One of the more mundane tasks of the day in the life of an internet marketer has to revolve around sifting through the stats that we compile for our clients. Keywords, click throughs, exit pages, visitor pathing, all of it a jumbled mess until we can take the time to work our way down to the core answer we’ve been looking for – did our campaign work? Not to toot our own horn too loudly, but we must be doing something right, our clients keep extending their contracts.

The stats that we compile during our time with a client serves two clear measures of success on the surface. The first data point we make sure to keep in view is the day we started working with a client, we can then pinpoint that day and going forward determine if our campaigns have met our expectations. It does neither us, nor our client a lick of good if we can’t work your site and content to the best of it’s ability. The second data point we use to begin measuring any success, is the new visitors/new page loads (different metric depending on the tool), and dissecting the information from this point we can start to see trends and patterns to the visitors to your website. After we’ve worked out where you have trends forming, we can start to capitalize on them and bring you an even higher conversion rate.

Despite all of the stats we can show you, and despite all of the visitors we can bring to your website, if you don’t have a clear call to action then it is almost like your website is working against you in some ways. A clearly defined and consistent call to action that can be seen through out your website is one of the key ingredients needed for online success. Without it, it’s like going to an automobile dealership to buy a car, and there not being any cars, merely brochures with descriptions. If you are building an e-commerce site, then make sure to push your sales or your online deals options, if it is emails you’re after, make sure that sign up box is extremely prominent. As internet marketers we have a proven track record of developing, and delivering qualified traffic to your website, just make sure you listen closely when we start helping you develop your call to action as well, it’s in all our best interests that you wildly succeed.

So you’ve started your business, you’ve built your website, and you think your designer followed all of the basics where the web is concerned. You have a little left in the marketing budget and you’ve decided to make your play on the web, the largest marketplace in existence, so where do you start. Search engine optimization is a jungle of misinformation, bad ideas, poor advice, and is full of fly by night operations across the globe. In order to protect yourself and your business, we’ll provide you with some basic information that everyone should have where web marketing is concerned.

A quick read of any SEO related material will tell you that the process relies on your content and the keywords contained within. Those keywords, or keyterms, are the first stop for the search engine spiders when they get to your site, they try to discern what your website about. Once you have identified your target audience, whether it’s specific to an industry or a customer type, you can work with your content, and your keywords serve you best when they reflect your target. If you are a manufacturer of a product for example that can be used by a wider audience, then you need to be aiming for an industry sector, if you make a unique plumbing tool then you want to target plumbers as an example, not home owners doing their own repair work. Knowing which terms to use for which audience can make or break your business, because while any traffic is good, qualified traffic is obviously preferable.

And while it may seem obvious when you say it, sometimes a website doesn’t completely leave development with all of the right settings. You should ensure when your website is live, that it can be completely crawled and indexed by the search engines. There are a number of free services out there that allow you to crawl your site as if you were a bot yourself, and if you find that you can’t access your site you need to correct the issue as soon as possible. Lost traction today, is a lost sale tomorrow, and when you’re dealing with a store front that never closes every second counts. Make sure that your developer knows the steps to keep your site available to the spiders, and has built your site in such a fashion that allows for quick spidering.

Here at Freshtraffic, when we take on a new client we have not only taken on a new goal in search, we have also taken on the challenge of their website. We do get asked from time to time just what it is that we do as a company, and while I won’t get into the specifics of it, I’ll go over just a little of what has to happen in order for us to begin the process of improving your position on the results pages.

We have 3 basic needs when it comes to taking on a new client, and based on the answers we receive when we pose the request for them, can greatly impact our effectiveness. The primary need we have is to be in contact with the person or persons who are making the decisions for the company. Not just the lackey who sold the company on the idea of using search engine optimization to boost their web position, but the person who actually makes the final yes or no call. The reason we need this contact is often times we need to make recommendations for changes to a website, and it saves everyone precious time, and resources, to be able to directly contact the right person. There are times of course, when a company is large enough it is easiest for us to deal directly with a marketing manager for example, but that again is the person who makes the call for us to completely do our work.

