Some Good Google Adwords (and SEO) Advice

Although I will never claim to be an Adwords or SEO expert, I’ve been successfully utilizing both in a variety of businesses and keeping up with the latest since Google hit the internet.

If used properly, it’s a great tool to cheaply drive qualified traffic to a site as part of an overall marketing strategy as well as move traffic to a relatively new site while you work on natural SEO and establishing a new site presence. If done willy-nilly it can be a costly and very useless tool.




Things have changed in the last few years so I thought I would take the opportunity to throw some tips out at you if you are doing or planning on doing some Google Adwords campaigns as part of a local or wide area marketing strategy.

Developing the ads themselves as well as keywords and other factors to watch is a book in itself. So I’ll just give some info on the other end of the spectrum that most people forget about or don’t even realize contributes to Google Ad success. This success also includes keeping the price of keywords down and ad rankings high.

Yup, that’s right. Part of what you pay for a keyword is actually attached to where the ad is driving people to. That spot on your site is called a landing page. And the accepted structure of that page is not what it used to be.

Not long ago a landing page was just that. It was a single page inside of your site that was very likely unattached via link so it was a standalone deal. Visitors could not go anywhere else. And sometimes this page had its own domain name containing just this one page. Better yet, it contained very little wording and gave the reader two choice; sign up for something or get out. Otherwise known as a “squeeze page”.

And it used to be OK and good to do that. No more, my friends.

So let’s look at some very basic natural search SEO items first that Google likes to see. Why? Because some of them also apply to a landing page and since Google is king, if it’s good for them, it’s important to other search engines as well.


SEO Basics (really basic)

•Meta Tags: Meta tags are code in the header of the page code that can’t be seen by visitors but are read by search engine crawlers. They give out information about the page.
o Title: The page title should contain the main keyword/keyword phrase for the page, which should ultimately give a super brief description of the purpose of the page in a couple of words.
o Description: This brief description area should contain sentences that utilize the main keyword phrase for the page. It needs to be 150 TOTAL characters or less. If not, Google will penalize you in a variety of ways. This portion is also what searchers will see on their search results along with your page title.
o Keyword Tag: I shouldn’t even included it since it is pretty much unnecessary for Google. But it can be filled out for not-so-important keywords to this page and for use with some other engines.

•Headline Tags: The coding for your page headlines should have an H (as in H1 or H2, etc) and not a plain old paragraph tag . Headlines are used at the top of your body content and sometimes as separators of paragraphs further into the page copy. At least the first headline should contain your keyword phrase.

•Body Copy: Use your keyword phrase as soon as possible. The more copy the more you need to get it and the ancillary key phrases in there. For actual phrases (meaning a keyword that is really made up of several words also called a long tail), you want to have the words that comprise the phrase as close together as possible but if necessary can have ancillary words between them.

•Graphics: It’s a good call to use Alt tags on your graphics that match your title/keyword phrase. If you put your mouse over a graphic, the Alt tag is the words that you see come up by your cursor.

•Links: Too much to go over here but basically links to other pages in your site and even better, links that open up a new page to another relevant site are good. Links into your site from other top ranked relevant sites are very good. Which leads into…

•Articles: These babies attract outside links to relevant pages. If you have a newsletter, it’s a good resource to take a few of those articles you already hand out for free and make a page for each of them in your site. A couple will do better than none. This is not to be confused with highly valuable information contained in something like a report or white paper. Don’t give those away as they are lead generation tools.

•Blogs: A site that is a blog is good. A blog within a site is good. They both attract outside links if they have good content. A separate blog is good as well since you can use it to link to your site. Instant outside links!

•Google Sitemap: Not to be confused with a sitemap within your website, which is good too. A Google sitemap is an XML generated map of your web pages that allows Google to quickly index pages. It sits on your main directory for the site and you use Google Webmaster tools to tell them it’s there. Here’s a link to a site that generates them for you http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/


Ok, now for your landing pages with Google Ads:

•Keywords: Have the keywords for a landing page associated with an ad match the Google Ad keywords linking to it. You may have multiple pages to accomplish this with nothing different but the keywords. You need to do this any way to keep track of results for ads. Metrics, metrics, metrics. See Headline Tags and Body Copy above in SEO. If you don’t adhere to this, you just lost your visitor and Google will “Slap” your keyword as irrelevant. This will add to a poor Quality Score and overpaying for the keyword. Do it right and combine it with decent click through rates (CTR) and you can actually end up paying less than your keyword bid price and be ranked high.

•Navigation: Allow your visitors to move around your site via normal site navigation and even links in your copy. No trapping them to the page anymore.

