It’s fair to say that SEO has been struggling lately as an industry and has had to deal with a fair bit of bad news. Of course I’m principally referring to the recent algorithm updates ‘Panda’ and ‘Penguin’ which changed the way that Google worked to the point that many websites suffered huge losses thanks to their now-outdated promotional techniques. At the same time though, SEO has also had to deal with a lot of competition from the likes of social media marketing and all this ‘real PR’ stuff and in general we’ve seen our reputations dragged through the dirt thanks to the black hat SEO techniques that forced Google to change in the first place.

In many ways, the SEO industry is now in something of a wounded state and trying desperately to recover. SEO is not ‘dead’ as many people claim, not by a longshot but we do need to learn how to go about it better if we are to stand any chance of improving our position.

What we need is a plan of action! Here’s how the SEO industry can come back and prove itself in this brave new world.

The Best Strategies

The first thing we need to do, is to learn from our mistakes. That means switching entirely from black hat SEO techniques to more successful white hat ones and keeping one-eye on the future. Your SEO should be ‘future proof’ meaning that it’s devised to take into account any future changes Google might enforce.

This means focussing on quality content first and on the experience of your visitors – rather than trying too hard to ‘game’ the system at the expense of quality. At the same time, it’s important that we don’t put all our eggs in one basket. Too many people in the past made the mistake of relying 100% on a single SEO tactic – such as link building using content farms. Then, when Google decided that content farms weren’t to be the way forward any more, those sites lost everything.

So even if you find a strategy that seems to work today, you mustn’t focus too singularly on it and you need to make sure that you are using other methods too. Likewise, you shouldn’t even rely solely on SEO – don’t look at social media and SEO as mortal enemies, but as complementary tools that are much more effective when used together.

Winning Back the Clients

After the mess that was Panda, a lot of people are saying that SEO is just a form of spam and that it’s too unstable to be worth the investment. Of course you and I know different – all SEO means is optimising a site for the way that Google works and that’s something that will always be relevant. The challenge though, is to convince other people of this fact and to show that SEO is still worth investing in.

One way to do this is by simply proving that we know how to promote a website. We can do this by getting our own sites to the top of the SERPs – actions speak louder than words – but also by using smart packages to let clients test our services for themselves before making too big a commitment.

Transparency is also highly important. Every step of the way you should explain to your clients what you are doing and why and you should make sure that they are on board. Don’t make the presumption that clients aren’t going to understand – tell them everything you’re doing and explain why other SEO techniques don’t work anymore. The more we talk about SEO, the better the general public will understand it and trust it. If a client has had a bad experience in the past – distance yourself from that by helping them to understand how your service is different.

Most importantly though, is to simple stick to the most upstanding and white hat techniques out there. Many of us are guilty of doing things that we knew weren’t in our visitors’ best interests in order to please Google and that’s ironically precisely what Google doesn’t want. Use every SEO trick in the book – but never at the cost of high quality content or a brilliant experience for readers. Again, actions will speak louder than words.

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Today’s guest post is contributed by Todd Ramos. He is the owner of toddseoguy.com and knows the field of SEO like the back of his hand. A health buff, he makes it a point to go cycling with his friends in his free time.

I also make use of a wide-range of premium plugins. If a find a premium plugin that I like -and that will be useful in a variety of contexts – I buy the developer’s license. This (usually) gives me the right to use it on an unlimited number of sites. My intent is always to use whatever is necessary to make the website as functional as possible. These plugins are my “tools” and I don’t think it’s right to charge separately for my “tools.”

Some of the newer plugins that I’m currently using include a great online appointment calendar, a membership site plugin, a “scarcity” plugin that counts down (days) or units available on special offers to create a sense of urgency, and a courseware plugin to allow for online learning.

Great tools all!

Israel-Samuels LLP provides expert guidance and assistance in business formation, contracts, marketing & sales, and labor law.

According to the website:
The attorneys at our firm have more than 50 years of combined general business experience, owning and operating their own companies, using their own money, and building firms from the ground up… The combination of real-world business experience with legal knowledge and practice offers total service greater than the sum of the parts. Both the business and the legal needs of our clients are better served by our ability to address issues in both areas, and help you to find and implement effective solutions.

So it was with the site of Dan Locklair (http://www.locklair.com), a noted composer and educator whose original site was, well, plain. The idea was to spruce the site up a bit and take advantage of WordPress’s marvelous widgets so that separate news items – commissions, premieres, performances, and publications – could be highlighted individually instead of being lumped together under News.

Still a work-in-progress – there are a number of pages that need improvement – but certainly more inviting, don’t you think?

Ms. Kock notes, “The Department of Child Support Services only deals with legal assistance concerning the calculation and collection of past due and ongoing child support. This agency cannot provide legal representation to parents on legal matters concerning child custody, child visitation or violation of parenting orders. The best option to protect your parenting legal rights is to have an experienced family law attorney represent you on your child custody matter.”

Or, in other words, just because they received your message, don’t assume they “got” it.

When I first began offering SEO and Content Marketing I sent around an email explaining how I’d come to the realization the web design is not enough and that a website – no matter how attractive or functional – that is not ranking well in it’s particular niche – well, it might as well not exist. I went on to elaborate on how I thoroughly enjoy designing but recognize how absolutely essential it is that content and SEO concerns be thoroughly integrated in to the website right from the start.

