Category: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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Do you want to be confused about SEO?

It’s really easy. All you have to do is believe articles like the one I ran across on LinkedIn recently. It was given credence by appearing on the Ad Age website. It’s title proclaimed that it was about Google’s “Penguin” update and how it would lead to something the author referred to as “new SEO“. (SEO is the acronym for search engine optimization)

It’s important to first focus on the fact that the author can’t know very much about any of Google’s updates because all such information is a trade secret that is carefully guarded by Google. Despite his lack of actual knowledge about Google’s algorithms the author conflates his opinions to improperly and insultingly define SEO (search engine optimization) as doing something to “fool a crawler into indexing borderline junk content to get high rankings”. Doesn’t an article falsely claiming to know something about Google’s Penguin update quality as “junk content”? In fact, isn’t his practice an example of “link baiting” which is the creation of “borderline junk content” to lure sites into linking to the material? I think that “yes” is the correct answer to both these questions.

It’s no surprise, then, that this author, speaking as a content creator, extols the virtue of content creation and how it represents something he calls “new SEO“. Unfortunately for his argument content has always been an important part of search returns so he is saying nothing new but thinks it appropriate to bash SEO anyhow.

Google has succeeded by doing search better than the other search engines. We can count on Google to continue to improve their performance. Yes, content is important and there are more ways than ever to produce content with the increasing importance of social media. Since SEO is the art and science of making it clear what your business does it will adapt.  It must be forever new and a single update to Google’s algorithms is unlikely to cause catastrophic change as this author purports.

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How can you get your website to be better at lead generation?

Every business needs to generate leads. Leads become customers and if you don’t have customers you don’t have a business. Consequently we see a lot of material online purporting ways to improve lead generation . However, if we look closely at the advice it is not clear how the recommendations could be supported by results which probably explains why they are not.

A post on LinkedIn claimed to identify the elements of a “great lead gen landing page”. It was posted by a prominent marketing company and cited another online source. Let’s start with their top three:

1. A concise headline. Was A/B testing performed with a concise versus a non-concise heading?  What does that even mean? An example would be fascinating as would the raw numbers in the difference on leads from each. Wouldn’t a headline that addressed what visitors were looking for be more persuasive than something that is simply concise? What process should be followed to identify a concise, or even better, a pertinent headline?

2. An image or video. Was testing performed with and without images for a variety of business types?  What was the difference in raw numbers of leads by business type? This suggestion is a no-brainer for physical products but illustrating services in a way that makes sense to visitors is not so simple.

3. A core benefit statement. Many businesses get tripped up on this because they state what they think is a core benefit rather than doing the research to discover the benefits that most people are searching for. What is the process for crafting an effective statement?

The point of this exercise is that your landing page needs to be customized to the needs of your best prospects. There is no “one-size-fits-all”. A careful search engine optimization (SEO) process can give the direction you need to properly craft your landing pages. By starting with the proper research as we do at sem[c] you will know how people are looking for what you are offering. Only then can you start tailoring your landing page to their needs.

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How important is SEO in lead generation?

 

The Samurai Business Group is one of the finest sales management training companies around. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to take their Black Belt Sales Training course and it gave me a string of epiphanies about the buying process and how marketing and sales fit into that process.

I have the pleasure of talking with both of the founders, Bob Lambert and Dan Kreutzer, on a regular basis. We frequently touch on various problems of interest to most people in business. I consider both of them to be trusted advisors.

Samurai has this to say about prospecting for leads:

5 Active Activities on Prospecting include: 
1. Quality Introductions (QIs)
2. Referrals
3. Alliances
4. Networking
5. Targeted Direct Mail/Phone

This is ordered to represent the most likely activity to result in a sale (QIs) to least likely. It is a good thing that numbers 4 and 5 can be helped by SEO because large numbers of interactions are necessary to achieve a lead, let alone a sale. Networking in particular must be seen to include not only search engine results but the entire ecosystem of online interactions. A business can begin to analyse metrics that include how many visits to the company website result in a lead or a sale.

