With that said, there are some basic components of every SEO campaign (not to mention a really big checklist) that form the foundation of a successful campaign. Anyone who’s been around SEO for any length of time already knows these “basics,” but they bear repeating for anyone who is unfamiliar as to where to begin with their SEO effort:

SEO & Keyword Research

Every SEO campaign starts with keyword research. It’s critical to uncover and organize your core terms and extended phrases in order to create the optimization road map moving forward.

The SEO uses keyword information to create customized titles, descriptions and page heading recommendations, along with editing the content of your pages to make them more keyword friendly. The SEO can use your existing content and rewrite it specifically to integrate the keywords selected, as well as improve the sales conversion funnel. Text edits should includes internal linking to other important pages as well as adding strategic calls to action if necessary.

As keyword performance is measured, additional recommendations should be provided, tweaking the pages to improve rankings and conversions.

Information Architecture & Usability

SEOa should regularly be reviewing site analytics information in order to seek out and uncover site architectural issues that hinder your performance in the search engines. Using this information, they can provide specific recommendations and solutions that will build better site architecture, remove duplicate content, fix problematic HTML and a whole lot more.

The mission here is to make your site search and searcher friendly on all levels.

Content Review

A site-wide content review provides strategic recommendations designed to help you produce content that better relates to your audience, effectively uses frequently searched keywords and improves the overall sales message being delivered. The goal is to create engaging content that informs, educates and sells your products or services while also attracting visitors through the search engines.

Content development doesn’t assist SEO alone, but also improves your sales process and your link and social media efforts. Without great content, your site really doesn’t deserve great search engine placement.

Link Building

Your SEO should research your and your competitor’s link landscape and provide you with a variety of linking opportunities to pursue. These opportunities include lists of  sites, directories, blogs, and other strategic sites and the best approach for establishing a linking relationship that compliments your optimization efforts.

The SEO works to establish contact with these link opportunity sites and lays the groundwork for a (linking) relationship, submits linking requests and negotiates link placement, among other things.

Social Media

Developing an immediate and long-term social media strategy is critical to leveraging your blog, Twitter, Facebook and other social streams to your advantage. In conjunction with the SEO efforts and content strategy efforts, the social strategy pushes content in the most effective way, monitors reputation and boosts SEO performance through keyword and link targeting. Part of the social media strategy is to create a publishing calendar that can help you keep moving forward and not get caught in social stagnation.

Analytics & Conversion Optimization

SEOs need to regularly review your and your competitor’s Web data to understand search performance and user trends. With this information, they can provide additional insight and strategy recommendations that assist on-page optimization, link building, social media and content development.

Based on the analytic data and findings, the SEO can conduct a/b and multivariate testing designed to test various performance and conversion options. Selecting the best performing options provides the ammunition needed to continually improve your site conversion rates.

These are just the basic fundamentals of a solid web marketing campaign. Each area noted here can produce a plethora of actions, reactions and recommendations that are designed to continually propel you forward in the search results. This is by no means an exhaustive list of the tasks in each of these categories, but it can give you a good place to start.

Follow me+ at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

Persona = motivation (what the visitor needs, why they are on your site)
Personality = temperament (how they navigate, what they need to see or read to find what they want)

Using both personalities and personas is important when writing great content that is both user- and search-engine friendly.

Use personalities to give your visitors the content the need

Despite what we believe about some people, every person has a personality. That personality determines how searchers seek out information that interests them. It effects keywords, sites they click on, how they navigate and what their expectations are.

There are four basic personality types, and every person usually has one that is dominant over the others, while maintaining some attributes of them all. Understanding these personality types helps you create a site that provides visitors the information they need to make the best decision for them and for you.

The four personality types:

• Competitive (aka Choleric or Lion)
• Spontaneous (aka Phlegmatic or Golden Retriever)
• Humanistic (aka Sanguine or Otter)
• Methodical (aka Melancholy or Beaver)

Competitive
Mal is a competitive personality. He wants to see options before making a decision. Not just some of them; all of them. He will often look at every nuance possible to determine which iteration of a particular product or service is the best one. Because of this, Mal can become frustrated when he can’t find the “perfect” option.

Mal is driven and thrives on challenges, sometimes even volunteering when others avoid. Everything is measured in goals and achieving those goals. Leisurely (non-goal oriented) activity is difficult for Mal as he measures his self worth through success. Mal does not like inefficiency and constantly seeks ways to improve things. When looking for a product, the one and only concern is – will it help him achieve his goals. As such, he is also hard to sell to, as he isn’t easily swayed by fluffy marketing language.

Traits:

• Spontaneous buyers – no time to “shop around”
• Curiosity driven – try to peak their interest
• Goal oriented – they are there for a purpose
• Appreciates honesty – no BS!
• Loyal customer – earn their business, they’ll be back
• Hard to sell – forget all the emotional fluff
• Dislikes inefficiency and disorganization – make your site EASY to use
• Impatient – tell them and tell them quick!
• Abandons page and sale easily – if they can’t find it they’re out

To sell to Mal, you must start with being upfront and honest. Creditability is important and you can establish that by saying what most people won’t–point out your own negatives along with your positives. Never make claims that cannot be substantiated and proven true. Do what you can to demonstrate the true value of your product without over-hyping it. Make sure all necessary information is readily available so they don’t have to dig just to find what they need. Use links and calls to action to get them to take the next step in the conversion process.

Spontaneous
Kaylee is a follower of whatever happens to be the latest trends and places a high value on others opinions. For her, it’s not so much about finding the value herself, but seeing what other trusted sources have to say. This gives her assurance she is making the right purchasing decision. She also fears missing out on a good thing, which can cause her to buy based on the excitement factor alone. Immediate gratification is a primary motivation, so great customer service before and after the sale helps provide the comfort and justification needed to help her feel like she made a good decision.

Traits:

• Follows trends – fads are a good thing
• Feeds on positive opinion – get testimonials and reviews
• Opinion-based buying – facts don’t matter so much
• Sold by word of mouth – social media is key
• Turned away by negative opinions – good products rule
• May suffer from buyer’s remorse – after-the-sale reinforcement is needed to get them back

To sell to Kaylee, your site must go beyond the bland corporate mumbo-jumbo. Content must be captivating and speak to her on an emotional level. Kaylee wants a lot of information but will likely skim until she finds what she needs. Be sure to clearly show your unique value proposition and that of your products and/or services. Provided they are good, having ready access to customer reviews and testimonials will be the final push for her purchasing decision.

Humanistic
Zoe wants to see your testimonials, but for a different reason. She is looking for anything that confirms that you are able to meet her needs, and the testimonials will either back that up or send up the red flags. Zoe looks at the bigger picture when making decisions and will often put the needs of others before herself. She wants to choose something that has broad acceptance, fearing any decision that may leave her hung out to dry on a planet full of Reavers. She doesn’t like getting “locked in,” so providing options for cancellation or returns can give her a sense of freedom to change her mind.

