SEO Monitoring Basics

Compared to traditional advertising methods, Search Engine marketing offers a unique advantage when it comes down to the overall return on investment. With SEO, you can achieve a better ROI and long term success because well optimized pages can be visited by thousands of targeted visitors a day.

The success of the SEO campaign needs to be measured on percentage of traffic from search engines, traffic from keywords, and rankings. It is important to remember that ranking is not the only way to measure success. A number of different elements need to be considered. Calculating the ROI can help better understand why the numbers are the way they are, and allow you to make changes and better your campaign. Once you calculate the ROI, you should analyze your visitor traffic, to do this there are a few steps to follow to get started on the right track.


Many have the mindset that having an SEO ranking in the top 10 is the most important objective of the entire SEO campaign. While having a ranking in the top 10 is ideal, the real objective of a SEO campaign is getting qualified traffic to your site. Once you have the qualified traffic, the traffic can be converted to leads or sales.  To analyze the visitor traffic, certain areas should be considered.

Traffic on Keywords: Your site will get targeted and un-targeted traffic. It is highly important to select the right keywords. Not only do you need the right keywords, but you should know the performance of each so that you can replace the ones that aren't working.

Keywords and Landing Pages: Different products should have different landing pages. This helps you to see what content and keywords are working the best. If the site is saturated, include more content to help convert viewers to leads.

Whether the CTA was followed for Conversion: If you find the Call to Action wasn't followed for conversion, find out the reasons why. You might have the wrong selection of keywords, or your content might need improvement. You can't fix something until you know what's wrong.

Qualified Traffic: In other words, qualified traffic is targeted traffic. Know the demographics behind the personas viewing your content and making purchases. Higher traffic rate will result in a higher conversion rate, which will help your campaign succeed.

Converted Traffic: Tracking converted traffic is also important. To do this, you can calculate the percent of traffic converting to actual sales made.


Tip: If you aren't comfortable doing SEO on your own, there are qualified individuals that you can hire. They can determine the success or failure of your company's online marketing activity, so make sure to do your research before hiring and chose an ethical SEO specialist.

Hubspot Tips on Perfecting the Conversion Process

The conversion process is a critical process if  you want to succeed. Why you ask? The answer is simple. This step turns an anonymous visitor into a real lead. A lead can turn to a potential customer, which only helps your business or organization. So, creating a successful conversion path is important. In order to do this there are three steps that you should follow.

Call to Action:  You may be asking what exactly a Call to Action is. Well, it is simply a button or image placed on pages. The  purpose is to drive visitors to your landing page. CTA's are important because they help get the potential leads' attention. Although their main purpose is to grab attention, they must be relevant to your content. Once a visitor clicks on the CTA, they will be taken to the landing page.

Tips: 

Use clear and concise words that encourage customers to click. 

Make the CTA's easy to notice. Do not place them below the fold!

Experiment with new elements. Do not stick with just one. 

Landing Page: The landing page will provide the specific information that the customer is searching for. Remember, the landing page is different than the homepage because it is not an overview of the entire company or product. It should be specific and meet the customers needs. Once a customer fills out a form on the landing page, they will be taken to the thank you page. 

Thank You Page: At this point, the content that was introduced by the call-to-action and landing page is delivered to the visitor. After they submit a form, they turn from an anonymous customer to a real lead. 

Tips: 

Make sure it is easy to receive the offer that you promised.

Take them further through the buyer's journey. You can use a new CTA to encourage them to go to the next stage. 

Include other social networking options. This helps your content reach additional people. 

SEO Pay Per Click Basics

Pay per click campaigns are  advertising campaigns that run on search engine result pages. You can use various programs, such as Google AdWords or Yahoo PPC Ads. It might seem a bit intimidating at first, but here are a few steps to get you started on your pay per click process.

Key Word Selection: Picking the right keywords is extremely important and is the first step in the PPC process. For this step, you can pick keywords that directly relate to your service or product. To help generate effective keywords you can use programs such as GOOGLE, Yahoo, or wordtracker. If the words you chose aren't specific enough, you can face a big loss. The goal is to generate useful and relevant traffic, so it is important to understand the product or service that is being offered.

