Most businesses know they need a website and search marketing, so many just do it. But there’s a huge range in how much you can invest. Seeing the likely profit scenarios will enable you to invest wisely. The fact is that, with professional help, you can predict the ROI of Read more
Short answer: like you do for everything else–create an annual budget. Search marketing channels and tactics proliferate so that only the largest companies can do it all in one year. Prioritizing and then estimating labor time and vendor costs will produce your annual budget, but that requires rare breadth and Read more
This post summarizes and reflects further on Rob Laporte’s “The Hard Freakonomics of Search Marketing for Small Business,” published in the Winter 2012-13 edition of Visibility Magazine. Hard Freakonomic consequences follow from the fact that display systems and the brain deal with only a few search results per search. The Read more
PageRank sculpting directs the flow of search engine spiders, indexing, PageRank, and other trust and authority assignations by using tools to open and close valves in the pipes of your website’s hierarchy. PageRank sculpting is vital to SEO management of large, dynamic websites, and it helps smaller websites doing redesigns. Read more
This graph reveals in one view how web marketing managers should think about allocating resources among SEO tactics. Study it first, and then let’s talk (well, I’ll talk about it, and I hope to hear back from you). This graph and the Marketing Sherpa survey it comes from illustrate the Read more
The Global banking crisis prompted me to contemplate whether search marketing firms – or for that matter any professional services firm — should loan money to their clients. The practice of firms loaning clients money under 30 to 60 day terms is so common that it suppresses the kind of Read more
A paid initial consultation in web marketing prioritizes what you should even consider, projects ROI that you can later track, and thus produces a proposal honed to your precise needs. In theory, an initial free consultation can do the same as a paid consultation, but in reality the proposing firm’s Read more
Google Analytics and paid software like Omniture provide tons of potentially useful information, but the amount of information can overwhelm and paralyze if you don’t distill it into a minimal executive summary. While every business has unique needs for metrics, all businesses want to see the resulting cash, so I Read more
No, there isn’t. It amazes me that, given the huge benefit of having a CMS and ecommcerce system automate SEO, no pre-built solution does so optimally. DISC has reviewed many of the top candidates, and while some are better than others, and most can be coded for much better SEO, Read more
As SEO options proliferate, and as websites and their web marketing intricacies proliferate, an ever greater percentage of time should be spent assessing and prioritizing. Just plunging into this or that tactic may seem to save on overhead, but it can waste plenty more time than you’d spend in proper Read more