When you start talking to experts in organic SEO, one of the first things they tell you is that if you quit the SEO game before you attain first page placement for at least a few of your choicest keywords, you probably shouldn’t bother doing SEO in the first place.

The reason why they would say that is pretty well established: less than 2% of all searchers get to Page 2, so if you’re on that first page, you’re basically getting nothing compared to what you could get if you were in the first few spots. Does that really mean that SEO is a complete waste if you don’t hit Page One, though?

To get into the nitty-gritty and answer that question correctly, we have to look at what SEO does for a website.

• Builds ranking — obviously, the primary function of SEO is to shoot your website up in the rankings for your targeted keywords. If you don’t get a high enough rank to see meaningful search traffic, you’ve failed this part of the equation.
• Widens your sales funnel — every page that links to your website becomes part of your sales funnel; the complete set of link-chains that will eventually take someone to your site. Even if you don’t get a first page placement, building backlinks will widen your sales funnel.
• Builds authority — authority is a tricky notion, because it comes from so many sources. Your page becomes more authoritative based on how much relevant content it has and how old it is; your site becomes more authoritative based on how many backlinks from unique root domains point at it and how many relevant pages it contains. Even if you don’t get first page placement, organic SEO will still help build authority — which is important because if you come back in the future to ‘finish the job’, you’ll already be partway there.

So, is first page placement the ONLY reason you would ever purchase SEO? No. SEO helps your website in other ways as well. But generally, SEO is priced on the assumption that you’ll shoot for first page placement, so it might not be a very good buy if you’re not going to go for the gold…and really, why wouldn’t you?

PPC management is pretty much the only smart way to go about pay-per-click marketing unless you’re willing to sacrifice quite a bit of time and money on the altar of learning by trial and error. But even among PPC management firms, there are some that quite simply win harder and more often, and it turns out that in the vast majority of cases it comes down to a single factor: the quality of the firms’ keyword research.

The Foundation of Internet Marketing
It’s no exaggeration to say that keyword research is the single defining factor of good marketing online. Every kind of Internet marketing, from organic SEO to pay-per-click marketing, relies on keyword research to establish how it will move forward. Keyword research, for the record, simply means the process of examining the mathematical attributes of short phrases in order to determine which of them will be most profitable to target with your efforts, whatever they may be.

PPC counts double
When you’re talking about pay-per-click marketing, keyword research is actually even more important than it is for any other form of Internet marketing. That’s because there are two monetary elements to PPC: how much you pay for each visit and how many paying visitors that keyword brings in. SEO only has the second one. So when you research SEO keywords, you have to make sure they’re solid buying keywords — but when you research PPC keywords, you have to do that AND make sure that you’re not paying more than you’re making for each successful sale.

Keyword Research Isn’t Easy
Not only is keyword research critically important for a PPC management firm, but it’s actually quite difficult to do correctly. There are a lot of different elements to balance when creating a keyword set to run a PPC campaign on — but equally importantly, a single PPC campaign (and often should) have hundreds of keywords associated with it. SEO has the relative luxury of focusing on a few keywords at a time. PPC management firms — at least the good ones — often come up with nearly a thousand different long-tail keywords before they have the hundred or so usable ones they need to do their work.

In short, the single most important aspect of any PPC management firm is the quality of their keyword research. Talk to your candidates about it before you hire anyone.

There’s always new slogans popping up in the world of website SEO. For a long time, it was “content is king!” Then we had “It’s all in the list!” Today, the cutting edge of SEO gurus are trying to decide on how to turn their theories about market leadership into a pithy slogan. But is the turn toward a new fallback phrase an indication that the old ones are out of date?

In short, no. Targeted email marketing has proven over and over again to be one of the best ways to turn SEO into cash, because it works on so many levels. The basic tactic of email marketing is to capture people’s email addresses so that you can advertise to them via Email — often over and over again for months or years. Each time you advertise, you’ll catch the attention of some small percentage of them, and they’ll buy whatever you’re promoting.

The focuses that email marketers have are simple: first, to get each sales message to convert as much as possible, but more importantly, they constantly work to make their list bigger. Its basic math: double the size of your list, and you double your profit-per-email. Because of that simple equation, “it” will continue to be “in the list” until the entire nature of the Internet shifts and no one uses email anymore.

The cutting-edge gurus may be chatting about social networking, blogging, market leadership, and putting in a year or more before you ever try to sell a product. While they do, however, the marketers out there who have a fifty thousand member mailing list and toss off an email once a week in order to draw out the <1% that will respond are still making thousands of dollars per email. And then using the rest of their day to practice market leadership and social marketing.

In short, targeted email marketing and ‘the list’ aren’t going anywhere. If you’re not using this remarkably simple technique to capture more money from the visitors that come to your website, you should be, and that’s that.

Sometimes we online gurus can get a little too caught up in our own online world, and we forget that people have options — sometimes strong ones — that don’t (gasp!) involve a computer. After the entry we posted a couple of weeks ago about organic SEO vs. PPC, someone emailed us to ask how SEO compared not to PPC, but to an offline option: direct mail. Now, we’re not experts in direct mail. But we did a little bit of research and we made a few assumptions and I think we have a good baseline to compare from.

SEO
If you’re a small business, SEO can seem like it’s got a steep entry fee. After all, you can’t do SEO without a website, and websites can be expensive — a few hundred dollars is a big bite of a small business’ advertising budget, after all. Then you have to pay for a few months of SEO before the results really start to show. Then once you’ve ranked for a few choice keywords, you have to keep up the work to make sure a competitor doesn’t knock you off the block.

Direct Mail
On the other hand, if you’re going to get into direct mail, you need quite a chunk of change as well. Not only do you need to hire a firm to design a killer ad for you — which can run a thousand dollars or more — but you need to rent the lists of addresses as well. Each list of 1000~2000 addresses costs about as much to rent as a month of SEO costs to have done, and you can expect about a 1% ‘conversion’ rate if you do everything well — so you’re spending a few hundred bucks to get between 10 and 20 customers into your store.

Results
If you can make back that few hundred bucks off of those 10 or 20 people, you can have some good results off of direct mail. SEO, on the other hand, converts a bit better — generally 2-4%, and actually a little bit higher if you focus on local internet marketing specifically. You won’t get several thousand ‘hits’ all at once like you will with direct mail, but you will catch up with the total number of hits over a month or two if you play your cards right. In short, unless you really NEED those 10 or 20 customers through your doors in the next couple of weeks or you’re going to go under, SEO pretty clearly beats out direct mail as a form of advertising.