SEO Results

HomeGuard

Does anyone have any data on leads or clicks that were generated as a result of Optimization (on your site). I'm really interested in anyone who was advertising their site prior to SEO and what the before # and after # is. Thanks for any help.

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Milk was a bad choice

LightYourNight

seo is soo crazy and time consuming. I've been doing some research lately. Its a interesting subject. What kind of site do you have?? Maybe I can ge you som tips!

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John Paul Cambruzzi
Landscape Lighting Specialist, LLC
www.LightYourNight.com

LightYourNight

MILK WAS A BAD CHOICE! haha good quote!

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John Paul Cambruzzi
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tinner666

If you mean PPC, or other paid ads, I didn't use any.

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Frank Slate Roof Repairs, Richmond, Va.

HomeGuard

I have data for the last 20 months with a ppc campaign. What I would like is any data that someone has prior to SEO(with or with out PPC) and then after achieving 1st page placement.

I'm creating a marketing plan, that possibly includes revamping the site with professional SEO management. But I would like to see if other's results justify dropping PPC altogether or adjusting the budget to accomodate both.

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Milk was a bad choice

tinner666

No hard data. 20 months ago, I hadn't done more than rudimentry seo with keywords. Had good PR, and 1 hit a month. Now, I get about 2-5 leads a week on average. Since last Wed., no leads. Well none, until about 10 minutes ago. He said he's ready to start one I bid 6 months back.

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Frank Slate Roof Repairs, Richmond, Va.

freshfitz

for $1500 - $2000 a month to seo websites, I think it's more worth it to use google adwords you can track your campaign's leads, sales, goals set a budget etc. I just set a company up with reachlocal.com don't know the results yet cause the campaign is too new, but they track how many people clicked your pay per click link they also track how many email's got sent tied to that pay per click link also they setup a virtual phone number and track how many phone calls to that number and records the call so you can monitor and manage what people are calling about pretty wild!

Crete Buster

I didn't keep any hard data on before our site was seo'd and after, but I know that I got 9 out of 10 leads from our website versus yellow pages after it was done.
@freshfitz - $1,500/mo is way more money than you need to spend on seo. However, if you compare it to someone spending that much on the yellow pages, it would be a much better roi even if you did spend $1,500/mo. For that much money though I would be on the first page search results for any keyword I wanted all over the world.

The good news is that for most of us in this industry, we are light years ahead of our competition when it comes to using the internet. It will not take much for most of us on this site to get first page results for our desired keywords in our area.

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Publisher1

Blogging can do magical things for your search rankings, but like most things valid in this space, it takes time. After eight months of daily updates in the wilderness of SEO obscurity, Google briefly suspended my blog -- for a real person review. Then, once some human eyes examined the thing and determined the blog wasn't spam or a SEO ploy, the Google rankings skyrocketed.
We receive three to five inquiries a day now -- while most of these do not convert to immediate business because of the regional nature of our services, some have been highly successful and relevant. (And of course some people here have been in touch with me because link backs from the blog now have some real SEO value to other sites!)
There is a paradox in SEO initiatives; if you engage in behaviours primarily for SEO you risk contorting yourself and possibly paying the penalty of the cat-and-mouse game with Google, whose intent is to generate relevant rather than 'optimized' results (unless, of course you want to pay for your ad spots, and then, I suppose, the optimization is purely to the level of your advertising budget!)
The more time I spend at this stuff, the more I realize the best way to handle SEO is simply to earn your relevance and backlinks, in other words, to do it naturally. But I would agree with working with a well-recommended website designer/developer familiar with the principals (not one of the so called SEO optimization services who frequently spam me) because the marketing cost this way is a lot less than most conventional methods.
In our industry, because things aren't so advanced or sophisticated, it is relatively easy to achieve high rankings, certainly for local services in most markets.

coolflatroof

I agree with publisher1 for the most part.

As far as hard data - 10 months ago my site was getting 10 visitors per months from Roofing.com - that is it. Now we get almost 200 visitors/day on a weekend, which are slow days - most from organic search. we get about 10-20+ real leads a week... It is getting to a point where we can't handle all these leads.

The site did start with SEO in mind, so the was no pre-SEO anything... We also never used PPC.

