Small Business SEO: Google My Business Or Pay For Performance SEO Pricing?

Small business SEO is the cornerstone of every small business marketing campaign. Organic traffic from Google can mean bank for your business. It can be a game changer.

Search engine optimization pays for itself. Think about traditional advertising — you pay for ad placement and hope to get results. If no new business rolls in, you’re back at square one.

The difference when it comes to small business SEO is that the investment you make continues to keep paying you back long afterwards. That’s the reality of ranking for a profitable keyword. When someone types in what they are looking for and finds you, what else can be better?

Used in tandem with on-page SEO, it’s a powerful strategy to add to your marketing arsenal.

Google My Business: Is It Good For SEO?

Google My Business is a free tool by Google aimed at helping small business owners manage their online presence easier. It combines Google Places and Google+ pages with Search and Maps to make updating your business information with Google a breeze.

Does it help your small business SEO campaign?

Sort of.

While it is important to optimize for your local market, Google My Business will not build links to your website or help you with on-page optimization. And those are the two areas to be concerned with the most.

What You Need To Know About SEO Services Pricing

Affordable SEO can fall into four different categories:

• By the hour
• By the project
• By retainer
• Pay for performance

SEO Services Pricing (Hourly):  

Hourly SEO pricing is typically the most expensive. This is usually reserved for SEO experts who work with an agency or are training a team or business owner over a set amount of hours. This is almost never a good option for small business owners because SEO takes time. A well optimized SEO campaign can still take around 3 – 6 months.

SEO Services Pricing (Project-based):

Project-based SEO pricing can be a good option for specific tasks. Say you need to train your in-house team or you want a consultant to lay out a strategy for you to tackle on your own. Projects typically fall into SEO audits, link building campaigns, or creating the actual strategy.

SEO Services Pricing (Monthly Retainer):

Monthly SEO packages are the norm. With this level of service clients are outsourcing strategy and execution. It’s very normal for monthly small business SEO services to require a contract of up to 6 months to a year.

SEO Services Pricing (Pay for Performance):

 Pay for performance SEO focuses on bringing results first.

 No money upfront. Here an SEO service provider will work to promote higher rankings for their client, and once that customer starts ranking for their keywords, they then would begin paying for the service.

Not too many companies offer this level of small business SEO service. Most SEO companies stay away from this pricing model because it makes them really live up to what they say. If a customer does not rank, they don’t pay. It’s for this reason that companies that offer pay for performance SEO truly must understand Google and how to rank websites because if they don’t, they don’t earn any money.

Which means they wouldn’t be in business for long.

Evaluating Youtube Video Performance

Evaluating Youtube Video Performance

Do you use Youtube for marketing? If you don’t, you should definitively consider doing it. Through Youtube you can drive traffic to your site, build your brand, interact with your customers and much more. Furthermore, Google loves Youtube and often ranks Youtube videos very highly in its competitive search results. Many marketers that have started to utilize Youtube and its benefits have had difficulties in analyzing the success of their video and content. For information about evaluating Youtube video performance, be sure to check out this article.

The most basic statistic you should be looking to when determining the success of your video is the number of views. Though often overvalued, the view count of your videos is nevertheless important. You should be able to look at not only the views, but also the “estimate minutes watched” through the Youtube Analytics panel. These statistics can tell you two very important things.

First, your view count can tell you how effective your title, picture, and description were in attracting viewers. Views are not dependent of how long the user watched nor are they dependent on whether the user liked your video. A high view count suggests that your video has a successful title and might be highly ranked in Google or frequently shared through social media.

The number of minutes watched is important because it describes how engaged your users were when watching the video. By dividing your minutes watched by the number of views you can tell what was the average number of minutes watched. A low number of viewers mean that your viewers quickly became disinterested and bored.

When evaluating your video’s success you also want to look at the traffic source page. Here you can see where your viewers came from. Common traffic sources include Google Search, Youtube channel pages, external webpages, and Youtube search. Unfortunately two other popular sources (embedded player & mobile apps and direct traffic) are unknown sources. However through these statistics you can still roughly determine what avenue of traffic is having the most success and which methods you still need to improve on.

Along with determining where your audience came from, you can also determine several important demographic factors such as age and gender. By finding which audience is most highly attracted to your videos you can tailor future content to apply directly to this specific  audience which cans increase subscription rate and user engagement.

Next, you want to pay attention to social shares. There is a certain “Sharing” page on Youtube where you can view the number of shares you receive. Popular sharing services include Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus

Finally, you want to take careful notes on comments. Customers often provide valuable feedback. By responding to their questions and comments you can often answer questions you did not address in the video.

To learn more about marketing, or ecommerce visit us at http://www.thepowersellersunion.com