The Forge

Researching and choosing your site’s target keywords is the first step to SEO success.   In a sense, keywords are the DNA of your master SEO plan; keywords will be the blueprint of where your site gets indexed and what type of customers are visiting you.   It may seem fairly simple – choose the keywords that best suit your industry.  However, there are several factors that must be considered and compromises that must be taken to target the perfect keywords.  I’d like to briefly analyze what factors should be taken into account when choosing your site’s keywords.

1.  Local or Not: Is your business local or not?  If you are a Napa Valley Winery, it doesn’t make sense to target the single word ‘winery’.  Although ‘Winery’ may have more monthly search traffic than ‘Napa Valley Winery,’ the competition will be much stiffer and the ROI much smaller.  On the flip side, if your website is selling a broader online product, like ‘MMA Shorts’ than it wouldn’t make sense to include a specific location (unless you had a brick and mortar store front you were promoting).

2.  Monthly Search Traffic: You can easily find the monthly search traffic for various keywords using Google’s keyword tool.   Search traffic should be a primary factor in determining which keywords to target.  If you have a super specific product, like ‘eco-friendly puppy treats’ you will probably find out that those specific keywords get nearly zero search traffic.  This probably means you want to broaden your keyword to something that gets more searches, like ‘puppy treats’.

3.  Keyword Connotations: Even after determining the monthly search traffic of your target keywords, be sure to actually search for them on Google to see what results come up.  Certain keywords may have various connotations which you hadn’t previously thought of.   Make sure that the competitors on the 1st page of results are in your industry wheelhouse.

4. Competitors: It never hurts to check out what your competitors on the 1st page of search results for your keywords are doing.  View their website’s page source to see if there is any secret sauce of keyword variations that you haven’t thought of yet.

5.  The SEO Compromise: When all is said and done, choosing the keywords that will give your website the best traffic is all about compromise.  If you aim too high at broad keywords that are incredibly competitive, the chances are you won’t break ground on them for quite a while (if ever).  If you aim too low at super-specific keywords that have nearly no traffic, you will likely see very little return on your SEO efforts. The key is finding the compromise in keywords that will provide your business the perfect amount of traffic meshed with the ideal type of traffic.

So you’ve taken the steps to hire an SEO firm for your business website – lets say you are based out of San Francisco.  Whether you are trying to climb above those pesky Yelp reviews, generate more leads, or simply want to get more eyes on a new special, you wanted to take the proper steps to drive more relevant traffic to your site.

Once the SEO site modifications have been made, the blog implemented and the  social media efforts ongoing, how do you know if it’s been successful?  As a San Francisco business owner, what measures can you take to ensure that you are getting your money’s worth?  I’d like to review several metrics and tools that can be used to gauge the ROI (Return on Investment) for your SEO campaign.

Install Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the king of all analytics programs, allowing you to simply and effectively track incoming visitors to your site.  Installing Analytics is the first step to measuring the success of your SEO campaign.  You can view various pinpoint statistics such as what browsers your site visitors are using and what content sources they are coming from.

To gauge your SEO campaign’s effectiveness, a key Analytics trend to keep your eye on is the ‘Traffic Sources’ -> ‘Keywords’ -> ‘Non-Paid’.  This will let you know what search engines and keywords people are coming from, how long they spend on site, what pages they view, as well as more helpful info.

To install Google Analytics follow the instructions on their guide here.

Calculate the Average Lifetime Value of Your Customer

Depending on your type of business, a potential customer can vary in substance and value. If you are a San Francisco deli, a customer is essentially someone that visits your website and then decides to go to your deli and buys a sandwich.  So your customer value would be the price of a sandwich in addition to factors like repeat business and word of mouth.

If you sell a software as a service (SaaS) package that charges customers per month, a customer would be someone that goes to your website and then signs up for your service.   To evaluate the effectiveness of your SEO campaign, you need to determine how much this new customer is worth for your business over time (lifetime value).   This value will help you going forward in calculating the value of an organic visitor.

Calculate the Value of an Organic Visitor

Calculating the value of an organic visitor to your site can be helpful in determining your SEO ROI.

Adwords Comparison

If you are already utilizing Adwords, you can easily compare how much you are spending per ad click vs. how much you are spending per organic click.  If you have conversion tracker installed on Adwords you should already know your cost per conversion.   If you are comfortable with this cost per conversion, you can determine that your cost per click (CPC) is in the right range as well.

Using Analytics, you can determine how many clicks you’ve received through organic search traffic over a given period of time for specific keywords.  Divide that number of clicks by the amount of capital you’ve spent on your SEO campaign and you have your organic cost per click.  Compare this CPC to your adwords CPC.

