Next up is the actual research.  Get this, I now get to learn everything I can about this client and their terminology.  I start by looking over their current website or just their initial phrases, if they don’t yet have a website (boy am I glad they found us if that is the case).  Then, I get to look at some of their competitors where I learn even more about what it is that this industry is all about.  I am having fun now, learning about semiconductors, extruded tubing, metal castings, etc.  Ok, I have to qualify that I worked for an Iron Foundry and loved it–I really like to know how things are made.  They even have a cable show that was written just for me (or it seems that way anyhow) called “How Stuff Works” and if you haven’t seen it, it is awesome.  Back to the topic, now I start my actual search looking for terms that are highly searched and yet have a lower competition in the search engines.  This is often the “hard” part.

Once I have found a sizable number of keyword phrases, I sort through them giving them a category, with the best ending up in my “top recommended” category.  These are what I can take to the client through my 1-2 hour presentation on my findings.  This is the “fun” part, especially when the client sees all the different variations and terms that they may not have even thought of,  but are being searched online.  This is often a surprise as they may not be the same “lingo” that is used inside the company.  I like to make sure that they are thinking “outside the box” when choosing their final keyword phrases.  This is also where I get them to focus their keyword phrases.  You see,  at the the beginning of any website project, you need to really focus in on a few keyword phrases for each page.  I generally will look at 1-3 to start off a project.  This is an effective way to focus the content on phrases that have the most potential to drive initial traffic to your just launched site.  The goal should be to drive more traffic and higher quality traffic to your site so your conversions can also increase and hopefully lowering your bounce rate.

Next up is working on your content and using the keyword phases in the most useful manner on the site itself.  But, that is a whole new topic that I will have to talk about later.  Hope you enjoyed the quick keyword research read  and maybe you will get excited about keyword research next time like I do.

It isn’t really about which is better – it’s about using them in the most effective way to make the most of every marketing dollar. Here are 5 ways you can use PPC and SEO together to get the best results:

1. Identify new opportunities for organic campaigns. You can cast a wide net with PPC advertising and see which terms perform well for your business. For example, one of our clients sells HDPE Pipe and other underground utility supplies. Although it wasn’t one of our original focus keywords for our organic campaign, it was one of the best performing paid terms for traffic and conversions. Now it’s part of our focus keywords and once organic visibility increases, we may be able to scale back on paying for that term.
2. Fill in the gaps on highly competitive terms. We all have our lists of keywords we want organic rankings for, and that’s great. The problem comes when the competition level is so high that we can’t justify the amount of time and effort it will take to get that organic ranking. PPC gives us another way to get traffic for that competitive keyword without all the work that organic involves. It’s critical to measure ROI, however: we don’t want to pay more for clicks than we can generate in profit.
3. Introduce new products. Organic traffic is great, but it can take the search engines days or weeks to index and rank our newest products. When we have a new, hot item, we can use PPC to get that initial traffic until organic positioning catches up.
4. Address seasonality. The industrial marketplace doesn’t always follow the standard holiday trends that B2C retailers do. There are still seasonal trends for some industries. For example, another client sells commercial pressure washers. Spring and summer, when there is a lot more outside cleaning to be done, are much busier than fall and winter. By allocating their PPC budget for pressure washer terms during this peak season, we can catch more of those searchers who are ready to buy.
5. Test landing pages. When redesigning landing pages or adding new product copy, it’s important to test how effective those changes are. The problem is when we don’t have high enough traffic levels to get statistically significant results in a short time. We can use PPC to send a relatively large amount of traffic in a short time. Now we don’t have to wait as long to check bounce rates and conversion rates to see if our changes have positive impact.

How are you using PPC and SEO in your online marketing?

“The initial release will be a set of reports in Google Analytics using search data from Google Webmaster Tools. This includes query information, clicks, impressions, clickthrough rate, and average position. You’ll also be able to use Google Analytics advanced data filtering and visualizations with this data.”

