Should Your Company Website Be Left to the IT Department?

Recently, we were asked to take a look at a website for a large corporation based in New York. There was a point during our test of the user journey when we had gone through several different screens, feeling more confused by the moment, and were beginning to dislike the company (from the point of view of a website visitor, of course -- we'd love them as clients).With a sense of excitement we clicked on a button which, we felt, might actually give us the information we sought.

It took us to a screen we had been on about three clicks previously.

As we continued to explore, we found a small number of links, outdated code, missing alt tags, and strange internal linking practices. We were surprised. This is a large company, they're savvy, they have the budget to take good care of their website.

They can't understand why their website has such poor results. Of course, we can easily tell them why it has poor results. We just didn't get why they had such a poor website. It looks good at first glance, but that's just the graphics. Scratch the surface even slightly and you find something that needs a lot of work.

We discovered that the website was in the hands of the IT department. We know their IT department. These are sharp guys. One of the guys there has done some tech work for us in the past. Because we know him, we also know his view of optimizing a site for search engines, the work we do:

"I know what SEO is. You are the ones who sit at home and spam people."

He also feels that people who take care of the GUI (the part that people interact with) are lightweights.

We disagree with him on both these points.

I'm not saying that IT departments never contain people who know about SEO or user experience for their websites.  I'm saying that you can't assume, just because all of us work with computers, that the experts who look after the servers or network the machines or build your database are also experts on websites.

There's a tendency to assume that all computer jobs are about the same. Not so. Don't have the IT department take care of the website unless they happen to be experts on websites.

Does Google Really Love New Content?

Recently I was listening in on a debate on whether Google really loves new content or not. After all, we know that old domains have an advantage. We might even conclude that Google loves old content.

In the search engine results page above, where someone is looking for a particular lesson plan, my old educational blog is #2, right in the middle of a list of large, well-funded lesson plan sites.It has been there for years.

That site hasn't been updated regularly for a year. In fact, if you go to that page, you'll find a suggestion that you go check out the updated lesson plan at my new education site. The new site is updated daily, sometimes more than once.The new site is better in many ways than the old one. The new, updated version of much the same lesson plan has been there at the new site for a couple of months.

Google, in this case, recognizes the value of my snazzy new site, but likes the old content better.

The thing is, we're not using "new" in the same way in both cases.

Google does respond well to sites that are regularly updated and looked after. It also likes sites that have been around for a long time. Given equal quality content and equal relevance to a search string, Google will pick the one with higher PageRank and greater stability (like years, not months, of history). That seems more trustworthy to Google.

But given a choice between an abandoned, outdated site and one that is regularly updated, Google will choose the active one. Not because Google has a thing about new content, but because the algorithm very sensibly values active sites over abandoned ones. Fresh content is a sign of a current, cared-for site.

Lab Report: Results Not Typical

Our lab project hit 10,000 page views for the month last night (10,265, to be precise). This is a significant number because it's the point at which a site can begin participating in many major ad revenue programs. For a three month old site, this is very good. It prompted a discussion around the office.

Should we use this as an example when we discuss SEO and SEM, or not? After all, we don't want to imply that all sites hit that point after three months. Most don't.

Rosie used to work for a national weight loss company. All their ads say "results not typical." However, she assured me, the results they show in the ads are typical -- for people who actually follow the program. Most people just don't.

Equally, most of our clients don't take our advice. We map out an SEO strategy for them, and they do some of the things we suggest, not all. Often they quit doing anything after a while. Many of them alter the highly-optimized content we give them to something less search-friendly. Very few keep up with blogs, social media, and linkbuilding after we start them off.

Hey, we don't even do all that for our own website. We have a business to run, just like you. Things like that get shunted to the side so we can do our billable work.

With FreshPlans, our lab project, we're adding one new SEO or marketing change each week so we can watch the results. We're continuing with everything that is successful, and adding on a new item each week. We're not doing anything shady, expensive, or exotic: just the normal things we normally do for clients and advise our clients to do for themselves. We have three people working on this, spending a total of about two hours a day among us.

We're beginning to feel that we ought to be spending a couple of hours a day on our own website. If we weren't SEO professionals ourselves, I'd be starting to think that it was time we hired someone to spend a couple of hours a day.

Can you find two hours a day among your staff? If you have twelve people on the payroll, that's ten minutes each. Could you end a meeting ten minutes early and send everyone off to do some strategic social media participation? Could you automate some paperwork and let your staff spend the time they save creating some excellent content? Could you skip some phone calls and update the meta tags on your pages instead?

We can do a strategic plan for you, and a marketing kit with the words you'd need, and you could do your own ongoing online marketing. We don't promise identical results, but we can show you some great numbers.

This site is FreshPlans. It's a WordPress site using the Allure theme. Jay Jaro and Shan Pesaru of Sharp Hue, Inc. did the design work, Shan customized and installed the theme, and SharpHue hosts it. Rebecca Haden Quality Copywriting & SEO does the content,including the video and most photographs. Some images are bought and some are Creative Commons licensed. One of the reasons we're doing this is so we can have a project with stats we can share freely, so please feel free to ask us any questions.

