Dispelling SEO myths and preconceptions…

Many of our clients come to us desperate because they’ve been mislead. They began with the perception of the Internet as a place with low barriers-to-entry. A place where anyone with an idea could build a 4 page brochure website (home, about us, services, contact) and become instant millionaires. They saw the television commercials where the small business owner couldn’t keep up with the volume of orders coming in. They saw banner ads and spam emails for SEO scams selling “#1 rankings in google in 48 hours” and assumed that anyone could do it.

Many of our clients initially launched their websites years before they met us and paid for a very inexpensive design that wasn’t intelligently constructed.  They have been handicapped by the search engines ever since and have a terrible taste in their mouth about the Internet Marketing and Web Design world. They have invested thousands or tens of thousands of dollars and by the time they find us and are crushed to learn that the only way to proceed is to completely redesign or restructure the entire website and repair damage done by link scams.

We have looked at a number of our clients previous websites and have tracked their spending before and after “intelligent structure”.  We have found a number of small businesses that spent $500 for their first website and then added to it over the years without a plan.  If they had initially paid a professional $3,000 – $5,000 to design a complete, well-structured website with quality content they would be farther ahead. If you are a small business owner you might be thinking, “that’s too much for my blood”. But,  over the long-term, the increased revenues they could have experienced is greatly increased. Let’s quickly illustrate this concept with a small business as our example:

Internet Marketing: Getting it right the first time…

Customer Bob owns www.Bobsales.com (before redesign & professional marketing campaign).

2001 | $800 original design/maintenance | 800 Visits | 1 % Conversion Rate | 8 Sales x $50 average Sale = $400 ($400 loss for 2001)
2002 | $950 marketing/maintenance | 1,200 visits | 1 % Conversion Rate | 12 Sales x $50 average Sale = $600 ($600 loss for 2002)
2003 | $2000 marketing/maintenance | 2,800 visits | 1 % Conversion Rate | 28 Sales x $50 average Sale = $1,400 ($600 loss for 2003)
2004 | $2000 marketing/maintenance | 3,500 visits | 1 % Conversion Rate | 35 Sales x $50 average Sale = $1,7500 ($250 loss for 2004)
2005 | $2000 marketing/maintenance | 4,000 visits | 1 % Conversion Rate | 40 Sales x $50 average Sale = $2,000 ($0 break-even for 2004)
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Total Spend: $7,500 marketing/maintenance | 12,300 visits | $1,850 Loss over 5 years.

Alternatively, we have clients who we are fortunate to work with from the beginning. Clients who come to us with an understanding of the true weight of the project. It’s a process that demands long-term focus, analysis, intelligence, adjustment, dedication, discipline and creativity. Most successful business people can comprehend a successful online marketing plan and collaborate with us as we move toward success.

Imagine a website that attracts traffic and links organically and sustains your hard-earned rankings by virtue of quality rather than driving traffic manually (the hard way). Imagine having a website with such useful content and so much exposure that OTHER people actually promote your business for free.

Now let’s look at the same business after a $3,000 re-design & a professional marketing campaign:

2006 | $3,000 marketing/maintenance | 20,000 visits | 2.5 % Conversion Rate | 500 Sales x $50 average Sale = $25,000 ($22,000 for 2006)
2007 | $3,000 marketing/maintenance | 30,000 visits | 3 % Conversion Rate | 900 Sales x $50 average Sale = $45,000 ($42,000 for 2007)
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Total Spend:  $9,000 marketing/maintenance | 50,000 visits | $66,000 Net Revenue

Which would you rather be?

We’ve released these insider SEO tips because education is best thing that we can do for our clients. It fosters understanding and a great working relationship while illustrating the full scope of our work and the value of our services. Visit our corporate website for more Small Business Internet Marketing tips.

Conversions can be tracked very easily with behavior analytics tracking software. By putting a piece of code into your website you can track how each visitor came to your website, what pages they visited, what keyword/phrase they used and you can then tell what traffic converts into your goals for a “conversion”. This is the tip of the iceberg for behavior analytics tracking software. Most have hundreds of features.

So, now the question. If you had to choose between bringing in more visitors or raising your websites conversion rate what would you do?

I’m in the process of going through this issue right now and I chose to raise that conversion rates! (By the way, any decent SEO or Internet Marketing person would do the same). By tweaking your pages, optimizing your content, eliminate any page errors, and making the buying process easier… you can improve your bottom line quicker by raising conversion rates. It’s not easy bringing in a new visitor. It’s even harder to convert a new visitor to a buyer. But, once you get your conversion rate up to a good conversion percentage (varies by industry) you’ll be set.

Your website is like a “testing lab”. You can make changes in minutes. Please do, as the worst thing you can do is keep your site stagnant if you aren’t making (enough) sales. Add new content and make tweaks until it’s where it needs to be. Also, if you don’t make consistent changes from a Search Engine Optimization perspective you’ll lose search rankings.

