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Today’s article

1. Take care to research the SEO and Web marketing niches – focus your attention on those sparsely occupied. Make a competition analysis on search engines to single out professional services with greater demand and lower competition. For example, if you have an IT background and feel comfortable with the technical side of SEO, you can find your niche in offering such services as optimization for sites built in a few popular CMS platforms or Adobe Flash. If careful keyword research and SEO copywriting are your fortes, then you may offer this as your core specialty.
2. Make a detailed task schedule setting the final and intermediate goals for every task. For instance, if you write and submit press-releases, you will do this for link building (+50 new links on Google) as an intermediate SEO objective and for reaching a top 10 position for a specific keyword as a distant goal. Your benefit from this approach is obvious – your client will see measurable goals, and in case a goal is not reached, you will more easily be able to separate your responsibility for the work done from external circumstances (as a rule, too high competition), and have a chance to elaborate a better plan to prevail.
3. Discuss with your customer the task schedule and conditions under which the goals are considered achieved. The scope of your work and your responsibility should be mutually agreed upon and approved by your customer in a written and legally binding form.
4. SEO services are result-oriented, but the results cannot be guaranteed 100%, because there are a lot of circumstances beyond the SEO’s control. A professional SEO is always tempted to charge for his work on an hourly basis similar to lawyers, auditors, and experts and consultants in many other areas. Since you are a beginning SEO practitioner, and don’t have the weight and reputation of a large SEO company behind you, you shouldn’t consider an hourly fee model. On the other hand, limiting your professional potential with only fixed cheap SEO plans is also unwise.
5. Understanding in full the complexity of the SEO goals and not being able to guarantee a 100% positive result, the following pricing strategy can be considered. After you analyze all the key phrases for the project, it makes sense to divide the keyword list into a) low competition keywords for which you can nearly guarantee top positions in the major search engines and b) highly competitive keywords, for which top positions are unachievable in a short time and with standard resources. The approach to low and highly competitive keywords’ optimization, deliverables timeframes, and costs should be different. When your site enters the top 10 for the less competitive keywords, your professional skills will become more credible with the customer, so she will trust that getting top 10 for more competitive keywords just requires more time and money.
6. On-the-page and site structure optimization prices should be based on the site size. Your time and efforts, as well as competitive market prices should also be considered.
7. The cost of off-the-page optimization is more dependent on keyword competition, so you may incur additional expenses. Many SEO companies include a basic off-the-page optimization into their service plans, for instance, submission to search engines and directories, link exchange, topic-relevant forum and blog posts, a few press-releases, etc. This standard service is enough for less competitive key phrases, but definitely not enough for the highly competitive ones. This is why it makes sense to divide the keywords by the effort and resources – time and money – required to achieve a goal, and based on that, define the prices of off-the-page optimization for the low competitive and highly competitive keywords separately.
8. In this way, you can clearly tell the basic mandatory optimization tasks (more or less fixed cost for a client after the scope of work is agreed upon) apart from the less predictable and costly off-the-page optimization works for the highly competitive keywords.
9. Cooperate with other professionals. If your customer wants you to do some tasks exceeding your current competence, don’t try to do them if you are not sure of an excellent result. A better solution is to get a competent professional involved in the project and complete all the work with great results.
10. As a rule, SEO companies offer a 6 to 12 month project delivery period. A well-done website optimization has a long-term effect and doesn’t require costly ranking maintenance (with the exception of highly competitive keyword optimization, where continual link-building is needed). Don’t deceive your customer and foist a costly ranking maintenance plan that will only require you to run automatic ranking reports and email them. A greater method of customer retention is offering her some valuable further services such as Web analytics, keyword research and PPC campaign optimization, landing page optimization, and so forth. Learn step by step, and extend your SEO business!

Great articles on SEO pricing:

“Pricing Strategies in Marketing: Price Point Strategy, Examples, Objectives & Tactics for Small Business” by Aaron Wall   (interesting theoretical considerations on pricing strategies)

“SEO Pricing & Costs – What Should You Charge / How Much Should You Pay?” by Rand Fishkin  (a three year old article that is really valuable and makes a lot of sense even now)

SEO Companies’ Visibility Rate

Are SEO companies as good as they claim to be on their sites? Will they return the efficiency they promise? Are their skills qualified? The only way to find it out is to check how they optimize and promote their own sites.

