We have a lot of ground to cover when we talk about website promotion. You have your business plan, your domain name, your hosting, and you have your website up and running and already optimized for the search engines with great content.

Testing Your Website Before You Spend A Lot Of Money To Promote It

I want to stress that before you go beyond this point, you should have already done the onsite seo and added great content that is ready to close deals or make sales or get people to sign up.

Before you do anything, you need a google analytics account. Get the google analytics code and put it into all of your web pages.

Then you need to set up a google adwords account. (Later in the new web business guide we will talk about how to use PPC to push traffic to your website for the long term, but for now we just need to test your website.)

Get the conversion code and put it into a page called thanks.html or thankyou.html or whatever. Make sure that only people who subscribe, buy, or sign up or whatever gets to see that page.

In other words, if you have them fill out a form, code it so that they get a thank you page. This page is where the google conversion code goes. That way only people who signed up or purchased something get counted as conversions.

Use the google keywords tool to put in the top key phrases you want to target. Ignore obscure or long tail phrases for now. We are not setting up your google adwords for long term. Again, this is just for testing. Using the top most competitive key phrases that people type in when trying to find what you have to offer will give us the best traffic to test.

Set your campaign budget. We are only going to run the test for one week, so invest $140 in your adwords test campaign. That’s $20 per day. Make sure you put $20 in the daily budget space in account settings.

Make sure you uncheck anything that puts you into the content network. It’s in your account settings. You may have to upgrade your adwords account from basic to do so. Lately google puts everyone in the content network who sets up a basic adwords plan whether they want it or not. For the purposes of testing, we want to test just search engine traffic alone.

Now select all of your keywords and hit edit keyword settings. Choose the proper landing page for each keyword and enter the url to that page. Landing people on the right page is a big part of improving your conversions.

Example; You sell cellphones and accessories. You built a page about motorola cellphones, a page about nokia cellphones, and one about nokia cellphone accessories. I know you would build more, but this is a short example.

You would want people who type in “motorola cellphones” to land on the page for that, the people who type in “nokia cellphones” tom land on the page with those on it, etc.

Once you have done that, set your default bid on all of those phrases to $5 per click. No, you do not want to pay $5 per click in a PPC campaign if it can be avoided, but remember, this is a test.

Also remember that just because you bid $5 per click does not mean you will pay $5 per click. You will only be charged the amount per click that makes you the top bidder, unless the top bidder is over $5 per click. For many key phrases, this is not the case, but there are competitive phrases that go even higher than that. Cellphones might be very competitive while hot sauce isn’t.

Create one good ad that describes what you sell. In a normal campaign, we would be testing each landing page with it’s own campaign and several ads to see how well each converts. This is just a general test to see how people react to your new website, so for the purposes of this test, just one ad will do.

Now turn on your google adwords campaign. You may only get a few clicks due to the $20 per day budget and the high per click bid. It’s okay. It will be enough to give us a quick general analysis of your new website. it will not be a definitive test as to how well you will do with google adwords because this test is very very limited in it’s approach.

When the week is done, turn off your google adwords campaign. Don’t delete that campaign altogether. You may want to test again. Go into your account settings and make sure it is paused.

Analyzing the results of the test

How many times was your ad shown (impressions) VS how many clickthrus you got. This tells you if your ad was any good. Again we were not creating several ads and testing them all as in a real PPC campaign, so this will just tell you if the first ad you wrote got very many people to click on it. Good information to have for later.

Cost per click or CPC VS Average Position. This should give you a good idea of what you would have to spend to run PPC on those keywords, the level of competition there is for them, and what others are bidding on those keywords. Again, good information to have for later.

Clickthrus VS Conversions. The meat and potatos of an adwords campaign. This is where you compare how many people clicked through to visit your landing pages against how many actually filled out the form, subscribed, or purchased something and got to the thank you or conversion page.

Do not be depressed if you got 0 conversions. You probably have not sent enough traffic to your pages to get a true conversion test because of the limits we placed on the campaign. If you did get conversions, then great! That helps a lot. But again, it does not prove your pages will always convert at the rate this test tells us you did in the long term. So don’t run out and increase your adwords budget just because you made a sale or two during this test.

Now go to your google analytics account. This will tell you a lot more for the purposes of this limited test.

Look at your bounceback rate. This is one of the most important things I would be looking for in the test. If more than 80% of the people that clicked through to your website are bouncing back to the search engine to get another result, then the page they landed on was not what they were looking for or you have not made that page interesting enough to keep them there for even a few seconds.