Lab Report: Setting Goals for Your Website

FreshPlans is our lab project: the place where we experiment with stuff, since we don't want to experiment with our own site and obviously we can't experiment with our clients' sites. We're learning a lot with it. We also want a site whose data we can share -- obviously, we're discreet with our clients' information.  It's also an example of my educational content. When I apply for educational content writing jobs, I need to have good samples to show people, and good writing always looks even better at a good website.

So we started off with the kind of goals people often have for their websites. We just needed a web site for a couple of particular purposes, and as long as it meets those purposes, we're happy.

Nowadays, all businesses need a website. If you have one, and people can find it when they look for it, you've got a measure of success.

However, it's good to have actual goals. If nothing else, you need to know when to break out the champagne. Plus, having goals makes it more likely that you'll reach those goals. You watch what's going on, you get feedback, you change your behavior according to the feedback, so you do things that tend to move you closer to the goal rather than things that tend to move you away from your goal.

With FreshPlans, we set a couple of fairly arbitrary goals. We decided that we wanted the affiliate marketing income from the site to pay for its hosting. As of today, we have reached that goal. It may feel good to reach your goal for the year in the first three months, but it really means that you've set a wimpy goal for yourself. We need to give ourselves a more ambitious goal to shoot for. So we've decided to set a goal of earning $1,000 per month, a number that covers staff costs.

We also decided that we wanted steadily increasing traffic. We've been meeting that goal all along. Here are our numbers:

• May visitors: 519
• June visitors: 1,482
• July visitors: 4,644

July's not quite over, but we can see that we're roughly tripling our traffic each month. Since our goal was "increase traffic," a very vague goal that would have been satisfied by adding a couple hundred each month, we think we're doing quite well. But it's clear that the goal of "increasing traffic" isn't going to work for us as a goal to aim for, or even as a way to measure performance. Tripling traffic every month doesn't seem like a realistic goal for the future, frankly. If nothing else, the Back to School frenzy will be over soon and we'd normally expect traffic to fall at that point for a site of this kind, just as retailers expect sales to fall after Christmas shopping ends. We've decided to aim for 1500 visits as day by January 1, five times as many as we're seeing right now.

These are our lab goals. We have no consequences if we fail to meet them. For your business, you may have specific needs: an amount you have to earn with your website in order to keep the shop open and the lights on. That can make it harder to set the goal boldly, but it makes it even more important that you do so.

What are your goals for your website? Do you want to see a certain number of visitors, subscribers, sales, or leads? Do you want a certain amount of ad revenue, affiliate income, or subscription income? Perhaps you have a different type of measurement entirely -- maybe having a link from a mainstream news source or gaining a client from the Fortune 500 is really your definition of success.

Whatever your goal may be, it's essential that you set one. Give yourself a good, measurable goal to shoot for and a deadline for reaching it. Be a bit bold -- at least bolder than we were in setting our initial goals for FreshPlans. Write it down somewhere, too. Put it in the comments, and we'll cheer you on!

Traffic at Your New Site

How can you expect traffic to progress at your new website?

Assuming that you're doing a good job with your SEO, you should see a pattern like the one above: some dips and peaks, but overall a steady upward climb. What do the dips and peaks mean?

The example above is a site directed toward teachers, and it shows a slump at the end of school and the Memorial Day weekend. Following that spell when teachers don't want to think about school, it gets back onto its upward path.

This example, a recent redesign, has a much spikier pattern, both because the total number of visits is smaller, and because there's more variation in the number of visits each day. But we do see a gradual upward trend. As time passes and the traffic continues to increase, we'll see a clearer pattern.

What if you're not seeing that pattern?

This example shows a site that recently launched a redesign. We see on the left the typical few visits a day the site has had for years. After the launch, we see some peaks -- and valleys. The average number of visits per day has more than doubled since the launch, but it's not yet showing the consistent upward trend we want. In this case, too, there are real-world factors: this is a business affected by weather, and the troughs coincide with rain.

We'll keep an eye on this. If, at the end of the month, we don't see an upward trend, we'll know that we need to give this some more juice to keep the improvement in traffic coming.

The thing to look for is that upward trend. You may want it to speed up, and you may want to fine-tune the type of traffic you're getting, but the rising line is the sign that all is well with your site.

Really Getting the Most Out of Your Linkbuilding

Recently I did a few hours of linkbuilding for motivational speaker Paul Vitale. When I do foundational linkbuilding, I like to work fast. Quality is essential, that goes without saying, but the name of the game is getting as many good links as possible in the time available.

Accordingly, I set him up at Brownbook.net with basic information. When I went back a couple of days later to make sure all was well, Paul and his associates had claimed the listing and added a photograph, a link to his YouTube channel with a video sample and a "subscribe" button, a map, a place for people to add reviews...

I was startled. I do encourage clients to build on their directory listings, of course, both here at this blog and when I speak with them individually, but I've never seen anyone jump to it like this before anyone had even suggested it. Paul has a Google Alert set, so he knows when his name turns up somewhere, and he took immediate action.

