SageRock Web Marketing Blog

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Pay Per Click Introduction

Hi, I’m Sage Lewis the president of Sagerock.com. So, I wanted to give you a quick introduction to pay per click, these are the paid listings you see at the top and the side of all of the major search engines, usually in a highlighted color. You generally can’t miss them any more. I wanted to talk a little bit about these and why they might be effective for you, and why you might find them useful in your web marketing strategy. By their name, you only pay when somebody clicks on them. This is, in my opinion, a much better system, for you the advertiser, then say, a banner ad. You’ll hear something called CPM which stands for cost per thousand; M is the Roman numeral for thousand. The salespeople for banner ads will tell you it’s not about the click-throughs, it’s all about the branding, and I for the most part don’t believe it. When it comes right down to it, you want to know what a lead costs you and how many leads you are going to get. A banner ad really just isn’t about that. Pay per click is, you only pay when somebody comes to your web site. There might be thousands and thousands of impressions on your pay per click listing but maybe a hundred people click on it. That can be okay, especially if you are bidding on a general phrase but have a really great title and description that pre-qualify people before they click on it. That way you are only paying when a qualified person comes to your web site. Another great thing about pay per click is you only come up for phrases you want to come up for. You don’t have to come up for anything you don’t want to come up for. It gives you a tremendous amount of control, then to top it off you can send them to exactly the right page you want to send them to. Sometimes we call that a landing page and these pages can be custom made for your pay per click campaign. These pages can be tested to determine how to best control your conversion rate. That is really where the metric comes into play, so a lot of times people will say they are going to get rid of a particular phrase because there isn’t a high click through rate. Sometimes that can be legitimate, but sometimes not. It’s not so concerning that only a small percentage of the number of people who saw your ad clicked on it. It may be that your ad is bad, but it could also just mean that you are pre-qualifying well. So, that number really isn’t important then. Who cares? You are only paying for the people who clicked on your ad, so if it’s only really qualified people who are clicking on your ad then you are okay. That’s where the conversion numbers become very interesting, and where you need to tune into them. So, then the person moves into your site and you need to determine what it is you want that person to do. Do you want them to fill out a form? Sign up for a newsletter? Sign up for free information? Then you can measure that very specifically. You can say, this phrase on this engine gave me this number of responses and cost me this much. You just can not find a better metric or a better way of measuring. Pay per click is super, and right now it is super hot. A lot of people are doing it; it’s getting a lot of press these days because you just aren’t going to find a better conversion rate out there. Other people may say that people don’t click on pay per click ads. We know that in Google, approximately thirty percent of people click on the paid ads. So, yeah, you are missing on seventy percent there, but you are only paying for the people who click on it. So, it does not hurt to be there. If you haven’t tried pay per click, it is highly measurable, highly controlled, you only pay for the people who come to your site. You have a very strict budget too, once you have reached your budget for the day or the month, you stop paying. You don’t have to worry about getting a huge bill at the end of the month. If you have given it some thought, if you have been considering it, try it. There’s no entry minimum. You can set up an account by yourself. Overture, which used to be Yahoo, had a twenty dollar minimum; they don’t have that any more. I hope that helps, if you have any more questions feel free to call me at 330-379-9000, or email me directly at sage@sagerock.com. Thank you so much for listening, check out our website there is a lot of great information there. Have a great day.

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Introduction to Search Engine Optimization

