5. 4. Search Engines Comparison

Approximately, 68% of all searches in the world are made on either Google or Yahoo!

Getting a good ranking in Google, Yahoo! and recently in MSN.com as well can have a strong effect on your business!

Google 35.11% ................................112 Million
Yahoo 32.79% ...............................105 Million
MSN 12.00% ....................................39 Million
AOL 9.00% .......................................... 29 Million
AltaVista 1.74% ..................................... 6 Million
Lycos 1.57% ........................................... 5 Million
Netscape 1.10% ...................................... 4 Million
LookSmart 0.59% ................................... 2 Million
AllTheWeb 0.21% ................................... 1 Million
Hotbot 0.10% .......................... Less than 1 Million
Open Directory 0.01% ............. Less than 1 Million
FindWhat 0.0028% ................. Less than 1 Million

Total 99.72% ................................ 321 Million

Source - Wordtracker

A very important point to keep in mind with pay per click is you must test, test, and test some more. A few hours spent ensuring that the correct search phrases are targeted can save months of useless optimization. Make sure that your most performing keywords appear on the pages of your website, especially on the homepage. If you change the content of your website, don’t forget to keep your best keywords.

An essential part of your testing is having a method in place that allows you to track your return on money invested. Keep in mind that like any successful marketing strategy, it is vital to ensure that you know whom your audience is and how to reach them.

Identify the search phrases that have been untapped by your competitors. Some search terms may have slightly fewer searches, but may have dramatically fewer competitors. Many, many search terms are so saturated by competitors that it would be highly unlikely that you would achieve a high enough ranking to reward your efforts. Therefore, it is often worthwhile considering those search phrases that may not have quite the same level searches each month, but likewise do not have as many websites targeting that term.

5. 3. How to Run Your Campaign with MSN.com

The most recent major search engine is MSN Search, owned by Microsoft, which previously relied on others for its search engine listings. In 2004 it debuted a beta version of its own results, powered by its own web crawler. In early 2005 it started showing its own results live. This was a huge development for many webmasters, who seek inclusion in the major search engines. In 2006, Microsoft started migration to a new search platform - Windows Live Search.

The procedure is quite similar to the above-mentioned Google Adwords or Yahoo! Search Marketing. Advertising on Live Search starts with signing up for an adCenter account. Once you have done this, you can set up your campaigns using the following four steps:

1. Create a Campaign
Name your campaign and set targets and tracking preferences.

2. Build Your Ad
Compose your ad, provide the links (URLs) for your ad, and even customize your ad so you can dynamically insert text.

3. Create Your Keyword List
Use tools to research keywords that could help your campaign and also upload keywords in bulk if you already have campaigns on other search engines.

4. Set Your Budget, Place Bids, and Submit
Decide how much you want to spend on your campaign and submit your order.
Microsoft adCenter is a robust advertising platform that you will use to build your search campaigns. Once you have an account, you will be provided with the tools, reports, and guidelines you need to build search ads seen by Live Search users.

Microsoft adCenter features include targeting based on geographic location, gender, day part and day of week. An interesting issue is that you can import your ads and keyword lists from Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing which can save you much time.

5. 2. How to Run Your Campaign with Yahoo! Search Marketing

Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) is one of the most expensive, and competitive pay per click search engines. If you are serious about generating targeted traffic to your site, but less bothered about minimum (or maximum!) bid amounts then you should consider signing-up with Yahoo! Search Marketing.

1. First of all, go to http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/ and sign up for the “Sponsored Search”. To start on your own, without assistance and fees, sign up for the Self Serve plan.

2. Before establishing your account, select your country and click “Continue”.

3. Now enter the 40 best keywords that you found in the box on the left of the page. With
Yahoo! you have the possibility to re-organize your keywords by category, which is very useful (Categories are names you assign to groups of keywords that are similar in a particular way, i.e., product type).

You can use the keyword suggestion tool if you couldn’t find enough keywords. You just have to enter your keyword in the keyword selection tool and click “Get Keywords”. To add one of these keywords, simply click the tick box next to the keyword and it will automatically be added.

