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By Neil Anuskiewicz
Once you complete your site, you will want to seek out reputable directories and other sites relevant to your industry, and request to have your site listed in these. Ideally, the link provided on these sites would reflect the keyword you are trying to optimize. For example, if you are optimizing “financial planner in Seattle” you would make sure that the clickable link is “financial planner in Seattle” not just www.yourcompany.com. This is easy to do in HTML.
Some directories require payment to be included. Some are worth it; some are not. Be choosy but err on the side of sites that have a high rank, the Google toolbar (available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox) can be a valuable tool in determining the page rank of a particular site. For example, Yahoo Directory charged $300/year for expedited consideration of your submission, which Yahoo organizes by topic. We have found this to be a worthwhile $300 for our websites.
Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
There are a number of services out there that provide PPC like services, including Google AdWords, Overture (Yahoo), and business.com. You will likely want to start with Google and then expand to one or more other services over time.
Maximizing conversions is your goal but you need to define exactly what a conversion means to your business. Generally, it is either a lead (normally a customer submitting a web form requesting more information) or it is a direct sale (a customer actually purchases your product or service directly). Your website can offer both of these primary types of conversions or focus on just one – or it is possible you have other measures of success you want to measure.
If your goal is to get leads, then that is the sort of conversion your website and advertising should encourage. In addition, do not forget to ask your prospects to request more information or whatever the action you are seeking.
One of the most effective ways to get qualified leads to your site in the first place is through pay-per-click advertising. It is important to read and become familiar with pay-per-click advertising, and then to continue to learn and refine by doing.
In Google AdWords, you set a daily budget (say $20 to start) and a maximum bid on specific keywords (say $2.50). You only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Therefore, if you are bidding $2.50 you might only pay an average of say $2.45 per click. It depends on the keywords you choose and how much you bid. Spend some time choosing good keywords. Google AdWords has tools to help you choose the most powerful keywords. You will also want to embed some special code in your website to enable Google to track conversions.
I have learned through experience that it is best to start with a low bid and increase it incrementally depending on the number of clicks and conversions you get. Your goal is not to outbid the competition but to get the maximum number of clicks (and ultimately conversions) for your budget. Your optimal bid, at your budget, may be much different from the optimal bid for a larger competitor with a much larger budget. The way to find that sweet spot that maximizes clicks for your budget is to start low and increase your bid until you find the optimal bid. That should be your bid for the time being.
Through systematic trial and error, it soon became apparent that the Google Search Network had a much higher conversion rate than the Google Content Network. I responded by dropping the content network completely and focusing exclusively on the search network, which resulted in an immediate increase in our conversion rates.
Over time, I was able to optimize Google AdWords. Now, it pretty much runs on its own and brings in a predictable number of leads and direct sales. We make adjustments here and there, and regularly run tests using different landing pages and so on.
Article Marketing: By putting your knowledge in articles for the benefit of others, the benefits that flow back to you are substantial. You can build a reputation as knowledgeable in your field, resulting in leads and more sales. In addition, part of the process of article marketing means including a bio of yourself. This bio usually includes links back to your website, thus helping increase the page rank of your website. That means that people who do a search for relevant keywords are more likely to find your website.
You increase the effectiveness of your search engine optimization efforts by making clickable links back to your website the actual keywords you wish to optimize—such as “Guatemalan Shade Grown Coffee”—not just a simple URL, such as www.yourcompany.com.
This process takes months to show results but the effort and the patience are well worth it. Our site went from the fifth page of Google results to page 1 in about a year. It took sustained effort but it was worth it as we get many more leads and sales because of this time investment.
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