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To Grow Your Online Sales How to Execute Internet Marketing Strategies

Johan Hedin — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 12:20:54 +0000

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To Grow Your Online Sales How to Execute Internet Marketing Strategies

Posted By: Johan Hedin

The end goal of internet marketing for any business or brand is to boost up your sales figure. As more and more businesses seem to tread online marketing path, exploring a number of internet marketing strategies to boost up the sales is important for every online marketer. If you are among the novices, it may appear to be a daunting task, but as you move on gradually, you end up finding it simpler and cost effective way to target your audience over the web. You can find a number of ways of marketing your brand or business over the web. All you need to do is to find out some of the best online marketing strategies and boost up your sales without any hassle or issue. Let’s check these out as under:

Video marketing

One of the best ways to boost up your sales through any internet marketing strategy is via a good video marketing campaign. If you are able to see real faces behind any brand or business, you are more likely to be connected with it as compared to doing the same with plain and simple way. With videos, you can portray yourself as more trusted figure, hence while seeing your products being in use in the videos, more customers are likely to be drawn closer to your brand. Video marketing has shown positive response for a number of bigger brands and smaller businesses, which eventually boost up the conversion rates. However, if you are not selling any product or service over the web, yet putting a video over your site can build the credibility in the market. Nowadays, people prefer watching anything rather than reading plain and boring kind of text.

Blogging

Starting up a blog for your smaller or medium size business is often called as the important step of professionalism. It helps in establishing your credibility in the market and readers or target audience coming to you would help in establishing you as a trusted expert for your niche area. When it comes to taking any buying decision, people usually end up trusting the experts, and blogs simply help you in this as buyers would take your recommendations seriously. Blogs are also one of the best ways to direct your target audience towards your website, which is linked with your business. All you need to do is to keep on updating your blog on a regular basis and keep the posts fresh. Consider asking other experts to share their views or in other words invite them for the guest blogs. This will help you in getting backlink, which means you end up getting good traffic that helps in boosting up your online sales.

PPC (Pay per Click)

If you are keen to garner a good response from people and reach to your target audience the best, consider opting for a PPC strategy. It helps in creating a good awareness for your brand and about your products or services and brings in good quality leads that help a lot in boosting up your sales. The moment you opt for the PPC campaign keep your target audience in your mind, which will include keeping in mind about their demography and try using images and jargons that can help in attracting more and more people towards your brand. PPC also help you in your other internet marketing strategies including SEO, which means you end up getting a sizeable amount of traffic to your site, that really help a lot in boosting up the sales. All, you need to do is to keep on trying with different ways and approach and you would certainly get good output.

Social media marketing

The other vital online marketing option, which works the best for boosting up your online sales, is via social media marketing. Owing to the whopping amount of people present on the social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest, etc. the idea of using these sites to get traffic has simply grown a lot. All you need to do is to choose the top social networking sites and start building up your presence over these sites. Once your voices are being heard and responded by the audience, you end up getting good response in the form of online sales. However, while approaching different social media sites, you need to unleash your different marketing strategies in the most natural and genuine way then only you end up getting a good response. Talking only about selling products all the time may not work using a number of apps and tools present over these platforms.

Final word

There is no doubt about the fact that embarking with effective online marketing strategies can boost up the online sales for your business. The above are some of the best internet marketing strategies, which can prove beneficial to you. Keep them trying.

Diana Maria is a freelance journalist who has been writing about mobile technology, customer relationship management and women’s health for more than a decade. These days she is busy to contributes on amplify

The post To Grow Your Online Sales How to Execute Internet Marketing Strategies appeared first on Marketing Ignite.

What the Hummingbird Update Is All About and How It Will Affect Your Business

Johan Hedin — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 12:15:30 +0000

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What the Hummingbird Update Is All About and How It Will Affect Your Business

Posted By: Johan Hedin

Every time Google makes an update to its algorithm, any website, blog or forum dedicated to webmaster issues or online marketing lights up with talk about the topic. We’ve seen it happen when the last two major updates, Panda and Penguin, have been rolled out. Of course, every time Google changes something, there will be a lot of people who will claim that “SEO is dead.” As we all know, this just isn’t true. SEO won’t die. It will only adapt itself to the changes that Google makes. But what about Hummingbird? Will it dramatically change the way we do SEO? To answer the question, we need to know what this most recent update is about.

What is Hummingbird and How Will it Affect Search Results?

If you’ve been following SEO news lately, you will have probably noticed that Google updates had one main objective in mind: improving the user experience by returning high-quality and relevant search results.

The last two updates, Penguin and Panda, were made with the goal of penalizing sites with over optimized anchor text links and low-quality content, thus increasing the chance that the user will be satisfied with what they see when they run a query on Google. Hummingbird also aims to improve the user experience, but the approach is slightly different. Rather than focusing on bringing the best results for the words entered, Google will now respond to the entire query and its context.

What Are Conversational Searches And How Are They Related To Hummingbird?

Simply put, search queries are becoming longer and are starting to look more as if the user was asking a question, as opposed to just typing in a few words that describe what they are looking for. One of the main reasons behind this is the rise of voice searches done on smartphones. People naturally use longer queries when speaking, as opposed to typing. But this is starting to appear increasingly in typed queries as well. As such, a growing number of users are running queries like “What is the closest gas station to my home?” or “How much does the new iPhone cost?”

What Hummingbird does is that it ensures Google is taking into account the actual meaning of the typed phrase, as opposed to just trying to match the words on the content of a web page. This helps the search engine deliver information that is a lot more relevant to what the user wanted.

This is done partly through natural language processing. When a user asks a question, Google will actually try to understand what they meant by looking at how the query is structured, what the words mean in context, as well as by considering the main elements of the query.

So SEO Isn't Really Dead, Right?

Not at all. Whenever a major Google update is announced, there are many people who start to panic, thinking that everything that they have worked hard for will now go to waste and that they would have to redo their whole SEO strategy. But more often than not, this doesn’t turn out to be the case. After all, when the Penguin and Panda updates were implemented, we didn’t see popular websites that offered useful and informative content sink in search results and get relegated to the 20^th page.

Many of the SEO techniques and methods that you have been using will still continue to work, even now that Hummingbird has arrived. The only differences are that you may need to do a few additional things to optimize your pages even more. But you will soon realize that you may have already been taking these steps long before Hummingbird came out.

Will My SERPs Suffer?

While Hummingbird was just recently announced, Google had already made the update for well over a month now. If you didn’t notice any significant changes to your SERPs or the amount of visitors coming from Google search results, it probably means that you haven’t really been affected by this most recent update.

If your site offers useful, original and high-quality content to visitors, and if you have incoming links from reputed and highly relevant websites, you can continue to enjoy a great ranking on Google just like you did before.

What Is The Knowledge Graph?

