OUTSOURCING YOUR SEO What You Should Consider

Transcription

1 OUTSOURCING YOUR SEO What You Should Consider

2 There is no debate; SEO is here to stay. Forget what you ve heard from self-proclaimed internet gurus proclaiming the death of SEO. True, SEO has changed a lot over the years but it has not died, and neither is it dying soon. Google understands the importance of SEO and this is why Matt Cutts (Head of Web Spam at Google) is constantly blogging and releasing new videos on how to do SEO effectively. Now that we have the question of the demise of SEO out of the way, let s get back to the issue at hand. If you have a website, you need to market and promote it to reach your target audience. How do you reach your potential readers? Through various ways, including , social media, and content marketing, as well as SEO. However, you do not want to reach just your target audience, you also want your website to rank higher than that of your competitors. You want the largest share of the audience that can benefit from your content. Your ultimate goal should be to have your website on the first page of Google for your target keyword phrases. According to a recent study by online agency Chitika, the first listed website gets 33% of traffic while the second one gets 18%. As you can see, the first two results get over 50% of search traffic. Therefore, if you want to get quality traffic, generate leads and make sales, you have no option but to get your site on the first page of Google for your target keywords. THE BENEFITS OF SEO SEO helps your website to get found on search engine results pages (SERPs). However, it is not just getting found, but getting found by prospects that are actually interested in what you have to offer. With proper optimization, your website can get traffic for years. If you have a good lead capture system, you can generate leads and enter them into your sales funnel for nurturing and sales closure. However, SEO does not come easy. Unlike in the last decade where simple SEO tactics like using Title, Alt and H1 tags could get your website ranking on page one of Google, today SEO has evolved to include more of off-page techniques like link building, social signals, relevant citations and listings and so on. Doing SEO on your own can take a lot of time to achieve the results you are looking for. You have to weigh between the time you want to get results and the amount of optimization you can do to determine whether to do SEO on your own. SHOULD YOU OUTSOURCE SEO? Unless you have a full-time in-house SEO department, you should outsource your SEO. Outsourcing is, most of the time, cheaper and will leave you with more time to run your business. Instead of wasting time building backlinks and constantly optimizing your website, you can hire an SEO agency to do the hard work for you. You have more important things to worry about your business such as working on your product or services, customer care, branding and so on. Outsourcing SEO is not for everyone. The competition in your industry and how quickly you want to get high rankings should help you determine whether to outsource SEO. If you are running a small niche site that has little competition, you may be able to achieve high rankings on Google doing SEO by yourself. If your product or service is in a very competitive niche, you will be better off outsourcing SEO. Not because you cannot do it by yourself, but because of the time you will spend doing SEO to get high rankings. The main benefit of outsourcing SEO is that you get high rankings quickly and save time that you can use to run other parts of your business. A comprehensive SEO plan will take a few months to implement to get results. Most professional SEO agencies will give you timelines for execution of various strategies and outline Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will help you see the effectiveness of the strategies used. o Some of the KPIs that may be tracked include: o Percentage growth in traffic over a defined cycle o Number of new leads generated over time o Brand awareness as depicted in social media mentions

3 o Website ranking for various target keywords o Number of social media followers When doing SEO, one thing you should be ready for is having patience. SEO is a long-term strategy of improving brand awareness and generating traffic. If you are in a very competitive niche, it may not be possible to get your website on the first page of Google for your target keywords within the first month. CHOOSING AN SEO AGENCY Are you ready to outsource your SEO? If so, let s look at five important things you should consider when outsourcing your SEO. 1. Keyword Research and Optimization Keyword research is one of the pillars of success of any online business. Doing SEO on the wrong target keywords will not help you generate relevant leads that will buy. Therefore, before any SEO work is done on your website, you need to know which keywords to target. You probably already have an idea of the keywords that you want your site to rank for. But are these keywords really profitable? Before the SEO agency begins the optimization work, the team should look and advise you on the keywords to target in your market. When doing keyword research, there are a number of things the agency should consider: o Relevancy: Are your target keywords relevant to your target audience? o Traffic Volume: Do the keywords get significant search volumes per month/year? o Ranking ability: How competitive are the keywords you want to target? Can your site rank fast for them? The agency can use free, commercial or proprietary tools to research your target keywords to determine how easy or difficult it will be to get your site ranking on the first page for them. Find out from the agency which keyword research tools they use. Apart from your target keywords, the agency should be able to uncover other LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords that will make your website an authority in your niche. Keyword optimization has to be done on your website content. The agency may need access to the backend of your website to add on-page elements such as H1 tags, alt and title tags. Apart from this, any content you already have posted on your site may need to be optimized with your target keywords and re-promoted. After determining the target keywords, this takes us to the next step: creating SEO-optimized content. 2. Creation of SEO-Optimized Content Content drives the web and good content will significantly improve your conversions. Good content refers to content that is optimized to be found on search engines. The content should be optimized with your target primary and LSI keywords. Look for an SEO agency that can help you create a content marketing strategy. Good content is not just about optimizing your target keywords. More than this, the content should be interesting, educational and make your readers take action. The first step to selling online is to build trust with your audience. To build trust, you need to produce educational content that will resonate well with your audience. Producing high quality content that will improve the lives of your target audience will make them start trusting you. Apart from this, you can produce quality content to position your brand as a thought leader in your industry. How to Create Great Content For your content to have the maximum impact, you need to understand your target audience. The SEO agency can help you segment your audience based on their needs in order to target them with relevant content. Depending on your industry, you can have content for beginner, intermediate or advanced audiences.

