Good SEO Client Communications

Following up the previous post about SEO reporting to clients, another major part of over-delivering to clients is how you communicate with them. Every time you send something to a client, you need to be crystal clear on the following two points…

First, you need to tell them what you are sending them and why. This should go without saying, however, all too often someone new to the business of working with clients will send out a document to a client without being clear about what it is. If you are sending a keyword universe to show the client some early research and you are not clear about what this is, they will be confused. Confused clients are a bad thing; they get cranky quickly. Be clear; explain what you are sending and why you sent it.

Secondly, summarize each document’s major takeaway. Many deliverables and reports can read like a foreign language to the non tech-savvy. To avoid this, be sure to explain the significance of each report and technical document. You can send a client a well-written thousand page report on their SEO, but if you do not sum up the main points succinctly, your recipient will likely miss them. Never assume that a client will understand or even read what you send them. Most of the time you are working with managers who see their company at a very high level. All they really want to know is that you’re getting the job done and that the traffic and money are flowing. It is your job to convince them of that.

Under Promise, Over Deliver

Probably one of the best pieces of advice I can give for anyone selling in any field, especially SEO, is to always under promise and then over deliver. A very quick way to impress a client, ensure client retention, and promote referrals from them is to promise them a mule and give them a stallion. This isn’t to say sell yourself short, however, when you are selling SEO, there are many variables that you cannot foresee. Make sure the client is well aware that ranking for their keywords might be difficult and take some time. If/when you start ranking and send a lot of traffic much more quickly than promised, the client will be thrilled.

Don’t just use this advice on the initial sell. Continue to set expectations below what you think you can deliver. There is nothing worse than giving the client a expectation that is never met. If this happens, there is nothing worse than constantly trying to get out of a hole you dug for yourself.

Anatomy of an SEO Crisis

One of my duties at ACCM 2008 in Orlando was to host a table at “Lunch with the Experts”. The table’s stated topic was one Netconcepts specializes in — SEO for large-scale ecommerce sites. Most of the table’s discussion revolved around two representatives from a company in a true SEO crisis. Their product pages were invisible in search engines, and their ancient and outdated CMS was about as search-unfriendly as possible — it even used frames! To add insult to injury, the people who understood that the website had problems were having a great deal of trouble convincing management to redesign the company site.

So the first element of the crisis is the technology. The site in its present condition is unable to generate any natural search engine traffic to the company’s many hundreds of product pages.

The second element is internal company politics; for whatever reason, someone high in the corporate hierarchy had an interest in using an inappropriate and underperforming CMS and wouldn’t relent unless the two ACCM attendees were able to present a solid business case for making dramatic technical changes. The two men’s purpose at ACCM was to collect information and material that would help support that business case.

The third element to the crisis is that the company is losing potential customers. Through extensive research, they’d determined that the Web was the number one way to attract new customers, and so they have relied on paid search placement via Google AdWords. They’ve had some success there, but understand that they’d do much better through high placement in organic results. They really needed their product pages to place well for their selected keywords (I didn’t ask them much about keywords, so I don’t know for certain that they’re on the right track as far as determining placement).

A few missed customers might not seem like a serious enough issue to label the situation a crisis… until you take into account the fact that this company’s products are such that potential customers only buy once about every ten years. So if you miss today’s opportunities, they will likely not show up again for quite a long time. A lost sale is a major problem for this corporation, and improved search engine optimization is the quickest, easiest, and least expensive way to solve it.

You might have guessed that I recommended GravityStream, Netconcepts’ proxy-based automated SEO platform. As fun as it is to battle one’s IT department, upper management and the accompanying internal politics, IMHO a proxy server that sidesteps these things adds to one’s career longevity.