The knowledge graph is simply part of Google’s efforts to answer a question that users may have. Many search results will now feature a knowledge graph, which is a type of blurb that appears to the right of search results and gives users an “at a glance” look at the information they are interested in, without even leaving the search results page. In many cases, it will also suggest other related searches.

You can try it by entering the name of a famous artist, or a city. In some cases, Google will try its best to guess the intent of the user. For example, searching for “Apple” if you are in a city that has an Apple Store will return information about that store (address and opening hours) in the knowledge graph. But if you search for “Apple Inc.” you will get more general information about the company itself.

What changes should you implement in a post-Hummingbird world? Here are a couple of ideas:

Keep Your Focus On Original High-Quality Content

With the last updates, Google has done quite a good job cleaning up search results of “garbage” pages that contain content which was not only poorly written, but also had little relevance to what the user was searching for. Google is continuing to refine its algorithm to reward sites that offer great content to visitors.

Thus, you should do everything you can so that Google sees the content on your pages as relevant. Don’t focus exclusively on specific keywords, but rather use synonyms and words that are closely related to the main topic of your page.

Increase Your Site's Authority

The concept of “authority” is something that comes up a lot more frequently in SEO circles. With Penguin and Panda, Google has shown that more authoritative domains will get more presence in search results. The two ways that Google judges authority is the quality of the content on a site, plus the quality and number of links pointing to it.

Having quality links pointing to your site is nothing new, but it has now become much more important. Do your very best to acquire natural links by encouraging people to share your content and link to it on their blogs, websites or social media posts.

Consider Adding Some Q&A Content

When people run a query, they often want an answer to a question they have. While you don’t have to rewrite all of the content of your site in an “FAQ” format, you should consider adding some “How to” articles to it, as well as adding a “Questions and Answers” section where it is relevant.

Don't Forget Mobile SEO

Mobile searches are growing and Hummingbird addresses this in many ways. This is why you should think about how your site looks like when accessed on a mobile device. Implement a mobile responsive design, which will help ensure that the mobile version of your site loads properly for your users, quickly and is easy to navigate.

If you’re looking for professional SEO services, Marketing Ignite is here to help. We can put together a complete SEO strategy that will work for your business. Check out more here: www.marketingignite.com/SEO-Services-Thailand.php

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How to Outsource Your SEO the Best Possible Way Using High Quality Strategies and Techniques

Johan Hedin — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 12:10:44 +0000

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How to Outsource Your SEO the Best Possible Way Using High Quality Strategies and Techniques

Posted By: Johan Hedin

There are many reasons as to why you might want to outsource your SEO by hiring an external SEO company. Many businesses simply don’t have the right in house staff to handle all their SEO needs, and hiring full time experts is usually too expensive for them. The main benefit that business owners hope to get from a SEO firm is that they will receive more visitors to their website, and thus get more sales. But hiring the right SEO firm can actually have some very attractive additional benefits, such as:

Getting a better website

One of the things that an SEO expert can do is to optimize the way your site looks and works. A site that is easier to navigate, is more user friendly, is faster and has more rich content will be a lot more appealing to your visitors. This can result in better conversions, as well as increase the chance that individual visitors will share your site with others or link to it on their own websites or blogs.

A better understanding of who your customers are

Experienced SEO experts can look into your potential customer base and give you details about who they are, where they are coming from, and most importantly, what they want. This information can be very useful when developing new products or making changes to existing ones.

Saving time and money

To do SEO the right way, you would need to have thorough knowledge of how search engines work, what factors can affect the way your website is ranked, plus stay on top of all the changes that happen in the online world, such as updates to search ranking algorithms. While it is indeed possible to acquire this knowledge and experience, it will take several years to do so. When you outsource your SEO, you can focus on what matters the most: running your business, as opposed to spending hours each day learning about search engines and staying on top of all the updates.

Anyone thinking of hiring an external firm to do their SEO should be aware of one important thing: not every SEO agency will be the same. If you actually want to get solid, long term results, you need to separate the good ones from the bad. Here are some warning signs that the company you’re looking at is one best avoided:

Unrealistic promises

This is valid not only when looking for a SEO firm, but any time you deal with someone through the Internet. If something looks too good to be true, then it probably is. Any company that makes unrealistic claims, such as saying they can put you in the first page of Google’s search results for extremely competitive keywords if you buy a “SEO Package” for $99.95 or $199 or some other ridiculously low price is simply lying to you.

Getting a good ranking for competitive keywords is something that will take time and it involves a lot more than just buying a package that gives you links. Don’t fall for any “Super Satisfaction Guarantees” either. Many disreputable firms claim to offer a money back guarantee in an effort to put your mind at ease, but if they fail to deliver and you ask for your money back, they will either ignore you, or will try to argue that they did all the work right and if you’re not going up in the rankings, something is wrong with your site.

Using blackhat tactics

Blackhat SEO consists on using underhanded tactics in an effort to “trick” search engines into giving your site a higher ranking. While this may give SOME results in the short term, it can be disastrous for your business in the long term. For example, if you buy links from an SEO company, these links may be from websites that are completely unrelated to yours, which can actually cause your site to drop in rankings.

Even worse, some disreputable SEO companies think that spamming your site’s links on discussion forums or blogs that are relevant to your industry is a good way to generate “quality” backlinks to your site. The problem is, this can seriously damage the way your brand is perceived in the online world, as your company now becomes associated with spam.

So, how do you know you’re dealing with a good company? Here are some signs:

You can easily find out who is behind the company

Reputable companies don’t try to hide their contact details. You will find an address, a phone number and an email address to contact them on their site. You will also find a section that contains a short bio of the company’s owners and key employees, which explains how long they’ve been in the business and what they’ve accomplished.

Testimonials, references and case studies

SEO is not a regulated occupation, so anyone who read a few forum posts on the topic can now declare themselves to be a “SEO Professional.” What separates true professionals from amateurs is that the pros will have references that will back up their claims. Legitimate companies will be happy to show you examples of work that they’ve done in the past and can often show you specific results that they’ve achieved for their clients.

The company uses legitimate, white hat practices

This includes optimizing various on-page factors on a website, as well as developing campaigns that will help you build your links naturally, for example by having your content shared by interested visitors through social media platforms, blogs and discussion forums. A legitimate company will always be willing to give you an explanation of how they do their work, without being overly evasive or claiming that it is a “trade secret.”

Updates and reports are provided

If you are paying someone to do SEO work for you, then you would probably be interested in knowing what they are actually doing for you. A legitimate SEO firm will provide you with regular reports showing the type of work that was done, as well as what progress has been made on your search engine rankings.

They will also be willing to agree on specific deliverables, such as more site visitors, better rankings for specific keywords, etc. Remember that as far as SEO goes, nearly everything can be measured, so setting specific targets and goals will not be a problem for an experienced company that uses legitimate SEO tactics. On the flip side, beware of any business that seems to be too vague when it comes time to set goals.