Hi, I’m Sage Lewis the president of Sagerock.com. Today I wanted to give you a quick introduction to search engine optimization, what the basics of it are. I get this question a lot, and thought I would put a little video together. There are two aspects, two general umbrellas when you are considering search engine optimization. There are on the page criteria, and off the page criteria. In on the page criteria, that is everything that is on your site, the content, the title tags, images, alt tags, meta tags, meta keywords, heading tags within your content. Search engines even look at things like bolding, italics, and what words you are using to link to other pages within your site. Really, that was how search engines ranked sites for the longest time. It was all on the page criteria stuff, early on it was so bad that search engines were just looking at meta tags. People would think they could just put all kinds of words in their meta tags and they would come up for them. Believe it or not there was a time that that was possible. You could just put words in your meta keyword tags and, POOF; you would come up for them. I find it interesting that belief is still carried on to this day, that the meta keyword is that powerful, it is minimal at best and often times not regarded at all. We still use it, but there are search engine optimization firms that don’t use it at all, and I can certainly see their perspective why they wouldn’t. On the page criteria plays a very important role, the amount of content that you have, the quality of the content, the content discussing key phrases that people are searching for. Something that most people don’t realize is, in order for you to come up in the search engines, you have to use the phrases that you imagine your audience is searching on. If your phrase is “boat insurance”, but internally you are selling “watercraft insurance” don’t use watercraft insurance on your site, you are going to be number one for a phrase no one is searching for, so understand your customers and the words they are using. Off the page criteria is everybody else and how they relate to your web site. The big examples of off the page criteria were in the 2004 presidential election, this is currently August of 2006, and if you type in the word “failure” in Google the number one listing is George Bush’s biography on the WhiteHouse.gov site. Interestingly, the number two listing for the word failure is Michael Moore. Now, neither one of them are optimizing on the word failure, it’s all these other web sites that are linking to their web site with the word failure. This became a very powerful way of doing well on the search engines, by having other people link to you in a very certain way. Now, in these two examples that I have talked about with failure, they didn’t want that. You can use information for good. So, if your phrase is “boat insurance”, you want to try to get links on reputable sites that link back to you with the words boat insurance. The search engines will go to that site and say, “here is another site about boat insurance”, because that is the hyper link, and you will get credit for that. So, you think, if a few links are good then a thousand must be great! You do not, especially in today’s climate, want to do anything that is sneaky or try to trick the search engines. I don’t recommend buying links anymore; I don’t really recommend link exchanges for link building sake. Certainly not a link farm where you put your site in as one of a thousand sites and you put those links hidden somewhere on your site, never ever do that. That can just get you banned from the search engines. You want to find links from legitimate, related sites that want to link to you. That’s it, that’s the story, now you are a search engine master. There are a lot of details that are within those two umbrellas, but it’s really all there is to it. Some people ask me how many pages can get indexed on a search engine; all of your pages can get indexed on a search engine. Every page should be focused on a particular key phrase that your visitor might be searching for. So, there you go, that is an introduction to search engine optimization. If you would like to talk about this more, my phone number is 330-379-9000, my personal email is sage@sagerock.com, I would be more than happy to talk with you, give you a free half hour consultation of your web site. I look forward to talking with you, we have a lot of information on our web site; please feel free to look around. Thank you once again, have a great day.

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Google Analytics Overview

Hi, I’m Sage Lewis the president of SageRock.com. I wanted to spend a couple of minutes with you and talk about Google Analytics. As of the week of August 15th, 2006 Google Analytics is officially open to everyone and the great news about that is it is completely free. So, if you are not completely happy with your current analytics program or you don’t have an analytics program I would strongly encourage you to take a look at Google Analytics. It’s at Google.com/analytics, or you can just do a search for it at Google, and it will take you there. The sign up is on the main page, you simply click sign up. When you get to this page, there are two ways you can go. If you don’t have a Google account you can sign up here, but if you do have an account you can just sign in. The secret to Google Analytics is that they are going to give you a piece of code that goes on every single page of your web site. If you have a footer file on all of your pages it’s going to be really easy, you just put that code right before the end body tag of your HTML, it will propagate through your entire site and you are done. If you don’t have a single file like that you are going to have to just go into every page of your web site and cut and paste it in there. Once that code is in all of your pages then Google Analytics takes care of itself. I wanted to walk you through a little of Google Analytics and show you some of the things that I like about it. First of all, the page we are looking at analytic settings, one of the things I like is the filter manager. This allows you to filter out specific traffic that you do not want to count in your reports. Usually this is traffic internal; you don’t want to count your internal staff. You can add a filter; give it any name that you like then it gives you some options for different filters. You can filter by domain, ip address, then you simply put in the domain or address then select the website profile which is the site you are using then click finish, it’s that easy. Where all the excitement really is is in the report section. One of the great things about Google Analytics is if you want to, you can tie it directly into your Google AdWords campaign. This gives you very specific dollar amounts of what you spent and what a conversion was. The executive summary shows the last week of traffic; Visits and page views, visits of new and returning, visits by source, and I really like this geo-map overlay. This next part is what I feel is the best part is conversion data. What you have to do is tell Google Analytics exactly what a conversion is, you can set that up in analytic settings – conversion goals and funnel section. You can have up to four different conversion goals for a site. Typically the URL is the thank you page; you can define the funnel and watch the process. This is especially helpful on an e-commerce site where a visitor has to add something to their shopping cart, visit the shopping card, and checkout. You can put all of those steps in there to define a conversion for your site. The next executive report is the site overlay report which is just visually interesting. What you see is they are overlaying the statistics within your web site. Showing you which buttons or links people are clicking on most often. By hovering over the link you can see percentages of the total number of clicks. There are also more detailed sections: marketer overviews, overall keyword conversions, campaign conversions, funnel navigation, and so on. Google Analytics does a fairly good job at presenting the data in a useful way. There you go, I hope this was useful, if you haven’t check it out, run on over and get an account, you’re going to be glad you did. Have a great day.