Keep in mind that comparing organic traffic to AdWords traffic is a rough way to estimate ROI as organic traffic generally has a higher conversion rate than Adwords  traffic.

Simpler Methods (like actually interacting with customers)

A simpler way to gauge the effectiveness of you SEO campaign is to talk to your customers.   Questions like ‘how did you find out about us’ can pay large dividends in evaluating the strength of your various marketing avenues.  If a good percentage of people are saying they Googled a specific keyword and found your site, you can be pretty sure that the SEO campaign has been successful thus far.

Photo by Esther Lin/STRIKEFORCE

The guys here at Insight Forge are all pretty big fans of mixed martial arts (UFC, Strikeforce, Pride, Dream etc.) and in particular of heavyweight champ Fedor Emelianenko.  I’m not sure who caught the recent Strikeforce broadcast on CBS, but it was pretty great to see “the Last Emperor” prove himself yet again with a 2nd round knockout of Brett Rogers.

Which brings me to the subject of MMA Marketing.  Because mixed martial arts is still a burgeoning sport many of the larger advertising agencies and web marketing firms haven’t yet caught onto how big MMA is going to be.  The sport has international appeal, is  immensely popular on all ends of the globe and has the potential to dominate the 18-35 age bracket (mostly male).  This same age bracket spends a huge amount of time online and can be targeted accurately through online marketing mediums.  I’d like to go over a few of these specific mediums:

Web Design & SEO:  There are still quite a few high profile fighters out there whose websites look like they are from 1993. Fedor’s current official  homepage is fairly outdated, is a hybrid between English and Russian and was last updated in 2007.

Mind you, when someone Googles ‘Fedor’, this official homepage pops on the 1st page of results.   The keyword ‘Fedor’ gets nearly 2 million Google searches per month.   Given Fedor’s popularity within the targeted MMA Marketing age bracket, you’d think that someone would have fixed his site up.   Fedor, if you’re reading this, we’d be glad to help out.

Twitter: Twitter is fast becoming a great way for fighters to keep their fans updated with daily training regimens, upcoming fights, appearances, sponsors etc. Although there are already quite a few MMA fighters that are taking advantage of Twitter, there are many that haven’t yet picked up this good marketing habit.

One notably absent fighter, again, is Fedor.  Someone recently created a fake Fedor Twitter account and tweeted before his Nov. 7th fight that he may have the flu (which must have caused quite a few gamblers to freak out).  Which goes to show:  a fighter with Fedor’s clout should be in control of his own marketing destiny with an official twitter account.  As far as translating his tweets between Russian to English and keeping them up to date – Fedor, once again we’d be glad to be of service.

Forums: MMA forums on sites like Sherdog.com are amazingly active with fans and fighters alike. Forum users will post anything from their opinions on the latest MMA events to their opinions on health care reform. This is a great place for MMA marketers to reach out to potential customers, whether they are promoting a fighter’s newly designed homepage, an upcoming local MMA event, a fight gear site, or anything else related.

Promoters must beware that  simply blasting out spammy posts about your site will certainly cause you to be banned from these forums.   Your posts need to fit in with the topic of conversation and do so in a subtle way.

In conclusion:

I’d like to leave everyone with Fedor’s recent work of art:

Insight Forge has an MMA marketing and SEO skill set. If any fighters, brands or event promoters are in need of services, feel free to contact us for a free site review and campaign estimate.

Recently one of our clients showed off their product at the Silicon Valley NewTech Meetup.  Presenting in front of a packed crowd at the DLA Piper Central offices, Joel Passen and Steve Hazelton pitched Newton Software’s cutting edge applicant tracking system.  Check out the video below and keep an eye out for Newton’s new recruiting analytics module.  The competition should watch their backs.

You’d think I’m referring to the famous 1968 Ford Mustang that Steve McQueen drove during the chase scene in Bullitt.  However, i’m speaking of a different type of ‘vehicle’ that showed off McQueen’s driving skills.

The Bullitt Chase scene gained a recent resurgence after the live video platform Seero.com tracked the entire chase with real-time GPS synced to video from the film.  It was recently released that Seero is up for sale to the highest bidder on Ebay.

Seero was one of the first live video broadcasting platforms available, debuting not long after Justin.TV in 2007.    Seero distinguishes itself by offering novel GPS sync functionality, allowing broadcasters to track their position along with any live video feed.  Although it doesn’t have the most traffic out of the current live broadcasting platforms, it certainly has a great look and feel.  I can see a number of companies in the Travel, Auto, or GPS sectors benefiting from  Seero’s technology and UI.