When SEO Firms Make Guarantees: What You Should Know

When you run a digital marketing agency, the #1 query you get is: if I contract with you for search engine optimization, can you guarantee a first place ranking on Google?

What this tells us is that there are SEO providers out there who make such promises. As a result, there are clients who may achieve a top ranking – but not much else to show for their investment in SEO. The words “guaranteed rankings and traffic” have tainted the reputation of the industry. One of the most common tactics is for the SEO provider to select your keywords for you. They will select non-competitive keywords which your potential customers are unlikely to use. This makes it easy for them to deliver a high search ranking based on those keywords, but this does not deliver quality traffic.

Companies who spend a lot of money raising their ranking from #2 to #1 may lose sight of conversion or dismiss pay-per-click campaigns that could help their bottom line. It’s possible to reach #1 and achieve little or no impact. It depends.

Search Engines Warn Against Guarantees

Google provides a very instructive set of guidelines on search marketing that every SEO client should read. They make one very clear statement: No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Although this section specifically warns about providers who claim to have special relationships with Google (such as access to knowledge of the ‘secret sauce’ behind Google’s search algorithms), the warning comes straight from the company who would know better than anyone that SEO guarantees are not feasible. For one thing, this would destroy the integrity of Google’s organic search model, which is the entire basis of their business success.

Rankings are Dynamic and Unstable

A reputable provider knows that search results for the same search term can vary from hour to hour, and from location to location. It depends on which search engine server is fulfilling your query at any point in time; whether you log in to your personalized Google account or some other account; or which city you’re in when you type the query. These factors change the order of results, so making guarantees based on uncontrollable circumstances does not make sense.

Rankings are the Wrong Metric for Business ROI

This is the most important thing to remember. The reason companies want high search rankings is to increase business. Rankings are a means to an end, not the end. Rankings alone do not increase traffic or convert traffic into business.

The most basic metric of SEO success is quality traffic. If an SEO campaign shows a marked increase in search engine traffic, that’s one part of the success. The other part is whether visitors stay on the site and spend time on product and services information, play with demos or watch videos. This means SEO has brought the right audience to the site.

Traffic is good, but converting traffic into visitors who take action is the ultimate success metric. Conversion could mean buying a product, or for non-eCommerce sites, it could mean signing up for a newsletter, or downloading a white paper. When visitors land on a company’s website, how easy is it to find information? Is the content clear and informative? Is the website easy to navigate? Does it provide calls to action in visible, logical places? Does the company know which phone calls or emails to the sales department come through search and which ones through traditional marketing?

SEO can drive traffic but not conversion once the visitor lands.

This is where Analytics come into play. An SEO provider will always install analytics to determine where the traffic is coming from, which were the most popular search terms and so on. Analytics can also monitor user behavior on a website: which pages were most popular, how long did visitors spend on each page, when they abandoned the site and on which page. This helps determine how a website could be improved for better conversion. A website optimized for conversion is also part of the business equation. A high search ranking definitely helps, but by itself will not convert business for you.

So What’s a Reasonable Promise?

A good digital marketing provider will focus on increasing a client’s business. This means taking a consultative approach that is broader than merely SEO. Typically this means an audit of the client’s existing online presence that includes search, website effectiveness, social media, and even offline mediums that drive visitors to the website. This will generate recommendations which may include content strategy, website optimization, or a social media strategy. This takes a lot more work than just promising to submit a client’s website to all the search engines.

A client may not have the budget to implement all the recommendations, but the provider will be able to advise which components are the most critical.

The other factor is time. There will always be components that only the client can implement. This includes tasks such as freshening content and images, developing marketing content specific to the business, regular blog posts, and setting up offline mechanisms for tracking (different phone numbers for web queries and print ad queries is a good example). Fresh content helps boost search engine rankings; this is why regular blog posts are important. Social media also requires real commitment from the client. But a client may not have the staff or time to do this, so again, a good provider will explain how the various components impact the success of the plan and help the client prioritize.