If you are looking for high quality SEO services, Marketing Ignite is here for you. They have been providing SEO and various online marketing services to businesses around the world for over 15 years. Check out their website at www.marketingignite.com for more information about their services.

The post How to Outsource Your SEO the Best Possible Way Using High Quality Strategies and Techniques appeared first on Marketing Ignite.

How to Use Social Media to Grow Your Business to the Next Level?

Johan Hedin — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 12:06:36 +0000

Learn Effective Digital Marketing Strategies

and Ignite Your Knowledge to the Next Level!

How to Use Social Media to Grow Your Business to the Next Level?

Posted By: Johan Hedin

Do you want your business to grow to the next level? In that case, you will be happy to realize that we now live in the age of information, and a wide variety of tools are available for businesses of all sizes to attract customers. One way to grow your business is to use social media sites. While these sites are primarily designed for individuals to connect to each other and share ideas, they are also a very powerful promotional vehicle for businesses. When done right, social media campaigns can raise awareness about your brand, and allow you to present your products and services to people who would have an interest in them. Here is how you can use social media sites to their fullest potential:

Establish a Presence

Everyone has to start somewhere, right? The first step to using social media is obviously to set up your accounts. This means creating a profile for your business on the main networks, such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

When you create your profile, you would naturally include your business name, a short description of what you do, plus your contact information, such as your business website and phone number. For your display picture, you would normally use your company’s logo. Once your presence has been established, you can then personalize it further and add some content to it.

Learn About Each Social Network You Use

If you’ve never created a business page before, you may want to take some time learning about each social network that you’ve joined. For example, if you’ve never used Twitter before, you may want to learn more about how the microblogging service works, how to add images to post, how to retweet, as well as how you can follow people and get them to follow you.

Educate yourself on the features of your account, such as the options that you can personalize. This will allow you to get a clearer understanding of how you can interact with your page visitors and followers. A lot of information is available in the help section of each site, but you can also read some free advice on numerous blogs and forums as well.

Add Great Designs to Your Pages

You should seek to make your social media pages as unique and attractive as possible. Different social networks allow different levels of personalization. For example, Twitter lets you add a background image to your account, while Facebook lets you add a cover image. Choose images that represent your business well and that will be attractive to your visitors. You can even hire a graphic artist to design custom images that you will use on your pages.

Remember, Content is King

This is true for your website or blog, but it is also very important for your social media pages. If you want people to be interested in what you have to say, your posts should be more than just self-promotion for your business or its products.

You can create content that your targeted audience (those most likely to become your customers) will relate to. This can be information about your industry, product reviews, news, infographics, etc. The content itself can be hosted on your website or blog, which will help increase traffic to them.

Offer Promotions and Discounts

Surveys indicate that one of the most popular reasons as to why individuals follow businesses on social networking sites is to see if any discounts or special promotions are available. This means that you can turn your pages into very powerful marketing vehicles, simply by offering promotions on them that aren’t available through other channels.

If you have an e-commerce site, you can insert the discount links into posts, or create a coupon code that can be used for a discount, free shipping, a free product, etc. If you don’t have an e-commerce site, you can create printable coupons and post them on your pages.

Get More Followers

Once you’ve created your page and added some content to it, one of your main concerns would probably be how to get more people to follow you or to subscribe to your page. There are a few techniques that you can use, but first, you should know that companies that offer to sell you fans or followers are best avoided.

Why? Because very often, despite claims that you will get “100% real people who are interested in your business,” these followers are often simply bogus, coming from either fake accounts or accounts that were compromised. Simply put, you will be wasting your money if you buy them.

But there are plenty of legitimate ways to get people onto your pages. Include social media buttons on your main website, your blog, as well as any other sites that you run which are related to your business, such as mini sites that are specific to certain products that you sell. You can also include your social media links in email messages that you send to your clients or email list subscribers.

If you have a blog or post articles on your website, you should also include social media buttons on them. This will make it easy for individuals to share your content with others, and if you’re lucky enough, it could become viral.

Use Video

Remember that video sharing sites, such as YouTube, are also a form of social media. While it is possible to upload video directly to Facebook and Twitter, it is best to use YouTube and simply share it on your pages on various networks.

This allows your business to have a channel on YouTube, where you can add links to your site (thus bringing you some SEO benefits) and it also creates a place where your followers can find all of your company’s videos in one place.

You can create a variety of short videos and share them with the world. The most effective kinds are instructional videos, that show what your products are, how they work, and what benefits they can bring to your customers. You may also add some video testimonials from satisfied customers. Finally, you can also create videos where you provide commentary on issues that are related to your industry.

Video works great because it enhances your brand’s credibility. A potential customer that sees your videos will be reassured that you are indeed a real business that sells real products. This will increase the chance that they will go check out your main website and even buy one of your products.

When using videos, try to keep them short, typically under 5 minutes. Of course, you should also ensure that both the audio and video are of good quality, otherwise, you will simply receive sarcastic comments questioning why you can’t afford a better camera or asking whether you filmed this with a potato.

Do you need help promoting your business through social media? Marketing Ignite can help you with their vast experience in online marketing. No matter what type of business you are running, they can develop social media campaigns that can help you reach their goals. Check out their website at www.marketingignite.com

The post How to Use Social Media to Grow Your Business to the Next Level? appeared first on Marketing Ignite.

Has Penguin 5.0 Affected Your Website and What Are the Remedies for It?

Johan Hedin — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 12:06:05 +0000

Learn Effective Digital Marketing Strategies

and Ignite Your Knowledge to the Next Level!

Has Penguin 5.0 Affected Your Website and What Are the Remedies for It?

Posted By: Johan Hedin

If you were looking at your site’s statistics and noticed a drop in traffic on October 4, there is a high chance that your website was affected by Google’s most recent update, Penguin 5.0. This new update, also referred to as Penguin 2.1, has been publicly confirmed by Google on Twitter. According to a Tweet from Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Search Quality Team, this most recent update will only affect around 1% of all search queries. Whether this figure is accurate or not, many websites seem to be affected by it, as there are numerous stories going around webmaster circles of people who’ve had their traffic drop right after this new Penguin update was released.

Naturally, if you believe that your site was affected, you would be quite concerned and would wonder what you can do to recover as quickly as possible. But before we can get into that, it is important to understand what this most recent update is all about. You must first remember what Penguin is all about: it’s an ongoing update to Google’s search algorithm that seeks to penalize sites that are viewed as low quality or “spammy,” yet still manage to get respectable rankings for their particular keywords. One of Penguin’s main actions is penalizing sites that have purchased links, or otherwise used inappropriate link building strategies.