Traits:

• Motivated by security – display guarantees, return and cancellation policies
• Repeat buyer – once comfortable, they’ll come back
• Scared of commitment – make buying (and changing mind) easy
• Needs constant reassurance – hold their hand through the sales process
• Relies too heavily on others’ opinions – build up positive reviews and testimonials

To reach Zoe, be sure to have ample links to the pages that reinforce your trust, commitment and quality. About us and testimonial pages are frequently visited so make sure yours is robust. Provide reassurances via guarantees, links to policy pages and iterate your site security. Be sure your content maintains a personal tone and often speaks of the bigger picture, as to Zoe, it’s not always about her.

Methodical
Simon Tam will be the most likely to read every word on your page. In fact, he’s likely to read every page on your site. He’s not an impulse buyers but reviews and weighs all the evidence in order to make an informed decision. Dr. Tam is a logical person with an eye for detail. He is likely on your site looking to solve a problem of some kind. Before making a decision, he weighs everything to make sure it is a responsible decision in the end.

Traits:

• Feature oriented – benefits are not warranted here
• Does not like fluff – be straight and honest
• Factual based buyer – back up your claims
• Engaged in content – more info is good info
• Skeptical – convincing may be tough
• Needs specific, detailed information – provide as much as you can

To reach Simon you need to present hard evidence in an organized fashion. He doesn’t care about a personal touch, but rather wants an authoritative voice. Simon likes graphs and tables, specs and any other detailed “proof” you can provide. State your facts with little fluff as that only raises the skeptical hairs on his head. Don’t say anything that sounds too good to be true, because it likely is and Simon will walk away.

Using information about these basic personalities helps SEOs and content writers to structure a website with the most appropriate content available on each page. Used in conjunction with established personas, the site content can be created to meet the specific needs of different individuals with different temperaments, different desires and different goals… but ultimately driving them to the final goal: the sale.

Addressing the right persona with the right temperament in the right place can be tricky. But these considerations are an important part of creating a website that will drive the most conversions possible.

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.

-Avinash Kaushik (@avinash), Web Analytics 2.0

Highest Paid vs. Data

In a typical business, the highest paid person’s opinion usually wins.  This does not mean that their opinion is always the most informed though.  It’s just the most powerful.  The problem is that it is also the least accountable.  But, in the world of the Web, there’s a new sheriff in town.  Data.  This is because data (when used correctly) can provide accountability for decisions made.

It gives us a basis for determining if a decision is working or not.  Previously, if the highest paid person thought the billboard should be a certain color, there was no way to tell if that was the right choice or not.  Now, when the highest paid person believes that a button on a site should be changed, he can be held accountable for that belief.  Either the change gets better results or it doesn’t.  Do you see how this changes the whole game?

When it comes to something as important as marketing your business, why would you rely on your opinion when you can swim in facts? Allow the facts to show you what to do rather than take shots in the dark.  We’ve moved into a time where data and (more importantly) the people who turn data into changes that make more profit should be higher paid people.  

Your turn: What do you have to add?  Learn anything new? Have anything to correct?

Almost. I might have left out a few details.

While the ease of starting a business online is great for life, liberty and the pursuit of sticking it to the man, it can also have its drawbacks. Just like starting a 100 mile sprint may be easy, finishing is another thing altogether. Every business must still follow basic business principles of success in order to attain a long and profitable life.

Your business’s place in history

Mom and Pops have been around since Abel sold Cain a little something from his road-side pets-and-rocks stand. Since then, the stronger guys have been using their leverage to force the little guys out of business. But the Internet provided a way for the little guy to fight back. It leveled the playing field and became a place where David could slay Goliath.

Due to their flexibility, lack of red tape and ability to make decisions without forming a super-committee, Mom and Pops were the first to really use the Internet as a sales channel. In fact, they were what initially fueled the growth of the Internet as they found ways to compete that were previously unavailable to them. Their corporate counterparts lagged far behind for many years.

Many mom and pops were able to use the internet to grow their small businesses to be medium-size companies and, in some cases, large corporations. Jeff Bezos started a small online bookstore and turned it into one of the largest online retailers in the world, Amazon.com. Amazon is a stiff competitor to Wal-mart (which also started as a Mom and Pop) and is, in part, responsible for the demise of Borders Bookstores. (Ultimately, the demise of Borders was its own fault. “Adapt or die.” They didn’t do the former so the latter snuck up on them!)

But not all Mom and Pop owners have ambitions of turning their start-up into a billion-dollar behemoth. Getting bought out by Google for $3.1 billion is rarer than some people may believe! Many Mom and Pops are content to shoot for something slightly less ambitious, or even desire to stay small so they can maintain their flexibility, freedom and live life without all the stress.

Your business’s place online

Small businesses continue to move online to find their place of success. But so are larger corporations. Maintaining the online success that was easy to achieve ten years ago has become more and more difficult.

The barrier for creating a web presence gets smaller with free tools like WordPress and Facebook, yet competitors, both small and large, are investing increasingly larger amounts of marketing dollars into their online campaigns. What seemed like a large investment five years ago is only a fraction of what many companies are spending today.

While starting a business on the Internet today is still relatively easy compared to doing so off-line, building a successful business has become more expensive and time consuming than ever. For many small business owners, the cost of SEO is getting out of reach.

A good SEO consultant or firm might cost between $100 and $500 per hour. Employing a full-scale SEO campaign can run anywhere from $12,000 on the low end to $100,000 or more per year, all depending on the industry and how badly you want to beat the crap out of your competition (figuratively speaking). Be careful, your competition fights back. A small twig doesn’t do much damage against a competitor holding a club!

SEO costs like those mentioned above may be chump change for large corporations, but they do make the online environment a less viable marketplace for new businesses on limited budgets. This is why do-it-yourself SEO articles are so popular. Why pay someone to change your oil when you can get dirty, ruin your clothes and scream curses at your car all on your own! (A little insight as to why I don’t change my own oil.)

But even do-it-yourselfers eventually run into the ROI factor. It may be cheaper to do it yourself, but the return on the time invested is just not there in the long run.

Your business’s place with your competition

It’s no longer easy for small businesses to achieve easy online success. That’s not to say the Internet is no longer a welcome place for those with grand dreams of starting their own business and making it big. It’s just that the competitive landscape must be duly considered before making the leap. Those who already have an established online presence have the advantage. New sites take more time to build the authority and reputation that is necessary to push past the mainstays.

There is really no reason why a new site should outperform an older site in the same industry that has already established trust and reputation online. The only way to overcome that is to beat them – not by manipulating the algorithms, though that can work for a time – but by making your site more valuable, reputable and trustworthy than your competition. Being unique helps too!

But just because you’re the mainstay doesn’t mean that you can’t be out-performed in the rankings. As long as your new competitors are willing to build a site that is more valuable, reputable and trustworthy than yours, they have a shot at being competitive. And the more money they invest in making that happen, the greater the opportunity they have in overcoming those that are spending less.

