking you to link to their website, and you feel that it would actually benefit your visitors, it’s fine to link to it. But, always choose not to exchange links with a robot!

If you’d like to learn a little more about one way to get links to your site that will help your search engine rankings, see my colleague John-Henry’s excellent post about link building with original content.

Tricky, Tricky, Tricky, Tricky, HUH!

Unless what you are selling is unique to your store and grabs the internet’s attention (think of trendy and buzzworthy sites like Threadless and Will It Blend?, sites that people naturally share on social media) getting links is tougher than nails for online shopping. By using general directories home page links can come easy enough – but finding powerful links to go to your category and product pages can be insanely challenging. People will link to a home page without hesitation, but linking to product and category pages feels slightly unnatural for webmasters unless there is a very good reason. There is a chance that a fashion website might say “this retailer has an excellent selection of skinny jeans” or a toy blogger might say, “This Uglydoll “Ikoy Yoki” is so cute!” but those type of organic links are going to be few and far between.

For the record: Ikoy Yoki is INSANELY cute and awesome!

So the question is, how do you go about getting natural links to your product and category pages? For SEO agencies its all about working with your clients every step of the way to come up with engaging promotions an useful content. Here are some ideas to get the ball rolling:

1) Blogger Outreach - No matter what industry you or in, or what item you are selling – there is someone blogging about your niche. I don’t care if you are selling movie collectables, luxury real estate or wigs, there is always someone talking about your vertical.

Apparently this guy is a “shrimp blogger”

It’s the role of your SEO team to get in contact with these site owners and blog editors and pitch them ideas and share upcoming releases with them. However, this can be hard if your online store has no unique products. In that case it may be necessary to move on to a different tactic.

2) Discounts and Giveaways - If your store doesn’t have exclusive items or drastically cheaper products than your competitors, it will be hard to find a legitimate blogger to promote your sites individual products based on merit alone. However, by offering a discount to the blogger (for their readers) through a promotion code that can be entered during check out – the blogger with engage readers by offering low prices and drive (slightly discounted) revenue to your store. Offering discounts almost never gets turned down and it can be a great strategy to garner specific links if you ask the blogger to highlight (i.e. link) to certain products.

3) Product Round Ups – if Holiday/back to school/graduation season is approaching, bloggers are going to be making lists of gifts they and their readers want. By contacting them early and making sure they are aware of your product – or even sending them some products to review with holiday consideration in mind – there is a chance you could ramp up your holiday revenue and your rankings.

4) Guest Posting Gift Guides – If you have the ability and the knack for writing content – then by all means do it. If you can find blogs that cover products in your niche offer to write a guest post gift guide and subtly sneak your products (and links to their landing pages) in the text of your article. Keep in mind, these posts can’t be overly self promotional. You need your links to fly under the radar. You don’t want to include links to any competitors, but throw in links outside of your niche for other cool items that are slightly related.

Link building is rough. If you don’t know what you are doing, it can feel like you are just spinning your wheels. But if you work with your SEO team and utilize these tactics, you are going to have some solid links coming in.

John-Henry Scherck is an organic web strategist at Digital Third Coast that specializes in link building. Catch him on Twitter.