When it comes to getting traffic to your site, there are pros and cons associated with every traffic generation method.

There are also costs. Some are obvious, such as the monetary cost of paying to run an ad in a newsletter or on a search engine. Some are not so obvious, such as the time and possibly monetary cost of harnessing search engine optimization or viral marketing.

As discussed in yesterday’s feature article, it’s important to be aware of all the relevant costs and make choices accordingly. Otherwise you could end up paying much, much more for something than you first expected.

In particular, there is often a large, yet not-so-obvious cost, associated with relying on seemingly free traffic generation methods such as search engine optimization (SEO) and article marketing. Many Internet marketers are attracted to these methods because they don’t necessarily involve any hard costs (unless you hire people to help you). But, apart from the time taken to do them – for example, the time taken to optimize your website, write articles, seek back-links, etc – there is another significant cost.

It’s the opportunity cost associated with not knowing how appealing your product or service offer is, or how effective your conversion tactics are.

There is often a lag between when you begin SEO and article marketing and when you start generating significant traffic. That being so, days, weeks, months – even years – could go by while you wait for enough traffic to be able to assess how appealing is your offer and effective are your conversion tactics.

Given that you didn’t pay anything while you waited, you might be content with that. But what if, after all those days, weeks or months go by, you discover that no-one wants to buy your product, or that your current conversion mechanism is an abject failure?

Not only did you waste time on doing SEO or article marketing… but you missed the opportunity to spend time on alternative offers or conversion tactics that WOULD have generated results.

So what’s the alternative? It’s to aim for FAST rather than FREE. It’s to pony up some money to invest in advertising – such as (but not just) pay-per-click advertising with the objective of TESTING your product or service, your offer, and your conversion mechanism (e.g. landing page).

Sure, this may cost a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars. That may sound scary… but if it ends up SAVING you weeks, months (or more) of wasted time and ignorance about what does and doesn’t work… it’s actually very cost-effective.

None of this is to say that you should neglect SEO, article marketing or other (seemingly) free traffic generation methods, or that you should just focus on paid advertising to test what does and does not work. It should be noted that there ARE ways to generate substantial search engine traffic in a relatively short amount of time WITHOUT paying for advertising… In this case, it may be possible to generate traffic FAST and (somewhat) FREE.

The point is, however, to fully assess the costs AND opportunities involved in each traffic generation method available to you BEFORE choosing one or the other.

Recently, we’ve heard a lot about the economy. How banks have gone bust, people are buying less, tech companies are laying off people, how we’re in (or headed for) recession, and so on.

If you’re like me, you can see the opportunity in all this. I firmly believe that this is a time when the pretenders will fall away, and only the strongest will survive and thrive.

But what about another kind of economy that really does doom Internet marketers? In fact, it’s the kind of economy that dooms us in good times and in bad.

It’s the ‘false economy’ i.e. the circumstance where you aim to save in one area… without realizing that what you save actually COSTS YOU MUCH MORE overall.

A great example of this is someone who drives across town to find the cheapest gas station… but ends up paying MORE in fuel costs (not to mention time) based on driving the car to find the cheapest gas station!

Unfortunately, I see the same phenomenon among small businesses and, in particular, Internet marketers. Actually, I’ve been guilty of it myself.

There seems to be, for example, a common tendency to try to avoid anything - whether it’s information, software or traffic generation methods - that costs money.

Now, there’s NOTHING wrong with looking for low-cost or free ways to do things, but the question is: is there a false economy in doing so?

Will the time you spend trying to cobble together your own website really be time well spent? If it takes you 6 weeks of struggle as you try to learn how to put together a website… is that really cheaper than enrolling in a web design course and learning how to do it properly? Or than paying someone to design and develop the website for you?

Even if you ARE an accomplished web designer… is your time better spent designing all your websites, or doing something else that has much more value (such as marketing)?

Or if you insist on using only free traffic generation methods such as search engine optimization (SEO) or article marketing… are these really free?

Or is there a price to be paid in terms of the TIME you must spend on SEO and article marketing to generate meaningful results?

And could you have learned what does or does not work much FASTER and ultimately more cheaply had you invested a few hundred dollars in pay-per-click advertising?

In some cases, the choice to take the ‘free’ option may entirely sound. But, as the saying goes, nothing in life is free. There is always a price to pay, whether it’s in terms of time, money or both.

On that basis, I would urge you to consider the obvious and not-so obvious costs of everything you do… and decide, on that basis, which is actually a false economy… and which will genuinely be cost-effective overall.