4 If you have a lead nurturing system, you can create different content for the audience based on their interaction with you. Below is an overview of the different places prospects can be with their interaction with you: o Top of the Funnel (TOFu): These are prospects that have expressed interest in your business in one form or another. The prospects here want to know more about your solution. The types of content that work well for this audience include articles, blog posts and ebooks covering beginner information of your solution. o Middle of the Funnel (MOFu): The prospects here are more advanced. They already know about your business or product and are looking for in-depth information on how they can benefit. The types of content that work well with prospects at this stage include whitepapers, instructional videos and thought-leadership articles. o Bottom of the Funnel (BOFu): These prospects know about your solution and just need a slight push or incentive to get them to buy. You can follow up on these prospects with calls, sales videos, or product demos. SEO combined with content marketing is the sauce of success in online marketing. Depending on your industry, you may need different types of content created for your website. For example, you may need a mix of articles, blog posts, ebooks, videos, slides and so on. Find out if the agency can create the different types of content based on best SEO practices. Creating content on a regular basis should be part of your SEO campaign. When trying to generate leads online, you need to keep them engaged through content for them to join your sales funnel. Why Create Content Consistently? Creating content on a regular basis is a crucial step towards achieving your overall goals of generating more leads, improving your site s ranking on search engines, and getting more sales. The State of Internet Marketing 2012 report by Hubspot has some interesting statistics: o Over 81% of companies report that their blog is critical to the success of their business. o 70% of companies indicate that they blog at least once a week. o 92% of companies that blog multiple times a day have acquired a customer from their blog. o 57% of companies indicate that they have acquired a customer through their blog. When a visitor reads your article, he may not immediately subscribe to your blog or join your list. Your marketing will be failing if it is only successful in getting new visitors but cannot retain or make them come back. To ensure repeat visitors, you need to create content consistently. 3. Measuring and Analyzing KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) SEO is wide and there are various metrics you can use to determine performance. However, not all metrics will help you towards achieving your overall business goals. Some agencies will give you a list of KPIs that they will measure over the duration of the campaign. If this is the case, make sure the KPIs are related to improving your brand, leads and sales. KPIs that do not help in achieving any of the three goals will not help you know whether you are getting a positive return on investment (ROI). Make sure that the SEO agency you choose will measure the following metrics: o Keyword Ranks: The agency should measure how much your target keywords have improved or dropped in search engines over the duration of the SEO project. Definitely, you want to see your keywords going up the search rankings. However, ranking is not just about keywords, but tracking the most beneficial keywords. You don t want to rank for keywords that have low search volumes as they are not likely to translate to success at the backend of your business. o To see how this KPI is performing, ask the SEO agency for a graph of your top keywords with individual revenue, traffic and rank data.

