What do Good SEO Results Look Like?

When I first started doing online marketing as an in-house SEO, one of the most difficult things for me to determine was what success would look like. What kind of results could we realistically expect? How would we know when we had succeeded?

I think this is one of the reasons that we get so focused on being #1 at Google, or on increasing traffic to a certain point (both good things, but not always the best primary goals): those things are measurable, and you can tell when you've won.

Still, it's a fair question. And a hard one to answer. Some companies get better results than others. Some companies have better products than others, or better follow-through, or perhaps even better luck. What part of your results can definitely be attributed to SEO?

Recently I had a rare opportunity to do a direct comparison of two directly comparable websites.

I've been working with A Plus Educational Supply for a full year now. When I started working with them, they had two websites: one each from the two main stock catalog companies for educational supply dealers. The two sites were comparable in importance and usefulness, similar in traffic and overall quality, and neither of them got many orders.

A Plus hired me to work on one of the sites. I found out about the other one in the course of my initial research, but they asked me to concentrate just on one of the sites, so I ignored the other.

The fortunate site got an SEO makeoever, a blog, linkbuilding, and regular monitoring and response to analytics. The unfortunate one just continued as it had been.

How do the two compare after a year?

The unfortunate one had no PageRank at all. It didn't get crawled by Google. It had no links, except one from the company that hosted it. No orders arrived through it. The domain name is still registered, but the owners let their hosting lapse at the end of the school year and it is no longer online.

The fortunate one has thousands of links and a PageRank of 3. Their sales over the past year are 600% higher than the previous year, even though this has been a very difficult year for their industry as a whole.

Interestingly enough, their traffic is not much higher than it was. Their rankings are better, and their traffic is better focused -- it's their customers rather than random visitors -- but their conversion rate is enormously improved.

The same company, the same people, the same products, the same location, the same economic conditions -- the only difference between the two websites is that one got ongoing web marketing efforts and the other didn't.

One is very successful, and the other is dead.

Choosing Your Domain Name

Recently I've been involved in a very lengthy discussion on how to choose the best URL for your website. This may seem like a very top-down kind of thing, and sometimes people are inclined to skip over it, but it can make a big difference for search and traffic.

The first website I conducted SEO for was called educationstationteachers.com, belonging to a company called The Education Station. It was a horrible choice. It's long, hard to remember, hard to see -- that is, it's difficult to look at it and grasp instantly what it says -- and impossible to guess.

I don't know why the owners chose this name. If you're choosing a URL, let's make sure that you don't make the same mistakes.

• Find out what's available. My favorite place to look is Psychic Whois, where you can type in the beginning of a possible name and get a list of available options. Your first choice will naturally be YourBusiness.com if you're a business or YourOrganization.org if you're a nonprofit, and Psychic Whois will tell you whether you can have that URL.
• Think about the top-level domain. That is, will you end your domain name with .com, .org, .biz, .net? If you make money from your website or from the company your website represents, then you need the .com ending. This is what people will guess and type in.
  
• First try to be guessable. If at all possible, use the address that people will be most likely to guess and type in. For The Education Station, it would have been educationstation.com. Ask people what they think your web address would be. Make them guess. Tally the answers and go with the most popular one.
• Then, try to be memorable. Onsharp, a Fargo web design firm, uses onsharp.com, which is exactly what you'd guess. You won't forget it, either. They have a very high proportion of direct traffic, because it's just as easy to type it right in as to search for it -- or even to bookmark it.
• At least, be predictable. One of the participants in the conversation I mentioned proposed www.signoooorama.com for a business called Sign-a-Rama. While there is a whimsy and coolness to that name, using the "O" instead of the "A" which the business uses, combined with the difficulty of getting the right number of "O"s typed in, makes this a bad choice. Your URL needs to have an obvious connection with your business. It can't just be evocative. You goal is to get visitors there.
  
• Use your keywords. All things being equal, Google gives higher placement to sites with the keyword in the URL. The name of your business certainly ought to be a major keyword for you. If for some reason you can't get signarama.com, you may be better off with signsYourTown.com than with some variant on Sign-a-Rama.
• If all else fails, be short. Among the many problems with educationstationteachers.com was the length. Even people who found it easy to learn and remember wouldn't care to type it in. "Bookmark it!" we'd say cheerfully, and that's good advice, but it's better to have a convenient URL in the first place. Not shorter than your actual business name (see "Be guessable" above), but no longer if you can avoid it.

