Your website is all show and no go.
Every week I am reminded of a common problem many businesses don’t even realize they have. What is that problem? It is the ever present form over function problem. Many companies approach the web with the eyes of the consumer only. Unfortunately your customers have very little impact on how you rank within the search engines.
“Businesses tend to spend it all to look cool online and not a dime on how the site can be found,” laments Gartner Research Vice President Gene Alvarez. “At least one-third of the design budget should be allocated to site discovery on things like keywords, reviewing pages for Web-crawler-friendly attributes, and the development of a site map.”
When making the decision to launch a new site or embark on a re-design answer these three questions and you will be on your way to better findability.
Spending money on a new site to only have it invisible to you future customers is wasted investment.
Bookmark at:What is it with this industry we know as Search Marketing?
It seems customer after customer has worked with a previous vendor that when asked about their services simply hands the customer a “chinese menu” pricelist and lets them order a solution ala carte.
How can this method work?
How can you be sure of successful results when you are buying the same size solution offering as every other company in any industry is buying? If you sell products are your needs the same as someone that provides service? Are you a B2C player, or a B2B? Every company has different goals, objectives and needs.
Every company is at a different maturation phase of Search Marketing.
Do yourself a favor, pass on the two egg rolls and chicken friend rice and partner with a firm that is interested in your business, the direction you are heading as an organization and is willing to taylor a solution specifically for you. Make them demonstrate they know you, your competition and your marketplace before beginning an engagement.
Bookmark at:We are often asked by potential clients, how long will SEO take?
To that question I am often reminded of the phrase “How long is a piece of string?
The real question is how long does marketing take? When does your company decide you have marketed enough, you have enough customers and growing any further really isn’t necessary.
I think you get my point, SEO, like marketing really never ends. There are always new goals and competitive pressures to address in an ongoing basis.
For SEO to work properly it should be viewed as a long-term strategy that needs to be a permanent part of how you operate on the web.
Patience is required when embarking on the journey known as SEO. Things take time, even the best executed strategies take time to work, we don’t own the search engines or the competition.
Gaining a first page ranking is huge for business but to get there, customers must realize that persistence and testing are keys to the strategy. Best practices must be leveraged over and over all the while testing and tuning to gain the best results for your business.
Ultimately you will be rewarded for executing your strategy properly and being committed to your goals. Select a vendor that will take the time to understand your business and will commit to being a partner for the long haul.
Bookmark at:We have always believed that business strategy is the most important aspect of any Search Marketing effort. Throwing SEO/PPC tasks against the wall and hoping something sticks is a recipe for disaster. Before we engage a client we focus on gaining a deeper understand of the client business goals and objectives for and now and in the future.
What direction is the company going in?
Then we point our tools at the competition, how are they positioned, what tactics are they leveraging to get there? This is a valuable part of forming a counter strategy to attain the goals our clients have set for themselves. Interestingly there is some amazing information in this research.
Many things can be discovered by looking under the hood of a competitors website, such as: What key words do they win with? On many occasions we get an idea of what new marketplaces, products or strategies the competition is focusing in long before these tactics are completely introduced to the market place.
If you are in a competitive battle, and who isn’t anymore - think of your SEO vendor in a new way. Ask you vendor to help with your strategic planning, see what they can learn about the competition that you might not already know.
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You lost them at Hello. Well, now what do you do? You are finally getting some internet traffic on your website, with higher organic rankings or PPC activity. So What! traffic pays very few companies bills. Lets be honest, the average website visitor will give you only 5 seconds to draw them in, to peak their curiosity. To maximize the value of this new traffic you must get these visitors to do something. Ask yourself these questions, with the correct answers you are on your way to higher click-throughs, and conversion rates. What is the focal point of my landing page or website? Am I getting visitors to focus on what is important or am I distracting them?Do I have any calls to action, meaning does anything on my landing page prompt the visitor to do something?Have I tested different content, text sizes and other attributes for user appeal? Their is an enormous amount of psychological differences in user base and target audiences, are you testing to find out what appeals to your specific audience?Is there any sense of urgency to get visitors to take action?Answering these questions and leveraging your answers will get you on your way to keeping your visitors interested and helping them take action.
Bookmark at:Search engine marketing is the act of leveraging a range of marketing techniques required to make a website visible to the various search engines and directories so that it will attract visits from a targeted audience.
These techniques include the optimization of the website or landing page, the submission of the site to directories, and the use of paid listings, which means paying a search engine to have an ad placed at the top of the search page or along the side of the page. The above mentioned techniques will help additional traffic to a companies website.
Website traffic is not the only concern of a company when if comes to its website, in fact it is only the first step in a successful search engine marketing campaign. The other two and more critical factors are click-through and conversion. Traffic is great, but traffic alone on your site does not pay the bills.
What makes the ROI in Search Marketing so powerful is when visitors to your site are encouraged through best practices to click through, or look deeper into the site.
Last and even most critical is the ability to generate and improve upon website traffic conversions. In a conversion, a visitor agrees to take the next step, to sign up for a whitepaper or account and even to purchase something from the website.
A properly thought out and executed strategy will take all the above facets into consideration and can drastically improve all of those areas.
Bookmark at:You have just entered Google Hell and you don’t even know it.
Or, you know it but you don’t know how you got there or how to get out.
What is Google Hell? For website owners/operators who at one point had a solid organic ranking, Google Hell is when for some unexplained reason your rankings have imploded and left you ranked on some distant page in the vast waste land of post page 3+ rankings.
What are some causes of transcending to Google Hell? Well, the first cause could be the fact that the search engines are constantly changing. Many people think a high ranking is etched in stone. Your search marketing strategy is a raft and the search engines are the river, when you stop paddling the current can take your progress away.
A strong Search Marketing strategy will have an ongoing component that monitors changes in your traffic behavior. The competition is another enemy of high rankings. If you are standing still your competition is busy devising plans to pass you. A solid Search Marketing strategy will observe the movements the competition is making and react. Technical server issues are another demon in maintaining high rankings. An offline server that occurs while search engines spider can hurt rankings, and/or speed to get listed (if you are brand new).
Be aware of server downtime and re-direction issues.
The last item we will talk about here are link issues. Once a good link does not mean always a good link. Link properties can change over time leaving you with links that are no longer relevant, these devalued links can lower your rankings. A solid search Marketing strategy will have an ongoing element that covers link analysis.
This should help you identify what the culprit was for sending you down the road to sudden poor organic rankings.
Bookmark at:You’re a loser, well maybe not you, but your website is. How can you know if this statement is true?
For many its not that obvious that the website they call their own is a true dog. So what defines a website loser on the internet? Ideally, a website should do the following:
Well, now you know what to look for. But, how in the heck can you validate the factors mentioned above? A simple to use tool for validating your current status is http://www.alexa.com.
With Alexa you can measure your current tracking ranking and measure the page views of each visitor. Some basic guidelines, the higher the ranking, the worse. So a 410,000 Alexa ranking is not great. The page view data is good for seeing how effective your click through techniques are on your site. The more page views per visitor the better.
One final simple but important tool is the Google Page Rank tool. You can easily locate that with a Google search and is available as part of the Google tool bar. With the Google tool bar the lower the number the worse. A 2 is not a good page rank, and 6 or a 7 are fantastic.
Leverage the tools mentioned above to determine whether your website is a loser or not.
Bookmark at: