SEO is a critical part of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and is the foundation for any online marketing strategy. It includes: finding keywords that prospects are actively searching for, updating each web page to conform to SEO practices, creating and executing on a website linking strategy among other steps. Essentially, SEO is the procedure a webmaster uses to make a website ready to be found in search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo) keyword / keyphrase search results.

A comprehensive online marketing strategy is more than just SEO – it involves applying marketing principles to your web properties and developing marketing campaigns to propel your brand to the top of your prospect and customers mind.

Consider your average customer lifetime value. How many more customers per month do you need to pay for the service?

A monthly investment of $2500+ in your own marketing consultant can return in spades. Consider this – a top realtor in the city spends more than $50K PER MONTH on their marketing (offline and online) and gets a return of more than double the investment yearly!

Great question – after the foundational SEO is performed, there are many more steps to take to ensure that conversions take place. From content marketing to conversion analysis and split testing, just having a web presence is not enough to translate visitors into active participants and buyers!

It can transform your local business! If you are no where to be found in the search results for key words/phrases that describe your product or service (i.e. not in the top 3 search results pages of Google). If your online marketing consultant can come in and get you ranking on the first page of Google, and ideally within the first 5 results of the page, then you will see a noticeable increase in visitors to your web pages. An increase in traffic can mean an increase in calls and emails from prospects that you can then close into customers.

Definitely! Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the foundation of online marketing, but it is just the start. Content Marketing, Social Media, Pay per Click, Webinars, Marketing Automation and more are all building blocks that add jet fuel to a good search engine marketing strategy.

Sure, as long as you are willing to take the time and the effort to learn about the numerous aspects of the craft and have the technical savvy to implement and test the strategies!

Two things – (1) Probably because they are not any good and/or (2) your business is in a very competitive space online. Either way, it helps to get a second opinion and have a thorough diagnostic done to your current web presence and monthly marketing campaigns.

PPC (such as Google Adwords) is a strategy businesses use to get their website to the top of Google search results. You bid and ultimately pay for a set of keywords and when someone searches on those words, your Ad (headline, short description and link to your web page) may show up at the top of the search results where the paid Ads are shown.

Generally on Google’s search results page (SERP) the Ads are shown at the very top (at most 3 of them) and at the right of the page. An example is if you searched for golf deals in edmonton (click for screen shot here) where you will see PPC Ads on top and on the side.

The ‘Pay’ portion refers to how much that website owner pays every time some one clicks on their Ad. The price per click varies based on how competitive the keywords are that brought up the ad.

Although extremely effective in driving visitors to your website, PPC can be a very very expensive advertising medium and should be done with a clear understanding of positive and negative keywords, and understanding of the keyword bidding process and the grouping of ads amongst other important concepts.

You can read more about Google Adwords from the search engine company itself by reading this blog found here