•Text: Besides the keywords as mentioned above, have actual relevant copy based on the promise of the ad but don’t give away the farm. The “call to action” purpose of the ad should be at the end of the brief but useful copy. That’s right. Don’t forget that using the ads to get traffic to your site should still have a purpose to it like capturing information for a whitepaper etc. otherwise you are generating viable traffic, but not necessarily good traffic (read as true prospects). You paid for it. Try to get something from it. Again with the metrics.

•No Follow: You don’t want Google or any other engines indexing landing pages as it defeats the purpose and ability to track how it did based on the ad attached to it. This is done by coding it into the header code to not be indexed.

•Meta Tags: Although the title should match keywords, these are not relevant as we are not allowing the page to be indexed or found on the site map.

Simple right? Now all you need to do is find some good keywords and write some excellent ads. No problem :-)

If you want a comprehensive do it yourself book before, or instead of, going to a pro for help, I suggest looking into Perry Marshall’s Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords 2nd Edition on Amazon. Get it here.


Now get to it.


To Your Business Success-

George Sierchio
The Consultant’s Coach

SMB Nation Fall 2010- Will I see you there?

Just a quick last second mention for SMB Nation 2010. Although the venue and date has changed from last year, this event will be held once again in Las Vegas.

The new venue is the Flamingo Hotel right in the middle of the strip with the event taking place from Oct 22-24.

If you haven't signed up yet, I encourage you to do so ASAP as there are still some specials and discounts floating around on the SMB Nation site.

I will be attending the event to meet up with clients, meet some new people as I always do, and to participate on what will be a very informative panel discussion.

The panel (BS106: MSP Future Speak – A Panel Discussion (Speaker: Joe Panettieri, Josh Peterson, David Schafran, George Sierchio)) is taking place on the morning of the 23rd. I would love to see you there and have you participate as well. Click the link above to see the current event agenda.

Follow this link to register if you haven't done so already. (SMB Nation Vegas Registration)

Hope to see you there!



To Your Business Success-

George Sierchio
The Consultant's Coach

Technology Business Value Reality Check

This week alone I’ve talked to 4 people and read a couple of blog posts on the subject of valuing a technology service provider business in a buy/sell scenario. Some spoke from the seller side and others from the buyer side. As is usually the case, all of them on the seller side saw a quite unrealistic, rosy picture, while those on the buyer side understood more of how this game is played.

As I’ve been around the M&A block quite a few times on the sell side, buy side and as an intermediary, these conversations have inspired me to give you a little insight on how this all works (and a prelude to a new book I’ve been working on).




It must be said that as a company owner, you can’t subjectively put a value on your company in a selling situation. There are 3 reasons for this.

First, I would venture to say that 99% of all business owners I’ve come across, as smart as they are, do not have a clue as to how to value and evaluate a business, which is understandable since most were never taught this skill. Most rely on rustling up some unreliable multipliers. This usually means revenue multipliers, which are never an end all be all indicator of value and if used there are more pieces involved than just a little multiplication or only revenues.

Second, 100% of business owners are too emotionally wrapped up in their business to pull that all important piece of their brain out of the way in a valuation.

Lastly, and most importantly, the owner/seller’s valuation has nothing to do with the bottom line, which is the company is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.

As a potential seller or someone that just wants an idea of company value, you could get a good picture from an independent outside valuation by someone that knows your industry market. Ultimately though, there is little control from the seller side on what a buyer will ultimately pay, but there is a way to utilize a valuation for a good idea of where you stand and to have as much control as possible when in a position to sell. I’ll get to that in a minute.

When putting a price tag on a business, it’s nothing like selling property. There are many variables that can turn two seemingly identical companies into having very disparate valuations by the same buyer. There are useful methodologies that go by financial based mathematical formulas then modified based on the structure and condition of the business. And there are multipliers that can literally change as the wind blows and only take certain pieces of a business into consideration (it’s more complicated than multiplying 2 numbers, believe me).

Ultimately, no matter what the industry or the economic climate or the model of the business, the buyer determines the selling price. The seller just decides if they want to accept the price and deal that surrounds it. End of story.

Here are a couple of key variables to know:

- Is the economy stable? (Bad economy typically, but not always, means a good time to buy and bad time to sell)

- Financial mode: downward slide, stable with little growth, or making good gains in revenue and profit in the last few years with growth still anticipated for next year (Pretty self explanatory on how this will work for or against you)

- Processes, systems etc (A big value point, and something I drive home incessantly with clients, is in how organized and repeatable your corporate culture is. No matter the method of valuation used, evaluation of the business structure will change variables and adjust them DOWN)

- What role does the owner(s) play? (Another important point in evaluating structure and company culture I push. Every buyer is different on what they want to do with the seller after buying the company. Most want to be able to remove you quickly, which is most easily done with you as a true CEO. In some cases, they are good with you being important to sales, but usually that comes into play if your business is helping their business enter a new market. Otherwise that’s more of a hindrance than a positive and will change the deal structure. And nobody is going to give you credit for being a technician.)