That means that 80% of the users typed in “nokia cellphone accessories” and did not think your page that sells those was what they were looking for. They figured that out in just a few seconds. That would be a bad sign and it means that you need to look at the top of that page and your first words on that page to see why they did not want to look at what you had to offer.

Then look at how many people spent 5 minutes or more on the page. Compare that number to how many sales you made. That tells you people did find your page relevant, but decided not to buy anything. That can be because of price or the way you close the sale.

There are other analytics to look over in google analytics. Look at all of it. Learn the behavior of the visitors who came to your website during testing. Remember that these were targeted visitors so you have the best results you are going to get. Organic listings bring you targeted traffic but not quite as good as ppc traffic so your conversion rate will be a little lower with the organic traffic in many cases.

Use the analytics to improve things that need to be improved. One page may have performed much better than other pages. Use it as a model and tweak the other pages using that info.

You may want to run the test all over again after making some changes. In many cases, this is a good idea, especially if you think you performed poorly.

TESTING, TESTING, TESTING. There is nothing wrong with doing a lot of testing before you promote your website. It will likely save you a lot of money in the long run.

Think of the text on your website as a sales pitch. Any sales organization will tell you that they write a pitch, test it, tweak it, rewrite it, test it, edit it, constantly until they know they have a great sales pitch. It’s no different with your website. You need to know you are ready to convert sales if you want to make a profit on what you spend to promote your website.

We will get into how to promote your website in the next part of this chapter. I just wanted to make sure that you do some testing before you spend a lot of money.

We can do this testing for you. Call 786-317-8774 or email info@seoserviceprovider.com for more information.

The reason I wanted to discuss this is that many companies expect all seo people to be like other vendors. A lot of seo companies cater to this by providing pretty charts and graphs and testimonials of nominal value and even suspect sources.

A lot of really good seo experts do not have the time to show you a lot of graphs and charts. They don’t really have time to do “case studies” and record them for you to look at. And if an seo company is providing all of those things, how much of what they charge you goes into that instead of actual seo work.

We get so much business, much of it repeat business because of the results we get for people, that we sometimes cannot provide you with a pretty chart. We do update you on things like link popularity, search engine saturation, search engine ranklings for your keywords and phrases, and on conversions.

Conversions. Sales. That is where our focus is. We don’t cost our clients money. We make them money.

Here are the questions Marty Weintraub says you should ask an seo company before hiring them;

Dear [Prospective SEM Vendor],

Thank you for entering into a dialog with us as we vet potential SEM vendors for [Name of Company]. In order to keep the process as streamlined as possible, please take a few minutes to respond to this questionnaire. Our goal is to make sure we are a right fit for each other before getting too far along in the process, and to make sure we do not waste your time.

The answers can be as detailed or short as you deem appropriate. We look forward to the process of getting to know your company better. We’re happy to read articles on-topic originating from your agency, if you provide the URL in any question’s answer. Thank you in advance for your efforts.

A very nice way to phrase the letter, even noting that the seo person’s time is valuable as well as your own.

Pay Per Click

Is anyone in your firm AdWords Qualified or a Yahoo Ambassador?

Taking the time to become adwords qualified means they do care about their business, but passing the test is not exactly rocket science. You can even use google’s help files to answer the questions. So the value of this question might be that you want to see if they took the time to do it, but it does not mean they really know more than anyone else. It does prove they at least read the help files though.

Does your agency have a designated Google or Yahoo representative?

You mean that someone who knows how to do seo or ppc for google does not also know how to do it for yahoo? This is like saying I need to hire someone that knows how to do metatags and someone else to write alt tags.

What is your agency’s billing model for PPC: percentage of spend, percentage of revenue, monthly fee, hybrid?

Do you have a monthly PPC minimum spend or fee?

What method does your firm use to manage PPC: by hand, by automation (what tool), hybrid?

Do you use our credit card, your agency’s or another method? How will you invoice us?

What reports do you typically send clients, and at what interval?

What PPC channels are you experienced with (Google, MSN, Yahoo, Facebook, etc.)?

How does your agency measure PPC conversion and ROI?

Is it in your vocabulary to do multivariate landing page or ad message testing?

Those are all great questions to ask a ppc company before hiring them.

How much PPC spend-cash do you handle annually?

