Business owners are always asking me how SEO works and what’s important to achieve great search engine marketing visibility for the terms that describe the products and servcies they sell.  So I went searching for good resources that can describe SEO in a way that is simple and straightforward, using terms someone not in the industry can easily understand.  I found this great SEO video (click on the image to the left) on You Tube (only 3.5 minutes) that gives a great explanation.  This video was created by Common Craft in cooperation with Search Engine Land, a leading search marketing resources organization full of great information about a variety of search engine marketing. 

As a quick summary about the video, it lists 5 important elements for SEO: 1) titles of the web-page, 2) content on the page, 3) links coming into the page, 4) the actual wording of links on the page and coming from other websites, and 5) good reputation and fresh content.  It is important to note that each web-page stands on its own in the eyes of the search engines.  Your website might have 20, 50 or 1,000 pages and each of those pages stands on its own. 

In the recent study, ”2011 State of Digital Marketing Report” compiled by Webmarketing123, a California-based online marketing agency, it was found that SEO was the best performing online lead generation tactic for both B2B and B2C companies.  While SEO may not be the best overall marketing tactic for some companies, as the internet continues to grow in its marketing, all companies should at least evaluate how SEO can perform for them.

One technique I have found effective is just to start brainstorming.  Open up a blank document and just start entering any terms that seem remotely related to the client’s business.  Try some variations of the basic phrases.  This is the time to get a bit unconventional, following tangents and capturing terms that may or may not work.  You can also use keyword research tools such as those found at semrush.com to explore keywords used by competing websites.  The intent at this phase is simply to build a list.

Once you have a nice comprehensive list, I like to throw it into the Google Keyword Research tool.  This can be found as a resource in any Google AdWords control panel. Running the keywords through this tool will generate a list that has fields for monthly search volumes, relative competition, and cost targets for the keywords if used in PPC campaigns.  I then export this list into Excel.

I use the Excel spreadsheet to create an additional column that I reference as KEI, the keyword effectiveness index.  This is calculated by dividing the monthly search volume by the relative competition.  This has the effect of a significant multiplier for monthly volume if the number of competing web pages is low.  Sort the spreadsheet by decreasing KEI, and you now have a ranked list of potential keyword terms.  Terms toward the top of the list can yield some “nuggets” in the way of terms that can have a significant volume of monthly searches, but relatively few competing web pages.

Now go down the list and perform actual searches for the terms, being sure to first log out of the search engine you are using.  This will give an indicating of whether or not the particular keyword term could be a good fit for your client.  If you see a number of the client’s competitors in the first couple pages of results, and the term seems to fit the client’s business model, add  it to the short list of keyword finalists.  Once you have identified a manageable list of candidate terms, add any geographic qualifiers.  This is important if the client’s business is focused on a metro area of a particular city, for instance.

Finally, meet with your client and review the proposed list. It helps at this point to be able to show the client how they presently rank for the candidate terms.  A big challenge at this point is often convincing the client not to dismiss the “nugget” terms you have found.  These terms may not be obvious to the client, but could generate substantial relevant traffic to the client’s website in a relatively short amount of time.

So I decided to test the viability of using a social media platform for market research and created two Linked In polls.  The first was around use of the poll feature itself – seeking to get feedback from others about whether they even respond to polls on social media sites.  The second was sort of a test poll.  This was done just to compare results.  It is important to note that I “don’t hide under a rock”.  I am fairly well known in the community and perceive I have a positive personal brand image, and I have nearly 1,000 Linked In connections.  I state this to support the fact that the social media (Linked In) polls I created were seen by a lot of people that know me fairly well.

The first poll asked the question “Do You Participate in Linked In Polls?”.  This poll ran for about 30 days.  I received 13 responses as follows:

• Very Frequently – 15% of respondents
• Somewhat Frequently – 31% of respondents
• Seldom – 46% of respondents
• Never – 8% of respondents

In summary, 54% of respondents seldom or never participate in a social media – Linked In poll.  Additionally, only about 1% of my Linked In contacts even participated in the poll.  One could extrapolate that to mean 0.6% of LinkedIn connections participate in social media polls, specifically Linked In polls.

