DSF

Hi all,

My primary business, and where most of my time is spent (MrIrishPrint here) is in the SEO realm.

I've been in the SEO industry for 15 years, some might say before there even was an SEO industry (some still say that!)

I know for sure that this website will continue to be a great source of knowledge the deeper MrsIrishPrint gets into the sub print industry so would like to give a little something back.

If you're looking for some SEO advice, post away in here and I'll be happy to pop on once a day and answer as much as I can.

Can Google Ads for a certain keyword also boost your organic search ranking for that term?

No, they're two totally independent strategies.

The only thing that's going to boost your organic search engine results for money keywords is SEO.

Topic relevant and unique content, rich media, social signals, solidifying your brand and securing links from trustworthy and authoritative web properties.

Essentially you need to convince Google that your website is an expert in the field in which the keyword is relevant.

I only ask because a seller has top ranking for every product keyword and they invest heavily in ads. I doubt that every product is on the first page as a result of natural seo techniques. Wouldn't google reward a paying advertiser?

Hi Irishprint.

What is the first thing a novice should do regarding SEO. We have a website which I know is screaming out for SEO but haven't got a clue where to start. There is so much conflicting advice out there it is hard to know what is helpful and what is not.
E.g. I read that you should have meta data on each page. Then I read somewhere else that Google no longer use this information.

Thanks in advance
Andy


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They wouldn't because it would call into question the integrity of their algorithm, which needs to independent from their revenue streams.

A big part of our business model is actually taking people away from spending money on Adwords. We have a client that works in the plastic surgery industry and used to spend over 4,000 Euros a month on adwords, and got maybe 100 leads a month.

Now, that's still a lot and each one of those leads is potentially a 30,000+ Euros order - but we took them on board as an SEO client at 25% of what he was paying for adwords, got him ranking for a ton of keywords with tens of thousands of monthly searches and they had to hire a call centre to take their initial lead call, vet them them pass them onto their new consultancy team (that didnt exist before) to set up appointments. They now get closer to 500 leads a month and no longer uses adwords.

For example, if you're using adwords for a keyword that gets say 10,000 searches per month on Google, you're sharing that traffic with everyone else bidding for the keyword, so depending on your competition - you're only ever getting a certain percentage of the impressions. So out of the 10,000 monthly searches a month - depending on your budget - maybe 1500 of them will see your ads.

Now, if you can organically rank in the top 3 search results for that specific keyword - you're going to get many, many, many multiples of the impressions as per the monthly search volume total. Potentially the vast, vast majority of those 10,000 searches.

A lot of companies use catch all prefixes in their adwords, which have a library of keywords that they will show ads for if anything in the list is searched for. The company in your question is likely using something like that to hoover up more impressions for the lower volume keywords but the main keywords remain on the library list. Hope that makes sense.

Try and not concentrate too much on what Google say matters and doesn't matter. With all due respect to them, their goal is to get people spending money on adwords as it makes them a ridiculous amount of revenue. A lot of what they say doesn't "work" absolutely works!

Google measures what we define as SEO reward by two factors: Trust & Authority.

Think of SEO as two seperate entities. There is on-page SEO, and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO is ensuring your website is clean, fresh, easy to use, has the correct url structure, has relevant images, has meta data inside said images, has schema markup, has the relevant internal linking structure, has a natural flow to the user experience, has unique and engaging content, has relevant rich media, links to all your social profiles, has trust signals (image links to local authorities or regulatory bodies), has call to action buttons (click me for x) above the fold (without having to scroll), has a consistent velocity of new content whether that be blog posts or industry news, has relevant meta data (this may not be as big of a ranking factor as it once was but meta is a language Google likes to read and provide snippets from, leaving this out would be lunacy), base your page titles around your brand, the product and the usp, allow sharing of all blog posts and products via social sharing buttons, auto post the articles to twitter, fb, pinterest etc, use an SSL certification and deliver all content via https, resize your image for optimum load times across all devices, ensure the website itself is fully responsive to work on everything from an iPhone 4 to a Samsung 65" 4k TV. There's a few nuggets in there.

Off site SEO is a completely different animal.

This is where you build your brand, this is where you increase the amount of social profiles in your brands name, using the correct NAP (name address phone number) in uniform throughout every platform, this is where you have your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, Blogger, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Flickr, Google Plus, Google My Business all interlinked and displaying the relevant information for your brand across the board, this is where you link back to your website from all of these trusted web properties in order to amplify the trust of your website itself, this is where we build listings with links back to the website on citation websites such as industry and local specific business directories and high volume user interaction directories like Yelp (Google likes good reviews!), this is where you solidify your brand's presence on the internet, this is where you add in highly authoritative web blog platforms such as Tumblr, Weebly, LiveJournal, Strikingly, Blogger and syndicate your YouTube videos or website blog posts direct to with a link back to your website - essentially leaning on the authority of such, this is where you use video content distribution to promote your products and services highly focusing on the respective USPs, this is where you get guest articles on highly trustworthy websites with a link going back to your website - again adding trust and authority.

The more your brand is uniform throughout all properties, has regular fresh content, has social profile and social media interaction combined with obtaining links back to your website from trustworthy and authoritative websites, the more trustworthy and authoritative Google will see your website, rewarding it with higher search engine results.

Over and above that, there are many secret sauces that really push the boundaries - but that should most definitely get you started!

Andysam26467;119212 wrote:Hi Irishprint.

What is the first thing a novice should do regarding SEO. We have a website which I know is screaming out for SEO but haven't got a clue where to start. There is so much conflicting advice out there it is hard to know what is helpful and what is not.
E.g. I read that you should have meta data on each page. Then I read somewhere else that Google no longer use this information.

Thanks in advance
Andy


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Wow thanks IrishPrint.
There is a lot to think about there.
Very much appreciated. I'll let you know how I get on.




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Andysam26467;119215 wrote:Wow thanks IrishPrint.
There is a lot to think about there.
Very much appreciated. I'll let you know how I get on.




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You're very welcome, pop back on and ask away anytime at all!

Brilliant thanks, just one question, can you give me examples adword prefixes? I don't quite understand those.