Solid SEO Starts With A Solid Business Model
Bob Massa, one of the original SEOs (though I don't think he likes to be referred to with that label), always talks about SEO from a conversion standpoint, offering quotes like "traffic without conversions is the epitome of futility."
The SEO space is a bit crowded right now. So many people are fighting for attention that it seems like people are fighting without purpose. There may be more people writing SEO blogs than there are reading them. That abundance of new publishers makes it easy for established authors to build links by re-spinning old phrases with new definitions, but if those links don't create profit what is the point?
There's no such thing as a free lunch
Looking back a few years, I can see that I was a bit economically challenged. I tried helping many people for free... but then some of those people I helped for free could never get enough, plus when something is free many people simply do not respect it. I remember my wife reading a book about self-made Internet and info-based product millionaires, and coming across a guy who in the past valued my time at nothing, always reminding me of how poor he was (though never reminding me that he is economical with the truth!)
How Persuasive is Your Marketing?
We know that SEO can deliver traffic, but we know from experience that traffic alone is not enough.
Skeptical consumers require more from your websites’ proposition to relinquish their reservations. This requires persuasion and persuasion marketing.
SEO, relevant and persuasive copy as well as usability all need to work harmoniously in order to shatter prior expectations about what users need from a website in order to take action. One aspect presented without the proper balance of the other can leave the visitor on the fence when it comes to making a decision to purchase.
Transforming a prospect into a customer involves multiple emotional and intellectual layers to facilitate trust. Often, the resolve of the prospect is weathered by a natural layer of mental and emotional buffers to offset the sales process. Just consider it natural reaction to being bombarded from disruptions from advertisements attempting to breach their awareness from every angle.
If you realize it or not, your pages are waging an argument of relevance, persuasion and validity. If you win, conversion occurs, if you lose, then your just another stepping stone for your competition who has structured a better offer, argument or call to action.
Qualified Impressions Translate Into Sales
Its not always the quantity, but the quality of visitor impressions that make the difference. Qualified impressions that translate into leads, sales or click through conversion are the true basis of SEO.
Out of every 100 visitors that visit your site, how many fill out a contact form, pick up the phone, download a special promotional? If you answered 15-25 visitors, then your pages are optimized for lead generation and conversion. Granted not every visitor that finds your site is going to want something from it, the idea is to set the stage for quality vs quantity and the right type of visitor who has a genuine need for your product.
Google’s new Quality Score Improvements Analysed
In case you haven’t read it yet, Google is now unleashing some new improvements to its Quality Score. News from Google about changes to their algorithms or the way they rank and charge PPC ads usually creates a tidal wave of blog posts, comments and outbursts from the community that uses AdWords on a daily basis. I therefore thought I’d analyse this new development and share thoughts & case studies with our readers.
Google announced:
Search Engine Mannerisms
When you constantly crawl thousands of search engine result pages daily (just to understand the behavior of cause / effect and the search engine algorithm) you start to notice the mood swings of search engine mannerisms which are the residual fragments, routines and traces the algorithm leaves behind.
In light of all seriousness, following are some of the “in-house” SEO nicknames we have dubbed these occurrences around the water cooler to identify these phenomenon.
Just like wine, pages get stronger with age, so the more pages you have about a topic (aging) in your site, the better chance your sites pages have when real page rank, trust rank and website authority is achieved.
How Social Media Can Help Your PR Efforts
The emergence of social media has been a game-changer for newspapers and magazines. On the one hand, they have seen their print numbers continue to drop as more and more people turn to the internet to get their news and information. On the other hand, they (the smart ones) have seen that by embracing social media and leveraging the different opportunities it offers, they can drive more traffic to their sites, engage in open dialogues and react quicker. So what does this mean for you? More opportunities than ever for you to build relationships and get publicity. Here are a few things to keep in mind when trying to leverage social media for PR purposes -- and that's PR as in public relations, not PageRank!
Start Small
Many times when people think about getting publicity for their business, their wishlist goes something like this:
Landing Pages and Bounce Rates
Landing pages or how to create landing pages that convert is an intriguing and debatable topic. Depending on visitor expectations and the relevance to the topic covered can make your pages candidates for high bounce rates (higher than 50%) vs. a successful conversion rate of 5-15% for pages that hit their mark.
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