William Flaiz has written an interesting article in Search Engine Watch. He suggests that the days of compartmentalizing search engine optimization (SEO) are over and that a holistic approach is now what’s required to win in the new environment of “universal search”.

Argues Mr Flaiz:

“An integrated approach across multiple disciplines is the only way to address the diverse nuances of the new SERPs. We can tame universal search if we address it from all fronts: SEO, paid search, social media, Web development and user experience design.”

The article is aimed at SEO agencies but the principle remains the same for SEO departments or individual search engine optimizers. A holistic approach is required if we’re to achieve optimum results.

For instance, we’re currently working with a client to:

1. Optimize some new product pages;
2. Prepare press releases for those products; and
3. Write articles related to those products and website pages.

By understanding the underlying keyword strategy and taking an integrated approach we can ensure that each of these items work together to enhance our client’s search engine ranking for the terms it’s targeting. After all, although the methods are seemingly disparate, the objective is quite singular: a higher listing in the organic results.

And given the (growing) number of Internet “assets” - website, press releases, images, videos, pages on social media sites, and so on - the demand for a holistic approach is only likely to grow.

Bottom line: rather than approach any given SEO tactic in isolation, approach it as one component of an overall effort where your main aim is to optimize your presence on the search engines for the keywords that deliver you the maximum number of targeted, qualified prospects.

Source: William Flaiz, “Universal Search: The (War) Elephant in the Room”, Search Engine Watch, November 10, 2008

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but I got spammed by an SEO consulting company yesterday. I get hundreds of spam emails per day, but this particular email stood out because it was sent by an Australian company based in my own city. A company that should have known better. (I’m tempted to name and shame them, but I really don’t want to give them any link value!)

Since we offer Internet marketing services, seeing this email made me MAD. It’s actions like this that give our industry a bad name. But I’m even more stunned at how DUMB this company is to send out generic emails offering its SEO services. There are so many things wrong with this picture, I couldn’t possibly list them all in this email, but let’s discuss three aspects that should have been obvious:

1. Sending out spam is against the law. I believe sending unsolicited commercial email is illegal in the United States and other countries. It certainly is in Australia, and has been for many years now. As a prospective client: could I really trust a company that so blatantly breaks the law?

2. Sending out spam is wrong from an Internet marketing point of view. It shows disrespect to Internet users and also makes me wonder: what would this company do regarding SEO if I did engage them? What kind of black or grey hat tactics would they use that might jeopardize my business?

3. The email itself was not personally addressed to anyone at our firm, and was a generic offer to provide SEO services. Had the sender bothered to look at our website they would have noticed that we were a COMPETITOR. One operating in the same city and country at that!

Actually, there’s a fourth issue worth mentioning…

4. Out of curiosity I visited the company’s website. The headline read: “Guaranteed Lowest Prices for Web Marketing & SEO”. Now, maybe there is a market for “cheap” web marketing and search engine optimization services. But to me, that’s a bit like a law firm advertising itself with the same line: “Guaranteed Lowest Prices for Legal Advice.”

Um… do you want the cheapest legal advice around… or do you want the best, most cost-effective legal advice that delivers the results you want? The same principle applies to Internet marketing services – especially SEO. Do you want to pay the cheapest prices… or do you want to get the best results for your money?

Cost-effective… value for money… affordable. They’re all terms that may be appropriate. But “Guaranteed Lowest Prices” sounds like their running a discount store. Not the kind of company I would want as my trusted SEO advisor…

What should you do when the top few search engine results for your company include one or more listings that are blatantly negative? Articles that are wrong, biased, misleading or worse?

One approach is to contact your lawyer. If the person behind the negative listing has lied or defamed you or your company, you may have a case for defamation. But litigation is costly. Moreover, the culprit in question may not necessarily have defamed you in the legal sense. They may have simply published an item of ‘free speech’ that is negative, but not strictly defamatory.

Another approach is to complain to the search engines. But they’re unlikely to do anything unless you can show them that the negative listing is unlawful or the result of ‘gaming’ the search engines.

A more practical approach is to beat the negative listing at their own game: use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to push down their listing in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Now, as with anything to do with SEO, you can take a ‘white hat’, ‘black hat’ or ‘grey hat’ approach. A ‘black hat’ approach is to try to game the search engines; a ‘white hat’ approach is to follow the ‘rules’ i.e. the rules of relevance and authority; and a ‘grey’ hat approach is somewhere in between the two.

The problem with black and grey approaches is that while you may be able to get rid of the negative listing in the short term… in the long term you run the risk of losing your own listing altogether and damaging your reputation among the search engines.

