When shopping for SEO consulting, you want to know the cost. When search marketing firms sell SEO, they don’t want to spend too much time writing proposals. These two marketplace motivations make set-priced SEO packages convenient and attractive. But do such packages mislead both buyers and sellers? Some of the Read more…
Good keyword research produces the linguistic DNA by which your business is found, and it should be used in everything from product databases through URLs to social media posts. So why do I tell you to stop paying for it? Because almost everyone selling keyword research uses tools that provide Read more…
In my college Internet Marketing class, I teach students to understand the huge forces of bias in articles about web marketing. Public relations campaigns, the need to scream controversial headlines (like the dunderheaded “SEO is Dead”) to get social buzz, poor pay for journalists, fear or complexity, and just plain Read more…
Inlinks (or backlinks or inbound links), which are links to your website from other websites, comprise roughly 50% of what determines your website’s ranking in the search engines. Most websites have inlinks to pages that no longer exist on your website. Discovering these inlinks and reconnecting them to pages in Read more…
Two or three years ago there was big news that many of the sleazy sales people who sold the bad mortgages that led to the financial crisis are now selling SEO for firms with great looking websites. These sales people are very convincing–way better than the many obvious scammers out Read more…
Most businesses know they need a website and search marketing, so many just do it. But there’s a huge range in how much you can invest. Seeing the likely profit scenarios will enable you to invest wisely. The fact is that, with professional help, you can predict the ROI of Read more…
Short answer: like you do for everything else–create an annual budget. Search marketing channels and tactics proliferate so that only the largest companies can do it all in one year. Prioritizing and then estimating labor time and vendor costs will produce your annual budget, but that requires rare breadth and Read more…
This post summarizes and reflects further on Rob Laporte’s “The Hard Freakonomics of Search Marketing for Small Business,” published in the Winter 2012-13 edition of Visibility Magazine. Hard Freakonomic consequences follow from the fact that display systems and the brain deal with only a few search results per search. The Read more…
PageRank sculpting directs the flow of search engine spiders, indexing, PageRank, and other trust and authority assignations by using tools to open and close valves in the pipes of your website’s hierarchy. PageRank sculpting is vital to SEO management of large, dynamic websites, and it helps smaller websites doing redesigns. Read more…
This graph reveals in one view how web marketing managers should think about allocating resources among SEO tactics. Study it first, and then let’s talk (well, I’ll talk about it, and I hope to hear back from you). This graph and the Marketing Sherpa survey it comes from illustrate the Read more…