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Why Not Hire SageRock

Hi, I’m Sage Lewis the president of SageRock.com. So, every web site and every salesman wants to tell you why you should hire them. I thought it might be interesting for you to find out why you maybe shouldn’t hire SageRock.com. I think there are some clear reasons that make us not ideal for a lot of companies actually. The first reason that comes to mind is that we are not a traditional, fancy company. We don’t have a fancy address, we don’t reside in New York City or Chicago, our address is 129 N. Summit St. in North Akron. We are in an old ice and coal warehouse. We will never be in a fancy building. I can never possibly imagine that ever happening to us, we just aren’t that kind of people. We are just down to earth people; we are ice and coal warehouse people. This is pretty much what suits us. The other thing is we work very deeply with a few clients. We don’t have a huge array of clients, we are not trying to reign in as many clients as we can get, and it’s not our style. We want to work deeply with people, we want to be valuable. We want to be an added valuable resource to our customers. When you ask any member of the SageRock team what is important to them, the number one thing that is most important to them is they want to contribute and feel appreciated by our customers; they want to do a good job for our customers. You can’t ask for anything better than that. The reason for that is because we don’t have hundreds and hundreds of clients that we don’t feel connected to. Every client we have we feel very connected to and we want to do a good job for them. I can not see us changing that any time in the future. We are always going to be a high level firm that works with a few core clients very deeply. To that point, a high level firm, we are very expensive, at least $200 an hour, if not more. If you need somebody cheaper give me a call and I will send you to them. We are intentionally expensive to slow the process down. If we were $100 an hour, we would be flooded with people, flooded with clients and we wouldn’t be able to provide the level of service we provide. We want to be communicative to our clients; we want to be available to our clients. We want to work deeply with our clients, and the only way we can do that is to slow the process down by being more expensive. Honestly, in the national realm $200 is not out of the realm of what most people are charging, but it’s certainly not cheap. So, there’s that, and even further into the non-traditional aspect of our business, my background is literature. I was an English major at Baldwin Wallace College in northern Ohio. The same with my partner and wife, Rocky, she was an English major at Baldwin Wallace. We have artists here, musicians, we have computer science degree guys too, but they have a really strong humanities background. Strong in visual arts and music, that type of thing. I personally don’t believe that business is about numbers and analysis, it’s about relationships and communicating, it’s about humanity. That is what business is about. I think our humanities background makes us great business people, but I certainly understand why some people feel uncomfortable with that, and I can definitely appreciate that. So, we may not be right for you, but I wanted to let you know these things. We are very open here; open about who we are and what we do. That honesty can be off-putting, it’s just the way it is, just who we are. We are sincere, genuine, hardworking people. So, there you go, we might be right for you, we might not be right for you. But, I wanted to let you know. If you would like to talk more about this, just give me a call, our phone number is 330-379-9000. You can email me directly at sage@sagerock.com . Thank you so much for looking at this video. Feel free to look around the web site, if you have any questions please contact me. Have a great day

