I recently participated in an SEO website audit for an industrial electronics manufacturer. The client was looking for a fresh perspective on their SEO efforts and had been working with an agency in the past to assist with their search engine marketing. They wanted to see how they could increase their search engine traffic market share.

Upon initial review, from a textbook SEO perspective they had done everything right. They were following all the best practices such as utilizing  a robots.txt file and an XML sitemap. No major coding roadblocks that could hinder search engine bots. Web copywriting best practices were employed with proper use of key tags such as H1, Title, Meta Description, etc.

Even though the website followed SEO best practices we identified design issues that were affecting our SEO efforts.

How Do You Know if Poor Usability Could be Affecting Your SEO?

Here are a few areas that might tip you off that your web design could be hampering your SEO (or overall internet marketing) efforts:

• Pages linked from the navigation aren’t being indexed or have low PageRank
• Content development opportunities are being hampered by the navigational structure
• Pages that should have been more prominent from an SEO perspective were at the same level as low-level pages
• Your on-site search engine has a number of search queries for terms that are related to pages linked from your navigation
• Overuse of drop-down menus (i.e. too many links within your navigation)
• Website copy is dominated by company terminology or industry jargon
• High bounce rate is undermining the organic search traffic that is being brought to the website

Yes, technically you can consider these elements as part of an on-site SEO audit. But these types of symptoms aren’t ones directly SEO related, they are typically more design and usability related. Areas that need to be addressed by a designer with a user centric approach in close collaboration with an SEO consultant.

Fixing these issues aren’t easy or straightforward as it usually requires a major website restructure. But it was a great reminder that SEO is only one element of an internet marketing strategy. A user focused design should be at the core of your SEO and internet marketing efforts.

If you are still on the sidelines about whether social media is a passing fad or whether it has any validity, I recommend you watch this video on the Social Media Revolution.

Interested in more internet marketing & social media related videos? Subscribe to my YouTube Channel today.

In the early days of advertising, brand marketing was “the” way to get your company or product noticed. Every company hoped to have enough budget to buy Coca-Cola scale type advertising to put their product in the face of the consumer. This continues on today in traditional media. With the largest advertisers likely the same ones in the Mad Men years (i.e. Coca-Cola).

The major difference between now and then, is that in the online space, your budget doesn’t determine how much exposure you get online. With social media and networking sites, it is easier than ever to get noticed. It just takes time and creativity to get your brand noticed.

Here are a couple of examples of how companies are getting noticed online:

• Submit your products to be reviewed. Major electronics makers have been doing this over a number of years on CNet and Gizmodo, where they do professional product reviews. The shift that’s occurred in recent years is that now bloggers as well as consumers have gotten into the act. For example, if you searched YouTube for “Flip Mino HD Reviews“, you’d get a whole host of reviewers giving the product a spin. It’s like 1,180, 5-10 minute mini commercials of the product.

• Although many will argue that Email Marketing is a direct marketing tactic (which it technically is). If done tastefully by offering useful content or eye-catching imagery (think of an Abercrombie & Fitch ad), it can also be seen as a brand marketing tool. Think of how many emails you have gotten from Target, Gap, Amazon, etc. where they have been invited into your inbox and their brand is being reinforced on a weekly or monthly basis. Although you may not purchase from them because of an email you had received, their emails are keeping them top-of-mind the next time you look for household items, or jeans or books. All this for pennies per email sent.

• Facebook Ads are notorious for not getting as many clickthroughs compared to other pay per click platforms like Google Adwords. But all the more reason why it can be a great branding tool. Think of it. You get to target your demographic right down to the type of TV shows and city they live in, for less than a cup of coffee a day!

Online marketing  is largely seen as a great direct marketing playing field. But with social media, email marketing and a few other creative tactics you can leverage the online space to keep your brand top of mind and in consideration when it does come time to buy.

For most companies it’s easy for them to gain top rankings in search results for their company name or product brand names. Barring any major issues with your website, Google does a pretty good job of making sure a company website ranks in the top 5 for their company name (assuming that your company name is unique).

This is one of the reasons why many PPC advertising campaign managers typically don’t bid on their own company name in Google AdWords. They assume this type of campaign is a waste of campaign budget.

However, there is evidence to the contrary that bidding on your own brand or company name in pay per click advertising is important.

1. Increases Brand Affinity & Purchase Intent - Research indicates that when a company is ranked #1 in the organic result as well as in the paid search result, they have a higher likelihood of looking favorably on the brand, recalling the brand as well as purchasing from them.