None of your business. I would not answer that way, but in reality this is not a question that is likely to get you a straight answer or an honest one. You may not get a straight answer because of the reason I gave and how will you check to see if the company you are thinking of hiring really does as much business as they tell you they do?

Please submit 2 short PPC case studies highlighting success.

Please submit 1 short PPC case study highlighting failure.

I would show a clients the results we get for clients that have approved their information being shared. Otherwise I have no time to do case studies. My case studies are done as I provide services for clients. Every job is unique. I can show you 100 case studies that were successful but none of them would have anything to do with the performance we get for you.

Those case studies sound more like something a company that uses the same plan for everyone would provide for you. If they have a one-size-fits-all approach to ppc, you aren’t likely to become a case study they will show future potential clients unless it’s under the failure category.

Please submit 2 PPC client-references.

I’d ask for more than 2.

Organic Optimization

What link-building tactics and methods will be employed?

Does your agency have a content creation practice, or will you guide us in building out our content?

Since content is the real SEO, any seo company should be providing the content or be outsourcing it to a reliable content provider. We create our own content for our clients and provide content to several seo companies because they know they can count on us for good, original, optimized content that helps convert sales.

How do you measure organic prominence in light of Personalized Search?

What keyword research tools do you use?

How does your agency measure organic conversion and ROI?

What methods will be used to mine competitive intelligence about our competitors?

What is the billing model for organic-related services? (retainer, hourly, flat monthly fee, etc.)

Those are all good questions.

Do you test organic landing page performance with PPC?

And that one is an excellent question. Any seo company should be testing landing pages with ppc and then tweaking them for performance.

What steps do you take to insulate clients from becoming too dependent on Google?

Doing proper organic seo means you target all of the search engines, not just google. Google may not even have the best conversion rate for a particular client’s products or services. Never put all your eggs in one basket is an old phrase because it has value.

Please submit 2 short organic case studies highlighting success.
Please submit 1 short organic optimization case study highlighting failure.

Anybody who writes an article about how to choose an seo company will always tell you to look for things that they provide to make themselves seem like the better choice. So, again with the case studies. I suppose the writer does them so he is telling you everyone should.

Please submit 2 organic optimization client-references.

Again, more than 2 would be better. And I have questions to add to this list that most seo companies do not want you to ask.

Can your company show me websites they own that sell something besides web services that make a profit? If they have never sold products and services other than what they are trying to sell you, or if they have never built websites that make money from affiliates if that is what they are to build for you, how can they know how best to sell your products?

How much actual offline and online sales experience does the person who will be doing my SEO have? Can you provide proof? If they do not have a lot of sales experience to go with their technical seo skills it won’t matter whether or not they get you a good search engine ranking. Being able to sell is more important than being able to get you a top listing in google.

Being able to do both is optimal. I personally have 33 years of sales experience, 12 of those years online. I have driven tons of traffic to affiliate programs and converted sales. I have websites that sell products and services other than seo that make a good profit. My very first business online was in 1995, buying, selling, and appraising domain names and sold more than 600 of my own domain names for a profit and sold more than that for my clients.

Use someone that has experience making money online. Many people have started an seo business based on the fact that the seo business is profitable. And it is the only business they were ever in on the web. No matter how many ebooks they read and how many matt cutts blog posts they read, nothing replaces actual experience.

Social Media

What social media channels are you currently active in for clients? (StumbleUpon, Digg, Facebook, etc.)

Give examples of how those channels might be used to bolster the overall SEM effort.

Both good questions.

What reputation monitoring tools will be used?
What is the frequency and substance of your reputation reporting?

Those two questions should be in their own category unless the writer believes that all reputation management is done through social media. Reputation management is a whole different animal and there are a lot of tools used for it, social media being only one of them.

What is your experience with open source blogging software like WordPress

What are your typical non-blogging uses of blog-style software?

Both good questions. Marty undestands the value of blogging and wordpress to seo so I definitely respect the fact that he is up-to-date on tools that you need to do proper seo and reputation management.

I would add to the questions about blogging if your seo company intends to use blogging as an seo tool.

Does your company provide hosting that is optimized for blogs? Can you make sure my blog is on a seperate C Class IP Address if it is to be an offsite blog?

Does your company handle the installation of wordpress for me? Even if I have a windows server?

Does your company handle all of the admin area setup such as proper permalink structure, the right plugins for my specific needs, and inserting a comprehensive ping list?

