We’ve already established that SEO is irreplaceable as a long-term online marketing strategy in prior articles. But how do you know if your company and website is ready for high-end SEO?

The time to start is right now. People are already searching online using keywords that describe your business. Don’t wait until your site is perfect. You can always be improving your site to increase your conversion rate, but that won’t matter much if you don’t have long-term strategies to steadily increase the number of qualified visitors to your site. Each day you wait you lose momentum in the search engine rankings, not to mention all the potential customers who are searching for businesses like yours that day.

There are two ways to begin implementing your SEO strategy: researching it yourself or having a professional analysis done.

If you choose to DIY your SEO:

· Brainstorm a list of 50-200 keyword phrases that relate to your products or services.

· Use Google’s Keyword Tool to find out the monthly search counts for each keyword phrase.

· Look at your current rankings for those keyword phrases.

· Analyze by the intersection of search count and probability of sale for the keyword phrase.

· Evaluate your competitors’ web positions for those keyword phrases.

· Compare your competitors’ rankings and data in Alexa and Google PageRank.

After going through these steps, you should be getting a good sense of your relative online standing and are ready to carefully select about 6 keyword phrases to initially target. Use the Goldilocks theory for keyword selection to narrow down your list. If you choose keywords that are too easy, you may get results quickly for keywords that have low search counts or competition, but they won’t do you any good since very few, if any are searching for keywords that are too soft. If you pick keywords that are too hard (competitive), without the search engine credibility, you’ll get nowhere and your efforts will be useless, your time and money wasted.

The second option is to let an experienced high-end SEO do a professional analysis for you. Some quality SEOs, like Search Optimizers, offer this initial analysis for free. This can save you a significant amount of time and effort and allow you to get a good idea of what the SEO opportunity is for your business quickly.

In our next post we will discuss the different types of SEO offerings.

"At Search Optimizers we are very focused on organic SEO and prefer to refer best of class partners when web development, marketing strategy and social media needs are revealed to us by our customers. In our efforts to vet out high quality partners we have interviewed literally hundreds and found that Creative Marketing Services (CMS) worked at a very high level, delivering superior results and service to our clients upon referral. Our vision is to provide clients a holistic marketing solution, but organic search is only one piece of the puzzle. CMS provides a significant complement of services that, when employed with SEO, creates a powerful marketing platform to launch a business into the 21st century and beyond." - Steve Kinney

Steve Kinney is the President and founder of Search Optimizers. For 14 years Steve and his team have been performing search engine optimization (SEO), currently serving over 100 companies. Steve focuses on continually automating the process of SEO in order to increase value add to clients year over year. He is a co-instructor of the Search Engine Marketing class for the University California, Irvine Extension Department and serves on their advisory committee for the Internet Marketing Program. He is also frequent guest speaker at various other MBA programs and business conferences.

Written by Guest Contributor: Steve Kinney - President & Founder, Search Optimizers

In the last SEO post, What is the Strategic Value of PPC vs. SEO, we provided an overview of the marketing benefits and drawbacks of both PPC & SEO and identified the best long-term strategy as SEO.  In this post we've included 5 reasons SEO is Vital to Your Marketing Strategy:

1.    It’s cost-effective, high-quality lead generation. Once your SEO strategy is deployed and fully effective, it will become a continuous source of high-quality new lead generation.  Why high-quality?  Because people who land on your site by clicking an organic search link have already qualified themselves.   They are actively searching for you, in terms that describe your business.  Once you’re on the first search pages for the right search terms, your website will see a steady stream of new visitors. 

2.    Your competitors are doing it. Or they aren’t.  Search engine credibility is essential to good placement.  If you are early to SEO in your market, you’ll have a head start on quality credibility that will give you a solid foundation.  Your competition will have a difficult, if not impossible time catching up.  Conversely, if you let your competitors unleash a high-end SEO strategy first, you’ll be in for a long, uphill battle to compete with their placement.

3.    The transition from the yellow pages to search engines is in full swing. When was the last time you pored over the yellow pages in the phone book to find a business or service?  Online search is now the preferred way to quickly find information about a business.  Evidence includes the growing number of online searches month over month. In a ComScore Search Report last year it was reported that there were approximately 24.4 billion Internet searches in May, 2010 as compared to 22 billion searches in May, 2009…nearly a 10% year-to-year gain!

4.    You’ll have unprecedented online reach.  A good SEO strategy will improve your online visibility over most of the Web, unlike services like Yelp or Google AdWords whose results are only for the individual service.  The money and effort put into an SEO strategy will save time and provide greater benefit.

