When the challenging economy strikes your business, you may need to revisit your marketing and ramp up your efforts to gain new customers. SEO has about the best ROI of any marketing strategy, but it can’t work miracles … especially not instantly.

SEO needs time to percolate in order to produce results. Here’s why:

On-Page Factors

You can’t just spend some money and find your self perfectly optimized. Keyword research needs to be done so you can choose the important keyword phrases to optimize for. On-page SEO needs to happen next. That involves sometimes extensive copywriting, website architecture and navigation changes, page download speed improvements, writing of page title and description tags, implementation of proper internal linking, and more.

Off-Page Factors – Link Popularity

Those on-page improvements to your website aren’t enough. You need to ensure competitive link popularity, and that means an ongoing link building program has to happen. Any scheme to get you hundreds of inbound links in a hurry is likely to hurt you more than help. You need an ongoing link building program that brings in new links on a steady basis, month after month. That helps your rankings to grow, but it’s a slow process.

Off-Page Factors – Social Media Exposure

You need to generate some buzz as a result of information posted at places like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and so forth. Real-time links from social media are getting increased attention by the search engines.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

Your rankings and traffic will typically increase slowly but steadily as your link popularity matures and your on-page optimization takes hold.

At Rank Magic, we include a year of link building on a steady monthly basis as part of a typical SEO project. Depending on the competitiveness of a client’s market niche they may require more intensive link building or a more protracted link building process of an additional year or more.

Beyond that, you need to be prepared to monitor your links, rankings and traffic on an ongoing basis. Changes in the search engine world, changes in your competitive landscape, changes in the focus of your business, and website changes and redesign all have the potential to take a toll on your rankings, and you need to spot that quickly so corrective action can be taken promptly.

When employing SEO it’s important to approach it with the understanding that it’s not sprint, but a marathon. If you expect to win the prize of a rapid increase in customers within a couple of weeks or months you will be disappointed.

Need help? Ask for our free Overview & Pricing Guide.

To Rank Magic Clients —

Thanks for having us provide you with Search Engine Optimization services. Now that you’ve taken care of your website ranking needs with a trusted SEO professional, it’s time to look at your software needs. Are you getting the most out of Office 2010? Or perhaps you’re about to upgrade from an earlier version? Has Rank Magic suggested you add a blog to your website? Does your small business need to share files within your team? Are your company documents polished and professional? Do you need help creating a PowerPoint presentation? Does your team need to share your calendar? Would you like help setting up a customer relationship management system without it being a chore?

If any of this rings true, or if this list helped you identify even more needs, turn these tasks over to a trusted Software Coaching firm. From Outlook and Excel to DropBox and Constant Contact, Home & Office Computer Training has been taking great care of my clients for years. Now they’ve created a spin-off company that focuses on the specific needs of the small business owner, called Right Click Advantage.

Their software coaches are friendly and personable as well as skilled, patient, and up to speed on the latest Windows, Mac and Android tech tools for your business.

Because of your relationship with Rank Magic, you’ve now earned a distinct advantage – the Lucky 7 Advantage. Give Right Click Advantage a call and not only will you receive a free phone consult, but when you do meet with them in their comfortable coaching center, clients of Rank Magic enjoy a 7% Discount. All you need to do is mention that you’re a client of ours, or if you’re filling out a registration form, you can enter the Code TRELOAR. You’ll automatically receive a reduced rate for all of your business software coaching needs.

Not so much.

Matt Cutts says Google’s not a huge fan. He says that sites which publish articles from article repositories tend not to be the highest quality sites, and there’s always the risk of duplicate content issues. He says that he would tend to “lean away from it” in preference to developing great content that can attract legitimate links itself, and promoting it with social media.

See Matt discuss article marketing.

At Rank Magic, we sometimes help clients with article marketing if that’s what they want, but we usually recommend they place such articles on their own website first. Then we can apply social media exposure to the original article. Once that’s done, if the client still wants to see if article marketing can help, we can facilitate that.

The key, really, is having content with enough value that people will want to link to it. The social media promotion just helps make more people aware of that content on our client’s website.

Dealing With Varying Rankings

In our recent post about rankings disappearing, we listed several reasons your rankings may vary substantially between checks. One factor was that searches by different people may show different results, and searches from different locations may do the same. The keyword ranking reporting Rank Magic does for our clients is done consistently so that trend comparisons should be pretty accurate even though the rankings we find may differ slightly from what you may find doing your own search.

A better measure may be the traffic on your site.

If a keyword phrase disappears from the rankings one month but your traffic remains steady for it, you can discount the ranking report as an aberration.

Another reason traffic reporting is helpful has to do with keyword selection. Some SEOs have been known to optimize and track rankings for keywords that are easy to rank highly for because no one searches for them. They may report great rankings that bear no relationship to whether your website is actually getting visitors as a result.

For that reason, we’re adding something new to our SEO Monitoring services. If you have Google Analytics on your website, we’ll report to you on that monthkly along with our ranking reports.

Ask us about adding this to your SEO Monitoring services.

Not monitoring your site’s performance? You really should — either manually yourself or with help from a professional Here’s what we include in our services:

• Monthly Broken Link Report so you’ll know if you’ve got dead links on your site that you need to clean up.
• Monthly Link Popularity Report showing how many inbound links are reported for you by Google, Yahoo and Bing. This also shows how many links are reported for about a half dozen of your most important competitors.
• Comprehensive online Keyword Status Reports updated for you monthly. If you’ve been a client of ours recently, you’ve probably seen them and know how thorough and how valuable they are. We typically run the first one for you as soon as you identify your keywords (as a baseline report) and then monthly thereafter.
• Review of your Traffic Reports monthly if you have Google Analytics installed on your website and give us access to review it.

