Google Maps Offers

Google’s new Offers plan may trigger a bit of deja vu for longtime users of Google Places. Google has always had an Offers option, which has been free. Companies who try to update those old offers now will see this:

 

The new Offers option is free right now but will become a paid option in the future.  If you’ve used the offers in the past and had good results, you should certainly jump on it now, before it becomes a premium feature.

What about the future? Well, Google seems to plan a service just like that of myDealCompass. myDealCompass provides this option for businesses at a single monthly price, regardless of the deal, number of deals, or how often the company changes its deals; Google isn’t saying what the cost of its Offers will be. Google has a heck of a lot more reach than myDealCompass, but for local businesses, that probably doesn’t matter — check your stats at Google Places and you’ll see that the billions of Google users aren’t being shown your restaurant or hair salon’s Places page. Still, Google does advertising very well indeed, so this may be a good option for companies that want to use the Daily Deal model. Try it out during the free stage and see what the ROI will be, so you can make a wise decision in the future.

Read another view from Rakesh Agrawal.

The Maybes at Your Website

Realtor Ken Jansen has a top ranking page for the prestigious LionsGate subdivision in Johnson County, Kansas. This page is also one of the top landing pages for his website, so we’re working with him to increase conversion.

The first step is to get into the web analytics and dig around thoroughly. In this case, we’re looking for the Maybes.

You may be familiar with the classic marketing advice that there are three kinds of people visiting your shop: people who are ready to say Yes, who will already be buying; people who have already decided to say No, who won’t be buying regardless of what you say; and Maybes, people who are undecided. The Maybes, the advice says, are the ones for whom you should tailor your marketing.

Maybes can be the ones who abandon their carts, the ones who spend a lot of time on the site but never call, the ones who download and use your free services regularly but haven’t quite decided to go with the premium version yet.

For Ken, we were able to identify a set of behaviors that looked like a group of Maybes. We created a persona based on this data, followed this hypothetical (but data-based) individual through the site, and came up with a plan to speak to the Maybes more clearly.

Give your own website a look. Are there Maybes you could be communicating with more effectively?

Online Tools to Swear By, Not At

Maintaining a valuable online presence takes time. Hiring this aspect of your business out makes sense for a lot of companies, but online tools can help make it practical if you prefer DIY.

We’ve used and reviewed lots of online tools over the years, but this year we determined to identify the smallest number of online tools we could use to accomplish our goals. Your particular list of must-have tools may be different from ours, but if you’re ready to streamline your systems, I think our decision method will work for you.

• Get your systems sorted first. Sometimes people choose a tool in hopes that it will impose order on the people using it. In fact, the tools have to mesh with your workflow, or they won’t be used (more on that later). Therefore, it makes sense to figure out how you’re going to do things before you look for tools to make it easier.
• Determine your must-haves. We charge by the hour, so a good timer was a must. Integration with Quick Books was another essential. We had to be able to delegate and see what tasks were completed, and we had to be able to invite our designers into our online workroom without adding them as permanent paid users. Your list may be completely different, but you can see how figuring out your system first helps.
• Identify the points of pain. The places where your systems can fail or become frustrating are filled with information for your company. For us, having to log in and out of multiple social media accounts was a pain. We also tended to ask team members for help in lots of places — IM, Skype, phone, face to face, email, and online workspaces — and that could get confusing.

Once you take these steps, you should have a mental — or better yet, written down — picture of the online tools you need. Now it’s just a matter of finding the ones that fit. Not easy, admittedly, but easier than starting with no real idea of what you need. Nearly all the online tools we’ve tried out or reviewed have trial periods, so use those. A good rule of thumb: if you don’t get your team on board to use it during the trial period, you won’t succeed with it.

