It can be challenging to reach a large area on a targeted budget. They had worked with other SEO companies before we met. An analysis of their campaigns showed a common weakness – chasing keywords that are too broad and untargeted. We suggested they focus first on search terms they could rank for quickly and that could bring in significant traffic.

We rewrote some copy on their site and re-optimized the site to target the new keywords. With some focused promotion, the results came quicker than we hoped. We not only got SPND on page 1, we got them second position (against 8,700,000 competing webpages) above the Google Places pages.

I am the senior marketing agent for the company name of Seattle Paint and Drywall. We were not being easily found on the front page. We had worked with other agencies and had paid allot of money to get first page placement and had no positive results.

Within two days of his work we were seen on the front page. We are very satisfied with Tim’s abilities and his proven results I would highly recommend his services.

Tim Fike, Executive Marketing Agent

Seattle Paint and Drywall

We tried several looks and settled on a format that was professional without being showy and that  provided a platform for her clients to speak for her.

I needed to have a presence on the internet that would give prospective clients a look at what I do, how I work and a way to contact me.

Tim  worked closely with me to understand my business and the services I offer. effectivewebmarketing created a website that beautifully reflects the passion and commitment around my work.

I’m delighted with Tim’s work and recommend him highly!

Dina Napoli, Communications Consultant
napolicommunications.com

Hubspot’s new guide, The Essential Guide to Internet Marketing, gives lots of sound advice that unfortunately falls short of what you need to be successful on key topics. Of course it’s a rather general guide. It’s free, and it’s meant as a lead-in to their services. And that’s a fair marketing tactic. Everyone does it. But the advice in the guide is so general that many will be unable to put it to use, and very many who try will waste lots of dollars trying to implement it.

The first and biggest problem you’ll find if you follow their guide is in the area of keyword strategy. That’s a pity, because as Hubspot rightfully points out, keyword strategy is the single starting point for many small businesses and internet consulting companies.

Keywords are the short phrases that I type into Google when I’m looking for someone like you to sell me a product or offer me a service. Examples include – “creative engagement rings”, or “Seattle painters”, or “great Thai food Bellevue”.

Here’s where Hubspot’s advice gets too vague to implement effectively. When you put together your keyword strategy, they say,”The keywords you choose should be based on difficulty and relevance”. In other words, when you optimize your website and promote it, focus your promotions on keywords that are relevant to your business and that you have some hope of dominating in the market. This is good advice as far as it goes.

It doesn’t go far enough. And following it can cost you money. Here’s an example:

I’m working with an exterior painting company in Seattle. They’ve worked with two web promotions companies before, spent months and dollars, targeted keywords that are relevant, and haven’t gotten their website to page one of Google for anything. Literally two days after starting our campaign with the company, they were on page one of Google in the Seattle area for four (4) relevant keywords that bring in good traffic.

What’s the difference? Good keyword selection.

The other companies were promoting the company on keywords like “painting”, “painters” and the like. That’s far too broad. Keyword choices like this have two problems. First, they’re not relevant enough. Google painting and you’re as likely to find a wikipedia article on the art of painting as you are to find a website promoting a local painting company. Second, they’re too competive – you just can’t beat wikipedia. You’ll never out market them.

That’s what Hubspot tries to point out to you in their report. And they’re right as far as they take the argument.

Here are the critical next steps:

You need to target what Hubspot calls “longtail keywords”. In our case, we targeted – Seattle painting, seattle painter, seattle painters, and seattle painting specialists. When you choose your keywords, it’s critical that you choose “buying” or “hiring” keywords. Let me give you an example. If you are a divorce attorney, you do NOT want to choose keywords such as “divorce”, “divorce law”, or even longtail keywords like “Atlanta divorce law”. The keyword is relevant and uncompetitive but it’s likely to put your site in front of searchers who are looking for information and not ready to hire you.

To attract people who are looking to hire choose words that contain: your geographic area, your specialty, and your profession – atlanta divorce attorney, phoenix custom jeweler, san diego emergency plumber.

Second, optimize your website as Hubspot suggests.

Third, concentrate your promotions. You need to focus on keywords you think you can get to page one quickly. Even if that means starting with keywords that bring in low traffic. Here’s the crux – 98% of searchers click on some site on page one of Google. It’s better to have one keyword on page one than 25 keywords on page 5.

When you create your keyword strategy, start promoting your site on keywords you can get to page one. You’ll build links that will help you as you try to promote tougher keywords. Promote from the bottom up if you have to. Get a word to page one. Then choose the next toughest keyword and get that to page one. Keep building as you would a pyramid. By the time you get to the really tough keywords, you’ll have built up a foundation of links that will help you rank more easily.

Using that strategy, we got keywords with good traffic onto page one within two days of starting our promotion, despite the fact that two other firms had tried and failed. Of course I can’t guarantee you’ll have this experience with the keywords you need to target in your market. But it’s the most effective strategy I know of.