Disappointed with these results, I decided to do another survey on a much timelier and lighter topic just to see if I got different results about overall social media poll participation on Linked In.  A week before the Super Bowl I created another Linked In poll.  This one asked the question “Who will win the Super Bowl?”  In the seven days before the Super Bowl the poll only received 6 responses – 0.6% of my total Linked In connections.  (BTW – the Pats were picked 4 times vs. the Giants). 

The missing ingredient here might just be giving people an extra reason to participate in a Linked In poll.  Perhaps if I gave a gift card to a nice restaurant or something, more people would participate.  I’ll have to try that next time.  The lesson though is if you are going to use social media to do market research and in particular Linked In polls, you’ll probably have to sweeten the deal and give something away in order to get enough respondents to make your poll results valid.

The next natural question, a question that any business asks at some point in time, is ”how do we create customers”.  In my meeting with the awesome people I work with, we decided that in the business services arena in which we operate, referrals is an effective way to create “warm” leads and new customers.  We do other things to market and promote the company but have found that referrals from our existing customers have fueled our growth for the past 8 years.  Then the challenge became – “how do we get more referrals from the marketplace”?  My research continued and I came across the concepts of “raving fans” and using Net Promoter Score (NPS) to evaluate how we are doing.  By the end of the meeting with my team, we decided that our mission in business is to “create raving fans” and we were going to use NPS to track how we are doing.  If you want to learn more about NPS, go to my favorite search engine (Google) and type in “net promoter score”.  It is very popular – you’ll find tons of info about it. 

Our “raving fans” program included contracting with a market research company to call our customers.  (Note – if you are one of our customers and haven’t been contacted at least once in the last 90 days, please let me know.)  During the survey calls we ask the infamous question – “how likely are you to refer us to someone seeking our kinds of services?”  That’s the primary question to ask when using NPS to measure your reputation in the marketplace.

If you are unfamiliar with NPS, here’s how it works.  You ask the “would you recommend” question based on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the most likely.  Ratings of 9′s and 10′s are considered “promoters”.  They are actively promoting your business and saying good things about you when someone is asking about the services you provide.  Rating’s of 7′s and 8′s are considered “neutrals”.  They neither promote you nor “trash” you.  They are simply neutral when it comes to they way they think about you.  Ratings of 6 or below are considered “detractors”.  These are people who for whatever reason don’t think highly of you and when in a conversation about your services will likely discourage others from working with you.  To get your final NPS rating, you simply deduct the % of ”detractors” from the percentage of “promoters”.  For example, if the % of “promoters” to your total survey results is 60% and the % of “detractors” to your total survey results is 20%, then your NPS is 40.  The reason NPS is so popular, and the reason we have adopted it as our metric for measuring our reputation in the marketplace is because studies have proven a high correlation between NPS and business growth/success.  It does make sense. 

Not to boast, our NPS is high in the business sector in which we operate and our business is growing.  Even though we focus on the online space to market our customers’ businesses, word-of-mouth reputation in the marketplace continues to be one of the most important elements of any marketing plan.  If you are  seeking a way to measure your word-of-mouth reputation, check out the NPS concept.  Good luck.

On several sites the lowest res turned out to be anywhere from 6-9% which made me think that maybe it is close to time to bail on this low res, allowing us to create bigger and more beautiful sites with a larger browser canvass. But then I noticed something interesting – several sites where showing 1024px at a whopping 15 to 20% still. I think it is fair to say that once the percentage of users on 1024px starts to drop sub 10% then it’s at least time to rexamine things. One fifth is a pretty sizeable chunk of viewers though no? The more I looked the more I realized these were not outliers but fairly ubiquitous across hundreds of sites we have built.

So what’s the answer then?

