Unless your online business is already a household name, we all know that the only way to poach consumers away from your competitors is to ensure that you have a well SEO’d site that ranks well in Google. Simple enough! The big debate however, is whether or hiring an SEO company is worth it or whether you should simply do your own SEO optimization.

This blog post focuses on the top 5 reasons why hiring a professional SEO company is a much better idea than doing your own SEO. Let’s take a look:

1. Time is money: SEO takes time. It takes time to learn, time to understand and most importantly – time to implement. You need to optimize your content, spend hours and hours building links and make any structural changes to your website that aren’t currently optimal. Sure, you could maybe learn to do your own SEO optimization, but you’re a business owner, your job is to concentrate on your clients, your business and how to improve it in as many ways as possible. Every hour you spend doing your own SEO is a billable hour stolen from your customers.

If you find you have a high bounce rate or people are trawling your site but buying none of your products, you’ll have to face the fact that your website is simply not ‘doing it’ for them. You have all the SEO strategies in place to drive people to your site but what they find when they get there is confusing, long winded or plain boring and bland. It’s like inviting people to a party at your house and giving perfect directions, but when they get there they find the house unlit, the gate locked and a snarling Rottweiler glaring at them.

Jennifer Laycock from Search Engine Marketing has given an inspired suggestion on how to find out why your high traffic is not delivering the desired conversions with her blog, Showing all the right people all the wrong things. It’s as simple as, ‘ask Mom’. The point of this exercise is that the mom in question knows as little as possible about SEO and is approaching the website entirely from a usability point of view. You’ll realise what needs to be changed by taking note of when she starts getting frustrated or lost on the site.

I’ve been banging on about the different budgets spent on PPC vs. SEO, so the latest Hitwise report really caught my eye. For those who haven’t read it, they reported a 26% drop in paid search traffic from last year, albeit in the US. A lot of people will link it to the credit crunch and overall reduced spending and I’m sure that is the case. What I’m really hoping for is that it’s a sign of change in marketing manager behaviour.

PPC seems to be the Linus Blanket for marketing managers. I’m not 100% sure why, apart from it being a certain thing. I suppose if you choose an SEO agency that doesn’t perform it seems like the safe bet. We have internal battles for the cost per visit from SEO and PPC and I’m proud to say the SEO wins the most, by a serious margin. (Navigational/Brand search taken out of course )

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the skills in demand at the moment, as it’s one of the only growth industries in these tough economic times. Google, the public’s search engine of choice, saw growth in the first quarter of 2009 with revenue up 6%, while other US companies only saw blood.

Study after study shows that companies in the UK and around the world are spending more of their budgets on online advertising. Now that marketing budgets are being slashed, SEO offers a longer term and more affordable option that PPC (Per Per Click) and has started to gain ground on PPC advertising. Currently, around 60% of UK online advertising budgets go to PPC, but this number is predicted to decrease as companies become more tech savvy and begin to understand the benefits of SEO.

I always struggle to explain what I do to people that aren’t in marketing or IT. I usually get the “Search Marketing? What on earth is that? Do you search for marketers?”

I think the most concise response is that we help companies market their products or services in Google. I suppose Google Marketing is probably more accurate in the UK due to the search engines’ vast market share. We help client’s with their Google search marketing plans.

Most people get that fairly quickly with the odd few saying “oh the ads on the right?” Well no, we help our clients in both areas with some pretty amazing return on investment.

There are two main places to market your products and services within Google, The paid listings (top and right) are referred to as PPC because you Pay Per Click. The results on the left are natural listings often referred to organic listings.

The last 6 months or so have produced a plethora of blogs by internet marketers stating that the obvious way to remain visible and in touch with your audience is via online marketing and all that entails. SEO is crucial, online PR essential and social marketing vital, so why have we, as SEOs, not been flooded with requests from established companies, home businesses and large-scale enterprises? Why have we, instead, had to read about an increasing number of business closures and staff cuts and listen to people, who are generally thought of as smart, blame the credit crunch for diminishing profit margins?

Answer to follow.

Just last Friday, Laurie Sullivan revealed that traditional brick-and-mortar retailers are still very, very SEO-shy. She was citing a three-year Retail Search Presence study by marketing firm Internet-Engine, which tracked holiday season search engine traffic from the big three (technically, the Big G and two also-rans) – Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live. And the news isn’t good for the retailer on the street.

After reading the 2009 search advertising outlook from JP Morgan (thanks Graywolf) I was disappointed to see no references to organic search and the forecasting thereof. In fact they blatantly cover the click through rate of paid search (22%) without even thinking where the other 78% of clicks are coming from.

It’s not a secret that Google sees 80% of its clicks through natural search whereas paid search enjoys 80% of the budget assigned to search in the UK. What fails me is this message seems to be falling on deaf ears. If I were an FD (and by qualification I could be although my life expectancy would drop by 50 years ) I would be demanding a comparison of all marketing methods, stripping back on the non-accountable methods to ensure I get maximum ROI for my pound. Surely right now is the time to ask the difficult questions?

Google Adwords recently released a new search-based keyword tool that will help advertisers discover which keywords relating to their services and/or products that they are not optimising their website for, and which may cause them to miss out on additional business as a result.

It’s a handy tool in that its results eliminate the terms you are already optimising for. If you have an Adwords account, and are logged in, then it will only display those keywords that your account is not currently advertising. One of the most convenient things about the tool is that you insert your URL and it then searches your site for missing keywords, as opposed to sitting on the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and going through hundreds of possible keyword options, which will then need to be checked against your site to see if they are already optimised for.

It’s almost Xmas time, the time, when traditionally wallets are opened and emptied with more abandon than usual. In there tight financial times, however, and with slim prospects of a juicy bonus, the stress can become unbearable.

Consumers need to be smarter about their purchasing behaviour and that means turning to the web where there are more options, more information and fiercer competition.
As High Street retailers start to feel the pinch, online retail sales are set to rise to a staggering £13.16 billion in the last quarter of 2008. This is a 15% rise year-on-year, according to the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index.

This calculation equates to £215 spent online by each person in the UK. Specifically, the online sales of clothing and footwear are expected to rise 25% each year to £1.27 million with the sale of beer, wine and spirits set to rise to £233 million.

It’s freezing outside in Cape Town; the wind makes it even colder. That is why I find Shaun Anderson’s post about link juice so ironic at this point. He makes the analogy that linking to pages in a website is like shooting lasers at them and heating them up. The hotter pages are the ones with the most “lasers” pointing at them. As I peer out the window I imagine taking a bath in laser energy, even a nice fireplace would suffice

Silly as this sounds, it makes sense. Despite his post being dated almost a year old, the principles around link juice still apply. A combination of good onsite optimisation –meta tags, titles, URL names, keyword density and relevant keywords and information surrounding the main topical keywords in the copy, strategic, and hierarchically structured internal linking – and a handful of really good, relevant anchor text rich inbound links are undoubtedly a pathway to ranking and search engine traffic.