Does your company install the wordpress template and have a seo expert with knowledge about php go over the code in my wordpress template to make sure it is optimized and has no unnecessary or bloated code in it?

Does your company provide the daily original and optimized content my blog will need in order to be successful?

We do all of the above. Blogging for seo purposes is a lot more than just putting up a wordpress blog and doing a little social bookmarking. Read more about Business Blogging

Please submit 2 short social media case studies highlighting success.
Please submit 1 short social media case study highlighting failure.

Again with the case studies. Show me some verifiable client websites that rank well in more than just one search engine for their main key phrases.

General Vendor Qualifications

How many full-time employees are in the agency? What are their roles?

What if they have a virtual team that does piecework? What if they have all part-timers and all of them are excellent at what they do. This question seems pointless and doesn’t necessarily qualify or disqualify anyone as a good seo company. I could branch off another company tomorrow and hire 20 full-time employees. It wouldn’t prove I can make you money. It would raise the prices I have to charge you though.

What SEM conferences did you attend in the past year, and which do you plan to attend this year? (SES, PubCon, SMX, etc.)

And I really love this question. My answer: 0 and I don’t plan to attend any this year or next year either. Going to conferences doesn’t make anyone an seo guru. Watching videos and reading ebooks doesn’t qualify anyone to play around with a company’s income by managing their seo.

It does mean that the seo gurus who attend the conferences can all tell us who they lunched with at the latest seo conference in their blogs though. It means they can name-drop better than the rest of us.

I’m not saying attending one of these conferences is wrong. But let’s call it what it is. A trade show. Attending or even buying a booth at a trade show does not mean that person is more qualified than anyone else. It means they have more time on their hands or have enough of their client’s money that they can send someone to attend or have someone else working while they go meet and greet.

What SEM conferences have members of your staff spoken at, and which ones will your staff speak at this year?

What trade publications (online or paper) do members of your staff write for, and on what topics?

Again, if you have the time to do these things, that’s great. But it is not a question that will really help you know that you are hiring someone that can help you make more sales with your website.

Obviously, those that do have the time to attend conferences and write to trade publications will disagree. Most of the time I am so busy working on my client’s projects that I don’t even have time to finish my own websites, so I certainly don’t have time to run around marketing myself as the next Internet Guru.

Please submit 3 links to articles you or your employees have written.

I do try to take the time to write articles and my blogs, but sometimes that doesn’t even get done because my clients need me on their projects.

In which forums is your agency “known”? (SEW, Sphinn, Cre8asite, High Rankings, etc.)
Please provide links to your social media and forum profile pages.

Wow, having the time not only to attend seo conferences and trade shows, but also to write to trade publications, participate in forums a lot, and hang around on social networking sites qualifies someone to be an seo expert?

There are real seo experts that do have the time to do these things. So I’m not saying by doing them they are not an seo expert. What I am saying is that doing these things does not necessarily mean that they are an seo expert. So the questions about these things will not help you qualify someone as an seo expert.

What traditional business affiliations (BBB, Chambers of Commerce, etc.) does your firm have?

Not a requirement for an online business. A simple google search for the company will provide more ionformation than the fact they joined the BBB.

Are you a SEMPO member?

Not required and membership in sempo does not autmatically qualify someone to handle my seo needs. It’s a great place to network with all those guys you met at the last seo trade show though.

Does your agency have in-house programmers and designers, or do you outsource?

Good question.

If outsourcing, what are your partner-vendors’ URLs?

None of your business. I have seo companies that use our services as a content provider and other things, but that agreement is between us and them and it comes with nondisclosure agreements. So they are not going to give you my url nor should they.

What analytics applications, other than Google Analytics, are used?

Is there an in-house method to measure offline conversions (phone, etc.)?

What experience does your agency have in local/mobile?

All three of those are great questions.

The point is that if 10 seo company owners wrote the questions they thought you should ask an seo company before hiring them, you would not get the same questions recommended by any of them. There would be a few all agree on, but there would be major differences between them.

Marty Weintraub is owner and principal of AimClear, a search engine optimization (SEO) Internet marketing firm in Duluth and Minneapolis, Minnesota. Marty has been providing PPC (pay per click) and organic optimization to businesses in Minnesota since 2001.

Everyone learned seo in different ways. There are a lot of seo “experts” that are followers and not leaders though, as with any field of expertise. These people tend to read whatever their seo mentor writes and then they do that for all of their clients. They do not innovate or get creative. They follow a specific school of thought led by one well-known search engine marketing expert.

