Search Strategies: Paid vs Organic

If you are like most people, you just want your website to be found. With 95% of the web-using world admitting to using search engines, that seems like a great place to start. But then you begin reading up on it and it is enough to make your head spin - where do you start?

That is where a solid Search Engine Optimization (often abbreviated to "SEO") strategy comes into play. As you've probably heard by now, the Internet is no longer an "if you build it, they will come" type of place. Your online presence needs a strategic marketing plan just like your brick and mortar (meaning non-online) business. Every good online marketing plan will include a section on search strategy, which is a plan for getting your website seen on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.

There are two main avenues you can take to get your website returned in the results when someone searches for various keywords: Paid Search and Organic Search. These two types of results are segmented on Google as seen below (Google calls Paid Search results "Sponsored Links", Yahoo calls them "Sponsored Results").
So what are the differences?

Paid Search is exactly what it sounds like - you pay to have your website returned in the results for a particular keyword. Every time someone clicks on your website from the search engine, you pay the search engine a predefined amount (usually from $0.30 to $2.50 per click). The people who pay the most are the ones that show up first, the second highest price paid is shown second, etc. This makes it easy to tailor a Paid Search campaign to fit within your budget - you don't have to pay the same as the big guys to still get a little visibility. If you can find some keywords that don't have many other websites competing for them, you might be able to show up on the first page for almost nothing!

In contrast, Organic Search is the results returned by Google's algorithm. If someone searched for "stone fireplaces" Google looks to your actual website content to see if your website should be returned in the results. There are two main elements any search engine looks at when deciding if your site matches what the searcher is looking for: Onpage SEO and External SEO. I will define these both in more detail in future posts. However, in a 3 second snapshot Onpage SEO is a set of things you can do on your website to convince the search engines you are about X, Y and Z whereas External SEO is pretty much other websites telling the search engine your website is about X, Y and Z. The websites that are returned near the top of the search results usually use a combination of both Onpage SEO and External SEO..

How do you know when to use Paid Search and when to use Organic SEO tactics? The best answer is you use both together. Their individual pros and cons compliment each other to provide you a comprehensive search strategy. I have listed out some basic comparisons so you can see what I mean:

I have seen a lot of people use Paid Search aggressively while they are getting their Organic optimization underway. Then, once they start showing up in the organic results they back off the Paid Search a little or change strategy for only very specific high-converting keywords. This is what is meant by them being complimentary - Paid Search gets you moving quickly but is dependant on fees whereas Organic takes longer and is a bigger upfront investment but then can coast for quite a while.

How have you combined both Paid Search and Organic tactics successfully?

How much website do I need?

When I was growing up, Girbaud Jeans were all the rage. Everyone was wearing them and you couldn't be "cool" without them. The problem was, they only fit girls who were built like a 2x4 - no hips or stomach or tush. I was not this girl. I was curvy and the jeans looked awful on me and were extremely uncomfortable. I had two choices - follow the crowd or look my own personal best.

I see this "keeping up with the Jones'" mentality on a daily basis in the web world. People see their neighbors running ECommerce sites so they think they need one. So how do you know what website will benefit your company and what is a waste of money?

The two criteria that can help you decide is to ask yourself two questions:
(1) Why do you want a website?
(2) How much time do you have to spend on your website once it is up?


There are many reasons to want a website, and your reason may not be identical to your neighbors, so why work so hard to emulate someone else?

"I want a URL for my marketing material"
If you simply want a website so you have a URL to put on a business card, you only need a "Brochure Website". This type of website is for extending your company's brand onto the web. It might have some company info (like location, profiles of the employees, an about us page, etc) as well as maybe some basic package pricing and a contact us page. It is essentially your printed brochure online and as such, should be pretty and eye catching with big colorful photos and a professional design. This is one of the most inexpensive types of websites in terms of both cost and time, because once it is up it is pretty self sufficient.

"I want to sell my products online"
If you want to actually sell products online, you will need an "ECommerce Website". This type of website actually generates revenue by people placing online orders. It usually consists of a searchable catalog of products and a shopping cart. Although there are many out-of-the-box solutions nowadays, this type of website is still fairly expensive because it requires a database, 2 websites (a client facing one and an administrative one to keep products updated and fulfill orders) and credit card security. There are ways to cut costs - such as using PayPal instead of your own payment gateway - but overall this one is more complex so plan on investing a bit more on it. The time commitment for an ECommerce Website varies depending on how often your products and pricing changes.