This is rarely a risk worth taking when dealing with your company and/or brand name and main website.

On that basis, a ‘white hat’ approach is the only approach I recommend for optimizing your main site AND for defending against threats to your search engine positioning and/or reputation.

And what if you actually rank highest for your company name anyway, and are simply trying to get rid of a negative listing that sits BELOW your listing? In that case, it’s not so much a matter of optimizing your main site or page any further… but to get other favorable listings to rise above, and push out, the negative listing.

One way to do that is to build and optimize alternative websites… but that’s likely to take a long time and a lot of effort on your part. This is because, among other things, the search engines tend to be slow to rank brand new domains highly in the SERPs.

Here’s a much easier - and more effective - way suggested by Aaron Shear: build a presence on various popular social media sites.

The search engines tend to rank the popular social media sites highly. Therefore, by establishing a page on all the major social media sites - Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and so on - you’ll have a shot at getting those pages ranked… and ranked higher than the negative listing you’re trying to get off the first few pages of results.

The key, of course, is to put some unique, compelling content on those pages, and attract in-bound links to those pages from authoritative sites. But it may not be as difficult as you think. Placing videos on YouTube, for example, is something you might be interested in doing anyway, and will likely to have many benefits (in terms of traffic and conversions) other than ousting those negative sites from the top listings.

Indeed, building a presence on the popular social media sites is a recommended traffic and SEO strategy and, by including links to your main site, can also aid in achieving or maintaining a high ranking for your main site.

It’s certainly your best bet in terms of getting rid of those negative listings that just don’t seem to go away.

Source: Aaron Shear, “Maintaining Your Company’s Image in the SERPs”, Search Engine Watch, November 4, 2008

Google recently added a tool to Webmaster Tools that shows links directed at 404 pages on your website.

Running the tool will generate a report that lists the links pointing to 404 pages. Useful, since (among other things) links to 404 pages don’t pass any ‘authority’ from a search engine optimization (SEO) point of view.

Armed with your report you will be able to contact the sites linking to those 404 pages and ask them to redirect or change those links. Alternatively, you can use 301 redirects to effectively pass the link authority over to one of the ‘real’ pages on your site.

Source: Frank Watson, “Google’s New Tools for Site Link Strengthening”, Search Engine Watch, Oct 17, 2008

Want our firm, Kikabink, some other search engine optimization company, or someone on your staff to assist with your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts? Well, before you get your SEO program underway, it’s a good idea to have clear answers to these three (3) questions:

1. What is your goal?

Sure, it might be higher rankings… but it probably isn’t. It’s more likely to be increasing qualified traffic to your website, right? Unfortunately, some companies get sold on the promise of higher rankings… and indeed they get higher rankings… but for keywords that don’t generate any meaningful or qualified leads. Your best bet is to ensure your SEO provider understands what your true goal is, and not to be ‘wowed’ by meaningless promises of high rankings.

Sadly, SEO consultants and clients can often get caught up in details and metrics that, at the end of the day, are irrelevant to the true goal. Perhaps more than in any other area of marketing, it can be easy to fixate on rankings, click through rates, keyword density and other statistics, that guide us towards - but in no way signify our arrival at - our goal.

So before you get started with SEO, I suggest being very clear about what you (really) want.

2. When do you want to achieve your goal?

Once you’ve defined your goal, the next question is when do you want to achieve it. Depending on how competitive is your market from a SEO perspective, getting higher, meaningful rankings may take several months. Getting to the first page, or in the first few spots on the first page, may take several more.

Now it’s not unheard of for companies in highly competitive fields to leap from nowhere to the first page of results within 6 months. But there are all kinds of reasons for jumps of this magnitude, and it’s not wise to assume it will happen for your site. So, in general, it’s wise to view SEO as a long-term process that requires continued effort.

On the other hand, if you need desperately need more traffic, you may be better off using another means of getting it e.g. advertising, partnering or joint-venturing with others, etc.

3. What are you prepared to pay (not just in money) to achieve your goal?

You didn’t really believe SEO was free did you? Like anything worthwhile, there are costs involved - whether in terms of your (or your staff’s) time, the costs of engaging someone to implement the raft of activities that SEO involves, or other resources. And keep in mind that just because you hire an SEO firm, you may still need to do plenty of work yourself. In fact, it’s all too common for companies to hire SEO consultants who, as promised, give them plenty of advice on what to do - and how to do it - in order to achieve higher rankings. Problem is, those companies don’t have the resources to implement all that advice.

