Web Design & Internet Marketing: a Practical Business Approach

 

 Get found in Google... hire the right seo provider [8:38m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (79)

…that will get your business found in Google. In this podcast I will tell you about the 3 major areas that your search engine optimization provider must cover… and how much to expect to pay for it. Click play above to listen.

Audio transcript:
Today we’re going to talk about how to get found in Google, or how to hire a search engine optimization expert. This is something you probably don’t want to do yourself and you’ll want to hire out, and it’s not that expensive if you do it right. Now what is search engine optimization? It’s best to explain through an example.

Let’s say you’re a fence installer in New Hampshire and you have a website that you want to get found in Google. Well, your hope would be that a prospective customer would go to Google and type in the keywords “fence installation New Hampshire” and your website would show up, they would see it, click on it and go to your website.

If you specialize in wrought iron fences, you’d want similar results. Someone types in “wrought iron fences New Hampshire,” boom, there’s your website. Or by town, that’s very powerful too–if somebody lives in Lebanon, New Hampshire, they type in “wrought iron fences Lebanon New Hampshire,” and you want your website to show up. That’s what search engine optimization is.

Now in order to hire somebody to do this work for you, it’s helpful to know what the basic procedures are for proper search engine optimization. I’m just going to share with you what we do and get great results with. The procedure we use falls into three basic steps: keyword research, keyword installation on your website, and then proving the effectiveness of the research, the data analysis.

So the first thing that has to be done is your search engine optimization expert has to research the scope of key phrases that people might use to type into Google to find your website. You should know how competitive the key phrases are, and almost more importantly, how popular the key phrases are, because you want to go after the popular keyword searches. When that research is done, you should have a pool of 100 to 300 different key phrases that people might search to find your type of business, and people search very specifically and that’s why this pool is so large.

Second thing is keyword installation. Let’s say you’ve picked 10 key phrases that are real important to your business and you’ve decided these are the ones I want to show up in. The search engine person you’ve hired needs to install those keywords on your site, and they install them in two general segments. One is visible text. The text that you read on your website needs to have those key phrases baked into them: the header text, the link text, the actual plain-copy text that’s on your website–you need to bake that in.

And a little tip here: If your search engine person is a copywriter, that’s a real plus, because you want to weave in these key phrases, but you want to make sure that the copy is still readable–that if a human comes to your site and reads the copy, it makes sense. The second thing for installation is there are hidden areas that most webmasters know about where they install these key phrases. They’re called “title tags,” “meta tags,” and those are the two biggies. There are “image tags” and there are other areas, but that’s the installation process.

The third and last thing you want to make sure your search engine optimization person does is that you want to make sure that they prove the effectiveness of the work that they’ve done. You want to see, after you’ve paid for the work and they’ve done it, that you’re ranking better on the key phrases that you chose, and there are a couple of ways to look at this. One is they should be looking at your analytics, which show you the actual visitor traffic to your website. And two, they should produce a “before and after” scenario for you.

So let’s say you have 200 key phrases that are in your pool. They should be able to give you a report that shows you all 200 key phrases and where in Google each phrase is landing. Are they on page one, are they on page two, page five, page ten? And you should look at that before the work is done and that same report should be run after the work is done, and the “after” report should show an increase in position on a lot of those key phrases. The analytics should show more traffic coming to your site, and it should show you the actual key phrases that people are typing in to get to you. So with a combination of those two reports, you should have a good sense of whether the work actually worked or not, and ultimately, your phone should be ringing.

Here are three questions to ask your would-be search engine optimization provider. One, what kind of research do you do? Listen carefully. Two, how is the installation handled? How do they actually install the key phrases? What’s their philosophy? Three, how do they prove to you that the keyword installation helped? Those are three really solid questions.