If I couldn't get MyBusiness.com as my domain name, I'd think seriously of changing my business name.

When your new site launches...

Shan Pesaru and I just finished making a new website for a local church.



They had the common problem you find in churches and other non-commercial organizations -- a website built by a member who volunteered, and then didn't keep up with it, and lots of people getting access and making changes and no one remembering how to get back in and fix the resulting mess...

They really needed a new website.

However, since their previous website had been unusable for some years, their members aren't in the habit of using it. They want to get the membership, which naturally includes people of many different ages and levels of technical comfort, to use the new website as a primary source of information.

Succeeding at this will allow them to reduce the amount of time the church secretary spends answering the same questions, the number of group emails they send out, and the money and other resources they spend on mailings.

They also want to make sure that people looking for their church online, or for a Methodist church of any kind in their town, can find them. (Secretly, they want to be above the big Methodist church on Google, but they are pretending that's a joke when they say it. After all, they're a church.)

So they're essentially in the same place that a business would be, upon getting a new website. You want your current customers to visit your site regularly, and you want potential new customers to be able to find you.

The things they need to do are the same things you need to do when you get a new website:

• Submit your website to the major search engines. Here they are:

Yahoo!
Google
Bing
DMOZ

• Tell your current customers about your website, and give them a reason to check it out. A store might choose to have a drawing among all customers who go to their website and fill out the mailing list opt-in form, a coupon available at the website, or a sale on online purchases only. The church has a blog at their website, and is e-mailing members asking them to send in items for the blog. Chances are excellent that members will then tell one another to go look at their pictures on the blog, and once there, they'll be invited to explore and to bookmark the website.




• Take the opportunity to announce your new website. Press releases, articles in your local or industry papers, mentions in your newsletter (and while you're at it, start transitioning to an electronic newsletter), and face-to-face invitations to visit your new website are all completely appropriate.
• Twitter, add a link to Facebook, request links from your clients and vendors -- any place on the internet that you have access to is a good place to mention your new site. While "We have a website!" isn't news, "We have a new website!" is, so go ahead and share your exciting news with your online community as well as in the physical world.

Chances are, you feel a little bit like someone with a new puppy, anyway, especially if yours is as nice as this one is. Go ahead, while you feel like bragging, and brag a little bit. Check your rankings and analytics after a couple of weeks and see whether your site has naturally done what you want it to do, and at that point you can decide whether you need an online marketing plan.

Cute Web Design for Schools

I've written before about cute websites, and one of the big questions about them: namely, should you have a cute website?

There are industries that just shouldn't.

Schools, however, especially elementary schools and preschools, can have the cutest websites they please. There is no upper limit on cuteness for teachers of children. I work with this population, so I know whereof I speak.

Designer Jeff Wain and I are working on a preschool website right now, and you can see his initial concept for the site at the top of the page. We'll be adding a photo, but it already has a very cute look.

His design for A Plus Educational Supply is another very cute site designed to appeal to teachers:



Jay Jaro did a great design for my environmental lesson plan page over at SmartPay, even with the challenge of including one very cute page at a more serious website:



And my own design for Teaching with Fairytales is also verging on the cute:



If your business caters to teachers, or if you are in fact a school, you can be as cute as you wanna be without sacrificing professionalism or appropriateness. Cute is your business.

While Jeff used a little red schoolhouse and an apple to good effect in his designs, you can also step away from the traditional education images. Jay's jungle look reinforces the idea of ecological responsibility that's part of SmartPay but also brings to mind concepts like growth and fresh new ideas. Animal mascots, whether a real dog or a cartoon tiger, are fun and appropriate for schools. Kids -- as long as you've considered privacy issues -- are always great.

When it comes to colors, these examples are using pink, blue, yellow, green, and red -- kid-friendly colors -- but in combinations, intensities, and textures that keep a degree of sophistication as well as fun.

