I’ve read that the best way to win an argument is to tell a story, so I got one for you. Well, no. I’m not a good story teller, but I can throw together a pretty decent analogy.

Let’s say you have a pile of money and you need to “invest” it. As with any investment there is potential to fail. The question is, where to invest?

You have two options:

1) Invest the whole pile in one place.
2) Split it up and invest in multiple areas.

The saying “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” comes to mind. After all, when playing poker, you usually don’t go “all in” on the first hand. You spread it around, (hopefully) winning more as you go.

Online marketing isn’t all that much different. Diversification is a good thing (unless you have very little to diversify to begin with, then you have to build up to that). Before diversifying, you have to make sure you have enough to invest in one area to ensure its successful return on investment. If your budget is frog-butt tight, this post probably isn’t for you. If you have–or dream of having–a larger marketing budget, then keep reading. The good stuff is yet to come.

Diversifying Your Online Investment

I want to preface this section by repeating that you can only diversify your online marketing if you have enough budget to ensure the success of each. If you invest too little into SEO or PPC, ultimately your ROI will be a loooong time in coming, or you will find yourself outpaced by your competition that is investing in business growth.

Aside from the fact many businesses are not willing to invest enough in online marketing, the next biggest issue is having an unbalanced approach. Throwing your entire marketing budget at SEO may reap you HUGE rewards. But, you’re still missing out on a significant portion of business, and therefore profits, if you ignore PPC altogether. Similarly, if you throw everything at PPC and ignore SEO, again, you’re missing out on a lot of lower-cost conversions that SEO delivers.

Let’s not forget to mention that if all your money is in one and something goes bad, you have no secondary source to keep the revenue flowing! The key is to take a more balanced approach to your online marketing efforts. That’s where the 3-3-3 approach comes in. Or, as I like to call it, the 3-3-3 Online Investment Model. Catchy, isn’t it?

The 3-3-3 Online Investment Model

There are three key areas of online marketing investment:

• SEO – search engine optimization
• PPC – pay per click
• CSML – content, social media and link building

The idea here is to split your spending between these three areas pretty equally. If you have $30,000 to spend on marketing each month, as tempting as it may be, don’t throw it all into your PPC ad spend. It boggles me when I see companies spending that kind of money on PPC but only a couple thousand on SEO.

Why does this kind of discrepancy happen? I think mainly because PPC is so much more trackable than SEO. This makes PPC appear much more lucrative than SEO, when, in actuality it isn’t. PPC accounts for only about 1/3 of the total clicks in the search results. Plus, it usually isn’t as cost-efficient, delivering conversions at a higher costs than you’d get with SEO. This means that it would be wiser to put more money into SEO than PPC.

I wouldn’t recommend dumping PPC for SEO entirely, but splitting up your budget between the two is smart marketing. You could easily get away with throwing $20,000 of your $30,000 budget toward SEO. But this doesn’t fit the 3-3-3 model. Or does it?

In a way, it does. Often times, content marketing, social media and/or link building are wrapped into SEO. All three are tied closely together as linking is, or at least should be, a part of any successful SEO contract. The problem is, linking is difficult and time consuming so it can often get bypassed by the sexier on-page optimization aspects.

By using the 3-3-3 model, you are placing equal investment into linking as you are on-page optimization. Again, that is smart marketing. Take your $30,000 budget, put $10K to content, linking and social, $10K to SEO and leave the last $10K for PPC. That gives you a robost on-page, off-page and PPC marketing strategy that is drawing traffic and building reputation through not one, but three different sources, all adding to the value and overall growth of your business.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

There is a reason people build businesses in cities surrounded by people, rather than in a desert surrounded by cactus! You need people to market to, and you need customers coming in your door. The success of your business relies on how well you market your product or service first, and second by how well you deliver it. Very few businesses survive on word of mouth alone. But what many small business owners fail to realize is that while marketing is everything, everything you do is marketing!

Everything you do, as a small business, has an impact on your marketing message and ability to get that message out to your customer base. How/whether you answer your phones, how you reply to email messages, what you say on Twitter/Facebook, the presentation of your website, and your ability to produce satisfied customers all play a role in your ongoing marketing efforts.

How are you perceived?

My company helps business owners build and execute their web marketing strategies. But all too often, many are missing even the most fundamental marketing and common-sense business development components. We can help them online, but lacking the offline aspects, we are simply attempting to fill a bucket that has holes in it.

Perception matters. If your potential customer’s perception of you, true or not, is less than they expect, you’re going to have trouble selling them. Would you trust a mechanic with a poorly tuned vehicle? A lawyer who drives a Yaris? A contractor with a run-down office? A landscaper with an overgrown lawn?

You might, but I guarantee you’d think twice before you do. None of these things demonstrate how well any of these business owners do their job, but the perception is, if they can’t take care of themselves, how can you trust them to take care of you?

When performing link building for our clients, they are often picky about where we get links from. So are we, but they often want to get links only from high-caliber sites, when their site is somewhere below that. In link building, people will generally only link to site’s of equal or higher caliber than themselves. If you want a link from a high-caliber site, you have to be one. Otherwise, take what you can get from those below you!

The little things matter the most

Businesses purchase online marketing because they want to increase sales. But if the SEO is doing its job but sales don’t follow, there may be something else at play. Lack of business success doesn’t always fall on the marketer’s shoulders. In fact, such woes may directly be caused by how the business is being run.

The SEO’s job doesn’t include running your business. There are a lot of things that fall outside the SEO’s area that can make or break your business success, and even your search engine rankings!

As an SEO, we routinely try to help our clients in areas that fall far outside the SEO box. We’ll provide feedback on design, programming and presentation, just to name a few. We want our customers to succeed, and sometimes that means we have to help in areas that we were not necessarily hired for.

Everything matters, and when it comes to business success, everything should be on the table for a discussion on how to improve your ROI. If your SEO thinks your design isn’t great, it may be worth discussing in greater detail, even if you love it. There might be a reason they hate it that goes beyond personal preference. If your SEO provides a recommendation on how something looks or appears on the website, it many worth noting, even if you can’t change it right away.

Little things can create big perceptions. Especially when it comes to usability issues. It’s not just website design, it’s also communication, problem resolution, response times and a whole lot more.

A picture on your website may be worth a thousand words, but perception is worth 1001. You are what you’re perceived to be. That’s true whether you believe it or not.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

But things might not always be as they appear. While it’s never a bad thing to grow in profits, ROI or a growing customer base, you may actually be paying good money to lose great customers.

I use this analogy often, so forgive me if you’ve heard this one before. But let’s pretend that you’re tasked with filling a bucket with water. The only problem is that your bucket has holes in it. You put water in, but it keeps leaking out.

What’s your solution?

You can a) add water into a bucket at a rate faster than it leaks out, or b) plug some holes.

Now, let’s say your website is the bucket, the water is your website’s traffic and the faucet is your online marketing efforts. Oh, and the holes are usability issues that cause you to lose customers before the sale is complete.

Every drop (visitor) that you let out of your bucket (website) is a lost opportunity to convert a sale. It’s a lost customer. Since you want more sales, you can choose one of the options above: a) drive more traffic to your website and hope to get more sales that way, or b) fix your usability issues to retain more customers without having to put more money into turning up the faucet (marketing).

If you choose option A (driving more traffic to your site), you’ll ultimately retain more customers by sheer volume alone, but the money spent on your improved marketing efforts are not helping you improve your ability to convert customers. It’s only increasing the number of customers you have available to convert.

Option B is a better bet. By plugging the usability holes, you are not only getting more sales, you are doing so without having to pay for any additional marketing efforts.

But there is also an option C. Fixing your usability issues while you are increasing traffic to your site. This is what any good SEO should be doing for you.

Unless you or your SEO are improving your conversion rates by plugging usability holes, you might as well be paying your SEO to send visitors away from your site. Otherwise, your visitors will be leaving just as fast as they came – with no sale to remember you by!

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

In each phase of this cycle, the searcher is typing in a unique set or words or phrases. Each search is designed to provide more relevant information than the last. As the searcher learns, the search phrases reflect what they know and what new information they need.

There is value in building a website that provides information to each of these searchers, but the value in each isn’t the same. By understanding the full marketing value and potential of your website, you can build an effective sales funnel that provides each and every visitor the information they need to make the decision you are hoping for.

Your website is a pre-sell channel

Not every visitor who comes to your website is ready to buy right now. In fact, many searchers are merely curious and are looking for knowledge they don’t already have. These researchers could turn into buyers, but the chances of making a sale today are slimmer than me turning down a free lunch at Chipotle. It can happen, it’s just not likely. (Try me and find out!)

Instead of trying to force your visitors to give you what you want, why not give the visitor what they want?

Every business website should implement a variety of pre-sell strategies. If you think about it, only your product/service pages are doing the actual selling. This leaves the rest of your site to walk people through the research and shopping cycles, pre-selling them on what you offer, so that when they are ready to buy, they come you.

Your home page, product category pages, about us pages, etc., are great places to engage in active pre-selling. They provide a goldmine of opportunities. Use these pages strategically to talk about your brand, your product selection, your value, quality of service, and whatever else will give your visitors confidence in you and your products. This won’t sell any single product by itself, but it will reinforce to the searcher that you are a reputably and trustworthy site to purchase from.

Content: Enter stage right

A lot of ecommerce business owners tell me they don’t like SEOs that want to add a bunch of text on the page. Instead, they just want to push the visitors to the product. This is the right strategy for those searchers already in the buying phase of the cycle, but most aren’t. At least not yet. And those that are – they are likely using search phrases that deliver them directly to your product pages!

If you’re not writing great content for your category and sub-category pages (or are hiding it), you’re not using your website as a pre-sell tool. This leaves you only with the sales channel after the visitor has already performed all their research searches on Google. Ultimately, you’ll have missed out on a lot of potential traffic and branding opportunities that would likely have brought many of the buyers back to your site for a purchase.

Your website is a sales channel

The sales channel is where the majority of the “value” of any website comes in. It’s certainly the most trackable and justifiable. Implementing analytics and conversion testing will allow you to tweak your conversion funnel to capture more sales and generate a higher ROI.

A lot of websites focused on selling products or services fail in this area. It’s almost like they tried to recreate the magical experience of the paper catalog online. File that under ‘FoMP’ – Failure of Monumental Proportions!

Your website sales channel must express your unique value to your potential customers. This is especially true if your products are sold at any number of other outlets. Why should they buy from you instead of that other guy?

Your customers should feel you know your products better than the manufacturer does. You can do this by writing unique product descriptions and value-based headlines and using language that is customer-needs centric. Telling your customers what you or your products do is good. Telling your customers the benefit you or your products provide is better.

Building up your tips, tools and helpful article database can be an asset to the active sales funnel. If a potential customer has a question that can be answered right from your website, helping them finalize their purchase decision, you both win.

Your website is a post-sales channel

When the sale is done, the sell isn’t done!

We all know it costs far less to keep a customer than to get a new customer. Unfortunately, too many online marketers fail at pursuing the customers they already have and continue to spend, spend, spend on acquiring new ones. (A great book about this is Flip the Funnel by Joseph Jaffe.)

A good portion of your online marketing budget should be used to maintain customer loyalty. There are a lot of ways you can do this; you can provide customer loyalty and rewards cards, re-marketing through PPC, coupons and discounts for a follow-up purchase, email follow-ups with “on sale” updates, etc.

Give your customers a reason to come back to your site, or, at the very least, a reason to stay in contact with you.

Social Media: Enter stage left

A great way to do this is with regular blog updates providing helpful tips and tutorials that let your customers know you care about them, not just their wallets. Use Twitter and Facebook to engage your customers and deal with potential PR nightmares before they get a chance to take a foot hold. Make sure your website allows customers to easily contact you when there is a problem.

