Internet Marketing Consulting

Archive for the ‘The SEO Experiment’ Category

I spent a few hours online today doing some keyword research to find what words  people are using to locate the type of information or services that I am offering on my website, www.mmwebmarketing.com. I believe that getting traffic isn’t the key to having a successful online presence. It’s easy to generate traffic and many Search Engine Optimization companies who claim to be professional Internet marketing consultants will use a wide variety of techniques to accomplish that. Problem is that often the traffic simply isn’t qualified. The result is a lot of  bounces.  Bounce rate is the term Google uses in their Analytics to show how many visitors left the site from the landing page. A high bounce rate could be bad and will eliminate the potential for conversions.

Since I offer search engine optimization and Internet marketing services, I decided to research keywords in these areas. I settled on several that were getting a lot of searches and then went to work to see what my competitors were doing. It is important to understand that while some keywords may be getting massive searches on the web, locally there may be very little interest. In Calgary, very few people are searching the web for these phrases. Still, I am not looking for business in Calgary alone, so I can utilize them to do a comparison of the final results.

Currently my website is ranking as a P2. It showed up in Google as 71st for “Calgary Internet marketing” and didn’t show up in the first 13 pages for “Calgary search engine optimization”. Basically means no one will ever find it. I located 2 competitors who show up very high on the searches (not naming any names here) and will use the information I gather from their websites to optimize my site.

The most important aspect of evaluating an SEO project is the ability to track your results. While this is obvious to professionals and many non-professionals, many business owners rely on their IT people to take care of it. Problem is, what happens if your IT person goes out of business or moves on? This is also true for Domain Name registrations and web hosting accounts. I believe that anyone who owns a website should be entirely responsible for their own Domain Names and hosting accounts. In addition you should have the FTP information and access to all files even if you don’t know what to do with them. If you ever decide to change web developers you will not have to fight for the right to move your data.

Today I completed the process of setting up my Google Analytics accounts for www.mmwebmarketing.com. I added the tracking code to all the pages so that I can tell how many people are visiting the site, what they are looking at and where they are leaving. As I go through the process of optimizing the site for search engines, I hope to see the numbers increase dramatically.

However the number of visitors is not the key factor in a marketing  website. Conversions are what we are after. Getting  qualfied people to do something that moves them forward in the relationship with the website owner and their online business is the key to a successful  program. Everything else is simply a waste of your time and money.

I have determined that many people claim to be experts at things they often know very little about. It is a trend now,  to become a Life Coach, a Marketing Coach or a professional Search Engine Optimizer after simply raising a couple of kids to public school age, taking some sales courses  or reading a couple of SEO books.

All of these skills require a lot more than just a little experience and a quick “how to” course. I claim to be an Internet Marketing Consultant and a Business Coach.  How would anyone know for certain that I am  qualified. I could list some testimonials…but these are easily obtained. 30 years in sales and sales management has taught me that most sales managers, sales trainers and business owners are winging it after reading a few books on the subject.

Most sales training seminars are copies of other training courses, and generally are more motivational than educational. By that, I am suggesting that  they use the energy in the room and the catch phrases and tricks of the trade  they present to get their clients hyped up and out the door ready to take on the world. Within a few days the energy is gone and the tricks seem ineffective.

I  would like to offer an experiment for visitors to my blog site to observe and take part in as desired.

I have a relatively new website that I built a few months ago at www.mmwebmarketing.com. I was not overly concerned at that time about its rank on the search engines as I was promoting my services in other ways. Currently the site is not up to date regarding content or SEO and the home page has a rank of 1.

Over the next 6 months I am going to employ a variety of marketing and SEO techniques to the site. I do not know what the results will be as the market is very competitive. This blog will be used to track those actions and the results. If you are interested in observing the process, come back and let me know what you think.