2. Your Brand Could Be Closing the Sale - Even in the online space there is a purchasing cycle. This is likely more evident for high dollar purchases or B2B purchasing behaviour, where more research is required to make an informed purchasing decision. Your customers could be clicking on one of your PPC advertising ads (such as product names or terminology) during their initial research, however if you find that those ads aren’t resulting in a direct sale, it’s likely because your customers are performing additional research before committing. They could be looking at third-party product reviews or opinions from social media users. Once they do commit to purchasing from you, they will likely look for your brand name or company name to find you again. This phenomenon is called First Click vs. Last Click sales attribution. If your brand isn’t easily found during the final leg of the purchasing cycle, you could be missing out on a sale. Bidding on your brand ensures you are there when it counts.

3. Your Competitors Could Be Stealing Your Traffic – With Google’s new lax trademark bidding policy, your competitors are now allowed to bid on your trademarked keywords such as your company name. If their paid search ads appear ahead of your organic search listing, you’re missing out on traffic that should have been yours.

So before you think of cutting out your brand names from your PPC advertising campaign, consider the affect it could have for your overall PPC campaign.

As always I welcome any comments!

Many real estate agents have flocked to sites like Trulia.com to establish their online identities. As you should. It’s a marketplace where home buyers flock to search for the latest real estate listings. Trulia is a great place to make sure you are accessible to the thousands of home buyers and sellers who use the site to begin their real estate search.

Trulia is a great place to let people know you are an experienced agent. You have the ability to answer users’ real estate questions, post your listings, submit your resume as well as publish blog posts.

I’m a huge advocate of blogging by real estate agents. It has a number of benefits. But one thing that agents aren’t aware of when they do blog for sites like Trulia is that it’s a lot like renting. It’s like renting because you aren’t building up equity in your own website with search engines like Google. Let me explain…

Blogging is a tremendous benefit for many website owners because it generates content for their website. With every new blog post that you publish on your website, you increase the opportunity of a person finding your website in Google. Let’s say you publish a blog post on “Advantages of Owning Real Estate”, if you published it on your website you’ve just given yourself an opportunity to appear for search results related to that article. As you accumulate blog posts you are building up equity for your website in the eyes of search engines like Google. You’re site will be seen as an authority in your particular niche and other bloggers as well as other websites will begin linking to your website. Links in the eyes of Google is like a vote of confidence; which they use as a factor in determining who shows up first in search engine rankings. You are working your way to making your website a powerhouse in search engine rankings. You see…equity.

Blogging for sites like Trulia (as enticing as it is) only gives you short-term advantages. You are building up equity for Trulia’s website, not your own.You not only are giving Trulia the chance to be found in search engines based on whatever you post, but on Trulia it’s easier for a potential client to navigate away from your Trulia profile over to the next agent’s. Your blog on Trulia doesn’t give you lasting benefits of blogging. You are renting.

So stop renting and build up your “search engine equity” by blogging on your own website. You’ll be reaping the rewards once your site starts attracting free traffic to your website because of your blogging efforts.

There’s a great book by Donald Keough the former CEO of Coca-Cola called “The Ten Commandments of Business Failure“.

It’s a great book that I highly recommend for any entrepreneur, and it’s premise is that there are thousands of ways to make your business successful, but from his own experience there were only about 10 ways for your business to truly fail.

This is no different in the online world. There are different ways to succeed online, but there are common factors to failing. So as you venture online to promote and market yourself; try to avoid these deadly pitfalls.

#1 – Launch a Bad Website

There’s no excuse to have a bad website. It’s almost better not to have a website than to have a bad one.

Thousands of new websites are cropping up each and every day. According to Domain Tools, a website that tracks domain name information, there were approximately 70,000 new .COM domain names registered per day. Although not the perfect indicator of how many new sites are launched daily, it gives you an indication of how many people want to get online. But most importantly it gives you an indication of how competitive the online space has, is, and will be.

Really good companies will put their best foot forward and have a professional looking website that is organized, pleasing to the eye and follows the best usability practices. Having a sub-par website cripples you right from the beginning. It’s your home base. Your face to the online world. Although content is still king, no one will eat a prime rib steak off of a garbage can lid. Also keep in mind that having a great looking website can be had with less than a couple of hundred dollars if you are tech savvy and use open source software like Wordpress (which is being offered as a free installation by most web hosting companies like GoDaddy) with a really good looking theme that’s free of charge.

#2 – Avoid Measuring Website Traffic or Activity

Just like your balance sheet and cashflow reports are critical to your business, so are web analytics. If you don’t track and review the data that exposes how your website visitors are getting to your website and what they do once they get there. You’re running your website in the dark. You won’t know about critical info such as:

• Which campaigns drove the most users to your website
• Which campaigns yielded the most leads
• Which pages have the highest likelihood of driving someone away

Services like Google Analytics are free, so there’s really no excuse to not track this kind of data. Unless you like the thrill of not knowing.

