Hyper-Regional Lead Generation for SEO Companies
February 18, 2009
Okay so for this post instead of talking about using SEO for online lead generation, I’m going to talk about online lead generation for SEO services.
When I started my SEO firm back in 2003, I immediately identified Baltimore, MD as my primary geographic market. At the time, I was living in the Towson area – which is a suburb about 15-20 minutes north of Baltimore. In 2003, few people had heard of SEO so I was worried about getting enough demand in Baltimore, much less a smaller suburb. I targeted keywords like “baltimore seo” rather than “towson seo“, as I thought the latter was simply too niche a keyword and didn’t have enough demand to support my lead generation needs…
Zi.ma – SEO-Friendly URL Shortener with 301 Redirects and Tracking
February 18, 2009
This is just a beautiful thing.
I’ve somehow started using Twitter again after our recent SEO Meetup about social media. At the event, @george_murphy and @timstaines convinced me (@jonpayne) there was a business benefit – a way to leverage it for traffic and leads.
Anyhow, today I was looking for a good URL shortener that also does 301 redirects. Why? Well let’s suppose I post a URL of a page on one of my sites – like this blog post for example. In Twitter, since I’m limited to 140 characters I need to use some sort of URL shortener or I might not have enough room for the long URLs typically associated with blogs. Until recently, I had been using is.gd, mainly b/c I just liked the “is good” reference.
So what if – by rare occurance – someone who visits my page actually likes it and wants to link to it? If they copy the URL in their browser post-rediret than I’m fine, they’ll link straight to my site. But what if they copy the URL shortener version and then they post that in their blog or elsewhere? I’ll get the traffic, but no link juice… and those are the perfect, real, natural “editorial” type links Google is really looking for. I should get that credit…
Denny’s Super Bowl Ad
February 17, 2009
Yeah, didn’t really do it for me. Still not relevant.
First. 
Segmenting Keyword Rankings in Google Analytics Reports – via Yoast
February 9, 2009
So the other day I found this post on Yoast that describes how to set up some Advanced Segments in Google Analytics such that you can isolate out the traffic you received from keywords where your site ranks on the second page (or any page) in the Google SERPs. Its pretty slick. It basically uses the start=10 value in the URL of the Google search results pages to identify whether they came from page 1, 2, etc…
Configuring PayPal Auto-Return (Redirect) After Payment
February 6, 2009
Non lead-gen or SEO post here… just a little annoying item that I couldn’t figure out for a few minutes. Did a Google search and couldn’t find a good answer… but if you are trying to set up a redirect or auto-return after accepting a PayPal payment for a product or service that is purchased on your website, try this:
Question:
I was looking at the goals and noticed the abandonment rate. Is that the number of visitors that reach our entrance page and don’t proceed?
Answer:
Yes…
Excluding Keywords in Google Analytics – “This” or “That”
January 8, 2009
A major metric I use when evaluating progress on a campaign for a client is total traffic to the client’s site from organic search, typically viewed monthly. Ranking is great, but if you’ve done SEO for even a short time you soon learn that ranking doesn’t matter unless it produces traffic. And traffic does matter unless it produces conversions.
Anyhow, in cases where the client has a very strong brand name its common for them to have a ton of organic search referrals for their brand, common mispellings of the brand, various product lines, etc. As an internet marketer who was likely hired after they created their main offering, you can’t typically take full credit for that traffic…
Google Making Cutbacks in the Tough Economy
December 3, 2008
I don’t have but a couple of minutes today as its a busier-than-usual week plus I’ve got only a couple of hours to finish the final project of my grad school career (due tonight!)… but I found this late last night and found it a terribly interesting read as to how Google is altering their tactics and even strategy a bit with respect to the current financial issues and recession.
Google Gears Down for Tougher Times – from the WSJ
The article sheds light on what we now might refer to as a bunch of waste and frivolous spending, which a couple of years ago was referred to as genius out-of-the-box management and superior corporate culture. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle there.
Thoughts?
Update: Literally 5 minutes after posting this I now have an email in my inbox from a Business Development person at Google offering to help provide me with additional data to help my clients as well as to help me when responding to RFP’s for my firm’s services. I appears as though this article is right on the money, and they seem to be re-focusing on search. Glad to see it!