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Why SageRock

Hi, I’m Sage Lewis the president of SageRock.com. So, why would you consider hiring SageRock for your web marketing needs. I think there are three reasons. The first reason is longevity. We have been around since 1999; SageRock was started with myself and my wife Rocky. My background is systems administration and web development, her background is in technical writing. Together those core competencies make a great team for search engine optimization. We have been around for a long time; we have seen a lot of things. We have made a lot of mistakes, certainly. But, we have had a lot of successes, and I think that there is some value to be had in longevity. We have seen things that newer companies haven’t seen, and I think we are stronger for having this legacy of longevity. I imagine that your company has been around for a long time, and certainly has been around longer than we have. I imagine that you, too, know the value of longevity. The second reason we think you might want to hire SageRock is we were written up in the Marketing Shirpas buyers’ guide for search engine optimization as one of the top ten search engine marketing firms in the country. We were given that ranking because we are able to position companies in the most competitive industries for the most competitive phrases at the top of the search engines. It’s just a knack that we have. We might be called what you consider a big gun in the search engine optimization realm. We are just able to compete in very competitive arenas. We are very proud of that ranking, we have been in the buyers’ guide since the beginning, and we are in it every year. It is a great resource to look for a place to start for researching a search engine marketing firm. The third reason I think you might consider us for search engine marketing needs is that we are specialists. We don’t do web development, we don’t do hosting, we don’t do offline marketing. We do search engine marketing. We do search engine optimization, paid search advertising, and statistical analysis. We feel that those three areas work very well together. Our statistical analysis leg verifies and validates everything we have done with our paid search programs and our search engine optimization programs, it’s a great tool that confirms or denies everything that we have done. Being specialists, we are able to keep up on news, things are always changing in this industry as you probably know, and it can get very confusing. We don’t believe that people who are generalists, at this point in the game, have the level of expertise that a specialist company, like ours, does. So, those are the three reasons we think you might consider hiring SageRock. We would love the opportunity to talk with you. Feel free to give us a call, our phone number is 330-379-9000. You can email me directly at sage@sagerock.com. I would be happy to talk to you about your needs and your goals, what you are looking to accomplish. I would be happy to give you a free evaluation of your website, anything you’d like. Thank you very much for listening to this video, thank you for coming to our website. Please feel free to look around, and if you have any questions contact us any time you would like, have a great day.

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SageRock introduction

Hi, I’m Sage Lewis the president of SageRock.com. I just wanted to put a short video together to introduce myself and to let you see me. I think sometimes that the internet gets a little too anonymous, and you can read things and you can read writing but it’s just nice to see someone for once. To give you a little bit of background SageRock was started with myself and my wife Rocky at the end of 1999. My background is systems administration and web development. Her background is technical writing. So, together those were a terrific fit for a search engine marketing firm. We started SageRock in our dining room of our 750 square foot house in Medina, Ohio. We are currently now an eight person firm, this is august of 2006. Our three core specialties are search engine optimization, pay-per-click management, and statistical analysis. Those are the three areas that we specialize in. We don’t do any web development; we don’t do any web hosting. We are not particularly design oriented. We are all about helping generate traffic and helping to increase conversion rates on your site. That’s what our focus is. So, that’s a little bit about us. My wife and I have a son, his name is Indiana and he is going on two years old. We have a dog. SageRock is made up of some very interesting creative people. I think that if you asked anyone here what the secret to SageRock’s success they would say that it is the team. We have one of the greatest teams that I could have ever imagined possible. Everyone works together super well, they are super friendly. Their core values are that they want to contribute and they want to make a difference and be valuable to our clients. You just can’t ask for anything better than that. If you would like to talk to us, or talk to me anybody in our team, our phone number is 330-379-9000. My personal email address is Sage@sagerock.com . Thank you so much for listening. There is a biography page on our website, we also give some information about what we call the SageRock experience of how we operate and what our values are and how we feel that we fit in our community, something that we feel is very important to all of us here. Thank you once again, and I look forward to talking to you soon. Have a great day.

