Gervais Group, LLC – Internet Marketing & SEO Company

How is search engine marketing (SEM) different than search engine optimization (SEO)?
Search engine marketing refers to optimization practices that take place off the website. Whereas SEO organizes the pages on the website for both the search engine spiders and the visitors to the site, SEM refers to all activities utilized to generate incoming traffic which is a vital element of moving site pages higher in search engine results pages. (SERPS) Common strategies and tactics include search engine and directory submission and back link development from blogs, ezines, forums, social media sites, and online news media.
If I my site has been search engine optimized do I need search engine marketing?
SEM is an active process of driving traffic to a website and improving search engine page rankings. Without it, a website would much like a bricks and mortar store that doesn’t advertise. Random passersby may find it but not in the kind of numbers required to make a business successful. Search engine marketing is the most cost-effective, fastest growing, and popular new marketing channels available, especially when compared to print and other traditional media outlets
Does SEM work for every kind of site?
Almost any site trying to generate revenues can benefit from a properly run SEM campaign. By raising awareness and driving traffic to your site the chances of purchases and or other forms of conversions increase. If you are in business, you need people to find your site and purchase from you. That is the core objective of SEM. The one instance where results could fall short would be where the cost of an SEM campaign would outweigh what could be expected from generated revenues.

Can I be successful running an SEM campaign on my own?
Running a typical SEM campaign can consume around one hundred hours per month at the outset and, because of that, is normally outsourced to SEO companies. While the do it yourself aspect might be tempting, re-dedicating a hundred hours to an employee or yourself is not going to be the best allocation of labor, especially there isn’t anyone in-house with SEM experience.

How do I know if SEM is working?
Contrary to advertising via traditional media, internet related activity is highly measurable. You will be able to track visits, click throughs, conversion rates, and a host of other metrics. Tracking is normally summarized by SEO companies on a monthly basis. Additionally, you can always check the keywords and phrases that are being optimized to see where your web pages are ranked on the search engines. One word of caution, any SEM campaign will take some time to show results so don’t be frustrated if you’re not on page one after two weeks. The timeline for significant results can vary widely depending on the level of competition for the keywords you are optimizing and your monthly budget.

How do I go about choosing an SEM/SEO company?
You’re going after results and the firm you go with should be able to deliver them. The best way to determine that is to check out how their existing clients are doing, i.e. how they rank, increases in traffic, conversion numbers, etc. If all other things are equal, lean toward a larger rather than a smaller one to ensure continuity should there be some turnover in personnel. Again, this is about results. You’ll have your choice of firms so be ruthless about demanding proof that each company can live up to its own billing.

How about that for a shameless, attention getting title? The truth is, regardless of how many visitors your search engine optimization and marketing company’s efforts drive to your site, it won’t matter unless you can grab their attention within three to seven seconds. Miss that brief opportunity to engage your visitors and they’ve clicked the “back” button, returning to their search engine of choice to see what your competitors have to offer.
This is where the AIDA sales model can transform your search engine optimized pages from simple traffic drivers to the presentation of a systematic process that drives increased conversions as well. Originally created for print advertising in the mid 1920’s, the AIDA model’s relevancy carries through to the present day and is commonly used across traditional media venues and the internet.
Breaking down its acronym, the first aspect of the AIDA model is “Attention”. For visitors landing on your site, making it immediately clear that they have found what they’re looking (keyword relevance) for will grab their attention keep them at your site to look for more information. The attention phase, which has grabbed the visitor, then segues to the next phase by playing to consumer motivations such as fear, the promise of gain, and hidden knowledge (like the title of this article).
The next step in the process is attracting the visitors “Interest”. This is where the problem that the visitor is trying to solve is discussed in great detail. Emotional pull of testimonies and stories can have dramatic effects in this phase. If you are selling, for example, a skin care product the emotional baggage and pain of having acne as it relates to the visitor can both put focus on the problem and that there is an understanding of the pain it is causing.
Having detailed the problem with some emotional pull, the next phase in the process is “Desire”, where you present the solution to the problem your visitor is trying to fix. One of the biggest benefits of search engine optimization is that the traffic arriving at your site is already seeking a solution, relieving you of having to create desire for your product. Your objective then is to build on that desire, describing the benefits and positioning your product/service as the solution to the visitor’s problem. The happy ending provided by your product/service to the testimonials and/or stories presented earlier can provide the finishing touch in building the desire to purchase by adding logical proof to the emotional aspect of the process.
The purchase is encouraged in the last phase of the model, known as the call to “Action”. Here is where you make you offer with guarantees and a sense of urgency, asking for the sale (or other form of conversion) then and there. The presentation of a strong offer, combined with the preceding steps of Attention, Interest, and Desire should generate conversions at a much higher rate than before you combined search engine optimization with AIDA.