If Rank Magic isn’t helping you monitor your search engine health, ask us how easy and inexpensive it is.

Some Keyword Rankings Gone?

Every once in awhile you may notice that some keywords suddenly seem to drop out of rankings and then pop right back a month later. We see that on occasion. What’s that all about?

Well, perhaps we  should explain a bit about ranking reporting.

1. If you check a keyword’s ranking from computers at two different physical locations, you’re likely to get slightly different results due to your results coming from different data centers. Google has dozens of data centers around the country, and they’re not all precisely synchronized. So this is one reason you might get different rankings.
2. Search engine tweak their ranking algorithms frequently. They often try a change, evaluate it for a few days, and then undo it if it didn’t work as hoped. This is a common cause of rankings that seem to disappear and then reappear.
3. Search engines are beginning to personalize results. If Google figures out that you’re a wine connoisseur or you own a restaurant, when you search for glasses they may send you more results about glassware than about eyeglasses.

All of these create variable results that are not always replicable from one query to the next, or even from one browser to the next.

Rankings that disappear are no cause for panic unless they’re still missing for two-three months. If that happens, ask us to investigate the problem for you.

The last time we wrote about SEO Monitoring, we were sending out detailed monthly reports on CD four times a year. That’s been much improved, and it’s time for us to tell you about it.

We now have even more comprehensive reporting about where you rank in Google, Yahoo & Bing for all of your keyword phrases, with details about trends, which web pages are coming up for your keywords, and even competitor comparisons. At the right is an example of just one overview graph from our reports. This one shows the overall rankings trend for a client over the course of their first year with us.

If you’re not effectively tracking your rankings, let us refer you to a cautionary tale of what happened to one former client. Contact us to discuss setting up effective monitoring of your keyword rankings.

We’re teaching a Lunch & Learn session for the Hanover Area Chamber of Commerce on March 15th (Beware the Ides of March!) in East Hanover, NJ. It’s at the Ramada Inn on  Route 10 westbound from 11:45 – 1:30, cost is $20.

The Secrets to Do-It-Yourself SEO explains (in plain English) how the search engines work and how you can leverage the power of your own web site and others that link to it so that you achieve high rankings in Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other search engines.

Bill Treloar, owner and chief SEO consultant at Rank Magic, will teach you how to select the best keywords, how to use them on your web site, how to improve link popularity, and how to build social buzz around you, your brand, and your website..

Bill Treloar, owner of Rank Magic, is proud to announce a new group training class being offered through a partnership with Home & Office Computer Training’s Entrepreneur University.  This class will enable you, as a business owner, to build search engine optimization (SEO) skills.

The Secrets to Do-It-Yourself SEO explains (in plain English) how the search engines work and how you can leverage the power of your own web site and others that link to it so that you achieve improved rankings in Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other search engines. A workshop will teach you how to select the best keywords, how to use them on your web site, how to build link popularity, and how to track your improving rankings in the search engines.

The class requires a minimum of 3 attendees and will hold a maximum of 8, to ensure the students get the personal attention and focus they deserve. The coaching session will be 3 hours of skill building using the web browser on your laptop.  It will be held on Wednesday, February 9 from 11:30 to 2:30pm and lunch is included. This unique group learning experience is $99 per attendee.

Bring your laptop and power cord to Home & Office Computer Training’s Coaching Center in East Hanover, on the corner of Mt. Pleasant Avenue and Hanover Road, East Hanover. For those attendees who don’t have a laptop to bring, Home & Office Computer Training has a limited number of laptops to use as loaners.

Registration is easy – simply email coach@njpctraining.com up to 48 hours before the class. They accept checks and credit cards. Questions can be emailed or directed to Susana Fonticoba at 973-952-0053.

Don’t miss this opportunity to drive more potential customers to your web site with this convenient and productive business skill building course.

Darlene Victoria Gonzales runs A Virtual Perception, a podcast targeted at virtual assistants and home-based business owners. She recently interviewed Bill Treloar, owner and principal SEO consultant of Rank Magic for an overview and introduction to Search Engine Optimization.

Episode 78 of her podcast is entitled SEO Challenged? Start Here. In it, Darlene questions Bill about many aspects of search engine optimization for small business web sites:

• What is SEO?
• What about meta tags?
• Why is the difference between text content and graphical text important?
• Why can’t someone be good at both web design and SEO?
• What’s the most powerful place to put your keywords?
• What main two factors control where you rank in search engine results?
• What are some link building best practices?
• What’s the Duplicate Content Penalty?
• What constitutes a good ranking?
• What are some of your favorite SEO tools?
• What’s Google PageRank?

Have a listen!

I‘d like to welcome some new clients who’ve joined us since last April. We’re looking forward to seeing some great rankings for them.

Diamond Filter distributes standalone and countertop water cooler filtration systems in New Jersey. They require no water hookups and they deliver easily replacable filters at just the right interval to keep you drinking pure, tasty water year round.

Tank Solutions provides residential underground fuel storage tank testing, removal & replacement in New Jersey. They also do soil testing and environmental remediation.

HockeyBOSS sells the best ice hockey and roller hockey equipment and gear online. Located in New Jersey, they’re satisfying hockey players and coaches nationwide.

Environmental Waste Management Associates, LLC (EWMA) is a full-service environmental consulting and remediation firm. They’re experts in environmental assessment, site remediation, environmental compliance, and litigation support.

Barry Herman Entertainment provides event planning and entertainment for corporate events, personal events like weddings and bar mitzvahs, charity events, theme parties and more.

Home & Office Computer Training offers private coaching and group training sessions to help you come up to speed in the software you need to use for business or personally. They can even help you make the right buying decision for your next PC or Mac.