Easy SEO Tip
October 12, 2009
Here’s a quick tip for you – and it works nearly every time (although, it wouldn’t if everyone does it, so I’m wondering why I’m telling you!).
Anyway – I’ve written about Product Comparisons as a content generation strategy before. Here’s a really simple way to ramp up your results from that:
Just put a “Vs.” in the title. As in “Red Widgest Vs. Blue Widgets” – you’d be shocked how important that “Vs.” is to search engines, and how few people have optimized for that.
Just don’t do it for any niches I’m working in. Please.
Using Product Comparisons for Fun and Profit
April 28, 2009
One of the best ways to create new content is to do a product comparison. You can go about this from a few different angles:
1) You Vs. Competitors – Use a comparison page to show why your Unique Selling Point (you have one, right?) is powerful enough for your customer to purchase your product or service over your competitor’s.
2) Product Option A vs. Product Option B – Use a comparison page to show different features of your products or services. A good example would be if a landscape company created a page showing the differences between, say, organic and inorganic fertilizers…and the pros/cons of each.
3) Affiliate product comparisons – It’s possible that you’re running an ad supported site, and are selling competing products, create a comparison of them to increase your sales of both!
So, what are the benefits of comparisons? For one, you can clearly and concisely illustrate why your website visitor needs to purchase from you vs. your competitor. On a deeper level though, it is an opportunity to create content that will rank well for a number of longer keyphrases.
For example, my site receives a good bit of traffic because I did a comparison of SEO and PPC – so now I get Google searches for “SEO vs. PPC”.
This is just one more step you should be taking to enhance your web prescence. Keep up the good work, and be sure to check back for more!
Content Strategy for Your Website
April 21, 2009
I was in a client meeting yesterday, discussing content strategy and how it relates to their need for SEO and better conversions. We’ve made some really good progress in a super-competitive area the last three months, but were having trouble converting visitors and wanted to expand our SEO footprint.
The CEO asked me, “Is it better to have several pages that are always changing, or to have a site that is constantly growing with new content?”
The VP of Sales laughed out loud when I answered that question, “Yes!”
We all know that fresh content is vital to SEO success. It’s also important for visitor conversion. And, it’s important to not only have your most prominent pages (home page, etc…) “freshen up” every now and then, it’s also important to push out new content on a regular basis.
From a search engine standpoint – it gets spiders coming back more frequently, which gets you indexed more thoroughly, more often, and often better. From a visitor standpoint, it gives you the opportunity to excite and engage the visitor more.
More and more, we are seeing that visitors need more than a catchy landing page, a great offer, or a slick form to turn in to leads or customers. Search is becoming less and less a direct conversion tool, and more of a sales process that you need to nurture in order to get the customer.
Of course, this rings true a little more for larger ticket item purchases than for, say, a book or pair of shoes.
What does this mean for your business? For one, you need to craft all your content with an eye for the ultimate goal – conversion. You need to come up with a schedule and stick to it (this is much harder than it sounds). You will need to create content that is interesting and useful for someone, even if they aren’t your customer. You need to give options to share your content (social bookmarking buttons, email this buttons, etc…) – and encourage people to use them.
In short – your website needs to start to become a combination of promotion and enhanced conversion strategies, and real substance.