Use the Keyword Assistant as well to select the most performing keywords:





Monthly Search Volume=number of searches the keyword received across Yahoo network in the last month.
Estimated Clicks =estimate of how many clicks you can expect to get over a month using a standard click-through rate of 5%.

Some search terms may have slightly lot of searches; nevertheless, it doesn’t mean that you will get numerous clicks and high conversion rates. As I explained before, it is better to have keywords which specifically target your customers. General search terms might not ensure you good return on investment.

4. Write the description for your keywords. You have the choice between writing the same description for all your keywords and creating a new description for each keyword.

Here is the structure of a description in Yahoo!:
Title (maximum 40 characters),
Description (maximum 190 characters)
Destination URL (maximum 1024 characters)
Follow the steps I mentioned with Google Adwords. Be careful that the URL you submit, links to the specific page on your site that most directly relates to the corresponding keyword.

5. Bid on each of your keywords. Keep in mind that with Yahoo! your position will depend on how much you bid. The higher you bid, the best position you will get. Before starting to bid, have a look on the top five maximum bids. That will be useful to determine your own maximum bid (you will only pay 1 cent more that the competitor under you).


6. Decide on your daily budget. Experiment with different daily budget amounts by entering currency figures and pressing the Calculate Estimates button to update the estimates. If you want to increase your traffic, consider increasing both your max bids and your budget, as only increasing your budget doesn't necessarily increase the number of impressions you get.

7. Sign up the form and enter your credit card details. After finishing this, you will be sent a validation e-mail. To finish, just complete the survey submitted by Yahoo! Now your campaign is on the way for success!

5. 1. How to Run Your Campaign with Google Adwords

5. 1. 1. Google Adwords Fundamentals

Launched in 1998, the Google Adwords Program is now the leader in the pay-per-click search engine industry. Contrary to its competitors, Google doesn’t list ads by only considering your bid or Cost-Per-Click (CPC). Google also checks if your clickthrough rate (CTR) is high:

CTR = Number of clicks your ad received / Number of times your ad is shown (impressions)

High CTR =1 / 20 = 5.50 %

Low CTR =1 / 2000 = 0.05 %

It means that with traditional pay-per-click search engines, you have to bid more than your competitors if you want to get ranked first. With Google, you also have to get a higher CTR as your position is determined by multiplying your CTR by your CPC: Position = CTR × CPC.

In few words, it doesn’t matter how often your ad appears and how much you pay. The key thing is that people have to click on your ad. Therefore your key phrase or keywords have to be relevant to the search. If your keywords achieve at least 1.5 % CTR, it means that they are relevant.

5. 1. 2. Create Your Adwords Account and Your Campaign

Now it is time to set up your account. Go to http://www.adwords.google.com/ and follow these steps:

1. Click the “Start Now” button and sign up the form for the “Standard Edition”. Choose your target language and location.

2. Now create your first ad. Its role is to generate traffic on your website; therefore it must attract people’s attention. You have to motivate people to click on it. You must be concise, accurate and clear for you have restricted space. Be careful, characters include spaces as well. Here is the structure of ads in Google Adwords:

Headline (max.25 characters)
Description line 1 (max. 35 characters)
Description line 2 (max. 35 characters)
Display URL (max. 35 characters)
Destination URL (max. 1024 characters)

This way of creating ads is recommended by most Google Adwords experts:

*Always include your exact keywords in the title of your ad. If searchers see the keywords they entered in the title of the ad, they will likely click on it.

*The first description line should contain your most important benefits to grab people’s attention and to force them to take action.

*The second line should list features – what exactly people get after clicking on the ad.
Moreover, I suggest to put a call to action to this line.

*The display URL can be used as well – after your domain address you can put anything.

*Your home page may not necessarily be the best one for all your ads so your URL destination address should mirror the content and purpose of your ad.

Before starting to write your ad and your description, just have a look on these useful tips:

*Get inside the customer’s head. What are your customers looking for? What do they expect?

