Search Engine Optimization is the process of modifying and enhancing your website so that it will show up on the first page of search engines for a certain set of keywords.

Why do you need SEO?

The way people shop for goods and services is constantly evolving.

50 years ago direct mail and catalogs began taking huge market share from brick and mortar retailers. Now the internet is putting direct mail and catalog companies out of business.

Things change – as a business owner it is your duty to go where the customers are.

Over the last 10 years more and more people have become familiar with search engines and now prefer to use the internet to find what they are looking for.

Today, when people want to find something, they use the internet to do it. They do this by going to Google and typing in a phrase that they think describes what they are looking for.
This search phrase is generally referred to as “keywords”.

If prospects can’t easily find your website, they can’t learn of your great products and services and they can’t become your customers. But they are going to do business – if not with you than with your competitor.

It’s time to be found.

It is possible to manipulate the results provided by search engines. It is not easy, but with the right skill and effort, it is possible to make your website show up in search engines under certain keywords.

Make a list of they things your prospect might use when he is looking for the product or service you provide. Then go search them in Google. If you don’t see your website – we can help.

eHotLeads is a Portland-based company that offers affordable SEO packages for small and micro businesses. Our pricing is as low as $400 per month.

In order to get sales leads from the Internet you will need compelling sales copy,
attention grabbing design, HTML programming, and online advertising.

But that’s just the start…

You will also need to measure response rates and track the results of hundreds of keywords, each of which can cost up to $3 per click.

In order to be successful, Lead Generation Campaigns must be carefully planned and executed.
The right expertise makes all the difference. That’s where we come in.

Affordable Online Advertising that works.

We created eHotLeads with a simple approach – to refine our clients unique selling proposition into a one page ad (landing page) and promote them online.

We capture the contact information of prospects who are genuinely interested.
This creates high quality sales leads for our customers.

» Learn how we will get your sales leads

It’s like when entrepreneurs get together they think their idea is so great that it doesn’t matter what they call their product or company, because it’s going to “sell itself”.

Take for example Jack in the Box. Who wants to buy a hamburger from a clown or a childs toy? How did they come up with that? Were they trying to copy Ronald McDonald or something?

Now compare that with KFC. Now there’s a name says exactly what it is.

The best company names say exactly what you are going to get, or even better- the value you are going to get when you make a purchase.

Good Names:

Best Buy – implies that when you shop here, you will get the best price. Even though in many cases that isn’t true. My wife and I call them Worst Buy, because their accessories are extremely overpriced. $50 for a 2′ Audio/Video cable? Seriously.

Bed Bath & Beyond – no question about what kind of products you will find there.

24×7 IT – Do you worry about not being able to get a hold of your IT support during a crisis? Not with these guys. Their name implies they will always be there.

The Honey Baked Ham Company – They sell one thing. Their name describes what that thing is. It’s hard to compete against them because their name IS the product.

Gentle Dental – Not only does it rhyme, it addresses one of the primary reasons people don’t like going to the dentist – fear of pain. Who are you going to choose? Gentle Dental or Advanced Dental Solutions Inc?

Mediocre Names:

Geek Squad – Probably would have been better to name it “Helpful Geeks” or something that conjures images of that friendly neighbor techie who would always spend a couple minutes making your TV or computer work right.

Terrible Names:

Anything with “Solutions” in the name – People just need to stop it.
That goes for Consulting, Technologies, Services and Systems as well.

Just say what you provide. Don’t call yourself Omega Solutions or Integrated Technologies (sorry if that’s your real name). Call yourself Reliable Networks Inc or something that at least hints and the benefit customers will get when they hire you.

Ever notice that Sushi and Teriyaki places never have complicated names?
They are always Something Sushi, or Teriyaki Something.

Stop trying to sound so cool. You are confusing your potential customers.

Your company and product names need to be so simple that an idiot who knows nothing about you could look at your name and infer what you provide.

If that’s too hard of a task, contact eHotLeads and for $1000 I will personally evaluate what you are providing and come up with a killer name for your company.

While we are at it, we will also create a PPC and SEO Lead Generation Campaign that brings you high quality sales leads who are genuinely interested in the product or service you provide.

My opinion: unless you have mega bucks to spend on branding, stick with a simple name that says exactly what you are offering.

Then for some reason their interest in internet marketing is re-ignited years later and they set out to redesign their website thinking that a new design will certainly turn their website into a sales lead generation machine.