If you’re not implementing some kind of follow up or engagement after the sale, you’re losing thousands of dollars worth of profit. Who better to convince to buy from you than an already happy customer?

We often build websites with a singular thought in mind: selling our products or services. Unfortunately, we usually do that with a singular method–getting a sale. But we don’t think about what happens before the sale is ready to be made, or after it has been completed. We have to be willing to lay a little groundwork to build credibility, build branding, and lay the foundation for a potential sale in the future.

And once the sale is complete, why give up there? Continue to pursue the customer. Let them know just how much you appreciate them and wish to continue a mutually beneficial relationship. Don’t just focus on getting new sales. Focus on building customer relationships before, during and after the sale.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

Several years ago I wrote, “Gone are they days when SEO focused exclusively on top search engine rankings.” I wish I was right about that, but unfortunately, we still see a lot of SEOs doing just that today. Not the good ones, mind you, but still, far too many.

Today’s top-tier SEOs are getting out of the search engine ranking business entirely. Well, maybe not entirely, but they understand that there is so much more to online success than a top position for your keywords. Many clients still need convincing.

Rankings still matter to SEOs. At least they should matter. While local, personalized and historically based results are dramatically changing search results, there is still a base set of search results that all other results stem from. But SEOs that talk only in terms of getting you top rankings on the search engines should be avoided at all costs. #notjoking

SEO is one piece. It’s a big puzzle.

Achieving search engine rankings is only a small piece in to the total puzzle of online marketing. In fact, if top rankings are the only focus of the SEO, there is a significant chance that the work performed on your site will actually make things worse. Top rankings only mean so much if your visitors are fleeing your site in droves because of usability or conversion issues.

Most people don’t care if they get 100 sales from 10,000 visitors or 5,000 visitors. It’s the same 100 sales right?

Well, no, not really. The difference is that the 5,000 visitors provides a better conversion rate than the 10,000. What’s important about this is that if you are getting 100 sales out of 10,000 visitors, to then get 200 sales you must bring in an additional 10,000 visitors to your site, for a total of 20,000.

Or, you can improve your conversion rate.

Improving your conversion rate means you get more sales out of the traffic you’re already bringing in. If you improve your conversion rate to bring in 100 sales out of every 8,000 visitors, you’re now getting 125 sales from the same 10,000 visitors you were getting before! Improve it more, you might be able to get 100 sales from 5,000 visitors which equals 200 sales from the same 10,000 customers.

You see where this is going? A better conversion rate means more business. If every sale earned you just $15 in profit, you just added an additional $1500 in profit to your bottom line. Now if you were to double your traffic on top of that, your profits leap from $1,500 (from our starting numbers) to $6,000, instead of the $3,000 you would have gotten from improving traffic alone.

Top rankings add traffic. Improved usability and conversions multiply it!

Without usability, SEO Kung-Fu is SEO F-U!

SEOs must maintain a very interesting balancing act between the creative and technical. Most SEOs start on the more technical side of things. They learn code, algorithms, architecture and what makes good rankings; then they figure out how to apply these into websites. As SEOs got more and more technically advanced, the search engines did, too, in order to prevent manipulation.

Good SEOs began to realize that the battle for rankings is only a part of the struggle for business growth. While SEOs still fight for top search engine rankings, those that have invested into the marketing side of website improvement find they bring their clients far greater success.

The technical side is still hugely important, but the knowledge gained from the technical research must be implemented in an almost purely creative way. Once rankings are achieved, the site must still be able to sell to its audience.

Ranking success alone is an SEO failure

Sites that struggle only to get top rankings will ultimately fail. Maybe not in the bankruptcy sense, but in the sense that they are not maximizing their return on investment. They are spending more to get less!

The analogy I use most for this is its like trying to fill a bucket full of holes with water. You’ll be able to get water in the bucket and may even be able to get it in faster than it leaks out, but you’re consuming vast amounts of resources in order to fill it up. It’s far easier–and smarter–to patch the holes first and then start filling the bucket.

You may not be able to patch every hole right away, but patching some while working on others (all while increasing traffic) can allow you to bring in and convert more and more every day. The more traffic you bring in and the more usability issues fixed, the greater the impact your SEO campaign has.

There is so much more to SEO than just SEO. And if your SEO doesn’t know that they, IMHO, they don’t know what they are doing. Is it worth paying for top rankings if your visitors are leaving in absurdly huge numbers? Or would you be better off working with someone who can help you improve your site and get you top rankings that bring in more profits? It’s your call.

Any SEO that fails to improve usability is not really doing you any favors. At best, the usability and site conversions stay the same. At worst, they plummet due to a ranking-at-all-costs approach. There is nothing like an SEO flipping you the bird and saying it means “You’re #1!”

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

Most people look for ways to “succeed” by investing the least amount of effort possible. That’s why the lottery makes so much money for the government. One dollar can make you extremely rich. If you’re extremely lucky.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with looking for ways to become successful with the smallest amount of effort. Luck isn’t random happenstance; it’s being prepared when the right opportunity comes your way! I have a motto I use quite often when I’m not working, “I worked damn hard to be this lazy!” But the key here is that I worked. I didn’t just get lucky and get to be lazy because of it – I earned it.

Over the years I’ve busted my butt to create a successful website marketing strategy firm. It’s had it’s ups and downs, not to mention countless long nights and weekends. And whenever I start to feel like I can relax, it seems something comes up, and we have a new push to get us to the next level.

Successful SEO can’t be done in a vacuum of search engine algorithms, social media and on-page optimization strategies. There is something even more fundamental to being successful at your SEO efforts than the knowledge needed to carry it out. These are foundational issues that, when applied, will help you not only gain the knowledge you need, but the wherewithal to grow in your success, even through difficult and dry times.

Seven steps to making sure your SEO is successful

Daily Growth: SEO requires a constant education on what the search engines are doing, how that might affect your site, and what new strategies you might need to employ. As rapidly as technology changes, your SEO knowledge yesterday won’t always carry you through tomorrow.

Value the Process: SEO isn’t about the destination (top rankings) but rather the process that brings constant improvement to your site. Every day you should find some ways to improve your site over yesterday’s version. Look for new keywords, opportunities for new content and ways to improve the usability and persuasion processes that will increase conversions.

Don’t Wait for Inspiration: Inspiration most often comes after you have started doing something. It’s the work itself that inspires thoughts, ideas and strategies. If you’re stuck in an SEO rut and don’t know what to do next, start doing something. Look at the analtyics, read a blog or strike up a conversation with someone about the site you’re working on. Do something to get the creative juices flowing.

Be Willing to Pay Now: There is a saying that says you can pay now or pay later, but you will pay. Be willing to invest heavily in SEO, especially in the early stages. In many cases SEO has to be done in large chunks rather than small bites. Be willing to invest in those large chunks of time. They often lead to greater rewards (sooner rather than) later.

Don’t Focus on Your Limitations: There is no SEO in the world that can do everything greatly. Sometimes you have to know what you don’t know and find qualified people to do what you can’t do. Don’t get stuck worrying about what you can’t do and work with people who can provide strengths that compensate for your weaknesses.

Master Your Time: SEO can often be an endless process. There is always something more that can, and should, be done. In order to get anything accomplished you have to manage your time wisely. Focus on areas that will provide the best results first, then move on to other areas later. Don’t get bogged down in the inessentials.

Trade Up, Not Down: When dealing with clients, developers and owners, the SEO often finds they don’t get everything they want. Sometimes you have to make concessions. When you can’t do everything, then look for trades that bring more value to you. Trade quantity for quality. Trade time for effectiveness. Trade rankings for conversions. You get the drift.

What’s good for SEO is good for business

Each of the tips above can be applied to every area of our lives and in business, not just SEO. They are tried and true principles for success in any arena. It’s just the application that varies.

SEO requires patience, determination, hard work and sometimes even sacrificing our perfect ideals. Everybody has a different definition of success. Many clients or SEOs look to rankings as the goal when they should be looking at business growth, conversions and profits. Determine what your real goals are and do what it takes to achieve them. Then you’ll be successful at SEO!

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

The SEO has a right to…

I.
Receive payment from the client for entire amount contracted.

A contract is a contract. If you change your business model, rethink SEO or decide to invest in other marketing avenues, you still have an obligation to fulfill your end of the SEO agreement. If you really want out, talk to your SEO about a proper buyout of your SEO contract.

II.
Collect payment from the client on-time.

Nobody likes to get paid late for work performed. The SEO is building profits for you, and the least you can do is not put that in jeopardy by delaying payment for work performed. If payments are delayed, even for a couple days, the SEO has a right to charge a late payment fee.

III.
Not to allow the client to place a “hold” on their account.

The SEO has the same obligations to its employees and other clients as the SEO client does to it’s employees and customers. SEOs often hire based on the expected income of all accounts, including yours. If you request a hold due to finances or other restructuring, you may be impacting the employment and performance of your SEO firm, which may impact your performance down the road.

IV.
Charge the client for services that fall outside the scope of the contract.

If the SEO client requests work that is above and beyond the strategy outlined in the contract, the client should expect to pay for any additional hours needed to complete that work. SEOs can only do so much with the time and investment they are given. If more is work is requested, more funds are required.

V.
Expect their recommendations get implemented in a timely manner.

SEOs never expect that every recommendation they make will get implemented or implemented perfectly. However, they have a reasonable expectation that any and all recommendations will be be discussed with them by the client and implemented sooner rather than later. The client cannot hold the SEO accountable for success if there are a number of unfulfilled recommendations on the table.

VI.
Not justify every minute spent. (Unless client pays hourly.)

SEO has its highs and lows. Some months require a lot of work and a lot of hours, and other months a lot less. Give the SEO freedom to track hours but not be bound to a certain expectation x hours every month. Let them rest some months and ramp up in others as needed.

VII.
Not spend too much time “reporting” to the client.

Providing the client status updates and information critical to the success of their campaign is expected. However, the client cannot demand so much of the SEO’s time providing reports and updates that it eats up a significant chunk of the time need to make the account a success.

VIII.
Revoke deliverable work performed due to client’s non-payment.

If SEOs fulfill their end of the contract but the client doesn’t pay for work performed, that is theft. The SEO then has a right to undo all work implemented, retract all recommendations and change destinations of links achieved, if necessary, until the client pays in full.

IX.
Suspend client’s account if needed.

If the SEO client is not keeping payments up to date, an SEO has the right to suspend work being performed on the client’s account. The SEO cannot donate their time or effort into a delinquent client when there are other clients making their payments and in need of work to be done.

X.
Cancel client services.

If the client is a problem and eats up too much time and resources, the SEO has the right to cancel services if warranted. This should only be done if the SEO has delivered on everything the client has paid for to date, and there is no expectation without further payment; otherwise, a refund should be provided.

If clients and SEOs agree on these expectations, there should never be a dissatisfied client! You can also read the historical documents from which this post originated.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

There can often be confusion between clients and their marketing team as to expectations, due dates, goal measures and even invoicing. While many of these things can be, should be and are handled in the service contract, not everyone reads the fine print.

So here are some basic guidelines to help SEOs and their clients realize what they have a right to in their SEO campaign.

The SEO client has a right to…

I.
Expect the SEO to fulfill the contract in full.

If you don’t have time to invest in fulfilling the expectations as laid out in the contract, give the client a refund for all uncompleted work. If you have failed to deliver any results as expected, a full and complete refund is warranted. Only charge the client for work completed and results accomplished.

II.
Not have a site hijacked, mutilated or destroyed by the SEO.

The client has a right to expect work of the highest quality. The SEO must not do anything that disrupts the usability or sales process of the site or creates a poor customer experience in order to achieve search engine rankings. Rankings are not the goal, but customer satisfaction is!

