With a focus on Myers’ two main categories of business, stair glides and ramps, Qiigo was able to immediately impact his call volume. Myers started seeing an increase of as many as 4 calls each day. By qualifying those calls, he has seen an increase in closed sales over the last several months. “Our March numbers were up 50% over February, April was up 25% over March, and we are on track to have a record month in May thanks to the SEO work Qiigo has done,” says Dave Myers.

Driving business to his local site was an important objective for Myers. His clients want to work with someone who has a local presence, someone who is rooted in the local community. By emphasizing his local website and phone number, Qiigo was able to start generating calls for Myers right from the start of the campaign. With the volume of calls increasing exponentially, Myers has even added staff to ensure that phones are answered at all times. 

“I am 100% pleased with the work that Qiigo has done and I look forward to expanding my efforts with Qiigo shortly,” says Myers.

Indented listings are also referred to as double listings.  Simply put, an indented listing is when you get two of the top ten search results on the first page of a Google results page.  An indented listing looks like this.

Google has this to say about indented or double listings:

“When Google finds multiple results from the same website, the most relevant result is listed first, with other relevant pages from that site indented below it.”

Your keywords can get indented listings by following these quick steps:

• Your webpage must already have a top 10 ranking for each keyword you want indented listings.
• Connect a second webpage to the first webpage with the top 10 ranking.  The second webpage should be on the same domain and have the same keyword, but with different content.
• Use your keyword in the anchor text to link the first page to the second page.  If possible, avoid using a site-wide navigational link in place of a contextual link within the body of the text.
• Your second page needs inbound links.  A few high-quality links can get good results depending on the competition for your keyword.

With these simple steps, you should be able to get 20% of the search results for your keywords.  With just a bit of additional work, you can get more clicks and visitors…and isn’t that the goal?

• 2009 SEM spending is projected to rise to $14.7 billion.
• 2013 SEM spending is expected to reach $26.1 billion.
• Online advertisers continue to embrace new marketing platforms.
• Advertisers are willing to pay for reach achieved through behavioral targeting.
• 40% of SEMPO State of the Market survey respondents are actively using social media sites for in-house marketing.
  • Facebook is the leading social media site.  Four out of five advertisers use Facebook for brand promotion.
• 75% of respondents would pay for clicks from targeted behavioral groups.
• Advertisers are willing to pay more for demographic, daypart and behavioral targeting.
  • 10% more for demographic and daypart targeting
  • 13% more for behavioral targeting
• 40% of advertisers plan to start targeting or retargeting searchers within the next year.

For more detailed information on the findings from the SEMPO 2008 State of the Market Report, visit their site at www.sempo.org.

While part of the results of any SEO project is more traffic to your website, more traffic is only valuable if you are able to convert those hits to sales or at the minimum inquiries.  When someone views your website and immediately bounces off, your SEO investment has done only part of the job.  The best SEO results include more traffic, a low bounce rate and a higher average time spent viewing your site.

If you are not getting any or all of these positive results from your SEO, then it might be time to re-evaluate.  If the visitors to your site are not finding relevant information that engages their interest, you may have the wrong keywords or content.  One of your SEO goals should be to engage the website visitor so that they spend time viewing your site. How do you make this happen?

First, you have to know what your goals are.  Do you want to generate sales leads or increase sales from your site?  Do you have a percentage increase you are looking to obtain?  Having a clearly defined goal helps you to evaluate the success of your SEO investment.

When choosing your keywords, those that will bring in qualified leads are better than those that will just drive traffic.  Searchers tend to fall into two categories:  those who are just getting started looking for information and those who know exactly what they want and are looking for specifics.  Focus on the keywords that attract those potential clients who are ready to actively engage your business.

After choosing the keywords that are most likely to bring in top quality prospects, be sure that your site is filled with content that is relevant to their search.  Provide them with specifics that will engage them and draw them into the site.  Don’t let them go away wondering how they got your site for a search result.  Give them information to whet their appetite, so that they explore more of your site.  Creating content that explains how you are different from the competition goes a long way to showing the searcher that you are ready to help fulfill their need.  But don’t promise what you can’t deliver.  You must be able to meet or exceed your new client’s needs.

Converting traffic to sales is one of the most challenging aspects of any business.  Make sure your SEO investment is doing more than just brining people to your site.  Your SEO should be bringing qualified potential clients who are ready to purchase.

With the decline in the economy, customer acquisition is becoming more and more vital.  As the focus on customer acquisition increases, SEO becomes a more vital part of the overall marketing strategy.  Because SEO provides a long term strategy for increased consumer presence, it has added value as compared to paid search marketing.

“Search Marketing Trends: Back to Basics” reports that SEO growth will grow from 17.7% to 20.3% while paid search will decline from 15.9% in 2009 to 11.3% in 2013.  When searching for information, consumers find more value in organic search results than pay per click (PPC) advertising.  The value placed by consumers on organic search results garners more clicks on these results thus making SEO a valued part of the marketing plan.

Combining SEO and PPC marketing efforts may result in higher search engine result rankings.  Paid search engine advertising offers more immediate results, but in order to see results in the search engine arena advertising must be consistent.  SEO marketing results occur over a longer time frame, but result in organic search results more valued by consumers.

In order to gain the most information and knowledge of your results, Web analytics is necessary.  Having solid feedback regarding your SEO and PPC marketing efforts will allow you to gage how successful your campaign is.  More traffic is only positive if the cost of the search ad relative to the conversion doesn’t reduce your bottom line.

SEO is a bit like a good public relations strategy; it helps to bring top of mind awareness to your site.  SEO gets them in the door, so you can complete the deal.