Marketing on Internet Road 

This section is based on WSI White Paper on Pay per Click (PPC): "Don't Leave Your Money on the Table. Your Guide to Paid Search".

Here are the top 5 reasons why a company must consider Paid Search Advertising (PPC):

1. Targeted marketing. It does not get more targeted than this. You are able to advertise your products and services to those that are looking for them, when they are looking for them (even with the ability to choose their location by geo-targeting those potential customers).

2. Instant traffic. I am a big believer in SEO for many reasons. However, SEO takes time and is in a way limited in the number of keywords you can optimize your site for. PPC is now and is limited only by your budget! Furthermore - see our post on using PPC for SEO to understand better why PPC will do your SEO only good.

3. Marketing during the purchase phase. PPC enables you to research which keywords your prospects are using in each of their purchasing phase, to prepare the proper content on your site to answer their needs (since you want them coming to you early in the process, and keep them coming), as well address them with the right message to convert them to the desired goals in that phase.

4. Measured budgets. As low as you can afford. See what works for you; increase when it's needed and pause when the situation calls for that.

5. Higher conversion rates. Done and managed properly, the conversion rates (your goals) should be higher than those achieved with any other medium.

As part of WSI Internet & Search Engine Marketing Experts Series, we are publishing each month a white paper and a webinar of a specific topic. You can find those white paper as well as a recorded version of the webinar and details on the next webinar at WSI E-Services Internet & Search Engine Marketing White Papers and Webinars section.

Comments and feedback are always welcomed

The design of a website is one of the most important aspects when talking about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In fact, SEO starts before the site's design in a way that the site's design should match the results of the initial SEO analysis for this specific site.

As much as content is important (very important!) it's not everything. The site architecture is (also) critical.
Here are the required steps to design your site for SEO:

1. Identify your keywords
Do a proper keywords analysis to find those keywords your SEO campaign (and your site and your business) should compete on.
When in your keywords analysis, look for those that have a lot of traffic and are very general as well as for those "long-tail keywords" that have less traffic but show higher purchase intent. Pick those that are right for you.

2. Construct you site according to your keyword
Collect those keywords per service/product that you are offering with one single keyword as the leading one for this page (yes, one keyword for one page) and the other to be used as supportive keywords since related terms are very important.

3. Plan your pages meta tags
With the keywords in mind, prepare the proper meta tags for your pages. Put a special emphasis on your title (the most important one from all!), a little less on your description and almost nothing on your keywords tag.

4. Plan your pages content
For every page, make sure you are using your keywords and the related once properly. Aim for a situation where you have 3-5 appearances for every 100 words. In addition, plan your header correctly: make only one main header (H1 HTML tag) and several sub-headers (H2 tag)

5. Create your internal linking map
Related pages should be connected. Search engines wish to see that there is related content to the page. In addition, this will also create your links to the pages, which is one of the main aspects of SEO success.

Now, you should have your site's map and structure that you can give to the designer and start working on the copy of the pages.

In conclusion, the way for a successful website design for SEO is simply to start your SEO efforts before the design and match the design to the best practices of Search Engine Optimization.

Comments and feedback are always welcomed

Why SEO is Important for your Business?

Conducting professional SEO for your website - such that should bring you to the first page of Google for searches on your products and services - can help your business with:

1. Gain visibility for your business

Good (white hat) SEO will make sure your website and its pages are listed on Google and the other search engines for much more visibility of your business online.

2. Brand recognition

Successful companies are now expected to rank high on Google and employ a Search Engine Marketing strategy as part of their marketing plans. Getting high rankings on Google will mean your brand is recognized by your target market and gets the proper recognition it deserves.

3. Get more business

Why go around? SEO should bring leads/prospects/potential customers to your business (online) exactly when they are searching for your products and services.

4.Cut costs

Compared to traditional media, you can experience better results with much lower investment (and make sure it is an investment and not an expense...

5. Get business insight

Using Google Analytics properly together with your SEO efforts, you are in a position to get valuable insight on the behavior of your prospects and customers and much more knowledge on their buying funnel (your sales funnel).

6. Stay ahead of the competition

Dominating the search engines' listings will position you as the top business in your industry and will drive bigger portion of the target market to you (rather than to your competitors).

The above points mean simply: If you are running a website for your business it is a must that you optimize it so that it gets found on the search engines by people looking for your products and services.

If your website is not visible on search engines, you are missing out on leads and a lot of potential business. Don't wait anymore and engage in a professional Search Engine Optimization process for your website.