III.
Accept or reject certain recommendations that may affect their website.

While the implementation of the SEO’s recommendations are critical to the success of the campaign, the SEO should work with the client to ensure all recommendations fit with the client’s goals and programming abilities. When recommendations cannot be fulfilled, the SEO and the client should work together to find common ground that gives both what they need.

IV.
Know the on- and off-site strategies being employed.

There are no such thing as “proprietary strategies!” The client is paying for a service and therefore has a right to be fully informed of any and all strategies being implemented. The client should also be appraised on how those strategies will affect their website and the website’s performance in the search results.

V.
Not have their site penalized or lose value for violating search engine guidelines.

Any strategies employed by the SEO should not, in any way, knowingly or potentially bring harm to the client’s website or their performance in the search engine rankings. Any questionable strategies should be discussed and approved with the client first.

VI.
Question results and value of the work being performed.

If the client does not understand a recommendation, they have a right to ask “why?” If the client is not seeing the expected results, they have a right to ask “why not?”

VII.
Expect optimization work performed to increase sales and profits.

SEO must provide more than traffic or ranking data to “prove” the value of their worth. The client should see the ROI from their SEO investment through an increase in sales and conversion rates.

VIII.
Have regularly scheduled performance updates.

Whether in person, via the web or over the phone, the client has a right to regular performance updates on their campaign. It is the SEO’s duty to inform the client of progress being made, issues complicating results and areas where opportunity may arise for further growth of their results.

IX.
Maintain ownership of all work performed by the SEO.

Unless the client is on a pay-per-click contract, the work they pay the SEO for belongs to them. The SEO cannot provide any type of switching, changing or removal of optimized content once the contract expires. All work performed belongs to the client paying for the work.

X.
Buy out of the SEO contract at any time.

If the client has lost faith in the SEO and the work being performed, they have a right to get out of the contract. The contract should contain stipulations for such contingencies and allow the client to get out when needed.

I’ll cover the SEO’s Bill of Rights in my next post. In case you’re interested, you can read the historical documents from which this came.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

Of course, the lines between business and personal use of social media are often blurred. According to a 2009 report from Forrester Research, four out of five American adults who go online use a social media outlet at least once a month, and half participate in social networks like Facebook. Plus, small business employees usually wear many hats. So, you may have your service tech tweeting, your office manager facebooking and your sales team blogging. It’s all in a day’s work!

Naturally, in the midst of all this positive buzz, there has to be a downer. That downer usually comes in the form of negative comments (I’ll talk about handling these in a future post) or updates from employees who may not be thinking a whole lot about the consequences of what they’re posting. People often forget that social media (and other forms of electronic communication) aren’t private. It’s like using a megaphone, and the fallout has the potential to damage your company’s reputation.

That’s why virtually every business needs a social media policy. This is not a new concept, of course, but it can easily get overlooked.

You’re busy. (Never a good excuse.)
You just got started with social media. (Is there a better time to create a policy?)
You don’t think you need one. (Review the second and third paragraphs of this post.)
You aren’t sure how to write one. (OK. This one is understandable.)

A recent article by Diane Stafford, writer for the Kansas City Star, notes that “case law and regulatory opinions are building more slowly than the social media use they’re trying to control.” So, right now, there are no hard and fast rules with social media policies – which makes this whole prospect a little nerve-wracking.

Back in 2009, Sharlyn Lauby of Mashable.com published 10 Must-Haves for Your Social Media Policy. I think she put together an excellent list, and it was one of several sources that helped inspire me when I wrote Pole Position Marketing’s policy.

Here’s my take on crafting a workable social media policy for a small business. These tips serve only as a baseline and can, of course, be tailored to your culture and environment. They are not intended, however, to take the place of legal advice. (Yea, lawyer fees!)

Stay Positive and Focus on Good Communication
Social media is not inherently good or bad. It’s how you use it. So, when you write your policy, keep it centered on what good and appropriate communication is, as opposed to trying to list every possible negative thing people should avoid. However, employees (and teenagers everywhere) do need to recognize that every post, blog or comment is public and, thanks to search engines, will live forever.

Define What Social Media is
Social media is more than just Facebook and Twitter. You need to consider YouTube, Flickr, social news sites, social bookmarking sites and blogs. Employees should be aware that you define social media more broadly and include any type of website or forum where conversation or comments occur in the online world.

Define Why Your Business is Using Social Media
For most small businesses, there are five primary reasons to participate in social media:

1. To engage current and potential customers in authentic conversation and positively influence their buying decisions.
2. To generate traffic (blog, website or, if applicable, a brick-and-mortar location), leads and conversions.
3. To establish thought leadership in your industry.
4. To share the company’s culture and brand in a genuine, professional manner.
5. To take customer service to a new level.

Since social media has Walmart hours, these functions may be taking place any time of the day or night – stretching far beyond the traditional 8-to-5 business day. So, whatever an employee’s personal reasons for using social media, they need to understand what the company expects out of its social media presence and support that at all times.

Emphasize Personal Responsibility
I alluded to this earlier in my post, and it was probably the most important take-away from Lauby’s article. Employees need to be responsible for what they write, even when they’re not working. Your policy should remind them that, any time they interact online, the information may be read by people who have, had or may someday have connections to your company. Employees speak for themselves, but their actions represent your company.

Provide Points of Reference
It would be nice if you could tell employees to use common sense and good judgment online, and just leave it at that. But, people’s opinions about common sense and good judgment differ, so it’s a good idea to give them some guidelines. Here are a few ideas:

• When making a comment online, employees should somehow use their name or identity. This can help your company establish authenticity and will hopefully enable you to create relationships with prospective clients.
• Employees should focus on adding value to any conversation. This will help establish your company as a thought leader in your industry.
• Follow copyright, fair use and financial disclosure laws. Give credit where credit is due.
• Share opinions respectfully. Employees should avoid posting anything they would not want their mom (or spouse or boss) to read.
• Employees must protect your company’s confidential and proprietary information. Let them know that failure to observe this may be hazardous to their job.
• Employees must protect your company’s reputation. You don’t want to take yourself or the company too seriously. But, employees should avoid insulting the company and their co-workers, even as a joke. They should also keep sensitive or potentially controversial work conversations private. Encourage them to ask if they are in doubt.
• Remind them to balance personal and professional social media time. For any social media campaign to be successful, a reasonable time investment is required. However, time spent on social media should not interfere with performing the core competencies of their job.

Do you have any good ideas to add to this list? Tell me about them. You can also follow me on Twitter at @martijen.

Several weeks ago I was asked to speak to the Cleveland, Ohio chapter of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). In all my years of traveling and speaking in different venues, this one is near the top of the list of great experiences (SBMU still holds the top spot!)

I don’t know much about public relations, but I do know SEO and Social Media. My task was to communicate the value of SEO and Social Media to this group of public relations experts. What follows is the result. I owe a debt of gratitude to my friend Jennifer Evans Laycock, as she worked with me on parts of this presentation. If any particular slide is valuable (or pretty), it’s probably due to her!

How Print Audience Differs From Web Audience

There is a big difference between reading things online versus offline. We often want to think that reading is reading is reading. But reading here isn’t the same as reading there. The mindset between on- and offline is vast.

Think for a second. When you grab a book, a magazine, or even a printed piece of material, what do you do? Most of us find a comfortable place to sit, have a tasty beverage within reach, and our feet kicked up on an ottoman or coffee table. We’re settling in. But, when reading online, we generally don’t get that luxury. We’re at a desk with a keyboard and a mouse, probably piles of paperwork within eye shot and our list of tasks is fighting for our attention.

Two experiences, two different mindsets. Before we dive into some of the PR specific issues, let’s look at some of the differences between print readers and online readers:

Print Readers are Purposeful

As I alluded to above, print readers tend to be more purpose-oriented. We go out of our way to make sure our setting is just right. Maybe we turn the TV off, maybe we grab a blanket to cozy up under or maybe we take our reading material outside or to the park to enjoy a bit of nice weather.

Many of us have our “reading time.” We wait until the office is quiet, the kids are in bed, or a time of day when the distractions are lower than normal. We generally set out to accomplish something. “I’m going to read 50 pages in my book.” You want to read the daily paper, or that weekly magazine before the next issue arrives. Or maybe you’ve got a pile of work papers you want to get through before going into the office tomorrow.

This is the mindset of print. It’s goal oriented. You’re going to get through this and be done with it. It’s completed. Web readers, on the other hand, think very differently.

Web Readers Have a Lack of Focus and Intent

When we read on the web, many of us are sitting at a desk in front of a computer screen. While mobile devices are getting more popular, I don’t think this is doing anything to focus our reading. In fact, it may even be less focused as we’re on the mobile device only because we are doing something else at the same time. Hence the “mobile” part.

But either way, web reading on any type of computer tends to be much more haphazard. It’s not like a book or a magazine. It’s more about finding small snippets of information, quickly digesting it and moving on. Our intent is usually more about immediate interest rather anything else. We may read a blog post, scan our twitter stream, scroll through our RSS feeds, or follow some links to a piece of content that looks like new information. And sometimes doing all these things at the same time!

Ultimately, we’re not settling in to read. We’re searching or scanning and we’re reading just enough to get what we need before we move on to another task or another piece of content. And that’s where it becomes a battle for those of us that produce content. We’re struggling to get the attention of a goldfish!

Internet Readers are Highly Distractable

One of the issues with people reading the web is that it’s usually a secondary activity. There is something, or often many things, going on around them at the same time. While reading a piece of content, an important email might come in to their inbox (or an interesting piece of spam, for that matter!) Or maybe their kids are throwing a football in the house and they need to be talked to in a nice, calm, rational way. Or perhaps someone IMs them and they start up a conversation.

When I’m on my work computer, I’m distracted by four monitors. Email, tasks, IM, Twitter, facebook and who knows what else is open in front of me at any given (or more likely, all the) time. Most people don’t have that many things open in front of them, but there is still plenty of distraction happening.

When on the web, our attention spans are shorter than normal. We don’t invest time to reading web content, and we’re often doing several other things at once. This makes it ever more difficult to get the attention of our audience. Bizy, bizy, bizy!

Internet Readers are Usually Multi-Tasking

Not only are we easily distracted when reading, most web readers are doing multiple tasks at once. That IM conversation that starts up may be going on simultaneously as we are reading. Or the article content we are writing leads us to research the topic to gather some thoughts and ideas. Or maybe we’re planning a vacation and reading up on locations and things to do.

This is the nature of the web. We go read (or search) not because that’s what we’re settling down to do, but because we’re doing something else and we’re using the web to accomplish that goal. Frequently, web reading is the secondary activity to the primary activity or goal we’re working on.

And since we’re using the web to complete a primary task, we go out looking for information that helps us achieve that goal. But instead of finding a few resources, we find, well, millions of pages of content at our fingertips, all clamoring for a piece of our divided attention.

The Internet is Highly Competitive When it Comes to Content

Billions of new pages of content are being added to the internet every day! Think about every new website, blog post, product page, twitter stream, facebook profile, or Google Place that gets created, and it quickly adds up. Billions of pages! That is a lot of new competition on a day-to-day basis.

Imagine turning your TV on one day and finding a billion new channels! Try channel surfing that! But that’s what we do on the web. We surf, search, follow and “like” our way through new content on a daily basis. The competition for our attention isn’t only endless, it’s growing!

This means we have to treat web content differently than print content. We have to write for the online audience. Taking into consideration all the things above, we have to know what our goals are and write in a way that enables us to not only get our audience’s attention, but to also make sure our content fulfills our intended goals.

Three Major Considerations for Online Content

When writing content for an online audience, there are three primary things we have to consider: search, social and conversions. Content that is designed for any one of these can succeed greatly at the one, but fail spectacularly overall.