Sites that were penalized in the most recent update had a combination of these attributes:

Efforts to get links from discussion forums, blogs or directories which were seen as being excessively used to build links.
Article marketing tactics in which a large number of blog posts were used to link to the same page.
Adding an excessive number of links on one particular platform (such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
Creating numerous pages on the site whose only purpose seems to be the creation of internal links.
An increase of links coming from bad domains.
In a guest post or article, placing an excessive amount of links to the same page on your domain.
Excessive number of do-follow links when compared to no-follow ones. According to Google, this could indicate link buying, as natural link building will have a higher percentage of no-follow links.
Placing links and anchor text in content in a way that looks clearly “made for SEO,” as opposed to helping a human reader navigate and get more information.
Blog posts or articles on the site that are stuffed with an excessive amount of keywords.
Deliberately stuffing keywords in anchor text.

If you have reason to believe that your site has been hit by Penguin 5.0, here are a few things that you can do to speed up your recovery:

Get Rid of “Clutter” Pages on Your Site

While it hasn’t been conclusively proven yet, the general belief is that Penguin is now taking a look not only at your external links, but also at internal links as well. Naturally, managing your own site’s linking strategy is a lot easier than dealing with links on other sites, so we will start with that one.

Penguin seems to have hit some sites which had numerous pages with low quality content, which were then used to link to another page on the site, called the target page. This strategy has been employed by some webmasters and SEOs as it seemed to have a positive effect on the target page’s rank.

However, you should know that building such a network of links on your own site isn’t something that Penguin appreciates very much. This can be made worse if the pages that make up your internal link network have little useful content on them and whose sole purpose seems centered around getting the visitor to click a link that goes to the target page. Needless to say, if this is a tactic that you’ve employed, you will need to stop right now and remove these useless pages from your site.

Change up Your Anchor Text

One of the main reasons why sites are penalized by penguin is because of the anchor text used in links. You may have thought that using exact match keywords in your anchor text was a good tactic, but Penguin changed all that. The most recent iteration seems to affect a greater number of sites that use a lot of incoming links that contain the exact keywords that you want to rank for.

You should find out where your links are coming from and what anchor text they are using. After this is done, there are two basic options available to you. Either you get these links removed, or you edit them so that they contain a different anchor text that flows more naturally within the content. The decision on whether you remove a link or change it should be based on whether the link in question is generating direct clicks to your site. You may want to keep links that are sending you a good amount of traffic and remove the rest.

Focus on Your Link Quality and Remove the Bad Ones

Google’s Penguin update penalizes bad quality links in two ways. First, it lowers the page rank of low quality websites, such as sites that have an unusually high amount of outbound links. This then leads to a domino effect, where your site drops as the quality of your incoming links has been lowered. Penguin will also penalize websites whose owners seem to make a deliberate effort to build a large amount of links by getting them from bad quality sites.

Once Google sees that your site is associated with bad neighborhoods, this could have a further effect on your other inbound links, even if they come from highly reputable sites. Having links coming from bad neighborhoods simply reduces the value that quality inbound links bring you.

Even though there is a lot of talk about anchor texts with Penguin 5.0, webmasters need to remember that in general, Penguin assesses the quality of a link not only by its anchor text, but mainly with the location where the link is coming from.

If you have links on sites that are a repository for bad quality content, websites that have little or nothing to do with your niche, sites that have an every growing number of outbound links to a variety of sites, or places which seem to have no problem linking to low quality sites themselves, then you should take action and remove them at once.

Manually reviewing all of your website’s incoming links is likely to be a tedious task, as you will have to judge whether each link is one that is of bad quality or not. But there are tools which automate the process by analyzing your inbound links and determining their quality for you. This will make cleaning up bad links much faster.

Work With a Reputed SEO Agency

If you’re doing your SEO by yourself, you may consider hiring a reputable SEO agency to do it for you. Keeping up-to-date with Google’s never ending updates may be quite stressful for business owners, but for SEO professionals it’s just part of their job. An SEO agency that has a long track record of achieving results for their clients can help you recover if you believe your site was affected by Penguin 5.0.

Marketing Ignite has experience since 1998 in the many facets of online marketing. If you’re trying to improve your site’s SEO, or want to explore new avenues to promote your business online, they can bring you the results you need.

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Pros and Cons of Joining Internet Marketing Forum

Johan Hedin — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 12:04:54 +0000

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Pros and Cons of Joining Internet Marketing Forum

Posted By: Johan Hedin

These days the popularity of joining different internet marketing forums is on a steady rise and hence can be called as an integral part of any successful online marketing campaigns. This act simply helps the number of online business entrepreneurs find their potential customers for their number of products and services, which they have been offering. Joining these forums is very simple and hardly requires any amount of money or in case of joining the paid forums you just pay a few bucks. Though it can benefit you a lot in your online marketing efforts, yet there are certain cons as well of joining various internet marketing forums, which you need to check before considering the same. The following are some of its pros and cons, let’s check them out:

Get highly targeted groups

The very first and important benefit of forum marketing is that you can find some highly targeted nature of groups present here. If you join very specific kind of forums very much relevant to your niche area, you are more likely to get customers for the products or services you are selling via your website. This can save good amount of your time and money in other forms of marketing options to promote your business. You can very easily seek the attention of people for buying your products or services, which you are trying to sell online. The best part is the people getting attracted towards you would be publically seen by others, which can even help them to come closer to your products or services at the later stage.

Get good traffic

Traffic is regarded as the life line for all the blogs and websites made for different purposes. Getting high traffic is considered as half the task done, wherein you get better opportunities to find new clients or readers for your business or blog. This is the very basic reason, why bloggers consume loads of time to generate traffic and find returning visitors over their blogs. Joining internet marketing forums can suffice this particular need and you would find people coming towards your blog or site and thus convert your loyal readers or customers. You can drive a good amount of traffic towards your blog by joining right online marketing forums.

Find opportunities to build good backlinks

A majority of internet marketing forums enjoy high credibility, authority and certainly a nice kind of traffic. So when you post any reply over these forums and your links can add good amount of value to the thread then you are likely to get the opportunity to build good backlinks. In this way, you not only get good backlinking opportunities but also find higher traffic, which you would simply like to have over your blog or site. Building backlinks for your blog or site can be called as the important benefits of joining these online marketing forums.

The cons

You cannot outsource this

Unlike the number of benefits you enjoy with joining online marketing forums, you will also find certain cons of the same. One of the first cons and the prominent ones is that this is not a program, which you can assign to any outside company or individual. You are supposed to take out your own time and start doing things yourself before you see even getting an inch of response from the people present over the forums. Due to this, it is not considered as one of the key options for people who are keen to get loads of traffic and sell out their products right away.

You need some specific skills

In order to be successful in this strategy, you are supposed to have good people skills along with the capability of showcasing yourself as the most credible group in the online world. If you fail to hone these skills, which are really difficult for people, then you cannot actually think of leveraging from the same.