#3 – Ignore What People Are Saying About You or Your Company

What your clients or competitors say about you online:

• Is easier to publish via their own blogs, review websites or forums
• Can be easily found by prospective clients
• Is more important than what you have to say about yourself

With this in mind it’s important to track your online reputation so you can mitigate any negative feedback. (Hint: Use Google Alerts to track website mentions and Yahoo Sideline to track real-time Twitter messages)

#4 – Don’t Respond to Inquiries or Criticism

This rule applies to inbound emails, comments on your blog posts or even online feedback that you find on other websites. Not responding is the equivalent of saying “I don’t care”. We’ve all experienced it at one point or another. We contact a customer service email address with no reply. Or post a critical comment on a blog post. Or send a Tweet to someone…and not even an acknowledgment.

Your silence speaks volumes, which in turn will come back to you in bad online Karma in the form of diminishing user engagement with your Twitter account or a decline in readers of your blog. Or simply bad word of mouth…”Oh ya, I contacted him but he never got back to me…”. It always come back to you in one way or another.

#5 – Stop Testing New Marketing Techniques

You’ve found a great way to drive leads, and your done? This is a great way of stifling any forward momentum or progress. But before you pat yourself on the back, remember that what works now doesn’t necessarily mean it will continue to work at the same peak level continuously.

The biggest gift that the web has given us, is the ability to fail really fast. Why not use this to your advantage and keep testing to improve upon your last best effort? Testing is what will help your marketing campaigns innovate and incrementally improve. To avoid this blunder start small by testing different variations of your email marketing or the pages that you send people to. See which marketing copy increases your inquiries.

#6 – Don’t Use the Web to Promote Your Website

This may seem like an obvious one, but you’d be surprised how many companies fail to recognize this. You may be putting your website URL on your advertising billboards, direct mail, business cards and flyers. But if that’s your only traffic generation strategy you’re missing out big time.

It’s too far of a reach to expect a majority of your clients to read your website URL on a billboard, remember that URL, recall that URL when they actually need to look for your services, and hopefully type in that URL without any typos.

To crank up your website’s traffic research tactics such as:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Pay per click (PPC) advertising
• Email marketing
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Etc.

Or just continue reading this blog

#7 – Ignore Google in Your Marketing Strategy

For a large majority of successful businesses that operate online Google represents the largest contributor to their website traffic. People use Google as their starting point to anything they need to find online. Google is also the most dominant search engine in North America.

So suffice it to say, Google should be a big part of your strategy to increase your online leads. (See #5 about SEO).

#8 – Being “That Guy” in Social Networks

Chris Brogan termed it best. So I’ll let him explain:

#9 – Let Your Web Designer Lead Your Online Strategy

Web designers are great. If you find a good, reliable designer that does great work for a fair price, keep her. But not all of them know online marketing.

There are many facets to succeeding online, great design is just one of them. Use other resources at your disposal to create an online marketing plan and to help you execute them.

#10 – _________ (Fill in the Blank)

What have you found that’s a one way ticket to failing online? I’d like to hear what you’ve learned from your own experience…

Ask most small businesses, consultants and those new to the online realm what tactics they have in their digital marketing arsenal and they’ll usually come up with the usual suspects. SEO, Pay Per Click Advertising, Social Media and so on. Email marketing is usually not at the top of their list. It usually doesn’t top the list because they believe it will take too long to grow their newsletter subscribers or don’t believe in the effectiveness of the medium.

According to a recent eMarketer interview of Bill Nussey (President of Silverpop):

“E-mail’s greatest weakness is that some marketers use it too aggressively, and they undermine the value of e-mail for all other marketers and consumers.”

Why do most new digital marketers fail at email marketing? They fail because they haven’t established the most important aspect of this medium. Trust.

As a consumer we have to trust email marketers as we invite them into our inbox.

• Trust them to not sell our email address to a Nigerian spammer
• Trust them to send us periodic emails and not overdo the number of emails we’re sent
• Trust them to send us relevant info and not pull a fast one on us
• Trust them to ensure their emails are free of viruses

As marketers we have to be aware that we have to earn the consumer’s trust at every opportunity. This happens before we send them their first email, it even happens before they subscribe. From the professional design of our website & logo, the information we request from them, assurances that we secure their personal information, right down to the copy informing them of what they can expect from our newsletters (and so on…). They all either reinforce a favorable view or turn people off to what we have to say or offer.

So before you launch your next email campaign; ask yourself, “Have we earned the reader’s trust?”.

Doing so will make all the other metrics such as Open Rate, Click Through Rate & Conversions much easier to attain.