Search Engines: Is your content developed with searchers and search engines in mind? If not, then you’re losing out on a significant portion of your audience. You need to make sure your content can be found, spidered and that it uses the phrases your audience is using. More on that later in this series.

Social Media: While not all content needs to be social content, social content has the ability to reach a much bigger audience. The question becomes, how do you turn “meh” content into “yay” content that gets passed around the social sphere. We’ll look at how to build content that gets noticed as well.

Conversions: Conversions is just another way to say “goals.” But on the web, the goal is to get your reader to take some kind of action; to “convert” from a reader to a subscriber, purchaser, communicator or whatever else you need them to do. If you know what your conversion points are, you need to make sure your content does more than inform, but drives each visitor to that point of taking action.

Good content accomplishes all three of these. Not only will it be well-optimized for rankings, but it will also be content that people find valuable enough to pass around their social profiles. On top of that, it’ll convert them into customers!

In the next post, we’ll look at the goals of online PR and what you want your public relations pieces to achieve on the web.

See all posts in this series:

Part 1: Intro / How Print Audience Differs from Web Audience
Part 2: Goals of Online PR
Part 3: Background Research
Part 4a: Crafting the Story p1
Part 4b: Crafting the Story p2
Part 5: Broadcasting the Message / Conclusion

Follow me at @StoneyD and @PolePositionMkg.

This is what I envy about web designers. They get to produce a finished work, then go and collect awards for their work. But, online marketing – that’s a different ballgame all together. Sure, we can celebrate top rankings, but tomorrow there is another keyword that needs improvement!

Making a Smart Purchasing Decision

Ninety percent of the online marketing services my company provides are based on the amount of time we guesstimate the job will take to get results. There are a few expenditures the clients may have to buy into (directory submission fees, requested analytics tools, etc.), but most of the cost associated with SEO services comes down to determining how many hours are needed on a month-to-month basis.

We look at time needed for researching, writing, analyzing, tweaking, optimizing, communicating, reporting and linking, just to name a few. Sometimes I think it’s difficult for clients to fully appreciate the time invested in doing a job properly, especially when they see “less expensive” options floating round. Sure, you can hire some kid down the street to mow your lawn, or you can hire the gardener to take care of your lawn, garden and flowerbeds and to get rid of unwanted rodents, weeds and other pests while making sure everything is properly fertilized and pruned each week. The time difference between the two is substantial.

The problem comes, in SEO at least, when many people are expecting to hire the gardener at lawn mower kid wages. There is just no way the gardener can do their job effectively in the time it takes for the kid to mow the neighbors lawn across the street. Can’t happen.

How Much Time Does a (Good) Job Take?

When it comes to purchasing an SEO or SEM strategy for your online business, there are two things to consider: How many hours does it take to meet your expectations, and how much are you willing to pay for each hour that goes into meeting those expectations?

Many SEOs charge a pre-determined package price. That just means they have pre-determined how many hours they will be providing you for their service. If you purchase an SEO package for $3000 per month, you can get anywhere from 30 hours ($100/hour) to 10 hours ($300/hour). The question you have to ask yourself is – can the $100/hour guy get the same results as the $300/hour team?

If you can confidently say yes, then maybe that’s your guy. If not, maybe you need to consider the more “expensive” option. But we all know, cheap and ineffective usually turns out to cost a lot more than the expensive option that gets results!

Ten hours per month on SEO or SEM doesn’t seem like much, but in the right hands, a lot can be accomplished. Here is a simple breakdown of what I would consider the average, high-quality SEO campaign:

• Site Architecture and Site-Wide SEO: five to 10 hours needed at the onset to analyze the initial site architectural problems and create a concatenation schema to make all pages “search engine friendly.”
• Keyword Research: initially, up to five hours to research the site’s core terms, determine which pages/keywords are a top priority for optimization and create an optimization plan moving forward. An additional 30-60 minutes of keyword research can go into each specific page being optimized.
• On-Page Optimization: one to two hours per page to optimize keywords into the text, streamline the code (if necessary) and implement onto the site.
• SEO Maintenance: two to four hours each month to review past optimization efforts and implement tweaks and changes designed to improve site performance. This also includes reviewing site usability and conversion issues.
• Link Building/Social Media: five to six hours each month, at a minimum. New or competitive sites can, and often do, need much stronger link building or social media campaigns.
• Analytics and Testing: three to five hours per month. No SEO campaign is complete without some way to analyze the overall performance of the optimization, usability and conversion improvement efforts that are being invested. The better the analysis, the more hours that must be invested.

These numbers can fluctuate depending on the size of the site, but this is what we would consider a pretty basic campaign. If you’re looking for the best pricing option, how much from this do you feel you can cut before you’re cutting into your success?

That’s the key question. If you’re looking solely at pricing and not factoring in the actual work, you’re bound to make a bad purchasing decision. The real question is, will the price you’re paying (or willing to pay) give you the ROI you need to make a profit? It’s probably not a good idea to purchase SEO until you can answer that question affirmatively.

Stay tuned. In my next post, I’ll discuss your options for hiring in-house vs. outsourcing, and making sure you’re spending your SEO budget wisely in an uncertain economy.

Follow me at @StoneyD and @PolePositionMkg.

Sometimes you’re doing one or the other, but most often you’re doing both at the same time. Taking action here, while waiting for results there. Then taking action over there, and waiting for the results here.

The battle for rankings, exposure, traffic, improved usability, and conversions is never ending. When starting an SEO campaign, we always take a look at the big issues first, but as we identify and resolve those, the rest is largely about baby-steps. I always find it amusing when SEOs declare with absolute certainty that such-and-such tactic doesn’t affect your rankings. As an isolated incident, maybe. But, when you look at each tactic as a piece of the whole, I’m not so quick to rule things out.

(Clearly there are SEO tactics that hold no value, and others that have a very minuscule value, likely not worth the time or effort. But these things must be thoroughly considered and tested before completely ruled out.)

Do vs. Don’t vs. Not Yet

The list of changes you can make to your site are virtually endless, but making too many changes without testing or comparing the results against each other will often lead to less than optimal results.

There is almost always something that can be done right now on or for your site that will help you get better results. But, at the end of the day, you have to take a measured approach to the changes you wish to make. Sometimes you have to make a change right away, sometimes you have to know not to make any changes at all, and other times you have to know that it’s not the right time to make a particular change, until you get more results.

When managing your online marketing campaigns, patience can often be just as important as making quick and necessary changes. Patience is a lot more difficult (especially when you have a client breathing down your neck for results today!), but after any change or group of changes is made, it’s important to hang tough and wait to see if the changes have had any sort of impact on achieving your goals.

To Hit Your Goals You Have To Know What They Are

In any search engine marketing campaign there can be many unique goals operating simultaneously. What are yours?

• improved search engine rankings
• better on-site usability
• increased traffic
• improved conversion rates
• more sales

These could be your goals, but in reality, these are more the paths that help you reach your goals. What you really want–what your ultimate goal should be–is higher profits. Unless, of course, you’re a non-profit and… wait… nevermind.

There is no direct route to increased profits. Don’t we all wish there was? But, we do know that you can reach that goal though any number of ways: improved rankings, higher sales, increasing conversions, driving more traffic, etc.

Once you have established your goals, and some of the paths that can help you achieve them, you then have to make sure that your marketing campaign is focused on delivering. As you send your visitors through the conversion process, you’ll want your visitors to reach certain pages that reinforce trust, build credibility, provide quality assurance and, of course, ensure the visitor will get exactly what they expect from a purchase.

Know the Good Changes From the Bad Ones

As you make changes to your site, and your marketing campaigns meet your marketing goals, it’s important to implement proper tracking and testing strategies. As you do this, you’ll find that you will get both positive and negative results (or a combination of both) from each effort or change. If you’re not careful, you won’t be able to pinpoint which change was effective and which wasn’t.

Let’s say you made two changes to one of your ongoing marketing campaigns. Could be PPC ad changes, landing page changes, SEO changes, whatevs. If you saw nothing but increase after checking the results of those changes, you probably have two winning changes, right? Not necessarily!

It’s entirely possible that one of your changes was positive and the other negative. The positive change was enough to overshadow the result of the negative change, creating an overall net positive result. The problem is, because you made two changes and the result was positive, you have no idea that one of the changes is actually hurting you!

Had you performed these changes separately, you would have been able to determine which change helped and which hurt. Then you undo the bad one and keep the good one.

Of course, it’s not always that black and white. Sometimes a single change may both help and hurt. You might see an improvement in rankings but a decrease in conversion rates. Or you might see a reduction in traffic but an increase in sales. Not all results are equal, and it will be up to you to determine what the ultimate net gain (or loss) for each change is.

Patience Starts Now

Making changes to your site and your online marketing efforts should be ongoing, so too should be the improvements being made. While you make changes and wait for results, you should see a continuous net increase in overall performance and achieving your goals along the way.

Search engine marketing is no different than life in general. You can wait for problems to find you or you can be working to make everything better as you go. And, and once a problem is presented, you can sit on your hands and do nothing, or you can find and implement the best solutions possible.

But, in the same vane, once you find and implement a solution, there is no such thing as a quick fix that makes everything instantly all better. Solutions take time to work themselves out into visible results.

In business, doing too much at once can have negative consequences. Taking decisive action is always good, but don’t forget to monitor and track your results to ensure every effort, and therefore every dollar invested, is well spent, proving the best benefit possible.

I’ve tried to hire sales people in the past, but it has never turned out well. It seems that I know our products and service far better than anyone else can learn them.

I’m knee deep in this stuff. I’m not just giving lip-service to what we do; I live it. I experience it every day, in the trenches with our clients, overseeing their campaigns.

I love my project management role, but I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with the sales role that I also play. Over the years, though, I’ve gotten better at it. But, every once in a while, I still find myself getting off a call thinking “Oh, I should have….!” I’m still not a natural.

The Availability of Persuasion

What I find most interesting is that I am in the same position as many of our clients. That is, I can’t rely on our SEO, social media and PPC strategies to convert customers. They play a role in bringing people to the door and starting the conversation, but where the SEO stops, the persuasion has to begin.

If you’re not available to your customers, then there is really no opportunity to persuade them. You can’t rely (totally) on your website, your content or your shopping cart to do the job. When running an online business, people still want to feel connected. And, to make that connection, you have to be available for one to be made, should the customer so choose.

You can’t persuade a customer who can’t reach you. When your phone rings, does it get answered? By a real person?

If a customer sends an email, does it get a reply? Promptly?

Being available to persuade is critical to the persuasion process. This isn’t just sales, this is customer building. It’s making sure your potential customers know they can turn to you to get their questions answered, their fears eased and their desires pampered.

You might be surprised what a prompt response can do. If I’m looking at products or services provided by two different companies, more times than not, I go with the company with the quicker response time. This has borne out on the other end as well. I can’t count the number of new client’s I’ve gotten because I responded quickly to an inquiry. Sometimes we even get a contract signed before another SEO company even returned the prospect’s call or email!

The Conversation of Persuasion

I know that high pressure sales work. If it didn’t, there wouldn’t be so many people out there putting the screws to potential customers. But, I think one of the values of social media is that it has turned the sales process on its ear. Instead of a convert-at-all-cost mindset, we now have a converse-at-all-cost mentality. A “this isn’t right for me” today can often turn into a “this is exactly what I need” tomorrow, but only if you’re actively engaged in the online conversation.

Through that conversation, you can often keep a more honest dialogue going than if you’re pushing for the sale. The conversation can allow you more opportunity to explain how your offering is different from your competitor’s. Or to discuss your philosophy and how it translates into quality. Or who your team is and the experience they bring to the table. Or… well, anything, really. The point is, if you are engaged in a conversation, things like this occur naturally.

Your social media efforts and your website are the starting points for the conversation process. If you are not using them effectively for this, there isn’t much chance of keeping the conversation going.