I think for now the infinite background is the better option – no sense in cutting out a sizeable chunk of users based on a desire to make the website larger on screen. Maybe further into 2012 this might change.

However, the answer in my mind is strongly dependent not on global browser statistic averages but rather on whether or not you have data on your specific website. If you have access to, lets say, the last 6 months of Analytics data that will help you understand what the user demographic is for your particular site. Of course it’s entirely possible that there might be something about your site that causes users to require a larger resolution, or a smaller one or perhaps they prefer to visit your site from a phone. Understanding your demographic and how they interact with your online presence is key to understanding how it should be presented to them.

 We heard recently that our beloved Short Pump Towne center received complaints from the ACLU about a technology they activated that tracks customer movement by monitoring their cell phone signals.  It is reported the mall owners are now holding off on this technology due to these concerns.  ACLU of Virginia Executive Director Kent Willis stated “new technologies give businesses more ability to trace customers’ movements and buying habits, nothing prevents them from sharing that information with the government.”

 On the contrary, it seems that some consumers are warming to the idea of connecting with geo-location information including deals and special offers.  While many mobile users have taken advantage of their device’s ability to connect location with useful information, such as maps, directions or recommendations, comparatively few (12% or so) are catching on to the check-in trend.  But things are changing as smart-phone owners are becoming more interested in other types of location-based services—especially deals.   According to a study by HipCricket, interest in time- or location-based mobile offers had increased from 40% of smart-phone owners in 2008 to 54% this year.

 It will be interesting to see how all this comes together.  For marketers, location based marketing and promotion offer attractive opportunities.  For consumers, what’s better than knowing you can take advantage of a special offer while you are in the vicinity?  Nevertheless, the privacy concerns are legit and it will be interesting to see how the “coming together of the minds” will occur.  Hopefully (and probably) in the end, the consumer will win.

Asking these companies what they wanted to achieve most from their digital marketing activities, those in the B2B space wanted to generate leads on which their sales efforts could close the deal.  For those in the B2C space it was all about generating sales.  In response to the question about how they measure their digital marketing success, all companies said overall website traffic was their main benchmark, followed by lead generation and sales.

For all companies, search engine marketing (SEO and Paid Search) was their most effective lead generation and sales tactic, with 75% of companies indicating so.  This was followed by social media marketing, which was reported 25% of the time as having the biggest positive impact.  As the social media world evolves, it appears companies are learning that social media may be a more of a branding and awareness tool than a lead generation and sales tool.

Furthermore, the survey asked for responses relative to social media marketing – specifically with which social networks the participating firms were most active – and separated it between those in the B2B and B2C space.  Not surprisingly, Facebook was by far the dominant network for B2B.  For B2B companies there was a more even distribution of activity.   When asked if they had ever generated leads from their social media marketing activities, LinkedIn was found to be the most effective lead generation source for B2B, while Facebook clearly was the leader on the B2C side.

Finally, responding firms were asked about their marketing budget allocations and how they will change going into 2012.  Historically, search engine marketing has dominated marketing budgets with 60%+ going to this medium, and 10-15% going to social media depending in what space they operate.

This is a great, revealing survey but what does this mean to you and your business, and what should you do?  The following two graphs show what has been and what will be marketing investment allocations going forward into the new year.  Here are some suggestions:

1. Who are your main competitors and how are they positioned in the search engines compared to you?  Search engines being the most positive online lead and sales generation tactic, it is important to assess your positioning here and decide how to allocate marketing budget and what search engine strategy makes the most sense for you.
2. Depending on what space you operate in (B2B or B2C) you should evaluate your positioning in Facebook and LinkedIn.  Are your competitors active in these mediums?  How good is their content and is this an opportunity for you to develop a specific “personality” in FB or LI and carve out a niche for yourself?
3. Ask someone knowledgable in this space for what he/she sees working for other companies.  Search engine marketing may be the best lead and sales generation tactic, but it may not be best for your type of company.  Same with social media.  It is attractive because it is essentially free, but it can also be time consuming.  Do your customers want to interact with you on the social networks?  Are your customers even using social networks for their business dealings?  These are all questions you can ask yourself and someone else to determine where your marketing budgets should be allocated.