If this sounds familiar, consider the following before investing in a web site redesign…

1. Do you have the statistic tracking needed to measure improvement?

The problem here is that no one bothered to install statistical tracking and no one knows how well the original site performs. If you don’t know how well your existing site performs, how are you going to be able to measure any improvement? (or lack there of)

I have a friend who owns a website selling educational books. She was totally unaware of how well her website converted because there was no statistical tracking. After an expensive redesign she noticed that sales were not as plentiful.

She went back to the old design and installed Google Analytics and found that the original site had a conversion rate of over 10% (that’s pretty good 1 out of 10 visitors made a purchase).

Newer is not better. Better is better.

Don’t try to improve something before you have accurately measured its existing performance and have the tools in place to measure improvement.

2. Is it just the design that needs work, or is there more?

How well does your content convert visitors into sales leads? You need to know this number.

Is it 1 out of 10, 1 out of 100, or 1 out of 1000?

Most of our clients get 1 out of 20 from PPC campaigns and 1 out of 40 from organic search.

Writing compelling sales text that turns visitors into customers is both an art and a science. Copy-writing is probably the most undervalued element of any marketing campaign.

In the direct marketing business they say that a successful advertisement is 40% List (meaning who its shown to) 40% Copy and 20% design.

Are you about to spend 80% of your marketing budget on an element that only influences 20% of the outcome? Don’t get caught chasing diminishing returns.

3. Is there something more important you should be doing?

Is your old, outdated looking website really your biggest marketing problem?

If it is, then by all means, fix it. But most companies suffer from a harder problem and use the website as a scape-goat project to work on instead of addressing the real (often times really hard) problem.

Perhaps your sales team just plain sucks and needs some training. Perhaps you are approaching your market from the wrong perspective. It’s easy to miss key insights when you are directly involved in day to day operations.

Are you working IN your business or ON your business? There is a huge difference.

Any number of things can go awry in a business. There are a million ways to grow a business and probably only a dozen will work for your company. Your job as a marketer is to find the best way to grow your company, and you don’t do that by guessing.

Looking for a internet marketing company with real world marketing experience and good general business sense?

» Learn how we can help grow your company

Organic Search Results are important too. Developing high quality content and seeking out relevant inbound links will help your site rank well on Google, Yahoo, Bing & AOL.

The techniques involved with SEM (search engine marketing) and SEO (search engine optimization) allow you to utilize CPL to increase your lead generation. With the cost per lead method, pretty much the same thing happens. Another website will host an ad for your site, for free, and you only pay if someone clicks the link and generates a lead for you. The lead generation is very important here, as it marks a key difference between CPL and PPC (pay per click) advertising. With PPC, you pay the site anytime someone clicks the link on their site to come to yours. It doesn’t matter if they do anything after that or not. You still pay anyways.

With CPL, the visitor must not just click the link, but also generate a lead. That means they need do something that will help you generate a potential sale. They might have to fill out a marketing survey or sign up for a newsletter. The newsletter is usually what most people accept as the terms for this type of advertising. If you can get someone’s email address, you can always follow up with them and try to land a sale later one.

In order for PI advertising to work correctly, it needs to be able to be tracked, so that the advertiser knows exactly who is responding to his ad. With CPL, you can see exactly what site the user came from and you can see if they signed up for anything. Thus you know exactly which hosting sites to pay and which ones not to pay. Another benefit of CPL is that you can use SEM and SEO to help increase traffic to your site.

SEO stands for search engine optimization, which means making modifications to your website that will increase its ranking on a page of search results.  There are actually a couple different ways to go about search engine optimization, and those are referred to as on page and off page.

One of the most popular optimization techniques is to use keywords which you want to rank well on in the text throughout your site.  When those words are searched for the chances of your site being among the top of the results is much greater.  This method is an example an on page optimization.

Another on page factor that you can utilize to help increase awareness of your site is to use meta tags.  When creating your website, you can place meta tags into the site’s source code, which will not be seen by users and visitors to the site, but only by search engine bots.

In these meta tags, you can place any combination of words and phrases you want to be associated with your website.  Although these techniques are widely used and considered an acceptable lead generation tool, there are some methods that are looked down.  You should avoid using things like hidden links or text on the page that the search engine can read, but users can’t.  Also avoid keyword stuffing in the content on your site.  These practices are considered very deceptive.

When you are looking to use SEM (search engine marketing) to increase traffic to your site, there are things that affect the SEO that are not done directly on your website.  One of the off page things you can do to increase your lead generation is to put keywords in the anchor text on your hyperlinks.