Someone has to optimize the website… someone has to install the analytics scripts… someone has to upload the optimized pages to the website… someone has to write the press releases and articles… someone has to distribute those press releases and articles… someone has to monitor the SEO performance.

And someone has to manage all these people and processes.

Are you going to do that? Is your SEO consultant going to do it? Apart from the budget required to get your SEO firm’s advice… do you have the budget to implement their advice?

All in all, when evaluating the extent to which you wish to pursue SEO - and the return on investment (ROI) you expect - keep in mind the costs involved.

Now for the good news: if you CAN answer each of these questions – and your answers indicate that SEO is well worth the effort - you are well on your way to implementing an unstoppable SEO ‘machine’. A machine that will consistently pump out the necessary content, attract the right back-links, and do everything required to lift your search engine rankings.

Could it be that we don’t really need to get the first spot on the search engine results pages (SERPs) in order to attract our most qualified prospects i.e. the supposed 20 percent of prospects who generate 80 percent of sales?

Well, some research from MarketingSherpa indicates there might be some truth in this…

In a recent study, MarketingSherpa found that certain kinds of search engine users are prepared to wade through more SERPs than one might normally expect. It found that among industrial engineers:

• 14 percent just looked at the first few results on the first page of results;
• 39 percent looked at the first page of results;
• 10 percent stopped looking after the second page of results; and
• 37 percent looked through more than two pages of results.

MarketingSherpa reckons these findings would be typical of niche searchers. Presumably, anyone highly motivated to find uncommon (i.e. niche) information is more inclined to look through more pages of results than other kinds of searchers.

Given that search engine optimization (SEO) - like anything - comes at a cost, it *may* follow that at a certain point it may no longer be cost-effective to keep striving to become number in the SERPs, simply because niche prospects are prepared to look through more results anyway.

Maybe…

Source: MarketingSherpa, “New Chart: Optimize All Your Web Pages For Niche Searchers Seeking Relevant Results”, MarketingSherpa, October 14, 2008

Over at Micro Persuasion, Steve Rubel reports on some research by Forrester Research, Inc. indicating that RSS penetration among Internet users may have peaked at 11 percent.

Yes, you read that right: just 11 percent.

Sure, almost 50 percent of Internet businesses have added RSS feeds to their websites, and RSS adoption among Internet users has increased from 2 percent in 2005 to 11 percent now. But if Forrester Research’s findings are accurate then of the 89 percent of users who don’t use RSS feeds, only 16 percent are somewhat interested, and just 3 percent are very interested, in using them.

According to Forrester, marketers have not done enough to promote the benefits of RSS to their customers. Probably because they’re too busy promoting the benefits of RSS to other marketers! And there ARE benefits - just ask a guy like Peter Drew about the power of RSS in terms of search engine optimization.

But when it comes to consumers using RSS, maybe Steve Rubel is right when he says that “feeds are way too geeky for most and the benefit does not outweigh the learning curve.”

Rubel also makes a great point: just because RSS adoption may have peaked, it doesn’t mean other online optin communications aren’t working. Writes Rubel:

“The Facebook newsfeed, Twitter and Friendfeed are perfect examples of opt-in vehicles that bring content you care about to you… In each case, you’re total in control. You can unsubscribe from individuals or groups and tailor the stream so that what you want finds you… RSS is only one form of opt-in communications. The potential is bigger when you look more broadly to social networking. This larger promise still holds and as the technologies become more invisible the newsfeed could even one day subsume RSS.”

Source: Steve Rubel, “RSS Adoption at 11% and it May Be Peaking, Forrester Says”, Micro Persuasion, October 20, 2008

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has a lot going for it… but if you’re relying on it for traffic, here’s a reality check: when it comes to attracting clicks, the overwhelming majority of search engine users click on natural or organic listings rather than paid listings.

According to research by MarketingSherpa, natural or organic listings attract 94 to 97 percent of all search engine clicks, while paid links attract just 3-6 percent.

In terms of how the percentages differ between the three major search engines, here are the stats:

1. Google

• 94 percent of clicks are on natural listings
• 6 percent of clicks are on paid listings

2. Yahoo

• 94 percent of clicks are on natural listings
• 6 percent of clicks are on paid listings

3. MSN Live

• 97 percent of clicks are on natural listings
• 3 percent of clicks are on paid listings

And that’s why serious online businesses are wise to focus on search engine optimization at some stage in their development.

Source: MarketingSherpa, “New Research Reveals What’s Working In Search: Telseminar Transcript, Slideshow, PDF”, MarketingSherpa, October 2, 2008