- What is the revenue model: recurring, services, consulting, design, resell (Some buyers want all you have as they enter a new business segment. Others are looking to grow certain pieces. Some pieces like recurring revenue are worth a lot more than other pieces like reselling. Let’s just say, if they don’t want it, they won’t pay for it. I don’t have enough room to expound upon it here but let me know if you want the full Monty on this as it is the crux of multiples being all over the map.)

- Is there enough profit compared to revenues? (Net profit, EBIT, EBITDA, ODCF… whatever the financial term/acronym most buyers want to see some kind of profits and others want to see profits where they should be or better according to current best of breed industry benchmarks. Where these numbers need to be is very dependent on the type of buyer that’s looking at your business.)

- Who’s your target buyer? (This ties into the above last 2 points. There are a variety of buyer types and each one is looking at your business differently. If you truly have a plan to sell in the future, you can aim at shedding the best light on your business value based on catering to a particular type of buyer. Someone in the know of M&A and your industry can give you an idea of how different buyer types will see the value of your business.)


These are some of the main things, but not quite everything and of course not all the details. But if you look carefully, you will see where things are not purely number (valuation) driven but structure (evaluation) driven.

Now back to my mention of an internal seller side valuation. Here’s an idea of how to best utilize a third party valuation in combination with the variables mentioned previously:

- Figure out what kind of buyer you would like to sell to if you ever sell.

- Get a third party to give you an idea of where you stand now in the market with a basic valuation (a full blown one is unnecessary at this point and could be very costly) and evaluation of your business based on the afore mentioned variables.

- Make an assumption that in a good economy, the same valuation model will produce similar results.

- Pick a value and time line goal.

- Develop the plan and metrics for the question of “what do I have to do to go from today’s valuation to get to my goal of $X value in Y years”.

- Make it happen and do a valuation every once in a while with a third party again.


Get help on any and all of these points if you are not sure of what you need to do. Seriously.

Hope this sheds some light on the ever popular valuation question. It was long but there is much more so comments and questions are welcomed below.


To Your Business Success-

George Sierchio
The Consultant’s Coach

The 3 Ways to Grow Business Revenues

As I am coming off of a typically slow blogging time in the summer, I thought I would go back to the basics to start September off.

So the subject for today is the three, and only, ways to grow the revenues of any business. Technology services most certainly included. And here they are:

#1 Get more clients
#2 Increase the frequency in which clients buy from you
#3 Increase transaction size





Pretty simple right? And it is to a point but I wanted to let you in on an alarming fact. Item #1, getting more clients, is the most popular amongst small business owners but it is also the hardest to do. Yes, believe it!

Once you have a client base, and one that works best for your business, meaning no worse than 80% being good to great clients and 20% being less than desirable, then looking at #2 and #3 are really your best bet.

You know this already but it truly is, as the statistics say, 6 to 8 times easier to sell more to someone that has already bought from you than to find and sell to a new client. This is why #1 is the toughest path to take.

So let’s first look at #2, increasing the frequency of purchase. As an example in an IT service provider world, the best way to do this is in switching clients to recurring revenue (i.e. any type of managed services) from break/fix to increase the frequency of purchase. It takes them from paying you inconsistently to paying you at regular intervals. This increases profit margins and it should certainly increase your productivity and efficiency allowing you to take on more clients without hiring new bodies to handle it, thus also increasing revenues.

But we still have one more area to go after. Item #3 is about increasing how much they are paying you in each transaction. This can be seen in two ways. It could mean finding ways to increase profit margins on things they are already paying you for by adding some more value that doesn’t really cost you more effort or becoming more efficient in delivering a service but charging the same price. The second way to utilize #3 is to add on services and products you can recommend that you, or a better idea a JV partner, can provide this client base which has already bought from you.

As another IT example, you sell a new client a BDR managed service deal, and then you bump them to also having you manage their network and then manage their print services, etc. Or you take an existing client and if the time is right for them, you recommend switching to VoIP and have a JV partner do that work with recurring revenue coming to you monthly. That revenue is pretty much all profit unless you’re giving out a commission to a sales person that made the recommendation.
Now that’s growing a business.

No matter what your industry or your business model, these are the 3 ways to look at growing the revenue your business generates. Increasing the bottom line is an entirely different story, but these are the basics concerning increasing your top line. So get on it.


To Your Business Success-

George Sierchio
The Consultant’s Coach