He speaks and writes about success. He also follows his own advice. Folks, this is a good example.

Building Links with Reviews

Who do you trust more: a paid ad for a company or your friends and people like you? The vast majority of people trust unsolicited reviews more than paid ads. The internet lets us all get out there and speak our minds.  Reviews and review sites are therefore growing in importance.

If you have a product, there are plenty of places where you can review it. Amazon.com is among the most trusted businesses, and they're selling the stuff, so you should certainly make sure to have reviews there if you have products there. I get emails telling me that I'm a major business book reviewer there and asking me to review books. Frankly, I don't know where the senders get this idea, but if I had products at Amazon, I'd ask them for suggestions of people to ask for reviews. I'd also ask my linkbuilders to check out my products and review them.

Lunch.com is another user-content review site, and you can place links there, too. You can review absolutely anything at Lunch, including all types of goods and services. It should be on your linkbuilding list, for sure.

Yelp.com, Judy's List, and local directories are all places where you can review local businesses. I'm not that impressed with the accuracy of Yelp (they won't allow me to change my phone number from a number that is currently out of service to the one on my website, for example), but it is certainly the most popular of its kind. This type of site will allow you to place a link and to write reviews.

Once you've completed the open review sites, you can contact bloggers who review goods and services like yours, and ask them to have a look at your stuff and see whether they'd care to review it. Remember that bloggers are now required to tell if they've been paid to write a review, so offering payment shouldn't be your first choice. Persuading the reviewer that your stuff is worth reviewing would be the best bet.

Whether you place reviews on review sites or ask people to review your stuff, the more reviews you have, the better.

How can you get reviews?

• Ask your customers. When a customer tells you how great you are, ask her if she'll go say the same thing at Yelp. Ask your friends and family, too. Swap reviews with your strategic partners.
• Give out samples. When I review a place for a magazine article, I pay my own way and take it off my taxes. But I review a lot of books and software sent to me by the manufacturers. My reviews are honest, of course, but it works better for the manufacturer than waiting around and hoping I notice their stuff would.

So how do you make sure that your reviews do the job you want them to do?

• They should be well-written. Whether it's a conscious decision or not, we are more likely to read, believe, and respect well written opinions than poorly written ones. If there are lots of obviously unsolicited reviews, the numbers can overcome that tendency. If you're asking for reviews, though, you should choose people who are likely to write well.
• They must be sincere. I see want ads for writers to churn out quick reviews of things they've never experienced. This is wrong. It also doesn't fool people. 18 variations on "This is the best stuff I've ever tried!" will not move people the way one sincere, detailed review will. You may also find yourself blocked from sites or otherwise punished for cheating. And of course there's the whole honesty and decency aspect. 
• Details are good. I added the tesimonial, "You rock!" to my collection of testimonials because it made me smile, but I think we all know that people are more persuaded by the one that says I helped the business grow and the one that says my copy was brilliant and I completely understood their business and the one that says I took them from PageRank 0 to PageRank 3 in a matter of weeks. Get some specific information into those reviews.

If you ask people for their honest opinions, you will get some negative comments, too. However, this will make your positive reviews more convincing by showing that you're not writing them all yourself. And one person's negative can be another's positive -- that comment saying that your restaurant was raucous and noisy may draw exactly  the crowds you want.

Creating Your Marketing Kit

A great website is an important tool in your marketing arsenal, but you'll probably want to have print pieces to support your online marketing. But we all know by now -- or should know -- that print is not the same as the web when it comes to effective content. People read print media differently, interact with it differently, and respond to it differently. Therefore, it has to be different. You simply can't cut and paste your brochure copy into your website and succeed -- or vice versa.

On the other hand, you want to maintain a consistent brand identity and a consistent message. So how do you harmonize print and online media?

Shopmobbing.com has a grand total of 158 words on their homepage -- one of the smallest word counts I've ever done. For their press kit (shown above), they need much more than that. So I started from scratch and wrote them a package of press releases that told their whole story. It has the same young, fresh, energetic tone as their website, the same fun, urban feel, but it shows the strength of their company, too. They used the same images as their homepage to tie the whole thing together, and they can send it as a print document or as a pdf file. The focus is on their new website -- the web address is the first and largest thing on the page -- but they've got scope in their print media to tell the whole story for investors and the press.

Landscape architect Chris Olsen started with a fresh press kit. He wanted a physical item to mail out and to hand out to people he meets at his presentations. His website is not a strong introductory marketing piece for him, but once people are interested, they can go there to learn more about him. Since Chris is a TV personality and a popular speaker with lots of opportunities for physical world networking, a physical object was the highest priority and a logical starting point for him.

I wrote this for LeeAnn Larkan at Vivid Marketing, and she used Chris's great garden shots and enthusiastic testimonials to put together an appealing brochure (shown above). We did a strong sales letter to go along with it for direct mail and following up on personal contacts.

