SEO and other online channels: different parts of the buying process
SEO Marketing and sales expectations
Google has created a map of the buying process that positions each type of online channel in relation to a purchase:
You can click on the graphic to adjust the display to show how this relationship varies from industry to industry.
This quantifies the delay in time between marketing and sales. The effects of SEO take months to realize but its value is seen by its proximity to an actual sale in the chart. The only channel that is closer is a direct click which means the prospect can go to the URL of the item of interest directly.
We have seen a lot of consternation about the direct effect one can expect from social media marketing. The chart proposes that it and display advertising are at the far end of assisting interaction whereas successful SEO and its benefit to organic results are closest to the last interaction or sale.
To improve your lead generation you need to talk so that everyone can understand
The DISC model of behavioral types can be a valuable way to help identify how to best communicate with a person to generate the most leads. If you speak in a way that is most accessible to a person they are much more likely to understand your point. The DISC model can be visualized as a set of axis:
This model predicts a dichotomy between “Task oriented” and “People oriented” behaviors. Another popular behavior model, Myers-Briggs, identifies a very similar thinking/feeling axis.
In ZMOT: Winning the Zero Moment of Truth we read: “The truth is that for many shoppers, the single most powerful impetus to buy is someone else’s endorsement.” The DISC model predicts that this would be most especially true for those on the “People Oriented” side. The Target Training International, Inc. DISC manual Chapter 11 shows the overall mean averages for each behavioral group as well as details when comparing gender and other variables. In general, the types of behavior models are fairly evenly distributed across the population.
The statement about endorsements in no way dismisses the probability that for around half of all shoppers the facts pertaining to their buying decision would be “the most powerful impetus to buy” because they are more “Task Oriented”. Equally true.
The point of this discussion is to underscore how important it is for marketing to speak effectively to all pertinent behavioral types.
The actual weighting of how important this dichotomy is for any particular business depends additionally on the type of business. For example the above average up-time stats for an ISP may be just as effective for that business as a Pinterest following is for sales of a particular dress.
The complexity of all this tends to increase over time. ZMOT shows an ever-increasing number of online influences involved in many types of buying decisions. Yet, confusion still exists in the business community about how this works.
sem[c] had a client who convinced himself that his 4.5/5 overall Yelp average was not valuable to his business because he couldn’t get Yelp to remove the reviews that he found offensive. His sales figures showed that females were an important demographic to his car repair business. He removed all website references to his business’ Yelp rating out of anger and against our very vocal objections. Almost immediately, he began reporting that he was getting fewer prospects from website contact. According to TTI, Inc. data, females are more frequently identified in “People Oriented” behavior patterns and consequently we would predict that endorsements would be particularly effective in influencing their buying decisions. Implementing a new AdWords campaign specifically targeted to a female audience more than doubled traffic to his sites but he reported no change in sales. Despite the obvious conclusion, he saw no reason to resume using the Yelp reviews as a sales tool.
In another Yelp anecdote, I had a personal response from a restaurant owner who offered me a $100 gift certificate to his place if I would “take down” my Yelp description of an unpleasant evening there because it lowered his average down to 4.5. Both of these examples show the desire of business owners to manipulate endorsements as well as the value to the consumer of a supplier like Yelp who resists being manipulated. Yelp realizes that impartiality is of the utmost importance to validity of their content. Both car repair and restaurants are types of businesses that are very influenced by Yelp for better or worse.
It remains important to practice the discipline of SEO which is to clearly identify your business NOT in the terms which you think of it but, rather, how others are looking for the benefits that your business offers. This will meld into the social media aspects of your business. A good record at Yelp can be an influential sales tool but you need to visibility from online marketing to build the lead generation that will allow prospects to see your ratings and to discover the facts about what your business offers them.
If your website breaks, SEO is NOT going to fix it!
Even if you have the best SEO in the world (we can help you with that) your website won’t help you if it’s broken. Websites break for all kinds of different reasons. The important point here is “Who is going to fix it?” This sounds simple but very often turns out to be anything but.
A lot has changed since a website was simply a collection of HTML files on a Web server. Many people have found that the ease of content update offered by a content management system (CMS) is very desirable. Since fresh content is essential to the success of a site’s search visibility CMS can be good for SEO as well.
The hidden cost of a CMS is discovered when it breaks. A current client had their site fail. The hosting company had a policy of NOT updated an unlying software utility because of the possibility of an update breaking the functionality of websites. However, since a lot of updates address security problems it was only a matter of time before a very serious security breach occurred. My clients were forced to change everything. Their site was converted to WordPress and placed on an offshore hosted server. There were many problems after the move that we started to resolve. Google had delisted the site for starters. No updates had been performed in over a year. The email form didn’t work.
The ecommerce plugin for WordPress had a major security update that needed to be implemented. When applied it was no longer possible to take payment for anything. Believe it or not there is nothing special this so far. The real problem became apparent when the hosting company insisted that a restore from backup was the only possible course of action and that they would have to be instrumental in the process. Instrumental but not responsible. Three different types of restore from three different backups were attempted. We got the last one to work… barely and without the interference of the hosting company. The process with this “support team” was dreadful. The host’s “support” consisted of frequently bad advice delivered through an antiquated bulletin board system. As a result of their actions the site will be moved to a different host with a useful approach to support.
