As, with most of your marketing efforts, your SEO campaign should be planned carefully to ensure you get the best returns from it. You should plan your SEO strategy carefully as each campaign will be different; there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ in SEO.

There are many tools to help you with the planning of your SEO strategy. Some are paid for, but there are some excellent free tools available from Google Labs, such as Google Trends and Google Insights for Search. These are some of my favourite SEO tools (actually, I love most of the free tools from Google – the Adwords Keyword Tool is invaluable to me too…)

How to use the information

Using Google Trends isn’t difficult, and Google do give a lot of information about how to use the tools so I won’t cover old ground or bore you to tears with unnecessary instructions. If you are a novice to SEO or Google Labs then visit this page for an easy, ‘how to use’ guide. Then come back here to learn how to use the information gathered.

As an example I have inputted three search terms that an imaginary SEO client is optimising their site for. The keywords I have put into Google Trends are: heating, heaters and central heating.

if you click on the above image, you will see that I have refined the search using the drop-down on the left hand side. I have set it only to check the UK search trends, as worldwide information wouldn’t be relevant for my imaginary client. My imaginary client wants local optimisation and the location they want to be found for is in England so I have refined my search down even further to show results just from England.

What do these results tell us?

Well, the results tell us things that we could probably guess at such as there are more searches during the winter than the summer for heating related keywords. I know, anyone could guess that, right…? But this also tells us that heating is searched for considerably more than heaters or central heating.  So, I would have to tailor my site towards the keyword ‘heating’ and make ‘heaters’ and ‘central heating’ the secondary keywords.

But, what about Conversion?

This is always my biggest question. Will the keywords optimised bring in the right kind of visitors to the site? Well, there is no real way of knowing this without testing, and monitoring the site over time. I would always advocate that you use Google Analytics to check for conversion, though unless you are at the end of the phone line advertised on the site you cannot absolutely say for certain where the calls come from and whether the caller has found the site through a search engine (unless you have a phone number that is only advertised on the site and track the number of times it is used), and much less which keyword they typed in.

The best way of making sure your site converts the browser into a customer is to make sure the website’s content is good. There are obvious points here, spelling errors should be nonexistent on your site – I would think carefully about whether to give my credit card details to a company that can’t even be bothered to use a spell checker, wouldn’t you? Make sure the imagery is appropriate. Ensure your contact details can be found easily. And most importantly, you must have a ‘call to action’. Make it clear to your visitors what you want them to do next, call you up, fill in a form, click to buy, sign up for a newsletter etc etc. Make it easy for them, don’t hide the phone number in a flash file at the head of your site. Put the number in the copy, ‘ring us on, 01234 567 890 to arrange a visit from your local central heating engineer’.

How Can E-mail Marketing Benefit SEO And Your Business

One thing that sets small businesses aside from large corporations is the personal touches that the company is able to offer. For customers it is important to have a regular contact, to know that someone will be available to talk through any problems that they may have and to be known as more than just a number.

However, just because a business has a large number of employees or premises across the UK or even the world, does not mean that they are not customer focussed. Essentially, all businesses have to start small and it is the customers that enable them to grow.

So how can larger companies ensure that they remain on a first name basis with their customers? E-mail marketing may be the answer.

Unfortunately, e-mails sent in bulk through a marketing system have often been considered as spam that will be deleted as soon as it sets foot into the inbox. Yet, it can also be used to contact existing customers in a personal way.

Sending personalised e-cards such as, birthday cards, Christmas, Easter or even ‘One Year with the Company’ cards, will give customers a slight nudge just to remind them that the business is still there, but it will add a personal touch to the business and consumer relationship.

E-mail marketing could have a slight impact upon a company websites SEO too; including links in an e-mail will encourage click through’s to the website increasing the numbers of visitors to the site, and the more visitors that a website has, the more authority that is gains in the eyes of a search engine.

Sending e-cards to customers can not only have benefits for SEO and add a personal touch to the relationship with the consumer but it could potentially lead to increased sales for the business.

Google Personalised Search

In this weeks video blog we are going to concentrate on Googles personalised search and how it could possible effect, your own website and your clients.

