Search Marketing Insomniac…The Blog of Adam Henige

While I’m certainly not a bashful person, I do tend to shy away from too much professional bravado.  However, I got a kick out of some of our organic results when I took a look at them today. A while back I published an article about geo-targeting with SEO, discussing the benefits of targeting your local market first, particularly in highly competitive environments.  In it I discussed our approach at Netvantage, where we made it a focus to establish ourselves in the local market before moving to broader, generalized terms.

Well, since I have been doing a lot of speaking engagements lately, and I also was introduced to an article which made it clear that you need to call out proposed “gurus”, I thought I’d throw this out on the table to prove the value in what I say.  We have three primary services here at Netvantage Marketing:  Search engine optimization, paid search management and web analytics consulting.  So in terms of geo-targeting these terms, we want to be the prominent firm for these services in Michigan.  So, according to Big Brother Google, how do we stack up?  As of 1:25am today (no, I don’t sleep), here are our results for:

• Michigan search engine optimization
• Michigan paid search management
• Michigan web analytics consulting
  *Click the link to run the search
  

Admittedly, we have teetered between number one and six for “Michigan search engine optimization” recently as we have turned our focus slightly towards other terms, but we have the top two listings for “Michigan paid search management“, “Michigan web analytics consulting” and even “Michigan web analytics” pretty solidly sewn up for the time being.  Granted, these are not the most competitive keywords on the market, but they are competitive and provide us a solid flow of highly targeted traffic.

We aim for transparency at Netvantage, and we laid out our strategy and just wanted to show that it’s working.  Since we can’t publicize what we do for our clients, I figured this would help show that our strategies and tactics work.  If you go back to the original article, you’ll also see that I pointed out that we aimed to segue this tactic into national level rankings.  To show how that’s working:

• Paid search management
• Web analytics consulting

Well, that puts the bullseye firmly on us for our competitors, but I think it’s important to display that our tactics work, even in the most difficult of markets.  And trust me, trying to SEO against the nation’s best SEOs (and Michigan has several of the best SEO firms, including OneUpWeb and Pure Visibility) is no small task.

***CAUTION:  Blatant sales pitch to follow***

SEO is the most important marketing tool we have, and we want to make it just as valuable to you.  Contact us online to learn more about our services, or just give us a call at 877.204.0234.

I was pretty impressed when Google announced the addition of enterprise level features to Google Analytics.  Of course, I felt this was an obvious knee jerk reaction to my previous blog where I review Google Analytics and pointed out the segmentation shortcomings.  In response?  BOOM!  Google adds segmentation a couple weeks later.  If only I had that much pull…

Let’s try this…

Addendum to my review:

Challenges:

• Another issue with Google Analytics is its inability to magically read dynamic ecommerce data from every shopping cart on the market.

I’m not holding my breath, but hopefully someone on the dev team comes across this at some point…

Anyway, the real problem I want to gripe about is…

WHERE ARE MY NEW FEATURES?!?!?!?

I’ve got more than a dozen GA accounts, and not one of them has these features available yet.  Brutal.  Please scale back the publicity if you’re going to have a phased rollout.  This is just not fair.

In a lame attempt to protest, here’s some PR4 link love comin’ atcha!

michigan search engine optimization

Take that, Google!

I may have the most fragmented thought processes of anyone I’ve ever encountered.  Thus, I tinker with things.  All the time. This is probably why I have a hobby of collecting hobbies.

Anyway, this has been a useful trait for the world of SEO, as we aim to become the premiere Michigan search engine optimization and pay per click management firm.  I find myself constantly tinkering with our page content, modifying the density of target phrases, monitoring the top spots, and seeing how I can provide content in a way that’s still aimed at the user but provides all of the benefits you could hope for in SEO.  This is such an important thing to spend time on and keep track of, as I saw recently on our own site.

We’re relatively new, and playing in an intensely competitive market (obviously), so we need to pick our spots wisely.  The first term we saw great success on was ‘paid search management‘.  Right now we’re sitting at number four, but have held the top spot on occasion.  That was a triumph for a site not even six months old, and a testament to our methods of on site and external optimization.  I swear we built a billion links for that term…We’re very aggressive with our link building, and of course, we see great results.  But if you stray too far from your on site optimization, you’re really short changing your efforts.

A perfect case in point was the term ‘michigan seo solutions‘.  We had previously targeted that term for our site, and initially done our due diligence in creating a page that was strong for that term.  This term didn’t have the time or resources attached to it as some other terms, but we were spending some time on it…and not seeing great results.  Our link building report showed that we should have been at least on page two for Google, yet as of September 19th we sat in the 74th position.  There had to be another issue, I figured, and it was time to tinker.

I went back to our on site optimization and saw some holes in how we had used the term within the page content and went to work making corrections based on my benchmarks of those holding the top SERPs.  The results were striking.  By October 1st we had jumped 66 positions to eighth.  We went from being invisible to being on the cusp of grabbing a good share of traffic for that term with a little more work.  The amount of time I could have spent doing external SEO for that term with lesser results would have been stunning.

The moral of the story?  Never stop taking the pulse of the pages you’re trying to optimize, or you’ll just be creating a lot of extra work for yourself.