Internet Consulting – It’s more than Just SEO
Internet Consulting – It’s more than Just SEO
If one accepts the definition of a consultant as being one who gives expert or professional advice, then by definition an internet consultant would be a person that specializes in all things “internet” which is a very broad scope for one’s level of expertise. Often people will have the mistaken impression that a consultant, being a expert professional, must know everything there is to know about the subject, but with all of the complexities of the internet and how rapidly technology changes, that is an impossibility.
What you can expect from your internet consultant is the following:
- They will listen to your areas of interest or concern
- They will apply their skills, knowledge, and abilities to research and address your specific areas of concern
- They will present you with a plan to fix problems or exploit benefits
In short, a much fairer way of looking at an internet consultant would be to say that they are a person that helps people or businesses determine and meet their needs.
Many people falsely present themselves as an internet consultant because they have specialized in a small subset of internet development, i.e. web development, search engine optimization (SEO), Google Adwords specialist, etc. Nothing could be further from the truth. Fat Loss 4 Idiots They are simply a specialist in that particular subset of the internet. An internet consultant must be capable of taking a holistic approach to the inter-workings of all areas of the internet and ferreting out potential solutions based on the issue at hand and what areas need to be addressed to affect a solution.
Specific problems will require tailored solutions. One does not need to spend hundreds of dollars to improve their website if their real problem lies with a failure of their marketing efforts to generate hits leading to their website. For example if you are a chiropractor trying to win new customers for your practice, a good course in chiropractic marketing can give you the directions you need for your offline marketing and this can then be translated to your website. A good internet consultant will know how to separate the wheat from the chaff, but to do so they will often have to ask a lot of questions first.
Areas of major concern will be:
Determining needs
Determining wants
Determining budget constraints and/or budget requirements
Determining growth opportunities
Needs and wants are addressed separately because they really are not one and the same. A good internet consultant will know the different between the two. An example of this difference is perhaps you need to generate X number of hits a month on your electronic cigarette starter kit website to generate enough sales to break even in your business. This is not the same as needing Y number of hits to make a stretch sales goal. Staying in business is a need. Meeting a stretch goal is a want.
Using the example above, a good internet consultant will be able to determine the different ways in which both X and Y number of website hits can be generated and the anticipated costs to achieve each target (i.e. a marketing budget of $100 may be required to obtain X number of hits and $200 to obtain Y number of hits). Elcorredornocturno The internet consultant will map out definite strategies to follow across the board (if asked to) supporting growth opportunities by focusing on a wide variety of areas including website development, Conversational Hypnosis SEO, pay-per-click, affiliate marketing, blogging, and generating email lists just to name a few.
How will an internet consultant help you to grow your business?
Taking a cross-section of internet related disciplines into consideration, one will begin to get a feel for the very broad scope of what needs to be addressed from the internet consultant’s point of view. Ryanutopia
Some typical areas that may be addressed are (this list is by no means all inclusive):
Website design and development
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Internet Marketing
Pay-per-click
Affiliate Marketing
Blogging
Maintaining email listings & distribution efforts
Website design and development
The consultant is going to want to take a very good look at your website to determine a number of factors:
Structural design
Esthetic design
Degree of user friendliness
Transaction speed
Effectiveness (number of hits & % of hits turning into a sale)
After a thorough review, the consultant will work with your company to address website development requirements and proposed budget allocations to make these proposed changes.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Using analytical tools, a specialist in seo consulting will perform a review of your website’s rankings on the major search engines and make recommendations on how to improve search results. Such a specialist from an SEO agency can also make recommendations to help you target local search results. For example if you wish to target visitors in the the Dallas area then a Dallas SEO consultant will be able to help you achieve this. This may require making adjustments to your content to make the website more “web crawler friendly” by rewriting portions of your web content and focusing on keyword creation.
Internet marketing
The internet consultant can help by doing an analysis of your company’s internet marketing efforts, level of expenditures to support these efforts, and determine what your current cost per hit is along with other benchmarking information. If you are selling large ticket items such as water tanks you may find that you can afford to pay much more per hit than if you were selling cheaper items such as leather jackets. This information is vitally important as the amount you can afford to pay per hit will be completely different based on the profit margin your products give you – whether you have rugs for sale or whether you are selling high ticket products such as large stereo systems or digital televisions.