"I want to strengthen my brand's reach"
If your goal is the strengthen your brand online, you will want to build an "Informational Website". This website type is less about selling your product and more about convincing your customer you are an expert in your industry. The best way to do this is to be the place they turn to for education. Load up your website with tons of articles, reviews, how-tos and advice. It is important you aren't plugging yourself in this content - blatant self promotion makes the content seem less genuine. Just be a resource your users can't live without so they think of you first when they are ready to buy. Because your goal is to keep users coming back, this content must be constantly updated and added to. One way to do this is by incorporating "user generated content" into your website. Things like allowing the users to add comments/reviews, having a forum, giving users the means to blog, etc, can help you grow your content. Just be warned that simply adding this functionality to your website does not mean people will use it. Normally it is a constant campaign to get users to interact - offering them something in return, being very active yourself, promoting your site, etc. This requires a huge time commitment to become successful but the payoff is repeat business and word of mouth recommendations.

Whatever your needs, just remember to define why YOU want a website rather than jump on someone else's bandwagon.

Online Competitive Analysis

Is one of your competitors boasting about how successful their web presence is while you are celebrating when you hit 5 visitors in a week? It isn't fair! However, the good news is, you can piece together (and copy!) your competitors' online marketing plans because all of their efforts are documented on the web! You just need to know where to look. Here are a few steps to get you started:

1. Define your competitors

Keep in mind your web competitors may not be your brick-n-mortar competitors. Use a few of your known offline competitors, but make sure most of your research comes from those competing businesses that are succeeding on the web. You can easily do this by just searching for a few industry keywords and seeing which websites always appear near the top of the organic results. These are the guys who have really put an effort into their web presence so they are worth copying.

Once you have compiled a list of potential competitors, use a free service such as alexa.com or compete.com to guesstimate your competitors' website traffic to see which are the true online success stories you want to emulate.

2. Find their backlinks

Google offers you the "link:" functionality built right into their search engine. Type "link:" before any url in their search bar and you will see all websites linking to that url. For example, if my competitor was Target stores, I could type "link:www.target.com" into the search bar in Google and see all external websites linking back to http://www.target.com/. This information can be used in many ways:

• How often and where are your competitors submitting press releases
• What directories are they set up in
• What websites are interested in writing about/linking back to websites in your industry
• What activities are they involved in that is getting them mentioned (i.e. the first backlink returned for Target.com was about a 2009 National Conference on Volunteering)
• What is the structure for their family of websites (i.e. if you look up link:www.projectorpeople.com you will see a lot of their backlinks are actually coming from sites they are hosting themselves but split into external websites to create an immense amount of backlinks)
• Which social media sites are they using and how often are they keeping them updated

By piecing together where your competitors are putting in an effort online you can follow in their footsteps. Once you know which online magazines have quoted your competitors in the past, try to gain your own relationship with them. Or if your competitors are getting a lot of local writeup for sponsoring a Little League team, look into it yourself. Sometimes starting out in the web world can be overwhelming, so why not let your competitors do all of the R&D and you just benefit from their results?

What is some other information you have found from your competitors' backlinks that you never would have thought of yourself?

Website Consultant vs. Outsourcing

Congratulations! You have decided you want an online business......now what? Finding and locating both a web designer and a web developer are only a small part of your total website. What about URLs and hosting and online marketing and SEO and promotion and .....whew! There are many parts to building an online business and each one requires its own budget. That is where a lot of people run out of steam. They may have enough money to get the website built, but then none left over for the exorbitant fees of a search engine optimization company. And what good is a website that no one can ever find?