Googles is always striving towards providing the user with the best possible results, so Google intend to enhance this by including geological location and search history. In fact it takes into consideration the IP of your internet provider to return companies and events local to you and upto 180 days browser history to alter the search results.

This has been happening for a while when you are logged into your Google account, but now they have rolled it out based on browser history and default search.

Lets see this in action and how to turn the function off. - Video  -

What does this mean for our clients?

Potentially we will see a decrease in traffic volumes to sites, but as Google users will be getting more accurate and relevant results so in theory the conversion rates should increase.

What can we do?

Obviously within the SEO industry we are often having to adjust to Google’s algorithm, the future of search might not be about traffic volumes and search engine positions, but more about; keeping visitors on a site for longer periods of time, having a good call to action and improving on the content of a site to attract users via direct traffic and social media.

We are really interested in other peoples view on Googles personalised search, so please feel free to leave comments on our Youtube channel or supporting blog on www.seo-creare.co.uk/news/

Draw Readers To Your Website With Additional Content.

Many businesses have a host of media content related to their activity, from press releases and articles to testimonials and case studies. This literature is an ideal way to inform potential clients of the business, yet many do not archive this information in a media section on their website.

Increasingly, the internet is becoming one of the primary places that individuals discover new businesses, products and services, therefore it is important that companies understand the importance of promoting themselves effectively online.

A media section can include various forms of content; press releases, testimonials, case studies, videos and articles. Even articles that have been published in the press can be transferred into an electronic format and archived on the website.

There are a variety of benefits that archiving content in a media section of a website can have, including a significant SEO benefit;

Adding fresh content to a website is renowned as being a way that search engines judge the authority of a site. For businesses that are regularly producing media, it is the perfect way to add new copy to the site on a regular basis.

If the content includes the businesses keywords, these can be included in the body of the text as links to other pages of the website, encouraging movement around the site and providing valuable back links. A popular SEO technique is social bookmarking to websites such as, Digg, Delicious and Mixx; adding links to the content on these bookmarking websites could increase the number of visits to the website.

One thing that many internet users will be looking for when they search a company’s website is information that exposes the business as a respected authority in their field. If nothing else, this will reassure the customer that they are worth investing in. Adding press cuttings and case studies promotes a business as being active and an authority in their industry.

Another possible benefit that including a media section in a website could offer is the chance for content to be used by journalists. Some will use the internet to find new stories; the chance that they could find it could be further enhanced by having content from the site indexed by Google news.

Businesses that are active online and add fresh content to their website are most likely to receive positive exposure, which will benefit both the sites SEO and could prove the website to be a considerable ROI. Adding a media section to a website could help businesses some way towards achieving this.

Mixed media search isn’t a new thing, Google’s Universal Search has been around for ages, it’s just now that people are starting to realise that you need to incorporate more than just web based search into your SEO campaigns.

What does this mean?

It means that your brand needs to be incorporating more than just text based search into its SEO campaign. You should ensure that your brand performs in all the different strands of search results available today. These include, video, image, news, and more, including the newest; real time search.

Larry Cornett of Yahoo simply puts it this way: “Am I really being represented the way I want to be in every one of these search experiences?”

Video for SEO

Video is going to play a bigger and bigger role online. Why? Because it’s interactive, it can be interesting and informative as well as entertaining and fun all at the same time. And that’s what people want. Of course you must optimise your videos, otherwise they will get lost amongst the thousands of competing videos.

You can say a lot with video. You can have a video presenter on your homepage to introduce your company. This is great for visitors as it means they don’t have to read everything written on your site (though don’t remove the words – that’s all Google can consume at present) to understand what services your company provides.

Maybe you could have a video to demonstrate your products? This, again is very useful to your end user, they can see exactly what it is you are offering. They can see how your products work, and more importantly how they can benefit from what it is that you are providing.

Your videos must be optimised, or you’ll lose the benefit of having them in the first place. You will need to make sure that our videos appear in Google’s video search. This is important for your brand, as you want your videos to appear when someone searches for your brand. Make sure you choose an SEO company that has experience in video optimisation because there are subtle differences in the approach to video SEO.