Wow! That’s a lot of potential visitors if you nail a top spot. But how targeted will it be? Let’s look at the competition. A quick search of Google shows that we have 22,000,000 competing pages; many about New York style pizza, not about pizza actually located in New York.

A bit more research shows us that “New York City pizza” has monthly potential traffic of about 63,000 and much less competition at 6,480,000. Now, that’s a big difference!

We still have plenty of potential visitors but now with only about one-third the competition (6,480,000 compared to 22,000,000).

Let’s try again. How about “NYC pizza?”

Wow! 58,000 monthly searches and only 2,990,000 competing pages. Talk about a no-brainer!

“NYC pizza” Close-up shows the lowest competition yet

You get the idea. Not all keywords are created equal. Consider these three possible scenarios…

• Some might bring you thousands of people who are not even looking for what you have to offer.

• Others might bring in all the business you can handle.

• Still others might attract a good number of visitors interested in a free offer but not becoming a paying customer.

Knowing how to spot the best keywords is one of the most important things your SEO company can do for you – or that you can do for yourself if need be.

There is so much more to keywords than we can cover here. The topic could easily fill an entire book itself – and actually has many times over. Just know that a true SEO expert has spent years sharpening his or her skills in this area – and for good reason; keyword selection is crucial to your success.

A GEO is simply a geographic point of reference, such as a town, city, or state.

When properly combined, keywords and GEOs are what targeted search engine traffic is all about.

For example, if you have a pizza parlor in New York City, you would want to be very specific about your business type (product or service) – in this case pizza, as well as your location.

The keyword will most likely be “pizza”, unless you specialize in a particular type of pizza for which you want to be known. But the GEO might take some thought. Let’s work through it…

“New York” is the state name but also a shortened version of the city name; aka “New York, New York.” But is it more? In this case, yes. New York style pizza is very popular, sold all over the country and often simply called “New York Pizza.”

Using one of several available tools, a good SEO professional would start by looking at the potential volume in terms of monthly traffic you could expect based on either a broad match or exact match of the selected keyword. Let’s try a broad match for the keyword “New York pizza” using Google’s keyword tool.

The next two posts will cover this in great detail.

Several years ago, Google introduced its natural text algorithm (NTA) and the game was forever changed. Before that, it was easy to write just what a search engine bot wanted to see and gain top rankings for your efforts. Not so today. Nowadays you need to walk a precarious line between what the search engine needs to see and what your visitor wants to see. And this is a good thing.

Do you remember some of those top-ranking pages from the early 2000’s? What a bunch of junk! Here’s an example of then versus now…

Then:

“Plumber Boston available for emergency services plumbing for plumbing problems from master plumbers Boston.”

Now:

“Looking for an emergency services plumber in Boston? Look no further! Our certified and bonded master plumbers will have your plumbing related problems fixed in no time. We are punctual, courteous and always happy to be of help.”

What a difference! Who would you rather call: the robot or the nice friendly plumber? Google knows the answer and that’s why they added their natural text algorithm. They value the user – and thus their experience – on any site shown in their results.

All this said, if you ever have to choose between two seemingly equally qualified SEO people, choose the better writer. That bet will pay off in spades every time.

The next time you are hiring, or re-evaluating current employee job duties, make it a priority to identify a good writer. Then be prepared to eventually develop him or her into an SEO copywriter. Again, I say eventually. This is not something that will happen overnight but copywriting (of any kind) is a skill set that pays for itself many times over – and SEO copywriting accounts for about 25% of your SEO success.

In fact, most websites don’t need to be submitted because the search engine spiders (AKA / crawlers and bots) will find them through inbound links. But of course, this means you have to have inbound links from web pages that the search engine visits, which in turn means you might be waiting a while before a spider ever crawls your site.

So is it better to submit your site to the search engines or should you just wait for them to find you? The answer is, an ambiguous, “it depends.” It depends on if you have the time to wait for a spider to naturally find your site. It depends on if you believe the rumor that Google gives less credit to sites that were submitted rather than found naturally. It depends on how you plan to submit your site, if you head in that direction. Yes indeed, it depends.

I tend to err on the safe side and not submit sites to Google and to only hand submit sites to Yahoo! and Bing. As for Google, I concentrate on quality inbound links to get the site picked up naturally and quickly by creating links on pages that Google considers “fresh,” meaning they come back and spider the content regularly – often daily.

And what was that about hand submitting? Why on earth would I take the time to manually submit a website to a search engine when I can have a piece of software do it cheaply or even free in a matter of seconds? That’s simple. I submit sites by hand because that’s what the search engines require. Not “request” but require.

Using a piece of software to submit your URL to Bing and Yahoo! might save you a few minutes work, but it could cost you the ability to get listed. And let’s be reasonable, they are ready to send you thousands of dollars in free sales and all they ask is that you abide by their requirements and hand-submit your URL. It’s a no-brainer. Get typing or have someone do it for you.