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Steps to Hiring a Web Marketing Firm

Hi, I’m Sage Lewis the president of SageRock.com. So, how exactly do you go about hiring a search engine optimization marketing firm? I’m here to tell you, it is not easy unfortunately. But, there are some steps that you can take. So, how did you hire your attorney, how did you hire your accountant? Did you go through the yellow pages? Did you just start calling people out of the phonebook or newspaper ads? I highly doubt it. Chances are you talked to a friend, you talked to an associate or someone from an organization you are involved in. Service based businesses are ideally suited for people through referrals. But, it’s very possible that none of your friends or associates have a search engine marketing firm that they are working with right now, or even worse, they do have a firm they are working with and they are terrible! They don’t do good work; they might not even do any work at all. I have certainly heard that before unfortunately. Or they are bad communicators; the list goes on and on. So you don’t want to work with them. The first thing you can do is check out this periodical called the Marketing SHERPA‘s guide to search engine optimization, it comes out every year and if you don’t know any search engine optimization firms this would be a good place to start. You can do a search for marketing SHERPA’s guide and you can find them that way. Get a list of a few that look promising and then call them. See if you are a good fit, see if they call you back, a lot of times they are so busy they won’t return your calls, that could be telling. If they don’t have the time to call you back for new business, are they going to call you back when you are a client? Potentially not. So start from there, talk to them. Then get referrals from them, ask if you can talk to some of their clients. Now, keep in mind, they are probably only going to send you to their best clients. You might get a surprise client who may not be happy with their search engine marketing firm, and that can be very telling. Hopefully for the firm that doesn’t happen, but it might happen in your case. Then ask the search engine marketing firm if you can see some example positions of their site or their clients’ sites. Some people say, “Well I go out and see how a search engine marketing firm is doing for ‘search engine optimization.’” That isn’t a terrible way to go, if a company is coming up for the term search engine optimization very likely they are a good search engine optimization firm. But there are so many variables to having a good relationship. Even though they are very competent, do you work well together? Are they good communicators? Can you afford them? There are a lot of things to look at. So, ask the firm for example positions, or if you are looking for a pay per click firm ask them about how they go about managing a pay per click campaign. What are the goals, what are they trying to achieve? See if that fits with what you are trying to achieve. At that point, once you have done your homework, you have looked at some firms, you have seem that they can provide good results, they return your calls in a timely fashion then it is all about the relationship. Do they seem like people you like? Because if it’s a good fit you will probably be working with them for years, this isn’t a one time thing. Like all marketing it is cyclical, it goes round and round, you will continue to refine your strategy. So, do you work well together, do you seem like a good fit? Do you like the people? It might not work out, but at least it’s going to be better than by finding someone by typing in a phrase and getting 100,000 results to choose from. Best wishes, if you would like to talk to us, feel free to give us a call, our phone number is 330-379-9000. You can talk to me; my direct email is Sage@sagerock.com, I would be happy to talk to you. We would be happy to give you a free evaluation of your website. If there is anything we can do, we would be happy to do it. Thank you so much for listening to this video and for coming to our website, we greatly appreciate it. I look forward to talking with you soon, have a great day.

