Getting an organic listing on google

Lyrical said:

So, I had an advertising rep call me up and tell me that they could get me an organic listing in google in all of the cities and suburbs that my business covers. But it was a lot of money.

Can anyone tell me how I can do this myself? We do google adwords banners, but they told me that only 40% of customers go there, and the other 60% pull people out through the organic links.

Thanks.

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Give Tyen $50 and he"ll do the same thing with 10 Fiverr purchases.

Lyrical said:

So, I had an advertising rep call me up and tell me that they could get me an organic listing in google in all of the cities and suburbs that my business covers. But it was a lot of money.

Can anyone tell me how I can do this myself? We do google adwords banners, but they told me that only 40% of customers go there, and the other 60% pull people out through the organic links.

Thanks.

Click to expand...

I do know that Google is changing their search algorithm to heavily weight social activity. Having your Google+ page claimed and updated will help your organic listings.

He"s probably talking about getting you into the local pack of search results. Slightly different algorithm than the primary results but they both kinda-sorta tie in together.

Here"s where I"d start:

1) google.com/placesforbusiness

2) Get an account setup on Yelp since ios6 is pulling organic data from them.

3) Check out getlisted.org and ubl.org for more sources to build local profiles

Keep in mind you"re going to see the most benefit out of this for localized search ("something in x") - These are usually shoppers or eaters looking for something specific.

Tyen said:

With adwords, do you even get engagement or just traffic only? ANYONE can drive traffic for you, but if 80% of that traffic is actually doing things you want them to, then you have something really nice.

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He said he"s getting around $10k/mo in revenue. It depends on the actual spend whether or not that"s worth it.

Lyrical said:

Do you believe that only 40% of viewers go to the google banner, and the other 60 goes to the organic listing? Because we are generating about 10k a month in sales off of the banner ad. So that would mean there is another 15k we are leaving on the table?

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Tough to say, lots of variables. Just because you"re in the # 1 adspot and # 1 organic spot doesn"t mean you"ll get 100% of the clicks (you"ll see some lift from the overlap, but people will still click on other pages in the list if the title/description is more compelling).

If it"s YP, they"ve got little overpriced bundles like everyone else - Very little of it is catered to your business, they"re just going by the numbers.

On Tyen"s Fiverr point - It still might work (sometimes) but I don"t like it anymore. For your personal business, if you"ve got the time I"d recommend having oversight in everything and understanding the impact it has on your business. If you spam the shit out of your site for rankings, go in knowing that you could lose everything and have to start over (paid search notwithstanding, they"ll still take your money for that.

Lyrical said:

Do you believe that only 40% of viewers go to the google banner, and the other 60 goes to the organic listing? Because we are generating about 10k a month in sales off of the banner ad. So that would mean there is another 15k we are leaving on the table?

Click to expand...

I don"t know the breakdown, but I do know I get far better ROI on my paid clicks than my organic listing.

I pay a company $4000 a month to handle all my SEO stuff, including organic listing, Facebook, Twitter, web integration, etc. I don"t know much about the organic listing stuff, but they do the legit (I guess) stuff called "white-hat". I"m not going to pretend I know what it is, but my friend that is into this stuff told me to make sure they did "white hat" so I would be in compliance with Google algorithms and not be penalized in the future.

My listing is almost always #1, that being said, I still generate far more calls and revenue from paid clicks. The importance of being listed #1 I feel has more to do with imprinting and branding than actual customers. It"s also much easier to track the clicks than it is your own website, so you may be generating more clients than you think from your listing.

However, for me personally, when I had extra money to spend, I bought more clicks. I purchased more area codes instead of key words, once I figured out which were my top ones. I went with Reach Local for my paid clicks.

Lyrical said:

Do you believe that only 40% of viewers go to the google banner, and the other 60 goes to the organic listing? Because we are generating about 10k a month in sales off of the banner ad. So that would mean there is another 15k we are leaving on the table?

Click to expand...