One of my bigger retail sites has had a conversion percentage of 2.2% for the last few months. That’s a little above average. This month we made a lot of format changes and our monthly converstion rate is up to 2.4%. That might not seem like much, but if you add the increased sales and average sale price and we’ve made an extra $3,900 this month just on the .2%. This weeks conversion percentage is over 3.5%…. so it’s working!

Now that all our pages are tweaked we’ll start going after new visitors. Visit our website for more Small Business Internet Marketing tips.

A combination of good search engine optimization and website content can transform your website into a sales tool. Combining the website content necessary to increase return visits and the SEO to get the initial visitor goes hand-in-hand. Combine that with a visually pleasing and fast loading website, and your website will achieve the results you desire.

“I don’t have the time to up-date my website every day”, is the comment I hear from customers on a daily basis.

The small business owner has many items on their agenda. I get it. I wear many different hats as well. From the A/R to the A/P to the Chief Operations Garbage Man…. I do it all as well. But…. adding new content or providing the content to your website management firm should be at the top of your list. The potential for new customer acquisitions and repeat customers from an updated website with good content is priceless.

Would you operate your retail location and never have:

• “New” specials in your store?
• Add new products to the shelf?
• Speak to the customers that come into your store?

Of course you would. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have any customers after a few months. The same is true for your website.

Most small business are very comfortable with hiring in-store help, but are reluctant to pay for quality website updates and content. If you truly want to succeed in the online world you’ll need to make the financial effort necessary to do so.

How much should you update your website each day? A minimum of 200 new words a day on your website will do amazing things to your website traffic and content. The viewers will appreciate it, and will come back more often. Search engines will reward you for the updated content and will move your website higher in the rankings for multiple keyword/phrases.

Some options on how it could be easier for you to add content to your website are:

• Take 15 – 20 minutes each day to sit down in a quiet area to write something relevant to go on the website. If you upload it yourself… great. If not send it to your website developer or SEO. I’m sure they would be very happy to upload your website each day. They should understand the importance of content and changes to your website on a daily basis.
• Find a website that provides free info for your industry. Add that content to the website. Make sure you add the appropriate bylines and links to the articles author.
• Have one of your trusted employees (or rotate the writing with your employees) write out the articles. It can be something they do as part of their daily routine. Most employees will enjoy it. It will also allow them to take more ownership of the website and business.
• Free newsfeeds are available for most industries. It won’t always provide the most relevant information, but it will allow a viewer to read “new” information if they come back to your website and won’t take much time for you except for the initial set-up.

This is all basic stuff, but it’s the meat and potatoes of your website. Content is King…. 15 – 20 minutes a day and you will be moving in the right direction.

Landing pages have been around for a number of years. Back in the day they were set-up for the search engines to help the website’s search rankings. Over time people realized that these “landing pages” not only were good for the search engines, but were good at converting visitors because the content matched what people were looking for.

So at this point there are a number of different kinds of landing pages. Landing pages to sell a product, an e-book, an email newsletter sign-up, request more info, etc. Our initial landing pages that I’ll show you below are set-up to collect contact information so the business can follow up with a phone call. They allow the visitor to fill out the form, sign-up and get more information all on the same page. At some point our long-term plan is to add more pages to the site that are SEO’d properly and they would also serve as landing pages for those keywords.

So, in Today’s SEO world landing pages are used when referring to pages that “convert” as well as to “drive traffic” from search engines.

The following links point to a few landing pages that we did recently. They are constructed very simply. Just one image at the top (search engines love simplicity) followed by a healthy amount of text below, which will allow the pages to rank well for the clients desired terms. A page such as this, with an appealing graphic is something of a billboard and gives us a great oppotunity to sell the product visually and induce a conversion by enticing the user to fill out the form, thus providing yet another lead for our client.

Think of the pages below in terms of a billboard on a highway. The text at the bottom could be considered a way to get people to drive by (a prime location) because it pulls people in from the search engines. The graphic at the top could be considered as the billboard.

Granite Countertops Miami
Kitchen Remodeling Miami
Marble Floors Miami
Bathroom Remodeling Miami
Wood Flooring Miami
Tile Miami

I hope you enjoyed this blog post. If you have any questions regarding landing pages go to www.carolinaimarketing.com and fill out our contact form. Happy New Year!

Our basic business concept is to take an active part in our clients businesses, essentially becoming our clients “Internet Marketing” department. We speak or email with most of our clients on a weekly basis and have contact on a daily basis with a handful of our clients. I have a teaching background and I’m in the process of writing a manual that will allow our clients to take an active part of the Search Engine Optimization or Internet Marketing process with us. This will allow our clients to keep their costs down and let us focus on the bigger picture so we can continually move our clients websites forward with the latest and greatest ideas. My long term dream is to turn the manual into an Internet Marketing book for small business owners.

Last, but not least, Happy New Year! I hope 2009 far exceeds your professional and personal goals.