Since this is intended to be read on paper, not on the screen, we can take advantage of the opportunity to have two pages visible at once, and we can use a lot more text and tell a story. Now, we're working with Chris to make his website as fine as his press kit. Vivid will use the same look, and I'll change the text for usability and search -- but keep the same message and feeling.

Sani-Service took a different approach. For this company, I wrote a complete marketing kit, with a number of seperate elements:

• case studies
• testimonials
• unique selling point briefs
• company story
• product and service descriptions
• educational materials
• homepage text

Sani-Service has been picking and choosing from this menu of elements for their website (shown above), their press releases, their training materials, their brochures, direct mail letters, and more. Whatever they want to say, they have the right phrases on hand to speed up the process.

Whether you start with your website, your print media, or a complete marketing kit, you can end up with successful marketing pieces for both online and print media. The key is to take the differing needs of the media into account.

Your Website's Traffic

I've been doing annual reports. Traffic is the starting point for all of them, and of course everyone is happy to hear about their increases in traffic. Me, too. My traffic is up 198.92% over the same time last year. But don't stop there. Ask yourself a few more questions:

• Is it business, or is it just traffic?

I have one client who had an increase of 370.95% in 2009, compared with 2008. But he only serves local clients, and his local traffic increased by a mere 44%. That extra traffic is fine -- there can even be side benefits, such as a general increase in web visibility and prestige that could increase conversions -- but his basic traffic info suggests a higher level of success than we're really seeing.

• Are you seeing the trends?

The client below had a nice percentage of increase between 2008 and 2009, but really it's better than that. 2008 was essentially flat, while 2009 shows an upward trend (ever since they hired me) that is likely to continue if we continue making good decisions. The reality here is better than the percentage of increase would suggest.



The client below has a fairly new site, and the percentage of increase isn't that impressive yet. But the line on the graph is heading upwards. We might want to speed the process up, but the general trend suggests that we're on the right path, and shouldn't make a complete change in strategy.

• Have you broken it down?

Here's my chart for traffic from search engines.


If I look at my traffic over the whole year, I have a fairly smooth and steady increase, like the ones earlier in the post. But breaking it down by source shows a different story. My direct traffic is relatively flat. Search traffic shows a temporary peak in May when I was mentioned in the Wall Street Journal, and then a nice increase between July and August that stayed high till the typical holiday drop --and even then was considerably higher than it was to begin with.

Here's a site, launched this summer, that shows completely different profiles for its three sources of traffic:





I haven't been working on this site since its launch, but if I were, I'd need to be aware of the different paths visitors were following.

When you look at your site's traffic for 2009 and make your online marketing plans for 2010, be sure to look closely enough at your traffic data to get the information you need for strategic decisionmaking.

Need more basic info about website traffic? Here are some posts you might find helpful:

Website Traffic
Learn from Your Traffic Sources
Detective Work at Analytics

Seasonal Online Marketing

Yesterday, in the context of creating a marketing calendar, I talked about seasonal businesses. Many businesses show a seasonal pattern, and whether to try to get as much mileage as possible during the busy season or to try to even out the oscillations in your system by marketing heavily in the off season is a strategic decision that has to be informed by the unique realities of your business.

But what about the truly seasonal business or product?

Right now I'm working with a couple of websites which are so spring-specific that there is really no way to market them for the current season.

First, here's Sweetique.com, a company distributing chocolate-filled eggshells (real eggshells, that is, filled with chocolate)



While Sweetique does make some other products that appeal to consumers year-round, this page is so completely for Easter that visitors who aren't looking for Easter items won't stay. The call to action is clearly "Order Easter eggs," so we can't expect sales till March.

The second site is Grand Getaways Passover 2010, a Passover destination site. While taking a Passover vacation (possibly with friends and family) is an undertaking that people are likely to prepare for earlier than ordering Easter basket items, we're still talking about an event that won't take place till the end of March.




Both sites offer the option of booking or ordering early, but neither will probably see much conversion for the next month or two. One of the benefits of the internet is immediacy -- but that also means that many of the things we'd usually do in the way of online marketing won't be valuable for these sites.

What's our best strategy?

• Work on rankings. We want to see Grand Getaways at the top of the page for "Passover vacations," "Passover travel," "Pesach program," and similar terms. Sweetique wants high ranks for "Easter baskets," "Easter chocolates," "Easter gifts," and other terms of that kind. Starting now gives us a good chance of being on top when consumers begin to search for those phrases, even with such highly competitive terms.
  
• Use articles. Well-written articles on these subjects can bring links and traffic. With this kind of lead time, we can pitch to online magazines and top bloggers in these areas as well.
• Get busy with linkbuilding. Intensive linkbuilding will help us reach the rankings we want, and can also get us at the places where consumers are likely to look for information once they start looking. Passover travel directories are an example of strong niche directories that are worth courting. Easter sites may not be updating soon, but their webmasters also aren't being inundated with link requests right now. This is a good time to start identifying and reaching out to sites that will want to share our sites with their visitors.
  

"Strike while the iron is hot" is good advice, but having plenty of time to heat the fire before you need to put your irons into it has its advantages as well.