Here’s a side note. There are a few directories you might want to submit to as well, or get your search engine person to submit to. One is called Dmoz, one is Google Local Search, especially if you’re a local business, one is Yahoo Directory, and there are several others. But note that today, you’re not submitting to Google, you’re not submitting to Yahoo, you’re not paying somebody to do that for you; Google will find your site. They usually come back–every 30 days, 14 days, or two days, depending on how frequently you update your site–and Google looks for changes. And once the work is done with the optimization, Google will pick it up. Google can pick that up in a day. So just be careful of recurring fees.

Now here’s the big question: How much money do you spend on optimization? Well, optimization really falls into two categories. One is for local search, less competitive. Two is for national search, much more competitive, and you can expect to spend more. For local search, you’ll be spending well into the hundreds of dollars. You’ll probably spend between $500 and $1,000 for somebody who’s going to take you through the whole process.

And think about the payoff. How many new clients do you need to get that money back? One? If you’re a fence installer, you probably need one client. Even if you spend $1,000 on the search engine optimization, you get one new client out of that who found you online through Google, boom, and your money’s back.

Now, national search is a little trickier because it can be very competitive, usually it’s quite competitive. You’ll want to look at– and this is where your search engine provider will help you–how many other websites are competing for you. If you sell PCs and you’re going against Dell and Hewlett Packard, you have a very long fight and you’ll spend tens of thousands of dollars, and still might not come up where you want to be. You’ll talk about things like back links and getting into social media, writing up blogs, article marketing, Facebook, social bookmarking–there’s lots of things to do, lots of money to spend.

However, if you’re a national business and your website has never been optimized or has had very little optimization, even though you don’t end up on the first page of Google with an optimization, you will most likely still generate quite a lot more visitor traffic, and that’s where your analytics really pays off. You can see, “Gee, we have 500 visitors a month, 1,000 visitors a month coming,” and after the installation that bumps to 700, 1,400, 2,000 visitors, and you know that your money has paid off.

As always, please feel free to comment and subscribe :)

Let’s take a look at a real search in Google: Look up a local florist say in Framingham, MA. If you typed in “Framingham florist” you would find a list of Google generated business links at the top of the first results page. If you ran a florist there you would want to make sure your business was on this list. You would also make sure that your business’s website address was included so visitors can link directly to your site. Watch the video below to find out how to get your business in Google’s Local Search in less than 10 minutes.

 

 Gain publishing control on your website [4:48m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (70)

Here’s the real problem. There is a lot to talk about in your business. You have new products, new services, you might have specials, seasonal promotions, holiday promotions, customer stories, case studies. Maybe you run a restaurant and you have menu items, or you host musical events and you want to get PR out the door. There are a lot of things happening in your business, and guess what, you should be getting it out on your website.

Now, what’s the problem here is most of us are locked out of our own websites. What I mean is that we have to go through our webmaster in order to get something changed on the website. And it’s just too much work, too much money, to get everything that’s going on in your business out the door on your website.

OK, what I just said is completely wrong today. Today the technology is available for you to be able to post information yourself easily; even easier than Microsoft Word is to use. You can log in today, with a user name and password right on your website, add the information you want to add, click “publish”, and bam, publish the information right on your website. And if you’re really clever you hook it up so that when you click “publish” it spits out to your email list as well as putting it on your website.

So, the software today has changed. The game is changing. In the past software such as Dreamweaver, FrontPage, NetObjects, and many others were used by webmasters, still are used by web masters, and they’re installed on the webmaster’s computer. That’s where all the work has to live.

There is also software that you can buy that you can run on your own machine that will hook up, through some work, with a software that either lives on the webmaster’s machine or through the server itself. But it’s fairly complex, mostly problematic in my experience. I’ve used a bunch of these different software packages and they just don’t work great.

The best software, here are the three biggies. I’m going to tell you which ones are the ones to look at. Drupal is a nice piece of software. It’s content management, it lets you make edits right online. Joomla!, same thing. Joomla! Makes edits right online. And you can even use WordPress to make edits online, logging in, no software required.

Now, here’s the downside. If you have a site that you recently built where you’re not quite ready to rebuild your website, it’s going to cost money for you to convert your current website into one of these websites that allow you to edit.

