When is the best time to invest in SEO?

Image credit: paraorkut

To get the best from your SEO investment, timing is crucial. The thrill for most SEOs is seeing month's worth of hard effort paying off and getting to the top of rankings ideally when the search volume peaks. SEO is a bit like surfing in this respect. To get the best results, you have to put a lot of mostly manual effort preparing things and doing the same things over and over before you can enjoy the benefits. Unlike surfing however, if you get your SEO right, the fruits of your labour can last for months and years (and actually improve), rather than finishing in a heap like the gentleman pictured above probably did.

There is still a misconception about SEO with some business owners who still think that you can get to the top of Google overnight. While this is a trend which is starting to change, and despite our best efforts, we still experience a good amount of comments along the lines of 'we are expecting to see results in the next few weeks'.

Indeed, speaking to some business owners recently in some industries there is still a general consensus that just building a website will instantly start to generate leads every day! Unsurprisingly these industries are hardly cutting edge...

However, for those that are looking to get better results in the search engine results pages on the holy left hand side of the results, you can't afford to wait. If you ask any reputable SEO company about how long results will take to achieve most will tell you that it can take anything from week to years, depending on many factors (up to 400 according to Google). These factors will include many things such as;

• How competitive your industry is
• How much traffic there is on the phrases you are targeting
• How good your competitor websites are
  
• How old your website address is (domain name)
• How well you've maintained your website over the years (frequency of updates)
• How well built your website is (are their technical things harming your rankings?)
• How well written the content is (does it use the words you want to rank for in the content?)
• How many links point to your website
• How many internal links there are between each page
• and many, MANY more...

So if it takes months to get good rankings and there are dozens of things to fix to get your website liked by Google, when is the best time to invest and start fixing the problems?

Well, the easy answer is always NOW. If you can fix things with your website to help improve your ranking now then it is only going to work in your favour. However, this isn't always possible due to budgets, resources and skills. If these are in short supply then a more considered approach will be needed. Rather than spending on SEO when budget is available it makes sense to time a good SEO campaign with your searchers. To help find out when the searchers are searching there are a few free tools which can be used.

The first is to use Google Insights. If you've not used it before, it is a really powerful tool to help you see what happens in your industry from a search point of view.

The insights tool allows you to compare multiple variables against each other and to build up a great picture of the micro and macro detail of your market. One of the best things about the tool is that you can see graphically where the peaks in your market are. If you know your market well then perhaps this might not be very surprising but in some cases you might see some unexpected highs of traffic.

In the frivolous example above, we can see Pink Floyd had a spike of interest back in 2005 due to their appearance at Live8. Interest and searches for The Beatles increased at the end of last year when they released The Beatles Rock Band.

In your industry you may find that there is an overall increase in traffic or perhaps even a decrease due to the recession. If you need to get more of an idea about what's happening and how the market is working overall in your industry, this is a great place to start.

The second tool to use is Google Adwords keywords tool. In the same way Google Insights can show you about trends in your industry, Google Adwords keywords tool can help show you which months are busiest for your target phrases. You can use the keywords tool for free and play around with various phrases as you wish.

One of the big things you'll miss if you just use the tool when it loads is Search Volume trend. Use the drop down below as shown above and then click on the relevant option to show it on the table. Using the same phrases as above, you can see that last year, the Beatles had a big amount of searches in September as the insights tool showed us. The key thing about this tool however, is that it gives us numbers instead of graphs. We can use these numbers to try to predict rough traffic estimates for our SEO purposes. We can also sort these columns by clicking on them to get a comparison of various phrases for traffic.

If we can see here that a phrase has had a good amount of traffic in the last few months and has a peak in six months time of X no of searches, then we need to start thinking NOW about how to capitalise on this. Starting work a few weeks before the peak seasons starts is not going to give Google and the other search engines enough time to see your website in a positive light and push you up the rankings.