Comments and feedback are always welcomed

Keywords analysis is one of the most important factors for any SEO project (some will say it's the single most important factor). However, in a broad Internet Marketing and Search Engine Marketing perspective, it is very much useful for web design and for PPC as well.

Keywords analysis in web design will be discussed in a future post. In this post, let's see how we can benefit from the keywords analysis in Pay per Click campaigns and furthermore - how the proper analysis of the keywords in PPC should help the SEO efforts.

Your initial keywords analysis should yield a list of the most important keywords you wish to target and compete on with you SEO project. Those are the keywords that you wish to be ranked high organically on the SERP (there are multiple resources available for the techniques and best practices in finding the right keywords for the SEO project and we will explain our approach in future posts). However, the one key ingredient for SEO is that one keyword equals one page. Simply put - you need to select a list of keywords and for each of the keywords you will need to have one page on your website optimized for that specific keyword and with valuable relevant content around this keyword. Unless you have (or planning on having) a very big site, your site will contain about a dozen keywords you will be competing on.

With PPC however, the situation is completely different: an average Pay per Click campaign should contain hundreds of keywords. You should still maintain a relevance between the keyword and the ad's landing page since (1) you wish to maintain high Click Through Rate (CTR) and make sure your visitors do convert, and (2) Google gives your landing page a score that influences your impressions, cost and overall performance of the campaign. However, you can find a lot more keywords that are relevant to your content without the need to pick up one to optimize for.


So, how do we combine between the keywords in PPC and our SEO efforts:

When you analyze the performance of your PPC campaign, give special attention to the performance of your keywords. With the multiple reports available on Google Adwords you can easily find out those keywords that perform better for you (sure - there are other reasons to take into account such as the ad's title and content, but we will ignore them for the benefit of making things simpler now).

The result of this analysis of the keywords performance should be applied in adjusting your bids as well as dropping the keywords that show poor performance.

Now, take a look at the conversion ratios on your site: there are keywords that drove visitors you wish to have to your site, and not only that they landed on your site, they even achieved the goals you wanted them to achieve (i.e. - converted).

Per each landing page, pick the one that performs the best and - assuming you have done a good job with the keywords analysis for your PPC -  you should be able to find a winner for optimizing this page for the organic listings. Furthermore, you should be able to find secondary keywords that should also appear on the page, support the main keyword and give you better results.

The last step is to track the ranking and the other factor of your SEO efforts and with this analysis to adjust back the PPC campaign on its keywords, it bids as well as its ads content.

Don't forget that with proper SEO efforts, you can simply drop keywords from your PPC campaign since you already are placed on the first SERP which means - reduced spending with better results. Now, isn't a combination of SEO and PPC seems an interesting thing to do? :-)


From a keywords analysis point-of-view, an interesting strategy could even be to start with a Pay per Click campaign (before doing any proper SEO on your site) and once the insight from the PPC campaign is analyzed  and the correct keywords are selected, optimize the site and its pages for the organic listings.

Comments and feedback are always welcomed.

When talking about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), we keep repeating the fact that content is probably the most important factor.

It does not matter how well you are optimizing your web pages with any of the meta tags, how many incoming links you are creating and how much you are using the Google Webmaster Tools if your content is poor. Since we basically live in the era of Google, the importance of content is obvious since it was Google that placed the idiom "Content is King".

The internet and SEO blogs is full with articles and explanations on the importance of content for SEO. I wish to bring just one additional perspective that is perhaps not being emphasized enough.

We were optimizing one of our clients, a Hyundai car dealership in Antwerp. The home page was optimized for a general phrase  (Hyundai dealer in Antwerpen) and the description entered was “De Hyundai garage van Antwerpen: Zoekt  U nu een nieuwe Hyundai auto? Liever een tweedehands auto met garantie? Moorkens Antwerpen Hyundai dealer staat klaar”.

Couple of weeks after the SEO project had started, while doing a review on the status of the site, we found the home page to rank on the first page of Google for a keyphrase we didn’t plan for – “Hyudani Testrit”. The nice thing was that Google decided to rank this page for this keyphrase while scanning the page content and analyzing that it has good content for this phrase. The result was that the text that appeared in Google SERP as the description was “Moorkens Antwerpen maakt Uw aankoopervaring zo simpel mogelijk. Maak een testrit met één van onze experts en ondervindt de sublieme kwaliteit van onze Hyundai wagens” and not the Description meta tag that was placed on the page.

Obviously, this opened for us opportunity we didn’t consider and we continued to optimize the client for this phrase (ranked number 1 in Belgium now…).

The lesson was learned and it helps us a lot to explain to customers the value of content as well as taught us to look for unplanned opportunities.

Comments and feedback are welcome always.