Our Approach to SEM

First of all, let’s explain what SEO, PPC, and SEM are all about in case you’re getting confused by the alphabet soup of acronyms.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Let’s start with SEM, because that’s the major category to which all the other subcategories belong. SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing, and is synonymous with “online marketing” or SM (Search Marketing). It covers a wide variety of online marketing techniques ranging from paid advertising, to free viral marketing, and email campaigns. There are so many ways of promoting web sites and web content that we won’t name them all right now. It’s enough that you understand that this is the main category that includes all other online marketing strategies.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Next, let’s talk about PPC, or “Pay-Per-Click”. The name of this category is pretty self-explanatory. You pay every time a visitor gets to your web site by clicking on your ads. This is probably the fastest way to get qualified traffic to your web site. Pay close attention to the word “qualified,” because it’s the key to a successful PPC campaign, and in fact, it’s the key to all online marketing.

Qualified Traffic

The whole idea is to make sure that the RIGHT PEOPLE (people who are interested in your products and services) click on your ads at the RIGHT TIME (when they’re ready to buy!). It’s so important to make sure you’re getting ONLY qualified traffic, because otherwise you’ll spend money on tire-kickers and people who are casually browsing the Web without any intention of buying from you.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The last major category is called SEO, which stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. The idea behind SEO is to drive large amounts of qualified traffic to your web site, and eliminate the need for paying for every click. In other words, rather than focusing on PPC methodologies, SEO seeks to drive traffic to a web site by using resources that are available on the Web, and forging partnerships with web sites that can boost your ranking in search engine. The idea is to get your web site to make its way to the top of the search engine rankings, so that people will find you in the free search results without you having to pay for sponsored links. Be careful though… Don’t fall into the trap of measuring your SEO success by your search engine rankings. There are many other ways to drive traffic to your web site, and search engine listings can drop out of the blue when search engines change their algorithms.

Why SEO?

The reason why SEO is so important, is because almost 70% of all people who use search engines click only on "organic" links (free links that are also known as "natural" links) and avoid sponsored ads (links in which sponsor companies pay for every click). Sponsored links can be fantastic for instant traffic, because organic SEO can take quite a while to become effective, and in fact, PPC is a crucial part of any SEO strategy. You should always implement PPC in your online marketing. However, if you’re in it to win it, you need to think long-term growth (which can be exponential in nature), and that means that SEO is definitely the way to go.

In order to benefit from the power of SEO, a web site owner can promote their site in the search engines using a variety of techniques, such as proper keyword selection, on-page optimization, using clean XHTML/CSS code, link-building, directory submissions, article submission, press releases, social networking, and email campaigns.

Organic SEO helps increase a web site’s popularity and relevance for particular keywords that naturally leads to a higher ranking on the various search engines. It’s important to understand that it can take several months to benefit from the full effect of SEO, so be prepared for at least a four to six month wait before you see a significant increase in traffic.

While PPC can get you an immediate stream of traffic, organic SEO is a great long term marketing approach. It demands constant attention to the company web site and a continual search for new opportunities to increase the site’s popularity through strategic partnerships, directory submissions, link-building, and adding relevant new content to the site. The site must be frequently updated and promoted, and landing pages must be honed for optimal performance.

Promoting New Web Sites

If a the web site being promoted is brand new and requires immediate results, then it is a good idea to couple SEO with a PPC campaign. A strong PPC campaign will give the web site targeted traffic for immediate conversions (positive visitor actions such as buying a product or filling out a sales lead form), while the organic campaign builds momentum in the background. As the SEO campaign picks up steam, rises in search engine ranking, and increases the site’s overall traffic, the PPC campaign can build the base for ongoing success. The idea is to get new visitors, and turn them into loyal customers.