If you’re comfortable staying a Mom and Pop shop, this won’t concern you much. If your dreams are bigger than that, you need to be doing more than monitoring your competitors. You need to be outsmarting (and in some cases outspending) them.

Your business’s place in marketing

If you’re fine being a small fish in a big pond, then you’re also fine not having top 10 results in the search engines. And if you’re not fine with that reality, then you need to adjust your goals. Not every hardware store can compete with Lowe’s or The Home Depot, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t be successful. You don’t need to be #1 to make a comfortable living!

However, if your ambitions are greater than staying a small company, you have to think like the big fish. You may not be able to compete against The Home Depot today, but you certainly won’t get there until you create an online marketing game plan that factors in higher budgets year after year. The Home Depot spends millions in marketing. Good luck beating them with your paltry $1000 per month campaign!

To be considered a competitor you need to change your drive, motivation and financial investment. Look to apply similar online marketing strategies and tactics, even on a lesser scale for now, but plan for growth until you’re matching or exceeding what your competitors are doing.

Even though the barriers to starting a business online are still less than starting one off-line, the mindset of success shouldn’t be. Earning first-page placement for your keywords requires much more than throwing up a website. You must be willing to invest in whatever it takes to overcome your competition. More determination, more effort, more patience and more marketing.

If you don’t know what or where your place is as a business, your marketing efforts will find it for you. You can complain about Google, argue with your SEO or rub a magic lamp, but until you’re ready to make a serious play for the next level, your marketing plan will put you in your place, which is right where you belong.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

If social media is the darling Cinderella of the current marketing world, then link building might be the u___ (unrecognized?) stepsister. When I describe link building and its important role in creating a company’s Web presence (see SEOmoz’s What is Link Building? for a definition/details), most people furrow their brows and say, “Sounds like you’re talking about social media.” (Cinderella gets all the glory!)

So, we’d like to end, once and for all, this unnecessary cause of forehead wrinkles by tackling the FAQ: What’s the difference between link building and social media?
 

Stoney (@StoneyD): Link building and social media have a lot in common and, in many cases, share similar goals. I would say that pure link building is a sub-set of SEO. The goal is to get keyword rich links on external sites pointing to your keyword-optimized pages. There are a lot of link-building methods, several of which cross over into social media: building relationships, creating great, linkable content and broadcasting it to bring eyes (and links) to that content.

Social media is an outlet for link building, but it also has its own goals, one of which can be getting valuable links. But social media has concerns far greater than just getting links, and any social strategy that doesn’t look beyond links is bound to fail.

You can have a link strategy that uses social media, as well as a social strategy that has a goal of links. But to maintain that narrow of a focus on either is ultimately not using each one to your greatest advantage.
 

Annalisa (@ahilliardm): Social media should be an important part of a business’s link-building strategy. It’s a way to engage an audience. In a sense, it’s relationship building. If you share information that is relevant and unique to your niche, you’ll be able to build relationships, and those relationships can lead to natural links.

Links are an outcome of a well-established social media presence. Here is an analogy to explain the difference between social media and link building. An athlete must train in order to compete. The goal of training is to be able to win the competition. Social media is the training and preparation. Link building is the reward or pay off. Now, don’t get me wrong, links are not the only purpose of social media. It’s important to create relationships in online marketing for many reasons. And, through those relationships, you can get links.
 

Jen (@martijen): Before I started with Pole Position Marketing, I had never even heard of link building. And, I suspect there are many in the marketing industry (particularly the “traditional” side) who are just as clueless as I was.

Thankfully, I’ve learned a few things about link building, including its primary Web marketing goal – to improve the rankings, visibility and credibility of your organization’s website. The more quality links to your Web content, the better your online presence looks to search engines, as well as readers. Think of them as love and hugs pointing in your direction.

But, it’s difficult to get that kind of attention without going where your potential “linkers” (and customers) are. Social media sites are vehicles for making connections and sending out your message. Think of them as online places where you give out love and hugs (with some specific goals in mind).

Social media can support your link-building strategy in two primary ways:

• Helping you identify and engage industry influencers who may want to collaborate with your business or promote it by publishing content or advertising. In either case, you have the opportunity to negotiate a link!
• Serving as a broadcast medium for your quality content that influencers may want to share and link to.

When you blend social media and link building together, they form the foundation for great online PR. Unlike the traditional discipline, online PR actually focuses on the public, not just a small group of media gatekeepers. Your news releases (with links) are for every online reader! For publicity, reputation management, coverage and more links, you can turn to not only social media, but also news outlets, bloggers, directories, partner websites, industry associations and even to yourself. (You, too, can become a publisher!)

So, while link building and social media have distinct functions and “directions,” they work better in tandem as a part of an overall online PR strategy.

Look for our Q&A posts about online marketing each month. Or, if you have a question you’d like to ask our team, just send it to ask@polepositionmarketing.com. We’ll be glad to answer via our blog.

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.

Comparing In-House vs. Outsourced Costs

The number of hours “needed” to optimize your website can fluctuate from one SEO company to the next, as will the hourly rate. Assuming that the cost of a quality SEO team runs $150-200/hour, you can see it’s not difficult to reach a monthly investment of $3,000 or more. For a lot of small businesses, this is no small chunk of change. Many small businesses will look at a $36,000 per year investment. At that rate, you could just hire a full-time employee!

While true, you also have to consider other questions as well. The main question is this: Can a single person do everything a team of experts can? Can they efficiently research, write, optimize, link build, implement proper IA to the same degree and hit expected results?

It’s rare that you can find one person who is an expert in all these things. Then throw in the education time they’ll need to not only become an expert in each of these fields, but to keep up with the latest trends and algorithm changes. You’re looking at a lot of education, time and money!

When you outsource you don’t have to pay for education time, only hours worked on your site. When you hire in-house, you have to pay for education time, materials, conferences, travel and everything else needed for a quality education. Let’s not even get into benefits, holidays and PTO!

Sometimes the hard part for the SEO provider is convincing clients to invest in our time. But this isn’t the correct approach. We should be convincing business owners to invest in their website. It’s not how much money the client pays for SEO; it’s how much return they are getting for the time they are investing into their online marketing strategies.

Cautious Spending in an Uncertain Economy

I’m as cost conscious as the next guy, but there comes a point when pinching pennies is counter productive… especially in business. When I look at various on- and off-line marketing campaigns, I don’t look at the cost so much as I look at the overall return on the investment being made (ROI). Sure, a big price tag makes me think long and hard before investing, but what I want to know is, will I get my return on that investment?

The bigger the price tag, the harder it is to jump into an unknown investment. This is just as true with SEO as with any form of marketing, but perhaps even more true with SEO because the return is not instant. SEO requires a long-term commitment before you’re going to get the results you want to see.

Making any business succeed requires an investment of both time and money. Consider this:

If you have neither time nor money, there will be no success.

If you have time and not money, success can come, but you may run out of time before it happens.