Tim’s Takeaways:
Set up your keyword strategy this way:
1. choose buying or hiring keywords
2. rank the keywords by the number of searches they produce each month
3. identify keywords that have little enough competition that you can get your site on page one of Google quickly
4. optimize your site for those keywords
5. promote your site on words that will bring traffic quickly
6. promote your site on tougher keywords as you build a base of links

First, to say it out loud – Google is a utility. Yahoo’s old tenacious hold on a minority of the search market -  and now Bing’s – keeps Google from being a monopoly. But they are a utility. They transitioned from being a noun to being a verb years ago. That’s a sure sign of utility status.

Second, they’re pissing me off. Which matters not at all to them. But its not just me they’re angering. They’re upsetting major segments of the market. In fact, I’d say the only people they aren’t angering are the people who don’t understand the internet and Google’s place in it well enough to know that Google is behind many of the problems they are having, and why.

The fact that Google can upset so many people at once is derivative of their pervasive position in the market. That’s their strength and the source of the weakness, the cause of their ultimate downfall. They effect too many businesses and too much of business. And ultimately, when a company does that, the market bites back. And the market is doing that now and increasingly.

Here’s the fundamental problem with Google – the internet is their personal website. They don’t appear to have a website. I know they have webmaster tools, Google tools, Google images, and Gmail, and etc. but all that seems ancillary to their main website doesn’t it? And their main website appears to be one empty page with a search box and a clever graphic of whoever died on this date 100 years ago.

But of course, when you analyze it, the search box is not Google’s website. It’s their home page. The rest of the website, the ginormous remainder of their website, is dynamically built every time anyone in the world Googles. They have billions of pages all made up of the title tag, and description tag, and url,  from other people’s websites. If someone looked closely at it, it’s probably at its heart a huge copyright violation. But we all accept it, even court it, because it gives us visibility, it gets us found.

But here’s the problem, Google’s search results page is their website. And they get to say what’s on their website. And that would be OK if Google weren’t a utility. And years ago when they built the business model, they weren’t. But today they are. Today they are Google Power and Light.

And that puts Google’s thumbs into everyone’s pies. And that creates too many opportunities for Google to piss people off. They have too much power, too much say-so. And with the unalterable certainty of algebra, the market will do the math, and see the light, and turn on them.

He asked us to bolster the ranking for a website in a mid-sized market in a city of about 100,000 people. We put together an SEO campaign to address potentially twenty-two keywords. After 45 days, we had achieved some pretty convincing results:

• 11 page one positions  (previously 6)

• 4 top 5 positions (previously 2)

• 22 top 40 positions – all the keywords we targeted – (previously 12)

• Higher positions on 19 of 22 keywords overall

Most SEO companies over promise and under deliver.  They also often charge outrageous fees and achieve marginal results.  Tim Dawes and Effective Web Marketing are the exact opposite.  Tim and his company take a methodical and pragmatic approach to SEO that is entirely results driven.  The result is a solid and trustworthy company that provides a variety of optimization services that produce verifiable results at highly effective rates.

For example, in one of our campaigns, I was interested in achieving measurable results for a variety of keywords in one of my local medium-sized markets.  These were competitive legal keyword phrases that I knew would produce clients if I could get my site up to the Google’s first page listings.  Effective Web Marketing delivered across the board.

If you are interested in helping your business methodically grow through organic online optimization, I highly recommend that you give Tim and his team a couple of projects.  I continue to give him project after project because he gets results.

Overall Rating:  Highly Recommended.

Jason N. (last name withheld for competitive purposes)
Head of a growing legal practice

It’s a good article as far as it goes. And it raises the issue of what the new big apps will be.

There are indications though. Mobile devices, for example, make tv watching more interactive. The exemplar is using your mobile phone to vote on American Idol. And other apps are gaining ground. Of course you can now use your mobile phone to scan in a bar code at Target and find out if the Fred Meyers down the street is offering a better price on your favorite shampoo. That’s getting closer to the potential of the mobile platform.

There some chap whose figured out that you can use mobile phones to manage the waiting queue at restaurants and theme parks.

So if you want to know where the money will be in mobile computing, think about what mobile can deliver that nothing else can. That means apps that deliver wyw3 “what you want, where you want, when you want it” . Find out how to deliver that in a way that’s relevant for your product or service, and you’ll own mobile computing.

If you Google it, you’ll find varying opinions. Here’s mine.

Google still dominates the search market. And Google doesn’t care about metadata. The reason is pretty core to their philosophy. Metadata is too easy to spam and gerry rig. In the words of Matt Cutt (paraphrased). If Bob creates bob.com and Alice creates alice.com, it’s too easy for Bob to put “alice” in his meta keywords. So they don’t really mean anything anymore.