We used to blog for a company that supplied a CRM solution (not available for Mac, or we’d have used it). During that experience, I learned that 75% of CRM installations fail. The main reason is that team members refuse to use it. That means that you have to find tools that everyone is willing to work with. For some companies, that means using carrots and sticks to insist. For us, we just had to have tools that were easier to use than not to use. Research shows that having the C level team members on board makes all the difference — that is, you can’t adopt a tool, tell the marketing department to use it, and assume all will be well. Everyone has to be invested.

We’ve ended up with five online tools that we use and pay for. The fact that we’re willing to pay for them shows that they give us a good return on our investment. Here’s our list, in order of the length of time we’ve used them:

• Google Analytics if you have a website for business, you need web analytics to tell you where your visitors come from and what they do when they arrive at your site. We’ve used other web analytics packages, but this continues to be our favorite. It gives you vast amounts of data, it’s highly customizable, and it’s free. It’s not necessarily easy to use fully, but everyone can get some actionable data with it, and we’ll be happy to help you if you need support or training with your analytics.

 

• oDesk At oDesk, we can hire specialists in whatever we need. We have a nice team there, most of whom we’ve worked with for years. We pay automatically each week from our bank account, and our people get 1099s from oDesk. They (and we) can get health insurance, we can supervise the work and share information easily, and currency differences don’t matter. Most of our oDesk team members are local to us, by the way, but it’s great to be able to work with the best people from around the world when we have special needs. oDesk offers services for both workers and employers, and employers can manage payroll for both employees and contractors through contractors. Employees pay all fees: 10% of the payments to workers,which you should compare with a HR clerk or payroll service. If you don’t have all the people you need to take care of your online presence in house and don’t want to rely on an agency, oDesk may be a good choice for you. (Also, if you are like us and don’t want to mess with payroll yourself.)

• Notable Notable lets us discuss websites with a very high level of accuracy. You and all the other people discussing the website can put notes exactly at the place you want to discuss. This is especially helpful when you’re working with people who don’t share a vocabulary — the word “image” means different things to different departments, for example. Have discussions in the Notable workspace or print out a PDF. Notable captures your website through the URL, but you can also use it for images (ummm, pictures) that you upload. If you make frequent updates to your website, prepare ads or other documents, and have a team working together on any visual things of that kind, you’ll be glad you have Notable. Under $20.00 a month at this writing, with a limited free plan.

• Sprout Social This social media management tool has a very high level of integration, allowing us not only to handle all our social media accounts from one dashboard but also to get a quick check of our Google Analytics (and how our traffic is being affected by our social media) and to monitor keywords and mentions of our company as well. If you have several social media accounts, such as personal and company Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts, Sprout makes it easy to handle them all and to collaborate with other team members all in one place. Prices start at $39 a month, and you can include 10 team members and unlimited social media profiles for $899.

• Bluecamroo Bluecamroo is the last piece of the puzzle for us. This is a relatively new project management/customer relationship management tool that includes all the things that all our team members need. While we’ve tried a lot of PM and CRM tools, they’ve all either lacked things we needed or had too much stuff for us to keep track of — or both. Bluecamroo is the Goldilocks option for us. It includes social media (your company might not need another social media management tool besides the one in Bluecamroo), to-do lists and tasks that can be delegated, sales and service tools, room to store files, internal messaging, invoicing and expense reports with layers of approval, milestones and timelines including sign-off by clients, and a whole bunch of other stuff. This is a much more robust tool than Basecamp, but the learning curve is not as steep as Salesforce. For us, the combination of PM and CRM (without having to cobble together a number of different programs) is key. Prices start at $29 a month for one user and you can have 10 users for just under $200. Most companies would benefit from a CRM, regardless of what else they need, but this counts as a must-have for online marketing because it allows you to capture and follow up on web leads, keep your blogging and linkbuilding on track, and otherwise handle all the myriad tasks involved in website management.

We’re not getting kickbacks from any of these companies, and these may not be the right tools for you, but I hope that by sharing our thought process, I may have helped you with yours. Identifying and implementing the right online tools makes a big difference in your efficiency.