Companies offering SEO services can typically be divided into two categories; those that deliver on their promises of meaningful search engine optimization and those that don’t. Fortunately, weeding out the companies that won’t deliver meaningful results can be as easy as examining the promises that they make while pitching for you business. These promises include:
* Promises of a page one ranking – There are so many variables in search engine optimization that promises of a page one ranking count for nothing unless they come from a search engine insider (…and how often does that happen?). Algorithms for ranking on the search engines are guarded in a higher security environment than the recipe for Coca Cola with a handful of people at each engine possessing the A to Z knowledge to navigate the process in its entirety. SEO companies make this kind of promise because they know it’s what a prospective client wants to hear, delivery be damned.
* Immediate rankings for keywords relevant to your business – Immediately ranking for keywords can be interpreted as “We are going to concoct a ten word keyphrase that, as long as the keyphrase is entered verbatim, will show up in the number one spot.” A phrase like, “Popsicle Company that has forty three flavors including roast beef” can be delivered and will probably hit the number one spot but who cares? The object of an SEO service is to generate traffic, something that this type of work will not accomplish.
* Flat fee pricing at ridiculously low prices – The same company delivering your zero traffic ten word key phrase will probably be very willing to charge a low flat fee for it. Considering that conjuring up the phrase will take less than five minutes, the $99 they’re charging you works out to an hourly rate of over $1,100; great SEO work if you can get it.
* Submission to thousands of search engines – This type of promise is another that can be categorized as “Things a client might want to hear”.  This kind of promise means nothing and works more as filler in a presentation than anything that might make a difference. Submissions can be done for free and too many can prove to counterproductive. Finally, someone trying to convince you that your website will have relevance to that many micro-market search engines should be ushered to the door as quickly as possible.
Search engine optimization, done properly, can yield fantastic results and an extremely positive return on investment. The main challenge for search engine companies and their clients is that the process rarely provides immediate gratification and requires a ramp up period ranging from weeks to months before significant results at the search engines can be realized. Additionally, an SEO campaign can take one hundred hours or more per month to get off the ground, requiring an investment from the website owner where, again, the return may take time to materialize. An experienced and reputable SEO company will not hesitate to convey these issues to a prospective client and while it may not be exactly what a client wants to hear, the long term results will always far outweigh a bunch of short term empty promises.

Search engine optimization carries many benefits beyond the big one; targeted traffic. These benefits can sometimes be overlooked as focus can often be locked on how many visitors come to the site each day but they can prove to be extremely valuable over time. Taking the focus off of targeted traffic, benefits two through six are:

2) Branding – According to search engine user studies, 36% of searchers believe that company pages that rank at the top of search engine results are the top brands in their field. Consider the amount of money it would take for that kind of brand recognition using offline methods and suddenly the money being paid for SEO services looks like a bargain at ten times the amount.
3) Credibility – Running alongside the branding benefits, occupying real estate on page one of the search engines translates into higher credibility with searchers. Multiple listings on page one can lock up the credibility factor even further.
4) Proactive reputation management – SEO that results in multiple listings on the top pages of the engines can act as a pre-emptive reputation management technique by making it difficult for negative content to get to the front pages of the search engines. Compared to the process of moving negative content off of page one once it’s embedded, keeping it from getting there in the first place is a much better outcome. With statistics showing that nine out of ten users never go beyond page one and virtually no one goes past page three, a search engine optimization plan that occupies a lot of listings in the top thirty spots can keep damaging content from ever seeing the light of day.
5) A better user experience – Following basic optimization guidelines should mean that visitors immediately get a sense that they will find what they’re looking for, a key factor in keeping them on your site. Ease of navigation and quality content results in a positive user experience and increases the site’s trustworthiness, keeping visitors coming back to the site which improves the odds for…
6) Conversions – Combine branding, credibility, a great reputation, and a positive user experience and you are going to get conversions at an increasingly higher rate. Continuing search engine optimization and analysis to improve weak spots on the site can further improve the site’s overall performance and conversion ratio.

An experienced SEO company can deliver benefits which go far beyond a high ranking and targeted traffic. In fact, when measured against a typical advertising budget, the money spent on search engine optimization can provide deliverables and a return on investment that dwarfs what could be expected from traditional and offline efforts.