Here we share Top 10 SEO Companies according to their search visibility rate for May 2010.

Click here to see the complete rate.

Web CEO analysts use objective evidence to rate SEO firms according to their search engine visibility. SEO companies’ visibility rate is calculated using a special formula that considers the positions of SEO companies’ sites in search engines results pages for the keywords their potential clients use, popularity of these keywords and number of competitors.

Learn more about the formula.

Here you can see how Top 10 SEO companies’ visibility rate has changed from March till May 2010.

Top 10 SEO Companies

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If you are not new to marketing, you have surely heard about the AIDA formula. AIDA is an acronym for Attention – Interest – Desire – Action; these four mental steps are necessary for you to inspire in your prospect if you are selling her your product or service.

Attention – attract your potential customer’s attention; Interest – raise customers’ interest by focusing on advantages and benefits; Desire – convince customers that they want and desire your product and that it will satisfy their needs; Action – lead customers toward your targeted action: ordering, purchasing, or subscribing.

This formula may be used to convert your virtual website visitors into real local and loyal buyers.

1. Attention

Grab your prospects attention, i.e. make people find your website and visit it. On-the-page optimization, link-building, submission to local directories and Google Places, use of Google Coupons and geotargeted pay per click ads will work perfectly. You may find more details on how to target prospects to your local business online in the previous issue of SEO MixTour.

2.Interest

This step is sometimes also called “Information”.

The visitors have arrived at your site. Now your task is to make them interested. How can you attract local prospects and motivate them to visit your place in the real world? Describe how easy it is to get to your shop, office, gallery, café, hotel, etc. and what great shipping possibilities, additional unique services, and special discounts or coupons you propose.

Provide your visitors with all the information they may want to know. Put your address and telephone number on the site. The best place is in the footer of every page. But it is also good to create a special contact or location page. Provide directions and a map, mention landmarks and neighborhoods you serve, add local zip codes and area codes. Make it easy for your prospects to find your business and remember that your contact page should be in text format, and not an image, so that search engines can read and index the information.

3. Desire

Now when the visitors of your website are interested in your business, it is high time for a very special proposal that will make them visit you offline.

• Demonstrate your products and services visually – let your visitors get acquainted with them before they visit you offline.
• Give your online prospects exact information on the availability of your products or services, and facilitate in preordering them via the Internet.
• Add special printable coupons to your site pages and give a discount for their holders.
• Propose special shipment options for registered site visitors.
• Let your online prospects be the first to know about new products, special offers and auxiliary services.

4. Action

If you were convincing with all of the preceding steps, your online visitors would become ready to turn into your offline buyers. However, they may put the visit off. Your task now is to push a little and make them take action immediately.  Limit your bonuses in time. Tell your potential buyers that your special offer will expire soon and that only now you are giving a discount coupon or some bonuses.

Don’t forget about proper site navigation to make your online sales funnel work – lead your prospect in the direct way to end up in the targeted action that will propel her offline visit.

And remember that even your virtual website visitors, who haven’t yet converted into real local buyers, will keep your offers in mind and drop in to your offline business when they are near.

Web CEO Metrics

Here we are sharing the generalized numbers from our HitLens Web Analytics service. It covers 300,000+ websites from all over the world.

In May 2010 Google referred 82 % of all visitors compared to the year 2009 when this number was 78%. Yahoo’s numbers reduced from 10% to 7%, and Bing’s audience remained the same.

Global Search Engines (%)

You can see how visitors are being referred to websites.

While the share of linking sites fluctuates between 20-21%, search engines were still the main visitor referrer (they referred 47% of all traffic in May 2010). The bookmarking level increased to 22%, and the number of search marketers who use paid advertising is increasing step by step (it referred 7% of all visitors in May).

Visitor Referrers (%)

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Today’s Article

Earlier we wrote about local optimization in the context of country-specific sites and duplicate content filters. This time we expand on this topic and will tell you about the web promotion of a local business as a whole.

Before you start, make sure your web site is search-engine-friendly: created with a SE-friendly technology (like HTML), having robots.txt and a Sitemap in the root site directory. Next, you can get down to optimization for local search. Here are the most important steps to take.