If you have money but not time, success may come, but it will be fleeting without proper preparation and planning.

If you have both time and money, success may come, but only if you have implemented a strong plan to achieve that success.

Obviously, the best option is to have both time and money and be willing to invest it, if you want your SEO to succeed.

Spend More to Get More

Growing profits means you need to get more conversions (sales, signups, proposals, customers, etc.) for less money. To achieve that often means you have to spend more, not less.

We all know that you have to be willing to spend money to make money. If you’ve seen the show Shark Tank, you know how much of their own money people often invest to get a business idea off the ground. You gotta risk it for the biscuit!

What you have to think about is whether increased spending will give you an even greater return. Spending less would be nice, but you have to get out of that mindset. Target, Walmart, Pepsi and Coke all continue to spend, spend, spend on their marketing because they know it gets results. And the second they stop spending, they know they lose market share to their competition.

If your online marketing efforts are working they way they should, your marketing budget should always be increasing rather than decreasing - assuming, of course, that you can handle the increased business that the marketing efforts are bringing in.

As a smart, savvy business owner you have to consider all your options. Pricing alone isn’t a strong enough indicator on whether you can “afford” a particular company or not. You have to consider what is being offered, the history of success the company has, the communication they provide in meeting your needs and a whole lot more. Just because it’s more expensive doesn’t mean you can’t afford it. You just have to determine if you want some kid to mow your lawn or a gardener to make your whole yard beautiful.

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.

There are countless test you can do with your website to help increase your conversion rates. A/B and multivariate tests can help you increase your conversion rate a couple of points, which can often translate into thousands of dollars of increased profits. But in all that conversion testing, trial and error, banging your head against the wall and twisting customer’s arms until they cry “UNCLE!,” there is often one overlooked piece of information that can help you dramatically improve your conversions.

That piece of information is: information. Content, to be exact!

A little information can go a long way when building relationships with your visitors–your would-be customers and bringers of the sacred sale. Building a relationship that is based on a genuine interest and possible dialogue with your customer can lead to more customers, higher sales and significant business growth. No arm twisting or head-banging needed!

Unfortunately, many websites employ the “less is more” philosophy. They see content as the barrier that prevents the customer from getting to the check out isle. Unfortunately, when you remove the content you are not removing barriers; you’re removing the associate that helps the customer find what they need.

I don’t know about you, but I often find myself in the middle of the store looking for someone–anyone–who can help me. Looking up and down isles, not finding an available employee within driving distance, I get the urge to shout, “I’m going to steal something!” just to see if anyone cares!

Your content shows them you do.

How information wins conversions

Unique content on your home, category, sub-category and product pages explains the value in purchasing your products and services. It allows you to provide the relevant information each visitor needs to know your product will satisfy their wants and needs. It gives them the emotional justification needed to commit to buying what you’re offering and make them feel like a puppy just licked them in the face while they do it!

More information on your site creates less resistance in convincing the customer to buy. Content on your site essentially greases the wheels for the potential customer to move through the various phases of the buying cycle. The more customer focused your information is, the easier it will be for your customers to justify a purchase from you.

Essentially, adding quality information to your site helps your visitors make smart purchasing decisions. When customers make decisions on little and/or incomplete information, you may get the sale today, but quite possibly the return will come in the mail tomorrow. Lacking enough product information and purchase justification on the site means you’ll ultimately lose the customer for life instead of gaining a life-long spending buddy.

Detailed information on your products and services gives you greater opportunity to create happy customers. Being up front with both pros and cons, benefits and possible side-effects, allows the customer to weigh each against that of other products or even your competitors. Short of that information you risk having an unhappy customer or no customer at all, when all that was missing was the correct information they needed to pull the trigger on a purchase.

Well-written and customer-focused content creates an open and honest relationship with your customers. The more open you are about your strengths and weaknesses, the more open your customers will be with you, as well. This will give you better opportunities to meet their needs, if not now, at some later point down the road with new product or service innovation. Even if you lose that customer today, you’ve built a bridge to bring them back to you later.

Building up a content-rich website through all levels of the buying process gives your customers reassurance that you are trustworthy and a valuable resource for them to return to. When customers trust you, they hesitate less when making purchase decisions, which ultimately leads to more customer confidence and translates into greater sales and repeat customers.

Any business looking for the long term customers: content can make the difference between no sale at all and a life-long customer. You’re essentially allowing your content to play the role of the store employee roaming the isles asking customers, “How can I help you?” If you want to get  conversions on your site, you need to think about how much content you’re giving your visitors.

If you don’t have quality, engaging, explanative and customer-focused content on your site, you’re preventing your customers from getting the information they need to make an informed purchase decision. That click you just heard is the sound of your visitors leaving because they can’t find any text that makes them confident in your products or services. That cha-ching is is the sound of your competitors’ cash registers ringing from the sales you just lost! And that crying? That’s you.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

How much does online marketing cost?

The response from our team comes at this tricky question in a variety of ways…

Stoney (@StoneyD): There is no one-size-fits all answer to that question. It’s kind of like asking, “How much does a house cost?” Or a car. Or surgery. Or ObamaCare. Well, not the last one because the others can actually have a defined costs. The better questions is, “How much ROI will I get for my investment?” While there is no “sticker price” that can be placed on that, it really is the bottom line question. Whether you’re paying $5,000 or $500,000 for online marketing, you need to make sure you will get a return. This comes back to making sure you trust your SEO. If you pay a lowball price then ROI can be very difficult to be achieved, especially if your competition is out investing you in SEO. You also don’t want to over-pay, either. If your SEO provides quality and gets results – and more importantly, gets ROI – then there is no such thing as overpaying. Bottom line is, you need to invest whatever is needed to grow profits and not a penny less.

Craig (@craiggeis): That’s a broad question. I prefer to look at online marketing as an investment rather than a cost. There was a day when playing the internet was like hitting the lotto. Those days are long gone. Today, setting goals, doing research and creating strategies are vital if you want to swim with the internet sharks. Don’t be fooled, there is risk when you invest online. But with the proper approach you can reap great returns if you proceed with wisdom and have patience.

Mike (@mflem25): Let’s say I have a friend who has agreed to give me $4 for every $1 that I give him. Of course, I’m going to give him as many $1 bills as I can muster up. That is, unless of course, I have another friend that will give me $5 for every $1, right? If this were the case, I would give friend #2 as much money as I could muster up until he ran out of money. If he stops giving me the $5, whatever I have left goes over to friend #1.

Yes, the friends are marketing channels and the Internet is one of them. Of course there is another layer in this whole deal. Whichever “friend” you treat better will make a better deal with you. So, if you don’t know how to treat a certain “friend” well, you likely would want to go get some counseling on how to conduct that relationship.