We sometimes run into an issue with our second request, simply because our new clients run into the problem of trying to be smarter than their customers. We ask everyone for their wish list of key terms that they would like to rank for. It is at that point that we begin to break down the website, it’s content, and it’s structure to decide if it is even a possibility to use the terms that have been chosen. It is not unusual for us to have to go back to a client and tell them that they either need to supply us with better content, updated content, or a revision in order to fit their desired terms, or to change their terms. The biggest fault with clients trying to be smarter than their customers, is you can end up alienating your target demographic. Keep it simple absolutely applies when trying to work out your key terms, keep in mind your target, and adjust accordingly.

The final major request we make of all of our clients, is really just one of access. Either access to their website, ftp access so we can make sure we can make adjustments on the fly, or management software access, as the majority of new websites coming online are often built with WordPress, Joomla, or a variation there of. The reason we ask for this level of access is simple, often we’ll be discussing a project and make a decision about a new, or refined target. Having the login credentials necessary allows us to make the adjustments needed, whether it is to address a new goal, or to anticipate a market change. Of the team here at Fresh we tend to spend the majority of our time online just reading trends and gathering information about everything that interests us. It isn’t unusual to find us working over a weekend or through the evenings to ensure that you have the greatest possible chance of attaining that number 1, 2, or 3 position in search. It is in both our best interest, and yours, for you to rank as high as possible as relevant as possible, and we don’t call ourselves the best in town because it sounds good, we have the numbers, and the history to back it up.

Every now and then you need to stop and take a look at your website, how it’s performing and make a decision based on your findings. Is your traffic up? Have you made any major revisions in the last year? Conversions, are the up or down? Whether you’ve engaged an SEO company or are managing your stats yourself, with a little invested time you can discover the answers to these questions, and any others you might have, without too much trouble. But once you have your answers, what is your next step? Just remember your grade school English class, and the rule of the 5 W’s, who, what, where, when, and why.

Your number one questions, whether you have a new site, an old site or even if you’re thinking about making some updates, is who am I targeting, and what am I after from them. Are you after industry specific targets who are going to use specific terms, or are you after more general users and have to be more in sync with your industries trends and changes. This is paramount, because if you don’t know who you’re aiming for, you’re definitely going to miss; step 1 complete! Take a good look at what you have to offer your audience, whether it’s content, connections, a product or even a service that you provide. Sell yourself quickly and simply and you’ll find that your returns will compound on themselves. Continually delivering on your products or services and being a professional in your space is the quickest way to boost your bottom line. Examine the potential costs you may incur when you’re trying to boost your position and website, do you have the time, money, and manpower to properly execute your plan? There’s nothing worse than setting a lofty goal and falling short due to underestimating any of those costs.

You’ve taken care of who your audience is and what it’s going to take to get them onto your website and after your product, and it may sound like a strange question but when do you want your traffic and visitors. Take Valentines Day as an example, if you’re in the business of replacing roofing, you’re likely not going to be sinking a lot of time and money into attracting people to your website at the moment. At least here in Winnipeg, we have a few more weeks of winter to look forward to. Timing is a very important factor to bringing traffic to your site, you need to focus your time and resources to acquiring the right traffic at the right time. A little more obscure question to answer, is the why side of the equation. Why are you promoting your site at the moment, why are you making content changes, why are you adding new images etc. If at any point you find yourself saying “..because these guys did it” then it’s likely the wrong move for you. Your end goal should always be your customers, gaining them, engaging them and delivering on what they’re expecting. Because if you fail on properly executing your customers/clients needs and wants, you’re in the wrong business to begin with.

One of the worst things about the internet is actually it’s greatest strength, how quickly and easily it can be to find information. It really only becomes a negative when you have your industry is full of people who know everything about it, usually because they read a few blogs, took an online test or quiz and received a virtual diploma or certificate. The reality though, especially where search engine optimization is concerned, is you can’t just pick it up and list a site with no skill set. Being able to properly build a site, tweak the on page so it works in conjunction with your off page optimization and then to keep on top the news, isn’t a three day course in a convention room.