So if you can't afford to invest in SEO on an ongoing basis, perhaps these tools will be able to help you plan out when to start spending your budget and when to speak to a digital marketing agency to get your house in order.

Quick & dirty brand monitoring using Google Alerts

I've done several presentations in the last few months on my usual subjects of SEO, PPC and social media which have gone down very well. These talks have ignited many peoples imaginations (not my words I must add!) to think differently about how they view their websites & online activity. Where I've had time, I've also discussed the subject of online brand reputation management, a growing issue for many businesses. Just the mention that it is possible has excited many people and when I've given advice on how to do it, it's sparked many more conversations.

With more and more people using social media in the UK and with web 2.0 sites being used more than ever before (where the user controls the conversation, not the website owner) it makes sense to keep an eye on what is being said about your brand and company online.

Monitoring your brand online is potentially a never ending job. But using some free Google tools, it can make your life a whole lot easier. If you're interested in finding out what is being said about your brand online, and have 10 minutes spare, I've outlined a step by step process below which should allow you to do just this. What have you got to lose? Potentially a lot if people are talking about your brand in the wrong way.

Note: There are many ways to do this, this is just what I believe to be the quickest to set up and most convenient way of keeping an eye on what is going on.

1. Go to Google.co.uk/ig
Like 90% of searchers in the UK, I prefer to use Google. If you didn't already know, Google allows you to personalise your own home page to be whatever you want it to be. To get to it, go to www.google.co.uk/ig

2. Get logged in on Google.co.uk/ig
If you've already got a Google account (you'll probably have one if you have a gmail.com or googlemail.com email address), then log in to your account. Otherwise click on the 'Sign In' link as shown below.

This will take you to a new page where you need to click 'Create an account now'

Fill in the form which creates your account and make sure that you leave 'Stay signed in' checked to on. When you're done, press 'I accept. Create an account'.

When you've done this, you'll get an email from Google as well as being logged into your new Google home page. You'll need to click a link which comes in the email to verify your account to allow your Google home page to work correctly.


3. Set Google.co.uk/ig as your home page
Rather than having to remember to check your Google home page each day to see if anything new has been added, it is alot easier to change your browser home page to be your default home page. Google home page is just the same as normal Google but with a few more bells and whistles added. Doing this will make make it alot easier to see what's going on, trust me. To do this in a newer version of IE, press 'Alt' on your keyboard which will show the menu bar. Then click Tools > Internet Options. If you're using Firefox, go to Tools > Options to get a very similar screen.

In the first box which shows up, enter www.google.co.uk/ig instead of whatever you have there currently and press OK. This means that whenever you click home on your browser from now on (or use the ALT + HOME buttons on your keyboard) you'll see your Google home page.

4. Adding Google alerts to your home page
Now that you've got a personalised page and have it set as your home page, you now need to add some alerts to the page so that you can see any brand mentions easily and quickly.

First thing to do is go to Google.co.uk/ig and click 'See your page' which will show your own page. This is the page which is now yours and that you'll be changing very soon. Google adds a variety of widgets to your page by default which you can delete or remove as necessary.

Now do a Google search for 'alerts'.

The first link (unsurprisingly) is Google Alerts. Click on the link to go to the alerts set up page.

If you are not logged in already, then you'll need to click on the link at the top and click 'Sign In'. When you created your Google account earlier, you would've received an email from them with a link to activate your account, which you need to have clicked to be able to sign in and make this process work.

Once signed in, enter the phrase that you want to monitor in the first box. In our example, we want to know what people are saying about our brand name, Adido, so we enter it into the box. Note, you can only enter and monitor one phrase at a time so if you want to check multiple phrases then you will need to repeat this process several times.

As we want to get this feed showing directly on our home page, we need to change the 'Deliver to' field to Feed.

Once we're happy with the feed settings, we press 'Create Alert' which will then generate the feed that we want to monitor. It will add it to the alert management centre which lists all of the alerts that have been set up in the past.