What the list doesn’t suggest is how important validation has become in both the development of leads and getting a sale. Almost every buyer consults a range of online resources before making a buying decisions in nearly every type of transaction according to the research funded by Google in the pamphlet “Zero Moment of Truth”.

If we look at the process for achieving success with quality introductions, referrals and alliances we see that the validation process that is now so common in the buying process would be incorporated here as well. Wouldn’t you Google a potential alliance partner or referral?

SEO increases the number of qualified visits to your website. The specific number of visits necessary to reach your goals will vary but, in the case of website visits, more is always better. These visits are better yet when properly qualified to how people look for what you offer which is the point of SEO by sem[c].

This report shows the relative effectiveness of SEO against social media and pay per click:

2012 State of Digital Marketing Report - SEO company, Webmarketing123

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Social Media can be a part of successful search engine marketing

There should be no question that social media can be an integral part of search engine marketing. Social media content is content afterall.  At sem[c] we have been cross-linking our clients’ social media and websites for years. The prime business goal for a business, that will do the work necessary to best utilize social media (and it’s a lot of work), is to have good, real, frequently updated and optimized content on their website and an active and very interactive social profile. Each will drive traffic to the other. In both cases the strategy is based on the fact that sales are positively influenced by the amount of qualified traffic looking at your content. Each type of content serves a distinct and different purpose. Each type of content has costs and benefits.

You should think of your website as a repository of everything there is to know about your business. You should assume that by the time a prospect interacts with you they will have read everything on your website that is important to them. You really want to be in the short list of possibilities when a prospect is looking for what you sell. To be successful at this you need to develop a contemporary looking website with good, original content. The SEO process as practiced by sem[c] will help you to do this in a way that will get you found AND make it clear to a prospect what’s in it for them. A link to your social media will allow the prospect to see what other people are saying.  The costs are monetary: website development, hosting, domain name and time: content generation and organization.

You should think of social media as both part of the validation process when prospects are investigating your business and a potential source of traffic to your website when a prospects finds you via their social network. If someone gets interested in your business because of one your mutual friends they will want to know more and will visit your website. The great thing about social media is that it has little in upfront technical costs. The real cost comes in time. To get the most value out of your social media you will need to create content in an attractive way.  The goal is to get people to react to that content which allows you to interact with them. This is the most important task in maintaining social media and it works even in the case of “negative” comments. In fact, like in the old saw that there is no such thing as bad pr, any comment in your social media, no matter how bad it is, can send a powerful message about your business.

Social media can be a great tool in your online marketing toolkit.

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How does your competition affect your SEO?

It stands to reason that if your competition is highly optimized you will need to out-do them in order to achieve better results on Google and the other search engines, doesn’t it? So, don’t make the mistake one of our prospects made recently when he emphatically denied that the businesses that were currently defining his target market weren’t his competition because they didn’t do exactly what his business intended to do.

This takes us back to a recurring theme in SEO:  what you think your business is doesn’t matter as much as what your prospects are looking for. His mistake misled our prospect to think that our expertise in his actual competition wasn’t meaningful because he didn’t recognize his competition. This mistake led him to believe that anybody offering SEO was the same as anyone else. His intended audience was already finding his competition enthusiastically. This was frustrating for us because there was no way that we could help him move his project forward in the right direction. It was clear that no one could.

To make the most of your SEO budget make sure that your purveyor can help you understand your competition in search. With everyone from printing companies to off-shore non-native English speakers offering SEO services you need to have some real criteria to make a good SEO buying decision.  Understanding the competition is a very good start.

Even better is to work with someone like sem[c] for your SEO. We’ll help you compete effectively.

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How can a security problem affect your website’s SEO?

A lot of us are a little sloppy about keeping our desktop and other documents organized. Sometimes things get too disorganized in other venues… like our websites, for instance. Recently a client needed to deal with their site being hacked because it was being used as a part of a “phishing” scheme to trick people into revealing their usernames and passwords for websites like their bank. Criminals sell this information to other criminals.

There are a number of organizations that monitor such activity and make the information about compromised websites widely available. When your website makes these lists it is likely to get “blacklisted”. When your website is blacklisted your company emails could get blocked. Google and other search engines could de-list you so that you disappear from search results. This is the opposite of search engine optimization (SEO).