This news is incredibly exciting for internet marketers, especially those who value the data they are used to seeing from PPC campaigns. Impressions, clicks clickthrough rates can provide invaluable data for optimizing title and meta descriptions and keyword effectiveness . Average position data can help us get a more accurate picture of our visibility, rather than relying on checking rankings at a specific moment in time.

Even though this data is available currently in Google Webmaster Tools, it will be very convenient to have it in one location, making Google Analytics an even stronger tool in your online marketing toolbox.

Most will find that writing the Homepage, About Us page and the forms come very easily.  What they don’t expect is that writing about their different categories and products is not so fun.  It did sound like fun before starting but now…this is work!

Here I come in again, at this point we need to make sure that we are writing as if we are talking (selling) to a prospective customer face to face.  After all, many have decided to upgrade or redesign with the thought that this will be a sales tool or even a virtual salesperson.  So, we need to make sure that we are populating the content in the same manner than our original reason for doing this project was.

Now, after writing this content many times I need to go back again and ask for more content.  You see, content is still KING in the online world.  Search engines love it, viewers love it—so we need to do it.  I will not stop asking for more content from my clients, and will always ask for it ahead of time as well.  What we need to remember is the reason we started the web project in the first place.  Hopefully that reason is to increase your business and add dollars to your bottom line.

If you have real world salespeople you would train them on what to say and express how and what your product is and does, Right?  So why would you not want to get that into words on your website—this can be your best salesperson ever and you don’t have to pay them a commission!

My takeaway here is simple:  write, write, write until you have explained exactly what it is you or what your product can do for your customer.  If you need help then hire a good copywriter, you will be happy you did.

According to the article, this case marks the first time that a website design company has been held liable for such a practice. The design firm was ordered to pay over 27 times more in damages to Cleveland than was the company that actually imported and sold the fake clubs.

This adds an interesting new twist to the “white hat, black hat” SEO saga. The web design company in question built the site using SEO strategies designed to lead shoppers looking for genuine Cleveland golf clubs to the copycat clubs’ site, which was called, by wacky coincidence, copycatclubs.com.

So, if you look at it from a certain angle, the website support company was pretty much just doing their job, building the best possible site for the company that hired them. But, since the company that hired them was engaged in business practices that were sketchy from the start, does this turn the web designers’ practices into black-hat SEO? Or is it just a case of doing white hat work for a black hat business?

Given that the website was called copycatclubs.com, it seems like the website design firm should have known that something foul was afoot. But, then again, they were paid to do a job, which they did—maybe a little too well. It’s sort of a fine line: every company wants to do their best work for every client, but, if a client may be up to something shady, where does responsibility for that shadiness begin/end?

Now we know that at least part of the responsibility (up to 2700%, in some cases) does lie with the web developers. Read the whole story here.

They came up with some interesting findings.

• Users focused on the middle column of the page, both organic and paid results
• Paid results in the right column got significantly less attention than the paid results in the middle of the page or the organic results.
• Very few users are using the filters and suggestions on the left side of the page.
• Google’s top listings in the middle column got more “gaze time” than Bing’s.
• Google’s organic results got more “gaze time” than Bing’s.

So what does this mean for online marketing? Should we give up on paid results unless we can get the top listing placed over the organic results?

Not necessarily.

Attention on search results pages does not always equate to conversions on your site. Paid search might bring you very targeted traffic who are ready to buy now.

Some visibility is better than no visibility. Getting 25% of the attention for a competitive keyword is better than getting zero attention when you rank on page 87.

Understanding how searchers use the search results pages gives you a starting point when initially deciding on the amount of time and resources you dedicate to paid and unpaid search marketing. Over time, you can test which method is not only bringing you traffic, but what method is bringing you conversions and sales.

The full article direct from the Googlites themselves can be found here. The short version involves adding just a little bit of Google-created code to your site:

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang="a-different-language" href="http://url-of-the-different-language-page" />

Then, with a few more adjustments, all your website’s users will be directed to the proper version of the site, based on their language preference (using their IP address, accept-language HTTP header, and/or other user info). No matter what language is displayed, and no matter how many other languages you want your content to be available in, every version will ultimately be found under one URL, with the help of 301 redirects or link rel=“canonical” tags.

