The Slums of Mumbai as we land

Before we left, I had a very romantic view of India. Rising early to practice yoga and embracing a free-spirit lifestyle whilst eating all the vegetarian food my body would allow (I haven’t eaten anything with a face for 15 years so this particularly excited me). However in reality, we slummed it on the floor of a train next to the (leaking) toilet for 14 hours, we were stranded in the Himalayas due to a political assassination and we spent 5 days locked in a hotel room due to partner’s severe case of Delhi belly. Not quite the travelling experience I had imagined.

So why were my expectations so unrealistic? Well, I am ashamed to admit that… I didn’t do my research. I didn’t know where the yoga retreats were. I didn’t know that May is possibly the hottest time of the year in India. I didn’t know that my bank card would not be recognised by the Indian Railway services (without naming names, I thought they were the worlds local bank?!) and to be honest, I was living in a bit of a dream world.

This doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy my Indian adventure, I loved it and I fell in love with Darjeeling,  it was just very very different to what I imagined.

Tea Fields in Darjeeling

So why am I telling you this little story? Well, I love telling anyone who’ll listen but mainly because I speak to so many people who say to me they want their website to rank number 1. Unfortunately, so does everyone else so it may not be as easy as you initially think. Tom wrote a fantastic blog post last August that I wanted to remind you of: Will I be number 1 in the search engines?

In summary though, you can always learn from my travelling experience:

1. Do your research
2. Have a bank card that works (Pay per click allows you to set your own budget)
3. Be realistic about what you hope to achieve

Namaste!

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) also known as organic listings

Before you learn how to achieve good rankings in search engines, there are a few things you need to know:

1. Your competitors are also competing to achieve top rankings.
2. Search engines use mathematical calculations to decide who goes at the top. Mathematics can’t tell whose website is the nicest looking, or who provides the best service.
3. Search engines fight a constant battle against hundreds of thousands of spammers who are very good at figuring out how to get a bad website to the top of the listings.

What factors do search engines look at when deciding who goes at the top of the list?

1. Links to your website from websites you don’t own (most important)
   If other websites link to yours, this is an indication that your website is important. If these websites are relevant to your products and services, even better.
   1. If you sell minced chicken, a link from a technology website isn’t that relevant, but is better than nothing
   2. Linking to other peoples websites from yours doesn’t help
   3. Swapping links with other websites has some value, but one way links are better
   4. Links that contain the words you want to rank for are very valuable
   5. Links from reputable sites (Government, Educational, BBC etc) are incredibly useful but hard to obtain
2. What’s on your website
   Does the text on your website (frequently and prominently) contain the words you want to rank highly for?
   1. The text that you can see / read is most important
   2. The text that you can’t see (meta tags, alt tags) is also important
   3. Don’t over-egg the cake
   4. Don’t try and hide text (i.e. white text on a white background)
3. The age of your domain
   This is very important in the early days as search engines try to figure out if you are a spammer and if people find your website relevant / offensive etc.
4. Domain name / page names
   An indication about the content of your website, but not overly important for popular or competitive search terms.
   1. A domain name that contains your favourite keyphrase is useful for providing context when people link to your site
   2. Don’t get too obsessed with this however, as long messy domain names are poor from a branding perspective
5. How frequently your site is updated
   If you don’t care about your website, why should a search engine?
6. Where your domain is hosted
   Do you share a server with pornographers and scammers?

Last thing to know:

There are two types of keyphrase

Competitive

These tend to be 1, 2 or 3 words in length, and are the first ones that spring to mind in relation to your industry. Competitive keyphrases tend to have very high volumes of traffic (lots of visitors) but relatively low conversion (visitors converting to sales/enquiries) because they are generic. If you sell cars, then “cars” or “cheap cars” or “cars for sale” would be competitive keyphrases.