Google has lifted the veil, a little bit, on the changes set to take place with the implementation of its update on search technology called “Google Caffeine”. The secret project is the next generation for web search which will mostly affect its indexing processes. Caffeine is likely to change search results to an extent and could ultimately lead toward the holy grail of real time search. In total, it will a more powerful version of what Google offers today emphasizing improvements in “…size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness, and other dimensions,” according to Google.

Taking a look at each focus area and anticipating the changes in each is, at best, an imprecise venture but here are some thoughts on where they might be headed with the rollout of Caffeine:

1) Size – Caffeine will allow for their spiders to crawl more of everything; sites, pages on the sites, blogs etc.
2) Indexing speed – With fresh content garnering more importance with search engines everyday and the sheer amount of it that hits the web on a minute-to-minute basis, Caffeine will allow for faster indexing of fresh content to keep results up to date with news, articles, and information. What that means for search engine optimized content is that pages will be picked up and rewarded faster than in the past. While it may not provide immediate gratification, the importance of adding consistently fresh content will be even greater as Caffeine rolls out and indexing gets even faster.
3) Accuracy – The parameters for the relevance of keywords and phrases as they fit into the content on web pages will become much tighter. It’s likely that Google’s interest will go far beyond traffic that goes to a site and will give much more weight to what visitors do when they arrive. Visitors that bounce off of sites quickly will provide indications that keywords are not tightly linked to page content. How quick bounces will be “scored” by Caffeine is likely to remain unknown but they won’t help. More than ever, sites will need to be optimized making sure that keywords and content relate to each other to keep visitors on the pages of the site.
4) Comprehensiveness – Going hand in hand with accuracy, Google will continue to rank sites that do a great job in conveying their authority in the niche they cover. Again, the emphasis is on the consistent addition pages with new keyword-relevant content. Google is likely to stick to its wheelhouse of big websites with tons of information that have been around for awhile.

At the end of the day, the “to do” list that will work for Caffeine is not substantially different than what is working now. If a “best practices” methodology is already in use, an SEO company won’t have to make drastic changes to adapt to Google’s evolution. In setting up their new algorithm, however, Google will force websites to deliver a better user experience which, ultimately, will improve the performance of those sites where their SEO services are paying attention.

Writing for search engine optimization, more than ever, is a balance of art and science. While the science applies to predominantly toward the search engines, the art pertains to the content your visitors see once they arrive at your site. While there are an absolutely unlimited number of SEO mistakes that can be made, the following is a list of five that will have your visitors clicking the “back” button and leaving your site, never to return:
1) Writing for the search engines only – Sticking as many keywords and phrases into your content may generate points with the search engines but don’t sacrifice quality for quantity. The algorithms currently in use take ratios into account but keyword rich content is only one aspect of the total calculation. Granted, you’ve got to cater to the search engines to move up the rankings but if your visitors are bouncing off the site after reading a couple lines of your content you are losing the battle.
2) Sacrificing readability while catering to your keyphrases – Jamming keyphrases into your content because they score well as search terms can work against you if they don’t read well in the content on your site. Optimizing your content in this manner can turn your keyphrases into a series of non sequiturs and can be annoying and confusing to your readers. You will get a much better response using keyphrases that fit into your content, even if they generate a little less traffic.
3) Using misspellings in your content – While misspellings can be valuable as search terms, sneaking them into your content will sacrifice the credibility and professionalism of your site. Calling attention to a misspelling using, for example, an “also known as” doesn’t work either.   Many people will go to site and forget everything they saw except for the words that were misspelled thinking, “Haven’t these guys heard of spell check?”
4) Multiple repetitions of the same keyphrases – It may work in songwriting but using the same keyphrases as a chorus will turn off a reader, especially if they see the repetition as an attempt to drive home a point. At that point it becomes insulting, which isn’t a great way to start a relationship.
5) Using key phrases that are tangential to your objectives – Incorporating high traffic keyphrases that relate to but aren’t part what you’re offering might get more visits to your site but they will bounce as soon as they realize they won’t get what they’re looking for. Don’t waste the time and page space going after visitors that aren’t going to convert.
Sacrificing the quality of your content to pursue traffic is an assured path toward frustration and sub- par website performance. The same can be said for content directed at your visitors which ignores the search engines. Optimized content must work both for the search engines to bring traffic to your site and for the visitors that arrive after finding you. Striking a working balance between the two with high quality content that is rich in keywords will drive traffic to your site while conveying the necessary credibility and trustworthiness to your visitors which will then lead to your main objective; conversions.  Contact Gervais Group today to see a list of SEO services we offer!