If you don’t follow this advice carefully, you could find yourself banned by Google Adwords in no time flat! Tread very carefully if you want to use Adwords now and well into the future.
Have you ever called a business to inquire about their services and heard the person on the other end ask you, “Where did you hear about our business?” Sure you have, this is a pretty common thing and while it may seem like a small, almost meaningless question to the customer, the business takes this question VERY seriously. This is how they determine how effective their specific marketing and advertising campaigns are.
If a business is using, let’s say the yellow pages, fliers, and postcards to advertise their business, it is VERY helpful for them to know how many customers they are getting from each source. Once they tally how much they are spending on each particular campaign versus how many customers they acquire, they can decide which methods to continue with or which to possibly discontinue. This is EXACTLY the data that you need to be collecting for your website. Without it, you are just marketing in the dark.
The good news is, this data is EXACTLY what you can get by using Google Analytics, and actually much more than that. Google Analytics is a free program that Google allows ANYONE to use who has a website. You simply place a piece of java code on each page of your website and the program does the rest. This data is simply invaluable.
How so?
Well, when promoting your website, it is likely that you are hitting several avenues at once in order to get visitors. You may be using Google Adwords, Facebook, Press Releases, etc. Now I ask you, how do you know which of your marketing efforts is bearing the most fruit if you have no way to track where your traffic is coming from or which traffic source is producing more leads or sales?
Before programs like Google Analytics, collecting this data was not so easy or cheap. Most website owners spent all their time promoting their site never really knowing which methods were producing and which were not.
Now, it is incredibly easy to see exactly where your traffic is coming from and which campaigns are effective. Once you find out what areas are not as effective, you have the choice of either stopping those methods altogether and focusing more time and energy on the ones that are, or try to tweak the less productive ones to increase the traffic rate.
Google Analytics is helpful not only in showing you traffic data, but in showing conversion data as well. So at a glance you’ll know the percentage of visitors that have taken action by signing up to your email list or by purchasing one of your products. You’ll also know which traffic source brings in visitors that take action the most.
As you can see, Google Analytics can be a website owner’s #1 tool when it comes to producing a powerful and profitable website. So stop “driving” your business “blindfolded” and install Google Analytics already!
We all want more traffic to our sites, this is a given. We also know that increasing our rank in the search engines (Google especially) will result in more traffic right? Right!
Here’s the problem: We have very little control over how high we rank in the search engines for a given keyword! The algorithms change all the time! Why spend countless hours on achieving a high ranking for one particular keyword, or set of keywords if you could easily lose those rankings tomorrow? I think there are better ways to spend my time that would bring better results, which is why I stopped handling my “search engine marketing” this way a long time ago.
So what is my SEO strategy?
1. I make sure my URL’s are search engine friendly by making sure the title of my post is included in the URL itself. Check out the URL for this post as an example. It is “http://truewebpresence.com/google/search-engine-marketing-simplified”. In order to do this in WordPress you have to go to Settings > Permalinks and select Custom Structure and input /%category%/%postname%/ in the field provided (check out these free wordpress video tutorials for further instruction).
2. I make sure my title tags are search engine friendly. I typically have them arranged this way “(Post Title) > (Blog Name)”. Nothing too crazy. This the URL, Post Title, and Title Tag are all synced up.
After doing basic SEO, I simply focus on publishing the best content I can possibly publish. That’s it.
When you simply focus on publishing quality content your bound to please more human beings, which is way more important than pleasing some computer algorithm. Why? Because human beings are known to share things like wild fire, it’s called word of mouth. This is the direction the Internet is heading with social sites like Facebook and Stumbleupon becoming increasingly popular and vital to a websites operations.
You have to remember what business Google is in. They’re in the business of providing relevant, quality content in their search results. So as long as you’re providing that quality, it’s Google’s job to find you, and even if they don’t it’s their loss. You will officially be taking the high road, and you will no longer need to depend on the search engines for traffic, for you appeal to a force far greater… human beings.
It has worked well for me over at my music blog/record store. Every month I get traffic from over 300 different keywords and that continues to grow the more I blog. I’m found under keywords I never even thought to target intentionally. I even rank in the top 3 for the keyword “punk blog” without even trying! You can expect different results depending on which market you’re in.
Obviously the kind of music on my blog is not mainstream, and I could get more traffic by blogging about more mainstream artists but that’s not what I care about on that site. It’s my hobby, and I only care to talk about music I’m passionate about there. Regardless, the strategy I’m applying is still working! So well that I decided to apply the same strategy to TrueWebPresence.com, so be sure to follow us here to see updates on our traffic and such.
It’s important to note that SEM/SEO is not the be-all end-all when it comes to generating targeted traffic. It’s not even my favorite method! Click here to learn about my other methods for generating targeted traffic.
Now ask yourself, if you lost all your search engine traffic tomorrow, how big of an impact would that make on your business/website? If the answer is “a lot”… then maybe you should rethink your business model.
Update 2012: The “Google Search+” update is introduced.
Update: See, even big sites like eHow.com can wake up one morning to find out Google doesn’t love them as much as they thought. In regards to the latest algorithm update by Google called “Panda”, WebProNews Writes:
“According to the SearchMetrics data, eHow.co.uk took a 72,30% hit in visibility. eHow.com took a 53,46% hit. Keep in mind this is UK data, but it has also affected U.S. sites.”
Hi, my name is Steve Longoria. Thanks for stopping by my site.
I strive to bring you only the freshest, most relevant marketing content from all across The Internet Tubes!
I also enjoy playing the drums, riding my bike, and pretty much anything wrapped in a warm, cripsy tortilla!