The Honesty in Persuasion

I have a strict “No BS” policy. This can make sales difficult, because I don’t tell potential clients what they want to hear, but I tell them the truth about what they can expect. I don’t make promises that can’t be kept, and I let them know, up front, what the situation is going to look like. It’s all about setting proper expectations.

Actually, if I’m going to be “dishonest,” I’m going to err on the side of caution. Basically, go by The Scotty Principle. I would rather under-promise and over-deliver than the reverse.

In my “No BS” approach, I always try to present my clients and potential clients with likely and worst-case scenarios. I try to make sure they fully understand that the process of optimization is not a short-term, quick fix solution, but a long-term investment. I’ve probably lost quite a bit of business over the years by taking this approach, but a happy client is much better to work with than an angry one.

Following Through to Persuasion

Follow through and conversations go hand-in-hand. If you have or are establishing a relationship, following up and continuing the conversation is natural. And, as much as possible, try to follow that conversation to the conversion. It might take days, weeks or even months, but the relationship is worth the time and effort.

Whenever I send out a proposal to a new prospect, I let them know that I’ll be calling again in a few days to follow up and answer any questions they may have. That gives them a chance to read our proposal and be ready with questions. This keeps the conversation and the conversion moving forward.

There is a lot more that goes into any persuasion process, but these are a few key points to consider first. The goal is to have a seamless persuasion process that starts with your SEO, PPC and social media campaigns; melds perfectly into your website persuasion and conversion process; and carries over into the off-line conversations that potential clients need to have before they pull the trigger.

SEO can only take you so far in achieving new business. In fact, it can really only get people in the door and help with the online persuasion process. But, you still have to do the heavy lifting, making sure your site meets visitor expectations, gives them the information they are looking for and walks them to the conversion goals.

In SEO and SEM, time management is critical. Almost anybody in the industry will tell you that you can spend countless hours “tweaking” a website, looking at traffic analysis and conversion stats, and employing link building campaigns. These are all essential parts of a good SEO service, but at the same time, some limits have to be placed on the amount of time you will spend on these activities for any single client.

Newer clients, or those that have a lot of problems, need to have more time dedicated to each of the activities above. Yet, the SEO has to maintain a workable time budget in order to prevent profits from circling the drain.

We often find ourselves needing more time in the day to get things done. I know I’ve wished for more. I honestly don’t know how people much busier than me do it. I have the same 24 hours to use each day as Trump or Obama have.

When I go home after a full day of what feels like non-stop rushing to manage one client after another, I often think about how these guys must feel. They have much more responsibility than I, but still the same number of hours in which to get stuff done, and always seem to find time for golf!

If I could have one wish, it would be to have more hours in the day and to require less sleep each night. OK, that’s two wishes, but I’d settle for either one of those (preferably the latter.)

Value Add or Cost Add?

When a client asks, “What more can we do to stay ahead of our competitors?”, one of the first things I do is look at their current contract. If the plan they have has any areas of weakness, I’ll let them know what more can be done to reach their goals. Inevitably, it is based on their willingness to invest in the additional time and resources required for a more aggressive campaign.

Unfortunately, that usually ends the conversation for some clients.

When they are asking “What do we have to do?” What they really mean is, “What more will you do?” I’m always willing to do more, but there is that pesky issue of our time and whether we’re willing to work for free or not. Usually not.

I never mind providing a value-added service every now and then. Sometimes we’ll do less of one thing so we can do more of another. But, eventually there comes a point of diminished profits, unless the client is willing to step up and pay for what they want us to help them achieve.

Accurately Budgeting Time for Process and Results

Whenever I put together a proposal for a prospective client, my goal is to estimate the number of hours that will be needed over the contract’s duration. This includes one-time only tasks, monthly tasks, and yearly tasks. All of that gets thrown in to create an estimated number of hours that we then use to figure a monthly pricing level.

That becomes our benchmark, and we use it with the knowledge that clients will occasionally need more time spent each month on a task (especially in the early months), and less time in other months.

Trying to accurately predict the number of hours needed over the next 12 months can be daunting. I have to look beyond time spent on research and implementation. Both ongoing consulting and client communications factor in a great deal, as does analysis. Most clients don’t realize that every call or email requesting a status update is time that is taken away from research, analysis and implementation.

Every SEO must determine how much consulting time will be factored into the campaign cost. Ultimately, the client wants, and needs, to feel taken care of. Failure to factor in consulting and management into pricing will reduce campaign performance, or create a client that feels out of the loop. Both can be hazardous to client satisfaction.

Time management, regardless of your field, becomes one of the most important aspects of your professional and personal life. It affects what you can do and what your client feels you should do. Those that don’t manage their time wisely are doomed to fail.

If the SEO wants to be successful – and if the client wants the SEO to be successful – then both must consider the time involvement in any new task or request being made. These things add up and eventually, if left unchecked, can tip the scales in bringing both the SEO and the client into unprofitable territory. This is a lose/lose scenario. But, if both manage time expectations and costs, both the SEO and the client and be in a win/win situation that will bring big-time success.

Go home. We’re done here.

Okay, now that all the non-geeks have left the building, we can have a frank, honest conversation about SEO (and a bit of Star Trek).

I’ve always heard of people that are so good at sales they could sell ice to an Eskimo, water to a fish or prescription glasses to the blind. I think I once bought a bridge.

Having a good salesperson is great, but the sell-at-all-costs approach can often come back to bite the companies that hire them.

What does all this have to do with The Scotty Principle? Let’s back up a bit and get some context. Lieutenant Commander Montgomery “Scotty” Scott was chief engineer on the U.S.S. Enterprise under Captain James T. Kirk. Of course, this being a TV show, Kirk had all the best people at his command, and Scotty was no exception.

Attacked by a crystal entity and the ship loses weapons systems? Scotty is the man to bring them back online. Romulans have the Enterprise caught in a time-traveling tractor beam? Scotty can deactivate it. Headed toward Uranus to wipe out the Klingons (tee hee)? Scotty will make sure the warp coil is it top performance.

But, Scotty is the habitual over-estimator. When asked, “How long till the warp coils are restored?”, Scotty estimates three hours and completes it in two. When will the transporters be back online? Scotty estimates 20 minutes and does it in 12 (and JUST in time too!). In short, this makes Scotty look like a miracle worker.

When working with the Enterprise’s Chief Engineer, Geordi LaForge, almost a century later (go with it, it’s sci-fi!) Geordi was asked by Captain Picard how long certain repairs would take. Geordi estimated two or three hours. Later, Scotty asks Geordi, “How long it will really take you?” Geordi responds, “Two or three hours.”

At this point Scotty is taken aback and says, “You told him how long it would actually take you? How do you expect to be considered a miracle worker if you tell them how long it will really take?”

While Scotty isn’t a salesman, all good salesmen can learn a lesson here. Imagine if Scotty said he could fix something in the time required, but in the end, he just wasn’t able to pull it off.

Disaster strikes. The Enterprise blows up. Roll credits. Send the cast and crew home. The series is a wrap, and they won’t be taking the action to the big screen to make three great movies (out of six)!

The salesperson has a job to do: bring in new business. But, a problem arises when the products or services are unable to deliver up to the sales rhetoric used to entice the buyer.

This happens frequently with Search Engine Optimization companies, and it’s one of the reasons that too many people feel burned by bad SEO. It’s easy to tell people what they want to hear: “19 days to #1!”, “Ranked in the top three!”, “First page placement for all your key phrases!” But, it’s much more difficult to fulfill such promises being made.

Despite the fact that no one can guarantee a #1 ranking, there are still plenty of “SEO” companies out there that insist that they can and will pull it off, “guaranteed!”* (*enter enough small print here to make any such guarantee null and void, should the client do as much as sneeze wrong.)

The truth is, the SEO may actually be able to achieve the results they are promising, but are they for the keywords that matter? And, if the SEO is unable to deliver per the client’s expectations, he or she simply points to the loopholes spelled out in the small print.

The SEO industry is aggressive; every SEO’s motive is to convince potential clients that the services he or she provides are a cut above those offered by their competitors. This is why so many oversell with the promise of spectacular results that may or may not be achievable.

Few SEOs go out of their way to provide a truthful assessment of what is possible and on what kind of timeline. New sites will take longer. Competitive industries require a bigger budget. And, poorly developed websites may require drastic and/or expensive changes in order to bring them up to par.

SEOs that are honest with potential clients find that they lose many sales from those looking for a quick fix, instant results, or some kind of ranking guarantee. But, they’ll also discover that those who do become clients have a much better grasp on what’s at stake, how long it’ll take, and what kind of results to expect. Oh, and they are much happier too!

I’ve always made it a point to let my clients know that we set benchmarks for achievement throughout the first year of their campaign. By communicating these benchmarks and expectations clearly to our clients, we’ve been able to maintain a very low turnover rate over the years, maintaining a renewal rate of over 90%.

That’s not to say that we always achieve our goals, but we do communicate with the client any problems or issues that we see may be effecting performance. By keeping them in the loop and not only succeeding, but exceeding, client expectations, we’ve earned enough trust for the times when we don’t hit our benchmarks.

SEOs that have made pie in the sky claims in order to sell you their services know they can’t deliver on the results. SEOs that go by The Scotty Principle sell their services based on historical results, while ensuring that expectations are in line with reality.

SEOs don’t need to oversell by making promises and increasing expectations beyond their ability to deliver. The SEOs that educate clients, provide a truthful assessment of expectations, then work aggressively to achieve results beyond those expectations, will find they have to worry less about getting their next client to replace the three that just left. Their focus can instead center on developing and maintaining a strong and profitable relationship with each client for years to come.

In Part 2 of this series, I started discussing a customers wants versus their needs. I continue this list here.

People want to feel important; they need you to speak to their needs first.

Everybody wants to feel as if they are your most important customer. They are handing over their money to you so, in their mind, that gives them priority treatment.

Delivering a product or service isn’t enough to satisfy your customers. You have to continue to deliver results well beyond the sale. Are you following up to make sure your customers are happy with their purchase? Are you providing ways for them to get the most benefit out of their purchase? Are you handling problems quickly and efficiently, going above and beyond their expectations? These are all important questions to answer in order to make the customers believe you care.

When persuading new customers, you have to be sure to handle inquiries near instantaneously. I know when I’m shopping around, if I sent off some emails, the first reply I get often becomes the company I do business with. Those that respond late make me feel like they have more important things to worry about than earning my business. Heck, I’m trying to give them my money, the least they can do is act like they want it!

You also have to make sure potential customers can contact you easily. Again, if I can’t find a phone number (not just a form), I’m thinking they really don’t want to talk to me. Anyone who doesn’t want to talk to me doesn’t really want my business. You’d also be well served to make sure your website addresses as many needs and questions as possible, so they won’t feel as if they have to call to get their questions answered. But, in case they do, seeing that phone number sure helps give them confidence.

People want to feel good; they need you to encourage them.

For some sites, shopping cart abandonment is astronomically high. Why is that? Primarily because people need to be encouraged to proceed with their purchase. This is done both by answering as many questions and concerns on the website as possible and making sure you have an easy-to-complete ordering process.

If I’m shopping, I’ll often add my product to my basket and go through much of the checkout process, only to hesitate before I finalize the payment. In my mind I’m thinking, “should I buy this now?”, or “Is this a good purchase?”, or even “Can I afford this?” Most of these questions surface on an emotional level; sometimes rooted in fact, sometimes not. The bottom line is that a little extra encouragement can help persuade visitors through the selling process.

This encouragement can come in many forms. Sometimes it’s by streamlining the checkout process, leaving less opportunity to abandon the cart. Sometimes it’s by providing security, warranty, and return policy assurances along the way. Sometimes you can encourage your customers by giving them a little something extra as a ‘thank you’ for their purchase, perhaps a discount for their next purchase or something to pass on to a friend.

