The All-Time Top-Secret Search Marketing Trick

By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing

by Mike Moran

Sometimes I can tell just by the way they sidle up to me at a conference. They look around to make sure no one is watching, and then they half-whisper to me out of the side of their mouths, "Just between you and me, what is the trick to search marketing?"

Now, you are all reading this column because you think I am some kind of high-fallutin' book writing, Twittering, blogging search marketing expert, so I have decided, for the first time, to publicly reveal the all-time top-secret search marketing trick.

Just promise that you won't tell anyone else. (Or at least look both ways and half-whisper out of the side of your mouth if you do.)

The all-time top-secret trick to search marketing is to have what your customer wants.

You need to have the right information to answer their questions. You must have the right arguments to overcome their objections. You must have the right offer to fit into their budget. You must have the right offering to solve their problems.

Whew! Aren't you glad you asked?

You see, search marketing is more about marketing than about search. The same things that make marketers successful in any other form make search marketers successful. But we so wish that wasn't so.

We tell ourselves stories about how this TV commercial worked so well to sell that lame product. We regale our colleagues with tales of how marketers have changed the course of so many unsuccessful products.

And, once in a while, that does happen. Sometimes a brilliant marketing message can save an otherwise unremarkable offering. But that's not the way to bet.

Instead, try to place yourselves in the searcher's shoes. What are they looking for? How can you help them? What problems do they have? How can you solve them?

The beauty of search, and of the Web in general, is that you have an unlimited amount of space and time to help your customer. You can approach your customer's problem from every possible angle. You can use as many different words and examples as possible. You can put so much information on your site that they are bound, not just to find you, but to be persuaded by you.

When you do that, suddenly you'll find that you have content written for all the possible keywords your customers use. You'll have information so compelling that it will attract links. And it will be passed along in social media. Basically, everything that you need to do to rank well in search will start to happen, not because you forced it, but because your helpfulness attracted it.

So, that's the secret. Don't tell anyone, OK?

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Adding Search to Your Marketing Mix, Part II

By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing

by Scott Buresh

This is part two of the article Adding Search to Your Marketing Mix. Read Part 1.

Leveraging Your Assets

Search engine optimization is not something that should be done in a vacuum if you wish to achieve optimal results, nor is it a discipline in which it is necessary to start from scratch. Many of the pieces necessary for a successful SEO campaign are already in place - it is simply a matter of identifying them and using them (and your search engine optimization company) to their full potential.

Your People

While your search engine optimization company should take the time to understand everything that it possibly can about your business before embarking on your SEO campaign, nobody will ever understand your business better than you and your colleagues. This is why it is important for your search engine optimization company to help you to utilize key people that are vital to the success of the initiative, including people outside the marketing department.

Sales

Salespeople are the front line of your organization - the people who know how to talk to your prospects and understand what is involved in their decision making processes. When it comes to collaborating with your search engine optimization company on keyphrase selection (finding the phrases that will bring highly-motivated prospects to your site), your sales staff can be invaluable. Many companies have names for products or services that are very popular internally but very rarely used on the street, so targeting these phrases during your SEO campaign will not bring you the type of traffic that you seek. Your salespeople (at least the good ones) know how your prospects speak in the real world. A good search engine optimization company will help you to utilize your sales staff - and ensure they feel involved and enthusiastic about the SEO campaign in the process.

Customers

Customers can also be invaluable when it comes to selecting the keyphrases to target for your SEO campaign. Many companies are surprised when they enlist the help of a search engine optimization company to begin a campaign only to discover that their customers do not speak the same language that they do. This is common across just about every industry - most people are very intimately involved in their industries and use proprietary names, acronyms, and other verbiage that is, at the least, confusing to an outsider. Anyone who has ever been dragged along to a work function by a spouse can attest to this - it often sounds as though the employees are speaking animatedly in a foreign language, leaving the reluctant spouse to fend for him or herself. In short, talk to your best customers. Ask them what they would type into a search engine if they were looking for a company that provided what you offer. You will almost certainly be surprised by the responses.

Company Experts

Almost every company can boast that it has industry experts on staff - the ones who design products and services, the ones who implement them, etc. Yet very few companies take advantage of these experts to promote the company as a leader in their respective fields. Since search engines place a premium on valuable, educational content, leveraging your company experts to create articles and whitepapers for your SEO campaign is an excellent way to attain search engine rankings while also providing something of value to your site visitors. Adding this type of content throughout your SEO campaign also allows you the luxury of educating your prospects online so that they will be further down the line in the sales cycle when they eventually decide to make contact.

