Internet Marketing Consulting

I recently read on another Internet consultant’s website that we have to be able to practice what we preach to verify that we are capable of providing quality service to our clients. I fully agree with this statement which is why I have been running the Calgary search engine optimization experiment since  March 2009.

Since then I have been tracking the results of a number of keywords 0n 3 search engines in one of the toughest categories to crack in the search engine optimization industry. The category I am referring to of course is the SEO industry itself. It only follows that the experts in this industry, whether located in Calgary, or anywhere else in the world should be able to get a page 1 position on the search engines in the city in which they work.

Of course many companies are sending out massive numbers of emails to us, promoting their SEO services and promising to “get you on page 1 for your keywords or industry”. Let me clearly state once again – Anyone promising to put your site on page 1 without interviewing you, assessing your website and basically analyzing every aspect of your competition is someone to be avoided. My experience with clients who have paid $1000’s of dollars for these types of services suggests they usually get a high ranking with search words that do not benefit their business at all.The same is true for Pay Per Click advertisers. While they may show up on page 1 remember that simply means they are bidding higher than their competitors for the same keywords. It does not verify that they are actually effective at search engine optimization. More about that on another post.

One test you can run to evaluate a consultant of any type is to see if they are successful in achieving the goals for themselves that they promise to you.

While my search engine optimization experiment has not been 100% successful to date, I have been achieving significant progress and recently made a major breakthrough. In order to achieve success as an Internet marketing consultant in the highly competitive high tech city of Calgary, one category that needs results is search engine optimization. You can design a great looking website and have all the bells and whistles, but if nobody can find your site on the search engines, whatever you have invested in your website is not going to as valuable as it could be.

The breakthrough came in the keywords ” Calgary SEO ” and “Calgary search engine optimization“. While I have achieved major success with other keywords, these ones were the hardest to optimize for and i was obviously competing with the most experienced and effective SEO experts in Calgary. Something you need to appreciate is that page rank and position are impacted by the age of your website, so if someone created  a Calgary based search engine optimization website 4 or 5 years ago, they would now rank quite high.  My site is newer.

So here is a comparison of my results after 6 months:

While these numbers are not exceptional for the last 4 rows this is the first week that the site has appeared in the top 100. I hope to see continued progress in this area.

Stay tuned.

I switched my website (www.mmwebmarketing.com) over from being a  simple static HTML based site to a WordPress – CMS ( Client Managed System) because a friend of mine told me that Google liked blogs better than your regular website.  He mentioned that Google will index your site more often if it is built on a WordPress engine.

So I rebuilt my site using WordPress and, switched it on and then waited to see if Google was treating me any better on the search engines than before.

Lo and behold it is. My site’s search engine ranking is improving significantly.

Compare these numbers to those on my post from May 4th.

The positioning is significantly better that it was before. The bolded results are improved over the last time I checked.

I receive a lot of emails and feeds from Internet  marketing professionals who are considered to be gurus in the field. One such article I feel is worth passing on was about the importance of testing user activity on a website after your search engine results have generated traffic to your site and what happens after they have landed.

Many website owners don’t realize that when visitors arrive on their websites and then leave immediately without  visiting another page, they represent more than just a lost client. We now call these unconverted web tourists “bounces” and Google uses the pages’ Bounce Rates to determine the value of a site for keyword search accuracy and rank. A bounce rate of 75% or more is a disaster while a bounce rate of 25% or less is considered exceptional.

If you score poorly in Google’s evaluation  regarding your Bounce Rate, you can slide down in page position and the result will be less traffic which leads to  poor ranking in another of  Google’s criteria. This begins a vicious spiral out of the high traffic search zone on the search engines.

Read this article by Rob Garner to see what the experts are looking at.