Do eCommerce Sites Need SEO and PPC?

If you're starting an e-commerce business, you've probably wondered how to get traffic to your site. And after doing your due diligence, you've asked yourself if you need SEO and PPC advertising? Short answer is yes. Read on to learn which kind is right for you. 

Why SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a system of honing a website to better serve the person searching for something. It focuses on a steady growth of organic traffic. This technique mostly means improving the website to be more user-friendly, relevant, and most importantly useful. 

The organic results on a search engine result page do not get there by paying money to google. Which means it is technically free. This is nice if you've taken the time to build up to that point because that traffic won't cost anything to you, and will bring many paying customers. The problem with this is it does take time and legwork. This is where PPC comes in.

Why PPC?

Pay Per Click (PPC) is a marketing structure that involves a business paying each time a user clicks on their online ads. This covers many different kinds of PPC ads, but the lion's share of PPC are paid search ads. Social media platforms often provide paid ad options. 

PPC is much like a water faucet. Because you're paying for the ads, once you turn off the faucet (PPC campaign), the water (traffic) stops flowing. If your small e-commerce site is still just a seed in a pot, this is just what it needs to grow.

PPC is often a great way to jump-start a business. It allows for building brand awareness and credibility. This is the key necessity for successful ecommerce sites. In today's age of e-commerce, brand reputation is everything. 

If nobody has ever heard of you before, they're much less likely to buy from you. Think of that green gecko selling insurance, or "it's my money and I need it now". Every company that wants to be successful has to get their name seen to bring in customers.

Why Not Both?

A very popular strategy is a hybrid approach. By concentrating on PPC early, and fixing up SEO problems on your site little by little, you'll enjoy the benefits of both. This way you won't have to buy PPC ad space forever, and your SEO work will pick up the slack in the long run.

As your site progresses, the trick will be balancing the two strategies. This is where ESSEO Digital can help you. We can assess your site's traffic performance and implement the right mix of these strategies, custom fit for you. We are well-practiced in the field of digital marketing and have helped countless businesses grow into prosperity. 

Contact us to get started.

How To Measure The Effectiveness of a Digital Marketing Campaign

Success is obviously the goal of any marketing campaign, but what is success? Well, that depends on the company and what they’re trying to achieve. Today we’ll take a look at how to measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaign(s).

The End Goal

Ask yourself: “what is the end goal?” Be honest, too. For 90% or more of businesses the end goal is profit. This is generally simplified into Return on Investment (ROI) to isolate a campaign for analysis.

Now this is not always the case. Sometimes (on rare occasions) a non-profit will want to market. Perhaps a rich journeyman will start a new venture and not really care about it’s success, only that it sees eyes. The end goal doesn’t matter; only that you identify it and be honest with yourself.

Yes, we all want to be friends and have a long-lasting partnership that makes life easier on everyone, but never take your eyes off the prize of what you’re trying to accomplish. Because at the end of the day that’s the common thread linking you.

Now for the hard part:

What If I Don’t Have eCommerce Tracking?

This is the single most common disconnect we see. You want to measure return on investment directly, which requires seeing exactly how much revenue SEO has generated. However, this is impossible to track with complete accuracy. That’s a tough one for the ‘numbers’ people to handle. SEO requires a bit of trust and you have to put some pieces together, that’s just a matter of fact. Unless you have eCommerce Tracking and a payment portal and only accept online transactions then you’re going to be stuck with some guess work.

Get As Close As You Can

If you don’t have eCommerce tracking, measure leads. This includes phone calls, form submissions and anything else that brings in a potential buyer. Then measure your ‘close rate’ for these leads and simply apply it to the number of leads from that channel. This is the most common method used and either involves some simple Goal or Event Tracking.

If you don’t have a form and your site is purely informational, that’s where it gets trickier. After leads, should they be unavailable, we would simply measure Organic Traffic and Keyword Rankings. These are always measurable, so there should be no situation where you can’t use these as a baseline.

To review: Return on Investment > Revenue > Leads > Organic Traffic + Keyword Rankings

In any of these events, Organic Traffic and Keyword Rankings should be reported clearly because they’re always an important part of the equation.

Want to start a Digital Marketing Campaign with an experienced set of agency-level freelancers who will report all of this for you? Reach out to us!

How Long Does It Take For Google Ads To Work?

One of the most common questions we see in the PPC (Pay Per Click) realm is: “I just started ads, why aren’t they working!?” We’re going to take a look at why this happens and what you should do:

The “Learning” Period.