5 o Search Engine Traffic: The agency should measure the amount of quality traffic volume your website is getting over a determined cycle. The traffic should be coming from your target keywords and should be likely to convert. While looking at the big picture is important, it s the nitty-gritty details that will give you a better understanding of how successful the SEO campaign has been. The agency should measure the percentage of visits from search engines as well as percentage of conversions. This information can be broken down by traffic source and split up by brand and non-brand traffic. Monthly and annual reports with percentage changes will clearly show whether things are moving up or down and whether your website has gone up in the rankings despite seasonal trends. Visitor Engagement Monitoring visitor engagement can help you to know whether the content on your site is resonating well with your visitors. Some of the KPIs for visitor engagement include: o Percentage of visitors who vote/share your content on social media o Percentage of visitors who leave a comment o Average page depth (the average amount of pages that visitors check out on every site visit) o Average time on site per visit To calculate number of engaged visits: (Total number of engagements) (Total number of visits) To calculate conversion rate: (Number of comments) (Total number of pieces of content) Brand Exposure Your SEO project should be geared at getting your website ranking high for both your brand and non-brand keywords. If the agency only focuses on non-brand keywords and forgets your brand keywords, you will have a difficult time ranking for non-brand keywords without your brand behind them. Apart from this, some visitors may have heard of your company through other third party avenues like other blogs, social media and so on. When these visitors decide to check out your website, they should easily find it by typing your brand keyword on search engines. Tracking this KPI can help you know your brand reputation and complete the whole SEO picture. The above four KPIs are the most important ones the SEO agency should focus on over the duration of your SEO project. However, they are not the only KPIs to track. The above KPIs are mostly related to conversion and brand awareness. However, to know how you are faring against your competitors, the agency may have to track additional KPIs such as PageRank and number of links to your site. 4. Integrating SEO with Other Marketing Efforts Find out if the SEO agency will integrate SEO with other marketing efforts you may be pursuing. Your social media and content marketing efforts should be complemented by the SEO services offered by the agency. For example, if your team will handle content creation, the agency should take over the task of promoting the content. Integrating SEO with other marketing efforts is even more important in the post Panda and Penguin world. These two Google algorithm updates made many online business owners lose their incomes overnight as their websites went from the top pages of Google to oblivion. The problem with relying entirely on SEO for your traffic is that your site will constantly be at the mercy of search engines. A single algorithm update can make you lose your business revenue. This is why a holistic, integrated online marketing approach is crucial.

6 Today, Google is considering more than just SEO when ranking websites. For example, social signals like the number of Facebook and G+ shares are also being considered. Other considerations include posting in-depth quality articles regularly, reviews and ratings from community sites like Yelp, Google Author snippet, number of Google+ circles and so on. Therefore, it is crucial that the agency integrates SEO with other online marketing strategies for the short and the long term. At the minimum, the agency should be able to integrate SEO with: Content Marketing We ve already talked about the need to create useful and engaging content for your audience. Your content may rank on the first page of Google, but if it does not provide the information search users are looking for, the traffic will not convert. Apart from this, the content should be created for link baiting. To integrate content marketing in your SEO project, the agency can hire experts who will create content that will be visible in search engines and make your target audience take action. Content here includes everything that can be found on your website such as videos, articles, images, podcasts and so on. Social Marketing Social media marketing should also be integrated in the SEO campaign. If you check Google results, you will see social media pages like Facebook Pages (including number of likes and people talking about them), Foursquare (including the rating and number of votes from users), Google+ pages (including ratings, map and reviews), YouTube videos (including date and length of video), Google+ profiles (including profile picture and number of circles), and others are being ranked. This means the traditional SEO approach is not sufficient in today s search engine world. You need social media marketing to get more traffic to your website. Therefore, apart from simply implementing the technical aspects of SEO, the agency should be able to manage or work with your in-house team to integrate social media marketing in the campaign. Conversion Marketing For social media marketing, content marketing and SEO to be effective, you need to integrate conversation marketing into the mix. Your website and content should not only be made for search engines, but also to communicate with real people. Your social media profiles should be built to increase exposure and links to your website and also provide you with a way to talk and interact with your followers. This is known as conversation marketing. Conversation marketing is crucial for conversions because it helps to build trust with your prospects. For example, when the SEO team does blog commenting, the professionals need to read and talk with the bloggers to understand the subject at hand and leave valuable and engaging comments. If the agency is joining forums for link building purposes, they have to create useful threads and participate in other discussions to build clout and be trusted in the forums. When trust is built, it reduces the friction to conversions. The SEO agency should not simply drive traffic from social networking sites or search engines. Apart from this, they have to convert the traffic into leads or sales. By creating conversations through landing pages or call to action (CTA) buttons that will evoke the desirable action, your conversion rate will significantly improve. 5. Cost of Service The final important thing to consider before you outsource your SEO is the cost of the service. Here, you have to look for a company that will work within your budget but still give you excellent results. Some companies offer SEO packages, which comprise a number of services. Other agencies will first want to know the scope of work that will be done before they give you a quote.

