When is Social Media a Better Investment Than SEO?

February 21, 2011

In a recent post Rob painted a bleak picture of the SEO playing field for small businesses – that an ever increasing number of small businesses soon won’t be able to compete in the organic search space because of limited budgets and increasingly savvy and well invested competition. For some small businesses that time has [...]

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Can Spending Too Little on PPC Labor Cost You More?

February 19, 2011

In previous posts I discussed how to allocate investments in SEO, and DISC’s head PPC guy, Dale Webb, recently posted on determining your ideal PPC budget. Here, I try to help you understand that if you spend too little in monthly PPC management, you will pay more in click costs – often more than revenue [...]

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Tips for Determining your Ideal PPC budget Part 1

February 18, 2011

How much to invest in PPC can be a bewildering task for business owners. We are often approached by companies that already have a PPC budget in mind, and just need us to help determine how to best allocate that budget. Just as often, though, companies have no idea how much they should be spending [...]

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What SEO tools Should You Use?

February 12, 2011

If you decide to do SEO in-house, what tools should you use? Companies create SEO tools for link bait, leads, and cash flow if the tool is for sale. Those incentives have spawned literally thousands of SEO tools and scores of tool suits, both free and paid. How can you know which to use? Unfortunately, [...]

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Top 3 Things to Look for when Hiring a PPC Agency

February 3, 2011

This is a topic that’s been covered in many other blogs over the years, but I thought I’d add my own perspective, especially since it has somewhat changed over the years as PPC Marketing, particularly Google Adwords, has developed. The initial approach a potential PPC firm should take to managing your campaign would vary quite [...]

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What Kind of Payment Plans are Available in the SEO Industry?

January 30, 2011

You’ve climbed a mountain of information by which to decide how much to invest in SEO. Now you’ve got to pay for it. What are typical payment plans? When is it worth hiring in-house, and what are the pros and cons of doing so? One SEO payment plan that I’ve covered elsewhere in depth is [...]

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Why you should be bidding on your own Brand Name in Adwords

January 26, 2011

One topic that has been heavily debated over the years is the extent to which PPC can “cannibalize” SEO. When you already have a top ranking organic listing, does it make sense to also pay for an ad to appear right above or next to it? Let’s consider the most basic example – your own [...]

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How Much Should You Invest in SEO within the 80-20 Rule?

January 22, 2011

Uh-Oh!: This post has lots of numbers and is not chatty, fun, or easy to read. It is intended for marketing managers who really want to figure out what to invest in SEO. You can read just the bold text for a quick overview. My post two weeks ago broached the 80-20 rule in SEO, [...]

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Dominate search results using Google Merchant Center Part 2

January 12, 2011

Last week, in Dominate search results using Google Merchant Center Part 1, we looked at a sample search results page in Google, and pointed out that over half the viewable area was dominated by listings that came directly from the Google Merchant Center.  We illustrated to e-commerce site owners the importance of getting a feed set [...]

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The 80-20 Rule in SEO

January 10, 2011

So you’ve decided that you want the free, relevant traffic delivered by SEO, but how much should you invest? That’s one of the toughest questions you’ll ever have to answer, for it asks you to predict the ROI of SEO vs. all other web marketing. By mining in-house and industry data and by using predictive [...]

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