If you were thinking about rebuilding your site, or if you’re looking at a brand new website, then what I would do is I would talk to your webmaster about using one of these three software programs to build your website.

Now, there’s an additional benefit to publishing your information, things that are happening in your company, online. The benefit is that Google loves this stuff. If you start talking about the promotions you’re having and the press and the case studies that you’re doing, Google picks up on this and they’ll come back to your website more often, and more visitors will find your website. And that increases the chance that they’re going to connect with you.

So, here’s what to do.

Think about the types of things that change in your business, things that you want to talk about, products, services, specials. Do you promote things on the holidays? Do you have inventory? Do you have performers coming onsite? Are there events that you want to publish on your website and let the world know?

Make a list of the things in your business that you’d like to talk about. And that list should be online. It should be available and it should be changing over time. And you should have the ability to easily make those changes.

And then talk to your webmaster about getting your website converted into this new software that is making an enormous difference in the performance of websites.

Once you start adding information to your website you’re going to learn the power of your website, and how effective it can be for your business.

Oh and let me know if you have had any experience with Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, or any other content management software!

 

 Why you have to publish company news on your website [4:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (40)

Your 2 main challenges:

1. Driving visitors to your website
2. Building trust so your visitors will connect with your company

Publishing a company newsletter accomplishes both.

Comments welcome! Hey they might even get answered :)

Transcript:
Today we’re going to talk about why you have to publish a company newsletter on your website. There are two really great reasons to do this.

One, you have to draw visitors into your website, and doing that is a web marketing challenge. Number two, once visitors get to your website you have to create trust and that trust happens over time so that visitors will reach out and eventually connect with you. And publishing your news and publishing your articles on your website and sending them out via email is the way to solve both of those challenges.

Now, let me tell you a little story. Last Monday we published at 11 o’clock at night our latest company newsletter. It had to do with a new green, carbon neutral server that we just put online for our clients and at 1:47 A.M. Google picked up the news.

The next day I woke up and found an email in my box from the communication department at Rackspace, which is the company where we host this server. A Google alert had alerted them that I had published my news and they wanted to do an interview.

So I responded back, “Sure, hey that’d be great”. And on Wednesday we had a phone interview. That phone interview is going to translate into a case study which is going to go on their website, offering my company free publicity. Now you can’t beat that. And that doesn’t happen everyday but this is what’s happening online today, and you have to take advantage of it.

I have been publishing a company newsletter on the website and pushed out via email for ten years now. And I have to tell you that it has been responsible for a steady stream of new clients. It just works.

Let’s review. If you provide good information on your news website you will build trust over time. Publish what’s happening with your products and services, publish what’s happening with your company and give good, helpful information.

You can create a tips article. If you are in the carpet cleaning business talk about stain removal, talk about chemicals, talk about green products. All these things offer limitless conversation with your customers.

Number two, Google loves news. It just loves news on your website. What happens is, as you write the text that goes on your website Google will crawl it. And the more you write the more often Google will come back to your website and read through your text.

Your text will naturally be filled with keywords that people will type in to find your site. And what will happen is, say if you were a carpet cleaning company and you were publishing news, is if someone was looking for carpet cleaning in a certain geographic area, like Boston. And maybe they were looking for something about green, toxic free cleaning products and you had written an article about that, they might actually land right on your news page. They will bypass your home page all together and after searching on Google land on your news page.

Then you have a chance of them crawling through the rest of your site to see, hey, these guys know what they’re doing. They’re writing articles on all sorts of carpet cleaning topics, and you might have yourself a new customer.

So here’s what I want you to do. I want you to talk to your webmaster about adding a regular news feed to your site. Start by publishing once a month which I know you can do, and make sure that that newsletter also gets emailed out to your list. Now you have an email list, right?

Well, that’s it for now but I promise I’ll talk about building an email list another time.

 

 Website metrics: How to understand your website's performance [2:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (33)

You must understand how your website is treating your visitors. Here is your first step to enlightenment!