So a little while back we started building casting “packages”, if you will, that basically fire out your most recent blog post to about 30 different networking sites. Pretty neat! so not only will my blog post be added to the usual blog RSS feed but several of the big social networking players receive it too … Facebook, Twitter, GTalk, Friendfeed, Delicious … the list goes on.

But wait, there’s more! Not only can I reach many of my friends and associates on social sites this way, but there are also some positive SEO ramifications. Carefully worded and content rich blog posts (with useful linking and video content too perhaps) automatically become back-linked to my blog and (if incorporated) my website.

So not just a useful tool for making my life easier but extra Web marketing related benefits too?? Nice.  :)

David McKillen, WebStrategies Inc.

The challenge becomes identifying the RIGHT web analytics data to use when measuring and optimizing marketing campaigns.  Following are 5 steps to making sure you are looking at the right web analytics information:

1. Make a list of the various ways you are marketing or advertising your business.  Then go into your Google Analytics and segment your traffic to match those advertising methods.  If you can’t identify the sources in your data, then you should consider setting up some advanced segments and/or separate profiles.  This will enable you to evaluate the effectiveness of each marketing/advertising tactic.
2. Have you decided what you want your website to accomplish?  If you have, then make sure you have tagged those items and configured your web analytics data for Event Tracking and Goals.  Combined with #1 above, you’ll be able to see how many goals you are achieving for each of your marketing/advertising tactics.  If you haven’t set goals for your website, then navigate through it and identify (or create) calls-to-action.  These could be downloading of information, signing up for newlsetter, scheduling an appointment, etc. 
3. Look at your top Landing Pages and evaluate how well they are performing for you.  When reviewing landing page performance, look at bounce rate and time-on-page.  These are “engagement metrics”.  If you find a landing page that gets a lot of views and has poor “engagement metrics”, take a look at the page to determine how you can improve it for better engagement.
4. Look at your top Keywords, those search phrases (keywords) that people are using to come to your site.  Evaluate keyword performance using some of the same “engagement metrics” as described in #3 above.  If you see keywords that are very relevant to your business but the “engagement metrics” are weak, then you need to evaluate landing page performance and content.   
5. If you are doing much offline advertising, obtain some unique domain names (website addresses) that resemble your brand or what you do.  For example, let’s say you provide plumbing services and your web address is WatkinsPlumbing.com.  Get an alternative web address like WatkinsPlumbers.com or FlowingFreely.com.  Then, assign a unique web address to your print advertising and tag that in your Google Analytics account.  Now you can see how many people are coming to your website from print advertising.

Just like in Moneyball, use the data to make good decisions.  Someone might say you should pay to advertise on another site because this other site gets a lot of traffic.  You might be enamored by you getting millions of eyeballs looking at your link but if no one clicks or those that do click and come to your site don’t do anything meaningful when they get there, then that “traditional approach” may not be the best approach for you.

The following are three ideas that can put you on the right track to better understanding the impact of mobile on your website.

Idea #1: What % of my visitors are coming from mobile devices:

This is the first question worth asking about our mobile traffic. While we watch the mobile industry explode all around us, we need to know how it’s affecting us right now. When it comes to profiling our mobile traffic, Google Analytics helps us answer this overriding question (among several others). When we first started reporting mobile usage on our client sites late last year, we saw usage somewhere in the 1-10% range. Now we’re seeing it in the 5-20% range.

The question is: are your visitors the early adopters or laggards? Is 1 in 5 of your visitors on a mobile device? If not, when can you expect them to be and what needs to be done to address this critical shift in website user activity?

The first step is easy enough: understand the ratio and understand if the criticality of mobile will be a problem down the road or a problem right now. Next, understand the nuances within this mobile segment so you know how to tackle it.

