SEO, PPC & Adwords Marketing Tips | The Forge

Google has added a new feature that lets local business owners respond to reviews in their Places accounts.  This feature-add continues a trend with Google Places matching / competing with Yelp  as a major player in the user-generated business review sector.

For both Yelp and Google Places, the ability for a local business owner to respond to a good or bad review is a very powerful tool.   In a world where many potential customers look to other people’s reviews before purchasing goods or services, it is important the local businesses have some control of their brand identity.

Although the age old advice of simply providing good service to bring in the good reviews holds some water, there is always the case of the disgruntled ex-employee who posts a bad review just for the hell of it.   This would be a case where the business owner could take time to respond and let the rest of the community know the reasoning behind such a review.

It’s a sure thing that the local business owners in San Francisco, who are attuned to the ongoings of the large internet companies around them, will be the first to take advantage of this feature.   Google – we’re looking forward to seeing more improvements with Google Places (i.e. a version of Adwords MCC for Places to manage multiple client accounts).

San Francisco is truly a unique place.  We’ve recently been working with several local businesses & stores within the city, helping out on various fronts.  Some businesses need a basic SEO overhaul or a PPC campaign, others require more complex work.  The amazing thing about local San Francisco businesses  is how attuned they are to internet marketing – from social media to Google local listings.

When speaking to several local business owners, it became apparent that being internet savvy was considered a necessity.   Considering the fact that much of San Francisco works in the tech / internet sector, this makes a lot of sense.  Any storefront that utilizes some form of online marketing improves their chances of getting the right eyes on their business.

Take a restaurant for example – a new, trendy bistro that is opening in San Francisco’s SOMA district.  Although the bistro technically will be able to survive based on its great food, service and prime location, they are still missing a key ingredient.  In San Francisco, reaching out to foodies via Twitter, making sure that you are on top of the SEO food chain and getting a YouTube clip featuring organic ingredients embedded on the website can make the difference between a good and GREAT restaurant.   Keep in mind, the difference between a good and great restaurant might not be completely be about food and service, it could also be about the customer feeling ‘connected’ with the restaurant, which is the role social media can fill.

Overall, its great to live in a city where the ‘real world’ is very in sync with the ‘virtual world’ – meaning there isn’t a complete disconnect between working on web pages for a living and the eating a delicious meatball sub downtown (does that make any sense?).    Anyhow, the Insight Forge team would love to get in touch with more local businesses – whether it be for the purpose of San Francisco SEO, PPC campaigns, design, social media, or whatever else.

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.

Our SEO and Marketing firm is based out of San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District.  Around The Forge ‘HQ’  is a plethora of tasty restaurants (Bistro 9, Park Chow, La Fonda), welcoming bars (Yancy’s Saloon), Dentists, Gyms, Hair Salons, Supplement Shops, Magic Stores  - you name it, the Inner Sunset has it.

Lately, walking around the neighborhood, I’ve seen many local business owners placing ads on buses, billboards, benches, newspapers, and magazines.   On the local TV stations I often find myself watching an infomercial or ‘paid-for’ segment to advertise for a local business.

Most of these local businesses have a web presences to some extent. They also have Yelp reviews that they have almost no control over which often appear higher in the search results than their own website (which they do have control over).

These small businesses need to realize that if they put a small portion of their local advertising budgets into basic SEO for their websites, it would be well worth the while.  Especially in a web-savvy city like San Francisco, where many potential customers are Googling terms like ‘Inner Sunset Bakery’ or ‘San Francisco Magic Store,’ the benefit to the business would be visible and immediate.

Going forward, I’d like to continue to analyze the cost/benefit ratio of traditional forms of ‘real-world’ local advertising vs.  local SEO projects.

We recently implemented a basic SEO campaign for our local Inner Sunset Kickboxing & Jiu Jitsu hotspot, Gym 445.   Gym 445 is a great place to get whipped into shape as well as learn a variety of martial arts, from muay thai kickboxing to brazilian jiu jitsu and MMA.  Head trainers Edge Brown, Bebe Etzler and Bret Bergmark are top notch.

Even though the monthly keyword traffic for ’san francisco kickboxing’ isn’t extraordinary, it is extra relevant.  In fact, when I first moved to the Inner Sunset, I initiated my search for a kickboxing gym by Googling those very words: ‘San Francisco Kickboxing.’  Sure, you get a bunch of yelp reviews, but I also often find myself clicking through the 1st and 2nd page results to see what else might be out there.

On our initial keword research it was very interesting to take a survey of the competitors for keywords like ‘San Francisco Kickboxing.’ Although many of the results were relevant for various obscure martial arts, they weren’t straight kickboxing gyms.

I think the same problem might occur for many other local establishments that aren’t utilizing the basics of SEO.  Almost every local business realizes that they need a website presence, but many still are overlooking SEO.  If more jump on board, hopefully some of those Google results will shape up too.