Getting new visitors is the purpose of the PPC campaign (and eventually of the SEO campaign), while turning new customers into loyal clients is the job of the SEO campaign. This is why it’s not a bad idea to continue with PPC indefinitely as part of a long term online marketing strategy (even after SEO has taken hold and is generating regular traffic), provided it has a high return on investment. At the same time, it’s very important to track exactly how much of your traffic and conversions come from SEO, and how much from PPC. More importantly, it’s important to continually seek to improve your landing pages’ conversion rates so that more and more of your traffic is converted into sales, because that can increase the success of your web site exponentially.

While it’s tempting to measure the success of an SEO campaign by your web site’s rise in the search engine ranking, it is advisable to base one’s measurements on increases in relevant traffic, and successful conversions. Each page of the web site must be measured for effectiveness regularly. Your campaign will only be successful if your web site continues to grow and evolve with your target market. To give you an example of why this is so, think of a web site that you frequently visit. It could be a news site like CNN, or a social networking site like Facebook. What common threads do these web sites have? Why do you like them so much? Would you like CNN if they had only a handful of articles, or if there were only a handful of people who created profiles on Facebook? What if the content was old, and CNN had articles from 5 years ago, and Facebook had inactive profiles with people who lost interest in the site long ago and no longer interact with each other online? Clearly, these web sites would lose their appeal if their content was old and static.

Content Relevance

Another big aspect of SEO is content relevance. For example, if The Wallstreet Journal all of a sudden stopped writing about finance, and started writing about rock and roll, investors would stop regarding it as a relevant source of information about the stock market, and their readership would decline. So, the main things to keep in mind about the content of your web site is not how “pretty” it is, but rather, how fresh, current, and relevant it is. Think of craiglist.com—a VERY profitable web site. It’s basically regular text. There’s no fancy design, multimedia, or catchy gimmicks. The only thing that makes it so popular is that its content is very relevant, updated, and useful.

If you’re ready to jumpstart your natural listings, and begin growing your online business profits, it’s time to give us a call about setting up an SEO campaign for your company. Our experts are standing by to help you increase your sales, so give us a call and we’ll show you why our clients love our SEO and PPC services. For more information, take a look at our SEO Packages and PPC Packages, or please call us, chat with us, or email us right now! Our operators are standing by to assist you.

SEO Best Practices

When it comes to SEO, Sadan Marketing adheres to best practices and promotional methods that are approved by all the major search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN). Unlike some of the fly-by-night companies out there that call themselves SEO/SEM companies, we never try to "trick" the search engines into giving our clients higher rankings.

We use legitimate well-established methods that ensure your web site will get the right kind of exposure without getting your web site banned from the search engines for using black-hat practices. We believe in doing quality work to build a long term, loyal base of users for our SEO clients. While we strongly recommend PPC for the beginning of SEO campaigns if a company needs to see immediate results. However our goal is to build lasting organic traffic for our SEO clients.

We start every SEO campaign with intense research on a prospective clients company and their top competitors. Once we have an idea of a company target market, their product and their competitors, we turn our focus to the company website. If the company does not have a site we will work with the company to build a client friendly site, that is easy for the search engine to navigate.

The website needs to be rich in valuable content and written in clean code. If the client has an existing site we will work with the client to make it user friendly and search engine friendly. We look beyond driving traffic to a clients website, we are more interested in conversion of high value traffic. This means we want the SEO client to be able to measure success in its ability to turn a profit.

We have several SEO packages that can help grow any business. However before looking into SEO packages a company needs to consider several factors. The number one factor to consider is the company’s existing online marketing strategy. What are the strengths and its weakness and what elements of it need to be dropped or improved before launching a successful SEO campaign? What does the offline marketing look like for the company? Does it work? Is it targeting the right market for the product and service it offers? If there is a break down in the offline marketing and our product placement and selection, these issues need to be resolved first.

A good SEO company will help drive traffic to a web site, but only you can fix operational problems in your own business. We can help you and advise you to make sure you’re getting the most out of your web site and marketing efforts, but It is imperative that you go through the proper planning to ensure that your marketing is in line with your existing products and services, and that your production/delivery pipeline is ready to handle an increase in business.

Keyword Selection

An important step in optimizing any web site is picking the right keywords to represent your business. The keywords are the words that your target market would intuitively use when searching for your product online. At first glance this seems like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many people pick their keywords off the top of their head based on what THEY think their clients are looking for, rather than putting sufficient energy into researching what THEIR CLIENTS are actually searching for. Be advised, that the wrong choice of keywords can cripple an SEO campaign before it even starts, by drawing the wrong audience (or NO audience) to the web site.

The first step of the keyword selection process should begin with surveying your company staff to see what words come to mind when they think of your products and services. Once the brainstorming process is complete, it’s time to do the actual keyword research process to find out how many searches each keyword gets, what’s the KEI (Keyword Efficiency Index) for each keyword, and what companies are successfully using them to make money. It’s important to keep track of the keywords your top competitors are using (if you know that these competitors are making money), because your competitors probably put in the time to figure out which keywords their customers are using. This approach will save you time and money, and will ensure that your web site will be found by your customers when they search for your products and services online. It’s relatively easy to find out the keywords your competitors are using, so don’t skip this part. However, not all keywords will work for your company. If a keyword is too competitive it may be better to pick a less competitive keyword that will actually allow you to rank high enough to be found.

It’s not enough to pick one set of keywords for the entire web site. To be successful, you need to pick a variety of keywords for every page on your web site, because each page will serve as a landing page (the page that your visitors get to after clicking on a link) for different keywords. The reason for selecting unique keywords for every landing page on your web site, is to enhance your web site’s effectiveness. For example, if a new visitor to your web site is trying to find a specific product or service, it may not be the best idea to drive them to your web site. Why not link them directly to the page that has the information they need? This can help increase your conversion rates, and lower the number of times a user bounces off your site when they can’t find what they’re looking for.

SEO On-page Optimization

Once you’ve done your keyword research, it’s time to optimize your web site. This is the process of cleaning up your web site code to make sure it’s up to web standards, and inserting your keywords into the web site in such a way that search engines can easily find and index your web site. The easier it is for search engines to crawl your web site, the higher your search engine ranking will be for your chosen keywords.

Here are some of the basic steps involved in web page optimization:

1. Title Optimization
2. Meta tag optimization
3. Important HTML Tags
4. Keyword Optimization
5. Link Optimization
6. Image Optimization
7. W3C Web Standards

SEO Off-page Optimization

You can think of off-page optimization as a popularity contest, and on-page optimization as the grooming process prior to the big event. You have to do on-page optimization on your web site to make sure that it’s ready for promotion, and once it’s good to go, it’s time to kick the SEO process into gear by doing off-page optimization. A good way of looking at it would be to ask yourself how many web sites on the Web recommend your web site, and how important are these web sites? The more web sites recommend your web site (by placing a link on their site over to your web site), and the more important these web sites are (from the perspective of the search engines), the higher your own web site ranking will be.

If your web site is being mentioned by a lot of unimportant web sites, then it may not help you as much as having only a few high quality recommendations. For example, if you’re a plumber, and the President of the United States gets on national TV and recommends you as the best plumber in the country, then that recommendation will probably be more powerful than a hundred recommendation from random people in your home town. Your goal is to get reputable links from high ranking web sites that are as closely related to the topic of your company’s web site as possible.

Here are some ways you can promote your web site with off-page optimization:

• Press releases
• Link campaigns
• Article distribution
• Link exchanges
• Social networking via sites like Digg and Slashdot
• Directory listings
• Forum posting
• One-way linking
• Anchor Text
• Blogging
• Podcasts
• YouTube Videos
• Email Campaigns

For more information about ways you can promote your web site, take a look at our SEO Packages and PPC Packages, or please call us, chat with us, or email us right now! Our operators are standing by to assist you.

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