Online Marketing Strategies to Make Your Business Shine in 2017 | Part 4

(Video Transcription. See video below.)

Stephan: Wait and see you are really attached to tends to work well.
It also depends on what kind of business you want to run. Do you want to run a volume based business, do you want to run a quality based business? If you are a volume based business pay per click can make sense. But you better have one heck of a promotion that you are actually running and that promotion better be beating anybody else that is running any kind of ads, otherwise you are just wasting money.

Here is something to be said about the ads. If you have an ad that you’re running and let’s say your budget is 50 bucks a day and you are spending the 50 but you are not getting any leads, you don’t have a marketing problem you have a sales problem. Understand that. Because the demand is there, it has been shown. And so, you need to go back and you need to look at your landing page and you need to look at your website to determine whether it makes sense.

Pay per click is a great test marketing tool. Do you want to go in a new market, do you want to try a new product before you spend money on pouring it in to SEO or anything along those lines? Run it on pay for click for a couple. You will get business. Don’t misunderstand me, you will get business off pay per click. But the consumer will be different. The consumer for pay per click is much more price conscious. They are a lower on the totem pole. They are the same guys that will go to page two because they are comparison shopping like crazy. If they are comparison shopping they don’t care if you are in the ads or not.

So, a little bit of it also has to do with how do you want to market the business, are you okay with some of those guys then great. Do you just want to go quality? Then stay organic. Do you want to run a mixture or do you want to just go pay per click you can just go pay per click? It just depends on how you want to do it. When people hire, us we start everything with an interview and we look at it and we say, “Okay we are going to develop a 12-month battle plan” and some of our first questions are; What are your margins? What is your cost of acquisition over a particular lead? Because we want to know that, why? Because very quickly we are going to be able to tell you pay per click makes sense or no and don’t do it.

Very very quickly. Because again, what did I say at the very beginning? Rule number one, make money. It’s just a numbers game. You shouldn’t care where you are so much as to how am I going to get the most ROI for my money. Because then the ads great, if not it’s okay. Our best performing customers are in the ads they are in the local pack and they are in the organic. Why? Because their brand shows up three times. Once we have customers there you know what we do? We build a second website and we start taking others out.

We have search engine results pages that are literally almost owned by our entire customers. Because they have three four five different websites, lead generation sites that are just driving and the end user doesn’t know any difference. So, there is a lot of opportunity to be had here.

Male speaker: Is Google cool with that?

Stephan: No Google is very uncool, I hate Google. There is nothing against a single person owning multiple websites. What is the worst that is going to happen? Google police come knocking on your door.

You can own as many websites as you want. There are some rules you should abide by, you shouldn’t have the same brand on two websites, it cannot be in the same location, it cannot be the same phone number. So, there are definitely some things you have to adhere to and abide by but if you are playing within that box, absolutely. Knock yourself out.

There are industries that have just completely taken that over and embraced that particular concept. So yes, if you play within the realm of reason– And by the way it goes actually back to link building and everything. Have you guys heard of white hat gray hat and black hat? Have you guys ever heard of that? White hat is like you are doing everything exactly Google wants you to. Gray hat is mmm. And black is oh my god no.

It’s kind of like when you drove here, tell the truth now who broke the speed limit. You are a white hat person. Just speed, its generally acceptable you are like 10 miles over before you are worried about getting pulled over. Okay we did that. So, that is gray hat. Anybody pass anyone in the emergency lane? That would be black hat, don’t do that.

But the point of it is we are big believers in pushing the envelope. Here is the beauty, if you reverse engineer you know if your competition is pushing the envelope and if they are getting away with it. So just reverse engineer. Kind of don’t worry so much about is Google cool with that or what are the exact conversions. Figure it out whether it works with your own ROI and then just kind of apply that. That was a tangent.

Let’s get back to this. Step two on your worksheets. If you guys flip them over is the pay per click section. Essentially what you guys are going to do for what you did on the organic is you are also going to look at the pay per click ads. So, for every single search term result you are going to look at what ads are showing up and you are going to write them down. Because guess what? There is a pattern and chances are the ads that show up a lot are working. So, go and actually put them up there, track them. If you want to get all exotic you can use SEMrush we’ve got some software programs that go way beyond that. I can tell you guys how much your competition is actually spending on marketing.

I can tell you how many clicks they’ve gotten. I can tell you what the user behavior is after somebody has clicked the ad. Meaning what happened once they went to the website; did it actually convert in to a lead. There are all sorts of awesome metrics that we have developed with our particular system. But for you guys if you want to run this yourself on your worksheet just track the ads. Because nine times out of ten that is good enough. So, in the ads you have actually got to put something that you guys have an example, but you are going to go ahead and put the search term in.

