In this scenario, it is imperative that a site owner with a fairly new site maximizes her chances of retaining as many visitors to her site as possible by giving them an opportunity to communicate with her site through a comment on her blog, leaving feedback or collecting the visitor’s email address.

This will allow her to sell products/services on the backend through email marketing. This is where website optimization techniques coupled with solid SEO strategy can pay huge dividends in the long run.

Website optimization basically deals with improving a visitor’s experience on your website and increasing the conversion of casual visitors into customers.

Internet marketers have long realised the power of squeeze pages through which they collect email addresses and then sell products/services through email marketing repeatedly. They also know the concept of “The money is in the list” as each email subscriber is a very valuable proposition.

Many a time, sites ranking well on the SERPs can be attributed to the diligent efforts of a search engine optimisation professional. But rankings are not an end in themselves. They are just the means to the end. Better visibility helps a site gain more visitors. But the crucial aspect lies in converting the visitors into customers. Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is an important aspect of SEO that is hogging the limelight in the present.

It would be worth the effort for SEO professionals to atleast propose to site owners the effectiveness of retaining visitors and/or upsell/downsell products and services once the site has attained good visibility on the SERPs. Let us consider a few techniques that can be employed in the light of what is being discussed.

1) Undiluted Focus:
If you are selling a product or service, you can be in a situation where you are selling many distinct products or services. This will result in specific money pages (inner pages) which highlight the particular product or service in question.

The page that describes the benefits of the product or service should focus completely on just that and should not diverge to talk about a related product or service.

Remember that prospective buyers will buy benefits and not features of a product or service. So it is important to highlight the benefits clearly on the money page.

2) Strident Call To Action:
With the singular focus described above, the visitor is subjected to a single call to action that specifically sells that particular product or service described.

As a site owner, it is your responsibility to ensure that the visitor is asked to take action. If you sell blue widgets, have a big bold button that says Buy this blue widget now. If there is no clear call to action, there is a good chance that visitors will not take action.

3) In the case of visitor trying to move out of the sales funnel:
In the above example where you sell blue widgets on your site, there are many reasons why a visitor is unable to buy a product. The price point can be a major factor as the visitor feels it is too expensive. You cannot predict this until you find out.

This is where the application of a popular internet marketing technique can help you gain a deep insight into the makeup of a typical customer in your niche. If the visitor clicks the Back button or tries to close the tab or tries to type in a new web address in the URL box, then she is definitely not interested in buying your blue widget.

If you use a script that can sense this action, it can popup a special one time offer for the same blue widget at a discounted price. As a business owner, you are cutting your profit by a margin that you can afford. This causes the visitor to rethink and induces her to buy the product at a discounted rate. You are gaining a sale where there was none in the first place.

An increased incidence of the one time offer sales indicates that your produt price is more expensive for most visitors. You have to bite the bullet and reduce the price to attract more sales.

4) Information seekers:
Not all visitors are in a buying frame of mind when they visit your site. There are many seeking information on the blue widget that you sell. For users in reasearch mode, you must have a Resources page on your site which explains all the features of your product.

You can have a review of your product and your competitor’s product and show the superior/useful features your product offers compared to that of your competitor. You can also compare the pricing models. If you have a truly superior product in your niche, then you can certainly justify its higher sale price.

5) Optimizing your site for buyers keywords:
I would like to insert here the idea of optimizing your site for buyers keywords. During keyword research, you are prone to come across keyword phrases that specifically are commercially action oriented in intent. Some examples in our case can be “buy blue widget” or “blue widget software download” (without the quotes).

These clearly show the number of searchers who have done their research and review of the product you sell and are ready to buy. It is ideal to have pages on your site optimized for such buyers.

6) Collecting visitor email address:
You can also incentivize your visitor to submit her name and email address by offering an ebook download that explains the nuances of what to look for when buying a blue widget. For information seekers who have no idea of your niche and/or product, this is a goldmine of information. They would certainly subscribe to your mailing list to get their hands on this great resource.