Long Tail (less competitive)

These tend to be 3 words or more in length and are usually more descriptive. These keyphrases will not individually generate as many visitors, but can be better for converting visitors to customers.  If you sell cars, then “cars in Warwick” or “green ford Capri 2.0 mk II” or “best website to buy a used vintage car” would be long tail keyphrases and (hopefully) very relevant to your service.

Up to half of all searches on Google every day are unique (i.e. only searched for once that day)! This means that ‘long tail’ keyphrases are also VERY IMPORTANT.

What actions should I take to achieve good rankings for relevant keyphrases in search engines?

• Check the text on your website
  Make sure it mentions your keyphrases frequently. If it doesn’t, update it. Try to remember that ultimately your website is for humans, so don’t get too spammy.
• Get some easy links!
  • Are there any website owners amongst your contacts, friends or family that might be willing to link to your website? Take advantage.
  • Sign up to any local or industry directories, some are free. (e.g. somebody involved in car sales in warwick might type “warwick directory” or “car sales directory” into Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. to find a list of directories they may appear in.
  • Get the people who built your website to write a blog post about you or link to your website in their portfolio.
• Make sure your website is optimised
  • Your web designers should have put your relevant keyphrases into your page titles, images and description tags. They can even do this with your page names if it is relevant and not too spammy.
• Start producing regular content
  • The more often the better, but just do as much as you can. You can add content in the form of news, blog, and articles. Your web design team will be able to provide you with a platform for adding content yourself to keep the ongoing cost down.
• Start producing AMAZING content!
  • The more interesting the better! If you write information that is interesting (to a specific audience) they will link to your content, refer people to your site and all the time you are demonstrating your knowledge to potential customers.
• Write content for other people
  • Why not write an interesting piece for a local or industry relevant website? If they publish it, they will almost always include a bio of the author with a LINK back to your website.
• Fire up the PR machine
  • Lots of small companies use PR to get their name in the paper by doing (or saying) amazing (or interesting) things. The same tactics work online, and most newspapers (even local) have websites too.
• Participate in blogs, forums and social media
  • However niche your industry, there is bound to be a community of people that love to talk about related stuff! Find them and engage with them. You’ll build a personal brand as part of the process and you may even get a few cheap and easy links back to your website (i.e. in your signature or in topics relevant to content on your website).

Being number 1 in a search engine implies you are the best. If you want to be the best, then you must prove it to the search engines.

Pay Per Click – instant gratification

If the principal way to acquire visitors from search engines is to achieve good rankings through link building and content strategy, then a very close second is Pay Per Click (PPC). Search engines make nearly all of their money selling PPC advertising to website owners.

Here’s how it works

• You sign up for a PPC account with each (or any) of the search engines.
• You create a list of keyphrases closely related to your product / service (start with 20-50 but you can expand that list to thousands of keyphrases).
• You group your keyphrases and create small text adverts that will appear in relation to those keyphrases.
• You set a maximum price against your keyphrases (either one price for all or individual prices for each keyphrase).
• Once approved, the search engines will start displaying your ads each time one of your keyphrases is searched for.
• Each time your advert gets clicked on and your site gets visited, your account is deducted an amount of money up to your maximum price.
• You can set daily or monthly spend limits, and set up your account to show your ads gradually or as often as possible. You can even set them to run only at certain times of the day or days of the week.
• Your ads will be displayed until your budget is depleted.
• How high your ad appears in the list depends on how high your maximum price is, and how popular your ad / site are when displayed and clicked.
• Over time you figure out which keyphrases lead to business and which ones are a waste of money.

Myths

• Nobody clicks on those ads
  Total rubbish, many companies make a fortune simply advertising on Pay Per Click. People have become conditioned to finding commercial services on the ‘right had side of the page’.
• It’s not worth doing because competitors will click all the time
  You do have to accept a certain amount of click fraud or wastage (people trying to sell you stuff) as part of the process, but search engines are VERY good at spotting people clicking on ads multiple times and won’t punish you if they identify a spammer.
• I can’t afford it
  You set your own budgets, either daily or monthly and can fix the amount you put into your account. It’s best to start small and pick just a few keyphrases with low maximum prices until you are confident you are getting good value.

Benefits

• Your new website can start working for you very quickly (within an hour!).
• You can quickly find out which keyphrases you should be targeting in the main search listings, which can take months to achieve with no other guarantee of success.
• You can switch off your advertising when you are busy, and turn it on when you need to bring in more business.

Negatives

• You can spend a lot of money very quickly if you do not set budgets and monitor regularly.
• You will always have to pay for the visitors you acquire through PPC, and therefore this strategy should be offset by an investment (time or money) in achieving good rankings in the natural listings.
• If you have a business model that takes time for enquiries to turn into hard cash, you may have to wait a while for results or fund a lot of advertising before your costs are recouped.

PPC is a very important part of most good online strategies and can provide answers and get your business moving quickly.

Other things you should be doing

• Make sure you have a stats package enabled on your website so you can see how many visitors you get, and where they come from (Google Analytics is excellent and free).
• Make sure you refer to your website in all of your printed material including your business cards, vehicle livery, newspaper ads, invoices, signage and anything else you can think of!
• Remember your website is also a tool to support, reassure and assist your existing customers. A website is a given essential for most serious businesses, and isn’t just a tool for finding new customers.

Things you should not be doing

• Buying thousands of links in one go or for an unfeasibly low price
  Search engines will spot this a mile off, and may penalise you forever.
• Spamming other people’s websites
  Participating in forums and blogs is a good way to build brand reputation (and to a certain extent some free links), but remember these people are intelligent human beings too and they won’t appreciate you trying to hawk your snake oil without putting something in first.
• Stuffing your site text full of keyphrases
  Partly because it’s not that effective, but mostly because real people will not do business with you if your website is just weird.
• Avoiding the shady operators
  The SEO industry is unregulated and has a deservedly mixed reputation. Any industry that is confusing to its customers will inevitably breed operators willing to capitalise on that confusion. Top rankings for popular keyphrases can be worth vast sums of money, and are not likely to be achieved with a small investment of money and no intellectual input from the website owner.

The internet is awesome!

For those who are willing to work on their online presence, there is a limitless opportunity to grow a business.

A website is just the beginning of an engaging, exciting and rewarding journey, and as always the first step is the most important. A good web design company can help you take that first step and show you which way to go. It’s how much walking you do after that will determine how far you go.

Whilst the data it provides is only relative (i.e. you don’t get a feel for market size) you do get some really interesting information related to peak interest and long term growth or decline.

So here’s the first example, and for this we’ll look at web design.

The graph below shows that interest in the phrase web design has been in steady decline since 2004. It also shows that the peak season for web design is January – February each year.

If we were planning our marketing and development strategies for the year, we’d know for sure that we’d miss a significant opportunity if we delayed until March. The graph also shows that we shouldn’t worry if things go a little quiet during the summer months.

Let’s look at some examples that effect the businesses of our customers.

The graph below shows the relative interest in wedding photography.

It’s clear that for this keyphrase there has been a stable growth in interest through the past 6 years. It’s also very clear that peak interest occurs during July August and September each year, with a very significant drop off in November and December. If I were going to spend money on advertising, clearly the three popular months would be a successful time to do it and the winter months would be a good time to think about making alterations to the website or maybe taking some time off.

The next chart shows the relative interest in landscape gardeners.

This graph shows a decline consistent with the recession, but makes very clear that peak interest months are March – June.

The final chart shows interest in funeral directors.

This graph shows strong growth in the industry (consistent with a growth in population, but also consistent I suspect with an increase in growth of the silver surfer community).

January through April are popular (?) times here, perhaps consistent with a cold winter and people “hanging on for Xmas” (sorry if that sounds a bit crass).