Recently, there has evolved an intermediary position called an Internet Business Consultant. It is what I do, so I can only define it as my services, not necessarily everyone who claims that title. What is an Internet Business Consultant? In my case, it is someone who tries to save you money without sacrificing your website. How can adding on an additional fee save you money? So glad you asked :)

First is defining the setup of your website. How much do you know about hosting websites? Do you know if you need 20MB or 200MB of space? How much bandwidth do you need to support your users? Should your hosting plan include MSSQL, MySQL, or none of the above? I have seen a lot of people pay $20+/month to host a website that could be hosted on a $5/month plan, simply because they let the hosting provider guide them into the larger plan. An Internet consultant can help you deduce your actual needs so you aren't paying more than necessary.

Next is development of the website itself. Did you know there is a way to get a cheap website
without sacrificing professionalism? Rather than paying for a custom site, checking out existing templates can drastically reduce your costs. The actual web programming options vary on what your website will do. For simple brochure sites (ones that just act as a brochure for your company without any online dynamic catalogs or ecommerce) usually you can pay a one time fee to a developer for the initial setup and then upkeep it yourself so you don't have any ongoing costs. Internet consultants can teach you how to do that and help find reputable developers and designers.

Once the website is up, you need to get it out there. There are many components to this: things like SEO, keyword research, competitive analysises (which help you deduce your competition's marketing plan), social media, etc. The good news is, you can do it all yourself if you are on a tight budget. The bad news is, there is so much information online about these tactics it will take you months or years to learn what to do by yourself.

In comes the Internet Business Consultant, who is usually (at least in my case), also an SEO consultant and marketing consultant and whatever-else-is-needed consultant. They can help put together a plan of action for you to carry out yourself. Often I write up step by step instructions and recommendations for individual websites and then let their owners take it from there. This is successful for many reasons. First is budget. A lot of the methods above don't require special skills but do require time. If you are paying someone by the hour, it adds up quickly. But if you can do the grunt work for your own website, but with clear direction on what you are doing, it keeps the budget manageable.

Second is the content that comes out. Am I an expert on the replacement parts for a 1967 Corvette? Nope. I can fake it if I had to write some content, but there is a learning curve so I would be charging you for the hours I spent researching the topic as well as writing about it. But if I taught you, the owner of the website about 1967 Corvette replacement parts, how to write your own good and optimized content, it would be much faster. You already have the knowledge and terminology down. Your passion for the topic trumps what mine ever would be. To me, the owner writing their own content makes it more believable and impactful than an outsider spending a few hours learning about things they have never seen.

This is also true for Social Media. If I join all of these car forums as a representative from your site, I will never have the same level of success as someone who lives and breathes cars. But I can teach you how to use all of these forms of Social Media to promote yourself. I can help research where you should be, what types of interactions you should aim for, how often, etc. Social Media is about relationships moreso than outright promotion, so the person most passionate about the topic will always come across as most sincere and valuable to a community.

Can I actually do the work on all of the above for you? Absolutely. I am a computer programmer with lots of online marketing and SEO experience. But it will cost you. By hiring an Internet Business Consultant instead and doing most of the work yourself, you can get your website up and running on a budget that leaves you with plenty left over. This makes it the ideal choice for startups and entrepreneurs just looking to begin their online presence.

Let me know hwo I can help you!

Finding Keywords

Everyone who has used a search engine is familiar with the concept of keywords. Keywords are the words you type into Google’s search box that describes what you are looking for during a search. It seems simple when you use it, but what you don't see is what went into making those websites appear for the exact term you typed in. Think about how many websites exist out in the World Wide Web and then ponder how those elite 10 websites made it to the first page of your search results. I'll let you in on a secret - it isn't random :) If you have never considered that before but have a website, it is time to give it some thought. Something like 90% of Internet users claim they use search engines on a regular basis. If your website is not showing up in their results, that is a lot of missed opportunity.

So how can you get your website in those results? It all starts with a set of keywords. There are three main steps when dealing with keywords, but we are only dealing with the first one right now (the rest will come in later posts). The steps are:

1. Research keywords and build a master list
2. Split keywords up into logical units of main and sub
3. Incorporate the keywords into your site (search engine optimization)

The first thing you need to do is get rid of your preconceived notion about what your site is about. Keywords are not about your site, they are about what is being searched for by your potential customer. Two completely different things. If your site is about selling organic cookies but no one is searching for the exact term "organic cookies", than it doesn't matter how well you optimize your site for the keyword "organic cookies", it won't help your site. It will never come up in search results if no one ever searches for that term. Did that make sense?