Now that you have their email address (you have to make it double opt-in subscription process), you have obtained customers for a lifetime (unless they decide to unsubscribe) to whom you can sell products/services in the backend. These offers can be tailor made for just your email subscribers and should not appear on your main website.

7) Collecting Feedback:
At every possible stage of the sales cycle, encourage your visitors to submit their feedback either through a feedback form on the site or through a blog comment if you have an active blog on your site.

The feedback can be about the quality of your product or service offered, shipping and handling concerns etc. It would be ideal to have a 6 to 12 hour turnaround time to respond to queries/complaints.

Feedback is valuable to a business owner to streamline her sales funnel and address issues that she may not have imagined existed in the first place.

8. Use of Website Optimizer:
I have described at length the process of using Google’s Website Optimizer. You can use this as a standalone tool or from within your Adwords account.

Please note that when you sign up for a Website Optimizer account, Google will automatically setup an Analytics account (if you already do not have one) for use with your experiments to collect your experimental data.

Laxity due to Free Traffic:
Though this is not part of the methods actually used to improve conversion rate on a site, many a time, even owners of websites well entrenched at the top of the Google SERPs can be lax as they are getting free traffic from the major search engines.

If a site owner is driving traffic to her site using PPC, she feels the pinch as she is paying for each visitor. This is also the case with CPA (Cost per acquisition) marketing where marketers pay for each visitor to visit their landing page on which they make an offer in the form of a signup to a service for example. They get paid only if the visitor signs up.

It is common for such marketers to employ these techniques mentioned above to gain the maximum ROI for the $ paid to get their visitors into their site.

It is important to realise the value of each visitor to your website. As a website owner, you have to endevour to improve the visitor experience in every possible way and get them to communicate to you their delightful and/or woeful experiences on your site. This will ensure the success of your online business and put you head and shoulders ahead of your competition.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search marketing consultancy that offers both organic search and ppc marketing to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.

The actual conversion process involves testing a landing page leading to a signup or filling in of a form or a thankyou page in the event of a successful sale of a product. With Website Optimizer, you can set up experiments that involve Multivariate testing or A/B testing to track which version of the landing page is pulling in the desired results.

The top ranking of a client’s website on the Google SERPs is often used to justify the success of a SEO firm’s efforts. Clients are also obsessed with their site rankings especially in the face of their competitors flying high on the SERPs which is a pretty natural human reaction. But rankings are not the ultimate way of judging the success of a website. Conversion of visitors into customers or visitors taking the necessary action is an ideal way to measure the success of a site’s SEO or PPC efforts.

The testing I did for a client involved switching between an original landing page and a completely new landing page in a PPC campaign. This is an example of A/B testing which is simpler version of testing with Website Optimiser. It is ideal to start with this test if you have lower traffic volume and gain faster results. The conversion in my experiment involved filling in a form.

Multivariate testing involves using the same landing page with changes to headings, call to action, placement of menu items, logos etc forming the variation of the original page. In effect, you are testing between variations of the same page to see which one results in the user taking the desired action and hence achieving the optimum measure of conversion.

When setting up the A/B experiment, fix the original landing page and a new landing page without any room for doubts as you will switch the traffic between these two pages. Then the conversion page is the page with the form that needs to be filled. It is handy to have a printout of the Website Optimizer help section for reference.

Steps to follow when setting up the experiment:
1) Choose your original landing page (let us denote it as OLP)

2) Create a totally different landing page (this is an A/B test) (denoted by DLP)

3) Choose your conversion page (denoted by CP)

4) Now comes the crucial part of installing the tags. These are pieces of javascript code that need to be installed on the different pages.
a) The control script is installed only on the original landing page, placed just after the head tag.
b) The tracking script is installed immediately before the closing body tag on all the three pages namely, OLP, DLP and CP.