Your Content

Now that you have learned how to effectively make the best use out of your colleagues, it's time to take an inventory of the content that is available to you for your SEO campaign initiatives. As mentioned previously, valuable content is held in high regard by engines and visitors alike. Often, however, much of this content never finds its way to the company website for whatever reason. Your search engine optimization company should help you to identify this content, which can include the following:

Whitepapers

Does your company have whitepapers that are used during presentations, at tradeshows, and in other areas but that are not available on your website? If so, you are missing out on a great opportunity to promote your expertise, educate your prospects, and impress the search engines. Most of these whitepapers can be optimized during the SEO campaign for maximum search engine benefit with minimal changes. Even older whitepapers can usually be dusted off by your search engine optimization company and brought up to date at a fraction of the effort that would be involved in creating a new one.

Articles

Similar to whitepapers but typically shorter, articles written by your company experts can be just as beneficial as whitepapers when added to the company site and for the same reason. Unless you have signed away the rights to any articles to the original publishing entity, there is no reason why your search engine optimization company cannot use them on your website for marketing purposes. Older articles, like older whitepapers, can typically be updated with minimal effort.

Press releases

Your company press releases can also be optimized and utilized on your website. In fact, optimizing press releases prior to their distribution on the newswires is also a good idea. Unlike whitepapers and expert articles, it is usually unnecessary for your search engine optimization company to go back and update press releases during the SEO campaign, since they are historical in nature.

Offline Marketing

Almost every organization has offline marketing materials that are used at trade shows, in sales presentations, or in direct mail. Since this material has (usually) already been vetted by the marketing department, it is usually fit for consumption by the general public. Often, however, these materials are left to rot once they have served their offline purpose, when they could easily be repurposed by your search engine optimization company and used to great effect on the website. Of course, there may be good reasons for this - you may not want to give away your best sales pitch to your competitors by making it public.

Unique Challenges

Although it is wise to make the most out of your existing assets when you are launching an SEO campaign, you should also be aware of some of the unique challenges that are inherent to the online arena. Keeping these challenges in mind as you begin your SEO campaign can make a large difference in your results down the road.

Understanding Searcher Behavior

In marketing, it is accepted that one must grab the prospect's attention with a compelling message in order to maintain his or her interest. On the Internet, this is paramount. People who are using search engines are, by definition, in a "searching" mode. While this is of course obvious, it is also important to remember that in no other form of marketing is it easier for the searcher to abandon your attempts to attract his or her attention and look elsewhere. Your competitors are a simple click of the 'back' button away. In fact, a recent study shows that the average visitor to a website stays for less than three minutes - hardly enough time for him or her to be sold. Searchers have been conditioned, by the sheer amount of information available, to be impatient when they do not immediately find what it is they are seeking. What does this mean? It means that your pages should offer immediate insight on the common problems that your customers face. If you cannot communicate, within a few seconds, how you understand your prospect and how you are different from the myriad of other firms out there, you have lost them, perhaps forever. With help from your search engine optimization company, take a close look at every page of your website. Do you focus on the user, or do you focus on your company? Do you immediately engage your prospects with your knowledge of what particular business challenges they are facing? If not, it may be time to rethink the most prominent marketing message on your individual pages and devise a new action plan for your SEO campaign.

Redefining "Competition"

Almost every company has a list of four or five companies that it considers to be its primary competitors. These are generally the companies that it believes offer products and services most similar to its own. Often these companies steal employees from one another, and they seem forever concerned with what the other is doing.

On a search engine, however, your definition of competition should be broader. It should include any company that offers the same products or services as your company that outranks you for important terms. Whether or not these companies are on your immediate radar is immaterial - a searcher will not know the difference, nor will he or she care. The Internet is, by and large, a vast and level playing field. There are quite possibly companies that you have never heard of using the Internet almost exclusively to promote their brands. It is important to watch out for these competitors as well as the ones you and your search engine optimization company currently track.

The Role of Patience

Unlike with most marketing channels, search engine optimization has many variables that will be outside of your control and the benefits will not be immediate. Simply put, it takes time to properly optimize a website for optimal search engine performance, and there are no guarantees as to when the engines will re-visit your site and reward you for the efforts of your SEO campaign (although, if you select the right search engine optimization company and play your cards right, it will happen).

The obvious downside is that an SEO campaign can take time before you begin to see your ROI, and unlike most other forms of traditional marketing, the timing can vary greatly. The upside, which people who successfully engage in an SEO campaign realize, is that the ROI is typically much greater than other forms of marketing (refer to the chart above). It is also important to remember that working with a search engine optimization company is a longer-term investment, which, like other longer-term investments, takes time to mature. If you spend marketing dollars on a print ad, that ad will only be effective for as long as the publication is in the public eye. If you buy banner ads or use pay-per-click advertising, your presence will decline once you stop paying. But a website that's been properly optimized by a competent, knowledgeable search engine optimization company will likely bring you traffic for years to come.

