Small Business Owner: Seattle SEO Services Overview
I recently got an inquiry from a contact who is starting a new business designing photo albums.
She had some questions that I thought might be of interest to many small business owners, so I have posted my response to her below, for your review.
Hi Kayla,
The website looks great… the next step – as you ascertained – is getting traffic to it!
The two broad categories for traffic generation are using PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Crunching The Numbers on PPC
Google Adwords is the most popular form of PPC advertising. When you advertise with Google Adwords you have a small classified ad appear when someone searches for a term you’ve targeted. Such as “professional photo organization” or something like that. You basically pay a certain amount, determined by google and approved by you (you set your own budget in advance), for each click. Clicks can be as low as 5 cents to higher than $20 each, depending on how competitive and profitable the niche is.
That’s essentially your cost to get a new lead arriving at your website.
Obviously, that’s just a broad idea of how adwords works. When you can put together a list of 1,000 keywords, you can have some very rare and unusual keywords that don’t have a lot of bids and you can get those clicks for much less than the average click in your category may cost.
Adwords also allows you to track the performance of each ad – some ads and keywords will perform much better than others if they are “well targeted” to the right type of client. For example – you might have more luck getting people to click who are searching for “photo album organizer” than with people searching for “4×6 photo album.” You want to run the ads that perform best as much as possible, and eliminate ads that are not converting well.
Once you see what ads are getting people onto your site, you want to look at what your visitors are doing once they arrive on your web page. How many visitors have to visit your site in order to make a sale? Once you know these numbers, you’ll know how much you can afford to pay to get a new client to your site.
For example, if the average client spends $150 with you in the first year of doing business and that’s $75 in profit, you would say… “I can spend up to $75 to acquire a new customer.” Hopefully you’ll spend less than that and make a profit on your clients in the first year of working with them. Then you’ll work backwards to say, “If 1 out of every 100 visitors becomes a new client, I can spend 75 cents per click to get a visitor to my site. My goal is to spend $.40 per visitor.”
So, it’s important to know your numbers… you’ll get a better feel for that over time, if you track it.
How Do You Get To Page One Of Google?
The other way to get visitors is through Search Engine Optimization – SEO. That means rather than appearing in the “paid ads” section of the search engine, your website appears in the “natural” search engine results – hopefully right toward the top where it is most likely to be clicked on.
That means if someone were to search for your name, your company, or a generic term like “photo album designer” then your site would appear.
It takes some work and effort to get your site appearing on the first page of the google listings. How hard it is and how long it takes depends on the competition of your niche.
Usually it takes a couple of months, but if it’s an easy word, it can be faster (I just got a first page listing for an easy word in about 2 weeks), and if it’s a competitive word… it could take much longer. The idea is that if you go after “long tail” keywords with longer phrases, you’ll have less competition. “Photo album” is going to be a competitive word. “Photo album designer in Seattle” would be much easier to rank for.
In the past, getting your site to appear on the first page of google listings was about having keywords on your site and meta tags in your code. While some of these “on page” elements are still important, off-page elements – primarily people linking back to your site – have become much more important.
If you can get a couple hundred or thousand links back to your site from high quality sources, using the correct anchor text in the link, you have a good chance of ranking well.
Can A Seattle SEO Services Company Help You?
These are the types of things that I help people with and have been doing on my own for many years. I have a website about dogs which has many first-page google rankings, it currently gets about 20,000 visitors each month. I also am helping a friend start a website/blog about commercial real estate and we’re up to about 30,000 visitors per month now. This site was started last year.
Obviously implementing and managing these campaigns is a time-consuming process, but it can be worth it if you are able to convert visitors to your site into leads.
On-site conversion efforts is another fun topic… how can you ‘capture’ contact information of the visitors that come to your site (an email opt-in for example, in exchange for a free report or bonus) so that you can follow up with them if they don’t buy after their first visit.
Although I have been doing this for my own sites for many years, I have just realized I could be offering it as a business after a friend of mine pointed it out to me.
Usually I charge an upfront set up fee and a monthly campaign management fee to keep things going. I don’t know if you are at the stage where it would be useful for you to start driving large amounts of traffic to your site, but if it’s something you want to talk about, I would love to set up a meeting.
Okay, well this is a long letter, but I hope it was helpful, and if you have further questions, please let me know!
Emily Cressey
206-245-8813
Well, that’s it for the letter, but I hope this overview of why and how you can invest in PPC and SEO Services makes sense to you. If you believe SEO services are something your small business needs help with, please feel free to give me a call.
Emily