Jen (@martijen): For more than 100 years, businesses have been sold on the value of traditional advertising and marketing, such as newspapers, magazines, trade publications, flyers, brochures, billboards, radio and television. Hundreds of studies have been conducted on the effectiveness of these communication channels. Collectively, companies have spent billions annually on “crafting their message” in ads and commercials. Yet, all this effort was one way, sent out via electromagnetic waves or printed materials to nameless, faceless consumers on the other end. Metrics were based Gallup Polls, demographic readership studies or, in the best-case scenario, an actual pile of coupons that could be counted when redeemed.

The Internet, however, has ushered in true two-way communication between consumers and organizations. People have names and faces and personalities and conversations. And, oh yes, they CLICK. Suddenly, you’ve got some actual numbers. You have measurable statistics. You can tie your online marketing efforts to conversions of all sorts (purchases, subscriptions, likes, retweets, etc.). Of course, interpreting and managing all this still takes planning, execution and, yes, moola. But, when compared to traditional marketing, online marketing demonstrates ROI in a much clearer way. In the end, you must decide how much that’s worth to you.

Look for our Q&A posts about online marketing each month. Or, if you have a question you’d like to ask our team, just send it to ask@polepositionmarketing.com. We’ll be glad to answer via our blog.

For me, the focal point of the conference (beyond curiosity about Lady Gaga’s bizarre meat dress, currently on display at the Rock Hall) can be summed up in this phrase: fascinate, compel and convert your audience using the power of story. If you want to succeed in online marketing today, content must be a foundational pillar, not some website architect’s last-minute add-on.

Now, just four short days after leaving Cleveland, I’m living in the dénouement, wondering whether I can fit all this juicy beef on the skinny little stretched-out bun I call my normal life. As I continue to chew on ideas that have the greatest potential to empower Pole Position Marketing and our clients, I see five key challenges that many organizations must face in the process of implementing an effective content, search and social campaign.

1. Time.
   Despite the Rolling Stones’ claim that Time is on My Side, that’s not true for a majority of business owners, marketing managers and communication coordinators. Writing blogs, snapping pix, staying on top of social media and capturing videos – even in “real time,” as David Meerman Scott calls it – all takes time. And not just once in a while. To see any fruit from your labors, you must devote time each day on a consistent basis and be prepared to handle the unexpected opportunity or crisis. All quick tips aside, how committed are you to garnering online attention and sales? You’ll need to prove it with your time.
2. Resources.
   You’ve Got a Friend, right? Hopefully, more than one because running a successful content+search+social campaign means having access to the “write” resources. With fewer FTEs on staff these days (or perhaps no other FTE but you), less must be more. However, a marketing specialist isn’t necessarily a writer. And a writer isn’t necessarily a programmer. And a programmer isn’t necessarily a writer or a marketing specialist. (You can usually be guaranteed of the last one.) So, if you need help in these areas, whom do you turn to? Agencies are good, but what if you can’t afford one on an ongoing basis? (That’s another resource issue!) If you are one of the few resources – or the only resource – at your company, you will need to determine just how much you can do or afford on a consistent basis.
3. Creativity.
   While Natasha Bedingfield is staring at the blank page (I can relate), Sally Hogshead makes it clear how important it is to “fascinate” in the world of online content. After all, we’re appealing to readers who, according to Hogshead, have the attention span of a gold fish. But, it’s tough to be creative when you’re working on 10 different projects at once or only had a few hours of sleep. And, if you don’t feel that you’re naturally fascinating (Hogshead says we all have to unlearn how to be boring), what will it take for you to get “in the zone”?
4. Know-how.
   Shania’s not impressed much by rocket scientists, so people who are into online marketing are in luck: it’s not rocket science! But, it IS a rapidly changing field that requires some technical knowledge or (back to #2) knowledgeable resources. Good news here… If you’ve got the time (#1), you can find all the information you need to create, monitor and measure a content campaign, often for free. You just have to wade through tons of online content to learn!
5. Speed.
   High Speed ”you on” in the of world of digital marketing. Things may happen and be over before you even realize anything of importance occurred in your industry. So, to compete online, you must constantly monitor what’s going on and be, at the very least, responsive. Proactive would be better. Do you have all the tools in place that will allow you to create, implement, broadcast and share content quickly (see #4)? Or, may perfectionism, fear or lack of time and/or resources hold you back?

I’m pragmatic by nature (or perhaps by nurture), and I much prefer to acknowledge the foes I face in all areas of life. It gives me the advantage going in, as well as a darn good chance that I’ll prevail in the long run. These challenges – time, resources, creativity, know-how and speed – are my Content Marketing World dénouement, and I will have to overcome them to achieve success in my career as a content marketer.

In the end, I wonder, “Have I bitten off more than I can chew?” It doesn’t matter. I want to taste victory.

Did you attend Content Marketing World last week? If yes, tell me about your experience. Share your comments below or follow me at @martijen or at @PolePositionMkg.

In the last few years social media has jumped to the forefront of online marketing for many small businesses. Some business owners aren’t even bothering to market (or in some cases even build) their websites anymore.

They can just create a Facebook page.

Or a blog on Blogger.com

Or tweet on Twitter.

Or build a Google Places page.

Are we entering an age where SEO just doesn’t matter?

You can now get a local ranking on Google just by having a places page. No website needed!

When all these other avenues are available, many without all the added marketing “expense,” is SEO still viable?

The short answer is yes, SEO still matters.

SEO Still Matters

That was important so I made sure to say it twice!

There are many reasons why SEO should still be on the forefront of your online marketing efforts. I’ll make the case below, but before I do, I want to stress that I’m not trying to take anything away from Facebook, Google Places, Twitter or other social media efforts. I’m sure someone *cough@martijencough* could write a post titled “Making the Case for Social Media in an SEO World!”

But since social media is the new big “it,” I think it’s important to revisit the case for SEO, as a solid reminder as to why it still matters.

You have Ownership of Your SEO

If you own your own domain name, your website belongs to you. It’s yours.

The same can’t be said about your Facebook, Places or Twitter profiles. Whatever marketing you do on these other profiles may be building your business today, but what if any of them go out of style? (Anyone remember MySpace?)

The marketing you do TO your social media profiles is temporary at best. At any time you can be removed, be kicked off, lose your profile or see the site disappear. If your web host doesn’t like you, you get to take your site (you do have a backup, right?) and find another hosting company. You get to keep it, and no one can tell you otherwise.

That means the SEO you do for your site is also yours. All that work, effort and money invested is yours to keep as long as you keep your site hosted.

SEO Gets You Noticed by Your Customers

Social media is great for getting the word out and building your brand, educating your audience and even providing information about your services. All good. But SEO puts you in front of your buyers. Top rankings put you in front of people that are interested in what you have to offer but don’t already know about you.

One of the goals of SEO can be to get people to engage with you on your social networks. This helps build long-term relationships. But SEO gets you in front of people who don’t already know where to get what you offer. That’s why they go to search engines.

Top rankings put you front and center for searchers who have an active interest in what you do. These are potential customers, not just information seekers. This is your money audience!

SEO Has a Mighty Long Reach

Your reach with SEO can be far greater than your reach in your social networks. Sure you can build a lot of followers and friends and they can repost or retweet your content to get an even wider audience… provided they are looking at the time your tweet or post goes out.