Idea #2: Segment the mobile traffic by device type

Some assume the designation of “mobile” only applies to smartphones, but as tablet devices increase in popularity and capability, we find them establishing themselves within the broader mobile category. When it comes to functionality – e.g. user interface and operating system design –  tablets are designed more like smartphones than desktop computers. Tablets are touch devices like most smartphones and have a retooled operating system based on the simplicity of the major mobile operating systems.

So while the functionality and feel of a mobile device is more similar to a smartphone than a laptop, there is an key attribute that influences the user experience even more: the size. While most tablets may look like oversized smartphones, the bigger screen makes the experience of using a website more like that of a laptop than a smartphone.

Tablet screens generally range in size from 7 inches (BlackBerry PlayBook, Samsung Galaxy Tab, HTC Flyer among others) to about 10 inches (iPad, Sony Tablet S, Samsung Galazy Tab 10.1 among others). In our research from sites we surveyed, we found only a tiny portion of tablet traffic (1-2%) come from 7 inch tablet devices. The rest of the tablet traffic are coming from iPads (~98%) which measure in just shy of 10 inches. Looking at industry data, iPads represents 68% of the global tablet market share followed by Android-based tablets at 27% and RIM at 5%. So while the industry data is a far cry from the almost unanimous preference we saw, the industry data still shows a strong overall preference for the iPad. Pulling data points from different sites, we found tablets represent anywhere from 25-35% of mobile traffic while total mobile traffic was 10-20% of overall site traffic. In other words, tablets are only a slice of a slice of the overall pie. But like everything else mobile, this segment is growing fairly consistently.

How does tablet traffic compare?

When it comes to visitor behavior, we found tablet traffic tends to behave much more like your desktop traffic than your smartphone traffic. On the sites we surveyed, we found our tablet traffic bounced 3-10% less than average, viewed 5% more pages during their visit than average and generally converted at or just below average. However smartphone traffic performed far less favorably in all of these categories – bouncing anywhere from 25-45% higher, viewing about 41% fewer pages in their visit and converting as low as 75% less than site average.

Tablet traffic tends to behave much like desktop traffic in terms of engagement and conversions. Smartphones are just the opposite.

What it means:

We may throw tablets into the mobile bucket, but tablet visitors behave just as well, if not better, than our desktop users. Smartphone visitors, on the other hand, behave far worse. When considering how well (or not well) your mobile traffic engages your site, it’s best to treat your tablet visitors and smartphone visitors as separate segments.

Why do we see this behavior?

Going back to the data above, most of your tablet traffic are on iPads with 10 inch screens. Holding up an iPad to a 13 or 15 inch lap top screen, you’ll quickly understand how much more an iPad is like the laptop on your desk than it is the smartphone in your pocket.

Our data is further supported by the nearly identical functionality between the iPhone and the iPad – the difference only being the extra 6.5 inches in screen. A difference that makes, well, all the difference.

Flash or No Flash

Most new smartphones support Adobe Flash. That is, most smartphones except Apple mobile devices. Apple made a bit of a splash when it announced its iPhone and iPad product lines would NOT support flash. Many predicted it would have a significantly negative impact on whether people choose Apple hardware.

Now we have to consider how much this matters. Going to back the sites we surveyed, we found 65-75% of mobile traffic was viewing the site from an Apple mobile device. So if your site is dependent on flash in any way, most mobile visitors are receiving a subpar experience. The number of websites using flash overall is slightly on the decline (perhaps for this very reason), but with a quarter of total websites using flash, it certainly presents an issue.

Time to take action: The solution is simple: have one site that services both your desktop visitors and your mobile visitors (quite the challenge!) or have a separate desktop/tablet site and a separate smartphone site. Treat them as independent sites, optimize them accordingly and analyze their visitors separately.

Now you need to ask yourself: Is mobile significant for you right now? What is the makeup of my mobile visitors? Is your website coded in a way that’s not friendly to all devices? Answering these questions will better prepare you for what the internet will transform into over the next 12-18 months.