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.

Online Marketing Cost

April 9, 2009

Especially in tough economic times, the  cost of online marketing  can be quite a concern for business owners.  If you’re a small business owner, this can be especially troubling.  How can you justify a $5000 pay per click budget, when you’re having trouble making payroll?

The short answer to that is, if your online marketing isn’t showing a direct contribution to your bottom line, you can’t.  However, the ABSOLUTE BEST THING about online marketing, especially pay per click marketing, is that you can track it down to the dollar.

Let’s take my favorite example, a local family owned plumbing service – we’ll call them “John Smith and Sons Plumbing.” Well, ole John doesn’t know much about PPC, and blew through $1000 in a couple months, and decided to get stop advertising.

Instead, he is spending $500 on Yellow Page ads, and another $2000 a month on some remnant radio time.  He’s doing ok, but he’s not really sure how many of the calls he’s getting come from his website, much less how many come in as a result of his Yellow Page or radio ads.

He’s throwing $2,500 into a void.

The neat thing about John’s business is, he doesn’t need leads, email opt-ins, or someone to purchase online – John needs PHONE CALLS.

Did you know there are CHEAP services out there that let pay per click managers like me track phone calls, down to the keyword?  Instead of throwing money into ads you can’t track – why wouldn’t you want to put an ad in front of people searching for “local plumbers?”

I can tell you right now – I can deliver phone calls to your service business for less than $20/call (that includes my profit margins) – do you think your business could turn a profit on those kind of numbers? (email me if you want more info)

Let’s make some assumptions in John’s case….he’ll turn 35% of those callers into customers, at an average revenue of $300/customer, at a $175 profit margin/job.  So, if he gets 125 calls from his $2500 ($20/call), he’s going to get 44 new customers (35%).  At $175/customer, that’s $7700 in profits.  Remove the marketing spend ($2,500), and you’re left with $5,200 in pure profit.

Let’s go one step further and say John retains about 30% of his business for future jobs.  Those people hire him back at the same profit margin, approximately once per year.  Since I talked him in to setting up a monthly email newsletter, there is no cost associated in closing these guys again.  So, for every 44 customers, he gets about 14 repeat customers the next year.  For 12 months, that turns in to 168 repeat customers.

So, in year one, John spent $30,000 online, and netted $62,400 in profits after it’s all said and done.  (that’s not revenue, that’s profit).  Because of his repeat business, in the next year, he netted another $29,400.

You can imagine what happens year after year, right?  There may be ups and downs, but since we have a controlled, trackable source of business for John, he’s not struggling right now.  In fact, he’s doing better than ever, all because of the things we’ve shown him.

10 Ways to Improve Search Engine Ranking Today

April 7, 2009

Since we’re just getting this site off the ground, and sent out our first newsletter only yesterday (to over 600 people!) – I wanted to post some of the info I shared.  This one is really – simple, 10 things you can do today to improve your search engine rankings:

1) Do your Keyword Research.  Try to target search phrases, i.e. “Affordable Widgets in
Kansas City” vs. “Widgets.”

We have some free keyword research tools linked here.

2) Write Unique Title tags for each page.

3) Be sure to have unique, interesting, and well-written content that covers your keywords.

4) Make sure you regularly update your content, as well as adding new content
(”Freshness” is key).

5) Be sure the every page on your site has an internal link.  Create a sitemap to help this out.

6) Be sure your site’s main navigation structure is accesible to search engines.

7) Use your keyword phrases in your internal links.

8) Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes,
domain name, and file structure.

9) Focus on accumulating quality inbound links.

10) Remember that SEO is an ongoing process!