Continue reading »]]> Making effective use of the visitors to a page or web site, in terms of completing a desired action. Goals vary and can range from filling out a newsletter subscription (leads), purchasing $1000s of dollars in merchandise (sales), or simply reading a second page (engagement). However you define success, Conversion Rate Optimization is about improving the frequency of that success. Combine marketing increases with a steadily increasing conversion rate and your amount of success will be exponential.

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If they’re big and you’re little, then you’re mobile and they’re slow. You’re hidden and they’re exposed. You fight only the battles you know you can win.

- Gene Hackman, Enemy of the State

Branding is more important than ever, with every link and mention, tweet and +1 being consumed, digested and weighed toward search engine rankings. Offline reputation bleeds over to some extent, giving the older, standby brands an edge in the online marketplace. All too often, however, fear of new media or the futility of red tape prevents these big brands from adopting ”new-fangled” technologies right away. That adoption delay is becoming an easy litmus test for the small, agile brands who are paying attention.

Old Site, New Target

For small brands in an industry where the key players have long adoption delays, it can be fairly easy to take the lead online. While it is rare nowadays that larger brands do not have a web site, your first step is to examine their technology. Most web sites more than 2-3 years old will likely have outdated optimization efforts (if any). By building your website with an already SEO-friendly, widget-based software, like WordPress or Magento, you can give yourself a significant, ongoing SEO advantage over older, poorly optimized platforms. Not to mention you should be able to stay up-to-date on new best practices with a little light reading instead of thousands of dollars in site overhauls. Note: Even with a low budget, choosing the cheapest possible hosting environment is not a good idea for reasons I’ll discuss a little later.

Out Firefox the Fox & Optimize for the Prize

Once you have your site up and running, take advantage of free SEO newsletters and add-ons for Firefox or Chrome to ensure that every page is well optimized. If your big brand target has a normal adoption delay any larger than 6 months, it is likely they have not done up-to-date keyword research in over a year and might have some decent holes in their optimization efforts that you can exploit quickly. Start out by going after the keywords they are missing in order to get sales in the door. Then turn around and use your profits from your new traffic to help fund the work you will need to do to tackle the larger, competitive terms. By not slowing down at your first success, you prevent yourself from turning into the kind of marketer you’re hoping to replace.

Get Social, Go Viral

While straight site optimization and link building takes time and some minor financial resources, the Internet also offers creative small businesses the opportunity for huge reputation bumps. The onset of blogs, YouTube and social media allows even the smallest budget to turn their good ideas into creative gold. The right video or clever infographic, that goes at all viral, can garner huge amounts of traffic you need to expect from the start. This is where your hosting situation comes into play. Receiving unexpected amounts of traffic has the potential to cripple your hosting environment if you went cheaper than you should have. While it’s true, you shouldn’t plan on millions of visitors at one time if your average traffic is closer to 100 visitors a day, ensuring that you can handle a traffic spike around 5-10 times your normal daily visitor count at a single point in the day is a good early benchmark. Ask your hosting provider about traffic tolerances if you are unsure. As you grow, you should also be able to move quickly from one plan to another, with little to no hassle from your provider (a good thing to know ahead of time).

Getting a blog article, video or social campaign to go viral can cause a huge lift in traffic, get people talking about your brand, linking to your site, blog, etc. and in general making you very popular overnight. However, the effects are often temporary, and you need to learn the best way to turn that huge traffic spike into a decent chunk of returning visitors, fans, followers, etc.

King of the Hill, Top of the Hit List

If you are able to take quick action, in an industry led by competitors with a large adoption delay, you have an opportunity to put yourself in the thought leadership role online. By becoming an influencer in your niche, you can gain the kind of clout that the big brands have offline in traditional media marketing channels. However, one thing about Internet marketing, SEO in particular, is that once you climb the pack, reach the top, and get where you want to be…you also paint a target on your back. The big brands will not like getting upstaged by a younger, smaller company. They will begin to improve their adoption delay, if only to take you down. Once you have the lead, though, if you keep doing what you’re doing, adopting new technologies early on and connecting with your audience, it will be really hard to catch you.

Tick, Tick, Tick…

One word of warning as you begin your meteoric rise to online fame and fortune… before you play the social media game, be sure to wade in carefully and figure out the mostly unwritten rules to each community. While rising above your offline competitors with a creative, witty presence is entirely possible, offending your audience and causing severe harm to your own brand is equally possible. In the movie, Gene Hackman ends up blowing up his own house all because Will Smith makes a phone call. And while the underdog still wins in the movies, even there, the setback almost costs them everything.