5) Website Optimizer’s validation tool will check for errors in the installed tags. It does this in two ways. You can provide the URLs to your original and variation landing pages and the conversion page. If these pages are externally visible, Website Optimiser will access them and point out errors if any.

Alternatively, if Website Optimizer cannot access the pages on your live site, you can save and upload the HTML source files for your landing pages and conversion pages and allow Website Optimizer to validate them.

Once Website Optimizer validates the installed tags, it is time to start your experiment. Make one final check of your experiment settings. Once the experiment is started, you will not be able to change the experiment parameters. You would do well to ensure that the settings are as you intended them to be.

6) The last but not the least step is the % of traffic you wish to switch between your original landing page and the new landing page. I started off diverting 75% of the traffic to the new landing page and retaining the original landing page 25% of the time. Google advises to have a 100% switch in order to run the experiment faster and hence obtain results faster. It is entirely up to you to make the final decision.

After the activation of the experiment, when you click on Website Optimizer, you can see the name of the experiment (the naming is part of the guided process that Website Optimizer leads you through when setting up the experiment) and the Status column says – Running Collecting Data. There are links below it to edit settings and view the report. (screenshot attached below)

The View Report setting allows you to compare the performance of the original landing page and the new landing page. It shows how well or how badly the newer version is performing against the original. In the early days of my experiment, I saw a yellow colured bar which showed that testing was inconclusive.

There are three other columns namely Chance to beat original, Observed Improvement and Conversion/Visitors. As my experiment progressed, the new combination worked better and finally in 15 days, the green colored bar indicated that the new combination is a clear winner.

The Website Optimizer documentation says that if the Chance to bear Original column exceeds 95%, then you can safely assume that your new combination is a winner.

In my experiment, I had to install the script tags on a site run by WordPress. A great Website Optimizer WordPress plugin created by Filippo Toso makes it a breeze to install the tags.

NOTE:
The switching of the original landing page and the new landing page is applicable to all forms of traffic, be it organic or pay per click.

For example, if the original landing page forms part of your website and your new landing page is created specifically to target a PPC campaign and therefore not visible to users landing on your site through an organic search listing, remember that the original landing page will be switched to show the new landing page according to the traffic percentage value that you set in your experiment.

Again, depending on the complexity of your experiment, it can take more or less time for Website Optimizer to judge the winning combination.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland seo consultancy offering top quality organic search and paid search services to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.

There are a variety of factors that are contributing to the client’s poor performance in paid search. If you are taking over the client’s existing campaign, there are positives and negatives which you have to be aware of. This post will discuss these at length in no particular order.

1) Figures Speak For Themselves:
The biggest advantage obviously is the amount of data available to analyse the patterns arising from performance of the keywords over a period of time. The longer the campaign has run, the better the trends available (if the business is affected by seasonal trends as in travel).

It is fairly natural to expect that the campaigns are linked to Google Analytics and goals have been setup. Adwords conversion code has been installed. All this data is invaluable in charting out a new path to improve the conversions and ROI of the campaigns.

2) Account History:
This is a crucial yet often overlooked aspect of PPC campaigns in general. If a keyword has performed poorly, say over the past 3 months, it can be a case of poor targeting and poor relevance to the ad group of which it is a part. Most often, DKI – Dynamic Keyword Insertion is the major culprit.

Its performance can be improved by shifting it to an ad group that improves its targeting and relevance by way of including it in the ad copy and also mentioning it in the landing page copy. If this does not see an improvement in the future performance of that keyword, then the market demand for that phrase also needs to be probed.

Just deleting the keyword and reactivating it hoping that it starts off with a fresh slate is the worst thing that can be done. The Pay Per Click Account History is a vital factor that has to be borne in mind as this has a major impact on the quality score as well.