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To Retweet or Not To Retweet

By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing

by Sage Lewis

Dan Zarella has spent nine months analyzing roughly 5 million tweets and 40 million retweets. The findings show that there is a recipe for tweets that get retweeted. Check out this video to learn how you can become a retweet master. Oh. And PLEASE RETWEET THIS!

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7 Steps to Improving Conversion Rates

By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing

by Stoney deGeyter

In the world of marketing and campaign measurement, the web has been a goldmine. Almost every conceivable metric can be measured online. But of all the things you can track, measure, weigh and analyze, the only metric that truly matters is conversions. Click through rates, page views, time spent on site, number of pages read, entrance and exit points, abandonment; all of these metrics are fantastic, but if you're not using them to improve your conversion rates, then why bother?

Most people look at their website as a whole but in reality it is a collection of many parts. These parts (web pages) are essentially individual steps on a path that should lead your visitors to a specific goal: the conversion. If your site as a whole, and web pages individually, are working properly, you should see an increase in conversion rates and sales. If anything is broken along the way your visitors are led the wrong way at the wrong time and you open the door to having them leave before they've reached the conversion goal.

Each entry point of your site (wherever the visitor lands first, not just the home page) needs to be treated as the starting point that will lead your visitors step by step toward the conversion goal. In order to guide your visitors from this starting point to the end point, you need to make sure each step along the way is aligned with the next; in sync and unbroken.

The seven steps to strong conversions

Step 1: Build the path to the conversion point

Just like good book needs to have a beginning, middle and an end, your site should be no different. All the steps, from start to finish, need to work together to bring the visitor toward the ultimate goal. However, with a website the start isn't always the home page. In fact, a website is more like a choose-your-own-adventure book than a traditional novel. The visitor starts at different points; wherever the search engine dropped. This could be the home page, product page, testimonial page, informational page, an article, or anywhere else.

This makes building the path to the conversion a bit more challenging, but it can be done. Each page must be able to act independently from the previous, having a beginning and a middle while guiding the visitor to the end. Essentially, every web page of your site needs to be able to be the very first step in the process, provide a link to or act as the middle step, and lead the visitor to the last step, which is the conversion.

Step 2: Create alternate paths to the conversion point

Not every visitor has the same wants, needs or desires as the next. If you plan only a single path to the conversion point, you will ultimately lead much of your audience down a path that isn't meant for them.

Twenty visitors can land on the same page and take 20 different paths to the conversion. Some want to read about your company, others want to see your testimonials, while another group wants guarantee or warranty information. Yet still others want to read more about your products or services before learning more about you and then getting some testimonials for confirmation. And of course there are always those who are ready to buy now with very little persuasion having to be done..

A path to the conversion should be created to provide each of your users precisely what they need in order to take the next step. Every visitor has different needs, desires, and temperaments from the next. Their needs vary at any given time in the process. Keep your visitor's options open but also be aware that too many options can create confusion or inhibit your visitors from choosing any path at all. Don't try to be all things to all people, but instead try to narrow the options down to the most common and significant so you can be sure to meet the vast majority of your visitor's needs.

Step 3: Inspect your conversion paths

Once you have created your paths you then need to inspect them. Put yourself in the mind of your visitors and follow through as many paths as possible. This is where you'll find out if any steps are missing or broken, or if there are too many steps in the process.

Take notes of obstacles that may disengage the visitor or may be an impediment to them reaching the conversion goal. Look for missing information, errors on the pages, broken links and calls to action. You want to make sure that the visitor finds no hindrances to getting to the destination and are able to find all the information they need to make a confident purchase decision.

Step 4: Fix broken steps along the paths

This is pretty self-explanatory. Once you've uncovered any problems with your conversion paths, fix them. Patch holes, fill cracks or otherwise improve the performance of each step along the way. Use your analytics to identify problem areas and test different versions to see which performs better.

Step 5: Add or remove steps to create the most efficient path

Again, using your analytics, determine if there are places where steps need to be added or removed in order to make the conversion process more efficient. Your goal is to make the site as streamlined as possible. Add no more steps than are needed and no fewer than what it takes to get the job done.

Remember, each set of visitors is different. Some paths may be long, others short but you need to have the options there for each segment of your audience.