One final note: you may have noticed that the cost of online tools and the time involved in doing the work, even with great tools, makes DIY less than cost-effective for your company. If so, give us a call at 479.966.9761 and we’ll be glad to help you out.

Is Your Site Ready for Mobile?

Whether your site is ready for mobile or not, chances are good that visitors are seeing it on mobile devices.

Google’s new site tester shows you how your site looks on a smartphone. Click the link, fill in the web address of your site, and you’ll get a screenshot, plus the load time and some questions to think about.

Our lab site, shown at left, has blank spots where the videos belong, and a longer load time (8 seconds) than we’d like. When we answered the questions, it got the same score as an elderly site for which we recently updated content, even though that site is obviously broken in its smartphone screenshot. The scoring may therefore not be that useful.

The screenshot is. Some sites we tested show the site in miniature, as FreshPlans does, Some were messed up, with navigation pushed around and pictures outside the frame. Some showed a different, mobile version of the site. They all got about the same score for mobile-friendliness, but some of the screenshots were a surprise.

Say your website doesn’t make you happy when you test it. What should you do? The GetMoMeter will show you a list of UK web designers who’ll fix you up, and of course we’ll be happy to do so as well. Do you need to?

First step: check your analytics.

The shot above shows you where to look in your Google Analytics for information about your mobile visitors. We can see that the broken site we mentioned gets less than 3% of its visitors via mobile devices. FreshPlans gets about 5%, mostly on tablets. One of our client sites gets more than one third of its traffic via mobile devices, with the iPad topping the list but a dozen different phones making up the bulk of the mobile traffic.

These three sites might make different decisions about whether to have a mobile redesign now, or to wait. The site with 33.9% of its traffic from mobile devices has to look good on mobile right now (it does). The site with 2.8% mobile traffic might wait till its next redesign. FreshPlans looks pretty good on tablets, but 5% is a large enough number of visitors that we should look further — if you saw those numbers for your business site, you’d certainly want to do so. Here are some questions you should answer if you need more information before making a decision:

• Is there an upward trend?  At FreshPlans, the mobile traffic is increasing  — 5% in the past month compared with 0.53% a year ago. The percentage is still fairly small, but certainly worth watching.
• Do conversion rates differ? FreshPlans is a public service, but we set up goals at Google Analytics for testing purposes. Our mobile population shows a 41% conversion rate, compared with a 29% conversion rate for the desktop visitors. If our analytics goals were tied with business goals, we’d need to make sure our site was as mobile-friendly as possible.
•  Does visitor behavior differ in other ways? FreshPlans mobile visitors stay on the site longer. This may just be because of the slow load time, since they visit the same number of pages. If your mobile visitors check out fewer pages, have a higher bounce rate, or  follow strange paths in their visitor flow, that’s evidence that the mobile experience is lacking.
• Does your business rely on mobile web use? If you own a restaurant, don’t mess around. People look up restaurants on their phones, and if yours looks bad, you need to fix that posthaste.

Considering these factors will help you decide whether to prioritize mobile site improvements.

A final word, though: these questions are just about whether you need to get your site mobile friendly right now or can put it off until your next site update. Websites need regular updates and redesigns every few years anyway. Next time you have it done, make sure your site is mobile friendly. This is a trend which will reach you soon even if it hasn’t yet.

#1 for Local Search: How Are Your Chances?

I had a call this morning from a local business which doesn’t currently have a website. We’re told that half of small businesses don’t have websites, and this business owner realized that without a site to send people to, he was wasting the money he spent on advertising. A good website not only lets you reach more potential customers (up to 86% of your customers look online first, depending on what you’re selling, and when they don’t find you, they’re likely to go elsewhere), but also improves the ROI of your other advertising by giving you another chance to talk to people who aren’t ready to call yet.

This business owner had a clear goal. He has a service, and he knows that people deciding whom to call for this service will just go to the first good, economical option they find. His goal, therefore, is to show up first when people search for the service he provides.

What are his chances of getting to #1 for local search? And — more importantly for you, dear reader, how can you tell what your chances are for reaching the same goal?

• How’s the competitive landscape? Search for your chosen keyword, preferably signed out and on a computer you haven’t used for such a search before. Search engines personalize results for you, so any computer where you’re signed in to Google or have made similar searches will give you places you’ve been before, places your friends like, etc. Get the cleanest experience you can, and see what comes up first for that search. In the case of the business owner who called me, the first spots weren’t even local companies. They were national service listings. That means that there are no local companies providing this service whose websites are good enough to get top listing. Our caller is in luck. When we build him a great website, search engines will be happy to have someone to list at the top of the page.
• How are your competitors’ sites? If the page had been filled with local listings, our caller might still be able to get top placement. It depends on the quality of the other sites. As it happens, there is someone in town providing the same service as our caller, and they do have a website — down at the bottom of page one below some companies in neighboring states. They have a homemade website, with typos and fuzzy pictures, but it’s not a terrible website. It has a good amount of content and clear calls to action. We can build our caller a better website, but this is not an unimportant competitor. If they get it together someday to have their site updated and do some linkbuilding, they would have the advantage of an older domain, and they could be a threat. If your competitors have very good websites, then yours has to be even better. A great blog, strong social media integration, and careful attention to the technical aspects of the site can give you some advantage, but you also have to be realistic. You might need to shoot for #2.
• What does your company deserve? If your company is brand new and there are competitors in your space who have been in business locally for decades, you should hope they have poor quality websites. If you deserve top rankings because of the stature of your company, then you can compete better. This may sound obvious, but not everyone realizes it — and not all business owners are realistic about the stature of their businesses. All things being equal, the more important company will get the top ranking. If your company isn’t that important (yet), a much better website can do wonders for you — but it might not get you to #1.

For our caller, getting top placement in local search is a realistic goal. What if you check the points above and determine that you’re not likely to get #1 right away?

• Get your website online immediately. You can’t compete if you’re not in the game, and nowadays a business with no website is simply not in the game. It’ll take time to improve your rankings, so start working on that as soon as possible.
• Make sure your website is better than your competitors’ sites — or as good as your resources will allow.
• Work on your off-site SEO. Linkbuilding, social media, and additional content will make your company more competitive.

15 Review Sites for Your Business

72% of consumers in a recent survey said that they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends (hint: way more than they trust ads). The vast majority of consumers do research online before making a purchase, even if they buy in person, and many check reviews while they’re actually in a store.

All this means that online reviews can be very good for your business. If your business happens to be a restaurant or retail store, or if you manufacture things sold in those environments, they’re downright necessary for your business.

Paying people to write reviews or writing your own reviews can backfire. Consumers perceive these tactics as dishonest, and getting caught can get you banned from sites and harm your reputation.

So what can you do, apart from being good enough to inspire some positive reviews? Asking customers for reviews is fine. Providing samples to good reviewers is also fine. Giving a little guidance to the people from whom you request reviews is also acceptable.

I’ve been involved in several studies regarding online reviews myself lately (I’m a “top reviewer” at Amazon.com, so I’m on researchers mailing lists), so I’ll be glad to share what I’ve learned recently:

• The most effective reviews, in terms of product choice, are moderate reviews. Both super-negative and super-positive reviews are less likely to influence product choice. Objective-sounding reviews that mention positives and negatives are the most effective. One study also found that “well argued” reviews perform better, which I find very plausible, but I have no tips for getting your customers to write well-argued reviews.
• Longer reviews are more influential than shorter ones. The studies that make these claims are just counting words, but one mentioned that reviews with lots of tangential personal information (“I bought this for my husband because he…”) don’t show the benefits of longer reviews that contain more relevant information.
• People write reviews for two main reasons: altruism and a desire for notoriety. I’m an altruistic reviewer, myself, but people who do research on this subject clearly believe that people get a kick out of being a top reviewer. If you can figure out a way to pat people on the back for their reviews, you may find that you get more reviews. If I owned a restaurant, I think I’d put people who wrote great reviews on the menu or in the hallways along with the Employee of the Month or something. Just be sure not to cross the line by rewarding them with tangible goods.