If somebody asked you today how your website is performing, would you have any idea? Would it be helpful to know what is working on the site and what’s not working on the site? Let’s look at a couple of examples:

Would it be helpful to know if visitors are getting to your home page and then just going away? Or, would it be helpful to know which pages on your site were viewed the most times? In other words, which pages on your website visitors found interesting.

And the reverse: Would it be good to know which pages visitors didn’t pay attention to at all, and were maybe even getting in the way? Or how about this: Let’s say you pay your webmaster to make some changes on your website. Would it be helpful to know if those changes made a difference?

Now to run a successful website, you have to know the good and the bad. Installing website metrics onto your website is the way to do that.

And guess what? You can do it for free. My favorite tool is ‘Google Analytics’. ‘Google Analytics’ gives you a great top-level view of your information and helps you make decisions on what to do next with your website.

So here’s how to get it. Go to google.com/analytics/home. Or you can just search for ‘Google Analytics.’ You’ll get a snippet of code that you’ll hand off to your webmaster, and they will install it on all your pages, and after about a week of tracking you’ll have the answers to the questions that I posed above.

Website metrics will tell a story about your website. It will help you understand what’s going on and will give you the clues to help you make better decisions down the road, and that will help your business.

Comments?

Here is the secret tool to help you brainstorm a terrific domain name, fast.

Comments, thoughts, or other?

Video transcript:
So, all the great domain names in the world are gone, right? Wrong. I have a secret weapon here that I use called “instant domain search”. If you go to instantdomainsearch.com you will be presented with this page, and this allows you to type and immediately know whether a combination of words is available or not.

It is a fabulous tool. It allows you to brainstorm different domains very quickly and know if they are available or not.

Now, a couple of pointers before we get going here. One, make sure you get a dotcom domain. You might be tempted to getting a dot net or biz or us, but don’t do it.

People remember .com. They don’t remember anything else. Get your company name. That’s very important, and if you can’t get your company name then gets a name that is easy to remember and that’s related to the business you’re in. OK, let’s get started.

Let’s assume we have a company named Smith and Smith Accountants, and we are looking for a website address. We click in here, and we type in Smith and Smith Accountants. And guess what? In the little green bar you see that dotcom is available so smithandsmithaccountants.com is available.

Now, a little trick here is you can press control, hold the control key down, hit the,’s’ key and it will save that name under your little save searches box here.

The next thing I like to do is actually see if I can find a short domain name. I’ll probably end up reserving the company name, but I want to see if there is a short one available because that one is just a little too long for people to remember to type when they have to key in your email address.

It’s a lot of work, and we don’t have any time to do anything these days so let’s do our customers a favor.

OK, so how do we do a short one? How about an acronym, ssaccountants? Nope, I get a red box. Dotcom, it’s taken, all right. Let’s back it up. How about cpas? Or cpa? That’s taken. How about cpas? That’s taken as well.

How about we do a little trick here and add a dash which is the minus sign in there which you are allowed to do? And that doesn’t work. That’s taken. Let’s knock the,’s’ off and ss-cpa.com is taken. So, that doesn’t work. OK, fine.

Well, let’s try another angle. How about smithsmith? Well, smithsmith.com is taken. How about smithsmithcpa.com? Hey, that’s taken, too; smithsmithcpas.com? Guess what? That one is available. Not bad, not bad.

Let’s do the trick of doing a control,’s’, and we add it to our saved searches. We have two domain names that are available for the business.

I think you get the point. You can quickly find something that’s available. Get a dotcom and what I would do here is I would definitely reserve the company name, smithandsmithaccountants.com, and I would also reserve the shorter name.

Now, I might spend a little more time finding something shorter than smithsmithcpas and something easy to remember.

But, I would reserve that one as well. I would make that one my main website, and I would use that for my main email. Then, I would point the company name to the shorter version of the website name.

That’s how you get a great domain, and you get to know if it is available right away.