You may have 10,000 friends and followers, but are they all looking at you moment you need them to be? If not, your message is lost.

SEO puts you in front of your audience when they search. Even PPC can fail here as ads roll in and out depending on your available budget. But with SEO, once you get those top rankings, your link is there for all the world to see.

Not only that, but the more keywords you optimize, the bigger your reach can be. Optimizing your site for well-searched keyword phrases puts you in front of a larger audience. Optimizing even low-volume phrases in large quantities can boost your reach even more while increasing your ROI. (More on that below.)

SEO is Relevant Now

Driving someone to your social media page gives them only limited amounts of information. It’s kind of a one-size-fits-all approach. Driving visitors to your site, through SEO, gives them all the information they need to make a purchase decision.

One of the beautiful things about SEO is that you can also drive each searcher to the most relevant page on your site, based on the query. That’s what optimizing is all about. Each page is optimized for a set of keywords that are most relevant the searcher. This is custom-fitting at it’s best!

SEO Focuses on the Conversion Experience

When a properly strategized SEO campaign is implemented, your website should see a boost in user experience. Your SEO should be looking further than optimizing keywords onto a page. They should be analyzing your site architecture, calls to action, internal links and conversion processes.

When your SEO focuses on the conversion experience, your site becomes much more about getting your visitors the information they need while making them confident in their purchase decision. The better user experience, the more loyal customer you create. Driving traffic to a site without considering usability can be akin to pouring water into a leaky bucket.

Your Competition is Performing SEO

Your competition is ranking for the keywords that would otherwise be driving business to your site. If you’re not competing for those keywords, search engine traffic is being diverted to them. That sound you hear is your profits going to your competition!

If your competition is investing in SEO, shouldn’t you be? If they are working hard at earning top search engine rankings, don’t you want to be right there next to (or above) them? And if your competition isn’t there today, they may be there tomorrow. Don’t let them get the competitive advantage on you.

SEO Delivers the ROI

The return on investment in SEO has been proven time and time again. It’s different for every industry and website, but in the long term, because SEO is long-lasting, the ROI validates itself. Compared to other forms of advertising, SEO can be a bargain.

The ROI on social media has yet to be fully proven. Its great for building an audience and driving brand awareness. It’s even better in conjunction with your optimization campaign, to create links and build off the SEO. As a standalone service, however, the benefit of social media is extremely limited. It’s only one piece of the marketing pie.

SEO has Extreme Longevity

SEO is (almost) forever. A page properly optimized today is a page properly optimized after the next four Google updates. On-page optimization is good for a very long time. Once you have that then you just need to continue to build your site and keep your audience interested. This is where social media, link building and content strategy really helps; they help maintain your position once your site is optimized.

This is why so many are flocking to social media. They think this is the way to get in front of your audience. And it is, but it’s only part of a smart marketing strategy. Getting your site optimized internally, and using social media and link building externally, gives you a long-lasting optimization campaign that withstands the tests of time.

Focusing on SEO, even as social media is the new, shiny thing on the block, still makes a lot of sense. If you bring in the right people to do the job, your optimization campaign should be one of the primary drivers of traffic, conversions and new customers.

Of course, you already knew all this. But it’s nice to have the reminder.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

In the first two parts of this series, we looked first at how the online audience differs from the traditional off-line audience. There are several distinct characteristics one has to take into account before pushing content out onto the web that was designed for print.

Next, we looked at the goals of online PR in order to identify key things that online PR must do that are both similar and different from offline PR. Good writing is still good writing, whether you are on- or offline, but when writing online content, you have to treat each piece a bit differently.

Now let’s move on into the next phase of writing online PR.

Background Research

Every good story starts with some background research. After all, we don’t just jump right in and start telling a story we know nothing about. We have to do a little digging first to understand the issues, pros, cons, benefits, who the audience is, what their needs are, etc. Only when you have this information can you begin to craft your story.

In addition to the normal background research one does for a good story or PR piece, there are some additional factors that must be considered when publishing content online. You’re not just trying to get your content to your audience, but you have to make your content available for your audience to find.

Instead of always pushing information to people you think need to see it, you want to be able to pull in those who truly do want to read it. This is a bit of a different strategy than most people are used to, but it’s one that does bring in more targeted customers than the “traditional” method.

How People Search

Finding content online is all about keywords. We like to believe people think in terms of concepts and ideas, but when it comes to online content, everything gets boiled down to a few words. If someone sees a commercial on TV, they watched a full 30-seconds of information. But, if they go online to look for more information, that entire 30-seconds is going to be narrowed down to a very short 2-, 3-, or 4-word phrase.

The search engines have made finding information so easy that almost anything can be found using just a few words. Sometimes we might get more specific with a 5- or 6-word phrase when necessary, but the starting point is usually those 2-3 words that we feel best captures the information we are looking for.

Because keywords are so important to our online searches, people tend think and hear in terms of these keywords. We listen and reduce everything down to it’s lowest common denominator of what it will take to find the information we are looking for. This makes it important that we integrate keywords that our audience uses into each piece of content.

If you’re talking about “pre-owned cars” because that’s a nicer sounding industry buzzword, you’re going to miss out on a lot of potential traffic. Of course, you only realize this once you know that your audience is searching for “used cars”.

This is the problem. We get caught up using our own internal industry lingo when our audience is using street lingo. While you tout your internal lingo to feel smart, sophisticated, classy, or whatever, your competition is outselling you because they are using words that people actually think, hear, and search for.

If you don’t use the language your audience uses then you’ll be missing your audience altogether.

Find Keywords Your Audience Uses

If you want to use the language your audience uses you have to find out what keywords they type into the search bar to find the information related to what you do.

There are a lot of tools that will help you do this including Wordtracker or Google’s Keyword Tools. Some tools are more helpful than others and each will give you different information. But parsing through that information is well worth the time. I have a blog series outlining keyword research strategies that is worth the read.

The value of keyword research cannot be understated. Not only will you find the broad terms that your audience uses, but you’ll also find a lot of specific phrases that people are interested in. This information can give you ideas and angles to address to ensure you’re targeting as many searchers as possible with your content.

What we often find is that words we would think would be valuable are not, while words that may not have been considered jump out at us as something we should be targeting. By finding these keywords, you are able to develop content that speaks more directly to your searchers rather than to the people who think up fancy words with little meaning to your audience.

It’s up to you to focus your content toward those that are seeking, but you have to use their language, not your own.

Keywords Don’t Always Mean What We Think

One of the downsides of the keyword research tools is that they only tell us the popularity of any given phrase. What they can’t tell us is what the visitor is thinking when they type that phrase into the search engines. Keyword phrases often have different meanings depending on inflection, word order, or even singular or plural variations. This is when we have to use our heads to think through the relevance of any given phrases.