Step 6: Create and test new paths

Once you have tested, fixed and retested your original paths and everything is functioning as it should, it's time to start building and testing new paths. Consider your users carefully here. The first pass at creating paths should have been designed to hit the majority of your target audience. Now it's time to accommodate the rest. While the broader target is easier to hit, the smaller target is no less important. Build paths specifically for these users as they can be the source of many additional sales, and often result in higher conversion rates.

Step 7: Test new stepping stones

By this time your conversion process should be going strong and you have pretty solid conversion rates. Well, if it ain't broke... fix it anyway. Never stop looking for new opportunities to improve your conversion process. Test, test, and test some more. Sometimes adding new steps in the process can help improve conversions with certain audiences. Just be careful to keep an eye out for any negative effects as well. The goal here is improvement, not to add clutter.

Building a cohesive path from your visitor's landing point to the conversion goal isn't easy. What makes it even more difficult is that you never know what any individual's preference or needs will be. But by taking the time to know and understand your audience you can find ways to build and improve upon the conversion paths that will satisfy the majority of your visitors.

Follow these seven steps and there is no doubt that you'll find ways to improve your conversions rates. It may be incremental or you may find huge gains all at once, but every gain is a good gain.

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Focus on Your Core Community

By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing

by Eric Brown

So, You have a Company Blog, are your getting the results you expected? And, what about when your company blog is NOT about your core product. Perhaps a company blog that has nothing to do with your Core Product, but everything to do with your Core Community is the best choice.

Your Core Community
That is the approach we took with our company blog, the Urbane Life Blog, Focus on the Core Community. Our blog posts have nothing to do with our apartment business, Urbane Apartments. In just over a year of blogging, we have doubled our web site traffic. And, despite a down economy, and operating in Michigan, the highest state in the union for unemployment, our year over year rental traffic and our net rentals have over doubled.

Pretty significant return considering not one of the over 360 posts, and 1,501 comments has ever been about our core product offering.

How Is This For a Page One Google Ranking
So what impact do you think we have with potential customers when looking for an Apartment in Birmingham MI, and the Urbane Life Blog Posts come up on Page One of a Google Search, and hold the first seven spots, which is the first third of the Google Page. After all, it isn't, in this case our web site, it is our blog site (as designed) that comes up. The prospect has yet to get to the actual web site, you are really spreading thick your Brand Awareness.

Prospects Are Looking For Much More Than Your Product
We believe that prospects are looking for much more than just an apartment. They are staking out what they will be doing, where they will be doing it, and what type of life can they expect for the next year or so. Frankly, the apartment itself may well be far down on the list of priorities when selecting a new place to call home.

Does Your Product Matter
Of course your product offering matters, sort of. We all get grouped pretty quickly into silos with similar product offerings as seen by the prospect, but what else can you do to separate you from the pack, Focus on Your Core Community. 

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Google Maps Place Pages Widen Local Horizons

By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing

by Miriam Ellis

Part of the adrenaline of being tuned into what Google is doing is that they change your game overnight. You go to bed on Wednesday feeling you've got a fine grasp on how it all works and you wake up Thursday morning to a surprising new landscape. This startling habit of Google's certainly keeps you on your toes. Remember the last time you searched for something in Google Maps, and when you clicked on the more info link next to a business name, you got a popup that looked like this and that it clicked to a tabbed presentation of all of the data available about that business?

Well, it's all different now and if you've not visited Maps in the last couple of days, you are in for a surprise! Google has just rolled out a whole new user interface which they've dubbed Place Pages. Clicking the more info link brings you to a full screen presentation with all of the old tabbed data laid out like this:

What's Different?

Apart from the wide and long new layout, I've noticed a couple of interesting things about Place Pages. The first is that major prominence is now being given to a link titled edit this place:

:

In my opinion, this draws a new level of attention to the fact that Google views Maps as an editable, wiki-like entity. And, if you're one of those individuals who don't like change, clicking the edit this place link will take you back to the familiar pre-Place-Pages popup you've always known and loved.

Secondly, the category in which each business is listed is now being clearly stated in the main data summary at the top of each Place Page, right below the contact information.

Google's plans for Place Pages sound pretty grand. They intend to create one not just for every indexed local business, but also for things like transit stations, landmarks, neighborhoods and cities.

Word has it that, while each Place Page will be given a unique URL, Google does not plan to index these to be presented in their Universal SERPs. I wonder at that decision. The new layout reminds me of those old Squidoo lenses (remember those?) in many ways and arguably has an equal or better claim to ranking well for a given place. With both Google-generated and user-generated Maps, reviews, citations, photos, videos and more, Place Pages have the ability to present a lot of data all in one place for the user.

Who's Talking About Place Pages?