So, you have got your five columns again, put the search term across the top. Then you are going to go and write down who the ad is for, what the domain name is and then information on that ad. The information on the ad, the call to action, that is very very important. You want to ensure that you are using that same call to action. And then if you are going to play in this realm you have got to make sure that whatever you guys are coming to the table with, you have got a bigger stick than they do, you have got to hit harder. You have to be willing to put whatever promotion on the table that is going to go ahead and beat them, otherwise you are not going to succeed and you are going to get clicks on the ads but they are not going to convert in to leads.

Any questions about that? No? Okay.

Let’s talk about competitor analysis and we are going to be talking about that next sheet, so you guys have two pay per click sheets. Just so you guys had a little more room, and then we have a sheet where we are going to talk about competitor analysis.

So earlier we talked about these signals. Could somebody tell me what the time is?

Female speaker: Nine.

Stephan: Nine o’clock, alright.

Male speaker 2: No, ten minutes to ten.

Stephan: Alright lock the door, the next guys not coming in.
[laughter]

These particular signals are going to drive what is going to matter to you guys. And on your last sheet that you guys have there the signals that I have listed here, these content signals HTML signals and so forth, they are the same ones that are right here. So, they relate to one another. So, you will have contents signal right here. You have HTML quality signals.

So, they are all represented right here. And you guys are going to fill this out and you actually have to fill this out per particular keyword. So, this part is a little labor intensive but trust me it’s worth its weight in gold. So here is the deal. Let’s talk about this a little bit more.

Content. You want to look at how much content your competition is driving. There are two core concepts. So, what we are doing right now by the way just so you guys know is we are talking about these little red things. There are two things at the heart of the matter that drive Google. Relevance and authority. Is your website relevant to the search term any user plugged in. Is it relevant? That is the content signal. Does it have authority in its industry? That is a link signal. We are going to get in to that in one second.

So, when we are looking at our competitors and I know content can be a daunting task, you guys want to see how much content your competition is churning out. If you want to play in this game you have got to be able to match it and beat them a little bit. So, freshness is a particular signal on content.

HTML. HTML is the way your website is coded. You guys aren’t really going to be that concerned about it other than the fact that I am telling you if your HTML code is more than– If your website is more than three years old that code is too old. And if you are running a website like a joomla a Drupal or a WordPress, you are just begging to be hacked.

And by the way if you are going to get hacked it is going to screw you with Google because they know you got hacked and they are going to think you are not on the ball and they are going to drop you. Don’t get hacked, don’t. So really if you have a webmaster if you have a web designer a brother a cousin whatever and they do it, just make sure your HTML code is up to date.

Architecture. Your architecture signal. This is where Google Analytics or Mouseflow really comes in. You want to see how people are moving through your website. It doesn’t take a long time to look at this, maybe two five minutes a month. Just see how people are flowing through it. Mouseflow is a really cool tool because it literally screen captures everything so if you feel like geeking out you can go ahead and literally watch people with their cursors move through your website. Like an instant replay. And you can kind of see where they are trying to click, what are they doing so on and so forth. And very very quickly you can fine tune things and really pick up your conversions.
You don’t want to do SEO, you think it’s still a crap shoot, that is cool. But if you have your website why don’t you optimize it and try to get as much out of it as possible. Mouseflow is like bolting a turbo charger on to the engine. You are really able to very easily fine tune things to make conversions go up with the existing traffic that you have. So, architecture is huge.

The other thing that we have listed there is the page speed. On mobile devices when they are not on your Wi-Fi network, on mobile devices you want your page to load within two and a half to three seconds. No big pictures. Put your videos on specific pages, make sure that there isn’t all the superfluous code you have. Anybody have a WordPress site or a joomla or Drupal site or anything like that? No? Okay. Go ask otherwise there is a great little website out there called builtwith.com. You can simply go there are punch in your domain name and it will tell you.
But the reason why it is so important is those systems that are like you builder systems, even like your square space’s and some of these out of the box builders, they are horrible when it comes to site speed. They are also a great way to signal to Google that I am being super cheap and I only want to pay 29 for my website. How can you expect Google to go ahead and take you serious when the next guy that might be ranking really really high spent two grand on it? Google knows that, they know by the kind of site it is whether you actually invested money in it or not. Page speed, big.

Domain signal. Probably one of the biggest ones here is registration of length. You also want to pay attention to– if you have had the domain name for a long time don’t get rid of it, there is value behind that domain name. Register is out for a minimum three years and then you can also set it up so that the particular URLs that you have, meaning the pages on your site. The add5ress the links at the top, you always want to keep those the same, especially when you go and develop a new site.

Yes?

Male speaker 3: So you are talking a registration link at multiple websites and they are on GoDaddy. And I have just got them set up for an annual renewal. You are saying no, do a ten-year renewal.

Stephan: Correct.

Male speaker 3: Is that a big factor?

Stephan: Its one of the factors that we have seen, but you are not going to take a website from page three to page one with that. But it is one of the signals that is very easy to control, you guys just make a small investment and then you forget about it but at the same time yes.
[00:16:11] [END OF AUDIO]