Recently I threw a couple of books into my Amazon shopping cart, but then I paused, and thought about how much I had been spending on amazon lately, so I began rethinking the purchase decision. Amazon provided the encouragement I needed. By filling out an application for an Amazon Visa card I got something like $30 off my purchase. I was sold and so were the books.

There are numerous ways to encourage your visitors to make a purchase. Brainstorm for a few new ideas and test them all.

People want to feel successful; they need you to help them win.

Everybody wants to feel like their life has meaning. This is the measure of success. Money, health, comfort, and power are all measures we like to talk about, but deep down, people want more. You don’t need health, comfort, money or power to be successful in life. Success often comes from the little victories achieved here and there that give life meaning.

Your product or service may not be able to change your customer’s destiny, but you can help him or her feel that their decision to purchase from you will help them “win” (and not in the Charlie Sheen way!)

Selling baby diapers? Your diapers can successfully prevent leakage and nasty “toxic” spills. Selling batteries? Your batteries can successfully start their car each morning and make sure they’re on time for work. Selling cleaning supplies? Your supplies can help them successfully clean their house better than ever before. These are victories your customers can relate to in their daily lives. Your customer now feels like a successful parent, successful employee or boss, or a successful friend, brother or sister or whatever.

Your product or services helped them achieve that success. You helped them win!

In order to feel like you can help them win, people need to see that you have won. It’s unfortunate, but true, that we judge people based on what we see. A lawyer in a beat up old Toyota doesn’t look as successful as a lawyer with well-taken care of Lexus. Though superficial, which one would you want to hire?

Your customers need to see that you have won. Is your website all beat-up and tattered, or is it well designed and maintained? Is your content well written or a verbal disaster? Are your products or services presented logically or just kind of thrown out there with no organization?

Like it or not, these things matter. If visitors perceive that you are successful, they will gravitate to you based on that alone. It takes “winners” to make winners!

Knowing what your customers want, and using that to give them what they need, is the basis for customer relationship building. If you are able to build a strong relationship with your website visitors, even perceptually, you will gain a significant competitive advantage.

Building relationships alone won’t make your business the most successful in your industry, as there are many other factors involved. But, relationships are a crucial factor in being able to establish and maintain long-term customers, business growth, and your own continued success. Every marketing dollar saved by not having to seek a replacement for customers that have left you is an additional dollar (plus additional sales profits) that can be spent in obtaining and maintaining new customers.

The dirty little secret of conversions isn’t really a secret at all. It’s simply about building relationships that matter. Relationships that don’t just matter to you, but that matter to your customers as well.

So, what is it that people want? How does that translate into what they need? And, how the heck does that get applied to your online business? Let’s look at some generalities of what people want and what you can do to meet their needs.

People want security; they need you to give them confidence.

It’s easy to trust a brick and mortar store where you see real people. Even if you’re being checked out by some overly-pierced and tattooed 16 year-old kid, you don’t have to worry that he’s trying to memorize your credit card numbers while he swipes your card!

This kind of confidence in the online buying process is lost due to the nature of the sit-at-home-and-shop-while-in-my-underwear anonymity that the web provides. For me, the biggest issue with buying products online is the return process. I can easily drive back to the store to make a return if I kept my receipt. But, repackaging an item for the mail is a total pain. Plus, you can’t just return it, you have to get approval to do so. Sometimes, just finding out how to report a problem is impossible! Add in shipping fees that you have to pay and, well, one can quickly lose confidence in the online buying process.

Giving your visitor’s confidence isn’t about just online security. You can’t throw up a secure certificate and think you’ve succeeded. Confidence goes into all areas of the buying process. Customers need information. If they don’t know what your warranties are, give them a link, so they can be confident in your products. If they don’t know what your shipping or return policies are, spell them out, so they can be confident in your handling of their items. If they want to know how to reach you instead of hoping their emails are not ignored, give them a phone number, and have a real person answer it, so they can be confident that you care enough about them to listen.

People want to feel special; they need you to compliment them.

I was reading a book the other day where a man was checking into a very ritzy hotel. The hotel concierge greeted him warmly and complimented him on his tastes. After all, the hotel he was checking into was one of the finest in the region! While that may seem like he’s complimenting the customer, the truth is, he’s really only complimenting the hotel. This is a great example of how businesses get compliments wrong.

People want to feel special. But, they won’t if you can’t stop talking about your own damn self!

I took on a client once and tried to help him address his audience’s need with his content. Unfortunately, all he wanted to do was talk about himself and his company. They are experts, they have degrees, they are skilled, yada yada yada, they’re not my client anymore.

I wanted them to focus the content on how the customer benefits from their services. Touting your skills and accomplishments is great, but only in as much as it is translated into a tangible benefit for the customer. In reality, the customer doesn’t care what you do, or even how you do it, they just want to know that they’ll be smarter, more successful, look better, smell better, ride longer, be safer, and so on.

Framing your content into the benefit the customer receives is the ultimate compliment. Why? Because they will make a decision that will make them smarter, more successful, look better, smell better, ride longer, be safer, etc. How do they know this? Because you’re telling them. You’re taking the service or product you provide and translating it into the long-term compliment they’ll get from it.

People want a better life; they need you to show them hope.

Will your products or services make your customer’s lives better or easier in any way? If you don’t know the answer to that (or the answer isn’t “yes”) then I suggest you get out of that business. Most people do what they love or work for companies they believe in. You should too. Because if you don’t, then you won’t be able to convince your customers that they should believe in you!

And, that is what you must do. Explain how your products are going to be good for them. Explain to your customer how life will be better once they purchase that product. This goes beyond the compliment. Compliments make people feel good, but giving them hope makes them know that the purchase is exactly what they need to solve their problems.

Illustrate the benefits, not just the features, of what you sell. The product will make them smarter (compliment) so they will be more successful (compliment) so they can reduce their debt (hope) and live financially free (hope). Your services help them be safer (compliment) so they will be alive to see their grandchildren grow up (hope). When you can give your customers hope, and make sure that is being, or will be, fulfilled throughout their relationship with you, you likely have a customer for life.

People want to be understood; they need you to listen to them.

Even before you have a chance to communicate with any customer via phone, email, or in person, your website is already communicating with them. Is your website doing all the talking or is it “listening” to your customers?

How do you know if your website is listening? Simple, does your website answer the question, what makes you unique? If you don’t know what makes you unique, then I guarantee that you have not been listening to your customers. You’re just selling something, and it’s likely just the same something as everyone else.

Your USP (unique selling proposition) is what sets you apart. This shouldn’t be based on what you think should set you apart, but what your customers are looking for that no one else is providing. When you proclaim your USP on every page of your site (no, not like a tagline, this should be worked into every page of your content!) you are letting your customers know that you have heard their concerns and have developed a solution or strategy to meet their needs.

Your USP is what makes you stand out from the thousands of other stores online peddling the same wares as you. Why should your customers buy from you as opposed to someone else? Price alone is rarely the determining factor. Creating a unique approach should come from conversations and research into what your customers are seeking and by finding solutions to problems even before your customers know those problems exist.

I’ll continue this list of wants and needs in Part 3.

Wal-Mart provides a quick and easy example. Do you really need someone handing you a shopping cart as you walk into the store? I’m a big boy, I can get my own cart. But, almost every Wal-Mart employs friendly, elderly types to smile, say “Hello”, and hand you a cart as you walk in. Believe it or not, that little gesture is relationship building!

Many businesses fight to keep their prices low, and they make cuts so they can have the lowest prices in town. But, the dirty truth of that is, people will often pay more for something if they have a connection with person or business selling. That connection–that relationship–leads not only to repeat business, but to word of mouth business as well. This is true whether you run a grocery store, a restaurant, a sporting goods store, or a movie theater.

Most people don’t develop relationships with people at the places they frequent. We’re too busy for that! We just want to get in, get out, and go about our business. But, this just proves the point even more.

It’s those places where the cashiers are just a bit more friendly, there is someone available to help you find what you need, they are willing to explain the benefits of one product over another, etc. These are all relationship building exercises that are actually expected of your customers. If you think about the places you frequent most, there is probably some element of familiarity with the staff, and that is, in part, what brings you back time and time again.

How to Build Relationships Online

Being online has it’s advantages, but when it comes to being able to provide that welcoming smile, “Can I help you find something?” offer, or handshake of mutual agreement, online businesses are at a distinct disadvantage. However, this inability to build relationships face-to-face does not negate the importance of building relationships with your customers. You just have to go about it a bit differently.

Some of this is done with your content, some via email or phone, and some through your online conversion process. But, since your website is usually the first point of contact, and your “first impression” to potential new customers, it’s vital that you do all you can to create a website that is designed to build those relationships.

If the design, content, and conversion process of your website isn’t developed with the idea of building relationships, it will fail at doing the job it was intended to do. People don’t want a cold, clinical website. They want to feel like they are doing business with real people that are willing to go the extra mile to help them find exactly what they need.

If visitors come to your site and feel like you care more about selling your product than you do about helping them, they’ll leave. You must use your site to build that connection, from the very first page your visitors land on (not always your home page,) all the way down to the delivery confirmation email after a purchase is made. Or in some cases, all the way to the conclusion of the contract, completion of service, submission of final invoice, etc.

Building relationships through your website isn’t really all that different than building relationships anywhere else. The message is the same, just the medium has changed. Most businesses focus on providing information that people want, but this is very different from what they need. You have to do both.

People want specifications, but they want to know what those specifications mean to them. People want features, but they need to know how those features benefit them. People want information about the product or service, but they need to know how the product or service will make their lives better.

If you give your visitors what they want, then you’re building a business. If you give people what they need, then you’re building relationships. The most successful businesses online are those that have built relationships with their customers and potential customers.

Building relationships for your online business is no different than building relationships anywhere else. It’s all about meeting people’s needs. Too often people build relationships to benefit themselves and themselves alone. While every relationship should be mutually beneficial, if you go about it from a selfish perspective, sooner or later you’ll be found out, and the relationship will be over.

This turn and burn strategy may get you what you want, but at a great cost. In business, you’ll be losing customers just as fast as you can gain them. However, if you find out what your customers need, and deliver that to them, for every one customer you lose, you could be gaining 10 more. That’s a recipe for business success.

Unfortunately, businesses often focus on what the customer wants and ignore what they need. Giving people what they want only addresses the surface of their concerns. When you give your customers what they need, they know you’re building a relationship that isn’t just a selfish one for your own gains.

In my next post, I’ll dig further into translating your visitor’s wants into needs so you can build a long-lasting, mutually beneficial, and profitable relationship with your customers.

But, sometimes coupons can backfire. Not for those who have them, but for those that don’t.

Have you ever been to a site where, you’ve shopped around, found what you wanted, and when you went to check-out they asked you to enter your coupon code number? WTH! You don’t HAVE a coupon! But, you know that, somewhere out there, a coupon can be found!

Every business owner knows that, in this economy, there are far more money-conscious shoppers out there than there used to be. Many are pinching pennies to such a degree that they’ll drive $1 out of their way to save $0.50 in gas (you know who you are!)

Even your average shopper may pause at the sight of a potential money saving opportunity that they may be missing. So, what’s their next move? Knowing that a coupon may be available, some shoppers will abandon their purchase and start searching for a coupon, whether that is from your site or your competitor’s. Or, they may simply realize that, if you can offer the item for less via coupon redemption, then it’s possible they can get a better deal somewhere else, and off they go in search for greener (or in this case le$$-green) pastures.

In both of these scenarios, your coupon–which was designed to earn business–just cost you business.

So how do you beat that? How do you entice visitors with a coupon, without alienating potential customers for the lack of a coupon?