Bidding Strategies: Where your ad gets placed depends on the amount you offer each search engine for that word. The higher the bid, the higher position you will have. There are a number of tools that can help monitor the numbers, and even adjust bids, which include: Atlas One Point, BidRank, and PPC PRO. It is highly important to constantly monitor campaigns and test how well your process is working. Ideally, a campaign should be monitored 4 times a day for at least 1 month.

Advertising Text: Having more than 1 advert is essential. You should make at least 3-4 adverts and use them at different times while observing their effectiveness. You want you ad to stand out from other competitors. People tend to mention discounts, offers, and special deals for the text, but you must have something informative in your text. After all, that is the reason they are searching the internet.

Develop Proper Landing Page: A landing page is ultimately more important than anything else.  If you are not sure what a landing page is, it is simply a web page designed for a keyword or related groups of keywords. They landing page and the advertising text needs to be relevant and consistent with the claim made.  This is where the visitor is asked to take an action. Relevance and consistency are important for your PPC campaign to be successful. People don't want to be taken to an irrelevant site or to a homepage directed towards a broad audience. If you give people what your ad promised, there is a higher chance of converting them to customers. To make your landing page the most successful it can be, you can try trail runs. For instance, have 3-4 different links with different landing pages, and see which one produces the best results.

Tracking: This is the last step, but not at all the least important. Optimization also plays a key determinant in the success of your PPC campaign. You need all of the data regarding your performance that you can get. Some tracking tools that can help you with this step include Webside Story's Hitbox Professional and Hitbox Enterprise.

Tip: Balance is important! All of the steps should be followed and go hand-in-hand if you want your PPC campaign to be successful.

Hubspot Smarketing Basics

Smarketing is important because companies that have strong marketing and sales alignment get 20% annual revenue growth. No, smarketing is not a typo, it's a real thing. It's just like it sounds. Basically, smarketing is sales and marketing put together. If you want to integrate smarketing into your organization, there are 5 steps that you should follow.

Speak the Same Language:  Sales is completely number driven. so the language of smarketing comes down to revenue. People on the team should pick a number and work to achieve it. While trying to reach that number, you must think of the buyer's journey and life-cycle stages. This includes having a sales ready lead that is a great fit with a high level of interest. 

Set-Up Closed Loop Reporting: This completes the loop between sales and marketing. From this, you are able to pass along information and gain more feedback. On the marketing side, benefits include getting up to date information, learning which programs are working, and increasing Marketing ROI. Benefits on the sales side include prioritizing leads, making warmer calls, and increasing Sales ROI. Analyzing what content helps to close customers is an important part of this step because you can surface that on your website and nurture. 

Implement A Service Level Agreement(SLA): An SLA determines what each team is set to accomplish in order to support the other. It sets the alignment around the goals. To calculate SLA you can set specific quotas, on both sides, and see if they are being met. An example of a SLA is: Marketers will deliver 150 leads per sales representatives per month.  

Maintain Open Communication: One way to accomplish open communication is to have a meeting where both marketing and sales attend and are on the same page and up to date. Monthly management meetings can also help to resolve any issue that there might be. You can also try campaign communication which involves marketing your campaigns to your sales team. Sharing updates about products is also extremely important to be successful. 

Rely on Data: To do this, you can create and share a dashboard that shows the daily reports aligned with the team goals. You can measure the volume of leads against the quality or even track leads by type of source. Analyzing campaign leads can be helpful in determining which efforts successfully drive traffic, leads, and customers. Monthly reports can also help to measure progress and from there, you can see what changes need to be made. 

SEO Site Readiness Using Links

Links can be useful to send more potential customers to your website, but you must use the right technique. There are three different types of linking that you can use to optimize your website. They include: one way linking, reciprocal linking, and triangular linking. Below you will find some basic information about each type.

One-Way Linking: If you are looking for the best way to improve your rankings in a search engine,
then this is the way to go. One way linking is done a lot like it sounds.You accomplish this by putting your link on one site without exchanging any other link. By having your link exclusively on one site, you are automatically protected from bad links that have no relevance to your site. There is also a long term benefit because one way links have more value and tend to stay on the site longer. Although one way linking is effective, it takes long term determination and planning to achieve link popularity.