 

 Why have a website? [4:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (23)

Today we’re going to talk about why a business should have a website. It sounds like a silly question but it’s really a very good one.

After 10 years of this Internet boom, 45% of businesses in the United States don’t have a website yet. I find that incredible. Fifty percent have websites that don’t do much for their business, and five percent have websites that are really performing for the business, and they’re wiping the floor with their competitors. Now let’s look at three reasons to have one; three simple reasons why every business should have a website.

First one is, Yellow Pages are dead and dying, they’re really not being used anymore. I ask people all the time, how they find things, and Google is the tool. Yellow Pages stay in the drawer and Google sits on their desktop at work, at home, and that’s how they find solutions for services, products, everything.

Number two: People judge a book by its cover, and websites are just that - it’s the new cover. So when someone goes searching for a solution for their wedding needs or for their hair, or massage needs, they want to go and do business with a place that has a good first impression at the very least. If they get to a website that looks amateurish, they’ll go away and go find some other business to work with.

Number three: Websites are like the new direct mail. Now direct mail’s great and still works, but it’s a one-way conversation. Your company sends mail out and it’s a lot of work, and it goes out to your customers and you hope for a one, two, three percent return.

Websites are a little bit different. People come in; they find you online through various sources, through other websites, business directories, through Google, on blogs, and they will link to your site. Not only do they come into your site, but you have the opportunity there to grab an email address and start a newsletter and mail out. So direct mail’s one way; websites are really a two-way communication.

Let’s talk about search a little bit. If you run a search for, let’s say your service or your product in your area - let’s say you’re looking for catering services in the Boston area or in Worcester or maybe out in the Berkshires. If you get junky results, in other words, you go to Google and you type in ‘catering Worcester’, ‘catering Worcester Massachusetts’, and the results you get just don’t look like catering companies, then you have a great opportunity there.

You really have an opportunity to get your website up to speed, get it optimized for Google, and then own that search when someone in Worcester is looking for a catering company. You’ll be there every time, and new people move to the area, they’re not connected; they’re going to go to Google to find a solution.

Now if you do a search and you get a list of your competitors, then you have some work to do. Just so you know, that’s where your customers are going, or your potential customers are going, they’re going to your competitors.

So, to wrap it up, the three reasons why you must have a website today: Number one: New people are finding your business via Google, or at least they should be. Number two: Once they find your website, they’re judging your business based on the impression they get on your website. Number three: People search and find links and get to your website, and you have the ability to promote via email, out from your website.

Questions, comments?

 

 2 things your website must do [2:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (22)

I love to ask business owners how their website is doing, and I get some really nice responses. Most of the time I get, “Um, gee, I really don’t know.” And sometimes they do know and they tell me that their website’s not doing anything for them. And more than a handful of times, they tell me not to even go and look at their website because it’s too horrible.

If you think about it, most people today use Google to find things, whether they’re looking for printing services or an accountant. Maybe, they need their carpets cleaned or they want to stay in a nice bed and breakfast. Or maybe setup a corporate catering function. If they’re not already plugged into a service or a company, they use Google to find it.

And if you’re not getting any connection through your website, that means that those prospective customers are going to your competitors. That’s right; they’re going to your competitors.

Now, how do you build a successful website? There are two things you have to do. One is you have to get people to your website. And each website does draw some visitor traffic, just because of the text, the content you have on the site. And there are visitors that search by your company name to find you.

But you also need to make your website Google friendly so that when people are searching for services that you provide, they find you. Now, try to find your business in Google. It’s an interesting experience.

Second thing you have to do to build a successful website is to get a visitor to act when they land on your website: to do something; to contact you; to fill out a request for quote form; to download a brochure or a data sheet; to subscribe to your newsletter.

And each contact should offer up their email address in order to connect with you or to download that item. There are many ways to inspire a site visitor to contact your business. And you should use as many as you can.

So ask yourself, is your website building your business?

Have a random thought, comment? Ask me :)