Your first step before you can begin researching keywords is to define your target markets. You need to think like your customers and therefore need to know who they are. In my mind, people who eat organic cookies are probably healthy, active, activists, outdoorsy, maybe late 20s to 40, parents who want their kids to eat healthy, upper middle class to afford the extra expense that comes with organic products, etc.

Your goal is to create content on your website centered around what these people are actually searching for online, rather than assuming they are searching for "organic cookies" just because that is what your website is about. Make a list of things you believe this audience is interested in that might be able to be worked into your website. Maybe things like pesticide research, healthy recipes, good snacks for the bike trips, how to get your kid to eat healthy, etc. Once you have a pretty comprehensive list, you are ready to start your keyword research.

To begin, you can use a keyword selector tool such as Word Tracker (wordtracker.com). Word Tracker (and other keyword selector tools) allows you to enter terms such as "organic cookies" "pesticide" and "healthy snacks". It then returns a huge list of everything people have actually searched for recently that is related to those. One of the best features about Word Tracker is it shows you quite a few things. For each keyword phrase it returns, it shows you how many searches have been done for that exact term in the past few months as well as how many websites come up in those searches. This is important - if the keyword "cookie" had 80 searches but 1,000 websites returned as results and keyword "healthy cookie" had 65 searches but only 350 websites returned, where do you think you should spend your time and effort? There is a much better chance your website will be seen when up against 350 other websites than up against 1,000. Word Tracker has their own ranking system to help you know which are "good" keywords and which ones might not be worth your effort.

The only downside to Word Tracker is after your free trial runs out, there is a fee to use it. But no fear, there are other free ways to keep on top of keywords.

One of my favorite quick tools is Google Insights (http://www.google.com/insights/search/). With this tool, you can put in keywords and it shows you the top related keywords being searched on Google (you can filter by timeframe or location as well). It also shows you the fastest rising related keywords - very helpful to direct you on what your next focus should be on.

You can also turn to your competitors to see what keywords they are using (look for a more detailed post on this tactic at a later date).

I recommend spending a few days/weeks on this inital research. Compile a list of hundreds of keywords - you can never have too many. Keep in mind that every keyword is an exact phrase - so if your list includes "organic cookie" then know that "organic cookies" (plural) is a different keyword, as is "cookies that are organic". This effort won't be wasted - I promise!

Has anyone else found great keyword selection tools they would recommend?

Web Designer vs Templates

Often times, when a person decides they want to start a website, they run into that brick wall that is price. Without having the skills necessary to design and develop their own website, they are forced to hire this out. For just a bare bones, basic brochure-like website (meaning no interactivity or database involved) websites can start at around $2,000 - $5,000 and move up from there. To get a Web 2.0 design (meaning some sort of forum or blog or "cool" features) you can easily get above $10,000 without blinking an eye. Throw in a database or eCommerce functionality and that can double or triple very quickly.

So how do you find a cheap website? Or rather, how can you find a cheap website that doesn't look cheap? The answer is Web Templates.

A web template is a website design that is offered for download for a small price (usually between $20-$120). It includes a sample HTML file and all images you need to get your website up and running. How can they offer it so cheap? Because multiple people can download the same one (and thus the cost of designing it is split between lots of people). The downside is someone can have your same website design, but with such a vast World Wide Web the odds are very slim someone will run into both your website and the other one using the same template. Also, you can make tweaks to it to make it your own (add your own logo, change up the button design, rearrange the page layout slightly, etc).

If you are a complete newbie to websites, you will probably still need someone like me to take the template and add in your own content, set up hosting/URL, tweak it, etc. But you just cut your price down by a couple grand by eliminating a custom web designer, yet you still get a professional looking website for cheap.

Your first step is to check out some template websites such as:

http://www.templatemonster.com
http://www.easytemplates.com
http://icetemplates.net

See if there are any that catch your eye. Then get with an Internet Business Consultant or web developer to have them download the template and insert your content. Depending on how many changes you want and the extent of your content, you can usually have your website up and running for under $1000.

Has anyone used this approach? Would you recommend this for people wanting a quick and cheap website?