And think about your vocabulary, too. When you're talking to teachers, you're certainly fine with fun and cute, but remember that these are educated professional people, too. Don't talk down to your visitors. A few years ago, one of my favorite school publishers brought out a series of books called "Technology for Terrified Teachers." Big mistake. I think most of those were thrown out after they languished on the clearance racks for a year or so. Teachers aren't terrified. In fact, a group of people who spend most of their workdays surrounded by mobs of children are probably pretty tough.

Just because you've got a cartoon tiger on your site, it doesn't mean you can get away with treating your visitors as though they were kids.

Whether you're a school, or serving schools and schoolteachers, strive to combine a serious, professional air with a cute, fun look for maximum effect.

I Have Nothing to Tweet!

Sure you do! You just haven't thought of it yet. When you're twittering for the sake of business networking -- and also taking care of your business -- it can be challenging to come up with that daily tweet. But consistent presence is the backbone of good social media marketing.

Here are some suggestions for you:

• If you're one of those over-zealous twitterers who started off tweeting every few minutes, calm down. Once or twice a day is plenty to keep you on the radar of most of your followers. The ones who follow hundreds or thousands of people may miss your tweets, but -- do the math -- they're not really reading all those tweets anyway. The people with whom you're actually networking will appreciate the fact that you don't take up their entire screen every time they look. A few tweets a day over the long run will be more effective than spurts of intensive tweeting followed by silence for weeks when you run out of steam.
• Join conversations. See what the people you're following have to say, and respond to them. If the people you're following aren't talking about things that interest you, you're following the wrong people. Try using the search box to find people who are talking about things that interest you.
  
• Share information. Twitter has become one of the best places to go to find cool blogs and articles, since people tweet the things they enjoy and find useful. You can do the same. When you find an interesting article online, or a book (search for the author's website to link to) you'd like to tell people about, tweet about it.
• Report on your company. Seriously. Your customers want to know that you have a new product, or a sale, or a new version of your software or whatever it might be. They're your customers. They don't want to see ads all the time, but they want your news. They may even like to see your link on their Twitter screen often enough that they can be reminded to go and visit your website now and again.
• Be a little frivolous. Don't be frivolous all the time if you're tweeting for business. You don't want your customers to get the impression that your new phone or the flavor of yogurt you're having for lunch is the main thing on your mind. You also don't want to Tweet as you get arrested or cope with a hangover. But an occasional glimpse of the personal is nice. I set up a new Twitter account for Clevertech yesterday (see how easy it is to make a custom background that sets you apart from the other Twitterers?) and the very first bit of news was that the CEO is headed to Amsterdam. I'm intrigued, aren't you?
  

Think of Twitter as being like those little conversations you have with people as you ride in an elevator together in your building at work -- not time enough for anything earth-shattering, but plenty of time to start developing a bond.

Hey -- come and visit me at Twitter, too. I want to know what you're doing.

Planning a Website for Older Users

I'm working with designer Jon Schleuss on a website for the local chapter of the American Association of University Women, an organization to which I belong and which I support wholeheartedly.

Last night I presented information about the planned site to the board of directors. Knowing that one of the main goals for the group was to increase diversity among the membership, and that the average age of the association was 60, I was confident that a new, usable website would be something everyone would value. I don't believe in stereotyping older people as lacking internet savvy (my mother is a popular blogger), but I'm also aware of the research that tells us that younger users rely heavily on the internet for information.

People under 50 don't use phone books or printed maps. Half of all executives under 40 use Twitter. People under 30 may conduct their entire lives from their Blackberries and iPhones. People under 20 have never had a better information source than the internet.

So I was assuring the group that their goal of reaching younger university women made a functional website essential, and there was widespread agreement, especially among the younger women present.

So far, so good.

Then we looked at the site structure, and one of the older ladies saw that the directory was to be online.

"I hate the internet," she said. "I spend too much time reading emails. I'd never go to a website."

There was some real distress there. The rest of the over-seventies were looking pretty tense, too.

"You don't carry a computer around with you," one said. "What if I need someone's phone number?"

There was a moment of silence while the rest of us -- the ones who do carry computers around with us -- readjusted our thinking to the idea of needing to look up a phone number and dial it on a telephone.

