MINIMIZATION (NOT OPTIMIZATION)

Let me downplay the importance of search engine optimization or SEO. The real work to be done is search engine marketing or SEM. You will want to find a smart companion for this journey. It takes a lot of patience, intuition, and insight to read Google’s abundance of traffic statistics and arrive at priority areas of strategic focus. How you trade against this knowledge decides whether you will go up or down.

Before looking at a list of activities that constitute “the real work” to improve Google rankings, consider the following:

1) Everyone wants more visitors online, which makes the market very competitive. This is not miracle marketing!

2) The best in SEO just puts you “in the grid”, which means that people will find you somewhere among the results returned by Google, but not in the top 5 positions where more than 75% of the traffic gravitates.

3) SEO can only succeed where real research is involved, which means it takes a savvy marketer to navigate Google data and tease out real leads from millions of searches. Once these decisions have been made both ingeniously and scientifically, then it’s very easy to leverage that knowledge to get results on your website.

4) Search engine optimization is deceptive. It should be “search engine minimization” as that is the least you can do to get your website in the game (too many think that is ALL they need to do).

5) The real difference is made with search engine marketing, where you allocate a budget to an ongoing campaign of measures that lift your optimized website up the rankings. A professional can help you prioritize which measures provide the greatest return in the short term.

So, what are the various service areas included in search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) services? There are two main components: increasing visibility and improving conversion. The latter is the process by which prospects are converted first into leads and then into customers. While SEO falls entirely into the first category, SEM straddles both categories. One thing must be clear. It’s not enough to convert consumers to your product. You have to motivate them to buy!

INCREASED VISIBILITY

Online Niche Discovery

keyword research

Local Google Listings

Google organic rankings

Google Sponsored Ads (Pay Per Click, PPC, Adwords)

blog

local forums

Customer Reviews

merchandising articles

Press releases

link building

Business directories

Industry Memberships

IMPROVING THE CONVERSION

brand consulting

Web-page design

Website Writing

electronic commerce

Contact form management

Email List Building

Electronic newsletter (quarterly)

RSS feed management

media development

WordPress BlogSoftware

Content Management System (CMS)

Audio/video content development

google analytics

Progress Report