Avoid deleting a keyword as far as possible. Give it all the opportunuties to perform well as specified in preceding paragraphs. If it does not work, then pause it for a while (in case it is affected by seasonal factors) and then revive it. If all efforts fail, then bite the bullet and delete it.

3) Avoid making wholesale changes:
If DKI is a reason for poor performance of the various ad groups in different campaigns, the first step would be to rearrange the keywords by moving them into new tightly knit ad groups that target a particular keyword and its variations with apt ad copy and landing page. This can be done using a cool and nifty tool like the Google Adwords Editor.

Do not change the ad copy and the landing page of every ad group in sight as it is going to be hard to measure the results. Make changes incrementally one step at a time and give the new changes some time to sink in. The Adwords quality score depends on a multitude of factors. Measure the results over a period of time. You will find that most of the changes respond positively in the new setup.

There can be instances where certain keywords have such a poor history of performance that they can take more time than normal to ignite. Give them a chance to do so.

4) Testing landing pages with Google Website Optimizer:
Instead of reworking the existing landing pages right from the word go, you can create alternative landing pages and test the effectiveness using the Googel Website Optimizer tool.

It allows you to split test different versions of a landing page (using Javascript) and gives you a good idea of which version converts better (users taking the desired action). Given a higher CTR, the quality score will impact the average CPC (cost per click) price. This multivariate testing is extremely useful in giving you an idea what the users are looking for in the particular industry in focus.

Please remember that each industry is a beast in itself. The rules of engagement are different as each industry has its unique inherent vagaries. As a PPC specialist, you can enhance the CTR , improve the quality score of keywords and campaigns and reduce the click costs. But visitors converting into customers depends a lot on the smoothness of the sales funnel itself.

Giving fewer choices to visitors when it comes to taking action leads to reduction in distractions and enhances the conversion process.

5) Expand the scope of the business:
A thorough keyword research using the Google keyword tool throws up the market demand and supply. Have a close look at the keywords targeted.

Many a time, there will be huge potential in the form of untapped market niches. This is a great opportunity to expand the client’s market scope and get her additional business for previously hitherto untargeted areas. This means targeting new keywords and creating new ad groups and landing pages all in sync with each other in terms of targeting and relevance.

These are starting off with a flourish with no blemishes in the past clouding them. This can boost the CTR (click through rate) and conversions and increase the ROI. The overall performance of the entire campaign is also improved.

6) Keyword match:
In my experience, I have come across industries where the generic broad match keyword phrases outperform the more specific targeted keywords in phrase and exact form. Negative keywords help cut down wasted clicks by filtering out unrelated intent of searches.

If some of the phrase and exact match keywords do not perform, it is wise to include the broad match terms for those keywords. Also, adding a geographical modifier to the keyword improves the targeting further. For example, a broad term like Auckland online florists is itself very targeted though it is still a broad match.

7) Reach out to a wider audience:
Sometimes, business owners can be fixated with local business needs. Small to medium ticket products can be sold to a wider audience. If it is a service, then the scope definitely is within the local area. But if the same service is quite unique that customers from neighbourbing towns or cities can afford to travel, then it would be worthwhile widening the geo targeting of the client campaigns.

If you have gut feeling that something will work (especially if the business owner feels that way), keep emotions in check and bypass it for the time being. Test it and check it out to make sure it works.

In conclusion, tread with care in the early days of managing an inherited PPC campaign. It pays to be conservative at the start. Gradually, grow your wings and try newer approaches. Test, rinse and repeat. Anything that works can be found only by testing.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland PPC company offering both search engine optimisation and search engine marketing services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

The Long Tail, if you don’t already know, refers to a theory promoted by a book by Chris Anderson titled “The Long Tail”, which describes a sort of niche strategy of business, such as employed by Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities. The idea is that while you can obviously sell large numbers of a few popular items (the “head”), the cumulative, smaller number of sales of all your many less-popular items (the “tail”) might easily add up to a far greater total amount.