The problems have arisen even more frequently lately, as more and more myths and misconception about the industry is being passed around the web. And while some are much more worse than others, even the smallest one does harm to the industry. One of the points which still makes me curious as to what it actually means, is when you come across an SEO detailing how they’re going to help a website list by submitting it’s url to search engines and domain directories. Now right off the hop our first reply when someone has asked that question of us, is you don’t need to submit your site to anything, the search engines are big enough, and smart enough to find your website. The only other thing I can think of when someone tells us that their previous SEO submitted their site to directories, is they did some shady link building and possibly got your site red flagged at best, kicked from the results at worst.

I think that the largest stain on the search industry, is the trend of writers and bloggers out there, typically in the main stream media like newspapers, television and radio, who bring up SEO as spam and manipulating the search engines. Just like there are more than 2 colors in the rainbow, there are a seemingly unending list of methods you can use to help your websites visibility, so it is understandable that some of them can be seen as spam or tricks. Proper white hat search engine optimization is a process which you can use to tell the search engines what your website is about, no more, no less. There’s no magic, no underhanded methods, and no sending checks to Google or Bing to magically push your website to the top of the results page. If your website is better than the other guys, you’ll rank above them, it’s survival of the fittest on the results pages.

In the last week or so we have had the Super Bowl & the blackout, Tiger & Phil winning their first tournaments of the year in great style and of course the usual gibberish around the Winnipeg Internet industry.

As most of you will know, occasionally I like to have a rant, today is the day

Having been around the net now as a marketer for 17 years, I have seen a lot come and go, Google came, AltaVista went, Facebook came and Friends United you get the gist, it’s no different in Winnipeg.

I have seen companies and individuals start in Winnipeg, then go, but they always seem to turn up again like bad pennies as some other company or expert consultant usually in Social Media, SEO or Marketing and it gets very tiring, I cannot believe that Winnipeg businesses keep falling for it.

One year there in college or shelf filling at Walmart, waiting in restaurants or selling flowers, the next there experts online peddling webinars or circuit speakers, really, do real people fall for this BS, In Winnipeg Yes.

People who know me or have dealt with my company know I don’t beat about the bush, I say things as they are, yes the truth hurts sometimes folks, my only concern is my client and the well being of there business and online return on investment.

I don’t care too much about money, it’s not our companies driving force, doing the job well and the client making money usually brings its rewards, enough to pay the wages and rent anyways.

We have friends in the city and probably a lot more enemies, mainly due to me speaking my mind, apologies to my sales manager, but how long can this charade go on for?

We have never really advertised ourselves too much, not joined the numerous clubs or groups in the city, done speeches even when asked or webinars for that matter, why, we never had to and to be fair I would probably struggle to get through it without a F word being thrown in there. I did join the Chamber for a few years after being asked, which did nothing at all for my company, maybe I faces just did not fit.

The truth of the matter is we had it all online, Yes the internet where 92% of people look before buying anything, and so as the old saying goes, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. So straight from the horse’s mouth are the reasons you could be missing out on all those top spots on Google, Bing & Yahoo not to mention the thousands of $$$$$ people are looking to spend on your products.

There’s a reason why we are the #1 Online Branding Company in Canada on Google, Bing & Yahoo.

There’s a reason why we have dominated local search in Winnipeg over the last 6 years for SEO, Social Media & Internet Marketing.

There’s a reason why we are #1 Online for Winnipeg Digital Media.

There’s a reason why we are #1 for Winnipeg Ecommerce in Canada Online.

There’s a reason we have a 99% renewal rate from clients.

There’s a reason why we have continued to grow and lasted more than 15 years online.

There’s a reason Google purchased one of our companies.

We could give you another 100 reasons why we are leaders online, but we would rather you hear that from others.

Can you think of a reason why you should not be working with us?

Give your company a reason to shout out to the world, Call us today for FREE Quote.

“It’s not bragging if you can back it up” Muhammad Ali

RECENT SUCCESSES
Fresh Traffic was voted every month in 2012 as a leading SEO Company in Canada by independent pier’s at Top SEO’s.
Fresh delivered over 60 million visitors to Manitoba websites in 2012.
Fresh has opened a new ground floor reception at 201 Portage Avenue

You Really Should Get on Board.

