Or "You get what you pay for".

Yet hundreds of business owners are being duped by offers of cheap Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

I hesitate to use the word 'lazy' but it has to be because they don't want to, or don't know how to, ask some simple questions and do some digging before handing over the keys to their business reputation.

Please, run a mile if you're offered:

• 99 dollar a month SEO
• Free SEO – even as a trial
• Results within a few weeks
• Anything involving the word 'secret'. SEO might be hard, but it's not magic.
• Or any of these SEO Myths as part of a sales pitch

Bad SEO WILL harm your business.

At best it will relieve you of some hard earned revenue. At worst it could mean completely rebuilding your website, your traffic numbers and your reputation from scratch.  Sounds like I'm getting a bit hysterical, but I have heard of businesses that end up in exactly this pickle.

I can sympathise with a business that wants to save money, but why take the cheap option and hand over responsibility for something so vital to someone who could do so much damage, without being very sure they could be trusted? Do you hire full time employees the same way? Sorry to sound so grumpy, but it's just not good business.

Cheap is just that - cheap.

Professional SEO's are NOT cheap. If you can't stump up the budget, you'd be better off with a modest PPC campaign like Adwords – at least you will get results. Or learn how to do it yourself (Here's a DIY Checklist)

What you get with cheap or shoddy SEO is:

• Cheap back links from blog networks and link farms that look like spam. Google hates spam and actively hunts it down and punishes it. Even though it might take a little while, it will eventually harm your rankings. Link building is hard and it takes time and effort. Submission to hundreds of business directories is NOT quality link building.
• Article spinning which involves taking an often badly written piece of content and changing enough of it so it doesn't look like it's a duplicate then submitting it to every article site available. Not only is it embarrassingly to have your business name associated with such garbage, but Google's Panda update effectively wiped out this as a legitimate tactic (thank you!)
• Forum and blog commenting. The only thing to say is that it is pointless from an SEO perspective.
• If you let these characters tinker with your website (or build a new one) you could also get technical errors, security vulnerabilities, bloated code and possibly an AWFUL site that doesn't actually convert any of the visitors to business.
• Satellite sites. While there is some legitimate uses for campaign or services specific sites that link to a 'main' site, setting up a whole lot of smaller sites and linking them back to yours for SEO purposes often takes as much time and effort as legitimate SEO practices. And Google's recent efforts to reduce the value of Exact Match Domain's means this won't work as well it used to.
• Guarantees: anyone that guarantee's you a page one result for a fixed price is going to take your first monthly instalment and run. You can't guarantee results without knowing exactly what the challenge (and therefore the cost) is. And the return on this investment may not stack up.
• Worse case scenario: Blacklisted or indexed at number 257 which is as good as being blacklisted. And very very hard to recover from.

There are NO short cuts in SEO.

No matter what they tell you.  If you want to be on the front page of Google you have to EARN it.  And the word 'earn' doesn't exist in the same sentence as 'shortcut'.

Choosing a SEO Professional

Good SEO professionals should talk to you about :

• Starting the project with in-depth research on keywords (not just which ones you 'want') including competitiveness and relevance to your business and market
• Your overall business and marketing strategies and how SEO fits in.
• A complete technical and structural review of your website. Bloated code, inability to update the site with fresh content, flash based sites and other issues should be addressed first
• Accurate measuring and reporting of results – ie goal setting (not just ranking results) including visitor numbers, conversion rates etc. If you don't have Google analytics (or something with equal power) or Webmaster tools they will ask you to have them set up
• A content strategy – unique content is now critical for SEO
• Local vs international SEO – if you are a small or local business your SEO will have a different flavour than international SEO (if you want to take over the world).
• Social media – which also plays an important role because of sharing signals. Linked to your content strategy.
• Your role in the project. Sorry, there's no handing complete responsibility over, you'll need regular communication and reviews of progress to monitor, tweak and refocus as required.
• Their prices. They won't be cheap. But they will have case studies and testimonials to back it up.

They should also properly manage your expectations and warn you it will take from three to six months to START seeing results.

Anyone willing to share any horror stories or hard earned lessons?  Or even challenge the premise?!

When your audience clicks on an ad or link you should take them to a purpose built page (sometimes called a squeeze page) or dedicated micro-site.

If you dump them onto your website homepage, as many businesses do - it's like getting into a taxi, giving the driver an address and having them drop you off 'somewhere' on the right street.  For the visitor it's frustrating.  For you, visitors can end up wandering off track and you'll lose the sale. Just because big brands do it, that doesn't make it right!

Don't just ask your web designer/developer.  A lot of them say yes without understanding anything about SEO.

So, how can you tell?

1. Create your Account

Sign up for a Google Adwords account - it's free to set one up.