“Head” items shown in red, “Tail” items shown in blue

Here at Netconcepts, we’ve been promoting the Long Tail concept in relation to natural search marketing for quite some time, since we’ve witnessed how its application can directly improve a business’s overall sales numbers. Indeed, businesses often get the most sales per item for their most popular products, but those products are also often the most competed on the internet, and sometimes the hardest to promote as a result. Even in the cases of top online retailers, we’ve seen that greater bulks of traffic and associated sales may often come from the bulk of less-popular Tail products.

Elberse’s findings are based only on a limited study of music and home-video sales, so it seems quite possible that her study might be true only for the companies and industries from which her data originated.

At the end of the day, theory is all well and good, but actual sales figures are far more important. Netconcepts has working formulas, methodologies and software (GravityStream) which have worked time and again to help improve internet retail sites’ traffic and associated sales. The Long Tail approach has definite applications for Search Engine Optimization (“SEO”), and understanding the concept and making use of it in a search marketing plan effectively will result in increased profits.

For more information on how the Long Tail can positively influence online business, read our white paper, “Chasing the Long Tail of Natural Search“.

(See also mentions of this study by Greg Sterling and Rafe Colburn.)

The two keynote interviews were mentionable.

First on Tuesday morning, Danny Sullivan interviewed Kevin Johnson, the President of the Platform & Services Division at Microsoft:

Johnson spoke about their new Live Search Cashback program (this offers rewards back to consumers a cash back rebate for purchases made online). Johnson stated that they felt the future of online search marketing was headed in that direction. He also mentioned a number of times that Microsoft is dedicated to the concept of multiple choices in the marketplace for software and search services — something which made a lot of audience members chuckle a bit.

Related to Microsoft’s Cashback program, Microsoft has just today announced a “Search and Give” program which will donate one cent for every search (up to 500 per user) to a charity. Many of Microsoft Live Search’s promotions such as the cash back program, Search & Give, and previous things like the Ms. Dewey promo are all engineered towards getting usage and usership of Microsoft pumped up.

SMX ended the day with the second keynote interview, this time with famous Googler, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team:

The Q&A with Matt was very interesting and revealed a number of interesting tidbits, not least of which was how he and Google view some of the less-ethical link-building strategies that some others suggested at the conference.

I’ll probably post more details on various conference learnings in upcoming days.

For those interested in our work in SEO & SEM in Asia, one of Netconcepts’ marketers, Allen Qu, will be speaking at the upcoming SMX China @ Timev conference in Xiamen, China during April 18 & 19.

I had a chance to visit with Allen back in February, and I can tell you he is extremely savvy in managing our client’s PPC campaigns that are running in Chinese search engines such as Baidu and Google China. Allen will be speaking at SMX China on a panel focussed on PPC ad management, although he is also expert in natural search marketing as well.

Chinese and Asian search markets are considered to be the new frontier in terms of areas for greatest potential future revenue and search audience growth.

If you’re interested in contacting our New Zealand office from the US, their morning office hours overlap US afternoon hours on Mondays through Thursdays. Our NZ office can be phoned at: +64 9 476-4601

I think this may be the first time that they’ve used the logo to honor another company or product. This must be the very pinnacle of both product placement and internet advertising, combined! Millions of people go to the Google homepage every day, so this gives Lego company a nice piece of exposure.

What would you need do if you’d like to get that sort of advertisement or endorsement?

Well, you’d likely need to be a product that Google employees particularly like, and have some sort of notable, date-associated event happen which doesn’t conflict with a major holiday or other observance. Barry Schwartz notes that Legos have long had a special place in the hearts of Googlers. Google founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page have apparently long enjoyed logos, even using them to build their first Google storage server cabinets:

(click to enlarge)
Photo of Google Servers from Stanford’s Computer History Museum.