Your Online Marketing Plan for 2010: Top 3 Moves

This may be the wildly busy time of year for you. If not, it's time to start thinking about your online marketing plan for 2010. How does your website fit into your company's overall marketing plan?

Tim Ash's Landing Page Optimization has an interesting chart showing the people who visit your website. He has them laid out like this:

NO
maybe no
maybe maybe
maybe yes
YES

The no and yes groups, he says, have already made up their minds, so it's the maybe group that you're really talking to.

People who know for sure that they don't want what you offer have come to your page for some other reason than to shop. People who know for sure that they want what you offer have come there to shop.

The rest of the people have wandered by or come over because they heard of you, or they're checking you out as a possible solution to their needs.

Here are the top three things to consider:

• Is your website doing its job? You can make all kinds of efforts to get traffic to your site, but if your website isn't doing what it needs to do, then bringing more people isn't necessarily a good thing.
• Do you have a way of keeping in touch? The people who come to your site thinking "maybe" might need a bit more contact. Do you have a way of collecting contact information, and a plan for contacting them?
• Are you visible? Whether you choose advertising, social media, or a combination of online and physical world strategies, you need to do something to make sure that people who need you can find you.
  

Word of Mouth Marketing Online

"Word of mouth marketing doesn't work," the woman I was talking with said scornfully. And then thought a moment. "Except for you."

It's true that I had a marketing plan back when I first started my business, and haven't been able to implement it yet because I have too much work to do. I keep thinking that I need to do some email marketing or something, but I don't have time -- we're turning away work as it is.

This is a nice problem to have.

Here's the thing: I don't drive people to my website by shooing them over there with the broom of high-pressure sales and I don't then browbeat them (I guess I could use the same broom for that) into calling me by covering my home page with special offers. That's doing it the hard way.

Instead, I have a high level of online visibility, and I do my best to offer useful stuff here at my website, and to do a good job for my clients. The typical person contacting me with a job offer or a request for a proposal (and I get about three a week) has read something I've written or heard about me from someone, and was already interested in working with me before arriving at my website. My website offers enough evidence of what I do that prospective clients can feel pretty confident about me before they ever call or email with that offer.

That's enough about me. I'm only talking about myself like this because I know that some people feel as though word of mouth, online networking, inbound marketing -- whatever you want to call it -- doesn't work, and I know from my own experience that it does. I also know that seeing the statistics proving it works is sometimes less convincing than hearing about it from someone who has direct experience. Word of mouth, in fact.

Are you good at what you do? Then strut your stuff online. Have pictures of the things you make at your website, or case studies of the work you do if it doesn't lend itself to pictures, so your visitors can see for themselves that you're good at it. You don't have to announce that you're good -- let them notice it on their own. Let other people say it for you.

See the penguins up there? One is sharing the amazing experience he just had with his friends. One of those friends, excited about this great news, is sliding over to another group of penguins to spread the word. I just made that up, actually. I don't know how well word of mouth works among penguins. But I know that it works among humans, who are probably the majority of your target market.

The Myth of Black Friday

Some say that the Friday after Thanksgiving is called "Black Friday" because that's the typical day on which retail operations get into the black, or begin earning a profit for the year. Others say (with better historical data) that the term "Black Friday" actually refers to the experience of retail workers and police officers coping with the beginning of the holiday season.

Neither of those is the myth. The myth is that the Friday after Thanksgiving is the biggest shopping day of the year. It hardly ever is. December 23rd is more likely to be, followed by the Saturday before Christmas.

Retailers like the idea of making Black Friday into a sort of holiday, though, a special shopping day that you shouldn't miss. And a few years ago, online retailers managed to concoct a whole mythical shopping day of their own: CyberMonday.

On the Monday after Thanksgiving, the story went, people would get back to work and spend their coffee breaks shopping online. Internet news sources reported the phenomenon, which didn't exist, and actually managed to get a nice little spike in online shopping for that day.

E-commerce sites have, ever since, offered special deals on this day and otherwise tried to get people to see it as a special shopping opportunity. Why not? Marketing stunts can entertain and amuse people, and can also increase sales. So if you're in the mood, run a CyberMonday promotion. Don't forget to do press releases. Interview local major business owners about whether they plan to be strict about CyberMonday shopping among their employees, and describe the extra efforts you'll be making to cope with the rush. If you have a brick and mortar store, tell your Black Friday shoppers to be sure to check out the CyberMonday specials. Make it a worthwhile stunt.

What Do Your Want Your Visitors to Do?

We've talked before about the importance of the call to action. You need to let your visitor know -- as instantly as possible -- what you offer and how they can get it.

Sometimes it's not that simple.

This is a work-in-progress page for the hot iPhone app Kosher Cookbook. Let's acknowledge right away that this version of the page doesn't really have that clear call to action. It will. The primary action the visitor is invited to take at this page is simple: buy a $4.99 iPhone app.

This is the only kosher cookbook available for the iPhone, and I think we all know that iPhones are the place where our recipes belong nowadays. If you're a kosher cook, then as soon as you see the tasty pictures, you're going to push the button and download the app.

