Gervais Group, LLC – Internet Marketing & SEO Company

The migration of advertisers away from traditional media and toward the internet continues to grow each day. While there are many reasons for this migration, one of the primary ones is the different approach required of each venue.
The push of traditional advertising
The hallmark of traditional advertising has always been “push marketing”. Push marketing is essentially outbound communication in the form of direct mail marketing, newspaper/magazine ads, and television/radio ads. These formats have several factors in common including:
* Expense – Each format can be extremely expensive, mostly due to the fact that these types of advertising methods are rarely successful on a “one and done” basis. It’s common for campaigns to take months before they generate any meaningful measures of revenues. For many small to medium sized businesses the cost of these campaigns is so high that they are not even contemplated.
* They can be seen as an interruption or intrusion – People rarely look forward to seeing commercials on television or getting junk mail soliciting them for the next big thing. The development of “Do not call” lists is further evidence that consumers do not want their lives interrupted with sales calls. To compensate for the decreasing appeal of push marketing advertisers are now required to fund larger and more expensive campaigns thus pushing them further out of the reach of business owners.
* Push advertising is difficult to quantify and measure – A familiar quote “I know half of my advertising budget is completely wasted, I just don’t know which half” attests to the difficulties of measuring what is working within a campaign. While print circulation or television viewers can always be estimated, it’s impossible to know how many people are actually seeing or acting on the ads. This leaves the effectiveness of any type of campaign of this nature open to debate.
* The campaigns are temporary – Once an ad is run or a mailer is sent, that specific event has run its course and must be repeated, one of the primary reasons these formats are so expensive. Once the campaign is stopped, it’s over.
The Pull of Search Engine Optimization
An SEO campaign is basically designed to increase the visibility to consumers who are already looking for a company’s products and/or services thus pulling consumers toward them. Pull marketing then, sits on the opposite side of the coin from push marketing on a psychological basis because the consumer is already looking for a company’s product or service . This pull on consumers has several advantages over push marketing:
* Affordability – Search engine optimization campaigns can be tailored to the budget of a small business. It’s not uncommon for months’ worth of SEO work to cost less than a single print advertisement.
* A growing medium – Estimates show that between 60% and 80% of consumers use the internet prior to making a purchase.
* Search engine efforts are quantifiable – Unlike traditional advertising, search engine marking efforts can be analyzed and quantified in many different ways, allowing for visibility into what is working and what is not within a campaign.
* Search engine marketing efforts remain in the public view – Search engine marketing materials will stay on the web indefinitely whether a campaign is ongoing or not.
Business owners looking to maximize the return on their advertising dollars are increasingly seeing the value presented by search engine optimization over traditional advertising methods. For a free consultation on what a search engine optimization campaign can do for your business, call the Gervais Group today at (770) 529 2262.

Simply put, the content presented on your site will determine whether your site is successful or not. Create targeted, search engine optimized content and you will drive traffic to your site looking for exactly what you have to offer.  Provide compelling content which caters to the interests of your visitors and you will keep them on your site once they have arrived and motivate them to return in the future. Lastly, organize your content so that it guides your visitor through the conversion process in as simple a manner as possible and your conversion ratio could improve dramatically. The short list of rules for optimized content which will yield optimal results can be divided into the following three categories:
Writing content for the search engines:
* Define the keywords which will most efficiently drive targeted traffic to the pages on your site.
* Use specific keywords on separate pages on your site. This will assist the search engines’ crawlers determine each page’s relevance to each keyword instead of diluting relevance by throwing a kitchen sink of keywords on to a single page.
* Do not overuse or cloak keywords in the content or anywhere else on the page. These practices can get a site blacklisted, as well as create other problems (see below).
Writing content for your visitors:
* Once your keywords have been specified, work them into the flow of your content. Forcing keywords into your text will read awkwardly and give your site an amateurish feel.
* Visitors will arrive at your site with either a “What’s in it for me?” or a “Do they have what I want?” mindset. Be sure that your content can answer those questions quickly by conveying clearly that you have what they came for with content directly related to their search term.
* Make sure that your content reads well, doesn’t contain spelling and grammatical errors, and keeps your visitor interested.
* Don’t let your content go stale. Fresh, search engine optimized content keeps the crawlers happy and gives your visitors a reason to return to your site.
Guiding visitors through the conversion process:
* The AIDA formula (attention, interest, desire, action) has been around for about eighty years and is as relevant today as it was at its inception. An SEO company will start with information that grabs your visitors’ attention by using content targeted at addressing their needs. At that point you’re well on the way.
* Make sure that navigating the process is easy so that your visitors will be able to convert at any time during the process. Your “buy now”, “add to shopping cart”, and/or other conversion actions should be accessible and visible in case your visitor makes a buy decision prior to getting all the way through the process.
* Simplify your shopping cart or other conversion pages as much as possible. Once the decision has been made to buy you don’t want to overload your consumer with too many choices. An intuitive and clear path through the completion of the conversion process will eliminate dropouts due to confusion or the uncertainty of whether the consumer is making the right decision.
The decision on whether to do your own search engine optimization can include many factors including the investment of time and money and whether writing your own content is within your skill set. Talking to professionals in the field of SEO could help you determine the best option for your company. For a free initial consultation call The Gervais Group LLC at (770) 529 2262. They have a variety of packages available which can put your website on the road to success.

