That’s a Good Question

I just left a consultation meeting with a client where I raised the question “where are your site visits originating from today?” The first response was “That’s a good question. We don’t really know.” After some thought he remembered that they acquired a competitor’s domain that was already organically ranked and forwarded it to their site. This now accounts for a vast amount of their daily visits.

Impressive

I have experienced cases where one site was forwarded to another to take advantage of its organic ranking. We have even done it ourselves in the case of a second domain we owned. We were taking this second site down, it was ranked, so why waste it? I was fairly impressed that these novices identified this opportunity and did what it took to milk the reward.

Temporary?

The question now is how long will they be able to take advantage of this free fruit. In this case both the acquired domain and the actual domain have similar content so it may retain the rankings for some time. My recommendation to anyone in a situation similar to this is not to bet your business on it. Start now doing what it takes to get the actual site ranked well organically or you may be caught by surprise.

Client Stories, SEO, Strategy | No Comments »

I just came out of a meeting where a client wanted to know how soon his site would show up on the search engines since he had now implemented some meta tags. It’s one of those situations that makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time.

Needless to say there are a lot of things that determine whether or not you’re in the number 1 slot on the first page of Google for a specific term or not visible at all. For those of us who are in this business of search engine optimization and search marketing, this is a topic of continued study and debate. For one thing, the engines themselves frequently change what factors they look at when determining where to place sites in the natural search listings. And to complicate things even more, each engine has a slightly different formula for search engine ranking factors. Right now, we’re all waiting with baited breath to see how things shake out on Yahoo! post Panama.

If you want a thorough, although a little bit dated, perspective on what’s important to the major search engines, check out Rand Fishkin’s article. It contains a large list of factors that can influence a site’s ranking on the engines as well as votes on the relative importance of each factor by some SEO gurus.

SEO | No Comments »

Here is a link to our whitepaper: SEO - What it is, What it isn’t, and Why you should care.

It covers the basics of SEO - a list of things you should know if you’re doing it yourself, or engaging an agency to help you.

SEO, Whitepapers | No Comments »

Here is just a sampling of some of the great work we’re doing for our clients.  Contact us if you’d like to see how we can help your online marketing!

Large Telecom Services Client - Extensive Geo-Targeting for B2B Telecom Services

Auto Repair Franchise Client - Geo-Targeting Campaign for National Leader

Leading Glass Repair and Replacement Client - “Our ROI has been Incredible!”

Investment Advice Service Client - Quadrupled Profit from Client Managed Campaign

Case Studies | No Comments »

At siteEDGE, we’re in the business of helping your business online. That includes letting you know what NOT to do. Thankfully, Guy Kawasaki did some of that work for us today. Check it out.

Here is the full list of his points, with my thoughts added. You should head over to his place to read the original thoughts.

1.Enforced immediate registration.
If you keep you content behind a wall, it’s going to stay there. Instead of forcing your customers to register, give them a reason to WANT to. They (and you) will be much happier that way.

2.The long URL.
This is bad from the standpoint of sharing sites with friends. It’s also bad from an SEO standpoint. In short - it’s easy to rewrite URL’s, so do it.

3.Windows that don’t generate URLs.
If the content is unique, make sure it has a home. If I want to send a friend to some cool content I found, I should be able to post a link, because I won’t be bothered to explain how to navigate back to it.

4.The unsearchable web site.
Don’t expect your users/customers to work too hard to find what they’re looking for. Make it easy for them.

5.Sites without Digg, del.icio.us, and Fark bookmarks.
Make it easy for users to distribute your great content. Please.

6.Limiting contact to email.
If you’re selling something, you should greatly prefer that they call you as opposed to email you.

7.Lack of feeds and email lists.
If people want to listen, why not make it easy for them?

8.Requirement to re-type email addresses.
Again - lower the level of effort required and you’ll increase conversion.

9.User names cannot contain the “@” character.
People like to user their email address. Let them.

10.Case sensitive user names and passwords.
It may sacrifice a bit of security, but it can also sacrifice your customer experience.