Seriously, though, it seems fairly unlikely that anyone else could realistically aspire to achieving this sort of Google logo treatment. Perhaps even Google considers it to be a bit too much free promotion, since they didn’t opt to hyperlink it to a “lego” keyword search this time. As such, the logo is only giving Lego a bit of good brand-building vibes, along with the ALT text that reads:

“50th anniversary of the LEGO brick”

Also, it could be that Google is trying to avoid a bit of algorithmic chaos, since their algos notice whenever there’s a sudden spike in popularity for a particular keyword phrase. One or two past Google logo-promoted keyword searches allowed newly-introduced spam results to rise up onto the first page of results for the term, reducing quality.

ReachLocal also sells local ads into Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, AOL, and my old company, Superpages.com.

I was privileged to be given a tour of the ReachLocal offices here in Dallas back in September, and I was pretty impressed with what I saw. ReachLocal has proven themselves to be highly effective at selling ads directly to local businesses, and they work primarily as an agency for those small companies, enabling them to easily get into multiple directories and websites. The centralized reporting they provide to those small businesses is also very useful, allowing businesses to easily compare ad effectiveness and referral/conversion rates across many different places.

ReachLocal’s training program for their reps is particularly clever, compared to what I’ve seen going on within major YP companies. I can’t reveal due to nondisclosure, but their methods really effectively prepare reps for the sorts of things they need to be able to do in order to communicate to a small businessman in his own language.

Others have reported that ReachLocal’s Adwords Reseller status sorta puts IYPs “on notice”, since selling directly to small businessmen has traditionally been the territory of yellow pages companies. But, ReachLocal was already a really big blip on yellow pages companies’ radar screens for their competitive ability to make sales and because of “poaching” of sales reps from the YPs.

ReachLocal is the sort of agency that YPs view with heavy distrust, and consider to be “coopetition” — “frenemies”, if you will, since they need and want the sales that ReachLocal can accomplish while being a bit afraid of just how facile the company is at maneuvering compared with them.

ReachLocal has been growing by leaps and bounds in the last two years, and have been industriously opening local sales offices throughout the country (check out the hiring section of their website just for an idea). This local sales presence is exactly the sort of thing that Google looks to leverage with this deal.

ReachLocal is operating in something of a niche market, but it’s a really huge niche market if that’s not an oxymoron. Local advertising continues to represent a gigantically unrealized opportunity, and companies which can effectively translate the online ad medium for small businesses stand to be able to really capitalize on that revenue potential.

(click to enlarge)

It’s not all that surprising that Verizon might do this, since they oppose net neutrality, but for users like myself, this is highly undesirable. I’ve been highly complimentary about Verizon’s FiOS service, because I’ve had excellent speed and high quality from it. I work from home providing expertise around internet technologies, so it’s vital that I be able to clearly experience the internet just as the majority of the rest of internet users out there, so having Verizon meddling with what’s delivered up to me is not cool.

If you all recall, another company did something quite similar to this back in 2003: Verisign previously did something quite similar when they abruptly launched their “Site Finder” service which intercepted all queries to mistyped/nonexistent .COM and .NET domain names and redirected users to a similar sort of search results page that they controlled. Verisign’s action was heavily criticized for interfering with many systems’ processes which expect incorrect domain requests to error out, and VeriSign agreed to suspend the service after ICANN pressured them to halt it.

Now, Verizon’s action isn’t quite as serious, but it’s the very same sort of thing, and while it doesn’t impact the entire internet, it does impact a great many of us who work from home or do hobby programming of various sorts. It’s a bit too little, too late to point out that users can opt out of this, too.

Now, I have my IE browser configged such that it uses a particular service when auto-correcting for this sort of thing, but I don’t have this set up in FireFox, and in that browser I’m getting that Verizon page.

Verizon is making money off of ads delivered on that search results page, so this was intentionally done to their already-paying subscribers in order to increase profits. Unfortunately, a great many of us do not want this sort of “assistance” when browsing the internet, and we get irritable when companies are aggressively inserting themselves between us and the normal process of interacting with the internet.