My client learned the hard way that failed installs and old software left on their website had become a security risk and had very likely been exploited by criminal hackers. They asked me to quarterback the correction so I brought in a developer who was familiar with some aspects of the site. Even after the developers cleaned up the site it will need to be monitored because nothing is completely certain in a circumstance like this.

In addition, like the software on your computer, server software needs to be updated to the current releases to ensure that it is not easily hacked. The ISP (Internet Service Provider) in my client’s case was not updating one of their most basic server software, PHP, because they were afraid of breaking the functionality of some of the sites that they host. I disagree with that kind of reasoning. It’s better to require necessary changes to functionality programming than to jeopardize the security of all the hosted sites.

 

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SEO update 2010

The state of SEO 2010

There’s been a lot of action in the search engine arena recently. Yahoo’s transition to using Bing’s search results has been largely completed in North America. This means the search results that you get on both Yahoo! and Bing should be very similar. As of the end of August, the total number of searches in the USA show Google with around a 70% market share and Bing/Yahoo! With 25%. Ask and AOL split the final 5% of market share according to Marketwire.

This represents the final month statistics before Google’s introduction of “Google Instant” which has a lot of potential. Google’s new approach is certainly compelling to watch as your results change as you type in your query. Google also showed an increase in paid results in both month-to-month and year-to-year numbers. This is further justification of our recommendation that AdWords is your most valuable pay-per-click resource.

This information is valuable to you not only for the quality clicks it produces but also as our research tool. In a project with our alliance partner, website developer Caxy, Inc., for Hair Professionals Beauty Schools we were able to identify the most commonly used keyword phrases by potential students looking for their options in pursuing their professional cosmetology licenses. This has quickly produced well-qualified visits to the website that could not have found their way there before we started.

We’ve found that we can help most B2C businesses and many B2B businesses. Please visit our website or call or email us to find out how we can make your website a more effective business tool. Our customers have found that the online marketing power we’ve brought to their websites has got them on track to increase sales.

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The opposite of SEO is called “de-listed”

SEO can help if you get delisted!

What’s worse than Google not listing your site?

How about getting completely removed from any listing of your site on Google after you are on the first page of returns? This is called delisting. Unfortunately it can happen as it did to one of clients last week. SEO can help you get relisted after the problem that caused the delisting is solved. sem[c] can help you with both.

How could this happen to one of my clients you ask?  The answer is that this client had opted to not have us monitor their site. They had enjoyed first place SERP on the first page of Google for so long they didn’t think it was necessary. But, their webserver got hacked by what looked like a botnet which is a criminal software that spammers use to take over computers all over the world. The spamming activity it was performing certainly led to the delisting.

Why would you do? Would you even know? My client only noticed after I became involved in solving the problem. The website statistics show that the delisting occurred several weeks earlier. It must be noted that the graphic design company who designed the site as well as the coder that they employed to implement the site neither noticed the problems nor were able to fix it.

How do you recover? You need to make sure any and all problems are fixed properly.  Then you need to begin the relisting process which is just slightly more complicated than getting listed in the first place.

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Have we seen the end of the cold call?

When’s the last time that you successfully reached a prospect with a cold call? With today’s sophisticated phone trees and voicemail systems you could make many, many calls before actually speaking to a human being let alone a person that could benefit your business. Then, what’s the odds that the person who you reach actually needs what you have right then?

On the other hand, it’s really nice when business comes your way from an inbound cold call, isn’t it? You can get more of that type of call with Internet marketing.

Internet marketing puts your contact information in a context that lets your self-qualified prospects easily find you. sem[c]’s effective integration of search engine marketing and optimization can get results right away. An attorney recently came to us after being with a large service provider who provided no leads at all in more than four months. The day after we started his campaign he made an appointment to discuss estate planning after receiving a cold call from our campaign.

That’s the kind of response that you can expect from SearchEngineMarketingChicago.com – contact us to start getting leads for you business.

You might never need to make a cold call ever again.