1) Optimize your site for the targeted keywords

After you defined the right keywords for your business, include them together with the city name into your pages’ titles and Meta keywords and description tags. It would be perfect if the title that you use to name your business should include not only your company name, but also your most targeted keyword, for instance ‘Greenstone Villa – Beach Holidays Australia’.

The site pages should give all the information people may use for search in your location – area codes, street name, city, and country names. Add as much local information as you can to your site – this raises your chances of getting listed high in Google local search results.

2) Submit Your Website to Google Places

(ex-Google Local Business Center)

It’s one of the best ways to get to Google’s first results page. :) Together with the snapshot of the map with the exact location of your business, people will find out all the necessary details like contact phone number and email, business hours; they will get discount coupons (at your convenience), view the photographs and obtain other information you’ve found appropriate to include.

Besides, the local business listings are also present in mobile search results, which should urge the people passing by to visit a local office or shop.

Some tips from Google:

• If you have more than 10 locations, submit these locations via a bulk upload and then request verification for the bulk upload.
• If you have two locations, but only one is listed, you can create a separate listing for your other location – create one listing per business.
• Fake reviews are against Google’s Comment Posting Policy.
• Providing an accurate and complete listing can help your local listing rank better.

More advice from Google can be found at http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en-uk&answer=148047

3) Get local inbound links

Take care to get inbound links from local TLDs (top level domains), especially links containing your targeted keywords and city in their anchor text.

Where should you look for such links? Consider the following opportunities:

• contact your local business partners
• get registered with your local chamber of commerce
• get registered with some government agencies
• contact your suppliers
• submit your site to local directories, for example:

SuperPages

Yellow Pages

Switchboard

Yelp

• submit your site to local search engines:

Yahoo! Local Listings

Bing Local Listings

• leave your comments in some local blogs

Only some potential resources for local promotion in the USA are listed above. We bet you will find more directories that are relevant to your business and its location and will give you more targeted local traffic (for instance, in Yahoo! Directory, Dmoz, or Google Directory, or by organic search).

4) Get the most out of customer reviews and Web references

Other people’s experience in social mentions is very important for someone who considers contacting you. Ask your customers to write a review about your business on their preferred shop site, forum or portal.

If someone wrote a negative review, don’t leave it as is. Contact them to find out why they didn’t like your service – maybe you can change their opinion. Respect has always been a winning tactic.

Here are some helping articles on where to get references for Europe and the US.

http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/local-seo/citations-in-continental-europe/

http://getlisted.org/resources/where-to-get-citations.aspx

5) Local domain and local hosting

These are also very important factors. Register a domain name in your regional DNS zone: *.co.uk for UK, *.it for Italy, or even a subdomain of your targeted place – such as *.sardegna.it or *.trentino.it. Additionally, choose a hosting provider in the same region, this way search engines will consider your site as being more relevant to that region.

6) Make use of Google Webmaster Tools

If your domain is in .com, .org or any other global TLD zone, you have a possibility to choose the target audience from within your Google account by means of Webmaster Tools.

7) Involve paid search advertising

It always helps, if you have funds. Being the most efficient and inexpensive among the paid advertising opportunities, PPC campaigns can attract not just people from your city, but those who are most interested in your product or service.

8) Promote business in local social media

Research local groups in popular social networks (check global networks as well as the most popular local networks). Promotion via these groups may bring you a lot of visitors interested in your services. For more information, read the article on how to choose the best social media channel we issued earlier.

After all of the above is done, it would be great to check how you rank in the local search engines. And here the Web CEO Ranking tool can be of help – you can either check your positions on your local search engines or search for your site in the Google Local results.

SEO Companies’ Visibility Rate

Are SEO companies as good as they claim to be on their sites? Will they return the efficiency they promise? Are their skills qualified? The only way to find it out is to check how they optimize and promote their own sites.

Here we share Top 10 SEO Companies according to their search visibility rate for April 2010.

Click here to see the complete rate.

Web CEO analysts use objective evidence to rate SEO firms according to their search engine visibility. SEO companies’ visibility rate is calculated using a special formula that considers the positions of SEO companies’ sites in search engines results pages for the keywords their potential clients use, popularity of these keywords and number of competitors.

Learn more about the formula.

Here you can see how Top 10 SEO companies’ visibility rate has changed from February till April 2010.

Top 10 SEO Companies