SEO Consult Blog

Today I discovered another fantastic feature for internet marketing and general Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). The feature is called Click Patterns, and for anyone who has not realised the full benefit of this tool I strongly advise you take a look into it.

The software basically creates a replication of your page, and shows the most popular links by percentage. As simple as this may seem, from a marketing perspective this is invaluable for three reasons.

1. You can manoeuvre popular links to be in a more reachable position on the page, ensuring the maximum amount of visibility and exposure for the good links.
2. You can scrap links that aren’t converting. Anything that is wasting space should be removed from the page.
3. If only a few links are taking all the traffic, you should consider a layout change.

It’s crucially important for your homepage to have clear navigation and structuring. It’s estimated that visitors will only spend an average of 2 to 3 clicks on a page to find the information they want. This is proof that you need your homepage to be perfect.

I am a big fan of ‘call to actions’. Having these is a subconscious reminder for the visitor to click through, and you’d be surprised of their importance in encouraging a click.

Content is important for a number of reasons, it is needed from both the perspective of the visitor and the search engines. Google anticipates 700 words of text on any given page, so if you have a “pretty” Flash site you won’t have any and you’re automatically at a disadvantage for Search Engine Optimisation.

Branding is a great way of building your company, use a catchy slogan, bright colours or memorable imagery to achieve returning visitors.

Finally always remember to keep your page colouring neutral, the last thing any visitor will want is to arrive at a site and wanting to turn their monitors off to protect their eyes! A good way to get round this is to look at high profile commercial brands that use a similar colour to you, then look at what they match their colours with and you can replicate this.

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO for short is such a simple, yet effective form of Internet Marketing, yet so often misunderstood. Through effective SEO you tend to find increased targetted traffic, reduced PPC bills, and more sales!

These may be quite bold claims, but I discovered this whilst looking through the data of our clients, as well as our own websites. As an Internet Marketer, I regularly read through the various publications around the internet, all claiming that one form of Internet Marketing is better than another form, usually followed by a debate in the blogs. However from my experience there is no one form of internet marketing which can encompass all of the traffic. In this blog I am going to describe the advantages of having your SEO and PPC within one company.

Inside SEO Consult we have a little team rivalry between SEO and PPC, however this banter only helps to drive both teams to push there clients further and work harder. However it is with this we also respect the other teams skills, recognising that through working together, we can push to increase the return on investment for our clients marketing budgets. This is done in a number of ways, as an SEO I regularly utilise the Google Adwords data my PPC colleagues collect, to find the keywords driving the most traffic for a client, and seeing what SEO can do to reduce this spend whilst still being visible in the SERP’s.

Through obtaining the rankings under these high traffic keywords, it allows us to either reduce the overall PPC budget, or expand the keywords covered under the budget, finding new areas the campaign did not previously have the budget to cover, and converting this into additional sales for our clients.