Difficult to handle and manage

Winning the battle of internet marketing through joining forums is not always an easy nut to crack. This is because you have to spare loads of time thinking and creating right and successful forums. Nobody really likes to post over the empty forums hence you are supposed to create and promote the right kind of topics for discussion on your own. If these topics are not interesting they may fail to attract people over it.

Final word

To understand whether internet forum marketing is for you or not, you are supposed to weigh both the pros and cons, which it carries. It’s true that you can enjoy loads of benefits out of it but the fact is if you fail to have the required skills it can be a futile effort to get traffic or customers through this method.

The post Pros and Cons of Joining Internet Marketing Forum appeared first on Marketing Ignite.

How to Rank Your Website Higher in Yahoo Search Results

Johan Hedin — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 12:09:11 +0000

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How to Rank Your Website Higher in Yahoo Search Results

Posted By: Johan Hedin

On July 29^th, 2009, Yahoo and Microsoft announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo Search results. So, in order to rank highly in Yahoo Search results, you have to learn how to rank well in Bing.

Ranking well on Yahoo! Search means that you have to rank well in Bing. That means that you have to know what the SEO ranking factors are for Bing, so that you can apply them effectively. In order of their importance, let’s explore the top ranking factors. A lot has changed in the last ten years in regards to search engine ranking factors, and keywords, meta tags, and back links now take a backseat to more relevant factors, like social signals, for example.

Bing (Yahoo Search) SEO Ranking Factors

Google +1’s, Facebook comments, Facebook shares, keywords, and tweets are the big five when it comes well to ranking highly in Bing. Social signals reign supreme, and they have replaced back links. If you really want to get ahead of the curve, understand that keywords are going to be less and less important. Creating great content, and getting likes and shares for that content, is the way that search engines will evaluate web pages in the future. Worrying about creating content based around keywords is a no-no, not only with Google, but with Bing now as well.

Other ranking factors for Yahoo Search, but those that take less of a priority than the aforementioned above, are the Facebook total, number of backlinks, Facebook likes, Pinterest, and the length of the URL.

What Else is Important to Yahoo Search Results?

Big Brand Name

It seems that top brands automatically rank higher. Pages from top brand websites seem to have automatic advantages in rankings. What does that mean for you if you own a small business? You don’t have to be hopeless, because you can build a brand with a small following, no matter what your budget is. Even if you don’t have a brand that has been known for several years, you can still start to build a following on social with a little advertising money and some excellent content that you post on a regular basis. Generating excitement and buzz on the social networks is the best way to build your budding brand and to enhance other SEO ranking factors as well.

Backlinks

Back links are more crucial for ranking highly in Yahoo Search than on Google. Back links are more closely related to higher rankings on Bing than on Google. Since Bing powers Yahoo Search results, that means that whatever works for Bing, will work for Yahoo in an equivalent manner. The number of back links is more important, and the quality of the back links, seem to be less scrutinized, on Bing compared to Google. Bing seems to care less about natural link profiles. What is a natural link profile, though? A natural link profile means that a website should not just have a lot of perfectly optimized links that have keywords the site owner wants to rank for in the anchor text. A natural link profile is different, and a little messier than that, of course. Thus, the word natural is used. Something that grows naturally will often look less neat and intentioned than what would be planned perfectly by a website owner, for example. A natural link profile would have a good number of ‘no follow’ links, links that have neutral ‘stopwords’, and links that use generic words like ‘page, ‘here’, and ‘there’. The most important back link metric seems to be the number, whereas the majority of the other back link features, like stopwords in the anchor text or no-follow links, are not as relevant as they are on Google.

Social Signals

Well-ranked web pages have a large number of tweets, plus ones, comments, likes, and shares. The number of social signals actually seems to correlate pretty well with the ranking position.

Quality Content

As with Google, pages with more text seem to rank more highly. Higher ranking pages have more text. In fact, on Bing, and by extension, Yahoo, the pages in the top 30 results had about 100 more words than the corresponding positions on Google.

On Page Factors

H1 headings, meta keywords, and titles are also important. On page technical factors cannot be disregarded. All high ranking pages on Yahoo have them included.

White Hat vs. Black Hat

Bing and Yahoo don’t seem to be fighting black hat SEO tactics as much as Google is. Thus, for example, the number of back links, regardless of their makeup, seems to be more important on Bing than on Google.

Directories Don’t Seem to Have as Much of an Effect on Yahoo Search

Directories don’t seem to have as much of an effect on Yahoo Search as they do on Google. Directory listings have taken a big dive in the last years, and, in fact, many directory listings are starting to be frowned upon by Google, even. It is starting to look like a black hat tactic more and more. Anything you do to game the system, and that includes low quality directory listings, do not look natural to Google. It might seem like Bing wouldn’t care as much, because they’re not as tough on black hat as Google, but directory listings still don’t seem to matter that much to Bing, and by extension, Yahoo Search.

Conclusion

Ranking well on Bing, and by extension Yahoo, is not much different than ranking well on Google. An ideal search engine marketing approach would be to come up with one marketing program that could cover all the major search engines. Big brands, more back links, and pages with more text content seem to do better on Bing. However, you may want to curb you black hat efforts now because if the past has taught us anything about search engine marketing, it’s that search engines will crack down on black hat tactics over enough time.

If you want to rank high in all major search engines, visit Marketing Ignite.

The post How to Rank Your Website Higher in Yahoo Search Results appeared first on Marketing Ignite.

Free Top 10 WordPress Plugins to Use for Your Business Website

Johan Hedin — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 12:08:16 +0000

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Free Top 10 WordPress Plugins to Use for Your Business Website

Posted By: Johan Hedin

Everyone knows that SEO is a huge field, and it requires a ton of knowledge to get it right. However, if you are serious enough, you are going to take the plunge in and learn as much as possible. Your marketing firm, business, or blog can’t afford to not have the visitors – because visitors lead to money. A good rule of thumb online is that the more visitors you have, the more money you’ll make. It’s a principle that applies to offline business too. SEO is all about pulling in those visitors, because search engines are one of the primary ways that people find websites. Improving your authorship and brand presence are secondary advantages to good SEO work. The more exposure you have, the more people see your brand, and the more well-written articles, blog posts, news pieces, and eBooks you have posted on your site, the more you contribute to the cycle, and that cycle leads to more visitors, more credibility, and more trust from consumers. What is the bottom line? You need to work on SEO to make sure those visitors keep coming in.

WordPress SEO Plug-ins

What can you do to work on SEO if you run a WordPress site? If you’re running a site on WordPress, the world’s most popular website development platform, then you’re going to want to use a number of SEO plugins to help your chances of doing well in the search engines. WordPress lets you utilize a number of free and paid plug-ins that can enhance your site in numerous ways, and SEO plug-ins are a very popular area of the plug-in marketplace.