ACCM 2008: Improving Conversion from SEM Traffic

Another great search marketing session at ACCM 2008 was “Conversion is your secret weapon,” given by Wine Enthusiast’s VP of marketing Glenn Edelman and The Rimm-Kaufman Group’s Larry Becker. The first part of the session concentrated on in-depth ways of determining advertising ROI and effectiveness. The general advice that Web marketers get on this subject can be pretty lightweight, but these guys gave some really great advice:

• Track at both the keyword and the ad level
• Pay as close attention to your organic search results as you do to your PPC results
• Choose your tracking technology carefully; if possible, use multiple redundant solutions

The second half of the session concentrated on both landing page design and general site design — the other half of the search marketing equation (it’s not all about keyword research and ad copy!) The presenters offered tips and tricks for fine-tuning your ads, landing pages, and your entire site as a whole. Every page needs to serve one of three purposes: It should offer information, an opportunity to buy, or an opportunity to click deeper into the site. In essence, every page is an offer page.

The presenters spent the last portion of the session talking in depth about usability as it applies to conversions and sales. They gave some examples of good and bad sites, concentrating specifically on the level of hassle of signup pages (and the degree to which visitors are satisfied after they’ve completed them).

Overall it was quite an informative session for search marketers. I’m sure everyone in the audience got at least one actionable tip from it.

ACCM 2008: Getting More out of PPC

The second search marketing intensive session at ACCM 2008 was all about how to maximize your PPC search engine marketing efforts. The speakers were Ryan Gibson of the Rimm-Kaufman Group and Glenn Edelman, VP of marketing at The Wine Enthusiast.

Much of the initial advice covered the basics of keyword research and calculating ROI, but there was also a wealth of detail in the presentation that you don’t usually hear in a typical PPC presentation. For instance, many people know that you have to track ad performance to determine the ROI sweet spot, but how far do you usually go with it? Do you track seasonality? Do you know the differences in ad performance according to day of the week? It’s this kind of analysis that can lead you to greater ad refinement and thus a better ROI.

A lot of people treat keyword research as an event, but it’s really a process, which the presenters instilled in the audience by showing that the search volume for a keyword plus the word review has gone up dramatically over time; people are increasingly using Google for product research. Keywords and search engine user trends evolve rapidly with time, so you have to keep an eye on search trends and regularly re-evaluate not only your keywords, but also your ad performance.

The session offered other excellent advanced details such as how to budget your advertising spend after you’ve determined your most valuable keywords — “As much as is profitable!” That sounds like obvious advice until you put it into the context of a typical, strictly limited business budget. If you’re doing more conversions and making more money for every dollar you put into your PPC campaign, why wouldn’t you keep plowing money into it until you reach a point where it drops off? I think a lot of marketers overlook that simple truth.

ACCM 2008: Reputation Management in the SERPs

If you haven’t had to deal with an online reputation management issue in the SERPs (search engine results pages) yourself, you probably know someone who has. Reputation management sounds like a vague marketing term, but it’s a burgeoning new area of SEO that encompasses monitoring what people are saying about you on the Web, combating negative or inaccurate information, influencing the sites you have control and sway over, and affecting sites’ search rankings to put your best foot forward in the SERPs. Maybe a few years ago you could have argued that the only companies that needed to deal with this issue are the ones that have a significant Web presence, but in this day and age, even mostly offline businesses have to deal with negative Internet exposure.

The presenters for the “Reputation management: Protecting your brand in search engines” intensive session at ACCM 2008 were Rob Key of Converseon; and Leo Odden of TopRank Online Marketing, and they had a lot of great advice for the attendees.

The first portion of the session dealt with how to find and keep tabs on the Web’s general opinions of you. In addition to the standard Google search, the presenters covered some unique reputation tools offered as standalone products, such as Andy Beal’s Trackur service, and as part of services (such as those that Converseon offers).

The next part of the session concentrated on how to combat negative blog and forum posts, and entire sites dedicated to directing angry comments at your company. Interestingly, the primary tactic the presenters recommended was traditional SEO — knocking the “bad” sites out of the top search results by boosting specific pages (ones that you control or have influence over) above them. The presenters also encouraged attendees to discover and leverage other Web sites that they may have some pull with, such as those controlled by friendly vendors, affiliates, colleagues, or personal friends.