When you first develop ad copy, it doesn’t go straight onto Google. Instead, it goes into the system for a “learning” phase. Google needs to verify that your ad is relevant, doesn’t contain any bad stuff, and also figure out it’s performance. It starts small, by delivering the ads and gathering data. The more data it gathers, the more ‘confidence’ it has in the ad and the closer to final approval the ad will get.

The most confusing part is that this learning period can drastically vary in time. For some people, their ads can be live in hours with full approval. For others, it can take weeks. As a rule of thumb: if it’s been 3 days and your ad is still in the ‘learning’ phase with no traffic then something is wrong.

Edit: Google’s learning phase has been extended. It will now last 1-2 weeks on average as of Dec 15, 2021.

Google Analytics Is Crucial

For you to know if your ads are really “working,” you need to make sure Google Analytics is connected to your Google Ads campaign. You also need to ensure that auto-tagging is set up. This is what marks the traffic as “Google / CPC” inside of Analytics. Without this, it will go into Direct traffic which you won’t be able to analyze well.

It’s Been 3 Days And There’s No Traffic, Help!

We offer small consultation packages for anyone just trying to jumpstart their PPC and would be happy to help guide you. If you’re interested, feel free to contact us! As we’re a freelancer agency we don’t have the overhead or high prices that most agencies do, but that also means we don’t have a centralized location to offer a phone number with. Once you’re hooked up with a contractor then you’ll communicate with them directly.

If you’d like to give it a go on your own then use the warning messages Google provides under the “Status” column.

And as mentioned in the previous blog, I’ll be pumping out as much content as possible to help guide new users with various questions. If you have a question you’d like me to answer then feel free to comment on this blog.

Happy Marketing Everyone,

Guide on How To Analyze Data From Google Analytics - Part 1: Basic Terminology

In this week’s post I’m going to take you through some basic Google Analytics data analysis. We’ll start with a look at where you can find simple information as well as what the terms mean.

A Simple Starter Dataset

When you’re inside Google Analytics go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source / Medium. Many SEOs use this as their “homepage” of Google Analytics because it displays a lot of crucial information in a very succinct way.

Once you’re at the Source / Medium page then make sure to change the date in the top right. Typically, we report Monthly using Year-over-Year data. This is used to avoid seasonality, an example would be comparing June 2020 vs June 2019.

After that, you’ll have a line graph at the top and a giant table under it with a lot of strange words. Let’s take a look at what all these strange words mean.

Google Analytics Metric Meanings:

First, let’s go over everything you see in the Source/Medium column. The first one is the source, which means “the company that referred the traffic”. If Bing supplied the PPC traffic, the source would be Bing. If it was a referral, it’d be the website domain. Some examples you’ll see are Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Instagram, etc. These are the main traffic movers on the internet.

The second is the Medium which is the “method by which they entered your site”. The types of methods are:

1. Organic - People who Google a keyword and find your site in the Organic section. Not applicable for any Google.com listings with “Ad” next to them. Those will be at the very top or very bottom.

2. Direct / (None) - This is a combination of Direct, which is anyone who types in the site URL directly, and a wastebasket of users Google doesn’t know what to do with. As your site grows in traffic, the percentage of this traffic will typically fall dramatically.

3. CPC - This means “Cost Per Click” and is a strange abbreviation used for PPC (Pay Per Click) traffic. These are for clicks on the Ads that I mentioned previously in #1. When you search on Google, you typically get a combination of CPC ads and Organic ads. Why Google didn’t call this medium “PPC” is beyond me, no one uses this acronym anymore.

4. Referral - This is website-to-website traffic. If my website had a direct link to your website and someone clicked the link, your Analytics would see one referral visit from my site.

5. Custom Methods - Some types of tracking let you put in your own source and medium, which is why you may occasionally see “email”, “social” and other mediums in there. If the Medium is not one of the ones I listed above then it is a Custom Method. That’s important to know, because a lot of people think Google Analytics automatically tracks Email Newsletter Traffic, Social Media Traffic, etc. It does not, those are typically done through Pixels or something called UTM Tracking.

Other Terms from the table include:

Users - The raw number of people who visited your site

New Users - The raw number of people who visited your site who had not in the previous 30 days (this number can be altered).

Sessions - If the same person visits twice, that’s 1 user but 2 sessions. This metric just means total visits regardless of if the same person visits multiple times.

