• Low divergence-losses, the searcher already knows what he wants. Desire doesn’t need to be created, the user already has it. The result is that the budget can be allocated much more exactly and thus return on investment is increased.
• Campaign reports are very detailed, conversions can be broken down to a single keyword. It is always very clear how much you earn with the PPC campaign.
• No need to predefine a marketing budget at the beginning of the year. As long as you know your product margin, your keywords and your conversion rate, you can use a floating budget because you know that you will earn with every conversion.

Possible ways for brand marketers to adopt search

But also for brand marketers, search engines are an important advertising channel. Many people who get aware of your advertising campaigns on TV, in magazines, radio or outdoor will sooner or later go to the search engines to search either your product or company. Or they will use search terms that are related to your business and do a general search and thus also search for your competitors. They will compare their findings as that’s especially convenient with search engines.

So, how can search engines be used by brand marketers for awareness creation?

• The user has to find you! That means, you have to book your brand/product keywords and all keywords that are related to you and your products and the user might associate you with.
• You should use the wording from the offline campaigns to give the user a familiar feeling and still have a click-animating text ad.
• You must have a great landing page which continues the story of the campaign and goes even further to more interaction with your brand and product and optimally results in a conversion, so you can use this contact again in the future, e.g. for newsletter campaigns or cross-selling.
• You have to find the best position in the search engine result pages (SERPs). That is not necessarily the top position.
• You have to differentiate from competitors because the competitor is only one click away.

If you think differently, i.e. comprehensive, strategically, user-centric, and understand SEO as a key part of your online marketing mix, then you might be interested in our understanding of search engine optimization and SEO outsourcing:

1. SEO is an investment into a business model
2. Long-term, strategic growing
3. SEO concept development
4. SEO content growing
5. Creative link building

So, now you might think: That doesn’t sound like offshore SEO, this is a high-quality approach and will cost me a lot, so outsourcing a project wouldn’t leave me any profit.

Wrong. We are able to deliver high-quality SEO services for affordable prices. SEO outsourcing = SEO + outsourcing. That is, we do not compromise on the quality of our services, SEO is good SEO, but the term outsourcing is about the money part.

As we just touched the topic of SEO costs, just one thing to make clear: We don’t accept fee models like “pay-per-link” or pay-per-page, because then we would reduce ourselves down to disclaimer at the top of the page. Instead our fee model would sound more like “pay for SEO strategy and implementation” or “pay for a striving online business and targeted clients.”

If you feel that sounds good, you should contact us.

• A lot of education is necessary, as experiences and understanding of search engine marketing is pretty low. Many Chinese customers don’t understand the difference between SEO and SEM yet. The value of qualified traffic is not appreciated yet, a conversion rate either unknown or often unimportant. Quantity (i.e. website visitors) counts, not matter if relevant or not.
• Chinese SEO agencies promise things that can’t be kept, customers believe it. Often heard potential clients say: “your competitor promised me to be among the top 5 in Google. If you don’t, you’re out…”
• Quality SEO has its price, also from Chinese SEO agencies. For quality SEO in China, experts are required. They are not cheap, but hard to find. Labor costs in this area are far above average.
• SEO is cheap because it is just about adding some things here and there. In fact, good SEO is a strategic approach and has to be planned and implemented thoroughly.
• Long-tail SEO (reverse search) is hardly understood. Customers want to be on position no. 1 with their most competitive keyword. Convincing them that long-tail SEO can deliver much quicker and more converting results is not understood or not wanted.

Parts of the header and meta tags

Title tag (importance: ++)
The title tag belongs to the header but is no meta tag. It will appear in the reverse bar of the browser and is also often used in the search engine result pages as the link to the respective website. Moreover, it will be shown if you choose to bookmark the webpage in your browser. Take a look at this website here, the title tag is Header and Meta Tag optimization. The title is placed between TITLE and /TITLE.

Meta description (importance: +)
The meta description tag is used to describe the content of this website. Years ago the search engines used it heavily, in the meantime it doesn’t have too much influence anymore, at least not with the big search engines. Smaller ones might still rely on the meta description tag. Still this tag should be used because sometimes it will be shown in the search engine result pages (SERPs), instead of the usual text snippets. So a good meta description is important to increase the click-rate for your webpage in the SERPs.

