SEO is about business

We’re a team of Marketing Engineers at Stew Art Media but an SEO campaign must start with the business case. Like any technology, the mechanics of SEO is simply a tool to achieve your goals. That’s where a lot of web designers and web developers can lose their way in SEO. They can get caught up in the coding of SEO and don’t understand the business goals. The reason we know this, is that we’ve been training web developers  in Melbourne on SEO since 2005! That’s when our founder began his Youtube channel on SEO and began running SEO Workshops. The last SEO workshop was run at the Melbourne Town Hall. The City of Melbourne is one of our clients. We’ve seen web designers get SEO wrong time and time again. So the questions a business owner should know the answer to before they let any SEO Developer touch their site are;

SEO Goals

What are you trying to achieve? More sales from SEO? More leads from SEO? A good way to measure the effectiveness of an SEO campaign is to know your current “close rate”. How many leads does your business need to get a sale? Any good sales person can tell you how many potential clients they need to see to close a sale. SEO is no different. You must understand your numbers. What is you business’ average sale value? These questions need to be asked before an SEO campaign begins, so you can calculate your return on investment and understand how to tweak your campaign.  Here’s how one of our clients measured their campaign.

• SEO Costs

• Cost of SEO campaign divided by No. of Leads generated via Google, gives a cost per lead value or;
• Client average sale value was $5000, their close rate was 20% (1 in 5 enquiries turned into a sale), therefore every lead was worth $1000 to the business. If the close rate went down they would need to re-evaluate two things. The quality of the leads and their internal processes. Unlike traditional marketing all these things are measurable with web marketing. You can even calculate which words are more profitable to you!

In the above case study we took the cost of lead generation via Google over a three month period from $70/lead to $3.85/lead and that is for a business whose average sale value is $5000! Not bad eh?

• SEO Leads

• Be careful what you wish for. A lot of micro businesses believe they need lots of sales leads from SEO. We had one client that learned that the hard way. When we got his site ranked no.1 in Google for his main key phrases, he was getting 2 leads EVERY day. He couldn’t handle the volume of leads as a single person business and ended up annoying a lot of potential customers, not to mention the stress it caused him.  So have a think about how many leads a week your business can handle and be prepared to service them. SEO is powerful!

SEO Keywords

What sorts of things do your potential clients type into Google to find products and services like yours? Often the business owner is not the best person to answer this question. One of the classic mistakes made by the tourism industry in the early days of SEO was ranking their sites for “Low priced airfares” but of course their customers were looking for “cheap flights” . A good place to start is by asking family, friends and customers this question “If you were Googling for products/services like ours what sorts of things would you type into Google?”. Try not to use any words that relate to your business when you ask that question or you will influence their answer.
Google Trends is our favourite keyword tool as it give you great data like the table below. It even shows seasonality.

KEYWORDS ARE THE FOUNDATION OF SEO

If you get your keywords wrong then you waste all your time and money.  Often business owners tell us “Oh we already rank no.1 in Google”. When we ask WHAT they’re ranking no.1 for in Google it usually turns out that it is their business name. If someone is Googling your business name they already know who you are. SEO is for people who are searching for your products and services but your business is not necessarily top of mind or they’ve never heard of you.

KEYWORD ANALYSIS TOOLS

You can just Google any of these tools and you will find them of course!

• Google Insights for Search – Like all Google tools this one is free and one of the most popular. It helps you compare one key phrase against another and see their performance overtime. Often keyword usage can be seasonal too. Here’s an example of how we use this tool for Keyword research
• Google Webmaster Tools – This tool is more about analysing your own site. It will tell you what Google believes are the most important keywords on your site as well as a lot performance issues to do with your site. Here’s some of the ways we use Google Webmaster tools
• Google Suggestions – Every time you Google something Google will suggest the phrase it thinks you are after. These suggestions are ordered based on their popularity.
  It will vary based on where you are physically doing the search from. This can be helpful if you are targeting the geographic area that you are doing the search from but misleading if you want to target another town. We tend to use it for crosschecking our analysis. It will also vary based on when you do the search, as it is giving you real time results.

There are quite a few good tools out there that are not free but those above should get you started. Things to keep in mind when doing keyword research.

• Plurals & singular often return very different search volumes
• Keyword searches can have a seasonal aspect to them
• Jargon isn’t usually searched for
• Use the language of your customers, not yours.