11.Friction-full commenting.
If you want to stimulate conversation, you have to let it happen. Get some spam plugins and let the people talk!

12.Unreadable confirmation codes.
Frustrating your customer has never been a good idea.

13.Emails without signatures.
This is as much common courtesy as anything - let people know how to get hold of you.

14.Supporting only Windows Internet Explorer.
IE’s market share is shrinking…why limit yourself?

Technorati Tags: Guy Kawasaki, Online Business, How to Hurt your Business

Strategy | No Comments »

Would you put your entire retirement into one stock? Of course not - it’s crazy, right?!? You would consult an expert, or do a lot of pain-staking research yourself, and carefully craft a plan to optimize your returns on the money you saved, while insuring that if one company you’ve invested in fails, you won’t end up in the poor house.

If the above scenario makes perfect sense, why is it that so many very intelligent business owners are only concerned about one stream of traffic? That’s right folks - the big “G” (Google, for those of you who were wondering) is a great source of traffic and revenue. However, if you have positioned yourself to be solely reliant upon Google traffic to be successful - you’re poised on the brink of disaster.

Fortunately - it’s not too late. If you’re still planning out your Internet strategy for 2007, make diversifying your traffic portfolio one of your top priorities. If you’ve already got your ‘07 strategy done, change it to include this.

What exactly does diversifying your traffic portfolio mean?
It’s just a fancy way of saying that you’re trying to find as many good sources of relevant traffic as possible. As a general rule, I shoot for no more than 30% of traffic coming from one particular source. That way, if one gets shut off, I still have at least 70% of traffic and sales coming in, while I figure out what to do about the other 30%.

Ok, so we know we need to do it, but how do we make it happen?
This may be easier than you think. First off, you want to make a plan - bring together your strategies for online advertising, PPC, SEO, email, PR, and traditional marketing, and look for ways they can work together to help drive traffic. Here are 5 example scenarios to get you started:

1)Our SEO is suggesting link building. Maybe we should INSIST that all the link building he does come from relevant sites that we think could provide us with a reasonable traffic stream.

2)We’re running a pretty extensive PPC campaign, so maybe we should look into adding a way for visitors to sign up for our newsletter if they don’t buy immediately. That way, we can bring them back.

3)Our communications depart sends out 3 press releases a month - we should send those out online as well, and maybe create a blog on our site to talk about them.

Those are just a few ideas to get you started. If your business is over-reliant on one traffic stream and you’d like to talk - just let us know.

Technorati Tags: Google, Diversifying Traffic, Website Strategy, SEO, PPC, Online PR, Email Marketing

SEO, Analytics, Strategy | No Comments »

The Center for Media Research reported Monday that 81% of survey respondents plan to increase 2007 spending on email marketing while 70% of respondents said they apply basic or no analysis to these campaigns.

As an Online Marketer I sometimes grumble at how offline media is not held up to the same standards as online for measurebility. I have even had a client, one of the top five US companies in telecommunications no less, say we shouldn’t hold traditional media up to the same standards as online. This was said while we were sitting down going over the details of their online campaign which reported how every dollar spent related to each conversion we achieved. The results of the online campaign weren’t bad but there was always this offline media superiority aura hovering over our heads. Since there was no way to measure the offline results it must be performing better than online.

Based upon experiences like this you would think I would be relieved to see survey responses like this. Wrong! We must go forward using the tools that are available no matter how uncomfortable they may sometimes make us. This should be done even at the cost of a decision to terminate a non performing online campaign and continuing a offline campaign where we just don’t know.

Pay Per Click, SEO, Tracking, Analytics, Offline Marketing, E-Mail Marketing | No Comments »

Seth Godin is writing about embracing irrelevant metrics - from calories to raw traffic numbers. While I would personally disagree on the calories portion of his commentary, we’re definitely on the same page with the rest of his examples.

At siteEDGE, we place a great deal of value on measurement. We’d like to think that we focus on only the most important, relevant metrics when it comes to determining the success of a campaign. So, what do we look at?