Another recent story came from a contact on LinkedIn whose site “disappeared”. I still don’t know all the details but both his Web developer and marketing agency suggested using a different ISP for hosting. It was clear that the original hosting ISP had fallen very, very short in support.
Another client found that the website he listed on his business card no longer showed his information but did offer “his” domain name for sale.
What a month!
How can these problems be avoided? You need to be clear about who is responsible for the maintenance of your site and what that maintenance entails. If you are going to have to interact with support of any kind I recommend that you make sure that phone support is available to you.
You site is of no use if no one can see it.
Contact us if you want to review (or fix) your site.
SEO marketing and its critical role in the buying cycle
Wouldn’t it be great if SEO got you sales the day you started? While that is frequently the expectation, it ain’t gonna happen in the real world. The effect of successful SEO will increase the number of qualified prospects knowing about you. SEO takes time to achieve this level of success that is measured in months… a length of time that is far from instantaneous.
But even though a prospect is qualified they will be somewhere along the time line in their buying cycle. This is to say that they may not be at what the Google commissioned study “Winning the Zero Moment of Truth” refers to as ZMOT or the point at which the prospects decides to buy. Our friends at the Samurai Business Group teach that it is at this point that the prospect’s apparent reason is re-defined by their compelling reason and they make their purchase.
To better understand this let’s use a real-life example of a car repair shop. It’s easy to see that anyone that owns a car would have an apparent reason to buy car repair at some point. The ZMOT study shows that online research in the Automotive category can be intense months before a purchase. This suggests that there is great benefit in having your marketing make you one of the “usual suspects” for future customers that will buy several months in the future. SEO marketing in this case is an investment in the future success of your business. The ZMOT process also details the increasingly large number of online interactions now involved in many if not all buying decisions. It is no longer enough to simply have a good website. There is an entire virtual landscape in which your digital reputation is recorded. It has become a very good business priority to tend this landscape. Social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp and others are all little gardens in this landscape.
It is only when a prospect’s compelling reason asserts itself that they will make a purchase. Samurai teaches that those reasons include pain, fear of future pain or the prospect of gain. In our example of car repair the prospect of gain is probably the least persuasive. It could figure in when someone is about to sell a car on their own. Otherwise, a purchase will be made when the car is broken or likely to break soon. Once again, it’s easy to see that these two options have different degrees of urgency. The worse the problem the more quickly a purchase will be made. With proliferation of smart phones the research at the zero moment of truth may be done from the broken down car. It is only in this last resort that marketing might lead to a quick sale.
SEO marketing is our business. Contact us to find out more.
The reports of the death of SEO are greatly exaggerated
“SEO is going to die in two years” asserts no less an expert than “one of the top SEO consultants in Utah”. This must be true because Utah, as everyone knows, is the center of the online marketing industry. Actually, when you read what was written after the headline the only thing being said is that SEO is changing due to the inclusion of social media statistics. What a surprise!
The same reason that led Mark Twain to say: ” The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated” exists today. The death of something makes a great headline. The truth really isn’t a factor in a great headline. Unless you confused “truth” with Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness”. This “death of SEO” headline is especially popular with purveyors of social media marketing and content marketing who would like people to think that their specialty is more important than SEO.
But when they include phrases like “To be clear, keyword research and internal linking strategy still matter, but they probably only control 15% of your website’s overall ranking” it doesn’t really seem anything has died, does it? They are talking about how important a tool SEO is in social media and content marketing. They are using the word “probably” in an unsupported guess about rankings. Google doesn’t share the weighting percentages of their ranking algorithm so where does this weaselly “stat” of 15% come from? Thin air evidently. They go on to say that external links are more important but now include links from social media. None of this is anything very new. None of it suggest that SEO is “dying”.
So, we are to believe without any evidence that the “death of SEO” is going to be the result of including social media more in the weighting of links from other sites? Even though the giant Facebook is a walled garden that search penetrates in a small way and inconsistently at that? Actually, not at all. The fact is that social media and content have been parts of SEO since the days of AOL.
SEO, at least as practiced by sem[c], is about clearly stating online what your business does so that people know that they can buy what they need from you. This is easier said than done. So many businesses talk about who they think they are and why they are proficient without ever touching on “what’s in it for me?”. SEO by sem[c] helps businesses answer that question in the most effective way using all the tools of online communication: SEO, SMM & PPC in a unified and effective campaign.
Everyone is entitled to an opinion. I prefer to work from facts. The fact is that SEO is the most effective way to increase sales. Contact us to get SEO working for you.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, from our ongoing review of online discussion seems to have begun to receive an undeserved unsavory reputation. This must be a result of “black hat” practitioners that have caused problems instead of delivering results.
I was speaking with one of Google’s SEO consultants recently and I mentioned that there were people being quite vocal online about SEO being some sort of “scam”. She laughed. Of course the fact that Google, Yahoo and all the other search engines have SEO people on staff should alert everyone to the validity of the art of SEO.
In fact, SEO not only helps with organic search engine return position (SERP), but also results in the improved relevancy that keeps costs down in a paid online search advertising campaign (SEM) and ensures that people looking for what you offer find you easily.
Being relevant is critical in the lightning quick world of online search and the more one’s website is honed to be relevant to its prospects, the more successful it will be.
sem[c]‘s combined SEO / SEM campaign for a major Chicago real estate firm nearly doubled the number of visitors and tripled the number of registered site users interested in buying and selling real estate. These numbers were achieved in a “down” market. This is the effective power of SEO.