There is online or telephone help that can guide you through this process if you need it, but it is pretty straight forward.

2. Do your Keyword Research

Keywords are phrases that your target audience use when looking for your services or products and form the basis of your campaign.

So you need to create a list of potential keyword phrases that are:

• Relevant – to your business and it's unique aspects
• Commercially viable – ones that you are going to make you money from.
• Competitive – ones that don't have a lot of competition
• And have sufficient volume to make it worthwhile but avoid ones that are too generic like 'finance', 'shoes' or 'appliances'

Begin with starter or 'seed' keywords to find related search phrases and the average number of searches each one gets.

Google Adwords 'Keyword Tool' generates a list based on seed phrases, and will suggest Ad groups for you as well.  You'll also be able to get an idea of costs.

3. Structure your campaign for success.

Set preferences at campaign level – your budget, duration, devices and geographic targeting.

Then write your Ads, load your keywords, setting billing preferences and you are off!  (Easy, Eh?).

Create an Ad Group for each service or product you want to promote - this makes it easier to turn ads on/off and see how each one is performing.

Writing ads are an art in itself but Google provides a guide for doing this.

Make sure you link Adwords to your Google Analytics Account so you can track performance.

4. Getting the most from your campaign budget

Because the higher your ads appear on search result pages the better the response, you want to get as close to the top spot as your budget allows.

Google decides this ad 'rank' with an bidding formula that says:

Page Position = Maximum Cost per Click (bid) x Quality Score

Pay less for top positions by having a high quality score. You do this by having relevant, targeted ads, competitive bids and an effective landing page.

Include those tightly focused keywords in your ad text.

Once your campaign is up and running, you need to monitor which keywords and ads are getting the highest click through rate (CTR), and remove the ones that aren't performing.

Low CTR's impact your quality score because it is an indication of poor relevance.

Load negative keywords to stop your ad showing for certain search terms such as 'free' or 'cheap'.

Set keyword match types to something other than 'broad', otherwise you will get a lot of matches that only loosely relate to your offer.  See Keyword Matching Explained for more.

5. Create a Campaign landing page.

Once people click on your ad, you want as many as possible to call you, fill out the form, or purchase a product.

To do this:

1. Create a landing page specifically for your campaign, that is not visable to other site visitors.
2. Repeat the Ad headline so they know they are in the right place.
3. Use the targeted keywords in the text as this reinforces relevance.
4. Include the offer, features and benefits as relevant.
5. Include a Call To Action!
6. Include testimonials as a way of building trust.
7. The load speed and use of search phrases on your landing page affects your quality score in Adwords.
8. Remove destractions like your main menu, links to other content

The page can stand alone if you want to – the quality of the rest of your website does not impact on your landing page.  It can even be completely seperate to your website.

Really, do I need a seperate page or microsite?

We've had a lot of debates about whether a seperate landing page is the best approach, or really necessary. 

In an ideal world, you'd test both approaches and see which works the best.  But if your buget is small (say, under $1000 per month) you may not get enough data to make a determination, and you will need very good conversion tracking. Most smaller businesses with modest campaigns don't have this so it's guess work.

All we can say is online marketing of any kind is more successful when focused on a single message to a specific audience with a specific need.  Your landing page/micro site should support these.  If you are trying to generally raise awareness of your brand, or are going broad with your campaign targets it becomes more difficult to be focused. 

We recommend landing pages (and it is 'best practise') but sometimes it's just not possible due to lack of budget or willingness.  So  make up your own mind about whether people will need to see all the information on your site to make a decision to get in touch or buy your product.

6. Track, measure and improve

Once your campaign is up and running, you need to see how effective it is.

You should have goals for your campaign such as number of leads, so you can measure how effective the campaign is. If it's phone calls (like many small local businesses) try and get a seperate phone number for your campaign so you can see how many calls you get.

Google Analytics integrates with Adwords to provide in-depth reporting on many different aspects of your campaign's performance.

Things you should measure:

• CTR (Click through rate) – the percentage of people using that search phrase that click on your ad. There is no ideal CTR because it depends on your offer, but if you get into double digits you are probably doing well
• CPC (Cost per click) – you want to tweak your campaign to pay the lowest price per click through, but still maintain a higher ad rank
• Ad position – the best spot is #1 but you can get good results from lower positions, if you want to minimise the cost
• ROI or Conversion – how many of the click trough’s actually resulted in a lead, and then a sale. This needs to be tracked before you can measure it!

And try out different things all the time to figure out what gets the best response - tweak wording on your ads, your landing pages, timing etc.

How about up to date news from your industry - but what do you use as source material?

Google news alerts, come on down!

Google will email you notifications when something is published with keywords you specify.

You can refine it to blogs, news, videos or 'comprehensive'.