Reciprocal Linking: Today, reciprocal linking is the most popular linking practice. Reciprocal linking means that two websites agree to link to each other. Many people know also know this as "link swaps". This type of linking helps to drive traffic to a website if the link is relevant to the site. From reciprocal linking, there is assurance because the other website was confident in your content and wanted to be linked. Trust is a major factor. Before you participate in reciprocal linking, it is important to do some research. Conduct a competitive analysis of the website you want to link to and you could even go as far as running a PR search to see where the website's ranking.  

Triangular Linking: This type of linking involves manipulation. When using triangular linking, you are manipulating reciprocal linking into looking like one-way linking. You use two websites to fool the search engines. There is a trade that occurs, but you make it look like you earned the link.
Search engines have found out about this technique and are currently working on an algorithm to work against this problem.

Hubspot and The Content Process

 Content marketing is commonly used by business to business marketers, but how many of the are actually have effective content? According to the Hubspot video, 93% of B2B marketers use content marketing, but only 42% of those say that they use it effectively. It can be hard to know how to create valuable and effective content, but here are some steps that should help you get on the right track.



Plan: It is important to know what you are trying to create and why. One way to help determine this is by your buyer personas, buyer journey, and overall business goals. The ultimate goal is solve buyer persona problems and answer question and the only way to do that is by being providing educational content that matters. Keyword searches, forums, popular news, and persona challenges are some ways to identify what the content is that matters the most to your audience.


Produce: When you are creating your own content, it helps to follow a plan that makes the most sense to you. A production strategy of who and when the content will be created is also needed. This is the step where you transform your content into real. It may be hard to hear, but buyers do not really care about your brand. Instead of giving information about your brand, give content that provides solutions to buyers problems.



Distribute: You can have the best content in the world, but if no one knows about your content, it is useless. In order to properly distribute you must deliver relevant content at a consistent rate. Your posts should be published at a regular rate so people  can find the information they need when they need it.


Analyze: After planning, producing, and distributing your content, you want to analyze you results. You should make sure that your efforts in content marketing are working. Not only should you check if it is effective, but you should know why or why not your analysis is the way it is.


 Repeat: It is important to continuously follow these steps!!!


Tip: Always follow the golden rule. Talk about the benefits, NOT the features.

SEO Meta Tag basics

Meta tags can help people find your website based on the description that you provide. Although search engines do not give a lot of prominence to meta tags, they can help you rank higher on a search with certain words that are used for a targeted search. Below I have listed some do's and don'ts of meta tags that should help you to get started.

Meta description tags:
Do's
Pay attention to the sequence of your words
Make sure that your keywords are relevant to the page you are posting\
Use a description tag that is between 25-30 words
Place the most important phrases at the beginning

Don't
Use excessive repetition
Make a lengthy description tag
Have a tag that is irrelevant to your post

Meta Keyword Tags: These are considered to be less important than other Meta tags, but they do add some extra information that can be useful. Using the proper keyword tags can help your website be found and make the site more search engine friendly. You don't want to use words that are irrelevant. For instance, if your post is about cats you're not going to put the keyword "puppies" in the keyword tag.

Hubspot Best Practices

Having a social media presence is key for amplifying your content. Many people may be overwhelmed and not know where to begin, so here are some of the best practices.

Optimize profiles: It is important to use keywords and links so that your company can easily be found. Your social media profile is like a mini version of your website that people need to be able to find. Visuals also help to attract and optimize.

Know Personas: By thoroughly knowing your buyer personas you can get content to them at the right place and right time. The networks that they are on and content they are reading or sharing helps to better know buyer personas. Once you know where your buyer personas are and what they want to hear, you must stop and listen. This includes reading comments and content sharing/posting.

Building Reach: After you know your personas, you can build reach by following, friending and connecting with prospects or customers. Instead of talking about yourself, ask questions and share content from others. A helpful rule to remember is the 80/20 rule. 80% of content should be interesting and helpful, while the other 20% can be promotional. You should also have unique content so that you can make something new, interesting and appealing.


Customize your Reach to Each Platform: It is important to position your content in the right context for the social media site that you are using. For example, Twitter is used to create conversation with other. Your tweets should be 115-120 characters long and using #'s help to connect with followers. Facebook lets you show your personality and posts should be kept under 250 characters. On here, you can ask questions that are more fun/personal. LinkedIn allows you to show your professional side. You can post to pages or groups and your posts should be published before 8am and after 6pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Analyze and Refine: After you go through all of these steps it is important to evaluate how you are doing and change accordingly.