Purely anecdotal, but I ignore all the banners/paid search spots and instead go to organic listings.

I have a marketing meeting this afternoon with the head of marketing from my franchisor, I will ask if they have any data on organic vs paid search from the markets they do paid search in. They don"t tend to be very tech-savvy at corporate though so they might just give me a puzzled look on their face.

I see inquiries daily from people that spammed their business and are looking for a way to get their rankings back. The honeymoon period after spamming is great if you"re setup to handle the fallout. More often than not people rely primarily on their search revenue and when that goes away they"re in deep shit.

There"s definitely not a silver bullet for rankings/conversions. It mostly comes from trial and error and finding what works for what niche. If your gameplan is to just do some keyword research, farm out some content and spam some links, 2013 may not be a very good year.

The game has been changing dramatically in a very short timeframe. If you"re just getting into the business be prepared to read, a lot. I"d recommend staying away from places like the warrior forum and steer more toward webmaster world.

Tyen said:

Go to Fiverr.com

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Lyrical has a real business with real customers. The last thing he needs is anyone from fiverr within 100 miles of his site. Sure, it might be "possible" to do it that way, but the downside is much bigger than the upside.

Lyrical said:

So, I had an advertising rep call me up and tell me that they could get me an organic listing in google in all of the cities and suburbs that my business covers.

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Hiring a reputable SEO firm is very sketchy business. There are tons of them out there, and at this point, most of them will literally do more harm than good. And unlike some other businesses, having big clients doesn"t really mean they aren"t going to do harm.

Lyrical said:

Can anyone tell me how I can do this myself?

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Considering the lack of competition, you should be able to rank for local terms without much more than the intent to do so a bit of attention.

Very briefly:
Find the terms you want to rank for. (If you"re already using adsense, you should have a decent idea what people search for and what converts.)

Make sure you have pages on your site that put those keywords to good use.

Make sure your site, and specifically those pages, have good on-page seo. (you can easily google up decent on-page checklists.)

Make sure you have entries in whatever local directories are relevant in your area with links back to your site. (Use in-context links with your target terms as anchor text where appropriate.) Do the same with the major social stuff (Facebook, twitter, google, etc etc.)

With no real competition, that"s probably enough to get you ranked. If you want to go a bit further, make some informational posts (teach people the best way to some landscaping thing... of course, they"re not going to do it themselves, and your very helpful article/video just shows that you"re the exact person to call) on some popular/useful local sites.

Of course, you can outsource it all (maybe even to fiverr!), but just be really, really sure that you"re getting exactly what you want.

Lyrical said:

We do google adwords banners, but they told me that only 40% of customers go there, and the other 60% pull people out through the organic links.

Click to expand...

The overall ratio means fuckall because it will vary dramatically based on the user and the term. Generally, more internet-savvy users avoid ads like the plague while the "average" user might not even be able to tell the difference. Also, informational terms ("how do i tell if my lawn is on fire?") will tend to result in organic results while more buying oriented terms ("lawn extinguishers in baltimore") can produce more ad clicks.

Tmac47 said:

I"ve read that consolidating your pages into longer single pages is the way to go these days.

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One of the keyword analysis service providers did a length analysis on the top ranked pages and found that 2000ish words was the most common length for the keywords in their database. Of course, there were plenty of top ranked pages at other lengths as well, but that was most common. That"s also not to say that length is the useful factor either. It could be other aspects that are just inherent to longer pages.

Longer pages are likely to have more long-tail and LSI keywords than short pages. Longer pages likely have a lower bounce rate and are possibly more likely to have users follow an on-page link. They may also work in more opportunities for other media and relevant outbound links (though the usefulness of that is debatable). On the other hand, long pages are much less focused. If your page only has one sentence of text, you could have a 10% keyword density without being spammy. On a 2k word page, 1% might be spammy.

Also consider your goal once the user is on your page. Long copy might work for selling scammy ebooks but check Twitter"s homepage without being logged in. I"m pretty sure they have a decent handle on what converts (for their prospective users at least).