With the way that the internet works, and with the way that the search engines whiz about indexing and ranking content million of pages at a time, it is a daunting task to try and break into that mold. It is that seemingly insurmountable wall that often troubles companies from taking on search engine optimization experts, as they see the search engines and the ranking pages as mountains, when they’re closer to speed bumps if you can do the job right.

Often times we get a phone call from a company or individual who has decided they would like to improve their business options by being prominently displayed in search. Thankfully because we are very good at what we do, our phone calls are prequalified up to a certain point, because they found our website at the top of the results pages. First rule of shopping for search engine optimization – if you can’t find the company you just called on the search engines, you should hang up. Picking an SEO company that you found in the yellow pages as opposed to searching for them is a bad idea.

Once you’ve found the company you would like to engage, then you need to pay close attention to what they’re saying. If you ever hear the phrase “..guaranteed #1 ranking..” in any results page, then you need to immediately start paying attention. To put it plainly, no SEO can guarantee placement in the results pages, the web is immensely fluid, with positioning sometimes changing daily, and often happening every 10 days or so. It’s not uncommon to see someone in the top 3, then disappear for a few hours while everyone gets re-indexed, and then reappear back in their previous spot. If you find you’re not suddenly available in the results pages after engaging an SEO company, before you pick up the phone in fear, just wait a couple of hours and search again. Pay attention to the layout of the results on the first couple of pages, and if you don’t reappear within a couple of days then absolutely contact them. Second rule of engaging a search engine optimization expert – shift happens.

When we have a discussion with a client, whether they’re new, existing, or a long term one, often we work with them directly with a handful of key on page components. One of the first things we look at are the very basic elements, the titles and meta tags of the individual website pages. We’ll also work with the on page content, and try to ensure that they’re keeping it relevant to what their campaign is focused on, otherwise you could find yourself at the end of a confused ranking algorithm. Once we’ve made sure that all of the on page basics are covered, you can start to expect the deliverable from our end – increased traffic to your website. One misconception that seems to hound the SEO industry is that engaging an expert to help with your positioning will yield more online business. And while that is partly true, it’s actually much more basic than that. Because while we can promise increased traffic to your website, we won’t promise you directly increased sales. Conversions are up to you and your website, as it doesn’t matter if we increase your traffic a thousand times and you have no way to convert it, you’ll still not gain as much as if you had a clear, strong call to action. Third rule of engaging an SEO expert – we can bring you traffic, but you need to work on your call to action to convert.

Google, and for Bing as well for their part in the search game, make hundreds of changes to their search algorithms every year. Two of the largest changes came in the past year from Google, with the inclusion of the Panda and Penguin algorithms into the search world. When the two came online, it didn’t take long for the affected site owners to cry foul, and some even still are feeling the effects of the new search cleaners.

Something very recently however has changed again, and this time it’s almost a backwards trend in search as opposed to moving forward. The Panda updates of the last year were included to try and clean out the scraper sites from ranking higher than the original author sites. And over the last couple of weeks it seems that either someone turned Panda off, or perhaps Google is placing more weight in their rel=”author” tag and just decided to not tell anyone. Since Facebook has come out with the news of their upcoming Graph search, perhaps this is Googles way of trying to push web owners into using the tag, in order to boost their own social pages in the search results. Only Google really knows, but at the present there seems to be a handful of scraped content sites showing up more prominently than the content owners. What this could possibly be is anyones guess, but maybe Panda took a vacation for a few days, just to see if anyone is paying attention.

And just to throw a little more into the fire for search speculation today, it seems like Googles Panda isn’t the only one up to something. Over the last couple of days there has been some shifting in the SERPs, and while that’s not uncommon, what makes it unusual is that it’s affecting 1-2 keyword searches, most affect 3+ term searches. The reason that is a little strange is you don’t typically see major changes in the 1-2 keyterm range, as the results pages are much larger. Penguin was the machine that was used to tune these pages, and at first glance it looks like that half of the Google zoo is on vacation as well. On some of the webmaster forums posts are trying to discern how they suddenly increased visibility and clicks by nearly 50%.

As mentioned previously, the only ones who really have any idea as to what is going on in terms of the changes in the SERPs the last few days, is Google. What ever the switches were that they tuned within Panda and Penguin the last few days however, definitely have the webmasters and SEOs on their toes, because rapid change like this can sometimes have some serious blowback.