There's more to it than that.

Appsolute Media, developers of this particular electronic cookbook, plan to make more cookbooks in future. Their Cookshelf app is an elegant platform for the purpose, and they have big plans. So they want people not only to download this cookbook, but to come back in the future and see the new ones.

This website must therefore not just allow people to buy the item, but must also foster a sense of community and bring people back.

Sometimes, you need to look behind the immediate sale, toward your company's future plans. How does your website reflect your company's long-term strategy?

Is SEO Easy or Hard?

Sometimes people talk about SEO (search engine optimization) as if it were a mystical art of some kind. It isn't. It's good business, good communication, ordinary stuff like that. If you wanted to find a metaphor for SEO, though, I think video games would be a better choice than magic. Like video games, SEO requires speed, strategy, and focus. There's a thrill in vanquishing -- excuse me, I meant in moving ahead of a competitor in the search results. and of course an equal sense of loss when they smite -- or rather, when a canny competitor moves ahead of your company.

So is it a hard game or an easy one?

I can give you a solid "It depends" on that. Optimizing a page for search requires skills which are fairly rare, but those of us who have them don't find it a particularly hard task. When you come to the fight for top ranks on the search pages, it can be quite easy or very difficult, depending on the company and the website.

If you want to predict the level of ease for your own company, ask yourself these questions:

• Do you deserve a top spot? Is your website the most useful and authoritative resource for the keyword in question? Are you a recognized leader in your field? If so, then SEO will be a matter of pointing this out to the search engines. If you don't really deserve the spot, it's going to be hard. Changing keywords or improving your website can both help with this issue.
  
• Are there a lot of orcs out to get you? It is easier to get a top spot for custom musical arrangements for brass quintets than for SEO services. The number of players, their skill levels, and the amount of time they spend on the effort makes an enormous difference. This varies from one keyword to another.
• Do you have any special challenges? A very common company name, especially if there are competitors for the name who have a very strong presence online (I'm still working on that one that's up against a couple of government programs, Microsoft, and an Amazon offshoot), can make your task harder. Not having access to your site or having other limitations that prevent the best on-site optimization can also make things tough.

These factors affect the speed with which you can expect results, and they affect the best strategy for your online marketing. They don't make the process any less fun, though. just examine them with a realistic eye, and then go ahead.

Your Website vs. Web 2.0?

Social media supports your website and extends the value of your investment in that website. Crowdsourced and user-generated content are great opportunities for linkbuilding, wonderful places to meet your customers and show them what great goods and services you offer, and the ultimate in professional networking.

So where's the vs. in "Your Website vs. Web 2.0"?

It came from a question a client asked me yesterday. "If you're good enough at social media," she wanted to know, "could you do without a website?"

It's an interesting question. If your business is adept enough with Twitter, Whrrl, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Squidoo, Digg... and so forth ... then that could be your entire online presence. People searching for you could type in your name and see your Amazon lists, your Flickr and YouTube contributions, and your deviantART portfolio, and learn all about you.

There could be advantages to this:

• In general, those sites are free. You save the cost of building a website.
• You can present different sides of your business to different markets.
• You can change and update your information continually even if you have very limited technical skill.

There are also disadvantages.

• Those sites are only free if your time is free. Putting time in at a few sites is great support for your website, great for networking, and good business practice. Managing your business via forum and aggregate site is extremely time-consuming. I know people who spend most of each day maintaining their presence at multiple free sites. They aren't running profitable businesses. These two facts are connected.
• All your different sides will be visible to potential customers at all times. So will all your changes and reinventions. I'm extremely visible on the web, myself, and you could see different sides of my life if you made the effort to do so -- but my website is primary. That means that the professional face I choose to present is the main one. People who search for my business aren't going to happen upon pictures of my family unless they make an effort to find them. If you conduct your life all over the web, you have little or no control over what tops the list when people search for you, and it will change from day to day.
• Even if you maintain a consistent presence across all Web 2.0 spaces you inhabit, you still have very limited control. Some sites will allow you to show products and some won't. Some will give you the option of showing certain information and some will insist that you do. None will let you present a consistent visual effect -- especially if you have limited technical skill. Forget branding your business.
  
• Your customers will hate you. Seriously. Let's say that I discover your products on Flickr and contact you via Twitter to buy something. A couple of months later, I think what a great gift that item would make for a friend -- but I can't remember your Twitter name. I Google you and find your Ning page -- but with no website, I can't track down your products easily, and I've already spent fifteen minutes getting cross about not being able to find your website. I'm not going to make the extra effort involved in finding you.
• It shows a lack of seriousness. All businesses need websites. If you don't have a website, it's going to be hard for people to take you seriously enough to send you money.

Your business website is the foundation of your online presence. Your participation elsewhere on the web supports it. But you can't do without it. (Want some figures? Check out "Can You Do Without a Website?")