While there is no bad time to hire an SEO company, the best and most efficient time to hire is either when a new site is being started or when you are re-designing an existing site. These starting points will allow the incoming SEO company the opportunity to optimize your site using their own protocols instead of adapting to and/or interpreting pre-existing architecture. Whether you are hiring for work on the fly or starting fresh, hiring the right company for your search engine optimization needs is one of the most important aspects of your website’s success. The following questions, and the answers to them from each prospective company you interview, should be able to clarify which company will be the best to suit your needs, drive targeted traffic to your site, and improve the conversion rates from your site’s visitors.

On experience:

* How long have you been in business? – Hiring a new company carries its share of risks, even if their rates are discounted from the other companies you’re interviewing.
* Can you show me some of your successes? – Front page success is what you’re looking for and if the company has done it with others you’re on the right track. Take it one step further and see if you can talk to the companies which have had successful campaigns run for them.
* Can you tell me about some of the people in your company? – This gives you another experience metric to measure and leads to the next question.
* How many employees do you have? – Avoid one or two man shops whenever possible. The risk here is that, should they get more work than they can handle, your project will end up being outsourced or put on the back burner.
* Have you done search engine optimization for anyone else in my industry? – Industry specific experience may not be critical as most SEO work follows similar paths. This question can be used more as a tie-breaker if all other things are equal between companies.

On the services provided:

* How will you search engine optimize my website? – This answer to this question should help define whether the company is going to use ethical tactics for the optimization of your website. Be wary if the company is offering to do your SEO work at a steep discount to other companies, especially when the discount is combined with an unclear description of optimization techniques. The likely outcome here will be underperformance at best, and major problems such as being removed from search engine indices if the company is employing unethical or black hat techniques.
* Do you provide search engine marketing? – Search engine optimizing on the site is only half the battle. Be sure you’re working with a company that can build in-bound links to your site and create content such as press releases and articles for submission to blogs, news sites, and social media sites.

On the partnership:

* How and how often will we be in communication – Quantifying this answer isn’t as important as determining that communication is both open and welcomed. Run away if you get a “Don’t call us, we’ll call you” type of response.
* How will we define success and what’s our timeline? Getting to the front page for defined keywords will be one measure. An experienced and successful SEO company will be able to provide estimates on your timeline but can never guarantee a result. Should the company you’re interviewing respond with a front page guarantee within a certain time, they are simply telling you what you want hear and don’t have your best interests at heart.

Search engine optimization is a process usually conducted in a competitive environment with an ever-changing landscape. The best SEO companies won’t be afraid to convey to that information to you. One such company is The Gervais Group LLC, which has being executing successful SEO campaigns for a variety of clients across multiple industry groups. Call us today at (770) 529 2262 for an honest appraisal on conducting a successful SEO campaign for your company.

The business of search engine optimization can be divided into two types of companies; The Right SEO Companies and The Wrong SEO Companies. Hire the Right Company and your site will be optimized to improve its search engine rankings, increase its visibility, and see higher targeted traffic numbers. Hire the Wrong SEO Company and you will waste time, money, and even incur damage your online business. Making the choice between the two types of SEO companies is critical but relatively easy if you know what to look for, especially from the Wrong side.

Wrong SEO companies usually play to the tune of telling perspective clients exactly what they want to hear, whether the promises can be delivered or not. Another aspect of a presentation from a Wrong SEO Company will include deliverables only attainable using tactics which can risk damage to your site and the reputation of your products and/or services. The following is short a list of what to look for from the Wrong side of SEO work:

* The approach – Spammed solicitations via email are a dead giveaway. Responding to them is an invitation to trouble, at the very least confirming that your email is valid which will result in an ever growing stream of more spam. According to Google’s Webmaster Help page, even they get solicitations such as “Dear google.com, I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories…”
* The guarantee of a number one ranking – The only guarantee of this nature which can be delivered is one where a ridiculously long keyword (eight words, nine words) is “optimized”. The end result is that you have a phrase which is ranked number one with absolutely zero traffic. Guarantees on any type of competitive keyword or phrase are a sure sign that you are being told what you want to hear regardless of whether it will happen or not.

* Submission the thousands of search engines – While it may sound great, these types of submissions are either unnecessary or a waste of time. Think about it; beyond the major search engines are a plethora of industry specific ones. If the promised submissions happened to occur, your apple-selling website would mean nothing on a site directed at buyers of home furnishings.

* A vague list of SEO activities – As Google points out, regardless of who does it, you are responsible for the actions taken on your site. A company using Black Hat techniques such as doorway pages and keyword stuffing might initially have some success in moving you up in the search engine rankings. The biggest risk is that, should the techniques be discovered by the search engines, your site could be removed entirely from their indices. At that point your online business is effectively dead.

Avoiding the Wrong SEO Company is critical to the success of your website. To see what the Right kind of SEO Company can do for your business; call the Gervais Group today at (770) 529-2262.