Meta keywords (importance: -)
Meta keywords have become more or less unimportant. You should evaluate carefully if your effort you put into meta keyword creation will pay off. They provide additional text for crawler-based search engines, but as these don’t have a relevant market share, meta keywords can be neglected.

Meta robots (importance: +-)
With the meta robots text you can exclude search engine spiders. It lets you specify that a particular page should NOT be indexed by the search engine. If you want your pages to be indexed, no special input is necessary, just leave the meta robots tag away in your source code.
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The users honor your good content as well. They will come back and recommend the site, moreover, you will more likely get links from other websites. Of course, writing unique content is a tough job. But you will get rewarded. Whereas those who do only keyword inclusion in a standard text will be punished. Not too long ago, webmaster uploaded thousands of webpages with the same text, just the keywords were automatically exchanged. No chance for them to get good rankings any more!

So actually the right term should be content creation instead of content optimization.

Vice versa, duplicate content will reduce your ranking. If done heavily we talk about text spam and that can have serious effects – even an exclusion of the SERPs can be thinkable.

Good content goes closely along with a good text amount. A reasonable text amount is considered to be 300 to 400 words at least. 200 words and less will be hardly recognized by search engines. The keyword density in the SEO text should not exceed 5 to 8%, else it could be keyword spamming.

Last but not least, good content and information will more likely draw links to your website which will boost your rankings even more.

Good content attributes

1. Unique information
   As mentioned before the content needs to be unique. No-one likes to read the same content again and again on different webpages or categories on one website.
2. Scannable structure
   The text should have good structure for the eyes, so you can fly over the text and right away get the most important information. Highlighting the keywords is very efficient as well.
3. An answer to a question
   A website is worth reading when you get an answer to the question you entered in the search slot of a search engine, for instance. Still happens often enough, that you have to scan 10 different websites to get a solution.
4. Quality of grammar, punctuation and spelling
   If you stumble upon mistakes all the time, you’ll lose patience and attention and thus even a professional text will become annoying.

Seoastute

Different SEO analyzing tools are available. Both for free as browser solutions and of course, as commercial software as well. Common commercial SEO software are e.g. AWR, Web-SEO, IBP, SEO Toolkit, just to name a few.

1. Taking a look at the competitors
   At least the 10 most important competitors should be quickly analyzed to find out their weaknesses and strenghts. Also to see if some competitors are strong in all SEO disciplines or just in one or two. Can help you to judge how fast which competitor can be caught.
2. Ranking check for the most important keywords
   Part of a SEO website analysis is also to check your website for the most important keywords. You will find them with a thorough keyword analysis. Checking ranks is an automated process and normally done by commercial or free available software tools. You will find out which keywords or maybe clusters the website is already strong in and which not.This analysis gives more information than a normal website tracking tool. There you often don’t see the search engine ranking positions and if a keyword is not ranked so well and nobody clicks on the SERPs for that keyword, it won’t be displayed in the tracking tool.
3. Check keyword density
   Check the keyword density for your search engine landing pages. There are certain limits which the keyword density should not exceed. A common number is about 5%.
4. Check technical aspects
   Technical aspects include 301 redirects, robots.txt, 404 error page, server response time, headers response, IP adress, etc.
5. Check page structure
   The focus here should be on the location of certain parts of source code in the website. For example, the headline and the text should be very close to the top of the website. The deeper it is the lower the value will be.
6. Check link structure
   Another very important part of SEO website analysis is to check the internal and external link structure. Is the linking without any system or do the internal links consequently link back to the start page? What about inbound links, where do they come from, what is the value of the websites that give the link?

So, many things to consider when performing a SEO analysis. And much to learn about a website as well.

Link popularity means the amount of links that you get for a site. The more links, the more popular the site is. In the meantime, link popularity is depreciated by some search engines and replaced by domain popularity. That again means that a lot of links from different domains are received. Domain popularity is commonly higher valued than link popularity.

Doing link building is a long-lasting process. You can compare it with daily life. If you are good in something, you will get recommendations. But they won’t come all at once, but gradually. The same with link building. The page rank is developed and earned slowly. Else you will face the danger of doing link spam.

In terms of link types you can distinguish between inbound links, outbound links and reciprocal links. A reciprocal link is when website A links to website B and vice versa. As reciprocal links could be regarded as paid link, search engines may not value them as high as one-way links.