Results of Regular Site Upkeep

While I work for private clients, I also work for a couple of agencies, helping to build and optimise websites and looking after some of their clients as I look after my own. At one of those agencies, I have a colleague named Tami. She minds the PPC results and I mind the organic SEO results, and we meet virtually sometimes on Monday mornings in our ritual mining of analytics data.

Tami calls this, "Making sure nothing awful has happened."

I like to think of it as seeking opportunities to maximize results, but it's one of those half full vs. half empty things, right?

In any case, I was there poking around among web sites that I take care of and websites that I ignore. Some people are happy with their initial results and don't care to be more aggressive about their online marketing, so there are sites in my data that get regular care and sites that just trundle along on their own momentum.

Not long ago I wrote about a single SEO case study: a company I'd had on my regular clients list for a year, with excellent results.

That's just one company, though. There are so many factors for each company, ranging from the state of the economy to seasonal changes to level of compliance, that one company can only be an indication of what can happen, not what does happen.

So I ran some anonymous numbers comparing well-built, optimized websites that were being taken care of with equally well-built optimized websites that were being left to their own devices.

I compared only one thing: traffic increase over the past month. Website traffic is not always the most interesting or important metric, but it's easily understood and easily compared. It's a neutral choice. Comparing July and August will certainly give you different results for a lawn care company than for a school supply store, but over a large number of sites, seasonal variations even out. So I simply gathered up all the numbers and took the mean increase (or decrease) in traffic for the entire population.

The good news is that the average good website increased in traffic, whether cared for or not. Some of the untended websites went up in traffic and some went down, but the average result was a 6.49% increase in traffic.

In general, healthy websites do show a gradual and steady increase in traffic, interrupted sometimes by seasonal dips. So it's good to know that a good website can survive a bit of neglect.

The other good news is that sites that were being looked after showed an average increase in traffic of 38.23%.

"Looked after" can include social media, blogging, routine linkbuilding, and keeping an eye on analytics and Google alerts. The sites generally have one to three hours spent on them each week, though some have less and some have more -- sort of like having the cleaners in.

What's the moral of the story? Simply this: spending a little time looking after your website is worth doing. If you have someone with the skills on your staff, give them an hour, or perhaps a morning, a week to do minimum maintenance. If you don't have someone with the skills, consider hiring someone.

The other take-away is that getting your on-site optimization done so you have a healthy website can be enough, even if you do nothing else, to keep you on a path of steady improvement. That's got to make you feel optimistic.

Does Your Website Work Weekends?

One of the great things about your website is that it will go ahead and work for you while you're out doing other things. It will, assuming you've done a good job with it, show the best side of your business to visitors 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

That is, if you have visitors 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

You can tell by looking at your analytics. Here's your dashboard. You can see the traffic to your site in the blue line.



If you put the cursor over the little blue dots, you can see exactly which day, and day of the week each is.

Look at a couple of examples and see the difference:

This site has minor peaks and valleys. Some of the peaks are on Thursdays, some on Tuesdays or Fridays. The traffic never goes way down. This site has traffic all week.




This site has valleys on the weekends. There is an enormous difference between weekday and weekend traffic every single week. Essentially, this site doesn't work on weekends.

What difference does it make? In general, if your site doesn't work on weekends, your customers probably don't either, and they're only visiting when they work.

In that case, your website can be an all-business kind of place. You can use the jargon of your industry. You should be serious enough that your customers' bosses can walk by and see they're working.

You might also be able to increase your traffic, and perhaps your sales, by posting something interesting on weekends, or even offering special offers only on the weekend.

If you have traffic all week, then people come to you whether they're working or not -- or they work weekends, too. You may want more of a Web2.0 feeling, a community aspect, a fun area. You should make sure that your site accommodates amateurs as well as pros at whatever you do. Or, if you're in an industry where people work on the weekends, you might want to take advantage of it by offering those weekend specials if your competitors don't.

It's just another useful piece of information about your clients.

Is an Old-Fashioned Website Harming Your Business?

When people ask for an analysis of their websites (I do that for free, by the way -- don't hesitate to ask me), one of the most common things I see is an old-fashioned website.



Here's one. This website is a good example of how websites used to look, long ago. Words and pictures and things were just stuck on the page one after another. Pictures were small. Nothing gave the visitor any indication about how to move through the site. People in those days expected to have to spend time figuring out what was going on with a website, and to have to read everything in order to find the information they sought.

In some ways, websites were like things on paper, in those days, but they wouldn't really have made nice brochures or anything. They were more like classroom handouts. It was kind of cool if there were pictures at all.

This site was also built in an old-fashioned way. Web designers in those days used the techniques developed for making tables of information, to sort of put things approximately where they wanted them to be, and it sort of works on some people's browsers.

Again, it was kind of cool, in those days, to be able to do anything besides just making a black and white page of text.

We are way beyond that now.



Here's the new website Shan Pesaru of Sharp Hue and I worked with owners Eric and Cindy Studer to build for The Retreat at Sky Ridge.