One of the best examples of this I have is when I was shopping for a headset for my cordless telephone. Walking through the isles of the Office Depot, I saw a box that read “cordless telephone headset”. Just what I wanted, right? Well, no. I needed a cordless telephone headset, what was in the box was a cordless telephone headset. Same three words, but entirely different products!

The meaning of a phrase can also change just by adding a qualifying word to it. In the image above, all the words in the circles have a single word in common. Can you guess what it is?

The word is “bag”. But the meaning of the word “bag” changes significantly just by adding each of these qualifiers to it. This is an extreme example, but it makes the point that we cannot accept every keyword at face value, we have to look deeper into the potential meaning of the searcher.

(This also illustrates why targeting single word phrases is a bad idea! Just sayin’.)

Knowing Your Audience

Knowing your audience isn’t always as easy as saying, “my audience is interested in x.” Just because someone is interested in a particular topic doesn’t necessarily mean they are your target audience, nor does it mean that they are all searching for the exact same reasons. Different searchers have different goals. It’s up to you to figure out what those are.

In the illustration above, I have created an example of three different types of searchers, three different types of interests, and three different types of needs. Each searcher may have a different interest and a different need. For example, a particular business searcher may be interested in education in order to develop a strategy, while another may be looking for ideas to give her a better direction. That’s not even to discuss the students or hobbyists!

Your job will be to put together your own list of possible searchers, interests, and needs, then determine which combinations lead to your audience(s). This won’t necessarily be used to eliminate particular segments of searchers, though, it likely will, but rather it can be used to make sure you are speaking to your audience based on who they are, what they want, and what their goals are.

Target Your Entire Audience, Not Just Journalists

The one thing PR professionals need to remember is that, when putting out online content, your target audience is not just journalists. Your online audience should be much bigger than a small group of people who may or may not be interested in writing about your PR.

Aside from journalists and information seekers, there are three types of searchers that may be interested in your content. These three groups are built around how people shop for online content, but the principles can apply to all different kinds of searchers, depending on what kinds of phrases they are using to search.

Researchers: The first group of searchers is researchers. These are people looking for information, but they may not quite be sure as to what exactly they need. They are using broad terms that will pull up a vast array of websites and types of content. Many of these researchers are using the search results to help them refine their search criteria. As they scan headlines and content, they get a better idea of what kind of information they are seeking.

Shoppers: This group has gotten enough information to begin to narrow down their search. In the shopping world they are no longer looking for a TV, but have decided on the Sony TV. As they continue to search, read and scan content, they are learning more about their topic and using that to decide what further details do they want or need and then taking that information to perform even more specific searches.

Buyers: This last group are those that are looking for very specific information. Not just a Sony TV but maybe a 52′ Sony 3D 1080p. They’ve gone through the research and shopping phase and now know exactly what information they need to be satisfied. Shoppers use 4-6 word phrases that give them a very specific set of search results to ensure less scanning of worthless content and a greater focus on getting this last bit of info.

Targeting researchers, shoppers, and buyers is critical in drawing in a larger audience, and an audience that might actually be a “converting” audience. Some of these will become customers, some will socialize your information, and others will report on it. All of these are important targets to reach.

Having done your background research on your keywords and your audience, you’re then ready to begin to start writing your content in a way that will reach the maximum number of people on the web. We’ll look more into that in Part 4.

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.

I started this series looking at the differences between print readers and web readers. This is critical to understand before moving forward with your online public relations material. We cannot expect to reach online readers the same way we reach those that are offline. We can’t just do the old-world methods in a new-world medium.

The differences between the two readers is vast, and, without that understanding, there will be no way to hit the goals you are trying to achieve. But once you have a firm grasp on who your online audience is, and how they react, you can begin to set attainable goals for your online PR.

Goals of Online PR

Every piece of content you create should have a goal in mind. What is it trying to achieve? What do you want people to do? How is this going to benefit your company? These and many other questions need to be answered before you even begin writing.

Being online, we have to look at specific set of goals that are unique to the web. As we noted at the end of Part 1, there are three things we have to keep in mind: Search, Social, and Conversions. What goals do we need to have in place in order to be successful in each of those areas?

Let’s look at four goals of your online PR. These should help you in crafting better pieces of content designed for the internet audience.

Goal 1: Get Noticed

The idea of generating any piece of content is to get noticed. What’s the point of writing if no one is going to see it, right? I mean, this isn’t just an exercise in futility… we want people to read what we write, dang it!

What you’re looking for is the double take. Imagine driving down the highway and suddenly you spot a purple cow. What the?! You’re going to do a double take. That’s what you want your online content to do, to stand out in a way that people go, “Holy purple cow, Batman, did you read that!”

Now be careful. You don’t want to lead people down a false path here. Don’t pull a bait-and-switch. Once they do that double take, make sure the second take is every bit worth it.

So, what happens next? What should your piece of content do once you get some eyeballs on it? That’s brings us to goal number 2.

Goal 2: Get Traffic

Traffic is essential to having a successful PR campaign. Your content may do a great job of getting noticed, but is that translating into traffic to your website? If not, then your “hot” piece has utterly failed.

You want to make sure that people don’t just read your single piece of PR then move on to something else. Your content should only be the teaser. It should act as a doorway into the real content: your website. Speaking in terms of food, you want people to move from the appetizer to the main course.

Is your content interesting enough to keep people engaged with your brand? Is it creating traffic beyond the piece itself, or is it just a (dead) end unto itself? No content should be the end. Heck, even after an order for a product is placed, the goal then is to bring the visitor back to start the purchase process all over again.

While your PR piece may be designed to inform, it also needs to have a reason to be informative. Information for the sake of information is what we call “useless knowledge.” I already have plenty of that!

Once you start moving people through the process from reading to engaging with your site, you have to then look at whether you are delivering the right traffic to your site. Which brings us to goal number 3.

Goal 3: Get Customers

Getting customers is one of the key goals of any online business. Now I use the word “customer” loosely. That can be whatever is meaningful to you. A customer could be someone who buys your product, or someone who downloads your white paper, or engages with you in Facebook. A customer can be anything you determine it to be. It really depends on your industry and what you are trying to accomplish with your business.

If you’re not getting customers, whatever those are to you, what are you getting? Traffic? Hits? Page views? A round of applause?

Is that enough for you, or do you want more than that? What is the content delivering for you, and how do you use your PR piece to bring new customers into the fold?

“You mean I actually have to produce something that produces something?” Well, yeah. Content just for the sake of being read is nothing more than a bunch of words on the page. Every piece of content should speak to your potential customers, encourage them to engage, and ultimately lead them to that conversion point.

Of course, not every visitor can turn into an instant customer. But there is a way to get them to become an evangelist for you, which leads us to goal number 4.

Goal 4: Get Links

The web is fueled by links. If no one linked to anyone, how would you find any content? Search engines? Well, they use links to find the new content. So, if they can’t find it, then your audience can’t find it either. That means your content not only has to produce customers, but it also has to get customers, and non-customers alike, to pass it on via links and social shares.