NOTE: When looking at data, either use “Users” or “Sessions” for all of your reporting. Do not mix them, it gets really confusing. Either one is valid, but only pick one.

Bounce Rate (Default) - The percentage of sessions that leave without visiting a second page. Average Bounce Rate is around 45-50% for most websites. We typically shoot for 35% here. Anything below 20% is usually indicative of a tracking error.

Bounce Rate (ABR) - The percentage of sessions that leave without visiting a second page or spending 30 seconds on site.

NOTE: ABR (Adjusted Bounce Rate) is a snippet of code you can add to improve tracking. Websites do not have this by default. It’s an amendment to the Bounce Rate definition since the base definition is extremely unfair, particularly to smaller sites. All 1-pagers, by definition, used to have 100% Bounce Rates.

Pages / Session: This is simple Total Pageviews divided by Sessions. It’s the average number of pages someone will visit per session. We typically shoot for 2.5 to 3.0 here.

Avg. Session Duration - The average amount of time a user spends on the site. We typically shoot for 2:00-2:30, though a lower number could just be the result of people converting fast as well. Oddly enough, this can be the hardest metrics to analyze and improve.

On the far right side you’ll see Goals and Events. I won’t get into these, but they’re ways to track conversions (form submissions, contact requests, etc). If you have an eCommerce site then you’ll see 3 final metrics:

eCommerce Conversion Rate: The percentage of sessions that resulted in an eCommerce transaction.

Transactions: The number of parties who transacted.

Revenue: The total amount of money gained from website sales.

I’m going to be continuing this guide series, so make sure to bookmark the blog and check back for the next part!

What is SEO? (In Easy To Understand Words)

Diving into the world of Search Engine Optimization (known as ‘SEO’) can be terrifying. The industry itself is a mystery to most people and the profession has changed so drastically over the past decade that it’s borderline unrecognizable. To help you better understand what SEO is in a simple and easy-to-understand fashion, we’re going to break it down into the bare basics. And we’ll try not to use any scary sounding terms to confuse you.

The Golden Rule of SEO

Simply put: the goal of an SEO is to improve a user’s experience on a website. Yes, there are other tasks that SEOs do. Yes, that’s an oversimplification. However, that is the very core of what we do as SEOs. It’s a simple reward system where you improve a user’s experience and Google, Bing, Yahoo and whoever else give you a reward. That reward is better rankings and more trust (which is a metric known as ‘authority’, they’re synonyms).

Think of Google as an omnipotent person. They need to decide how to rank websites and in what order to list them, but they don’t know any of these websites. So how do they know what to do? Well, think about what you would do if tasked with listing websites based on the most trustworthy ones.

Product websites? You’d list the sites with the biggest inventory.

Informational websites? You’d look for ones with a good track record of telling the truth.

Service websites? Well, what do their previous customers think of their service?

And in all of those cases you’d also want to make sure the site is safe, secure and user friendly.

Putting yourselves in Google’s shoes is something people rarely do because they’re still stuck in the early 2000s when SEO was all about ‘gaming’ the search engines. Those days are over and Google is smarter than that. In fact, they’ll penalize you for trying to game the system now, so don’t believe anyone who tells you that’s the way to go.

I want to do SEO myself, what do I do?

While we offer SEO plans ranging from small buckets of time to recurring monthly programs, many people want to try SEO on their own and we encourage everyone to at least dip a toe in the water to better understand the industry. There are a few options here:

1) You can get training from professionals. This includes individual training as well as business consulting.

2) You can start learning SEO on your own. A great resource to start out with is Moz. They have a segment called “Whiteboard Fridays” (I’d recommend the ones done by Rand Fishkin, the previous owner).

3) You can find a different website that looks nice to you and see what they’re doing right, then try to replicate that. Remember, as long as you’re improving a user’s experience or improving your visibility on search engines (Google My Business page, getting reviews from customers, etc.) then you’re doing SEO. It’s a very random field that’s essentially a laundry list of hundreds (if not thousands) of tasks.

Someone cold-called or cold-emailed me offering SEO services, should I take them?

No, run away. If someone is cold-calling you or cold-emailing you then there’s a 100% chance that they’re absolutely terrible at SEO. Ask local businesses and friends/family who they’ve used that they trust. Worst case scenario, we’ll point you towards someone. The industry has been plagued by terrible SEOs and we’ve watched countless clients get hurt and waste enormous amounts of money.