For you I recommend a slow transition from PPC to SEO. While using both, your goal should be to eliminate PPC with-in 6-12 months, at which point SEO should take ove in terms of bronging clients/leads.

My recommendations: get quality & relevant content to your site. Content that is designed for your visitors - not search bots. Get links to your site. Do not over-optimize too quickly.

In the end, SEO will kick in, if done smart, and you will not need PPC.
Good luck.

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LightYourNight

Be sure to add your business to google local and yahoo local. Your business will pop up on a map first thing in many local searches.

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www.LightYourNight.com

RidgeWalker

I don't have any data because what I did not realize is that I should have been split testing two versions of my home page a long time ago. Many reason I won't go into here. But you should be monitoring your web site statistics, many hosting companies offer basic statistical reporting that can be delivered on a daily basis to your email.

Paying for SEO? Here's a tip, before you hire ANY ONE claiming that they can rank your site for X dollars. Check out their companies Alexa Rating, Page Rank on Google, and do a Google search on them to see where they come up in the organic search engine results.

I find it very funny that SEO companies Guarantee 10 Ten rankings on Google when they can't even get their home page past the 2nd, 3rd, or worse when some one does a search for SEO companies!

Knowing what I know about SEO, which isn't much I'd never pay anywhere near the prices quoted by another poster in this thread.

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simplejack

I have a one page "profile" on a site and they provide three fields: I think it was meta tags and descriptions and keywords...

How often can I change a "Meta tag" or "or a key word on my page?
I was given a "meta description" "meta tag" and a key word field from my one page profile. and after filling it out I don't know how it worked (or even if it did!) is their a waiting period? do I get Indexed into google? and how long does it take?

I just entered: Local contractor, commercial construction, General contractor along with my specific city, and services and then how will changing these "key words" OFTEN affect my placement?

sorry their are four questions in their!

Mr. Mike

Please post a new topic for that...

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Rav

I believe in doing your due diligence, but sometimes there are small businesses that are run by genius SEO guys that are very busy and don't really do anything with their business sites. Because of generating sales to do their work.

I guess what i'm trying to say is don't judge a book by its cover. We have used a small business that produce some great results for organic results and the conversion for both the organic and ppc was great!

Yes we did our research by speaking to them personally and their thing was spreading the knowledge about seo/sem organic, ppc etc....
They can do this because nobody does it correctly to get results, and not everyone will market their website on their own, because we are all general contractors and we are busy making money... leave seo for the experts...

Oh yeh somebody mention check the site out on alexa, yeh thats good, but
did u know that most websites that are ranked hi are made up of your mom and pops businesses, and some to most fly under the radar of alexa...

Yes seo does work, but there is a method and its all about being specific of what it is that you want to produce on the internet..

fakie99

that's not true. businesses that show up on google or yahoo maps at the beginning of the search results are the ones with physical addresses within the city that was searched on.

Jordy3738

SEO becomes second nature for on site content and coding once you understand what works. There is a good tutorial at the SEO Guy website that is so right on.

SEO is worth learning if you spend a lot of time on the INTERNET. Generating content and back links takes time.

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astor

http://www.google.com/analytics/
This tool all you need, you can compare how it gets improved overtime.

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MOTB

I think the average contractor can do very good with SEO tactics since your business is so specific to general towns & cities that you serve. The lead generation services simply deploy SEO and PPC tactics but the SEO is for free and should be maximized. My business is so much harder for SEO becuase I tackle a national audience. The goal of each contractor is to ensure they show up on Page 1 of search results and that is done by a combination of SEO, having others link to you, and doing some blogging to provide additional creditibility for your business. Yes, you may want to pay for PPC while your SEO positioning is taking hold (which can take months), but SEO, once deployed doesn't cost you much other than your time to fine tune it. Brian

silvertree

SEO is something we can have control of. I started blogging and now have the #1 and 2 spot for a few Mpls, St Paul search terms. Its not a lot of traffic, but add up another 6 or 8 terms I place well at and I'm convinced I will chip away at some other terms I would like to place well with.
I beat Service Magic on some pages, and although I'm an amateur SEO student I do get some of what I should be doing. My blog helps a lot.

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