In the meantime a lot of link exchanges have developed. They focus on commercial link building to increase inbound links but to avoid reciprocal links. However, some search engines are also clever enough to detect these networks. In my opinion, link networks are a risky bet.

Other ways to do link building is get natural link juice or link bait. These terms mean that your content or services are so good that other webmasters voluntarily like to link to your website. This could be free software or services, reports, downloads, whatever is useful.

Besides the link itself, the link text is very important. Coming back to the daily life example from above: when you get personal recommendations like “Mr. xx is good” it doesn’t help too much. A recommendation like “Mr. xx is good in maths and physics” is much more helpful. The same for link building. The more ’speaking’ a link is, the better.

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Before selecting the right online marketing channel there are a some strategic questions to answer. Target group information should be available, the general marketing strategy should be considered and how digital advertising fits into there. Interaction and integration with other sales channels in a company should be looked at and the goals of the online marketing campaigns itself.

Online Marketing Channels:

Search engine marketing / keyword advertising / SEM
Search engine optimization / SEO
Affiliate marketing
E-mail marketing
Banner advertising
Blog marketing

To find the right SEO keywords for a website, you should do a thorough keyword research. First, you need to be aware of the target group of that website. You have to ask yourself which visitors will come to your site and why they could be interested in your website and the information you provide. And what could they search for when they should find your web presence?

There are several ways to do that. You can use keyword tools that automatically generate you lists of keywords and keyword phrases. But you should not only rely on these automated processes. Use your brain and set up a keyword matrix.
That means, build categories about your target group, group them according to locations, products, price information, etc. Whatever you can think of and what makes sense. Fill these categories with keywords and combine them.

Figure out the most important keywords. Naturally, one-word keywords are more often searched for than keyword phrases. But of course, they are also very general and thus the competition for that keyword is often pretty high. So ask yourself, if it is really necessary to optimize your website for a handful of very general keywords. Maybe it is easer and more efficient if you use long-tail keywords for SEO optimization.

Later, when you write the content for a website, you should take a look at the keyword density. A webpage should not be crowded with keywords as you build the website for your visitor and not for the search engine. Repeating SEO keywords too often is neither good for usability nor liked by the search engines.

Why should you do Search Engine Optimization?

1. Search engines are in the meantime the entry channel no. 1 when it comes to searching product information. Most of search engines command over 100 million searches everyday, day after day. Search engine optimization helps you get this piece of the pie, which you might be losing otherwise to your competition.
2. Search engine optimization offers a much better return-on- investment (ROI) compared to banner campaigns and other internet marketing techniques. This is due to the fact that search engine users don’t have to be attracted for a product, they already are, that’s why they search for it. Thus the stray losses are very much reduced.
3. Search engine optimization helps you increase targeted traffic. People who are already looking for the product or service, which you are offer don’t have to be attracted but convinced to buy.
4. Search engine optimization is a long term and permanent answer to your traffic generation. Once a website has been optimized through search engines it can stay at the top for long periods of time.
5. Search engine optimization results in huge savings on ad-spent using traditional channels of marketing

Which marketing goals can be achieved with search engine optimization?

Basically, search engines are the ideal platform for performance marketing. You can measure very exactly, how much output you get for your marketing investments. So one goal of SEO would be to increase sales and leads, mostly very transaction-based. Combined with a superb landing page, search engine optimization can also be a useful instrument for brand awareness creation.

SEO and SEM/keyword advertising strategies:

As search engine optimization is a long-term approach and keyword advertising a short-term approach to get into the search engines, they should be combined wisely. So you can start with SEM and later when your natural search rankings improve, you can reduce your SEM spendings if your online marketing budget is limited.

Another approach is to try to have both a paid search result and a natural search result (search engine optimization) in the result page. Studies show that this will significantly increase the conversion rates of your online sales process.

Elements of Search Engine Optimization / SEO:

Keywords (Keyword research, keyword density, keyword matrix, keyword tag)

Link building (link popularity, link text, deep linking, inbound link, link checker, outbound link, reciprocal links)

SEO Analysis (check competitors, keyword strength, site structure, link structure)

Text and content (text amount, keyword density, content is king)

Header components (title tag, meta tags, meta description, meta keywords)