The SEO industry is hard to navigate for a business because there’s no formal training. Colleges don’t teach it and the self-taught people usually only get as far in as learning Metadata, which is the bare basics you need to know. If you plan on contracting an SEO then use your network and ask around or contact us and we’ll push you in the right direction.

What's The Difference Between SEO and PPC?

One of the most common questions we see in the digital marketing world is simply: what’s the difference between SEO and PPC? This one’s fairly straightforward and best explained using the tomato analogy.

When You Need Targeted Traffic Immediately

PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click Marketing and is controlled using Google Ads or Bing Adcenter, though Google is far more widely used due to the extra volume that Google has. It’s an excellent channel (in my opinion the second best behind SEO) and gives you some benefits but has some downsides associated for it. Let’s use the tomato analogy as an example:

Say you need tomatoes. You can grow them or you can go to the market and buy them. If you go to the market and buy them then you’re able to choose the shape and size as well as exactly how many you want and how much you want to spend. The downside? You have to pay for every single tomato.

This is equivalent to PPC. We can control the traffic that comes in with great detail (including even age, gender and income levels). We can also press start as soon as it’s set up and get you running quickly and it’s great for gap fillers (nights that need filling in a hotel, for example) and also works great as a long-term strategy to pair with SEO. However, it is not sustainable. If you turn off that campaign or cut the spend, all that traffic disappears overnight as well.

Our other marketing channel compliments this strategy perfectly.

From Seed To Farm

Back to the tomato analogy, but let’s look at the other method this time.

If you have a bit of time to spare and want your own huge, sustainable farm full of tomatoes then you can plant seeds in the ground. These seeds need to be watered and fed and there will be both rainy days and sunny days, but if you keep nurturing the crops then you’ll get a mostly self-sustaining farm of tomatoes. You may not be able to carefully control the shape and size of them, but they’ll be in the ballpark.

This is akin to SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Our work doing SEO will take 3-6 months to start taking off and will be based off percentage increases. A 50% increase of 20 users is 10 users, while a 50% increase of 10,000 users is 5,000 users, meaning growth tends to seem slower right at the start. However, if you have an SEO tackling things every month then you’ll eventually have a steady stream of people coming in through the channel.

SEO is simply the strongest digital marketing channel and it’s generally not very close. It has the best engagement, the best conversion rates, the best everything. The only downside is that it’s slow and inflexible and takes a while to build. Even if you quit SEO down the road and take a break from it, the traffic won’t disappear. It might taper off slowly, but it will have a much higher ‘floor’ so to speak.

So What’s The Strategy?

If you desperately need traffic right now (particularly startups), then go with PPC. You can always get SEO rolling later, but SEO isn’t very useful if your company doesn’t survive long enough.

Not worried about short-term survival? Prioritize SEO. This channel will get you the long-term success if you stick with it and grow it up.

We understand how tough the world of digital marketing is to navigate as a business owner (we’ve heard it from plenty of them), so reach out if you need guidance on where to go next using the form below.

What Does Good SEO Look LIke?

SEO is undoubtedly the hardest internet marketing channel to determine the success of. One of the reasons, as we cover in our SEO section, is that the job is basically a laundry list of hundreds (if not thousands) of different tasks. These tasks are prioritized in a way to have the maximum possible effect, but it’s often VERY confusing to clients what is actually going on.

Transparency is the key

This brings us to the biggest indicator of what a good SEO looks like: transparency. Simply put, bad SEOs don’t want to show you what’s going on behind the hood. Up to this point, we’ve only done word-of-mouth marketing because we believe that’s the most transparent and honest way of gaining clients. Do a good job, the client tells their friends and everyone wins. Bad SEOs don’t play like this because they don’t get results.

In regards to transparency, bad SEOs will often not send out monthly reports. Let’s make this crystal clear: If an SEO is not sending out monthly reports, you need to dump them immediately. Request a report if you wish and see what their response is, but this is the biggest red flag we see. If they’re too afraid to show you the results; run for the hills.

The Breakdown

A good SEO will:

• Send monthly reports

• Not leave emails unanswered

• Come to you through word of mouth marketing or a recommendation (or sometimes just really good reviews, though those are easily manipulatable)

• Request a monthly call to review the report together

The really, really good ones will:

• Be able to tell you what to expect in the upcoming 1-3 months (this is due to a ‘lag’ period where tasks we do today take 1-3 months to have an effect)

• Ask you about your success metrics: revenue, conversion rate, etc.