Simple: Don’t allow for a “coupon” field on your order page.

I know, I know! You’re asking yourself, how else do you accept coupons online if you don’t have a coupon field? Well, let me answer that question with another question…

Who says you have to call a coupon a coupon? Why not call it an optional “transaction code”? You can call it anything you want really, just don’t call it a coupon code.

The shopper who already has a “transaction code” on hand will know that what they really have is a coupon. And they won’t be afraid to use it! The shopper who doesn’t have a transaction code won’t think they’re missing out on a better deal, and will continue with the transaction without another thought. It’s a win-win.

The trick to making this work is to make sure your coupons say something along the lines of “Enter transaction #123456″ instead of “Enter coupon #123456″.

That’ll pretty much cover it. This simply change in terminology still allows you to pass out coupons willy-nilly while not making non-coupon holders think you’re giving preferential treatment to someone else. This ensures you won’t get penny-pinchers or better-deal seekers to bolt before they finish their transaction. Everyone walks away happy!

But, too much information can also cause a handicap. It’s not too difficult to be so inundated with info. that you get information overload or conflicting advice. That leads to decision paralysis. You don’t know the right course of action to take, or you can wind up using good information to make bad judgment calls.

Some time ago, I was working on a client’s keyword research and received the following email:

We decided to optimize our website only for keywords that bring up our competitors when searched. So, what I have to do is to take every keyword that is in your research and to run a search on Google to see if our competitors are there. You’ll hear back from me early next week.

I have no doubt that if this client’s competitor jumped off a bridge, the client would follow. This is a great example of taking information you have and making a bad decision with it.

Now, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be ranked for the same keywords your competitors are ranked for. But, this cannot be your sole optimization campaign strategy.

Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s Restaurant, once said he wanted to place a Wendy’s across the street from every McDonald’s in America. A smart strategy. It follows the same basic principles as to why car dealerships all congregate together: Customers looking for one may be swayed when the see more available options.

But, here is what Dave Thomas knew about McDonald’s that I guarantee most people don’t know about their own competition: McDonald’s does a significant amount of research before building a new store in a new location. Thomas realized that McDonald’s only enters markets where they are confident their restaurants will thrive. As Dave saw it, what was lucrative for Ronald would also be profitable for Wendy!

How SEO Smart Is Your Competition?

Before you follow your competitor off that cliff, are you sure each of your competitors have performed the right research on all their keywords? Do you know that they know that every keyword they are ranking for is bringing in traffic and conversions? Have they employed research strategies that have gotten them ranking for every possible keyword that will produce profits?

More than likely, the answer is “no” to more than one of those questions. That’s not to say that any of your competitor’s don’t know what they are doing. In fact, they may have a very strong and successful online marketing campaign. But, chances are pretty good they are not doing all things perfectly.

Are there some targeted keywords that they are not ranking for? Do they know all the different ways a potential customer will search for their product or service? Are they investing time into keywords that produce little traffic or no conversions? If you don’t know the answers to any of the questions posed above, then this may not be someone you want to blindly follow when it comes to setting the course for your own online marketing efforts.

Is Your Competition Making Mistakes?

From a competitive standpoint, it’s always good to know what your competitors are doing, who they are targeting, and what areas they are venturing into. A failure to know this information can lead to developing a poor business marketing strategy. While Dave Thomas wanted to be everywhere his competitor was, he also never stopped identifying locations to put a Wendy’s that McDonald’s hadn’t yet exploited.

We often explore our own client’s competitors and see that many do not have a full grasp on what keywords they should be targeting. Part of this is ignorance. Another is the lack of insight from those running the SEO campaigns. Or it could be strictly due to lack of budget invested in SEO. Who knows.

Those that employ a “me too” marketing strategy will undoubtedly find themselves following competitors through the same mistakes, costing themselves valuable time and money. Or, in the case of the client I mentioned above, missing out on entire segments of convertable traffic solely because their competitor isn’t ranking for the same phrase.

Think about what can be accomplished (and how much money can be saved) if marketing dollars are placed into a more forward thinking marketing campaign; one that doesn’t solely focus on competitors but instead focuses on the audience. After all, it’s not your competitors who’ll be buying from you, it’s your targeted consumer.

How Budget Smart is Your Competition?

But there is one area where it may be important to follow in your competitor’s footsteps. That’s in the area of breadth and reach of the campaign. I often hear from business owners wanting to outperform their competition in rankings both naturally and paid, but they don’t want to invest the money needed to make that happen.

This is where it becomes difficult for us managing the campaigns. An SEO can only do what the budget allows. If your competition is out spending you ten to one, and they have good people managing their campaigns, there is little chance that you’ll be able to out perform them, no matter how much you cross your fingers, tap your heels together, or complain to your SEO that you’re not doing as well as you had hoped.

Money isn’t everything in SEO, but it certainly does open the door to a greater online presence and bolder optimization strategy. A bigger investment can implement broader keyword research, more targeted link building, and a more keyword and search engine friendly site. These things matter in SEO.

That’s not to say you have to match your competition dollar for dollar. Working smarter is just as good as working harder. But, unfortunately, it still takes money to make money.

Doing what your competitors do, without ever really understanding why, is a bad SEO strategy. Pay attention to what your competitors are doing, but also know why, and make sure those same goals and objectives match up with your own before following them down ANY path, including one that might require a larger investment into your online marketing campaign.

Ultimately, you want to be able to compete for business for the same keywords, provided they are the right keywords. But you also want to find and exploit areas that your competition hasn’t.

If your online marketing campaign is simply a reaction, you’ll never be ahead of them. You’ll always be playing catch-up. Instead of being the “me too” guy, you can become the industry authority, leaving the others playing catch up and trying to be like you.

I submitted 17 questions and a few weeks later they called to do the interview. Fortunately, for me, I didn’t have to worry about any trick questions, because I wrote them. Unfortunately, for me, what seemed like an obvious answer when I wrote the questions, somehow escaped me during the interview.

It didn’t help that the questions were not always asked verbatim. But I should have anticipated that. The interviewer has to own the question he’s asking, not just read them from a sheet of paper.

When I wrote the questions, I knew exactly how I would respond. If fact, I even worked in a few “follow up” questions. I’m quite clever that way! The interview questions were written like a good book; it had a beginning, middle, and an end.

But, nothing ever turns out quite as planned. When the questions were asked a bit differently than I had anticipated, it often led to different answers than I had planned. Which means my follow up questions were, well, somewhat out of place. More than once, I found myself having to go back to re-answer a previous question just so I could answer the follow-up question correctly.

Awkward.

And, all of this was totally my fault. As you can probably guess, I aced How Not to Do an Interview 101.

I figure since this was a learning opportunity for me, it could be one for you as well. I’m a big fan of learning from someone else’s mistakes. Here are a few quick pointers on giving an interview:

Know Your Topic

A no brainer, right? Well, not always. Sometimes when a good opportunity for an interview comes along, we jump at it, regardless of how well we might know the topic of focus. It’s all about the publicity!

I was recently asked to be interviewed on an internet marketing related topic of which I had a good amount of knowledge. However, I also knew that I didn’t have enough of a detailed knowledge to be able to give the interviewer competent answers if they dug too deeply.

At this point, there were two options before me: study up on the topic and hope I learn everything that could possibly be covered in the interview, or pass the interview off to a colleague who I knew would be able to answer the questions better than I could. If it’s a topic you should know in that much detail, then go with option 1. If not, then option 2 is good too.

Be Prepared

If you don’t know all the questions that will be asked, then the best you can do to be prepared is to make sure you’re in the right setting. Go to a location where you’re comfortable and distraction free.

Preparation also means having a general idea of the type of questions you’ll be answering. If you’re doing an interview, like I did, where you get to provide the questions, be sure you write the questions in a way that ensures you’ll fully understand the context. As I found out, this is critical to being able to answer the questions competently.

Looking back at many of my questions, I honestly don’t recall what I was thinking. Where was I going with this? What did I mean by that? It all seemed so clear at the time, but several weeks later, when being asked them by someone else… yeah, I got nothin’.

If possible, keep a list of those questions in front of you while you are answering them for the interviewer. This will help you stay on track for those follow-up questions!

Be confident

Confidence goes a long way. Whether the interview is via phone, email, or in person, if you don’t come in confident, you won’t come across strong. Your answers must be thoughtful, well considered, and should sound like you were ready for them (even if off the cuff).

And, if you don’t know the answer to a question, pretending is usually not the best option. No sense risking being found out that you really don’t know what you’re talking about. Be careful faking an answer, because there will be people out there reading or listening who’ll be screaming out, “That’s not right!!!!”

This is why one of my favorite ways to interview is over email. It really gives you a chance to think through your answers. And, if you don’t like the question, re-frame it so you can answer it the way you want.

I’m sure there are dozens of other tips out there that you can find with a good search. However, these three basics can go a long way. To wrap up, I wanted to provide a link to one of my favorite interviews I’ve ever done. It’s a few years old, but still kinda fun. Enjoy!

That?

It brings up images of Charles De Mar from the movie Better off Dead saying, “I’ve been going to this high school for seven and a half years. I’m no dummy.”

The problem is, these websites are speaking to the minority that are already sold on you. Congratulations, the choir knows God loves them. Now how about tailoring your message for those that have yet to be convinced?

In online marketing, you have to reach past even the point of conversion. In the religious world, it’s called “discipleship”. In online marketing, they call it, “customer satisfaction.”

For many companies, they let the conversion process end at the point of sale. In the service industry, customer satisfaction obviously happens AFTER the sale. We get that. We don’t just take the money and run, we have to deliver. This is especially true if we want to earn their business a second (or third) time.

But, retail isn’t so different. You can’t wash your hands of the customer once you ship them their product. That may be the end of one sales process, but it’s also the beginning of another.

The Client is Yours to Lose

In the service industry, once you’ve got a client, he or she is yours to lose. That means that, unless you screw something up, they’ll often continue to be a client for as long as there is a need for your services. But, it’s your job to continue to sell them on the quality of what you provide by giving the best service possible, and making sure the results are more than merely satisfactory.

Providing quality services can net you far more than just an ongoing contract, it can generate great word-of-mouth, leading to scores of referrals, which is the most lucrative form of marketing. What you say about yourself is not nearly as important as what others are saying about you.

Cultivating your existing clients can result in a great source of new clients. But, that’s not just for service industries. Again, what happens after the sale in the retail industry matters too!

Anytime you sell a product, you have the buyer’s name and contact information, which can be used to cultivate them for additional sales down the road. You have the ability to send them product updates, sales information, warranty expiration notices, satisfaction guarantee information, related products, product updates, and more. The cost of communicating with a customer to keep them a customer is far less than the cost of acquiring a new customer!

Once a customer has bought from you, there is a good chance he or she will buy from you again, provided that the experience was a positive one… and they remember. Following up after the conversion ensures that you keep your “good name” before them, so the next time around, you are on their mind instead of Google. They’ll go directly to you – no additional “search” needed.

Sometimes, preaching to the converted is the exact thing that needs to be done. After all, there is no such thing as “once saved, always saved.” Or in this case, once converted, always converted!

This mindset needs to change.

The success of a website’s online marketing efforts can make or break many businesses. It no longer makes sense to hire your SEO only after a website has been developed. That’s like doing demographic research after you have already chosen your store’s location and invested thousands of dollars in setting up shop.

Just as demographic research must be done to determine where and how a business sets up their brick and mortar store, SEO is needed before you begin to program the first piece of code or design the first graphic for your website. In reality, development and SEO are so completely intertwined that they both have to be considered together. Failure to do so frequently leads to expensive re-development costs as the SEO requests changes that could have been done during the initial development stages.