The Top Ten WordPress SEO Plug-ins

Let’s explore the top ten WordPress SEO plug-ins for 2013.

1. SEOPressor

SEOPressor is definitely the most powerful all-in-one SEO plug-in. It can help you manage all your post formats, posts, and pages. It even has a keyword research tool that’s built right in to help you find those juicy long-tail keywords. It has a number of page and post analysis tools, as well.

2. All in One SEO Pack

This is one of the most well-known SEO plug-ins, and it’s built for magazines, ecommerce websites, online businesses, and bloggers. It has over ten million downloads, and it has a pretty high overall rating. The pro version of the software has a lot of features that you won’t get in the free version, including installation and premium support. This tool helps a lot with on-page optimization, and it can automatically generate meta keywords, meta description, and other on-page elements for your posts.

3. WordPress SEO by Yoast

With almost five million downloads, and with a rating near almost five, it is one of the best SEO plug-ins out there. His plug-in has been used by several high-profile websites, like TheNextWeb and Mashable, amongst others. The plug-in even includes an option to integrate the newest features to make your website more social-friendly.

4. WP Social

This is a plug-in that focuses on making your website a lot more social-friendly. Most people are aware by now that Google has been using social signals extensively to help rank web pages. This is a plug-in that helps you optimize your website to take the most advantage of social signals. It helps you add social media sharing buttons, Twitter meta data, Google authorship tools, and even more.

5. Google Sitemap

BestWebSoft came out with this powerful and easy plug-in that lets you easily make and submit your sitemaps to Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. This plug-in is very simple, and it supports multiple kinds of post formats.

6. SEO Friendly Images

This is a plug-in that easily helps you boost your search engine traffic by boosting your images’ positions in the Google Image search results. Up to 15% of searches on Google are in the Google Image search. If you’re missing out on that traffic, then you’re not doing the best you can for your site.

7. HeadSpace2 SEO

HeadSpace2 is another SEO plug-in for WordPress that lets you control all the meta data of your site. You can add Google Analytics, and it supports advanced tagging too.

8. Automatic SEO Links

This plug-in helps your linking management significantly. There is virtually nothing easier when it comes to managing your links. This plug-in can even change the words in the plain text, if it finds a word in the header, title, or link.

9. 404 SEO Plug-in

This plug-in will turn that Error 404 Page Not Found into a page with related links on your site, with the help of the words it finds in the URL. You can have total control over redirects and dead links with this plug-in.

10. SEO Rank Report

The SEO Rank Reporter is a special plug-in that lets you track your Google ranking based on the keywords that you enter in, and it display the results in a user-friendly graph so that you can easily make sense of it and make the required changes to enhance your traffic flow.

While these plug-ins can’t guarantee more traffic, they can ensure that you manage your keywords, pages, and posts in the best way possible to contribute to higher rankings. The most critical aspect, when it comes to getting higher SEO rankings, is to just create better content than your competitors do. Google and other search engines have become better at just recognizing great content, recognizing what people like on social networks, and then reflecting that in their search engine results. While WordPress SEO plug-ins can help your SEO efforts, they are by no means the key to unlocking a lot of search engine traffic.

The post Free Top 10 WordPress Plugins to Use for Your Business Website appeared first on Marketing Ignite.

Steps to Delete Repeat Keywords in PPC Account

Johan Hedin — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 12:07:18 +0000

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Steps to Delete Repeat Keywords in PPC Account

Posted By: Johan Hedin

Keywords form a vital part of any writing assignment. It is only the keywords which can boost your rankings or show you the door when it comes to climbing up the page rank. This increases the relative worth of keywords and makes them an important part of your writing process. However, at times you might have noticed that keywords get repeated or duplicated. This is a precarious situation, especially if you are managing a PPC account.

However, all is not lost yet and you can take corrective measures to ensure that your PPC account is clean of duplicate keywords. Before we dwell on the process of removing the duplicate keywords from the PPC account, it is all the more relevant to understand as to why you need to clean up the duplicate keywords in the first place.

The Need for Cleaning up the Duplicate Keywords

Do not panic if you see your PPC account full of duplicate keywords. You must remember the fact that it is almost impossible of sorts to have a PPC account which does not contain duplicate keywords. This situation becomes more complicated in case you have multiple people working on a single account. They may be frequently adjusting the match types or making changes in account settings, leading to duplication of keywords in the PPC account.

At times, some advertisers use duplicate keywords intentionally. This is done under the misconception that the advertisement can make its appearance twice for a single auction.

This is a misconception and you can lose your worth if you fall prey to any such initiative. AdWords is intelligent software and will only showcase one advertisement per advertiser, every time a search is initiated.

Duplicates are always dangerous and the same applies to keywords. If you promote the strategy of using duplicate keywords, you will be playing on the quality aspect as your trust graph will go down. In case you bid for the same keyword more than once, both get entered into the same auction and you will end up competing with yourself only.

Another point which needs to be highlighted here is that most of the time confusion prevails among advertisers on what falls under the preview of a duplicate keyword. These keywords can cause irreparable damage to your endeavor if they are same in action and target relatively the same audience repeatedly.

Let us understand this with the help of an example. Online Jobs from Home and Jobs from Home Online are virtually the same kind of keywords and can be considered duplicate. Avoid using these kinds of keywords in a single content as this can harm your initiative causing professional and financial losses to you.

Is It Acceptable To Have Duplicate Keywords in Certain Conditions?

You might be surprised to know, but it is true that in certain exceptional circumstances, it is considered as acceptable to have duplicate keywords. Let us consider few such scenarios before we come to finding ways to removing the duplicate keywords from the PPC account.

1.) Duplicate keywords can be used in circumstances when a campaign has been set to serve advertisements in distinct geographic locations. Most advertisers who use duplicate keywords in their PPC account use this strategy. This way one can bid on the same keyword in each of the campaigns undertaken as no duplication will be noticed in the same auction.

2.) Similar keywords can be used in search campaigns and display network campaigns. These keywords are all set to be utilized in distinct circumstances and these will never affect the account performance.

Finding and Removing Duplicate Keywords in the PPC Account

After debating on the need to clean up duplicate keywords from a PPC account and discussing scenarios where it is acceptable to have duplicate keywords, it is time to find ways and means of removing duplicate keywords from the PPC account.

When you embark on the task of identifying the duplicate keywords in any PPC account it might seem like a challenging task. However, by using the AdWords Editor Magic, finding and removing duplicate keywords from the PPC account becomes extremely easy.

1.) In case you do not have AdWords Editor, you will be required to download the same. This is a free tool from Google and works offline too. It is a must have if you are using the PPC account on a regular basis and can be used with extreme ease.

2.) As the account gets downloaded, it is time to head to this tool’s dropdown and thereafter select “Find Duplicate Keywords”.