• Give you homework to help out with SEO efforts. There are some tasks that SEOs can’t do as well as a company such as Google My Business postings, garnering reviews and establishing connections with local businesses and chambers of commerce.

Need more warning signs of a bad SEO? Aside from a lack of transparency, watch these red flags:

• If they cold called/cold emailed you or claimed to be referenced by someone (I.E. “I was referenced by your head of marketing), then that’s a huge red flag that they might be vulturing you. Avoid poachers at all costs.

• If they instantly bad mouth any other marketers and seem “defensive” then that can be a warning sign, though good SEOs have to do this to some degree to combat vultures.

• If the tracking goes out for an extended period of time (3+ weeks is certainly plenty) without a notice then that' shows that they probably aren’t looking at the account

• If you ask them what they did for the month and they just mention a ton of “analysis and reports” then that’s a red flag. Actual SEOs need to execute on their findings every single month.

• Watch for bad contracts that tie you in for a long time. Good SEOs will typically have month-to-month contracts with opt-outs at any time or, at worst, a 3-month contract. 3-month contracts are fine because it generally takes 3+ months to see movement.

Help, I Need Guidance!

The world of Search Engine Optimization is incredibly challenging for businesses to navigate due to a wealth of bad players and a general lack of understanding that opens the door for manipulation. If you need guidance on finding a good SEO then reach out to us. If we don’t have someone in network available, we can certainly reach out to agencies and top freelancers as many of us know one another.

And if you get scammed: don’t fret. Every single client we currently have was scammed in the past and had horror stories of their first experience with an SEO. It happens.. to almost everyone. This industry is 95% bad and 5% excellent, and once you find someone in the 5% it’s much easier to find the rest.

Stay safe and happy marketing!

Businesses, Beware! How to identify and avoid SEO Poachers

In the professional world, some call them "SEO Vultures". You might hear them referred to as "Basement Dwellers" or just simply "Poachers," but they are everywhere. Eventually, as a business owner, you're going to have an encounter with them.

Their goal? To steal your trust, your business and your money.

Good SEOs are referred to by word of mouth or through a network. The best referrals generally come from other businesses saying "you should contact my SEO, they're really good.' However, as high as the demand for SEO is, the supply is even greater.

The reason for this is that clients often don't know what SEO is. It's a foreign language to them, so they don't know how to look for one or what makes someone an SEO. That leaves the door open for:

• College graduates who need money

• Bad SEOs who can't find business and are getting desperate

• Genuinely evil people who just want your money

How to Spot a Bad SEO

The first question you should ask yourself is: "how did they contact me?" If they reached out to you and use the following strategy, you should run for your life. The most used poaching strategy is:

1. Get an audience with the client
Often through cold calling or random emails. They might even make a vague claim that they were "referred to you" even though they weren't.

2. Present a list of 'errors' the site has. These might be nonexistent, meaningless or nitpicky.
If they mention image tags, site spacing, meta keywords or optimization of useless pages (FAQs, Policies, etc) then that's an easy red flag.

3. Paint an armageddon scenario
"Your SEO hasn't addressed these!? What HAS he been doing?"

4. Convince the client to fire their SEO without communication
"It's not worth talking to them, you should just send them an email cancelling your agreement right away."

Sound familiar? Yea, you've been vultured.

You might be saying to yourself "how on earth does this actually work?" Well, it stems from most clients not understanding SEO. Because of that, they don't want to host calls because it just ends up confusing them. They don't know what minification, disavows or even Search Console are and they often don't care as long as they get results.

The problem is, that lack of communication leads to a lack of trust and opens the door for engagements like this. Let it go on the record: SEO Poachers are dangerous. I can't tell you how many battered, bruised clients have come to me because they fell for the wrong SEO and ended up with a penalty or a huge dip in traffic. Since poachers aren't good at their practice, they will effectively ruin your organic presence by either utilizing some outdated technique or doing nothing at all.

How to Avoid SEO Poachers

This is more simple than you might imagine. If someone cold calls you or emails you out of nowhere in regards to SEO, just don't respond. Block them, ignore them, do whatever it takes because you're going to get a lot of people doing that.

Need a good SEO? Ask local businesses, ask others in the chamber of commerce and do your research. Also, you're welcome to reach out to us as well. The best SEOs come from personal referrals or long-standing relationships.

Poachers are easier to fall for than some might think. Keep yourself informed and keep yourself safe, because a bad SEO can do more damage in 1 hour than a good one can fix in a lifetime.