WestJet (Canada’s best airline) recently launched their WestJet Twitter account. To gain exposure & new followers they ran a contest where all their recent Twitter followers were eligible to win a trip for two to any major destination in Canada. At the time of this blog post they have already reached 4,653 followers. I’d say that’s a pretty successful contest.

Before I go on, I have to say that I was already a huge fan of WestJet. They have the best service. And as an internet marketer, finding out they were on Twitter was icing on the cake!

Within a few hours of being sent a direct message, I was connected to Huda of their promotions team. Once the formality of forms and correctly answering the skill testing question is out of the way, I’ll be the owner of two shiny flight vouchers.

Thanks Westjet!

I recently had a conversation with a potential social media marketing client. They had approached me to create a Facebook Fan Page for their company to support their upcoming website launch. Like any other consultant, I was thrilled to have a chance to work with a new client. However, after taking a step back it was clear that the prerequisite weren’t in place to run an effective social media campaign.

Before taking the deep dive into social media, here’s a checklist to get your campaign off on the right foot:

1. What’s Your Story?

What’s your elevator pitch? What’s the short & concise reason why your company exists and is different from everyone else?

- Obama’s story was that he was the outsider who had fresh ideas and can change Washington

- Grasshopper (formerly known as GotVMail) is the company that provides telecommunication services to small companies so they can look like they are a bigger company.

- SouthWest Airlines is the low cost, no frills airline that get’s you to your destination on time

Without a story, all you have is a bunch of products and services to sell that doesn’t compel anyone to act (or buy).

2. What’s Your Goal?

Are you trying to increase direct sales? Are you trying to soften up your prospects? Are you using social media to increase your links for SEO?

BuildDirect launched a YouTube video to show their products were durable, give insight into their company culture and spread the word about their company. Although no direct sales are attributable to their viral video, their sales team has said that the video made it easier to approach certain prospects because they were already familiar with the company through the video they had discovered online.

Before talking tactics, have your goals in mind. It not only gives your campaign a direction but also helps identify the metrics you can use to measure your campaign’s effectiveness.

3. Who Are You Trying to Reach with Social Media?

Although you may be tempted to jump to the obvious choice; your target market. Your potential customers are just one of the potential targets for your social media endeavor. It could also be the media, to try and gain some publicity. It could be a group of influencers such as bloggers who can help you influence your target market. Whoever it is, have an exact picture of the group you’re trying to reach with your social media campaign. It’ll help you (and your agency) focus when it comes time to plan tactics.

4. Is Your Organization Ready to Be Involved & Invested?

Are you ready to invest people & time to the process? Setting up a Facebook Fan Page, Tweeting your first few Tweets, uploading a couple of videos to YouTube…that’s just the first few steps to set things in motion.

Brad Nelson who Tweets for Starbucks has said that he spends about a third of his day on Twitter.

Social media isn’t a set it & forget it medium. To get some real value out of social media, you have to socialize, interact and be involved. In order to do those things you need to have people. People to take ownership of your Twitter account. People to create some creative & interactive promotional ideas for your Facebook fans. People to come up with a snazzy contest to get some value out of YouTube or Flickr.

Although social media is perceived to be a free method to promote your company and increase brand awareness, it takes valuable time & resources away from other core activities that you have on your company’s to-do list.

Jumping into tactics may give the perception of a marketing win, but when results don’t materialize the enthusiasm & support can soon fade. Having these answers in place before you get started with social media will help your organization focus on creative & effective strategies that will lead to a greater likelihood of success.

As a professional SEO firm, we keep track of the latest trends search engine trends. Google recently launched a new feature in their search results page that allows users to further filter their search results.

This was an anticipated and inevitable move by Google since Twitter recently announced they will be enhancing their real-time Twitter search engine. Many in the search marketing field have crowned Twitter the king of real-time search because of it’s ability to quickly index Tweets by Twitter users, enabling Twitter’s search engine to display real-time search results of emerging news trends. Something that Google hasn’t been able to keep up with since Google’s search engine indexes all types of content (not just Twitter feeds). Google has been known to take several days or weeks to re-index websites for new content.

Google’s New Options

With Google’s new options, searchers are now given options to enhance their search results by:

• Filtering the type of results (forum, video, reviews)
• Filtering by date published
• Showing more text or more graphics
• As well as giving the user the ability to expand their search with related searches, wonder wheel or through a timeline

Google has been known to continually tinker with their search results page. Adding new features at a dizzying pace. Features such as:

• Single in-line site links
• Showing search results for correct spellings
• Suggesting related search queries
• Including blog, news & YouTube links as part of Universal Search
• And the list goes on…

Time will tell whether this latest feature will truly enhance the search experience. Or whether Google is again diluting their core strength; which is, providing relevant search results in a clean & simple format.