With no further ado, 15 sites that allow reviews of businesses:

1. Citysearch
2. Yellowbook
3. YP
4. Yahoo Local
5. Merchant Circle
6. Angie’s List
7. Google Places
8. Insider Pages
9. Pinbud
10. Wimgo
11. Manta
12. Yelp
13. Dex Knows
14. Superpages
15. Best of the Web

 

 

Google Cracks Down on Poor Quality Linkbuilding

If you own a website, you’ve probably received unsolicited offers to swap links,  invitations to buy links, or promises of thousands of links for your website at economical rates. You might have tried automatic link submission software or hired cheap linkbuilding services in hopes of getting that large number of links that makes your site look good to the search engines.

We’ve always told you that poor quality linkbuilding could harm your website’s rankings, and Google has frequently spoken out against unnatural linking and paid links. Now the most recent algorithm update is targeting websites that haven’t been paying attention.

Google sent out notices to hundreds of thousands of sites that were violating best practices in their linkbuilding. However, these notices arrived through Webmaster Tools. If you don’t have Webmaster Tools, or don’t check them, you might not receive notice. The sites that got the warning were given a few weeks to clean up their acts, and then were slapped with penalties.

Innocent site owners sometimes accept offers that sound good. They also sometimes use strategies that aren’t wise, because they don’t know those strategies are bad choices. If you dabble in SEO for your website, how can you be sure that you aren’t facing penalties for unnatural links?

• First, don’t worry about natural links — that is,  people linking to you without being asked to. Google knows that you can’t control who links to you, and you can be sure they have enough experience to distinguish someone’s natural links to you from those you’ve paid for or swapped for. If you’ve never done bad linkbuilding, you have nothing to worry about.
• Requesting links from relevant directories and building profiles at sites like Brownbook, Merchant Circle, or Google Places is absolutely okay. Those directories are like phone books: places which list businesses for the convenience of people looking for goods and services. Paying for premium listings at such places is also fine.
• Paying for ads on websites, as long as it’s clear that they are ads, is also fine. Advertising is not frowned upon by Google — they are in fact the world’s largest seller of ads. Paying for links which are not clearly ads is not okay. If you’ve done this, undo it as fast as you can. Read more about paid links.
• Natural links swaps are okay. For example, we link to designers we work with when we mention them, and many of them link to us, too. If your bed and breakfast links to restaurants in your neighborhood and some of them link to you on their “Local Accommodations” page, that’s fine. On the other hand, if you have a page of links to everyone who will link back to you, from overseas massage parlors to link farms, you’re going to be in trouble. The basic rule here is simple: make sure the links are valuable to your readers. That bed and breakfast’s visitors will be glad to know about local restaurants, but their experience wouldn’t be improved by links to a distant puppy mill.
• Note that it is not any better to do that kind of unnatural linking by using complex linking schemes where you link to the puppy mill, who links to the massage parlor, who links to you. Google is specifically cracking down on sites that do this.
• Requesting links from other website owners and showing them how your content will be valuable to their readers is absolutely okay. If they agree and link to you, you’ve simply sped up the natural linking process by drawing their attention to your website.
• Social media links — linking to your blog posts at your Facebook page, for example, or to your website at your LinkedIn profile — are completely okay. You’re supposed to do that.

What if you realize, upon reading this, that you have some shady links out there? You should try to undo the damage. It may not be easy — especially if you hired a shady company to get those shady links. Do your best, remove all questionable reciprocal links, cancel all unwise paid arrangements, and request reconsideration from Google if need be.

