First of all, it is obvious that any business after SEO benefits has to invest good money in it in the first place. And not being too optimistic to say, long-term effective SEO services are always not cheap. The quote from an experienced SEO company in Australia would not likely be below $140 per hour. Therefore if we decide to invent in SEO marketing, we couldn’t be careful enough to distribute the budget wisely. Any careless fault will not only waste money but also waste our time and confidence in the e-marketing campaign.

So all in all what is the solution? To answer in one sentence: find the right balance between investments and income. It’s all about ROI (return on investment). However different kinds of businesses have different investment balance and portfolio. Let’s go through some typical categories as follows.

Small Businesses

I always hear some SEO conclude that small businesses shouldn’t do SEO because they couldn’t afford the price. Yet I can not agree. In fact I reckon a small business with the right keywords strategy would gain even higher ROI than bigger businesses. We need to plan well. Choosing one or two specific keywords (basic level) very close to the business itself as a start point, is a good way to achieve a positive feedback of investments and income cycle. As a small business, probably the only reason we do SEO is for more sales leads. If we succeeded with the chosen start point, we could gradually invest in more keywords we need. If some of them don’t work, we forget them and try something else instead. Just don’t do a bunch of keywords together. Because if leads are not ideal, we couldn’t possibly know which of them are not working. Our budget are tight and we wouldn’t like to waste money. As our business grows, we can adopt some medium level and even top level keywords.

Medium-sized Enterprises

Our business is already running and we are looking for chance to broaden our territory. My suggestion, like small businesses we circle all the specific keywords related to our products and services. Meanwhile we underline some keywords from the medium level as per our business broadening plan. For example we may already are the market leader in Melbourne and we have the plan to promote our product in Sydney. In such case we can firstly promote “some product Sydney” and let people in Sydney get a piece of information about us before we enter into the market there. In the long run we should do one or two top level keywords regarding our best selling product for the future branding success.

Large Companies

We have already got enough market share. Then why should we bother doing SEO anyway? For branding of course. The profitability of our business depends on how much value we put in our brand. Imagine when people search any keywords relevant to our products or services we are there on the top three. This is how we get impression. To achieve this we will need to leverage all the three levels of the keywords. Additionally we should establish our social network (I will discuss this in another article later) and meanwhile invest in a PPC (pay per click) campaign. Ideally for top level keywords we will have our website, our ads and our social network like Google Plus listed all on the first page. This is how the branding on search engine is done.

As I explained above the keywords combination for different sized businesses differs. However this is just one part of the big picture, we still need to take more factors than just business size into consideration. In my next article I will try analysing keywords strategy regarding diverse business fields and localities.

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No doubt more and more businesses are doing SEO and most of us think SEO so technical that the only thing that matters is to find a brilliant IT company. Then we could just hand over all the credentials, pay the cost and wait for clients to ring. Easy yet not right at all. Admittedly good SEO must have good understanding of many technological details of websites, protocols and servers. But they are important only because we need them to implement our e-marketing strategy. Simply put, if we are targeting wrong keywords, we are targeting wrong clients or even no clients.

I guess someone would think how hard could this be? If I am selling A, just target A as the keyword. Well, yes and no. Several months ago I met an business owner selling air conditioning. He used to pay tons of money on “air conditioning” and indeed his website once listed in top three positions. The phone did ring slightly more than before. However at end of the day he found only few led to successful sales. The money he made out of this e-marketing effort was far less enough to pay the SEO services. So what was wrong? Indeed “air conditioning” has high search volume, but it doesn’t have high search value for sales. If we are targeting leads for selling A, we are targeting people who would like to buy A, not people who just want to, for example, get some general information about A, or repair A, or install A. I am not saying A is not worth doing at all. I just have to say we might not achieve our goal by only targeting A.

What is the solution then? Keywords combinations. In my point of view, we need to think all the relevant keywords in three levels. Then we can decide our keywords combinations as per our marketing budget, short term and long term goals.

Basic Level – Specific Keywords

For example if we are selling used cars, it’s highly likely that we sell some popular models way many than others. Perhaps “used model A cars” only has 5% search volume compared with that of “used cars”. It is still worth doing because when a client search for specific keyword he/she would have a strong will to buy this specific product or service. The chance of making a successful deal is relatively the highest. Additionally this kind of keywords are normally not very difficult to achieve. Therefore we can target more than one specific keywords simultaneously which times our chances of getting potential clients.

Medium Level – Range Keywords

Range keywords are a good part of the big picture. I’ll still use “used cars” as an example. If our shop is located in Melbourne, “used cars Melbourne” is one of the range keywords. This category has higher search volume than specific keywords and relatively good value for sales, although not as good as that of specific keywords. The competition of doing this kind of keywords is often higher than that of specific keywords.

Top Level – Broad Keywords

The last level is just what it is. Now we are talking about “used cars”. Keywords like this are really hard to achieve. We will get remarkable impressions (when people see our site listed in the search result) and clicks (when people click our site in the search result), yet not necessarily good sales. Whether we should do this category or not depends on lot of factors which I will try explaining later.

Now we are clear about these keywords levels and we can get down to a good sheet of our keywords combinations. In my next article I will talk about how to decide the keywords in these three levels based on the size, the characteristic and the locality of the business.

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I should say this is not a small topic. Actually there is no single standard to follow. Yet we all love good websites just as much as search engines do. Only by building an awesome site can we lay a solid foundation for our ambitious e-marketing plan. Although it is very hard to give absolute answers to this big question, we can still discuss some general rules.

Neat Layout

People love reading beautiful pages and we should make our pages easy to read. We need to take many factors such as fonts, colour scheme and spacing into consideration while designing. We want people feel comfortable when visiting our site otherwise we’d be wasting precious opportunities. As for search engine’s part, many site owners think the search bot is not able to understand aesthetics because they are machines. However modern search engines do measure some basic visual parameters of a webpage and they can at least tell what is a bad layout. Though not big, their measurement is one of the ranking factors. One extreme example is using black colour font on a black background which might result in being removed from Google index, because Google bot would recognise it as content hiding.

Original Content

I bet you would feel very angry to see the same content again and again when you are seriously looking for something important. Search engines hate plagiarism even more than humans do because for any search engine the lifeline is the quality of search results. If they serve users with bad repeating content, no one would ever use it again. Therefore not only do we love reading high quality original content, but also search engines give very high weight to an original page. I’ve seen sites, not fancy,  few back links,  yet filled with tons of unique information, rank top 3 for very competitive terms. So however time and energy consuming it is, creating appealing and original content is totally worth doing.

Highly Logical Structure

You’ve got good materials in hand and now you need to organise them well. It’s about hierarchy, priority and category. When I visit a site, I would expect to dig inside smoothly otherwise I’ll be tired and upset and losing my interest easily. Search engines are just logical creations and they analyse and estimate  a website’s structure faster and often better than us.

Lightning Response

Assuming all hardware and software conditions are ideal, can your site be loaded within one second? Of course everybody can do it if there is only one sentence on the site. So the problem is how can we make the content as rich as possible while lowering the loading time. Search engines understand this impatient human nature very well so they give considerable amount of ranking juice to sites which load really fast. I have to say this is something really technological. Although there are some many website builders out there, only a few can actually do this speed optimisation job. So be patient when choosing your site development service.

These factors listed above are just a few to mention, however they are definitely main factors of building a both human and search engine friendly website.

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