So, how do you make link-worthy content? Well, there are three steps. 1) Get noticed. 2) Get traffic. 3) Get customers!

Huh. Those look familiar.

If your content is doing those things, and the visitors that read each piece find the information in it valuable, then it is more likely to be passed, linked, or shared. And that’s what you want. Why? Because the more your piece of content is linked or shared, the bigger potential it has of reaching more customers.

More links means better rankings and more traffic from your target audience. More traffic means more customers. More customers means more links. It’s a magnificent cycle to be in!

Every piece of PR may have a different set of immediate goals, but the four goals mentioned above shouldn’t ever change. These are your universal constants in the online marketing world. If your content isn’t hitting these four goals, you need to rethink what you’re doing. It’s not that there is anything wrong with the writing itself, but perhaps you’re not writing with the right goals in mind.

Refocusing your content onto these new goals will help ensure that your online PR strategy lines up with a search and social world, which really just means it’s doing the job it was intended to do.

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.

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.

One feature of this tool that allows you to do just that is called “Rising Searches.” These are searches that have experienced significant growth in a given time period, with respect to the preceding time period. It’s where and how things are changing. This is golden information because by the time keyword markets are well established, it’s more of an uphill battle to dominate there. You can clearly see how the benefits you get from positioning yourself at the forefront of web search interest trends are huge. Insights for Search is a great place to look to make that happen.

So, you look at the volume of a keyword theme and you are given up to 10 rising searches in this market. This should immediately give you insights; whether it’s competitor’s names, a feature, a benefit or hopefully YOUR company name! You can immediately ask why? and gain intelligence that could help guide future decisions regarding all aspects of your business.

Let’s take an easy example from the past. In the chart below, we are shown the search volume over time of the keyword “emr” (short for electronic medical records). In just looking at the graph, we see a pretty consistent trend…

But, look at what we find in the rising searches column.

#1 is “ipad emr.”  It was a breakout term.  When you see Breakout listed instead of an actual percentage, it means that the search term has experienced a change in growth greater than 5000%.  This makes a lot of sense since doctors and nurses are acquiring ipads to look up patients medical records at a fast rate.  So, for those companies that offer EMRs, did they know that ipads were going to be used as a main emr tool?  Did they know fast enough to be one of the first to offer the app?  If they were, did they incorporate this keyword phrase into their online marketing campaigns?  Did they use SEO, PPC, content creation, etc. to attract these prospects before their competitors did?

And now, look at how things have changed when comparing this year to last year…

Looks like now there’s more of an “incentive” for using an emr, or at least more of an interest in it.  Are searchers coming to you to find out what that is?  Is that a part of your keyword strategy?

From this simple example, you can see how being at the forefront of dynamic keyword research at the appropriate time would have been a big advantage for a company in the emr market, keeping them ahead of the curve before it was too late.  Part of dominating the search game is taking advantage of the long-tail of keyword themes.  Keeping your eyes on rising searches can give you the intelligence to do it.

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, here’s the problem with your keyword research.  It’s static. You get a number and you compare it to other numbers at a single point in time.  That’s great for that day, that month, or even that year.  But as you know, your industry changes.  There’s new advances, new challenges, new demands, etc.;  and part of winning is staying ahead of your competition.

Well, how are you going to do that if you’re not understanding the ecosystem of your industry online RIGHT NOW and what’s forecasted for the future?  Those keywords you optimized for last year might still be great, but what’s old news?, what’s new?, where is there opportunity to get ahead of the competition?  Can you create content about a pressing question that searchers have that will help drive brand awareness?  The only way to see that is by looking at keyword search interest in trends and not static numbers.  It’s DYNAMIC keyword research. The trends give another dimension to the numbers that help tell a different story of what’s going on.

Are there popular keyword searches for our industry RIGHT NOW that aren’t currently on our keyword list?  If they are on our keyword list, are we currently ranking for them?  How does their search interest compare to phrases that we have targeted in the past and/or we do rank for? Has this changed since we last did keyword research? Why has it changed? Has it changed worldwide or just in specific countries? If search interest has gone up, have the visits to our website kept pace? Why or why not?

Not only can you look at trend volumes, but you can look at them by geography as well.  How does this lead to insights?  For example, you may look at your #1 targeted keyword and find that it’s very popular in the United States, but Canada is a close 2nd.  But, when you compare your brand name to your top 5 competitors in Canada, you’re nowhere to be found and your analytics data confirms it because you’re getting very little brand keyword visits to your site from Canada.  So, your product or service is very popular, but you aren’t.  Why?  How have you failed and how can you fix it?

If you’re Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft; you may notice how video games exploded in popularity around 2009 in India…

but wonder why your brand did not…

Now, I have no idea if there’s any legs to it, there may be a great reason why.  But, if there isn’t a great reason, then this would be good to know right?  Absolutely.

So, it’s simple tool but also a digging tool.  The more questions you ask of the data, questions your competitors aren’t asking; the more insights will pop out at you with market intelligence that can put you a step ahead.  You will know why the word “insights” is in the name (although I think a better name might have been “Insights from Search” because these insights aren’t just FOR search, they’re for every marketing channel).

Good marketing is a continuous endeavor of adjusting to the ebbs and flows of your industry’s ecosystem and looking for areas where you can get out in front of the competition by giving your prospects what they are telling you they’re looking for.  Get to know how to use this tool really well and you can do just that.  Stay tuned for more on this…

I can’t help thinking, what’s wrong with THIS picture?

For the past 10 years, I’ve made my living as a marketing and PR writer, and – though I scorn pandering, hyperbole and truth twisting – I’ve had to spin some yarns from time to time. Traditionally, companies have attracted people to their product or service by hyping it. The more alluring or creative (or shocking) your advertisement, the more likely people are to notice it, for at least a second. However, the majority have clearly become jaded by and distrustful of this old approach.

Content marketing, on the other hand, appeals more to reason and relationships than to hype. That’s what happens when consumers – who are usually inclined to educate themselves before buying – now have the power to do so at their fingertips. They’re looking for solid advice, helpful conversations and enough useful information to enable them to make a well-informed purchase. That’s what the Web can deliver.

I like this shift away from hype and toward authenticity. It’s attractive to me personally, and, judging from the growth of Internet communication and commerce, it also appeals to millions and millions of others across the globe.

In his book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR, David Meerman Scott says, “The Web is different. Instead of one-way interruption [that's common with traditional marketing and advertising], Web marketing is about delivering useful content at just the precise moment that a buyer needs it.”

Do writers use the Web to deliver false information? Yes. Do companies still provide biased opinions in their Internet content? Absolutely. (Will my kids still have to be careful of online ploys? Without a doubt!) The key is that there are many voices on the Web, and it behooves a business to be as honest, transparent and responsive as possible. In the long run, this approach will help them build trust with their customers and garner more loyalty than an amusing commercial or billboard ever will.

I am excited to be part of this new marketing strategy and welcome the changes it brings to my industry.

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.