3.) Distinct types of duplicate keywords have different impact on the PPC account. The duplicate keywords can be identified and selected through the AdWords Editor too in following four ways:

a) By Word Order

b) Through Match Types

c) Through Location of Duplicates

d) Hiding the Duplicates Option

Identifying and selection of duplicate keywords by Word Order

When you choose this option, two distinct options in form of Strict Word Order and Any Word Order crop up. You can tick any of the two depending upon your imperative requirement.

Identifying and selecting duplicate keywords through Match Types

You can alternatively identify and select the duplicate keywords through match types. Once you select this option, you can tick either on the same match type option or different match type option. In both of the scenarios, the duplicate keywords get removed from the PPC account.

Identification and selection of the duplicate keywords through Location of Duplicates

If you choose this option for removing the duplicate keywords from your PPC account, three distinct options show up. These include duplicate keywords in the same ad group, duplicate keywords in the same campaign (these might be scattered across various ad groups) and duplicate keywords across selected campaigns. You can choose any of the options as per your imminent requirement to remove the duplicate keywords from your PPC account.

Hiding the Duplicate Options

This is an option feature in the AdWords Editor tool. By using this option you are in a position to select duplicate keywords in deleted and campaigns which have ended in the past. The option can also be used for finding duplicate keywords in campaigns which have been paused owing to any of the reasons.

Duplicate keywords in your PPC account are a grave danger to your professional presence. Remove the same and reap the benefits of being a true professional.

The post Steps to Delete Repeat Keywords in PPC Account appeared first on Marketing Ignite.

In-house vs. Outsourced SEO: Which is the Best Option?

Johan Hedin — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 11:34:26 +0000

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In-house vs. Outsourced SEO: Which is the Best Option?

Posted By: Johan Hedin

Should I hire in-house SEO specialists or outsource instead?

This question keeps many business owners up at night.

Do you lose sleep over this, too?

When it comes to SEO, you want to have the best SEO guy in town.

I mean, you can’t just let a random guy who claims “I do SEO” touch your business.

Right?

So we decided to help you answer this question once and for all.

In this blog post, we’re going to uncover the deep crevices of the in-house vs. outsourced SEO issue so you can make the best decision for your business.

In-house Vs. Outsourced SEO:

3 Important Questions to Ask Yourself

The key to deciding on this matter is to consider the needs and capacity of your business.

Think Which risks am i willing to take?

Think about the following questions carefully, and after this, you should have a clear answer of whether or not to outsource your SEO:

Question #1: What kinds of risks are you willing to take?

Question #2: Which course of action makes more sense to you financially?

Question #3: How much control do you want to have over your SEO strategy?

Okay, you ready?

Let’s dive in!

Question #1: What kinds of risks are you willing to take?

The first question deals with the kinds of battle you will choose.

Both building an in-house agency and outsourcing your SEO involve risks, but these risks differ significantly.

Let’s start with the risks of building an SEO team.

THE RISKS OF BUILDING AN IN-HOUSE SEO TEAM

Here’s the thing about SEO:

Just about anyone with Internet and knows how to make a Google search can learn the basics of SEO.

There’s no shortage of blog posts, guides, ebooks, podcasts, video tutorials, and even online courses that teach you how to do SEO.

I mean, a simple search of the word “SEO” on Google gets me these results:

It’s amazing how much you can learn about SEO for free…

But that presents a possible problem for us:

It makes it so easy for anybody to claim they “know SEO”.

And anybody can get certified as an “SEO Expert” with any paid courses out there.

But what sets apart the real SEO experts from the bunch is, simply, lots of experience.

It’s easy to create a great-looking resume and answer questions about SEO during an interview, but you’ll only really know if your hire’s the real deal once they start working for you.

And if you find out that the “expert” is full of fluff, you’ll fire the guy, look for a replacement, and unnecessarily lose money in the process.

Because firing and looking for replacements are such a waste of time and money, most companies don’t bother and just hope that their hire will learn soon enough.

The risk of hiring the wrong guy and pushing back your timeline months or even years – and losing a significant amount of money – is very real.

What you can do to avoid it is to have a thorough, strict hiring process – which requires you to have a discerning hiring officer and a test to properly gauge a person’s SEO skills.

THE RISKS OF OUTSOURCING YOUR SEO TO AN SEO AGENCY

If you don’t want to deal with the risk of hiring the wrong people for your SEO team, outsourcing to an SEO agency may make more sense.

SEO agencies – like Marketing Ignite – are armed with the expertise, tools, and experience needed to successfully pull off an SEO project.

Sure, there’s still the risk of working with the wrong agency, but this can be minimized by asking for client testimonials and case studies.

Successful SEO agencies often have lots of case studies under their belt to prove that they know what they’re doing.

Look for stuff like these:

These are some of our case studies, and you can clearly see the date range and important KPIs like the rate of increase in users and goal completion.

Seeing an agency’s track record just really eases your mind.

You can also ask for a list of previous and existing clients that you can talk to, and most agencies would be happy to comply.

It’s a lot easier to verify an agency’s experience than an individual.

But don’t be mistaken:

Outsourcing to an SEO agency is far from being safe.

For one, there’s the risk of the agency not being familiar enough with your industry or not willing to go the extra mile to know it like the back of their hands.

There are also agencies that go off the grid for days, leaving you wondering about the status of your project.

To address these risks, you can ask if the agency has worked with companies in a similar industry as yours.

You can also look at their previous works, ask them, or ask their clients about their communication and reporting style.

So those are some of the risks involved in hiring an in-house SEO team and outsourcing to an agency.

Ask yourself:

Which risks am i willing to take?

Let’s now tackle the second question.

Question #2: Which course of action makes more sense to you financially?

This is a crucial question… and arguably the biggest factor you should consider.

Everything boils down to your budget.

I am a businessman, and I know the importance of drawing a budget and sticking to it.

Both building an in-house SEO team and outsourcing to an SEO agency will cost you…

But more often than not, building and maintaining the perfect SEO team will cost you more.

Let’s dig deeper into this.

THE COST OF HIRING SEO SPECIALIST

SEO Specialists are not cheap.

At least the best ones aren’t.

When hiring an in-house SEO team, you’re going to have to deal with three main expenses:

Salary
Benefits
Tools and training

Salary

According to this report, SEO Specialists in the US earn an average of $63,193 annual income.

This is the highest average salary of SEO Specialists on the planet.

Image Source

The report also found that the salary of SEO Specialists had a

28% increase from 2016 to 2017.

This only means that if you were to hire an in-house SEO guy, you should expect a significant salary increase every year.

And here’s the thing:

You often need more than one guy to properly SEO your site.

Here’s an overview of the SEO process from Psynapsis;

Image Source

Each phase requires unique skills and expertise, which means you need at least one guy for each.