That’s no less true of the Dublin Core metadata standard. So I don’t hold much hope of Google embracing it.

So is there any reason for you to pay attention to it and get your webmaster to implement it?

There may be.

Some government, non-profit, and educational institutions use it. If those are important to you, if you get traffic from them, you may benefit from implementing the Dublin Core.

The other reason would be if other large sources of traffic started to care about it. Facebook comes to mind, though there doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason for them to care. Facebook cares about Facebook. They don’t rank or index websites. They essentially have one huge website that everyone joins. So there’s very little incentive for them to care about your website. They’d rather you ported your business into Facebook than do anything new on your site.

The net: if you get business from the government, non-profit, or education sector and it’s important to you to have those institutions find your website the Dublin Core may help. Otherwise, spend your time creating valuable content.

Sabina had a website that she had invested in. She was moving out of the country and raising her profile and wanted a new site that would match her sensibility and position her at the highest strata of CEO coaches.

Lisa acted as executive producer for the project. She developed the branding, logotype, color palette, tagline, photographic brief and more. She directed the photo shoot, and hired the talent, and wrote nearly all the copy for the site.

The result was a website that helped showcase Sabina in the top echelon in her industry.

Lisa Dawes helped me take my business to the next level. It would be a gross misrepresentation if I said she merely helped me launch my website. Her work included so much more. It started well before the first line of code was written for the site by Lisa spending several hours understanding my client’s needs, business landscape, what I bring that is of significant value to my clients, and how best to represent it. She then served as the single point of contact and voice for a high quality, superbly produced, and completely on point website. This included:

• Working with photographers, shoot location, and all aspects of the photo shoot to deliver high quality photos
• Working with a web designer to iterate on a design that targeted my client group
• Creating the appropriate voice and verbiage for the site
• Setting in place the right backend technology to optimize the site’s location on searches

I am fortunate to have a successful executive coaching practice and, for many years, I have been loath to take the time away from client work to create a website. Hiring Lisa was one of the best decisions I made that ultimately delivers further value to my clients. I was able to continue my coaching practice while Lisa did all the hard work to launch the site. Now that the site is up, I have yet to come across someone who didn’t comment positively about it when they accessed it. It helps me efficiently communicate what I do and the impact I have on clients so that prospective clients can decide whether or not they want to select me as their executive coach.

Sabina Nawaz, CEO Coach
sabinanawaz.com

He was driving traffic with Google adwords and wanted more exposure. But mostly, he wanted the site to do a better job of converting visitors into clients.

We interviewed Charles to find out distinguished Harris & Moure’s maritime law practice from their competitors. Then we rewrote the homepage copy to underscore their comparative advantages, and created a couple of down-loadable offers to engage visitors.

The challenge with cruiseinjury.com was that prospective clients wanted to see results and the law firm was legally prohibited from revealing them. We turned that problem into an asset with some effective copy writing:

“We get such good results, so consistently, the cruise lines make us sign agreements not to disclose the sums our clients receive.

What we can tell you is this:”

The result was a homepage that consistently brings in new business.

Tim did great work for us.  He didn’t blindly recommend a new website. Instead, he suggested ways we could maximize what we already had by rewriting some copy and adding web features we were missing.

His changes have positively impacted our business and it was all done well within our budget.  We could not have been happier. I check the site regularly and all is still working well. I use it in conjuction with Google adwords, and I am getting cases.

Charles Moure, Attorney at Law
Harris & Moure
cruiseinjury.com

Luxury rentals have not escaped the downturn in the economy. When Kellee Daugherty contacted us, revenues were off and she was heading into high season looking for ways to increase bookings.

We did some fundamental keyword research to uncover the search terms vacationers use to look for high-end homes. We put together a program of branding and a tagline to differentiate the property from the competition and make it memorable – a destination property.

Then we designed and ran a Google Adwords (paid advertising) campaign and advised the Daugherty’s on sites where they should set up accounts to show case the Point.

The result was a quick injection of revenue in time for high season.

I would highly recommend Tim Dawes who helped design a targeted marketing, advertising and communications plan to build my small business.

Last spring, my revenues had dropped by 80% and I was panicked and didn’t know where to start. Tim was able to ask the right questions, complete some thorough market research and come up with a successful marketing plan that was easy to execute.

Within 1 month, I had a new (and copyright protected) name, tag line, vision, website strategy, Google AdWord and SEO strategies that suddenly increased my business prospects by 600% and my revenues tripled (from my top year) in just a few short months!  All during the recession!

Their processes and communication are clear, focused and on-target and my questions were answered quickly, with excellent ideas for immediate action.  I will continue to use them regularly to continue to grow my businesses and to stay on track on current in the ever-changing world of internet marketing, advertising and communications.

Use them, but don’t let your competitors know about them!

Kellee Daugherty, Owner and Manager – Luxury vacation home
thepointatsandpoint