Conversion Rates - How effectively is our campaign selling your product? Is each click (that you’re paying for) likely to buy something, or become a lead? If not, how can we improve it?

Traffic Quality - This can become a point of contention, and is perhaps my own personal preference, but I like to infer that visitors that spend a little longer on your site, and go a few pages deeper (when they aren’t converting from that first page) are of higher quality. Are your visitors taking one look and clicking the back button? Do they think your site is boring or hard to use? In the same vein - is your site bringing back visitors? Do you have enough great content to make your site sticky?

Traffic Distribution - If you were to get dropped from Google’s index tomorrow, would your business survive? Have you diversified your portfolio of traffic channels enough to weather Yahoo’s next shakeup? What if your PPC budget gets cut this quarter?

The Cost Per’s - Cost per Lead, Cost per Sale, Cost per Customer, Cost per Acquistion - call it what you want, it all boils down to one thing - are you paying too much to get new business? Is your ROI positive? Better yet, is it as positive as it COULD BE?

If some of these questions leave you scratching your head - contact us to get a free initial consultation. We’ll talk through your business needs, and let you know if we can help. If you’re not in the market right now, subscribe to our feed or bookmark our site. We will provide you with enough information here to get you started on a great, comprehensive online marketing campaign.

Technorati Tags: Seth Godin, Marketing Metrics, Measuring Success, Analytics, Tracking

Tracking, Analytics | No Comments »

This question has been answered in so many ways with a common response of “it depends.” And it’s true–it depends on how much you need to make on your product or service after all the costs have been subtracted out.

Yes ROI has been written about many times before but for a good reason. You need to know how much you should spend to secure a sale. If your product sells for $500 and you stand to make $250 after all the manufacturing and administrative cost, and you know you need to clear $150 per sale to make it worth your time, then you have $100 per sale to put into your PPC campaign.

Once you have a clear goal for your online campaign you can quickly determine if it is worth pursuing. Using basic tools you determine the available searches (Impressions), apply the expected click through rate (CTR) for your industry so you know how many clicks to expect (Total Clicks), apply the average cost per click (Avg. CPC) so you know how much you expect to pay (Total Cost), and round it out by multiplying your conversion rate (CR) by Total Clicks so you know how many customers (Total Customers) to expect.

I will plug in some example numbers for these as follows: Impressions = 10,000, CTR = 8%, Total Clicks = 800, Avg. CPC $2.50, Total Cost = $2,000, CR = 5%, Total Customers = 40.

Remember the $100 per sale that you determined you could pay for a PPC campaign. Using the above example we would divide our total cost of $2,000 by the total customers expected of 40 resulting in an expect cost per acquisition of $50. Since this $50 is below the $100 we were prepared to pay we should proceed with the campaign.

A big consideration with all of this is to be aware that a new campaign does not have history to accurately predict the performance of any of these parameters. This is not a reason to neglect going through this process. Once you have a clear goal you can monitor the progress and pull the plug or accelerate the campaign as appropriate.

Technorati Tags: Pay Per Click, Marketing Budgets, SEM

Pay Per Click | No Comments »

David Meerman Scott’s newly revised ebook is a must read if you’re serious about reaching buyers directly, driving more traffic to your website, achieving high rankings on the search engine, moving more people into your sales process or competing more effectively. That pretty much takes care of evey business owner who still has a pulse.

The ebook gives a step by step guide to how to use press releases to drive sales. If you use a PR firm, make sure you get a copy in their hands. If you have a corporate communications department, ditto. Thanks to the Internet, press releases are now a direct to consumer communication channel. So if you’re not writing your press releases to appeal to your customers and prospects, you’re literally leaving money on the table. The New Rules of PR will show you how to solve this problem. Read it. Put it into practice. And get on with enjoying more leads, more sales, higher profits.

Technorati Tags: New Rules of PR, Ebooks, PR Firms

Public Relations, Brand Management | No Comments »