An in-house SEO team should have at least the following players:

A project manager – this should be the person who develops SEO goals, delegates tasks, and oversees the entire project. Average annual salary: $44,000 – $94,000
Data analyst – this guy should know how to interpret traffic analytics, keyword data, and other KPIs. Average annual salary: $35,000 – $70,000
Content Creator – content drives SEO, so your team should have at least one creative to get the ball rolling. Average annual salary: $37,000 – $85,000
Link Builder – link building is a huge part of SEO, so at least one person should be pursuing link building opportunities for you. Average annual salary: $23,000 – $52000
Web Developer – site speed, responsiveness, and all that other techie stuff also impact SEO, so your web developer should be adept at optimizing your site. Average annual salary: $38,000 – $85,000

Salaries are based on figures provided by www.PayScale.com.

Whew. Big numbers.

While some folks get tempted into hiring newbies just to save a few bucks, what you save on their salary might cost you more in the long-term.

Benefits

You also have to consider the medical and other sorts of benefits you need to provide to your team.

Kaiser found that small businesses have to pay around $6,400 and $17,600 annual health insurance premiums for single and family coverage, respectively.

This is the main reason why more small businesses are not providing HMO at all…

And you shouldn’t be one of them.

Lack of health benefits is the reason for 20 percent of employees to leave their job, according to an Aflac Workforces study.

If the premiums are too high, you can explore alternatives to group health insurance such as the QSEHRA or “qualified small employer health reimbursement arrangement”.

Tools and Training

I know by now you’re realizing that building an SEO team is expensive, but there’s one last thing we need to talk about.

The SEO landscape is constantly changing, so what works today might not work tomorrow.

Considering this, you need to invest in your team’s regular training, so they can be and stay the best at what they do.

This means paid courses, seminars, conferences, etc.

Here’s another thing:

When you hire an SEO team, you can’t expect them to bring their own SEO arsenal.

You need to buy your own SEO tools to stay on top of the competition and achieve your KPI’s.

Although there are many awesome free tools out there, for some tasks you just have to go for the paid ones.

Here are some of the best premium SEO tools that many online marketers swear by (with their monthly subscription rates):

Friendly tip: If you can’t invest in premium SEO tools right away, you can try out the free ones first and upgrade to the paid ones later on.

Now let’s talk about the costs of outsourcing your SEO.

COST OF OUTSOURCING TO AN SEO AGENCY

I’m not going to tell you that working with an SEO outsourcing company is affordable.

Because it’s not.

Despite that, it’s usually more affordable than hiring an entire in-house SEO team even if the agency is comprised of highly paid experts in the industry.

An SEO outsourcing company can charge by the hour, monthly, or per project – which often means more flexible payment setups.

Let’s take a look at each closely.

Hourly Rates

SEO consultants often charge $80-$400/hour.

Monthly Retainers

SEO agencies also offer monthly retainers for a set of agreed-upon tasks such as:

Link building
Keyword research
On-page optimization
Regular analytics reports

Monthly retainers often range from $400-$2,000/month depending on the scope of tasks.

Project Fees

Projects often cost around $5,000 to $30,000 depending on the scope and level of complexity.

What’s great about project-based fees is you can set the scope of the entire project so you’ll know exactly what you’re going to get.

And here’s the kicker:

You can totally forget about paying for benefits and tools.

The burden of paying for health benefits falls on the agency owner’s lap, and any decent SEO agency will have their own top-of-the-line tools to get the job done.

COSTS: THE BOTTOM LINE

Needless to say, when it comes to costs, outsourcing SEO often wins.

With SEO agencies, you have many payment options to suit your current situation.

And you don’t have to worry about taxes, benefits, tools, training, and all those expensive stuff.

As this is a crucial part of the decision, I suggest that you:

Create a budget for SEO (annual if possible), and
Decide your desired ROI

You can then start asking for quotes from agencies and comparing that with the potential costs of hiring an internal SEO team.

Now it’s time for the last question…

Question #3: How much control do you want to have over your SEO strategy?

The last thing I want to talk about is the level of control you’re going to get in both options.

This is a pretty important issue to think about as soon as possible, so that you won’t be stressed over it later on.

FULL CONTROL WITH AN IN-HOUSE SEO TEAM

One of the most attractive benefits of hiring an in-house SEO team is the full control you’ll have over the SEO strategies that they will develop.

You can roll up your sleeves and get really hands-on here.

You can literally stand behind your team and look at their screens whenever you want.

This is ideal if:

You have a background in SEO (meaning you know keywords, backlinks, and effective SEO techniques)
You have the time to closely collaborate
You want to closely monitor the progress of your team

In other words, if you see yourself sitting down with your SEO team over coffee and learning all about their latest adventures, then an in-house team may be great for you.

It’s also easier to communicate with them regularly since they’re just in the next cubicle.

This results in an easier back-and-forth collaboration between your marketing, sales, and SEO departments.

LESS CONTROL WITH AN SEO AGENCY

On the other side of the coin, if you want to get your hands off the entire thing, then an SEO agency makes the most sense.

Working with an SEO agency looks a lot like this:

You’ll have an initial consultation where the agency tries to get to know you and your business.
The SEO Agency will then develop an initial SEO strategy based on your specific needs and goals.
You give your stamp of approval (or rejection).
They implement (or revise until ready for implementation).
They give you regular reports.

Notice that in the entire process, you only have to be involved in the first and third steps.

And all you have to do is literally discuss your business and read and evaluate their proposal.

Once the strategy is finalized, you can sit back, focus on the other sides of your business, and get regular updates on how everything’s going.

You’re essentially paying a bunch of SEO experts to handle the entire thing for you.

The level of control is obviously less, but it’s a trade-off for more time and less effort on your part.

There’s also a higher sense of security that your SEO is in capable hands.

The flipside to this is you’ll also have a tougher time getting them onboard with recent changes in your company.

An in-house SEO team is just a few steps away in case there’s an important update about your company or industry.

You won’t get that with an external agency.

Here’s a scenario:

If your marketing and sales department decided it’s a great time to launch an exclusive discount campaign, they can easily tell your web developer and SEO team to add a webpage specifically for that purpose.

It won’t be as easy with an SEO agency.

This is one of the common issues when working with an agency, but at Marketing Ignite we remedy this by maintaining an open line of communication with all of our clients.

Again, it’s a trade-off between the level of control and time, effort, and ease of communication.

So:

Do you want to have total control over you SEO or have someone else take the reins?

SO WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Those were the three crucial questions you need to answer to decide whether to build an in-house SEO team or outsource SEO services to an agency.

Now I want to hear your thoughts:

At this point, what do you think is the best course of action for your business?

Share it with us by leaving a quick comment below.

The post In-house vs. Outsourced SEO: Which is the Best Option? appeared first on Marketing Ignite.