If you've just set up your first one, this list will look short so it'll be easy to find the one you've set up. What you need to get now is the feed data. Click on the 'Feed' link which will then show a long list of code, some of which might already mention the phrase you want to monitor (as shown here)

You need to tell Google home page about the feed that you've just created. To do this, click in the address bar and right click and press Copy. This will copy the unique address of the feed for you need.

Next, go back to your Google home page by clicking your home button on your browser or going to Google.co.uk/ig. On the right hand side about a third of the way down you'll see an 'Add stuff' link which you need to click.

Welcome to Google gadget world. This page lists thousands of different widgets or gadgets (or whatever you want to call them) that you can add to your home page to make your life easier. You can play around with this later, but for now, you need to go to the bottom left and click on the 'Add feed or gadget' button.

When you click on this, a larger box will appear which is where Google asks you to add your feed. Hopefully you've done nothing since copying the link so it works ok. In this box you can right click and press Paste which will put the feed your created and copied into the box. Press 'Add' and Google will then verify the feed that you've added and after a few seconds will come back with a tick to show that it liked it and that it is now added to your home page! Success!

Now go back to your Google home page and you'll see that a new widget/gadget has been added listing any mentions that Google has picked up about your targeted search term. Superb!

If your feed has been added but has no content listed, then it means that Google hasn't picked up anything recently. Don't worry, it can take some time (up to several days) for your feed to pick up content up so be patient, it will appear! If you want to see more than the three listings shown here, you can click on the small drop down box on the right hand side of the pale blue bar shown above and change the settings to be how you'd like them.

That's it! You've now got Google telling you about things it knows which match the search phrase you want to monior. If you want to know more, go through the same steps and you'll be able to build up a list of phrases to monitor quickly and easily.

What do you do with this data? If people are talking about your brand online then you should try and interact with them. Normally comments on blog and forums allow links to be posted which can come back to your website. The more links pointing to your website, the better and this will, over a longish period of time (most likely months), improve your rankings on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Why not go further and pick up on anything relevant to your industry and comment on it? This will help build your name outside of your immediate network of contacts.

This tool is really, really helpful. We recently discovered a couple of potentially huge issues relating to the Adido brand using Google Alerts which we have taken action on. If we didn't have this set up we wouldn't have found them and we probably would be none the wiser to what people were doing with our brand. More on this in due course...

Any questions or problems, please leave a comment.

More Google Adwords spam emails - BEWARE!

Considering that Google Adwords is the biggest pay per click advertising platform in the world, it is surprising that there aren't more spam emails being sent out trying to get unsuspecting advertisers to click on phishing websites to get login details of advertisers.

We've recently received several of these Google Adwords phishing emails so felt it was our duty to make more people aware of them so that they can be avoided. Here are just a couple the latest one that we've received.

PLEASE DO NOT CLICK ON THE LINKS IF YOU RECEIVE THEM!


---------------------------------------------
hello dear customer,

You have a new alert from AdWords Alerts
Please use the link below to login:
http://www.adlwevordsx.com/Selects/Login/static/index.html?ref=77493138827

Advertise and Grow your business with Adwords

Yours truly ,
Google AdWords Team ©2009

---------------------------------------------



Here is another email we received asking us to enter our Google Adwords details to another spam/phishing website.

We hope that buy publishing these spam emails that people don't fall into the trap of clicking the link and falling foul of the spammers. We feel that unfortunately some people must click at some point otherwise the spammers wouldn't be so persistent. If you know of anyone who advertises on Google Adwords, why not tell them about these emails as well?

We've read a variety of stats on the open rates of spam emails ranging from 0.0001% through to up to 23%. Given the cost of sending an email is virtually zero, whether open rates are as low as 0.0001% or not it still makes it a worthwhile activity for the spammers to make money, albeit illegally.

Don't fall into the trap!

Please leave any questions that you have below.