5.    Be part of the great marketing dollar shift. It’s no longer effective to pour money into “outbound” marketing communications that blare messages indiscriminately at the public.  As evidenced by the dramatic rise in popularity of technology like Tivo and Satellite Radio, consumers want control over the messages they see and hear.  Marketing dollars are going where the customers and prospects are going…online. Online channels are less costly and more measurable, and as a result, continue to overpower traditional media. 

"At Search Optimizers we are very focused on organic SEO and prefer to refer best of class partners when web development, marketing strategy and social media needs are revealed to us by our customers. In our efforts to vet out high quality partners we have interviewed literally hundreds and found that Creative Marketing Services (CMS) worked at a very high level, delivering superior results and service to our clients upon referral. Our vision is to provide clients a holistic marketing solution, but organic search is only one piece of the puzzle. CMS provides a significant complement of services that, when employed with SEO, creates a powerful marketing platform to launch a business into the 21st century and beyond." - Steve Kinney

Steve Kinney is the President and founder of Search Optimizers. For 14 years Steve and his team have been performing search engine optimization (SEO), currently serving over 100 companies. Steve focuses on continually automating the process of SEO in order to increase value add to clients year over year. He is a co-instructor of the Search Engine Marketing class for the University California, Irvine Extension Department and serves on their advisory committee for the Internet Marketing Program. He is also frequent guest speaker at various other MBA programs and business conferences.

Written by Guest Contributor: Steve Kinney - President & Founder, Search Optimizers

In the last SEO post, What is Search Engine Optimization?, we touched a bit on the differences between purchasing “sponsored link” space from search engines - commonly referred to as pay-per-click (PPC) marketing - and using a search-engine optimization (SEO) strategy to improve your organic rankings. Most businesses have a limited budget for their search-engine marketing efforts, so let’s look at the features, benefits, and drawbacks of PPC and SEO.

First, you should evaluate the options according to your goals, resources, and time frame.

PPC Marketing Benefits:

• Can be effective for short-term, defined campaigns with temporary keywords
• Link placement takes place almost immediately
• Clicks to your site are fully trackable with analytics
• Straightforward measurement of your campaign
• You can select search terms that fit even the smallest budget

PPC Marketing Drawbacks:

• Poor long-term strategy
• Auction system subject to rising costs as keyword popularity grows
• Can be difficult to find appropriate intersection of keyword popularity and price
• Like renting a property; if you stop bidding, you no longer have space on the front page and are invisible.

So, what is the best long-term investment strategy for search engine marketing?

That would be organic search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO Marketing Benefits:

• Often lowest cost lead generation in long run
• Organic listings are ranked based on the unbiased search engine algorithm (and not price)
• SEO is perceived by searchers to be the more credible and accurate response to the search query
• Organic results deliver a majority of the total online traffic by a wide margin
• Once the point of ROI is reached, should continue to be increasingly profitable over time
• Few businesses are doing true SEO, so those who start now can build a sizeable lead in search engine credibility.

SEO Marketing Drawbacks

• Can take months to see significant results
• Higher upfront costs
• Placement not guaranteed

The differences between SEO and PPC indicate that they can also be used effectively in tandem.  PPC’s strengths lie in short-term, defined marketing campaigns, and can yield results when carefully evaluated to be a good fit for your organization and specific campaign.

High-end SEO tends to be a good investment for most businesses that have a website.  There really isn’t a marketing substitute for consistent placement on the first pages of organic search results

In the next post in the SEO series, we’ll discuss more of the specific ins and outs of why SEO is so important to your long-term marketing strategy.

"At Search Optimizers we are very focused on organic SEO and prefer to refer best of class partners when web development, marketing strategy and social media needs are revealed to us by our customers. In our efforts to vet out high quality partners we have interviewed literally hundreds and found that Creative Marketing Services (CMS) worked at a very high level, delivering superior results and service to our clients upon referral. Our vision is to provide clients a holistic marketing solution, but organic search is only one piece of the puzzle. CMS provides a significant complement of services that, when employed with SEO, creates a powerful marketing platform to launch a business into the 21st century and beyond." - Steve Kinney

Steve Kinney is the President and founder of Search Optimizers. For 14 years Steve and his team have been performing search engine optimization (SEO), currently serving over 100 companies. Steve focuses on continually automating the process of SEO in order to increase value add to clients year over year. He is a co-instructor of the Search Engine Marketing class for the University California, Irvine Extension Department and serves on their advisory committee for the Internet Marketing Program. He is also frequent guest speaker at various other MBA programs and business conferences.