Unfortunately, some SEO companies who claim to provide call tracking of the organic search results actually hard code a unique number on your website.  This might be in the form of text or an image. Either way, it eliminates your ability to find out if that visitor reached your page through organic efforts or otherwise.

The only thing this does is tell you that the caller found that number on your website; however, in this case you have no idea how they arrived at your site.  They could have been referred from another site or PPC campaign or typed your URL directly into their address bar – none of which would be the result of search engine optimization.  As a business owner it is extremely important to know which marketing dollars are producing results (calls in this case) and which are not.

Many of our customers also purchase additional unique phone numbers which they can utilize in other marketing vehicles (yellow pages, direct mail, newspaper, radio, etc.).  If they are all feeding into one call tracking console you will have one place where you can easily review the effectiveness of all your marketing campaigns.  Now that’s powerful!

1. That particular phone number is called only when the person searching found it on your website, and…

2. Only if it was found by clicking on an organic search match that led them to that page.

The rare exception is when someone writes down that (script generated) phone number to call later. The effect however, is the same. That person found you initially through an organic search and you can easily track that fact, whether it’s now or later.

A good SEM or marketing company can take care of all the complicated bits and pieces and just let you enjoy the benefit of knowing what calls came in from where – and what was said, if that’s of interest.

Here’s what you should expect:

Expect to pay $25 to $40 per month, per additional phone line initiated for call tracking purposes and possibly a “per minute” rate of 10 or so cents. One new unique call tracking number per voice line (whose number is on your website) is usually enough. And remember, this is on inbound calls only, so your per minute costs can easily be minimized.

Expect to provide a “forward to” phone number. This can be any telephone line or even a cell phone.

Expect to be asked to record a short message or have the company do it for you – usually at no additional charge.

Expect to be given the option to have the inbound calls recorded “for quality and training purposes” (with caller notification of course).

Expect to receive a call tracking console login of your own so you can check your stats or even listen to recorded calls anytime you wish.

Expect to receive a regular report that provides all of your call stats in an easy to understand manner. This is typically provided on a monthly basis.

And finally, expect to get more useful information out of this call tracking information than you ever thought possible.

With your very first report you will be able to spot calls that dropped off in less than one minute, and even those who just hung up. You will be able to listen in on calls to see how your employees treat customers and how customers treat employees. No more “he said, she said” headaches!

Incidentally, these are real numbers taken from a real account, rounded for simplicity sake in this example. This is not guess-work. It’s historic data that a good SEM company will use regularly to tweak your ad spend and maximize your return on investment.

What was the end result? In this particular case we were able to get this client down to $1.63 per click with 38 clicks needed on average per conversion for a cost of just under $62 per conversion. When they came to us, they were spending $148 per conversion on average.

Ad ID     CPC        CTC        CPT

1              $2.00     50           $100.00

2              $2.50     60           $150.00

3              $1.75     40           $70.00

4              $1.63     38           $61.94

Does this sound crazy expensive? Here’s the really crazy part. At $148 per conversion they were still making money so they never questioned it. Now they make a TON of additional bottom line profit and continually reinvest some of the saved revenue into testing new keywords and campaigns. That’s smart business. Not all campaigns are winners like this, but their lowest producing campaign is still less than $95 per conversion on a $1,600 sale.

Just think about it. It takes only minutes to set up a goal in Google Analytics and doing so can help you increase profits exponentially. Where is the downside?

Advanced Tip: If you have a multi-part form (such as a 2 or 3-step sign-up process) you can quickly add a funnel to learn just about everything you ever wanted to know about where conversions come from, and where they go to die.

If Ad 1 is based on a keyword that costs $2 per click, and it typically takes fifty clicks before someone actually completes the call to action to become a solid conversion, you now know it takes $100 per conversion – whether that “conversion” is a form fill, sale, or whatever.

How about Ad 2? Thanks to Analytics we can see that the keyword for that ad costs an average of $2.50 and takes about sixty clicks to get a conversion; so it is costing us $2.50 x 60 = $150 per conversion. Wow! With that little bit of change tacked onto the cost per click and a few more clicks it really ads up fast.

Let’s look at Ad 3. It costs $1.75 per click and it typically takes forty clicks to convert. A little quick math tells us that $1.75 x 40 = $70 – or less than half of what Ad 2 costs per conversion.

We just multiply the Cost Per Click by the number of Clicks To Convert, to get the Cost Per Transaction (or per lead).

ID #        CPC        CTC        CPT

1              $2.00     50           $100.00

2              $2.50     60           $150.00

3              $1.75     40           $70.00

ID# = Ad Identification Number (1-3)

CPC = Cost Per Click

CTC = Clicks To Convert

CPT = Cost Per Transaction