Obviously, the new site looks more attractive than the old one. But notice the ways in which it works better:

• The name of the place is in the top left hand corner, where people who read English naturally look to begin getting information from a page, and it's large and different enough to work as a title. The old site had the name (the former name) in that place as well, but it wasn't visually distinct from the rest of the page.
• The navigation is obvious. It's in the place where people expect to see it, it looks like navigation, and the colors change on mouseover (the mouse, in the screenshot, is over "Contact") to help visitors find their way.
• There are clear calls to action. If the visitors are ready to book their stay at The Retreat, they can do that. If they want to get on the mailing list for special offers, they can do that too. Getting the contact info to make a call is easy.
• The site is built to modern standards. You can't see this in a screen shot, but it makes a big difference. As time goes on, old-fashioned kinds of website construction work less and less well, and before long they simply won't work at all. Trying to maintain a web site built with outdated methods is sort of like clinging to cassette tapes. It's only a matter of time.
  

If your business has an old-fashioned website, that may mean that you've been online for a long time. Good for you. You have domain age and probably also faithful visitors on your side.

But you may not realize that you have an old-fashioned page. The first time I heard my son talk about what astronauts did "in the olden days," I experienced some cognitive dissonance. To me, the terms "olden days" and "astronauts" didn't go together. I'm old enough to think of astronauts as kind of new by definition, and "olden days" as something that goes with maybe cowboys or knights in armor.

If you have an old-fashioned web page, then you might be used to it. You might not realize that modern users of the internet are going to look at a page like the "before" picture here and feel confused. Is that the homepage? Where are they supposed to go? What company is this, and what do they offer?

Highly-motivated visitors may search around to find the information which is after all, there somewhere. Most visitors, though, will spend a few seconds at this page and then return to the search engine results page whence they came, and go somewhere easier to understand.

I should add that I sometimes see quite new websites which have been built in old-fashioned ways, with old-fashioned designs. This is really sad. If you have one of those, then you've got the negatives of an old website without any of the positives. It's a bit heartbreaking to say "I realize you just had this built a month ago, but you know all that money you think you saved by having your cousin do it for you? It's an illusion."

If your website looks like the "before" picture here, you really have to have a redesign.

Finding Your Customers

In general, the object of a web site is to allow your customers to find you. You make your site eminently findable with good SEO and SEM, make sure it says what you need your customers to know about you, and get on with your work.

But it occasionally happens that your customers don't actually look online for what you offer.

One of my clients creates custom software for people in the financial sector in New York City. We were talking recently about how he has lots of traffic now, but still would like to see more conversions.

"We need," I said again, risking getting really boring, "to figure out where the people who need you are hanging out online. Then we have to make sure that you're visible from there."

This is another thing that's generally true about online marketing. It involves research. I track down the people who need my client's product. I say to them, "Now, supposing you needed some goat gamma globulin, what would you do?" or whatever the product in question might be.

Sometimes it takes further probing, but at some point you will find out what terms people are going to use and where they'd be likely to begin. You'll then have enough info to begin some in depth research. Or you'll confirm what you, as a business owner and expert in your field, already thought. Or you'll be amazed,and that can really turn around your business.

But in this particular case, we're talking about a small and specialized group. So it's different.

I understand this because I'm a musician. If you're not a musician, and you need one, you might go to your favorite search engine and type in "wedding singer" or "guitar teacher" or something.

If you are a musician, then you are never more than one contact away from the right person. You say to yourself, "I need a tenor -- who might be available?" If you can't come up with anyone yourself, you ask another musician. Conceivably, you tweet it: "Short on tenors for the Requiem. Who's available on the 19th?"

I've literally never Googled for a musician of any kind.

So what if your customers are like this -- such a specialized group that they practically all know one another? Does that mean that you really don't need a website, and can just rely on word of mouth?

Nope. Even in groups where "everyone" knows "everyone," it isn't literally everyone. There's a new person in town. There's a start-up company you haven't heard of yet, but with your help they'll be in the inner circle next year. There's someone in a slightly overlapping circle who could use your services, even though you didn't go to school together.

And there are also people you know -- even current clients -- who need something else from you, and they've been meaning to call you, but haven't yet. Or your competitors' current clients, who aren't completely happy right now and are considering a move.

So the fact that you may need to go out and find your clients doesn't mean that your website is irrelevant. Here's what it means:

• Your website probably won't be the first place people encounter you. Don't assume that your visitors know all about you, but do assume that they'll be prepared to read more, and will want more information. They're deciding, after all, between you and some small number of specific other people. The idea that people will decide to stay or leave within a few seconds may be less true for your website than it is for most. You may need more content than another site
  
• Your website needs to come up first on search for your name. When people hear about your business from someone else, they'll still look you up online before they call you. They're just very likely to look for your name rather than your business name. Having your business website at the top of search for your name allows you more control over how people see you. Sure, they can still check out your Facebook page or Amazon profile, but a good website can make them feel that they don't need to.
  
• Don't neglect social media. It's the new word of mouth. An online follow-up after some face time at a conference, tweeting the link to an article you discussed, or adding someone to your network can remind them of you and help establish a mutually satisfying business relationship.
  

Even when you need to find your customers, your website still speaks for you.