If you need some help with your linkbuilding, we’ll be happy to help. We never use automatic submission or any questionable methods. Call Rosie at 318.572.6002 to get on our calendar, or email Rebecca@HadenInteractive.com with any questions and concerns about your link profile.

Planning an Online Marketing Campaign

Ongoing, integrated online marketing as a part of a good overall marketing strategy is what you want for your business. One part of that, however, can be a specific marketing campaign for a promotion, a seasonal push, or another special focus for your company. Here’s a step by step method for planning an online marketing campaign for your business. Our example is a new campaign we’re working on for a new office supply ecommerce site.

Step I: Choose a focus.

Sometimes that focus is obvious: an event or a new product you have coming up, Back to School or Christmas, your company’s 10-year anniversary.

Sometimes it’s not so obvious. You know it’s time to get an email sent out so you could randomly choose a topic and let it go at that. When you do that, you’re missing out on opportunities. Instead, put a little time into research.

You know your customers and your primary keywords. Check your analytics for previous years to see the kinds of searches that were most popular in the time period you’ve chosen for your campaign. Now use Google Insights and Google Trends to see what the trending topics are in relation to your keywords. If you have information and insights from offline experience, include those as well.

For our example, we saw that green cleaning products are a breakout topic in searches at Google, we see Earth Day coming up, and we know that the company has these products. The manufacturer of the products has some handy marketing materials we can use to reduce the time involved in putting the campaign together, too. We have our focus!

Step 2: Develop a Strategy

We want our campaign to bring traffic and drive sales. We want it to strengthen our website with links, to grow our house list,  and to help us increase our social media reach. Since this is a new website, we also want to get some good data to work with. Your campaign might have some additional goals, from improving brand perception to getting rid of those leftover flyers in the back room.

Note that all of these are goals for your business. The strategic goals of your campaign should never be things internal to the campaign, like a certain click-through rate or “a really cool banner.” Those are goals, but not the primary strategic goals of the campaign.

The tactics will depend on your budget, your prior experience with similar campaigns, and your target audience. A very likely set of options for online marketing:

• blogging
• PPC or banner ads
• social media
• email blast
• linkbuilding
• multimedia content

Step 3: Content, Content, Content

We need a great landing page for our ads and emails, some relevant linkbait for our linkbuilding on the subject, good stuff to put in our emails and social media posts, and posts and pages for our website. We may also need ad copy and images. This is where the cost comes in. For our example, we were able to take advantage of some marketing materials from vendors, but there’s no substitute for good content. Make the investment, and then do enough with your great new content to ensure a good ROI.

Step 4: Set up the Metrics

You must figure out how to track the results of your campaign. Your email blast can include trackable links. Your ads should take visitors to a trackable landing page. You should be measuring the reach and level of engagement of your social media efforts.

For green cleaning products, we’ll be able to watch the effects on the sales of specific products. You can’t do this with a more general initiative: you can’t, for example, judge whether people bought more Mother’s Day flowers because you did a Mother’s Day campaign or because it was Mother’s Day.

You also want to be able to know which part of your campaign converted the best. That is, if you saw the most traffic from your social media efforts and the longest stays from PPC ads, but those who came from your email newsletter were most likely to buy, you’ll know how best to allocate your resources in future.

Step 5: Connect the Dots

Unless you’re running a test and don’t care about traffic or sales at this point, connect your various tactics as much as possible. The email that includes a video which encourages visitors to go to an article on your website which they can share at social media sites where you’ll make a point of communicating with those who share — as you can see, each element of the campaign can support the other elements.

For this campaign, we’ll use a series of related email flyers, blog posts, social media, and banner ads on the website. We’ll request links in green directories and join in the discussions at green business sites. This well help position the company as a thought leader in this area and help them stand out in the minds of new visitors.

The result should be a successful campaign — and continuing benefits in terms of search and a growing customer base.