As a website owner, the past year was a bit of a roller coaster ride where search and search engine activity was concerned. Between Pandas and Penguins attacking across the web, and Bing and Facebook amping up their own search options, it can sometimes be a bit of a surprise that you came out the other end on a positive note. It’s a simple task to take a minute and search around for the projected search shifts for the year, so instead here’s a short list of topics you should focus on for your website, regardless of the unknown changes in search to come.

First things first, you need to address your website and its content. The search engines over the last year, contrary to popular belief, have been ramping up efforts to deliver quality websites with real content as opposed to scraper sites which offer only a sliver of real information. When you are going over your sites content you need to take the time to ensure that you’re delivering your message, in your own unique way. Keep your articles clear and on topic, and try to work in the trending terms or topics which relate to your niche. Once you’ve gone over your site and reworked everything you can then begin pushing it out, either on Facebook or Twitter social channels, or even providing snippets to industry white paper sites. It’s free to market yourself on your social pages, and if you didn’t get the message last year, search engines are slowly pushing towards integrating social content into the results pages. As an added bonus, if you’ve done a bang up job creating your content, you’ll garner backlinks and it will help your efforts that much more.

Since you’ve taken the time to rework your content (you’ve done these steps right?) you need to go the next step and break down your website. I’m not insinuating that you take it offline or anything, but you need to carefully deconstruct your site, performance, appearance, layout, and then once you have finished optimizing for desktops you need to consider tablets and mobile displays. Over the last few months especially, the amount of users on mobile devices conducting search queries has grown to around 25% or so, and while that may not seem like much on the surface, think of that percentage again with the realization that there are more internet connected mobile devices on the planet than there are people. Ignoring the mobile search market is just as bad as ignoring the social angle, you’ll only continue to shoot yourself in the foot online. So load up your website on your tablet or smartphone and try using your pages, if you’re experiencing issues, correct them and count your fortunes later.

Now that you have your site mobile friendly, and you’re taking advantage of the mobile search growth, you have one more small step to take, and it is one that has been touted for a number of months as a trending market to grasp. You need to work on focusing your efforts into your local market, even if you don’t have a brick and mortar store, zeroing in on your target area and demographic will have the search engines loving your site more and more. Take advantage of the maps and local information that you can include on your website and social profiles, as the search engines will build a default local page for your site if you don’t already have one. Encourage your visitors to post their reviews to your social pages and engage your customers. Be active with them and you’ll soon find yourself with more work than you can handle.

When you perform a search with Google or Bing, one of the elements which allows a website to climb the results pages are the backlinks pointing to the site. When the links are from a similar site, which is related to the site they’ve provided a link for it tells the search engine that “even though we’re an authority, this other site is better than we are” type scenario. This is an extremely basic description of how the search engine results pages become filled with those little blue links, but Facebook search is going to try and do something a little different.

Facebook isn’t necessarily concerning itself with virtual locations, they are wanting to focus on the real world version of a page. Instead of using a similar system of backlinks however, they will be going down the route of using a like system, using your friends list as a foundation. It’s a twist on a way to determine a search results page, and it’s going to have some interesting applications moving forward with some people having hundreds and thousands of friends.

A solid description of one of the goals of Facebook search that I came across was it can be considered a multi-dimensional search results page. If you have a vacation planned for Las Vegas for example, you would need a hotel to stay at and try to plan it around the shows and events you would want to enjoy. Performing the search on Google or Bing, will return you the pages that have typically the best SEO laid out based on your search terms. From there you would do more research until you made your decision. The goal of Facebook search and using the Like idea, is that when you perform the same search within their service, you instead get a results page populated with the results based on your friends feedback. Instead of your results being based on the best optimization team, it will be based on the experiences of your friends, and if they enjoyed their visit to a particular venue.

There is a great deal of discontent already for the way that SEO works, and a lot of speculation that the methods used are gaming the search engines and breaking and bending rules to cheat to rank. The system, while built on solid principles does have it’s flaws, but it works as it is implemented. When Facebook introduces it’s method of basing their results around a like and share system, at that point I believe we will truly see what it is like to game a results page.