And I thought I was fairly clear about all this. In fact, sent out a second email about two months later re-iterating my first post but adding additional important information.

The other day I received an email from a long-time client which began with “I seem to recall seeing a notice from you that you’re no longer designing websites…”

Whoa!

I’m a long-time member of BNI and each week each of us gives a 30-second infomercial about our business. Of course, we don’t say that same thing every week but it’s always interesting how an oft-repeated message will suddenly reach receptive ears. As we know, our focus of attention is usually inward and may take hearing the same message many, many times before it finally “clicks.”

What does it take to make a message “click?” Sometimes it’s just a matter of timing – who knows when that particular set of ears will actually “hear” what we’re saying. Other times, we may not be as clear or precise as we think we are. I’ve found that simple is usually better. And, finally, there’s repetition. Change the wording, experiment with format – anything that will get your message across.

Then repeat.

“Profit Margin Magic” workshops are produced by Fat Margins, a firm founded in 1996 to help business owners increase the profitability of their companies while building them into highly valuable and saleable assets. It is the only firm in the United States dedicated to teaching business owners how to increase their margins…“Profit Margin Magic” workshops are presented by Chuck Moyer, Fat Margin’s founder and president….Chuck is dynamic, energetic, and entertaining, whether speaking to a wide variety of business groups or when conducting Fat Margins workshops. His content is cutting-edge, straightforward, practical, and easy to digest and remember. Chuck holds a Certified Pricing Professional designation from the Professional Pricing Society and a Certificate in Personal Financial Planning with distinction from the University of California, Berkeley.

I’ve known Chuck for several years, have attended seminars led by and worked with him on website projects. The man knows his stuff. And, while his message is initially counter-intuitive – “raise my prices in this economy?!” – this is precisely why we should listen before we continue to lower our rates and wonder why we are going nowhere.

Call (877) 373-1710 to register. For more information on Profit Margin Magic…

According to their Mission Statement the Football Safety Academy “is committed to making the “Great Game of Football” safer at all levels through the development of improved contact skills while promoting awareness and understanding to parents, coaches, and players of a safety impact protection technique called the “Hulk Up” Technique (HUT) that has the potential to reduce the frequency of head, neck, and spinal cord injuries.”

The Football Safety Academy is the brainchild of Coach Lee Becker, a retired educator with over 40 years of football coaching experience.

One of the drawback of wearing ALL the hats – besides often eliminating our weekends – is that we don’t have someone with whom we can bounce ideas. So we often get stuck – making the same mistake over and over without seeing a way out.

That’s where business development masters such as Andy McClure of Sherpa Business Development can be such a help. They can provide a different perspective – often just a subtle nudge in our thinking – that leaves us with that “A-ha moment” and what had appeared as such a dead=end is now rife with possibility.

The great thing about Andy is that he gives you practical advice – advice you can implement today.

I recently attended Andy’s webinar “How to Get Your Ideal Prospects to Stop Ignoring You” – and found it full of reasonable, common sense ideas. Nothing startling or outrageous – just good old-fashioned practical help from someone who knows what he’s talking about.

So check out the Sherpa Business Development website, sign up for his newsletter, and sign up for his “How to Get Your Ideal Prospects to Stop Ignoring You” webinar which he will be repeating soon. I think you’ll be glad you did.

Unfortunately the reality of the situation here isn’t a case of ‘what’s good will sell’. Rather it’s more a matter of ‘if you’re good at selling, you’ll make sales’. In other words, the difference between success and failure really comes down to your sales patter and your site design and how many people you get to read your blurb.

One of the tried and tested methods is to use a ‘landing page’ where you direct as much traffic as possible – from your own site but also from links on other sites etc. Here you will then do your best to convince anyone who stops by that they need to buy your book or your course or whatever it is, and that all comes down to the way you lay it out and how convincing you can be in your writing.

If you have a really great sales speech on your site, and if you are getting highly targeted traffic, then there’s no reason to think that you can’t get 1-2% of people to buy an e-book worth $30. If you are then paying .20 cents per visitor using an ad network, then you’ll be making a tidy (and scalable) profit without having to do… well anything really.

Making Your Landing Page Work

But that’s all reliant on the work you put in to start with and how good you want to make your landing page. If you’re going to make a good profit then this needs to be able to convince people who land to buy.

Take some time and look around other landing pages selling e-books etc. You will notice right away that many of them have a very narrow site design that forces you to scroll down the page. There’s no menu and no other buttons – because of course that would enable you to navigate away, and the point of the narrow and linear page layout is that it forces you to ‘commit’ by scrolling. If you spend a while reading and if you scroll down the page as you go, then you’re visitor won’t want to then just leave without having done anything.

You should litter your ‘buy’ button then throughout the page so that people can click it at any point, and you need to appeal to the emotions of the person buying. Note that most purchases are not logical or sensible (except maybe a new toothbrush) but rather are emotional and impulsive. Throughout the course of your text then you want to try and subtly manipulate those emotions to work the person into a frenzy where they will click buy. To do this you need to create a feeling of panic and urgency by stating that there is a time limit on this, you need to make them feel envious and make your product seem exclusive, you need to outline what it is they will get from your product and how it will make their life better, and you need to allay their fears and recognize their barriers to purchasing.

Matt Jordan believes internet is vast ocean who needs job when one can work from home be his own boss and earn great profits.