It does not mean they are bad seo companies to hire. They are following some standard practices that have a track record of success. So they can get you some decent results. They will help you keep up with your competitors.

The problem is that the web is constantly changing. You need a leader who innovates and knows when to be a little creative in their approach to seo to be ahead of the pack rather than to simply keep up.

SEO, Content, and Link Building Strategies that help you improve your bottom line

But this really takes the cake. Wal-Mart owns Sam’s Club and Sam’s Club wants you to buy their SEO services. Listen, if you go to Wal-Mart to get your SEO services then your business is simply doomed to failure and you are too stupid to own a business. This is SEO for those that rode the little bus to school.

From their website;

Establish a local search profile and have your website submitted to the major search engines with our new LeadConnect™ offering.

LeadConnect will help grow your business by providing your key business data to all of the major search engines.

Profile creation tool with unlimited updates
Profile distribution to major search engines and online Yellow Page directories like YPGuides.
Hand submission of your website URL to the major search engines and directories.

Uh oh. Someone at Wal-Mart read an ebook. The only problem is the ebook they read was from 1996. Hand submission of your website url to the major search engines! Wow! What will Wal-Mart think of next? I bet they will even put your keywords metatags in your main page. Maybe some invisible text at the bottom of the page. I think they plan to roll out an alt tag service soon.

Seriously. This has got to be the biggest ripoff I’ve seen so far. it’s a total joke. When I first read about it I thought they really were joking. They are. But the joke is on you. People will buy it. Wal-Mart has the money to advertise anything.

They even claim to run your ppc advertising for you. They want to charge you $50 per month to do it. Wow! Cheap hunh?

Well, if you remember your last trip to Wal-Mart or Sam’s Club and had to ask for help finding something in their own store you’ll understand why I say how can they help people find your website?

I can just imagine it now. That person who stands in front of Wal-Mart and says welcome to Wal-Mart to everyone is standing there doing their job and the manager comes up to them and says, “Julie we need help back in the SEO department right now so I’ll put george up here while you go back and run someone’s PPC ad campaign.

SEO, Content, and Link Building Strategies that work

The following types of websites are likely to merit low landing page quality scores and may be difficult to advertise affordably. In addition, it’s important for advertisers of these types of websites to adhere to our landing page quality guidelines regarding unique content.

eBook sites that show frequent ads
‘Get rich quick’ sites
Comparison shopping sites
Travel aggregators
Affiliates that don’t comply with our affiliate guidelines

In other words Google is going to charge them extra for their keywords? I’m glad about the get rich quick stuff and don’t even disagree with affiliate websites so much, but comparison shopping sites and travel aggregators?

Does google getting into >shopping comparisons and >travel have anything to do with it?

Does the fact that >Google is about to compete with Commission Junction with their own Affiliate program have anything to do with it?

Google may as well go ahead and get into the get rich quick schemes too.

Now it seems some users have found that setting up a new campaign means you do not have the opt out option anymore. I can tell you that if Google forces me to participate in the content network, I’ll opt out of google adwords altogether.

I just set up a quick campaign on Google Ad Words for one of my new affiliate sites, and nowhere along the way was I offered the option of being in the content network, nor was I shown this usual checkbox that says I’m going to be included. Doesn’t that seem wrong?

Basically, as far as I can tell, it’s now completely impossible to add a new campaign without being automatically added to the content network. Am I seeing this correctly? When did this change?

Well I haven’t had a chance to try it yet to see if this is the case for me. Have any of you set up a new adwords campaign recently? Did it let you opt out of the content network?

Forget #1 PPC Spot; Greedy Google Grabs It
By Gary Thomas

A colleague and I were recently doing a search when we came across Google in the PPC and organic listings. At first we thought it was a Google marketing push for Google Maps. However, after doing more research, it looks like Google is trying to promote their local coupon search.If you do a search on the word “coupons” you will see that Google.com is the number one result in the Sponsor results.

We also did a search on “pizza coupons” Google was ahead of Pizza Hut in the sponsor links.

After doing a search on “Marco’s Pizza Coupons” Google’s directory came up number 5. You know it’s only a matter of time before its number one.

So now you can put your money into Google Adwords and you have to compete with Google for the number 1 listings? Google has no claim to the Do No Evil slogan anymore.