7 SEO is dynamic and prices vary across providers and regions. Unlike offering a specific service, SEO is not a turn-key solution that you plug and play. You obviously want to save money, but concentrating on the money will make you fail to intelligently allocate your marketing budget to various marketing tactics, of which SEO is the most important. SEO is not easy and neither is it simple. Google has over 200 things it looks at when ranking websites. Moreover, the search engine giant keeps tweaking its algorithm regularly, up to 600 times a year. Therefore, you should be cautious when an SEO expert offers you a complete price for SEO. Sure, the services may fix some glaring weaknesses on your website, but deep and lasting SEO is more than that. When it comes to pricing, you shouldn t focus more on price but most on the KPIs for your business. You may save some money with a cheap SEO, but will the services help you reach your business goals? Will the KPIs we ve mentioned be attained? When evaluating SEO agencies to work with, you will find various pricing models. Below are some of the important things you should know about SEO prices: Hourly SEO costs vary across countries On average, you should expect to pay any amount from $76-$200 per hour. This range is what is charged in developed countries. On the other hand, outsourcing to developing countries, particularly India, is significantly cheaper. Most companies offer flexible pricing By-the-project pricing is most common. Depending on the agency you work with, you should expect to pay anything from $1000-$7000. Most agencies will want to analyze your website and check how difficult it will be to rank your target keywords before offering a quote. Some agencies offer monthly packages or retainer prices The packages are differentiated based on the activities that will be done, number of hours that the SEO team will have to work on your site, and so on. Package pricing varies greatly from provider to provider. Smaller businesses should expect packages ranging from $250-$500 per month. For businesses that require thorough SEO, average enterprise package prices range from $2500-$5000 per month. SEO agencies are moving towards inbound marketing Today, pure SEO agencies are fading into broader inbound marketing services providers. The SEO agency may offer SEO, analytics, conversions, content marketing, social media marketing and other related services. If you want to consolidate your entire website s promotional activities, look for an agency that offers a whole range of inbound marketing services. The SEO industry has had its fair share of controversies, with some agencies charging outrageously high or low prices without delivering results. Before you hire an agency, look at their past experience, preferably in working with a similar company in your industry. Request the company s portfolio or past works to prove that they can really get you the results they claim. The portfolio should help you see the KPIs that the agency was able to reach for different clients. Ideally, you want a company that has a proven track record and that is even managing the SEO campaigns of some reputable brands you may know. Chances are that if the agency is managing the SEO of a big brand, then they know their stuff. SET UP AN EDITORIAL CALENDAR Effective SEO can bring you good results in a cost effective manner. Moreover, the results can last for a long time and be a source of repeat leads and sales for your company. Therefore, choosing the right SEO agency is crucial to getting good results. Before you outsource your SEO, ask yourself why you want to outsource. Are you looking for cheaper services?

8 Do you want to save time? Do you need an outside team to complement your in-house marketing department efforts? Answering these questions will help you determine whether the company you approach will be right for you. Before you finally bring the SEO agency on board to help you with your online marketing efforts, make sure you sign a contract. The contract should indicate the various tasks that the agency is expected to do and the KPIs and milestones to be reached. It is also important to have regular updates of the online marketing campaigns that the company will be running. Some companies will send you manual reports while others will give you credentials that you can use to log onto their portal and see the activities in progress and those that have been finished. Either way, the most important thing is to be in the know of what is being done on your website. If you are not sure of the impact of any task, ask the agency to explain. Finding a good SEO agency is easy if you know what to look for. There are many considerations to make when choosing an agency. However, most of your considerations should be based on the end-result you are looking for: whether it is generating more leads, getting more sales, improving brand awareness and so on. The above are five of the main things you should consider when you are looking to outsource your SEO. ABOUT EDUCATION SERVICES GROUP Education Services Group (ESG) offers sales, marketing and operational support services designed to help technology companies reach their training goals. For over 15 years, ESG has been partnering with technology companies to create best-in-class approaches to direct education management. Let us help you expand product usage and overall performance by improving your organization s education services. Want to know what Education Services Group can do for you? Contact us at or visit us on the web at educationservicesgroup.com. Disclaimer: The information contained in this document is the proprietary and exclusive property of Education Services Group except as otherwise indicated. No part of this document, in whole or in part, may be reproduced, stored, transmitted, or used for design purposes without the prior written permission of Education Services Group. The information in this document is provided for informational purposes only. The information inside of this document is subject to change without notice.