*As you have limited text space, avoid terms like “a”, “the”, “of”, “at”…

*Use words like “new”, “free”, “limited offer”, “discount” to attract clickers.

*Avoid superlatives like “the best product...”, “the most wonderful …” or “the top of…” It is too basic and not pertinent.

3. Now enter the keywords list that you have created with Chapter #3 of this ebook. Notice that with Google Adwords, you have the possibility to format your keywords with the four types of keyword matching options:

*Broad matching: for example => marketing consultant. Your ad appears each time users search on these keywords, whatever the order or the other search terms.

*Phrase matching: for example => “marketing consultant”. Your ad appears if the keywords are all present in the right order, regardless of other search terms.

*Exact matching: for example => [marketing consultant]. Your ad only appears if the keywords are all present in the right order and no other terms are searched for.

*Negative matching: for example => -manufacturing (use the “minus” character). Your ad for “marketing consultant” only appears if the word “manufacturing“ does not appear in the search query together with “marketing consultant”.

By using these matching options, you should be able to produce well-targeted results. Google also gives you the possibility to block your ads showing for searches conducted by people from certain countries or people who speak a certain language.

4. Next step is to decide on your daily budget. Choose the budget which fits to your resources.

5. Place your bid as well. Your bid price is your maximum bid price, which means you will not necessarily pay that all the time. You will only pay 1 cent more that the competitor under you.

Google will suggest you a bid amount, however it is not compulsory to follow up their suggestion. Just place the bid that you can afford. To find the most relevant bid, use the traffic estimator by clicking “Estimate Search Traffic”: it will give you some idea on the amount of clicks you can expect per day, the position of your ads among the others and how much you will be spending.

I would recommend you to place higher bids at the beginning. That will help you to generate traffic on your website rapidly and therefore to figure out which ads work and which ones don’t.

6. Enter your email address and your password. Afterwards you will be sent a validation email. Log into your new Google account. You just have to enter your credit card details and your campaign will be running!

7. If you wish to add a new campaign, log into your Google account and click “Create New Campaign”. Then you will just have to follow the steps that we have just detailed below.

The good strategy is to run two ads against one another in a campaign. After few weeks, delete the one with the lower CTR and write a new one to replace it. Google will automatically alternate your ads according to their CTR.

To create a new ad, just click the link “Create ad Variation”. Enter your new ad, and then click “Save new ad”. Google will alternate your different ads throughout the day.

Repeat the keyword in both the ad title and ad description to improve your chances for a click.

5. 1. 3. Google Account Structure

It is important to understand the structure of your Google Adwords account when creating particular Google Adwords campaigns. Namely there are three levels in your account, as you can see in the table:

The first one, Your Account – there you have set your email address, password and billing information. Within each Campaign, there are particular settings common for all its Ad Groups, such as the daily budget, geographic and language targeting, distribution preferences and end dates. On the third level you create ad variations and keyword groups which are stated just for that Ad Group.

Other Google Adwords fundamentals you need to know to run your campaign successfully:

*Only the top 8 ads are shown on the first page.

*You must achieve at least a 0.5% CTR to maintain your campaign active.

5. 1. 4. How to Track Your Google Adwords Campaign

TRACK YOUR KEYWORDS

Providing that your keywords fall below the 0.5% CTR for the first 1000 impressions, they will get disabled. That is the first reason you need to track your keywords performance and modify them regularly. Remember, change your words around, use new keyword matching options, try out different capitalization and spelling variations, use singular or plural versions as well as different punctuation and grammar tenses…

You can decide if you want to receive daily, weekly or monthly Google Adwords reports.

Google can also create your personalized report in only five minutes. Click on the tab
“Report“ => “Create a report now”. You can create a report to track the performance of your keywords, text ad, image ad, URL, ad group, campaign and account.

In order to save money, you can delete the keywords that do not convert into sales from your list. It is also recommended that you “peel” those keywords that get low CTR and “stick” them to a new campaign or ad group with an ad specifically targeting them.