Understandably, this brand new UI is causing a bit of buzz in circles where Local is King, and both Mike Blumenthal and Greg Sterling are weighing in and offering their own valuable takes on the potentials of this change in the Maps interface. So far, the general feeling is positive, though few Local veterans can help remarking that they would love to see Google putting this kind of creative energy into developing a customer service department rather than simply making their product look nicer. I'd have to agree with that.

Local SEM Tip Of The Day

As I played around with Place Pages last night, I noticed quite a few photos being pulled from CityVoter.com. Never heard of them? CityVoter is a Social-Local site (we need a good term for that: Socal, Locial?) that enables users to vote up businesses they like and I've been hearing such good things about this website that I've added them to my must-create-profile list I use when doing Local SEM for clients. If you've not added your business to CityVoter, today would be a great day to do so. I like their UI and Google is trusting them enough as a source for photos in Place Pages.

Overall, I'm feeling good about Google's new product layout. I think it has the potential to be really useful if backed with accurate business data. Why not have some fun this weekend checking it out?

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Friday Fun - The SEO Song

By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing

by Jennifer Laycock

Had an email this morning from Oliver Blake over at The Creare Group pointing me to a video on YouTube that stars Creare Group web designer Michael Angrave. Now normally, I wouldn't bother to click a link to a random video, but since Oliver claimed this video featured "The SEO Song," I thought I'd give it a try.

While the song doesn't exactly fit with my own personal tastes in music, (to do that it would need way more twang or a driving guitar beat) there's no denying the production quality of the video or the effort that clearly went into the song. Check it out, it's a nice way to kill a few minutes on your Friday afternooon.

Of course any post about SEO related songs and music would be remiss without a mention of Chuck, "The SEO Rapper" over at PopLabs. He's got quite a few SEO related rap videos up on YouTube, all of which are quite impressive lyrically.

Of course if you're a fan of Angrave's SEO Song, The Creare Group has been kind enough to make it available for download as an Mp3 or an Mp4 and take it with you.

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Tiger Direct Must Not Like Money

By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing

by Sage Lewis

I just bought something from Tiger Direct. But they tried really hard to make me not take my money.

Fortunately, I'm obsessed with forcing my money on people. And I was able to overcome their desire to get me to not pay them.

Don't let this kind of thing happen to you in your shopping experience.

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Sociopaths vs People Pleasers

By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing

by Sage Lewis

I'm a people pleaser. But there are other people on the spectrum of humanity. We have something to learn from the sociopaths in the world.

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Why Blogs Aren’t Dead

By Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing

by Mike Moran

For the past couple of years, people have been asking if blogging is now dead. Now, as you read this blog post, you might expect that if I took the time to write it, I probably don't agree. And I don't. But the "blogging is dead: crowd does have a point--I just don't think the situation is as extreme as they say.

Now, I could go ahead and list all the reasons that blogging is not dead, but truthfully, that misses the point. The reason that people love to declare things dead runs deeper than some analytical look at the pros and cons. What's really happening here is simple human nature's interest in finding the answer.

We all do it at one time or another. In our need to simplify, we tend to make things a bit too simple. So we veer from, "Everyone needs a blog" to "Blogging is dead" in less time that it took to put up an averaged-sized building. Our planning horizons in marketing seem so short nowadays that we don't have a minute to put things in perspective.

So, yes, Twitter and Facebook status updates have made blogging less essential than it was just a few years ago. You no longer see blog posts that riff off someone else's post, because people just link to that post on Twitter. For people for whom blogging was too long a form to stick with, Facebook status updates are more manageable.

But blogs aren't "dead" any more than TV is dead. And TV didn't kill off radio either. As each new media form comes along, it makes all the previous forms somewhat less important, because each of us has only so much time in the day to create those forms and (more importantly) to consume them. So we probably watch less TV than before the Internet came along, and yes, we probably read fewer blogs now that we monitor Twitter.

So, now that 140-character updates are all the rage, we'll actually have to have a reason to write blog posts. We'll need reasons to read them. We won't just be doing it because it is the new new thing. We'll have to figure out what they are really good for.

So, rather than blogging being dead, I think it just emerged from adolescence, where instead of being the thing that "all the kids are doing," now we need to find the true business purpose for our blogs so they are used when needed, just like every other kind of media. Here's betting that blogs do find an important place for years to come.

If you have a business that depends on providing expertise, it's hard to beat blogging as a way to show off what you know. Contrast the impact that a blog has to influence opinion over a 140-character tweet. That will certainly keep some people (including me) blogging for the foreseeable future.

What other purposes for blogging are there? That's what we all need to figure out now. Because if your business can benefit from blogging, it makes sense to keep doing it, or to start doing it, even if blogging is no longer the flavor of the month.

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