Most search marketing agencies don’t have clients with astronomical marketing budgets. It’s a rare day when an agency lands a client like Proctor & Gamble, which in 2013 spent $234 million on Internet marketing. What you could do with a chunk of change like that! Chances are, you get pumped when a client comes in with a few thousand to spend every month. Most small marketing agencies’ clients don’t even have that.

Can Your Clients Afford SEO in 2015?

In December 2014, a survey of small online marketing agencies found that the reality is a client with a search marketing budget of $500 to $1,500 per month. Every client, whether the budget is on the low end or the high end, expects great things. Small budgets are a big challenge — especially when the clients have no idea that their grand expectations don’t match their tiny budgets.

The survey found that small business clients allocated 36 percent of their marketing budgets to SEO. That’s more than twice the amount spent on other online marketing services (12 percent each to PPC, email marketing, and social media marketing).

Generally speaking, a small business should invest in SEO, but many of the most effective tactics covered here on Search Engine Watchare out of reach. SEO is a far more delicate operation than it was when you could almost effortlessly get endless cheap directory listings and not worry about Panda and Penguin. Those days are long gone. Content marketing is now synonymous with SEO and it is a huge undertaking.SEO on $500 per Month

But while the work has become more challenging and time-consuming, according to the survey, search marketing firms don’t expect small business marketing budgets to increase much in 2015. So while the workload, time and effort increase, budgets remain stagnant. So...what can be done with $500?

Optimized Website

Some small businesses actually had the money to spend on a website in 2014. According to the survey, 36 percent of small businesses marketing budgets were allocated to website development. That’s actually a very promising statistic for the future of online marketing. Clients are finally getting it — a shoddy website doesn’t convert. Spending money on search marketing to send traffic to a bad website is not smart. A client with a good website makes our job so much easier.

Of those that did invest in website design and development, 51 percent spent between $1,500 and $4,000 and about 12 percent spent $4,001 to $10,000. Website design and development is a service that any small marketing agency can offer or outsource. Clearly there is demand for it!

Even a client with zero to spend on website development can certainly make some improvements. Spend a little time evaluating the site and make recommendations for the client to do on his or her own. Every website can benefit from adding fresh content, titles, descriptions, fixing typos, broken links, missing images, etc.

Google Issues Warnings About Poor Search Rankings For Non-Mobile Sites

Google has been making strides to improve mobile search results to make the SERPS a better place for users searching on smartphones and tablets.

One of the more recent changes have been displaying a “mobile-friendly” tag next to sites in mobile search results that have been confirmed to display correctly on a mobile screen..To earn a mobile-friendly label your site needs to pass a set of criteria. You can find out if your site meet’s Google’s standards or not by using the mobile-friendly site testing tool.

Now, Google isn’t leaving it up to webmasters to test their own sites, the company has taken to sending warnings to users who have verified their site via Webmaster Tools when their site is not mobile friendly.If Google detects an issue with your site in terms of how it’s displayed or how it functions on mobile, be prepared to get an email warning that your site may not rank as well in mobile search results.

The email will indicate which site and which pages the issues were detected on, along with steps on how to fix the issues. The email also links to documentation on how to make a CMS (like WordPress) mobile-friendly.

When Google introduced its mobile-friendly site criteria late last year it was indicated that it may be used as a ranking signal for the search algorithms in the future. Perhaps these warnings are an indication that Google intends to roll out a mobile-friendly algorithm update sooner than we all thought.If that’s the case, at least Google is giving site owners fair warning. If there’s one thing you do to improve your site this year, making it mobile-friendly should be a high priority.

SEO Tips from every SERP

SEOs rely on tools, data, numbers, metrics, reports, charts, graphs, and huge Excel spreadsheets bristling with pivot tables. We do love our data. But sometimes, the best information comes from the good ol’ eyeball test. One of the best eyeball tests is the Google SERP. Using information from the Google SERP, you can discover how your website is succeeding or failing. SERP information is the kind of information that delivers powerful knowledge for the SEO. With this information, you can increase the SEO perfection of your site or your client’s site.

Identify the Presence of the Keyword or Query String in the Title

Let’s start with title tags, because they are the single on-page element that is most closely correlated with a highly optimized site. When you type in a keyword, pay close attention to the titles of the sites that are displayed. These titles are critical to the site’s ranking success. If you see your competitor outranking you, understand how the title may function into their ranking.

Pay Attention to the Significance of Keywords in the URL

It’s obvious that URLs are important for SEO and search results. If your competitor is outranking you for a given keyword, figure out what they are doing with their URL.

Ask the following:

• Does the URL of their page have any of the keywords in the query?
• Does the URL of your page lack the keywords in the query?
• 
  

Understand What Kind of Results are Favored in the Search Results

All types of content are not created equal, and Google doesn’t treat all content as equal when they deliver it up in the search results.When you type in your query, find out exactly what kind of content seems to be ranking best. This could be your clue as to which kind of content you need to be generating.

This is one of the easiest eyeball tests you can do.

Elegant Ways to Google better

 

Google is a pretty amazing search engine. But, even the all-powerful Google can sometimes fail to find the information you want in the vast, never-ending vacuum of cyber-space. sometimes, the search engine returns results that are not at all related to what you have in mind. There are certain tricks you can use to overcome the odds, and get Google to find the droids that you’re actually looking for. Here are a few tricks 

Use Quotation Marks to Find ExactPhrases

 Google is a Boolean search engine. “Boolean searches” allow you to combine multiple words and phrases to limit, widen, or define your search. Google and most of the other Internet search engines default to Boolean search parameters. So, when you type in a search query, say something like Are the droids in Mos Eisley, the search engine technically searches for pages that contain: Are AND the AND droids AND in AND Mos AND Eisley. If you’d like to find sites that contain the phrase exactly as you’ve typed it, search the phrase in quotation marks, like this: “Are the Droids in Mos Eisley?” Play around with that and see how that impacts the results.

Use a Dash to Exclude a Word FromYour Search Query

If your search phrase is pulling up results that are not relevant to what you’re actually looking for, you can use a dash to exclude them from your search. When you search on the word “droids,” for example, Google is probably going to think you’re looking for information about Android operating system or a Smartphone. You’ll have better search results when you exclude the words that might interfere with Google’s ability to understand your true intentions. For example: Droids -Smartphone. That little adjustment will make a difference in your search results. At the very least, you won’t have to scroll through all the results that have nothing to do with the Droids you have in mind.

Use a Tilde to Include Synonyms ofYour Search Terms

 To find exactly what you’re looking for, you may need to cast a much bigger and wider net. If you put a tilde before one of your keywords, Google will also include that word’s synonyms in its search, allowing you to get the results you didn’t even know you were looking for. A search for ～Were those the droids I was looking for? would also find out if those were the robots, cyborgs, or automatons you were looking for.

Search Within a Website For SpecificPages

  Most sites have a search function within them that is supposed to find content on the site, but, more often than not, those widgets aren’t very helpful. They don’t always find everything on the site. Luckily, you can use Google to search those sites for you. All you have to do is type “site:”  followed by “intitle:” and then the keywords you want to look for. Say for example you need to find a new job, you could type: site:taleo.net intitle:careers.