To finish, don’t be obsessed by getting the first position. The first position enables you to get more clicks, but not necessarily to get a high conversion sale. Why? Because clickers who aim at purchasing something will take time to look down the page. In contrast, users who just want to take a quick tour will click on the first ad.

TRACK YOUR AD

Making tiny changes to your ad can have a strong impact on your CTR. Keep changing your ads around regularly. After few weeks, you will be able to detect your best performing keywords.
Use them to rework on your ads. Your ad should include your best keywords. On the same way, if you detect bad keywords, delete them from your ad.

Google gives you a separate CTR and CPC for each ad so you can track their results separately:

What Buyers Really Want
Is often different to what You Sell
So what's the secret to Success?
http://www.3r.ie/

10 Clicks 3.40% CTR €0.21 CPC
Served - 9.1%


Sales and marketing ideas
Free Bulletin every month, with
Articles to help you grow business
http://www.3r.ie/

49 Clicks 6,4% CTR €0.24 CPC
Served - 71.4%

TRACK YOUR SALES CONVERSION

Google has a built-in "conversion tracking" tool that's linked to AdWords. You put their code in the "success" page on your site and along with your CTR statistics, Google will give the percentage of visitors who opt in or buy in your weekly, monthly or daily report.

5. 1. 5. Test Your Website Using Google Website Optimizer

Google now enables Google Adwords users to do split testing of particular pages of their website, or even of some parts of these pages. This can be done through Website Optimizer.
Using this tool you create several variations of landing pages you put to your Google Adwords advertisements. Then the particular combinations will be tested and you will get an overview on which versions are performing the best, i. e. which versions bring in most conversions. This tool is a great help especially in the next stage of using your Google Adwords, just after you manage to gain clicks to your website and you want to convert them into sales.

5. Pay per Click Advertising Campaigns

To support and enhance your SEO, the three biggest search engines offer an opportunity of pay-per-click advertising. This is a special form of online campaigns where you pay just when people click on your ad so that they are directed to your webpage. Your ads will be shown always your campaign keywords are looked for in the search engine, however, you do not pay for these impressions, you pay just for the clicks your ads receive.

4. 3. An Example of an Optimized Landing Page

Here is just a part of a landing page we created for our 3R BluePrint for Success Workshop. The goal is to make people register for the workshop or to at least ask for more information.

Here are the “non-visible” parts of the landing page:

title 3R Blueprint for Success workshop to grow your business in Ireland /title

meta name="Description" content=" Business owners in Ireland grow business with sales and marketing consultancy. Increase sales leads and profits. Your blueprint for success will drive growth, using the 3R sales and marketing services." /

meta name="Keywords" content=" sales Ireland, blueprint success, 3r, business growth, grow business, lead generation Ireland, sales marketing Ireland, sales leads Ireland, marketing consultant, sales marketing, sales leads, blueprint for success" /

The page continues with listing other benefits, confirming the trustworthiness by picturing the facilitator of the workshop etc.

The ending of the single landing page looks like this:

You can view the whole landing page here.

4. 2. Meta Tags, Headings & Links

4. 2. 1. Site Title Tag

This is the most powerful SEO technique you have, so use it creatively! When search engine results are displayed, the title is the first thing people see.

Thus each page should have a different title with 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning. The title should explain in a few short words (your keywords) the intent of the page.
Don't put your company name first - place your keywords first and if you feel you absolutely must have the company name in the title add it second.

Despite its importance, rather do not overdo it with the length of the title tag; 50-150 characters including spaces should be appropriate. And do not just list your keywords, because you then risk being considered as spamming. Rather try to remain as close to a readable sentence as possible. You also should make the title enticing, so that the viewers of search engines listings will also click to see your website.

4. 2. 2. Description Meta Tag

Below the title is a description which will be generally the first sentence on a page. The Description Meta tag is also fairly important. Your description should also have 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning as so should your first sentence. Just like the title tag, reflect the content and try to keep there no more than 200 characters including spaces. Change the words around enough so that you can hit various typings of your keywords.