Given factors such as: competing SEO campaigns, changing search algorithms, client resources and/or ability to implement, the only guarantee a digital marketing agency can give a client is: to provide the best advice possible for using the Internet to increase traffic and improve business.

Analytics & Optimizer: A Dream Team to Achieve Business Objectives

Collecting analytics data about your site visitors is a good thing. The theory behind collecting information is that if you have some sensible data, you can better plan when executing business objectives. But, like most good things, there’s a catch.

You need a way of testing all this wonderful data against your theories of what works. If you don’t, you will be left with a big blob of information that doesn’t do your organization much good except supply icing for colourful reports.

For example, how useful is it for you to know that, on average, your website visitors spend 40 seconds on your landing page?

Or, what intelligence do you get from knowing that your customers drop out at the third step of a registration process on your site?

You can get all of this data from analytics, but so what? How does that translate into implementing changes to your site to help achieve results? If only there was a way to use this data to help achieve business objectives…

Enter Optimizer. [Read more]

The Fastest Way To Increase Your Traffic and Generate More Leads

Deciding which keywords to target for search engine optimization can seem like a daunting task. To simply this often complicated task, I’m going to show you a simple and fast method to increase your traffic and generate more leads for your business.

Instead of searching for brand new keywords to compete for, the easiest way to increase your traffic is to work with keywords you are already ranking well for on search engines.

To get started, you will need a Google Analytics and a Google Webmasters account that has a least of month of data for you to examine. If you have e-commerce tracking or conversion goal tracking already set up, then it will be easy to identify the best keywords to target for search engine optimization. For example, here at SmarttNet we track our website’s lead generation with two Google Analytics conversion goals that are triggered whenever somebody completes our Contact Us form and Website Consultation form.

To see which keywords are sending you quality traffic, open your Google Analytics account and navigate to the keywords report under the Traffic Sources menu. The initial keywords report will show the top 10 keywords that sent you the most traffic in the last month. Now, I want you to choose 3 keywords in this report that we will focus on for search engine optimization (if you have goals setup, you can use the Goal Set 1, Goal Set 2, etc. to see which keywords are generating the most leads). For our website, I’ll choose three keywords that send our website quality traffic.

Next, I want you to open your Google Webmasters account. On the Webmaster dashboard you will see a list of your website’s most popular search queries. Click on the “More » ” link to view the entire search queries report. Here you will find some keyword data that will be very useful in analyzing how much of an increase in traffic and leads you can generate by optimizing your website better for these keywords. For the 3 keywords I choose this is the keywords impressions data provided:

As you can see, we are only realizing a small portion of the potential traffic these keywords could be sending us. By focusing our search engine optimization on these three keywords which are already sending us quality, converting traffic we can easily increase our website’s lead generation. Even small, incremental increases in our search engine rank for these quality keywords would result in an increase in our traffic. The question, is how much more traffic would a slightly higher rank result in? To answer this question, we have some actual data from a 2006 study that analyzed 36 million queries on AOL’s search engine:

Source: Predictive Marketing

This click-tracking study provides useful data to gain a rough idea of how  much more traffic we can expect from an increase in ranking for each keyword. Keep in mind that this study focus strictly on clicks on the organic search engine results page (SERP) and that about 10-15% of people will click on Google’s Adwords ads.

The easiest way to increase your traffic is to modify your Title Tags and Meta Description Tags to more prominently feature your keywords on the search engine results page. In the example above, the click-through (CTR) for keyword #2 is much lower than the other two keywords and the reason for this is that the keywords text is not nearly as prominently displayed in search engine results page (description/title) as they are for competitor’s websites.

Once you’ve made the basic modifications to your Titles Tags and Meta Descriptions Tags, the next step would be to create new content around these keywords and build some incoming links with the keywords in the link anchor text.

By focusing your search engine optimization and link building resources on high quality keywords that you are already ranking for, you can easily calculate the potential increase in traffic and lead generation by using the click distribution chart above. Rather than guessing, now you can analyze all the keywords currently sending you traffic and easily cherry pick the most valuable keywords that should be the target of your next search engine optimization campaign.

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