20% of Americans Have Heard of SEO

Matt Cutts used the new Google survey tool to ask whether people had heard of search engines optimization, and reported that 1 in 5 Americans is aware of SEO.

This isn’t scientific research, of course, but rather an experiment with a new online tool.

Still, it was encouraging. Somewhere around a quarter of U.S. businesses are said to have a search engine optimization plan in place, and 35% of businesses in a recent survey said SEO was the single marketing channel they’d choose if they had to pick only one, so it seems that business owners have an even higher level of familiarity with SEO than the average.

Clearly, people are becoming more aware of the importance of search engine optimization.

Nonetheless, just to keep it in perspective, I feel that I must list a few other things that are true of 20% of Americans, according to surveys:

• 20% of Americans suffer from mental illness.
• 20% believe they will become millionaires.
• 20% of us work while on vacation.
• 20% are chronic procrastinators.
• 20% believe that the sun orbits the earth (I want to see the raw data on this one — I don’t believe it).
• 20% have never heard of Occupy Wall Street.
• 20% have ended a romantic relationship because of a pet.

I think we can conclude that people who understand the value of SEO are special people. If you’ve heard of SEO, you’re ahead of 80% of people in the U.S. If you know that SEO is important for your business, you’re ahead of some 65-75% of business owners. If you actually know what search engine optimization means and how it benefits your company, you’re downright amazing.

Now let’s get serious. If you are a business owner who knows the value of SEO, you have an enormous advantage over the majority of business owners. In fact, the U.S. census tells us that fewer than half of businesses with revenues of $1,000,000 or less even have a website. Even if we assume that businesses with websites are more likely to be owned by people familiar with SEO, that still gives you some nice odds. Get your business online with a well optimized website, and you will probably be way ahead of your competitors.

Can We Give You $100?

Haden Interactive is a Google Engage agency, and we have $100 in free ads to give you to celebrate the birthday of the Engage program. If you want our assistance in making sure the ads coordinate well with your overall marketing strategy, we’ll be happy to meet with you and discuss your online marketing needs. We’ll also be happy to send you a special $100 coupon with no further commitment.

When these coupons are gone, they’re gone, so don’t delay. Contact us now.

SEO Tip #34: What Else Should We Do?

SEM, SEO, or Both?

SEM, or search engine marketing, is different from SEO, or search engine optimization.

For one thing, there is fairly broad agreement on what “SEO” means. Optimization, or making something the best it can be, for search engines, so making your website the best it can be at showing up when people search for things relevant to your business. This is about good content at your website, a high level of usability — stuff like that. It’s also about getting links to your website. Good quality links require good content, too, as well as regular linkbuilding, so linkbuilding is generally considered part of SEO.

SEM, on the other hand, may be anything that improves marketing using search engines. While some people define SEM as only paid search tools such as Adwords, others (include Wikipedia) would include SEO under the larger umbrella of SEM. I’d be inclined to say that important steps like printing your web address on your receipts or invoices qualify as SEM but not as SEO. Such a step can lead people to search for you no matter what your site is like once they get there (though it had better be good to bring them back).

The question is, can you manage with just one or the other?

Our experience with FreshPlans, our lab site, tells us that we can succeed with a site using only SEO. With nothing but a highly optimized website, we increased traffic to the site by 3,000% in  a year. So yes, the answer might be that you can indeed make do with just SEO.

The next question is, are we talking about your lab site?

If your website sends business to your shop (or you want it to), you shouldn’t be experimenting to see how far you can get with just one approach when you could be doing more.  Diverting traditional advertising dollars to paid search, advertising your website in traditional media, sending customers to your site, using social media to increase visibility — all of these are effective strategies for most companies.

So can you use just SEM? We’ve met people who use only paid search and ignore the quality of their site. We don’t get it. SEO is cheaper, more effective, and lasts longer than PPC, so why would you bypass it?

If you’re trying to decide between SEO and SEM, you’re asking yourself the wrong question.

Next Page »