When doing search engine optimization its critical to do your research and come up with a short list of targeted keywords to focus on so you can actually measure results.  In other words, don’t just come up with keywords and phrases off the top of your head, find words and phrases that people are actually searching for.

PPC (pay per click) ads are a great way to refine and test your list of keywords – PPC can provide fast results, but it will cost you.  We generally like to use PPC to see what keywords will provide results in generating leads for you.  This prevents wasted time spent optimizing for phrases that no one uses and have a low probability of bringing you traffic.  With a potentially unlimited number of phrases that can be searched, you should focus your time and efforts on key phrases that will pay off immediately.

Sometimes on search engines, a business can have a list of keywords associated with their site and when that word or phrase is searched for, an ad may be displayed, trying to get people to click on it. These advertisements that are placed at the top of the page of search results are PPC ads, but they are more commonly referred as sponsored links. Sponsored links are contrasted with organic SEO. Organic SEO refers to using keywords or key phrases on your websites and trying to be found on a search engine within the regular listings, rather than having an ad right at the top.

This has become a topic of discussion for those that deal with SEM (search engine marketing). If you have a site set up, no matter what you use it for or what you sell on it, you will have to find a way to let people know that the site exists and get their attention enough to get them to visit the site. So you have to choose which path to take. Do you go with sponsored links which appear as ads, but most people can’t tell the difference between the sponsored ads and other search results? Or do you go with organic SEO, which may appear farther down the page within the search results?

If your business is looking for immediate sales, using sponsored links is a much better approach than using organic SEO. The organic approach could prove to work out better when looking at the long term potential of bringing in new customers through search engines. But if you are looking for sales right now, the best approach for lead generation and SEM is to get a sponsored link put up at the very top of search results.

Lead generation describes the process of someone paying another website to host their ad and when someone from that other site clicks the link and takes the time to fill out a survey or sign up for a newsletter, the site hosting the ad gets paid.

Sometimes an SEM model known as PPC (pay per click) is used instead. With this marketing model, the hosting site is paid when someone simply clicks the link.  They don’t have to sign up for or buy anything, just simply click the link to visit the site.  It is important to remember that even if you have to pay the other site for when someone just visits your site, but doesn’t end up buying or signing up for anything, if they do sign up for something, you need to follow up with them.  Lead generation would be rather pointless if you get leads and don’t do anything them later on.

Using email marketing to follow up with leads that were generated from PPC advertising is sometimes essential to take someone being only interested to turn them into a paying customer.  If you have a newsletter or something else on your site that people can sign up for, they are taking the first step in willingly giving you their email address.  In today’s world of spam and malware, that is actually a big deal.  The next step is yours to make, as you should take the initiative and follow up with them.

You can use things SEM and SEO to help draw users to your own site without having to hope they click a link on someone else’s site.  Using SEO (search engine optimization) is a way of putting specific keywords or phrases onto your site so that when those words or phrases are typed into a search engine, your site has a greater chance of being at the top of the list.  You can have a list of one million names on a mailing list, but if you don’t follow up with them, letting them know who you are, what you do and what you are selling.  Otherwise, your mailing list that used PPC for lead generation will prove to be worthless.

A similar method that is somewhat identical to the CPA model is CPL, which is cost per lead. This advertising model makes it much less risky for someone to put an ad on their website, as the user doesn’t necessarily have to make a purchase like they do with CPA. CPL only requires that someone make enough of an effort to show the person paying for the ad that they are interested enough that they might potentially buy something later. This can mean that the user does something like filling out a survey or signing up for a newsletter. This is known in the industry as lead generation, as someone signing up for a newsletter, for example, can potentially lead to a sale later on.

With SEM (search engine marketing) it can be hard sometimes to make money, depending on what the user has to actually do in order for the owner of a website to get paid. Probably the easiest form of advertisement to get paid from is PPC, where all a user has to do is click something. The next easiest is CPL, where the user needs to show interest by signing up for a newsletter or something similar. The hardest to make money from is CPA, as a user must actually click and make a purchase.

The best path to take would be to utilize CPL, as it makes use of PPC, SEM and SEO (search engine optimization) to make it work even better for them. This can be virtually risk free for the person putting the ad on their site. Using SEO, you can have specific keywords throughout your site so that search engines can find you. All of this is done to help increase the lead generation for the person paying for the ad.