Now if you have worked in these industries for a long time, it is probably obvious to you when your peak months are, but if you are entering a new industry, or working with people in other industries, it certainly helps to know this sort of information.

If a website can be a unicorn . . . why can't a duck?!

A professor of English has been in the news today because she was thrown out of a New York branch of Starbucks for refusing to use the chain’s choice of phrasing.

Apparently she was ordering a plain multi-grain bagel, and the barista wouldn’t serve her unless she used the phrase “without butter and cheese”.

Now, during my long and distinguished career serving coffee (part-time when I was at school), I’ve never told a customer they can’t make an order unless they use the designated word combination as authorised by the company.

Starbucks are pretty smart by controlling the words and phrases used in their shops, by using terms like ‘grande’ instead of ‘large’ they’ve altered the vocabulary to give them a more continental and classy feel. Changing the phrases gives them control and branding beyond the products and into the actual process of ordering itself.

However, you get to a point where your carefully crafted vocab ends up being a barrier to effective communication. If staff only speak Starbucks, and can’t translate ‘large’ into ‘grande’ then you’re in trouble.

Personally I think I’m going to start calling Edge of the Web designed sites ‘unicorns’. We’d be the only unicorn designers in the world – even gods can’t lay claim to that one!

Business unicorns ready in 1 day. It’s catchy, but something tells me we won’t get much business if we insist all our customers ask us for unicorns!

I like money!

Once you’ve got a shiny, workable, awesome website (assuming you got one from Edge of the Web, of course!), there are things you can do to make even more money out of it.

There are two main forms of online marketing that can help you climb search engine rankings and attract more clicks and customers.

Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing is the most immediate way to get your site noticed and probably the method that brings you most control.

Organic marketing requires more time and effort, but can bring about a far more lasting and productive result.

Pay Per Click

PPC ads usually appear on the right of the main listings when you search. It ranks websites by how much they are willing to pay to appear in the listings for particular keyphrases. The more you are willing to pay for a click, the higher your company will rank.

One of the great things about PPC is that you keep tight control of how much you are paying, and how much benefit you are getting from it.

It also means you can tinker with your keyphrases and how much you spend on each click, so that you can work out what gives you the best return for your money.

Organic

Organic marketing is less immediate than PPC, but is a highly valuable way to optimise your site.

Organic listings in search engines are hard to climb, but are more likely to bring you high volumes of traffic, as most people click on organic listings before the paid for adverts.

The best way of getting your site to rank higher in search engine listings is through inbound links. Links from other websites to yours are very valuable, when search engines find them they know that your site is considered credible by someone else, which is taken into account when they rank you.

However, search engines are not easily fooled. If you go out and buy 100 links from online directories in a week, search engines know you’re just trying to improve your ranking, and won’t play along. The best links to get are from people in similar or related industries, relevant blogs or articles.

Simply turning up on a blog and posting an ad and a link to your site isn’t very helpful (it’ll probably just get you deleted for spamming), but involving yourself in the discussion, and including a link as an explanation or for extra info could be very useful.

The main thing with link building is to ensure you’re getting links from relevant or highly regarded sources. A link from the BBC counts for far more than one from justpayusforalink.com.

Of course, online marketing isn’t a one-or-the-other option, a mixture of both could be the magic blend that lets you make even more money online.

The internet is still a new opportunity for lots of businesses, even those that have been established for a while, but lots of people still find it difficult to work out how they convert that opportunity into a money-generating operation.

Far too many companies think that the internet isn’t the right place to do business, and simply don’t feel the need to get an online presence, but even if you’re a bricks and mortar firm, a website can help you find new customers and make more money – you just have to choose the right kind of site for what you do.

So what is the main idea behind your site? What do you need it to do?

Inform
An information-based site is usually the best option for a company that’s new to the world wide web. All it needs to do is provide the information about who you are and what you do. It can include anything you think is important; prices, service information, testimonials, but its main purpose is to promote your company.

