ItsTheROI is a San Francisco Bay Area based SEM company that delivers sustainable, data driven marketing strategies which focus on conversion and ROI. Online Marketing is a complex, multi-channel endeavor that includes Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click, Social Media, Display Advertising, Affiliate Marketing and email. With all of these channels, SEO is the core strategy for building a brand online.

During the last 14 years, the art of ranking #1 has evolved from manipulating search engines by jamming pages full of hidden keywords and flooding the engines with doorway pages to a high ROI discipline which delivers relevant content to engage users.  SEO has become a data driven methodology for guiding web development rooted in query frequency, semantics and statistical co-occurrence.  The process begins with keyword research which dictates information architecture which then drives the content roadmap and defines the information scent for each page.

SEO is not a cookie cutter process where the consultant can provide a set of recommendations and walk away.   It is an iterative process that involves a series of compromises with design, IT, development and marketing.   Along the way, ItsTheROI evangelizes the core principle to be relevant and to develop a website that aligns the  content with the user intent and to present clear calls to action that align the intent of the user with that of the site owner.  This new form of SEO is geared towards listening to users and given them what they want — Search Engine Optimization has become User Optimization.

The art and science of designing websites for users has evolved significantly in the thirteen year thanks to the contributions of Jakob Nielsen, Gord Hotchkiss and tens of thousands of designers, conversion optimizers and site owners who have observed user behavior and tested and validated different theories that enrich the body of knowledge about user interactions with the web in general and search users in particular.  What has emerged is a set of best practices and the simple conclusion that Flash based sites, fancy formatting and very large images are as much of an obstacle for users as they are for engines.

What works for users and for search engines is

• Delivering clear information scent that matches the search intent
• Structured content with headings and short paragraphs
• Bulleted content
• The judicious use of bold text.

Users will rarely engage with the site navigation if the landing page doesn’t match the search intent. Scent should be presented in easy to read text with high contrast and the content should be written with the assumption that the user wants to scan the page in 3-5 seconds to make sure they are in the correct place. If the scent is not delivered in that time frame, the user will hit the back button and “bounce” from the site.

The search engines reward on-page and on-site factors by trying to emulate human users as they crawl and interpret the page.

• Content in the golden triangle is more important than content in other locations on the page. The impact of keyword stuffed H1 tags has diminished over time but designing your site to deliver good information scent in your headline is more important than ever for both SEO and for conversion.
• Engines adknowledge that the location of a link on the page matters. Links in the variable content area on the page, particularly links in the golden triangle, count more than links in the boilerplate, the left/right rail or the footer. The savvy optimizer includes the most important links as citation links above the fold in the variable content area of the site, where users are likely to see them.
• Query behavior, toolbar data, analytics data, conversion optimizer data and other streams give the engines an incredible assortment of information about how the user interacts with a site and we are seeing this data affect rankings more and more.

It used to be that all the online marketer needed to worry about was banner ads and email. Google introduced relevancy in search results and made SEO and Pay Per Click the best way to drive qualified traffic. The last few years have added Local Search, Social Networking and Social Media to the mix.

ItsTheROI Consultants have been helping businesses in San Francisco and around the world with their online strategy since 1996. Our mission is to help our clients merge all of these channels into a coherent strategy driven by the insights from data available from site Analytics and search queries.  Contact us for free 30 minute consultation if you would like to find out more about how ItsTheROI can help your business.