You should have a different title, description and first sentence on each page. You many also want to try shorter titles with only one keyword or keyword phrase as this will raise you keyword relevance. And try to consider putting your domain name at the very end of the title.

4. 2. 3. Keywords Meta Tag

Although many people rely on them so much when performing SEO, meta tags have decreased in importance recently, but are still worth using for clarity and search results. Their initial purpose was to help search engines find out important information about your page that they might have had difficulty determining otherwise.

The Keyword tag is now the least important but is still used by some engines. As you never know when the rules of the search engines will change, or a new engine will want them, so take the time to include these tags in all your web pages. We recommend you do not overdo it with meta tags as well; your Keyword Meta should not exceed 250 characters including spaces.

If your site is especially interesting for a specific geographic location, be sure to include the actual location in your keyword meta as well.

When performing SEO, you should always use the same keywords which also appear in the
copy of your page, title tag, meta description etc. Any keyword phrases which are used in your meta tags only, will not have enough prominence to help your listings for that phrase.

4. 2. 4. Headings & Links

Headings are a very important attention-grabbing essence of your landing page. People will not read your entire page. That’s why it is smart to divide your page into short paragraphs and to highlight each of them with a killer headline which will not only catch their attention, but also tell them in a second what the whole paragraph is about.

For the SEO purposes, make sure that your headlines are marked h1 Headline#1h1, h2 Headline#2 /h2 etc. and that they are stuffed with your best keywords. Apart from the keywords, use words like "free, proven, benefit, first, discover, complete, exclusive, how to…" in order to gain people’s attention.

Another important part of a landing page are the links. As mentioned already, your links should not direct visitors to your home page or elsewhere other than the next step towards reaching your goal. What is also relevant, is the anchor text, i. e. the clickable text of the hyperlink – for the SEO purposes, stuff it with your keywords as well, don’t leave it just as “Click here to sign up”, but mention your product as well: “Click here to sign up for the Search Optimisation Workshop now”.

4. 2. 5. How to Combine Headings and Links Keywords

Here is an example if your landing page promotes a newsletter with free marketing, sales and leadership articles.

Headings Keywords:
*interesting articles
*valuable articles
*free articles

Links Keywords:
*marketing articles
*sales articles
*leadership articles

This means a capture on the whole list of keyword searchphrases:
*interesting marketing articles
*valuable marketing articles
*free marketing articles
*interesting sales articles
*valuable sales articles
*free sales articles
*interesting leadership articles
*valuable leadership articles
*free leadership articles

4. 1. Content is King

Create useful and comprehensive content that's related to your market to keep your visitors there. Adding keyword-rich text that makes sense and serves the concept of the web page improves your ranking and keeps your visitors interested. The more text, the better for search engine spiders when they index a website; it is strongly recommended that your homepage has at least 200-300 “visible” words. Moreover, the search engine spiders crawl especially the first 20 words of your website so try to keep an eye on them and make them really relevant to what your site is about.

In addition, valuable, dense and regularly updated content is one of the most important items you need for your website because visitors who stay longer while visiting a website help measure popularity of the site in the search engines. When creating content for your landing page, you should pay attention to the following elements:

4. 1. 1. The Purpose of Your Landing Page

The first step when creating your langing page should be setting a goal you want to achieve.
What is it that you want your visitors to do? This could be one of the following:

*Buy a product
*Sign up a newsletter
*Download a free trial
*Read an article
*Do a survey
*Participate in a competition

4. 1. 2. List the Real Benefits

When you know the purpose of your landing page, you should give your visitors a REASON to move towards the goal. Remember, it is not your goal that they will follow; in fact, people are always looking for what is in it for THEM.

To achieve this, always list benefits of your products or services; not features. The difference is that benefits mean something valuable to the consumer while features are just descriptions of your product characteristics. Nobody cares so much about what material you used when creating the product, or what the technical parametres are. Usually, what matters to them is what problems your product can solve, and more importantly, how they will benefit from buying and using it.