This kind of site will augment your company’s ability to make money through greater exposure, creating a sense of professionalism (lots of customers have more confidence in a company with an online presence), and by making your business more available – visitors can get in touch whenever they want to, without you needing someone to answer the phones at half-past midnight!

Making money with an information site is also relatively easy to track. You can look at the statistics of people visiting your site and filling out your enquiry form (we provide our clients with an AW Stats package to keep track of these numbers), and it’s usually best to ask people how they found out about you if they call in too, as some people prefer to phone after seeing a site and get more immediate contact.

Sell
A website that sells, or an ecommerce site, is pretty self-explanatory when it comes to making money.

A website is a lot cheaper than a physical store, and it’s also open to a wider range of people for a much longer time. Making your products available for purchase by people all over the world at any time is a lot easier on the net than in person.

Again, you can use your stats package to find out the search terms people are using to find you and how long they stayed – useful information to let you know how your site is performing and how it could be improved.

Whether you’re looking to advertise your company online or directly sell across the net, a website can be a hugely valuable asset to a company.

Next week, I’ll be explaining how to make MORE money from the internet, by using Pay Per Click to manage your online marketing.

Who's afraid of the big bad . . . oh who am I kidding?

Cold-calling random people is likely to p*ss off 90 per cent of the people you talk to, whereas identifying people who might genuinely need or want what you’re offering will get you a much better reception.

Pushing your website marketing towards popular keywords, regardless of their relevance is just as likely to p*ss people off. They might not be able to say anything colourful and hang up on you, but they’re not likely to call you in the first place – and that’s the point of marketing to begin with.

On the net, relevance is the most significant factor.

If you’re trying to sell sheep, don’t dress them up as wolves. If someone types “wolf” into a search engine, clicks on your site and finds a small fluffy lamb, they aren’t going to hang around and buy one.

Stay specific to the things you do and provide. There can be hundreds of different keywords that actually work for your company, and relevant marketing to a smaller audience is always going to be more successful than just pushing your marketing towards any popular terms, whether that’s wolves or XFactor.

There’s no point having lots of visitors if they’re all looking for something you don’t have.

If you’ve got sheep – sell sheep!

It's all about YOU!

Ever put together a campaign, pouring time, effort and money into it, being enthused and excited, only to get to launch day and discover that your customers weren’t nearly as excited as you were?

A month ago that was how the General Election was looking, like an exercise more for the politicians than the electorate, and there were expectations of a historically low turnout.

But now here we are on May 6^th, and facing a totally different election.

And the difference is because the voters feel like they are really involved now. The television debates were an opportunity for the leaders to actually connect with the public, and for the public to feel like they had a connection and a place in the political landscape.

Getting your audience involved is a lot harder when you’re talking at them, and not with them. That’s why making a sale face to face can be easier than sending a leaflet, and why the debates were more effective than releasing editorials in the papers.

Being a person instead of an institution is hugely beneficial, but how can you achieve that on a website?

Step one is to speak to your customer and not at them – identify what they really want to know, and tell them about it.

Step two is to use those opportunities to drop in why you provide that service better – how you’re cheaper, faster, better qualified, better quality.

Step three is to make their choices clear – make your ‘buy now’ button, your contact page and your list of services really easy to find and easy to read.

In the end it’s up to the visitor to make up their own mind, but sometimes a little involvement is all they need.

Because we are!

Edge of the Web has been voted the Best Business Provider in Warwick for 2010!

Thank you to everyone who recognised our hard work & high quality service, and voted for us or left a testimonial (bribes will be delivered in unmarked brown envelopes*).

Now Tom, Bhups, Mark and myself will have a celebratory muffin, and get back to what we do best – building awesome websites.

And that’s not just our opinion; it’s the judgement of the people!

*Actually we’re going to have to stop bribing people. As the Best Business Provider in Warwick we feel that shady dealings are probably beneath us now.