Select news, as this will give you world-wide headline news - i.e. what is topical and of interest to your visitors.

Specify how often you want to be notified.

From there you can create articles about relevant topics that are deemed 'newsworthy' to the media.

News outlets keep a keen eye on what is useful to their readers, so it's a good bet that it will be interesting to your audience as well.

You can either summarise the contents of the news or comment on it.

Or just tweet it if you want.

Easy as.

But you need to know these techniques because to be honest there is a lot of rubbish content published by people who know how to get their site high up in the search results.

One of our favourite sites, The Social Media Guide, posted their list of 10 Simple Google Search Tricks. We thought there were a couple missing, so have added ours here.

First I'll summarise Social Media Guides list. Check out the entire post if you want to read them in more detail:

Ten tips for getting more from Google search

1. Narrow your search by using double quotation marks eg "cat food" so you get results with the exact phrase you are looking for rather than results with any one of the words. You will get much more relevant results this way.
2. Search within a site ie site:essentee.co.nz hosting. Useful when you think what you are looking for is on a particular site.
3. Search for specific file type ie report filetype:pdf
4. Spell Checking. Not sure how many people haven't noticed this one, but if you spell a word incorrectly, Google will suggest the correct spelling - politely!
5. Use Google as a Calculator - just enter 356*24 and you'll get the result
6. Find out the time eg Time Auckland
7. Find out what the weather is like by typing in weather and a city ie weather London
8. Exclude results using Not. Put a minus sign in front of a word you don't want to include eg Apple -fruit and you'll get results that include the word Apple but not ones that include fruit.
9. Get definitions of a word by entering define:sneeze
10. Click on the 'similar pages' link to find sites with similar content not listed in the first few results.

And now ...more Google Search Tips

1. Quick currency converter.

   Type in "100 pounds in NZ dollars" and you will get a list of currency converters. Since more than one country uses the same currency name (eg dollars) you might need to specify the country as well. Thanks to Simon Mackie of Gigaom for this one.

2. Limit to recent results.

   When you get your initial set of results there is a list of search tools on the left hand side with a drop down called 'More search Tools' that has some handy extras.

   One of the tools we use most often is to filter by time - usually Past Year.

   This means you don't get results from three or four years ago that are no longer relevant or are out of date

3. Filter results to places.

   If you only want to find images or news, you can select your desired option. Particularly useful is the Places option.

   If you are looking for something with a presence in the real world like a retail business, restaurant or the like then filter by Places and you'll get those businesses that have a Places listing with a place holder on a map to show you where it is.

4. Use the preview tool.

   The small magnifying glass next to the title will show you a preview of a site.

   This is handy when there are a lot of results that look similar but you don't want to go through to each site.

   You get a small snapshot of the site from which you can see if it has the kind of information or quality you're after.

5. Fill in the blanks.

   If you add a * (known as a wild card) into your search term Google treats it as 'any unknown term'. For example, you may want recipes that have apples mixed with some other ingredient, but you don't know what.

   Put apple and * recipes into Google search and you'll get results for apple and cranberry, apple and carrot, apple and rhubarb etc etc.

   Got any more you'd like to share? - Let us know!

In a nutshell, it means you only pay a company if you get the result which is typically, a number 1 (or close to it) ranking in Google.

And a lot of SEO companies will give you a guarantee to entice thousands of dollars out of your pocket.

Sounds fair - if they can't produce the goods, why should you pay for it?

Black hat SEO is risky

In short, it is because there are a lot of factors involved in good (meaning high) organic search results. And because not all of those factors are within a persons control, a guarantee is likely to lead to some bad behaviour on the part of the SEO provider. It will usually involve what is known as Black Hat SEO. You might get immediate results but they won't last and what's worse you might get banned from being listed in the search engines for some time.

The only way you should part with your hard earned cash for performance-based SEO is if you are going to give the service provider COMPLETE control over the strategy and implementation - including the design of your website and its contents. And you've got to be willing to pay them if your website needs a complete redesign as part of that strategy.

The provider would have to be confident that your expectations and commitment are going to allow them to do the job properly. And you'll pay a premium for the privilege.

SEO is complex

There is no silver bullet any more.

SEO is complicated, and to guarantee good results takes time, effort and expertise. Anyone that tells you otherwise has never tried to optimise a website in any crowded, highly competitive, web savvy industry.

The search engines don't share their formulas with anyone. Google has reportedly some 200 factors that determine your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) ranking.

These include:

• A robust research based keyword strategy
• Standards compliant code
• Appropriate placement of keywords in content and headings
• Keywords in links, alt tags, file names and directory structure
• Fresh content
• Backlinks - naturally generated
• Social mentions (there is some debate about how much SEO good comes from it, but it should be part of the picture)

The more competition there is for your keywords, the harder it will be and the longer it will take to get to Google's front page - and stay there.