In addition, websites offering products that managed to fix a problem usually get highest conversion rates. Moreover, try to use "you" more often than "I" or "we". Remember: Your customers don't care about you at all. The only thing they are looking for is what is in it for them.

4. 1. 3. Include a Call to Action

Once you have decided what you want your visitors to do and after revealing all the benefits they get, it is crucial to tell them what to do next. It must be crystal clear what they need to do:

*Click here to order your SEO eBook now.
*Sign up for the Success! Newsletter here.
*Press Enter to continue. Etc.

In order to make a call to action more catchy and attention gaining, there is one smart trick: use the red colour always you want to highlight something to be clicked on. However, do not overdo it, since when your website is red on its whole, the particular spots will not stand out.

4. 1. 4. Keep it Simple

In order to keep your visitors focused on the steps you want them to take, keep all possible distractions away. This means your landing page should not be stuffed with links that will direct them away from the page. The only links your landing page should contain are those in line with your goal: links to your order pages, newsletter sign up forms, etc.

4. 1. 5. Generate Trust

Although many of us probably do not pay particular attention to Contact Details and Privacy Policy when browsing the Internet, these are vital parts looked for especially during the purchasing process in order to make sure that you are a serious company. Apart from that, Testimonials could add trustworthiness to your landing page, too, as they are kind of confirmation and a referral from the REAL people who have already tried your products or services and who didn’t mind to publish their names (sometimes their occupation and pictures as well) and you can possibly find them, if you need to confirm their positive statements.

Last but not least, the trust in your company and products will be supported effectively when you offer an unconditional money-back guarantee if at all possible. This will prevent the fear, uncertainty and doubt about moving towards the purchase.

4. 1. 6. Make Your Ordering Process Clear & Secure

In general, over 60 percent of online shoppers abort the ordering process. It’s a pity that after gaining their attention, interest and desire you can still lose them due to a complicated, unclear or unsafe ordering process. To prevent this, try to follow the advice:

*When already in the purchasing process, don't hide the price for your products or services. People will not continue if they don't know how much they have to pay.
*Tell your visitors upfront about your refund policy.
*Tell your visitors about all additional costs and taxes they have to pay, so that they know the final price before they have to enter the credit card number.
*Make sure that your order pages are easy to understand. Test them with your friends or relatives who don't browse the Internet very often.
*Make sure that your order page shows an understandable notice if the customer forgets to enter the email address or any other required field.
*Make sure that your order pages work internationally. Some countries don't have postal numbers or their regional structuring can be different from yours.
*It's very important that your order pages are secure. Use as much encryption as you can and use the additional security services such as Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode.
*Test your order pages regularly in order to make sure they work.

4. Turn Your Visitors Into Buyers

Once you have created your keyword list, it is essential to create landing pages which contain these keywords. This is a crucial step to get conversions. A conversion is when a customer buys your products or signs up for a newsletter or takes any action you would like him to take.

When your landing page does not include the keyword your customer typed in when looking for your services, it is not very likely that he keeps browsing your website. Moreover, it is recommended that you create a separate landing page for each of your keyword, or combination of keywords. Each of your PPC ads should point at a relevant landing page. So how to make your landing pages bring you actual sales?

3. Keywords to Attract More Visitors

The second step of your SEO (and PPC campaigns as well) is to make the best keyword list possible. A keyword is a word or a phrase people who are looking for your product type in Google or Yahoo. For example, if you are a marketing consultancy, one of your keywords may be “marketing advice”.

Creating a rich and appropriately targetted keyword list is a fundamental step that will have a strong impact on your campaign success. Avoid expensive general keywords: you will certainly get a high rate of impressions, but not necessarily high conversion sales. Focus on specific key phrases that will get more highly targeted people to your site. That means, do not use just “marketing” as there are many people typing this word in, but they are not looking for any marketing help or advice for their business. Instead, go for combinations such as “marketing help”, “marketing consultancy” etc.

Moreover, I would advise you to apply the following methodology to choose the right words:

1) Organise a brainstorming with your co-workers, business partners, friends or relatives to find
keywords relevant to your business. Focus on the needs of your target audience, what they would type in when looking for your products. Having created your BluePrint for Success before, this should be now much easier to do.