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Link popularity

Hi, I’m Sage Lewis the president of SageRock.com and today I wanted to talk to you about link popularity. When you are dealing in search engine optimization there are two main umbrellas that you are working under. One is what we call on the page criteria which is your page content and the code on your page, that type of thing. The other side is off the page content and that’s what I want to talk today about, this is called link popularity. I wanted to show you quickly how you determine what your link popularity is. We are looking at a site called “Senior Care Investor Newsletter”, and as you can see here it says “the online story on mergers and acquisitions in nursing homes, assisted and independent senior living”. We are going to look at three different sites to help determine how many sites are linking to Seniorcareinvestor.com. So, the first thing we are going to do is we are going to go over to Google, and we are simply going to type in their full URL, but right before it I am going to put in a definition that says link:http://www.seniorcareinverstor.com. Then I simply hit Google search. Now, this shows the links that are pointing to SeniorCareInvestor.com. Briefly here, you can see results 1-11 of about 27. So, there’s that one. Now, we are going to do the same search over at Yahoo. This is Yahoo’s homepage, and I’m just going to paste that in here and hit enter. Now we can see 1-24 of about 202. So, as you can see, there is a big discrepancy between the number of links Google has, they are reporting about 27 links, and Yahoo is recording that there are 202 links pointing into SeniorCareInvestor.com. So you might think maybe Google doesn’t realize all of the links that are there. The fact is Google knows exactly how many links are there, but there are trying to hold that information privately; they don’t want you to know all of the links that they know about. When you are doing link popularity check it is often times helpful to go to Yahoo to do this research, but I wanted to show you the discrepancy between Google and Yahoo, and why a search engine optimizer might show you a link popularity report from Yahoo as opposed to Google. Yahoo is just a little more accurate. Finally, I wanted to show you one more site, it’s called Yahoo Search site explorer which is currently in beta, it’s an interesting site because it gives you a backdoor look at the order of importance of the links that Yahoo has, and so what it does is show you two things. The first thing it’s going to show you in the number of pages that Yahoo has recorded for SeniorCareInvestor.com. What is different in this case is, as opposed to just going to regular Yahoo, is lists them in order of importance. So, SeniorCareInvestor.com is actually a new site they have opened up a weblog there about the merger and acquisition information in the healthcare industry, and so if you are looking at stocks I recommend you checking it out. But, what I wanted to show you here was the inlinks section here, when I entered in the URL into the Yahoo site explorer, this was the page that came up. Now, here I’m going to click on inlinks, which shows 242. What is interesting here is that these are in order of importance as according to Yahoo. So, this gives you a lot of inside information where Google didn’t give you any inside information at all where Yahoo is telling you a great deal. Their link from Levinassociates.com is very important and it goes on from there with multiple Levinassociates links which are highly regarded as far as Yahoo is concerned. So, if you want to find out how many links are pointing to you, this is how you do it. Okay, have a good day.

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Importance of Titles

Hi, I’m Sage Lewis the president of SageRock.com, and we are a web marketing firm. We specialize in search engine marketing. Today I want to talk to you about titles. We are talking about titles on your webpages. Titles, as far as search engines are concerned, are by far the most important tag of any tag you can think about while you are trying to optimize your site for it to come up high in search engine listings. Titles are very easy to modify, but they are very often not paid attention to. So, for an example, you can see here; this is our home page and if you look at the top at this blue bar. I am using FireFox as a web browser, but it’s the same thing in internet explorer. Right here web marketing from SageRock.com is our title; it’s in the HTML of our website here. The title is in the heading of the HTML. It is in-between the beginning title tag and the end title tag. You can put it in by hand, or if you are using a web editor like FrontPage or Dream Weaver a lot of times there is a property section that you can put it in, but it is worth spending a few extra minutes in focusing on. For example here, I have FrontPage installed; it is easy in FrontPage to change your title. You just simply right click on the page you are editing: you go to page properties and right here is the title. You want to make the title descriptive of the page. You don’t want to have just one title for the entire site. Every page should have a title that is specific to it. If you are on the “about us” page for your web site, you might say something like “About SageRock.com” or if you are talking about the products you have, you may say something like “featuring these products from our company” Ideally you want to use phrases you think people are going to search for in the search engines. As an example, here is a search I did for model cars, if you look here, the number one result their title is diecast model cars, here is another one from motormen.com: Diecast model car collectables. All of those are coming from their titles. These titles are playing a significant part in how these people are doing in the search engines. Now granted, titles are just one of many criteria search engines look at. If you had to rank criteria, title would definitely rank in the top three of most important things to consider. If you have never thought about this, you are not alone. Most people or a lot of people have not considered this. A glaring happening of poor titles is with people who use Adobe GoLive, which is a HTML editor, but for your convenience the default title is “welcome to Adobe GoLive” and it puts that on every one of your pages. If people don’t think to change the title, then you are just a big advertisement for Adobe GoLive. I did a search, in quotes for “welcome to Adobe GoLive” and I turned up 1.74 million results for welcome to Adobe GoLive, and if you just scroll down here, none of these sites are Adobe. They are people’s websites. It’s not even small websites; Princeton.edu has a page with this title. So, you are not alone, you don’t need to feel bad that you didn’t know this. It is easy to fix, and it will make the biggest difference in your search engine rankings. So, there you have it: titles, I recommend them.

This video is 10 expectations you should have when entering into a search engine optimization campaign.