There’s a lot more to it than that, of course, so be sure to read the complete original article to get all the details. It’s pretty heavy with technical jargon, so it’s not the easiest read (I had to read it about five times just to be sure I was getting the general idea correct), but it’s a supremely easy fix for a potentially difficult conundrum. If your website users speak Spanish, French, German, or even whatever language is spoken in Guam,* they’ll find it in the right language the first time on any Google search. A unified URL for all your content will help you avoid PageRank dilution, as well as other problems which may arise due to multiple pages of (essentially) duplicate content.

It’s an incredibly useful little patch for your site, plus it lets you use the astoundingly official-sounding phrase “multilingual template content unification.”

*Guamish.

So, for your company’s sake, get LinkedIn today. This may just be a great place to find leads, educate your customers, entice great future employees, gain credibility and much more. Not ready for social marketing? This will be a great first step and arguably the best one for any industrial small business.

Also, I would like to give a shout out to Reelseo.com for turning me onto this cool video–they posted this in their blog this week also. Thanks for the great post.

You can also check out our linked in page if you would like.  Feel free to poke around and see who we are, and if you like us, leave a recommendation.

But if you act now, you can cover SEO basics faster than you think. Many industrial ecommerce solutions have built-in SEO friendly features that let you cut through basic SEO with all the power of a Ginsu knife!

All you need to do is create keyword rich, descriptive product names.

Here’s an example:

Many manufacturer databases give you a name for each product. It might look like this:

CLR 1.25 ACR SHEET

You could use that description on your ecommerce site, but if you tweak it just a little, it turns into a keyword rich product name.

1.25 Inch Clear Acrylic Sheet

For the time it takes you to tweak those product names, you get all this!

Improved Title Tags – many ecommerce solutions use your product name as the default title tag. So, when you improve product names, you improve your title tags too!

Improved Meta Description Tags – Scripts can be written that allow you to insert the product name into a general meta description tag that can save you from having to manually update each description tag.

Improved Category Page Content – many category/subcategory pages don’t have a lot of text on them, so they can miss out on attention from search engines. However, these pages usually have a list of products by the product name. If you have keyword rich product names, your category pages will have keyword rich text by default.

Improved Anchor Text – Product names are often used as the linking text (aka anchor text) on your site. So remember, all those great product names on the category pages we just talked about? Well, you get bonus points because they are the anchor text that links to your product pages.

More Improved Anchor Text – Additionally, if you have cross-selling features on your site like a “customers also bought” or “we also recommend” feature, you’ve just created keyword rich anchor text for those links too.

But wait, there’s more!

Since your keyword rich product names appear in your title and description tags, and search engines often use those tags on the search results pages, you can also improve click through rates to your site.

But wait, there’s even more!!

Your customers also have a better user experience because they can actually understand what you sell and that can lead to increased conversion rates.

What are you waiting for? Act now! Create keyword rich product names and improve the performance of your industrial ecommerce site!

For Tracking Visits from Email Campaigns:
Google Analytics URL Builder – this is great for tracking email campaigns, especially if you’ve bought an ad/link from a 3rd party. Email links show up as “direct traffic” in Google Analytics, so measuring the effectiveness of email campaigns are can be challenging.  You can use the URL Builder to help you create the link that be placed in the email, then you’ll be able to see all the traffic you get when someone clicks on that link and if any of those visits converted.

For Tracking Visits from Twitter:
Goo.gl  URL Shortener – this handy tool works great for social media like Twitter. Long URL’s can be troublesome for the 140 character limit in Twitter, especially if you want to have a detailed comment with it or you expect lots of re-tweeting. Paste in your long URL, click “Shorten” and voila, you’ve got a short URL for your Tweets. Then, log in to Goo.gl with your Google ID and you can see how often that short URL was clicked.