"I can't find anything on websites anyway," another objected.

"Maybe we can print it out, too," someone said. "We can have both."

I suggested that it would be easy to print copies on demand whenever someone wanted a physical copy, and one of the women asked whether it could be a PDF.

"I'll have the file, " I said, "so I can easily make a PDF for printing."

"Can you copy something from a PDF and put it in an email?" the woman wanted to know.

We had a bit of a conversation about PDFs and what they're for. On the other side of the room, the woman who hates the internet was speaking in scandalized tones about the fact that without a printed yearbook we wouldn't know what the upcoming programs were. Those who weren't still coping with the PDF question began discussing the difficulty of getting the programs set up a year in advance for the sake of the yearbook.

"You don't need to set them up a year in advance if it's online. You can change it any time and keep it up to date." That was me, trying to make the website more appealing. I pointed out that it was easy to email things to people if the things were on the internet already. We finished with a clear split in the room: the Facebook crowd, who were happy, and the others, who weren't.

My goal: to get everyone happy with the final product.

Here's the original concept mockup that Jon came up with. The stock image at the top will be replaced by images of women of different ages and ethnic backgrounds, and of course there'll be real content there, but this is what I had come up with in discussion with the president and secretary of the organization, and Jon carried it out nicely.



We had already thought about the importance of using black text on a white ground for visibility, and also about having very straightforward navigation. Jon went with a good amount of white space, and clear headings on the sections.

After the board meeting, I think we also need to have very obvious navigation buttons, even more so than usual. We need to keep them identical on all the pages. Assuming that the reluctant users make the effort to get to know this website, we need to make sure than they can easily find those phone numbers whenever they want them.

Those of us who've been using the internet since the '80s -- whether that's when we were born or when we first got email at work -- have grown up along with the internet, and we know how it works. There's no reason to expect people who retired in the '80s and haven't gotten fond of the internet in the interim to have that knowledge.

That doesn't mean that older people aren't visiting your website. In this particular case -- and perhaps in yours as well -- we know for sure that a lot of the potential users of this site are going to be pretty old. We should design the site with this in mind.

But it's something to think about for many businesses. Right now, somewhere out there, someone is giving a PC to her grandpa and showing him how to visit that online fishing tackle store or music website. Is yours the next one he'll try?

Looking for a Hero

When writing ads, or things that are expected to function like ads such as a landing page for your adwords campaign or a direct mail piece or a call to action, you should think like your readers.

You shouldn't always think like your readers. If nothing else, your readers sometimes want to read something different from what they're already thinking about.

Not with ads.

If I'm ready to buy, or at least to make a decision about what I want to buy, then I'm not thinking about my subject in an abstract way. I'm not contemplating the topic philosophically, or seeking greater knowledge.

On some other occasion, sure, your visitors might just be thinking about the thing you're writing about. Dragons, for example.

On some occasions, your visitors might care to examine the various intriguing suggestions writers have proposed for how dragons might in fact be able to fly. They might want to speculate on the origins of the markedly cross-cultural dragon stories. They might be looking for cool pictures of dragons.

If they are, at that moment, about to be eaten by a dragon, then they don't give a flip about any of that stuff. They want a dragonslayer.

If you are indeed a dragonslayer, then they don't care about your mission statement, your educational background, or your features. They want to know right off that you are a dragonslayer and prepared to come right over and slay their dragon.

Let's move away from dragons. I'm feeling sorry for the dragon in the picture right now, even though it's strictly metaphorical.

Put very simply, people reading your ads or ad-like content are thinking about themselves, not about you or your product. Speak to them about their current needs and wants.

A client of mine sells software. They want a great headline for a page people will visit when they search for the term "mirror server." If someone is searching for "mirror server" and clicks on a software company's website, then they want secure data management. That's what we need to offer them. We have a lot more to say, and we can say it somewhere else. On that page, we want to give the purchase-ready visitors what they want. The others can look around, and come back to that page when they're ready.

The damsel in the picture, once she's feeling less distressed, may be in the mood to hear all kinds of fascinating tidbits about dragons or about the knight's experiences. Right now, she's just looking for a hero.