All About Frontburner Marketing, Founded by Kyle Bailey

Frontburner Marketing is an SEO Agency based in Austin, TX, and offers SEO, Strategy, Sales and Social Media services to small business owner clients in Austin, Dallas, Houston and around the country.

I’m Kyle Bailey, and I started Frontburner Marketing in 2010, after finding that most of the business owners I talked to needed to make a connection between their SEO and their sales process.

Frontburner Marketing is an SEO Agency first, with a strong emphasis on Strategy and Sales, because if your SEO Campaign doesn’t sell, what’s the point?

My goal for all Frontburner Marketing SEO campaigns is to do one thing:

Increase sales for your business.

I do it through the “3 S Strategy”;  SEO, Sales, and Social Media. If it isn’t one of those 3, I’m probably not a fit for your needs.

I live near Austin, TX, with my beautiful wife Ruth, and 2 kids. We love it here!

I moved to Austin from Dallas in 2006, started working in digital marketing in 2008. After 2 years of helping small business with social marketing and other digitial marketing services, I started Frontburner Marketing.

One of my core passions is public speaking, and that takes a few different forms: workshops, small marketing workshops and keynote speaker.

I offer all my slide decks for review by anyone interested in hiring me to speak.

You can find that link here: Digital Marketing Workshop Decks

• We’re dedicated to your success, and we look forward to serving you. If you’re like many of our clients, you are doing ok in your business, but you’d like to do better. You know that you need to improve your online marketing efforts, but either you don’t know where to start, or you’ve been burned and don’t want to repeat that experience.

At Frontburner Marketing, we completely understand. We actually look forward to serving folks just like you, because we deliver, and we do it in a clear and concise way that you can readily understand.
If you feel that you’re ready to make some positive changes in your business online, contact us today for a free consultation!

What is SEO?

SEO is an acronym, and stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. It’s a combination of art and science resulting in increased search ranking for your website and its keywords. The history of SEO is a checkered one, with many people engaging in what is called “Black Hat” SEO. This is the act of cheating in one way or another to gain the rankings you seek. We won’t go into all of the specifics of how this is or was achieved, but one example is bad links. For several years, you could get any link at all to your website or page and get it ranked. As search evolved, the quality of inbound links had to be better, but still could be in any volume pretty much, and using any anchor text (these are very general statements, but true).

The rise of Google changed the world of SEO, and search for users, forever. By providing a more relevant search engine return page (SERP) experience, they became the dominant search engine. As such, they make the rules in SEO, and if you want to be on the first page, you’d better obey their SEO rules!

More recently, Google has released the Panda and Penguin updates (and even more recently, MobileGeddon), turning the world of agency-driven SEO on its ear for many companies. You got hammered by Google if you were one of the unfortunate horde who were using these tactics:

• Drive all of your traffic on one or two keywords
• Use the same anchor text too many times on a page
• Use spammy links or any of several other major factors

your page ranking has fallen. This is the future of SEO, and while it has certainly made link building harder, it is providing a much more relevant and rich search experience.

So where does this leave your SEO efforts? In short, be relevant, be engaging (this means using social media extensively with your SEO efforts), and only get quality links that matter to your content. Worry less about links, and more about getting good content in front of your core audience.

DO I NEED SEO?

SEO is a great tool, but despite what many SEO companies will tell you, you may not need it. That’s right, you might NOT need SEO for your small business to succeed. Sounds strange for an SEO company to tell you this maybe, but it’s true. Not all small businesses need SEO, but you need a professional to tell you. That’s where we come in.

SEO is predicated on two basic ideas:

That people search for your service in large enough numbers to matter
That you can benefit from increased requests for service
Those two sound simple, but maybe they’re not. Massive numbers of people may search for your product or service, but can you explain it clearly on your website? If not, it’s not a good idea to pile a bunch of confused people onto your website. In fact here are some great questions to ask yourself before purchasing SEO services:

Can you process/handle a dramatic increase in leads?
Do you have the infrastructure to handle increased sales?
Is your site conversion friendly (can prospects get to the info they need, and is it easy for them to make a buying decision)?
If your product or service can’t be purchased online, do you make it easy to contact you?
Is your per-unit profit enough to justify spending money on marketing (hint: if the answer to this is “no”, you’re gonna go out of business)

WILL SEO GET ME MORE SALES?

Perhaps the most important question an Austin Small Business can ask themselves is this: “Will SEO get me more sales?”

See, without sales, what’s the point of any marketing, right? SEO is just one more tool in your toolbox (although potentially a very powerful one), so if it doesn’t result in more Sales and bottom-line growth, again, what’s the point?

SEO will get your message in front of more people, but if your message is flawed, your sales will lag. In fact, if any link in your sales chain is weak or broken, SEO will only empty your wallet and frustrate your prospects. You MUST take a holistic view of your marketing and sales, and be prepared to execute any point at which your prospects come in contact with your value proposition. The problem you solve and the way you solve it will be the most important elements to your prospect, and if that’s not clear on your website, don’t do SEO.

WHAT ROLE DOES SEO PLAY IN THE SALES PROCESS?

We talk a lot about The Sales Process, and we also talk a lot about SEO, but where does SEO fit into The Sales Process?  It’s a great question, and a relevant one for any small business owner.

To start with, you need to know your own sales process backwards and forward. If you don’t know the steps that your prospects take in the process of purchasing your product or service, you’re starting off two steps behind.  The Sales Process dictates the purpose for every piece of content, and every page on your site. So how does SEO work hand-in-hand with yours?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, tells search engines like Google what your webpage and website is about. By doing this, you make sure that they know what your content is relevant for which SERP (Search Engine Return Page) or search query.  Let’s say you’re a dentist, so you want to get exposure for “Austin Dentist”.  Once you’ve done the work to put your content on the first page, you’re going to get people searching for that service. This puts SEO into the early part of The Sales Process.  This means that, for the most part, you’re going to talk to these visitors as if they are just walking through your front door or have called you the first time.

Greeting, Rapport Building/Investigation and early Presentation are the steps you’ll be using, and then be sure to engage “sticky tools” to ensure that you stay in contact with your nice, new prospects.

WHAT IS PPC?

PPC, or Pay-Per-Click, is really more of a reference to a division of Online Marketing called Paid Search. Encompassing several facets, Paid Search is generally referenced in contrast to Organic Search, which is the process of getting pages and websites ranked on return pages of search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Paid search is all about getting an ad in front of an audience that searches on a keyword, then getting that audience to click on the ad. You then pay either Google or some third party per each click that your prospects perform. As you can imagine, it’s a little scary to put money out there every time someone takes an action. You can’t control that, and that can feel very uncertain. There is light at the end of the tunnel, though.

If you do the proper work on your message, and you make sure that the destination page (also called a “Landing Page”) is properly set up, you’ll have success.  Really, it all starts with you having a good product or service to sell in the first place. If you solve a big enough problem, you have far less to worry about when it comes to messaging. Get the problem solving right, and your life is a lot easier.

Paid Search, or PPC, is a great way to test messaging and the “pretty side” of marketing. Colors, placement (do you put your “click here” button top right or top left?), font size, font color, background color; these are all elements that you can, and should, test. Remember the testing rule: Never Stop Testing!

All that said, you should carefully consider all aspects of your budget and marketing plan before engaging in Paid Search. Perhaps as no other form of marketing, Paid Search can cause you to lose a large amount of money before you even realize it. This is why it’s important to consult an expert.