Continue reading »]]> With an awesome weekend behind me, it was somewhat disappointing to come back to an overloaded Monday. I couldn’t quite find the time to put on my blogging hat yesterday.

As it turns out, that was exactly what I needed. Eric Lander posted a very good article yesterday afternoon about some of the posers in our industry, creating a new word for those SEOs who possess necessary, technical SEO knowledge: Dinocorns (old-fashioned and becoming rare). He made up the word, but I think it fits perfectly.

As I said in my comment on his article, as well as a previous post about SEO training, I have been guilty of not fully educating my team in the past. In an effort to get projects done, often I played to individual strengths and only taught what was needed for the project at hand. That mindset caused me a few issues in the past and, if prevalent, could have a negative effect on the search engine optimization industry at large.

Just to be clear, a professional SEO is someone whose sole occupation is providing SEO services for clients. Unfortunately, as Mr. Lander points out, some of the folks who claim to be SEOs do not have a solid foundation. Things in search engine optimization change too fast to claim to know it all…but the need for on-page optimization is just as important as it was a decade ago.

Search engine optimization at a professional level requires a degree of constant learning. New rules, tactics, tips and myths seem to come out of the woodwork. An accomplished SEO not only works for clients, but somehow manages to always have a few tests running to verify things for themselves and keep abreast of the latest news from search engines and a few of the more influential folks in the industry. Guys like Danny Sullivan and Rand Fishkin have spent years providing quality advice and wise counsel. They are considered experts by several in the SEO industry, but you don’t hear them claim the moniker for themselves very often. And for that, I tend to respect them even more.

So, if you are looking for a professional SEO to help you promote your site, learn some of the basics on your own in order to make an educated decision. And for those looking to become a professional SEO, start with the basics and be a Dinocorn. The industry will be better for it in the long run.

Continue reading »]]> Every company who has ever approached me about building or optimizing a web presense seems to have the mindset, to some degree, that their offline reputation will be enough to propel them to online success. At some level, they assume that without any change on their part, the pocketbooks of the digital masses will be thrust at them with groupie-like adoration. While this can be the case in rare circumstances, being the best in the biz offline does not guarantee online success.

Traditional media customers call with questions because they expect a company selling products to have the answers. The same thing is true online. Each and every visitor to your web site has a purpose for being there, something that is important to them. If your web site does not contain the answer they are looking for, they move on to the next digital competitor in line. And like a phone call, you can choose to listen and go out of your way to please customers…or not.

Likewise, few companies are large or popular enough to sway search engines into accepting traditional media success as proof of digital worth without additional work. The most important thing to remember is that the Internet is a marketing channel like any other. To achieve sustainable success, you must learn the rules of the game. And keep learning, because the rules change often. Companies who have been winning the traditional media game for years must adapt and look for ways to leverage their offline reputation to create online authority if they want to win in the world of new media as well. It is not automatic.

Continue reading »]]> Whether you are tasked to promote a product that has been around for years or the newest gadget still in prototype, you have to first establish who it is you are targeting. Who needs your product? What do they call it? Are they motivated by price or features? Technology or lifestyle? All of these questions can be answered, if you know where and how to look.

Using the Right Tools

To get to know your potential audience, there are several tools available online that can help you determine the particulars of how people are talking about your type of product. One of the most commonly used is a Keyword Research Tool maintained by Google. Start with a specific word or phrase that  you think best describes your company or product. While there are several advanced options to play with later, the purpose of today’s lesson is more about the big picture. Type your specific word or phrase into the form and hit the Search button to get underway.

What comes back are the words and phrases that Google visitors typed into the search engine during the previous month, along with rough numbers of how many times each was typed in and how much advertising competition exists for each. Take any terms that accurately describe your product / service / company and save them into a spreadsheet.

Then go back and type in each one as the focus term and search again. This allows you to get 2nd and 3rd tier suggestions from Google that may not have shown up originally. After a few rounds of this, you should begin to see trends. What does the data begin to answer for you?

Drawing Conclusions

First of all, if you are having trouble finding terms, it may mean that your product only serves a very small community of people. While this can make a large quantity of sales difficult to achieve, it can often mean that competition will be light. Likewise, if you’ve only gone to the second tier of suggestions and you already have thousands of keywords, it would seem your product is fairly popular, which may lead to significant sales if you can overcome the competition.