Pay-per-click
The consultant may review and suggest participation in some fashion of improving web traffic through the use of pay-per-click marketing with an estimated cost per click (and total) along with the necessary budget allocations.
Affiliate marketing
Perhaps slightly more complicated than pay-per-click, affiliate marketing can be considered to help boost sales by paying a fee or a % of sale to sources that drive traffic to your website through direct promotion or backlinking. Argan Oil For example if you have a product on Amazon, affiliates can easily promote your product and receive a commission when their traffic purchases the product. This is a fantastic way to promote books on any topic from chiropractic marketing to cooking wedding cakes. Your consultant should be able to make a recommendation as to how affiliate marketing can work for you after conducting a review of your existing system.
Blogging
A consultant should be interested in reviewing your efforts to supply web content on the internet by posting articles, having a presence on Facebook, or any other effort in which backlinks to your website can be utilized to improve traffic. Alaska Freedom
Maintaining email listings & distribution efforts
What level of activity does your company engage in for the distribution of emails to willing potential customers whose email address you have captured? Are you even participating in this activity? Do you send out a monthly newsletter or “specials of the month?” Your consultant will ask these questions and work to provide answers as well.
It should be noted that the categories discussed above are all individually broad enough in scope to support “specialists” that work exclusively in each and every one of these subsets. Within each subset there are even more subsets such as attraction marketing. As strange as it may seem, some company’s still don’t have as much as a website yet, so considerable focus will be provided in Part III regarding how a consultant can help specifically with website development.
A deeper look into website development
Key areas of website development include:
Structural design
Esthetic design
Degree of user friendliness
Transaction speed
Effectiveness (number of hits & % of hits turning into a sale)
Structural design
The lion’s share of work that needs to be performed to launch a website lies in the structural area and the structure of the website impacts all of the other factors to some extent. Ilo A good consultant will know what is good and what is bad about your website, but to expect them to have a level of expertise to deep dive your website to rewrite code, well, that’s the job of a web designer, not a consultant.
The structure of the website is really contained in two key areas:
Format
Content
Format
How the web homepage is setup is a function of selecting a style for the homepage and there are many different templates available. Some templates work better for certain content requirements than others. For example, a website dedicated to presenting information on flooring Dallas will need a different template than a website designed to sell products as a ship from stock environment.
Content
The website must be loaded with the critical information that represents the real “heart of the business.” If the website is a blogging site, then articles, blurbs, newsletters, etc. will need to be loaded and organized for access by the visitor. The visitor needs to be able to find the relevant content quickly so if your site in on the topic of water damage orlando then the crucial information that the visitor needs would be an explanation of how the water damage is treated and of course ways to contact the business quickly to deal with emergency damage. If the website is to support a “ship from stock” product oriented business then a significant amount of information needs to be inserted such as part number, item description, in stock quantity, price, product description, and this list continues significantly on from this point on. This is why Data Management is extremely important for such a site and having a streamlined way to do this that does not slow down the user experience is crucial.
Esthetic design
The internet consultant will take a look at your website through the eyes of a customer. Is your site attractive to the eye? Is it well organized and structured or is it far too busy and extremely difficult to locate what you are looking for? For example if the goal of your site is to inform your visitors how they can get free wii points then this needs to be clear from the text and banners on your site and the graphics need to be attractive to the eye. Marketing 101 will tell you that if the website looks bright, attractive, and inviting your chance of keeping the customer through order entry is much better.
Degree of user friendliness
Your consultant should determine just how many mouse clicks it takes to place and complete an order. If your customer has to fight your website they will move on to another company, and your consultant will know this.
Transaction speed
Your consultant knows that they call it the world-wide-wait for a reason. Having your site hosted by a tortoise is not going to win friends and influence people. People want to see more progress than some spinning wheel and loathe waiting 10 seconds for a screen to refresh. Make no mistake, even if their personal system is slow, they will find a way to blame it on your website. Your site needs to have an effective design, zipped images that load quickly and CRM Software that allows for fast and efficient storage of sales leads and customer details. If your customer is going to be making payments by your site you need to use an electronic payments service such as Crescent Processing to ensure that payments can be made smoothly and quickly and the customer feels confident at all times when providing their financial details.
Effectiveness
The consultant will deep dive the actual results obtained on your website. How many hits is your website receiving every day? What is the percentage of hits that get turned into a sale (are people just window shopping or are they buying)?
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