2) Try to make a list of 100 keywords minimum. Providing that you barely reach this goal, do use search term suggestion tool (such as http://www.inventory.overture.com/ or http://www.wordtracker.info/). These will give you an idea what phrases based on your keyword have been looked for recently.

3) Don’t forget dashes, apostrophes, spelling variations, plural versions and various tenses. Your potential customers will not search a keyword in the same way. For instance: website, web site, web-site.

4) Check out your competitors’ webpages for ideas. View the source HTML code and take a look at keywords in their meta tags. They could be a good tip for yours!

5) When you are combining your SEO with PPC advertising campaigns, it is very helpful to use tracking results from Google Adwords or Yahoo! Search Marketing to revalue your keyword list. Try to put emphasis on those which gain the highest number of clicks in your PPC campaigns.

2. What Offering will Bring You Fortune?

If you want to boost your website traffic, the first step you have to take, is to create your customer value proposition. Success in a company is governed by three key factors;

1. How valuable, your target market believes, your offering is.
2. Your ability to market, sell and service the offering.
3. The quality and skill set of your management team.

Many excellent companies have all 3 ingredients for success. Where strong management teams, or entrepreneurs, have a great offering, but realise they may need help in the marketing and selling of their product to reach their true potential, they should turn to external experts.

Some companies seem to find the selling and marketing of their products a particularly daunting task. The reason is that their product is often intangible. Many companies find huge difficulty in accurately articulating their Customer Value Proposition (CVP).

Without a clear definition of value to your clients, it is going to be difficult or impossible to formulate your sales and marketing messages to define why people should purchase from you. When creating your CVP, there are 5 key steps, which lead to 5 deliverables:

Items: Know your Customer - Select Target Customer
Deliverables: Customer Needs, Wants & Pains Identified

Items: Know your Product or Service - Identify Customer Value
Deliverables: Customer Benefits identified

Items: Know your Target Market - Select Target Markets
Deliverables: Addressable Market identified

Items: Know your Competitors - Choose Competitive Differentiators
Deliverables: Competitive Differentiators chosen

Items: Create your CVP Statement - Create a Value Proposition
Deliverables: Value Proposition created

We are able to help with this crucial task via our 3R BluePrint for Success full-day workshop that is strongly recommended to take before or after attending the 3R SEO Workshop. However, if you decide to go just for the SEO one, we will cover the topic of CVP briefly at the beginning. Without a clear CVP statement, you cannot move forward with your SEO and PPC strategy.

1. What You Get from SEO?

SEO means that your website is "optimised" for search engines, meaning that, ideally, your web site will come up as one of the first 10 sites when people search for keywords pertinent to your business. This is essential to your website traffic which might lead to further sales generation.

Getting a top 5 search ranking in Google, Yahoo! and recently in MSN.com as well is the key factor to advertise your product online. Optimising your website will generate more traffic than all of your other Internet Marketing efforts combined. By simply getting traffic coming to your website, you have got better chance to generate more sales....

During the 3R Boost Your Website Traffic Workshop you will learn about SEO and pay-perclick (PPC) campaigns before you waste a lot of money on a campaign that doesn't work. This ebook provides essential overview of SEO and, together with the workbook coming from the workshop, it will help you to launch or optimise your online advertising campaigns with Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) or Microsoft AdCenter. However, given the current market trends in Ireland, we will focus on Google Adwords above all.

Although SEO might seem to be a simple and relatively easy-to-use way of improving your website ranking, which helps your customers find your website easier, there is also a possibility of abuse. This can finally lead to your website being excluded from the search engines listings. Therefore it is crucial to know the difference between techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design (so called “White Hat” SEO) and those that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimise their effect (referred to as “Black Hat” SEO or spamdexing).

Another interesting fact to know is that search engines change their search criteria daily. There are usually very subtle changes an average website owner does not have to track. Their purpose is to prevent spamdexing or at least make it as difficult as possible.