By the way – for one mistyped domain I did, it appeared that InfoSpace was powering the search results. For another, it was Yahoo! powering the search. I’d suggest that neither of those companies should associate themselves with this sort of business. InfoSpace results:

(click to enlarge)

Verizon: not cool! I shouldn’t have to go in and opt-out of this sort of thing, and you should’ve notified me in advance before interfering with my internet access. Are you using the same software that the Chinese goverment uses to control their citizen’s internet access?

Verizon has tried to fight off net neutrality through propaganda, issuing statements like that of Peter Davidson, Verizon’s senior vice president for federal government relations:

“…Net Neutrality – better named Net Regulation – is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist…”

Um…. they’re just not convincing me with stuff like what they’ve done in this example.

Inspired by this thread, Lisa Barone at Bruce Clay, Inc. responds with “You Can’t Automate Search Engine Optimization” (which is just the tiniest bit ironic, since Bruce Clay’s Dynamic Site Mapping tool arguably provides a level of automated search optimization).

While Commerce360 is looking to create search optimization automation, we’ve already been accomplishing it for quite some time here at Netconcepts, as I outlined in an earlier article on Automatic Search Engine Optimization. So, do I think SEO can be automated? Hell, yes!

Now, to be fair, Lisa and others who nay-say the concept of automation are primarily criticizing the concept of doing it 100%. Their contention that humans should be involved in the process is entirely realistic. To achieve quality, humans *do* need to be involved, since we haven’t really developed machines that understand both concepts and language.

But, there’s a couple of big reasons why I think the experts should not be so quick to shout out headlines about how one “can’t” do automatic SEO. The majority of sites I see out in the wild have technical barriers to indexation and other basic optimization factors that can be pretty easily solved through a programmatic approach. This basic, indisputable fact, is coupled with the industry-wide experience that most people who pay for SEO consulting don’t manage to actually implement all the changes recommended to them.

Large corporations frequently have a good deal of inertia which can make it difficult for them to have the focus necessary to perform good optimization for natural search.

In any case, our automated SEO solution isn’t purely automatic, either, although we do a whole lot more optimizations than virtually any other remotely similar solution in the industry. Just as Google has started removing the term “purely algorithmic” from their collateral materials due to the human element they’ve introduced via quality scoring and other rank-influencing interventions, our GravityStream solution also allows our professional optimization staff to hand-tune a client’s pages, and our admin interfaces allow our clients to view and approve changes. We have a solid foundation of purely automated natural search improvements, coupled with the classic, high-quality keyword research and copy writing necessary to run good search marketing programs.

Further, our offering of SEO in a sort of web services format allows us to roll out cool research and development improvements to a large number of clients simultaneously, allowing us to provide numerous cutting-edge improvements to our clients including such things as local search optimization, social media optimization, image search optimization, and more.  This software solution approach allows us to provide a suite of services that many companies would find quite hard to duplicate through purchasing of bespoke consulting and development services, allowing those companies to benefit from a team of experts that they couldn’t hope to build internally.

Not only that, we’re one of the very few companies willing to use a Pay-Per-Click financial model for how much we charge clients (available for certain types of clients).

Our GravityStream program has enabled a number of major corporations to increase their traffic and associated sales, as reported in various news articles like this one.

I’ll be interested in seeing what Commerce36 develops in the way of automation. We’ve been doing this for a long while, and it would take a considerable effort for any company to catch up with what we currently have operational and functioning for a large number of sites.

Will we go even further down the road of automatic optimizations? Undoubtedly. We have a considerable amount of brainpower working at Netconcepts with expertise in computer science, taxonomy, search marketing, usability, and interactive development. We’ll also likely continue to include the human element in our GravityStream product, but we’ll always be pushing for efficient, scalable ways to improve enterprise-wide sites for search.

So, can SEO be automatic? Hell, yes!