You never want to have to rebuild your foundation

I frequently get calls from business owners exploring Search Engine Optimization but want to wait until their website is fully developed and operational before they sign on with any particular SEO company. This strategy seems to make logical sense because business owners often want to make sure the site looks and performs properly before dropping money into a long term commitment to an online marketing firm. But, SEO is just as much a part of the business plan as the website development.

The website marketing plan should really be one of the driving aspects of the website development. But, unfortunately, many of the things related to marketing are typically done wrong during the site development. That’s not to say developers don’t know what they are doing, quite the opposite. Developers can be great programmers, designers, and creators. They’re just generally not great optimizers. And there is nothing wrong with that, it’s just not what they specialize in.

Rolling out a site that operates at less than it’s full performance capabilities is not only a waste of time, it’s a waste of money, even if you’re not quite ready to put the thing into high gear. It doesn’t make smart financial sense to develop a site that has to be re-developed again once you get your SEO involved. Nor does it make good sense to tie your SEO’s hands because you don’t want to invest in site development again. Ultimately, this puts you in a lose/lose situation.

Instead, you want to have a site built from the ground up that is search engine friendly and SEO ready. It’s the difference between being able to give your car a tune-up vs. having to rebuild the entire engine.

SEO before development starts you in the pole position

“Pole position” is a racing term I have adopted for my own company. It basically means to take the first position. When Nascar racers line up at the starting line, the car in the pole position is the one on the inside of the first row. This is the absolute best position to be starting from, giving you the best advantage.

Having a good SEO or SEM on board during the development stage can save countless hours, and dollars, because it starts you off in, what is essentially, the pole position–the absolute best position you can start from.

Here are just a few examples:

Database driven websites often come with their own unique set of SEO related problems. Over the years I’ve worked with a number of different CMS and never have two been exactly the same. Some are more SEO friendly than others, and some are easier to alter than others.

The basics needed for SEO is the ability to create default, dynamic title and description tags, with the ability to customize on a page by page basis as needed. Control over breadcrumbs, image alts, and editable body content that isn’t tied to a manufacturers database is a must. Being able to dictate URLs can also be a sticking point for some systems. Basically, it comes down to the ability to control and customize the environment.

Clean and lean code can improve website performance issues more than most people think. Bloated code can slow down both spidering and page download, both of which can have an impact on a site’s search engine rankings. If the developers use poor coding practices, your visitors won’t see it, but they’ll feel it as usability is diminished on top of everything else.

Quality content is just as important a part of the sales process as your “add to cart” buttons. Many sites are still not designed with content in mind, leaving SEOs to have to insert optimized content wherever they can, rather than having it be a seamless part of each page’s design.

I still hear people say that they don’t want a lot of text on the site because it distracts from the products. This is a valid concern, especially when content isn’t factored into the design process. However, content is part of the information gathering and decision making process. Without it, you lose all of your persuasive ability, and you’re just offering another product they can get anywhere else.

Not every visitor will read your content, but you need it for those that will and do. It’s up to you to satisfy each visitor’s needs and persuade them to buy your products from you, rather than from a competitor.

These are just a couple examples of how planning your SEO strategy before, or along with, your website development strategy is essential. Your website development budget should be a part of your online marketing investment, not a “development expense”.

This is an important point that I think still too few online businesses are getting. If you don’t bring your marketing team in to participate in the website design and development process, you don’t fully understand what’s at stake.

Before developing your website, choosing your design and development should be secondary to bringing your optimization and marketing team on board. The marketing team can help you interview and select the right designers that will build the site within the specifications and parameters that will be necessary for a successful marketing campaign, saving both time and money in the long run.

We recently had a “small” business come to us for a proposal. We talked at length about their needs, concerns, and budget for SEO, PPC, and Social Media campaigns. We found out that they were spending over $1.5M a year on phone book advertising. For a lot of small businesses, this is an incredible sum of money.

As we developed their proposal, this company became concerned about the PPC budget we had recommended, which was well under 10% of their phone book ad spend. When they asked, “How do small businesses afford SEM?” I initially dodged the question. Every small business is different, but if you can spend $1M on phone book advertising that is completely un-tracked, you can certainly siphon money out of that to invest in SEO and PPC which is trackable. Especially PPC, which can be tracked down to the nth degree.

Understandably, this client doesn’t want to pull all of their phone book ads. I get that. Even if you don’t know whether it is working or not, you know you’ve been successful. The last thing you want to do is yank marketing that could be responsible for your success. (Just the fact that this is an unknown, yet so much is invested in it boggles my mind!)

I understand the slow migration philosophy… cut it, but don’t eliminate it. Take money out of that and invest in something new. That “something new” must prove to be successful, both on it’s own and as part of the bigger picture.

For instance, the PPC may bring them a positive ROI, but they may find that they lost money overall by taking it away from the phone book ads. I know, I chuckled too when I wrote that, but lets just consider it a “possibility”. If that were to happen, then we know that money needs to be re-invested back into the phone book. But, that also means new money needs to be invested in PPC.

Why? Because the PPC is profitable. Any marketing that is profitable is smart marketing. If you gave me a dollar and you knew, through proven historical metrics and tracking, that it would return $5, would you walk away because you didn’t have a dollar? Not me. I’d go diving under the sofa cushions to get whatever change I could find. As soon as I rummaged up a dollar, I’d invest it, take the $5 I earned, return the $1 back to the couch (thanks, Mr. Sofa!), and re-invest the remaining $4, eagerly awaiting my $20.

That’s the beauty of any marketing that is trackable. Once you know that every dollar you spend returns a profit, you’re a bit foolish not to continue to invest money in that marketing avenue. Eventually there is a tipping point, but again, good tracking has your back on that.

Some businesses understand the value of SEO. They have invested their entire marketing budget on SEO/SEM because they know that’s where the money is. I have clients that came to us years ago when they were still publishing catalogs or traveling in RVs to peddle their wares. The economics of those old school marketing efforts worked, but clearly not as profitable as the online marketing efforts.

But, unless those efforts are proven money losers, I say keep doing them. Profit is profit, no matter where it comes from. Of course, this is only valuable once you’ve hit your profit tipping points in the other areas. As long as there is room to invest more in your highest ROI marketing avenues, keep investing!

Unfortunately, for the REALLY small businesses that are just starting out and don’t have a significant budget to work with, SEO can be an expensive foray. This is the case of finding a way to invest the little you have and turn it into a little more, and then turn that into a lot more.

I don’t envy the small business in that position, but that doesn’t make SEO/SEM any less important. You may not be able to invest thousands of dollars a month in SEO or PPC or Social Media. Heck, you may not even find a qualified SEO provider that will take on your account for the budget you offer.

But, you still cannot afford NOT to SEO!

Fortunately, there are plenty of self-help SEO tutorials out there, as well as consultants that can answer your questions on an hour by hour basis. Your options may be limited, but you still have them. It’s just a matter of finding out how best to invest what you have, so you can get some return and grow your pot of SEO gold.

Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose).

We find that people quickly evaluate a site by visual design alone. When designing your site, pay attention to layout, typography, images, consistency issues, and more. Of course, not all sites gain credibility by looking like IBM.com. The visual design should match the site’s purpose.

First impressions are a killer. Within a fraction of a second, your visitors are making an evaluation of your credibility based on your site design alone. Just any old design won’t do anymore. Web surfers are growing accustomed to professional looking sites in just about every industry. Those that don’t “look professional” enough quickly get abandoned.

If your site has not undergone a major re-design in the past few years, it’s probably time. If your site looks like something that was built on a shoestring budget, you’re not giving your visitors much confidence in how you run your business.

While a more professional looking site may be in order, pay attention to what your industry is doing. Different industries require different styles. Don’t go with a corporate look if your competition is all artsy. Don’t create a mom and pop site when your competitors are high tech. Unless you are creating a new niche, you don’t want to vary too drastically from the “expectation” your visitors have from viewing other sites in your industry.

Make your site easy to use — and useful.

We’re squeezing two guidelines into one here. Our research shows that sites win credibility points by being both easy to use and useful. Some site operators forget about users when they cater to their own company’s ego or try to show the dazzling things they can do with web technology.

Site usability is one of the most important factors in increasing (or decreasing) your conversion rates. When it comes to good usability, everything should be on the table: navigation, colors, product placement and display, headings, add to cart buttons, and more.

Be sure that all elements of your site work together to being a valuable and useful resource. Sometimes you need more than just products, such as descriptive content, to help sell the products. The text you use is what visitors will read to be convinced that you have what they want.

Update your site’s content often (at least show it’s been reviewed recently).

People assign more credibility to sites that show they have been recently updated or reviewed.

The primary takeaway here is to keep your content fresh and relevant. Have you ever been to a website and you could just tell the content was old or outdated? Maybe it wasn’t obvious right away, but as you browse through the site, you find certain parts of the site that don’t quite match up with others. Or perhaps you see a “Valentine’s Day Special” six weeks AFTER Valentine’s day.

Small things like this can really turn visitors off. When a visitor sees this kind of irrelevant or outdated content, it conveys that you don’t care enough about them to keep your site relevant. This leaves open a question of whether they’ll get timely service from you as well.

RSS feeds are a great way to highlight new products and information and present them to your audience. Your most loyal audience will subscribe to this feed to ensure they receive your updates.

Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g., ads, offers).

If possible, avoid having ads on your site. If you must have ads, clearly distinguish the sponsored content from your own. Avoid pop-up ads, unless you don’t mind annoying users and losing credibility. As for writing style, try to be clear, direct, and sincere.

This recommendation really only applies to commercial sites, not informational sites. Displaying ads on your informational sites and blogs is perfectly fine and a great way to create an additional source of income. Of course, this only goes so far. Even informational sites can lose their credibility if you have too many ads that overpower the content.

On commercial sites, displaying ads that direct your visitors elsewhere are counter-intuitive and counterproductive. You might get a small stream of “additional” income from these ads, but undoubtedly it will be at your own expense in the long run.

Commercial sites should be focused on selling one thing… your own products or services. Anything on the site that pulls visitors away or interferes with that selling process is a bad marketing strategy.

Keep your audience in mind when writing content. Don’t write above your audiences head, and don’t talk down to them either. While you won’t be able to please everybody, knowing your primary target audience will ensure that you are not insulting the larger percentage of your audience.

Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem.

Typographical errors and broken links hurt a site’s credibility more than most people imagine. It’s also important to keep your site up and running.

I recently spent four hours fixing broken links on a client’s site that had just been redesigned by another developer. This is the epitome of incompetence. We all make mistakes, but lets hope it’s not to this magnitude of colossal ineptness.

Over time, pages we’ve linked to move or disappear, or we move things around on our own sites and miss a few links in all the hubbub. These can easily be corrected with a monthly broken link check. Find and fix both internal and external broken links.

You also want to check your site for spelling and grammar errors. Blogs have a little more leeway in that department, but for a professional site, there is little room for these kinds of issues before you’re looking like amateur hour.

Before publishing new content on your website, take a few extra minutes to run the content through a spell check program. Even if you’ve made a only few minor edits, don’t assume that you don’t need to double check your work.

Just like any other form of medium, it’s best to get a third party to proofread your site’s content. Undoubtedly, they’ll find something you missed, even after you’ve proofread it several times yourself.

Website credibility goes to the heart of being able to run a profitable business. Without credibility, you can implement all kinds of marketing strategies and drive hoards of traffic to your site, but in the end, you won’t have the impact you otherwise would.

Sure, you can find more ways to drive more traffic and eek out a few more sales, but doesn’t it make more sense to improve your credibility and increase your sales without having to pay to drive new traffic to your site?

You can read even more information on building a credible website by reading my series on Destination Search Engine Marketing where I cover how to develop a website that deserves top search engine rankings.

By taking the time to make sure your website is in a credible condition, your visitors will continue to drop in to explore what condition your condition is in.