Does your list of terms create more questions than you started with? In several cases, the most important keyword is likely what you expected it to be, but what about the 2nd most important? Are there any terms that surprised you? Or whose level of importance surprised you? Looking into these more closely might help you better reach your customer.

Where do price-related terms fall in your list? Observe their popularity and variety and be aware of how they may affect your ability to compete.

How about popular feature-specific terms? Perhaps items with those features should receive prominent placement in their category or even the home page.

Data for Data’s Sake?

In the end, how you find ways to use this initial data to promote your product or service will help determine how successful you are at connecting with your audience. And keyword research is only the beginning of the insights available to you. The sheer volume of information available to the Internet marketing professional is staggering. Starting with the basics will help the rest come easier with time.

Continue reading »]]> The majority of catalog merchants had brand managers and merchandisers long before they had web sites. These folks have given vision and character to the brand over the years. They know the history, seasonal trends and audience profile better than anyone. They have great working relationships with vendor reps and other catalog merchandisers in the industry.

All too often, however, these same people are unaware of the tools that could be made readily available to them… tools that could increase their own productivity and take away some of the guesswork that remains.

When you start to develop a strategy for search engine optimization or a pay-per-click campaign, you get lists of keywords from the search engines for which exact phrases drive the most traffic, use a select few on each page and try to capture as many others as possible. Give your merchandising manager access to these same tools, and they can use the most popular phrases in their marketing messages. By excluding what they already sell, they can also find missing opportunities in their product lines, complete with relative popularity and competition levels.

Go one step further, from global search engine tools to the results of the search on the brand’s web site, and you’ve now empowered them to develop that new color for an existing product or to or add a new size or style because they have data that proves customers are looking for it.

By unlocking the information stored on the web, these highly loyal, brand experts are now able to proactively receive customer feedback, improve their own marketing efforts, and be as invaluable in the digital marketing strategy of the company as they have been in traditional media.

Continue reading »]]> When your web site is launched for the very first time, your web presence takes on a life of its own. Marketing helps to build its reputation, developers continue to ensure good health, management’s oversight keeps it in line with the goals of the company. Redesigning your web site should be approached like trading in a car: an accepted, expected part of life, in response to a change in needs (not mid-life crisis), and thoughtfully considered for efficiency and longevity.

Procrastination

For one reason or another, many companies drive a platform until it begins to significantly harm their ability to compete before launching into the redesign process. Such procrastination almost inevitably causes the timeline to seem more important than ensuring the redesign continues to offer features that visitors rely on to find or navigate the site.

Once a redesign is deemed necessary, it is important to set a realistic timeline with plenty of buffer for testing and tweaking. Redesigning a web site in a rush can damage the reputation of a brand and the bottom line of a company far more in the long run than holding on to an outdated platform a few months longer to ensure the new platform is done right.

Very few people walk in to a dealership and sign the paperwork on a new vehicle without ever taking a look at it, but if you’ve ignored your engine light for the last three years and your car catches fire, you might not feel like you have a choice.

Audience and Usability

Jumping on the latest platform bandwagon may seem like the right thing to do, but companies need to carefully evaluate their audience’s ability to use any new platform and its features before committing to the necessary development and customization efforts. New platforms are usually designed by technical people, for an internet-savvy audience that are bored/dissatisfied with existing platforms.

When identifying a platform to correct certain issues, also be mindful of which features are not in need of fixing. If your product is aimed at an older, less-internet savvy demographic, you may need to run a usability study to gauge the reaction of your audience to changes in certain features. For instance, logging in with one of 50 social media accounts might seem like a great idea to a platform developer, but may confuse a less-savvy visitor.

Research best in class ratings, read up on safety features, scan customer reviews, etc. because there’s nothing worse than getting stuck in something with a huge payment, bad gas mileage and no cup holders that a little research could have prevented.

Reputation & Rankings

For companies who rely on search engine rankings to deliver a decent portion of their visitors, a redesign can also lead to lost rankings if accurate planning is not done. A recent discussion at SEOmoz provides a detailed checklist on how to carefully approach the redesign process from an SEO perspective. Basically, giving yourself time to prepare for the transition is key.

If you have spent any time optimizing the structure and code of your existing site, realize that your new platform should be optimized as well, before you turn it on. And all those links you have agonized over getting, to beat out your competitors…will do you very little good if they land on a 404 error page because you forget to 301 redirect your old pages to the new platform equivalents.

In other words, driving into a dealership in an older model mini-van and driving out in a Ferrari may sound cool to you, but if your spouse can’t drive a stick…sleeping on the couch might not be worth the added wow-factor.