Many companies offering these service make it sound so good:

• Learn what I use to charge clients $2500 a day to do !
• Top 10 result in Google in just 45 minutes! - just sign up online to our Guaranteed Results System!

But it would be almost impossible for a SEO provider to guarantee a top listing in Google, Bing or Yahoo without either a conversation with you about your business, budget and expectations - unless they are resorting to Black Hat SEO techniques.

If you are approached by any SEO provider that guarantees you a result - run to the hills.

For professionals and those wanting serious insights, a paid tool is probably what you need, but there are also free tools that can get you started on discovering your keywords.

1. Google Analytics

   Google Analytics has a whole lot of information that is extremely valuable.

   For keywords, look under 'Traffic Sources', then look for 'keywords'. Make sure you are showing enough rows to get all results.

   This will tell you what keywords people are using to get to your site now.

   BUT...

   This only show you what keywords people are using to get to your site now, not words people are using that are NOT getting to your site.

   So you'll need something else....

2. Google Webmaster tools

   You should verify your site so you can use Webmaster tools for a range of useful information about how Google sees your site.

   Under 'Your site on the web' click on 'Search queries' you can find out information the search queries that returned pages from your site.

3. Google Insights for search

   This tool shows you what's happening to keywords volumes over time. If the keywords are on the decline, it means that these keywords might not be worth pursuing.

4. Google keyword research tool (external)

   With this tool, you can enter a list of 'seed' words to start. If you have an Adwords account you can get a bigger set of keyword suggestions, if not it will give you a list of 100. Allows you to specify a country which is particularly useful as some tools focus on US data only.

5. Wordtracker

   Wordtracker free tool – gives you keyword suggestions from a starter word, along with the number of searches for each - although this is in the US so some adjustment for local conditions may be required.

6. Check your competition

   WebSEO Analytics provides a tool called Keyword Analyser. Enter your website URL, so you can check the keywords on your competitors site. You can analyze the content of a page to extract the keywords and shows you their relevance based on the content of the page.

Any others you'd recommend? Let us know!

People got tired of searching for Pizza Delivery and getting results from the other side of the world. Imagine ringing Tokyo from Auckland and asking 'Do you deliver?'

So, more and more people started to enter location information to refine the search results.  And Google includes location signals when it works out what to show people.

Location is particularly relevant if your business is geographically dependant, eg lawnmowing, dentists, childcare centres, restaurants etc.  If you don't narrow your focus there is going to be a lot of other similar business across the globe you'll be competing with.

Recommendations:

• Include your location details on your site. Preferably not just on the contacts page where you'll only get one instance of your location. You could include it in your footer to increase the number of instances the location words are used.
• Although I wouldn't recommend it unless it is relevant, try a page for each different location if you have more than one.  Eg one for your Auckland shop, one for Christchurch etc.  I've seen people add a page for each suburb they target, which is quite a nice tactic (at least from a search engine perspective) but if identical content is repeated across each page then you'll probably run into duplicate content issues (and it looks contrived from a user perspective).
• Treat location as one of your keywords so you appear ahead of that Christchurch promotional company if you are in Auckland (if the searcher has entered Auckland). You probably want to keep it to the general area (eg Auckland rather than Browns Bay), unless you really do only want to attract local residents. This might be OK if you are a vet clinic for example.
• Include your location in your directory listing information and descriptions.
• Get a local business listing in Google (Google Places). It's easy and free. You'll need to sign up for Google but that's no hardship.
• Consider your business name - eg Auckland Barbecue Warehouse. If you are able to choose which location, use the one earliest in the alphabet, ie Birkenhead Optics rather than Verrans Corner Optics. This is an old directory trick, hence the reason for so many businesses named "AAA Barbecues".
• Include your location in content - eg Testimonials, blog posts (erm, like this one although it wasn't intentional!). For example, "Tony's Tire Service in Henderson got me four new tires for the price of two!"

Google Places - it used to be so simple

Up until recently, a post about local SEO wouldn't be complete without a recommendation to add a Google Places page because it was quick and easy.  But then Google went and merged Google Places into Google+ Local.  And it got a lot more complicated.  Verification issues, duplicate accounts are some of the issues. 

If you want to go ahead and do this, here is a step by step guide and a FAQ posted on the forum

Footnote:

There is a lot of buzz lately around something called 'location wars'. This sometimes refers to competition between Foursquare and Gowalla which are mobile social applications, or it can mean the general rush to grab a piece of the location based services action. These use the GPS capabilities of smart phones to help you shop or socialise (for example).

In NZ these don't seem to be as popular - it migh be because they didn't live up to the hype, the number of users didn't reach a critical mass, or our mobile data prices are still too prohibitive.