As a small business, you are looking for the biggest bang for your buck. In SEO that translates to the most sales per dollar you hand over to your SEO consultant. Will Reynolds, founder of SEER interactive, recently blogged about how Google has turned the SEO “good guys” into “bad guys” by punishing them for spending money on “white hat” strategies.

How? By giving sites that buy lots of low-quality links the top spots in the search results pages. In doing this, Google is choosing not to reward sites that focus on quality content and creating a great user experience (what Google tells us we should do). Thus, Google is encouraging sites to do SEO one way, and rewarding those who do exactly the opposite. 

This month I wrote a blog about the importance of content marketing. It’s important that I note this isn’t a service that is offered by most SEO firms. That’s because it takes creative effort and can only be done by someone who has a marketing edge. These types of folks aren’t necessarily the ones running SEO companies.

Instead, it’s IT-savvy, html coding geeks that are plugging in meta data and pitching websites for we’ll-give-you-content-in-exchange-for-a-link deals.

And they’re smart for doing so.

As Reynolds shows with charts, sites with lengthy, but low-quality backlink profiles still fare better than blogs with lots of subscribers, lots of Twitter activity and sites that engage on Google+. This, he says, means that Google is “ ‘letting’ the bad guys rank, which only gets them more clients, and pollutes more of the web with crappy sites that have over aggressively linked.”

Here’s how we break this down at Klik Marketing. From my experience I would say the top four SEO activities that produce the quickest results are:

1. Placing optimal keywords in the title tags
2. Building back-links
3. SEO-minded content
4. Optimizing backlink anchor text to match keywords on the pages to which they link

Professional, quality content makes the user happy and can also be helpful for a website’s SEO campaign. Here’s the problem for Google: a search engine can’t evaluate whether or not content is quality in the same way humans can. It can only use an algorithm designed to try to be intuitive enough to try to guess the level of quality. So the SEO activities in the list above, like correct keyword density and anchor text, end up being the focus of many SEO campaigns.

The problem with stopping at quick fixes to try to rank higher in the search engines is that you haven’t stopped to think about what your visitors will think of your site once they arrive. If it appears “spammy” or like a machine wrote it, they aren’t likely to stick around. Traffic is half the story, conversion rates are the other.

The bottom line: Reynolds is right to acknowledge that Google is contradicting itself by rewarding sites using tactics it explicitly tells us not to use.

However, we shouldn’t be getting mad when what Google is telling is just plain common sense. Yes, rankings are the first thing we should be concerned with, but once we use strategy to get our sites ranked high, we shift focus to our branding, what others are saying about us online (social media) and providing quality content that make our visitors happy. That means a focus on content quality. After all, SEO is really all about turning visitors into customers.

And we should also not forget that Google is continually updating its algorithm. It’s possible that Google will eventually be able to think of better ways to match how it ranks websites in the search results to its own advice.

The Klik Marketing Blog is your source for Charlotte SEO and Small Business topics. It is written by Klik Marketing founder and President Eric Fransen. Eric has been involved with the Internet Marketing industry since the late 1990’s.

Over 6,000 people (including Klik Marketing!) Thursday attended a webinar on The State of Inbound Marketing in 2012. Hosted by HubSpot’s CMO Mike Volpe and Inbound Marketing Manager Melissa Miller, the session outlined findings on “permission-centric” inbound marketing channels from a survey of North American marketing professionals conducted in January.

The HubSpot report reveals some serious advantages of spending more of our budgets on inbound marketing. Not only are inbound marketing leads less expensive, they are also more likely to convert to a sale:

• Average cost per lead for inbound marketing-dominated businesses: $135 dollars. Meanwhile, the average cost for business primarily using outbound marketing rang in at $346 dollars per lead!
• 89% of marketing professionals say that they will either maintain or increase their budget for inbound marketing this year
• 47% of respondents said they will increase their marketing budgets. Of those, over half said this was because of their past success with inbound strategies.
• Of those not planning on increasing their inbound budgets, 62% said it was because of the bad economy and 21% cited a change in management. Only 4% said it was due to past success with outbound strategies.
• SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads only close the sale 1.7% of the time.

 “Even the people not increasing their spending on inbound, there are other factors driving it,” noted Mike. Melissa and Mike let us in on some interesting quotes from the respondents regarding outbound marketing failures. One individual had zero return on an outbound marketing campaign.

“This past year we spent a few hundred dollars on a door hanger marketing campaign, we got zero response.” – A small professional services business

Another said that the worst mistake his company made was attending trade shows which provided no return on investment. On the other hand, a marketing professional at a manufacturing company raved about the benefits of social media and blogging.

“The best thing we’ve done is embrace social media, establish a blog and convince the ownership to embrace inbound marketing.” – Manufacturing company

Small businesses, defined in the report as having 1-5 employees, said that they planned to spend a whopping 43% of their lead generation budgets on inbound marketing.  

 “Small businesses are leveraging inbound budgets more than large businesses,” said Melissa. Large businesses plan to spend only 21% of their budgets on inbound marketing.

Mike added that if you want the most efficient marketing budget, you should focus on inbound and ROI. But as your business grows, you will start to have other objectives, like branding, that might require other outbound media channels.  

Blogging and Social Media

The webinar emphasized the strengths of blogging and social media as part of an inbound marketing campaign. In the survey data, blogs were most frequently cited as having a below average cost per lead. 

In the past four years, businesses have more than doubled their spending on blogging and social media. The HubSpot report noted a correlation between the frequency of blogging and return.  

 “The most successful category is those who blog multiple times a day,” said Melissa. 92% of companies that blog several times a day reported acquiring a new customer because of their blog. A surprising 25% of respondents said that their blog was “critical” to their business and 81% said that they viewed their blog as being “useful” or better.

Melissa and Mike acknowledged that though social media generates leads, it should be judged for appropriateness in relation to the industry. For example, one marketing professional said that he didn’t target social media because his client sells expensive software to banks, and those bankers don’t spend a lot of time on social media sites.

Generating great blog content isn’t easy, said Mike. The biggest problem for companies starting a blog is that they don’t know what to write about. One of the easiest ways to get good ideas is to consider the type of questions you are getting from leads and customers on a regular basis. Plus, the blogs will get more traffic because they are addressing keywords for which users are already searching.

Mike told webinar attendees that blogging is difficult, but that we should be glad it is.

“The more content the better. No one said that these things are easy. But we did say it works. The reason why it works is because not everyone can figure out how to do it.”

If everyone knew how to blog well, Mike added, “The entire internet would be flooded with this kind of stuff.” This gives us an advantage in using this strategy proven to convert leads into customers.  

The HubSpot hosts also said blogs should be integrated with social media to be effective.

“It’s important to remember that a lot of these techniques tie into each other,” said Mike. “A lot of the effectiveness [HubSpot has] had with social media is because we have a strong blog to support that social presence.”

During a question and answer session, Mike and Melissa responded to Twitter comments asking how to effectively use a blog to increase leads and sales. Mike said that blogging “gives you great content to use within social media.” It also helps to attract more people to your website through SEO by creating content with keywords, and attracts links with relevant content. The effectiveness of your blog can be measured by the number of page views and inbound links for each of the articles you write.  

Blogging Musts:

• Include a call to action at the end of every blog. Point people to a lead generation form
• Share blog content on social media outlets – Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Klik Marketing’s team includes SEO professionals and copywriters who can effectively manage your blogging and social media needs. Request an SEO Quote Today!

The Klik Blog is written by Klik Marketing founder and President Eric Fransen. Eric has been involved with the Internet Marketing industry since the late 1990’s.