The session ended with an overview of businesses that do well with reputation management and the tactics they use to maintain a positive SERP impression. eBay, for instance, uses a large number of category-specific subdomains to flood the SERPs with eBay-related sites that the company controls. So a search that involves the keyword ebay will be dominated by pages on eBay subdomains. eBay also leverages its network of sites to transfer link juice when necessary. And of course there were examples of companies that don’t do well with online reputation management, including PayPal (see the Google SERPs for “paypal” and feel their pain).

Overall it was a great session, the topic being particularly interesting and unique among the typical array of search marketing sessions at retailer/cataloger conferences.

Live Blogging ACCM: Increasing Web Sales on a Shoe String Budget

I’m here at ACCM in the session “Increasing Web Sales on a Shoe String Budget”. Here’s the session description:
As the cost of doing business online continues to increase, small businesses must be strategic and creative in how they expend limited funds and resources. This session will discuss ways to maximize your conversion and average order size without breaking the bank on expensive bells and whistles. Using solid web design, studying metrics and trends, taking advantage of strategic cost effective marketing and using strategic catalog mailings are all part of the frugal marketer’s playbook.

Mike Feiman of Pooldawg is up first. Pooldawg (a Netconcepts client, btw) was founded in 2003 and sells 2100+ pool cues. Pooldawg uses Google Analytics. Number of visits doesn’t really matter, it’s all about what they do while on your site. They are focused on visit length, visit depth, bounce rates, conversion rate. Have about 3000 pages total, fully indexed by Google, each page is a potential entry page. Very important to present a consistent feel throughout the site. Pooldawg buys PPC. Don’t get caught in bidding wars. Focus on the long tail. Drop keywords that don’t perform and focus on conversion and cost per action (CPA). They buy ads on Google Adwords, Microsoft adCenter, Yahoo Search Marketing. By chasing keywords they cost per conversion skyrockets. “billiards” as a search term converts poorly. Long Tail is where it’s at. Brand names + pool cues convert much better and are cheaper. They constantly evaluate keywords, trying to get them to perform by ad copy tweaks and landing page tweaks etc. and if they still don’t perform, they drop them from their PPC keyword list. Mike says: I’m willing to pay $1 a click if it’s costing me $5 a customer, but not $1 a click if it’s costing $40 a customer. People who use their internal search convert at 4x higher rate than those who do not. Signed up with Celebros and conversion jumped from 4x higher to 6x higher. Look at the results for searches coming through and if the results are poor, do something about it. Added a “Related Searches” tagging feature, thanks to Netconcepts, put them on the product page, and people use them. That creates more pages for Google to index, and they’re seeing search traffic already coming in directly to these pages. They just launched this but it’s already returning ROI. Only 10% of visitors are using the internal search. It’s really about taking advantage of their current customers rather than throwing money at getting all new customers. In terms of guerrilla marketing… Participating on message boards is hugely valuable to Pooldawg. They talk to the board leaders who then communicate to the forum users, sponsor the message boards. With blogging, they haven’t quite found their voice yet. They write articles internally and get them syndicated. One of their most popular articles is “the Anatamy of a pool cue”, get tons of traffic to that page and it converts really well, so the ROI on the hour it took to write the article was great. Before site redesign done by Netconcepts, only 30% indexation in Google. Now 100% and they rank really high. Affiliate marketing is great for low cost customer acquisition. 6-8 % of total sales. 1000 affiliates, and only 100 really drive any real revenue for Pooldawg. 49% of traffic from natural search, 9% from paid search. 85 of their Top 100 terms are in the top 5 rankings in Google, 80 of the Top 100 in Yahoo. Natural search is very cost effective. Give users engaging tools and content. Pooldawg is building a very nice library of proprietary content – over 100 articles – will be adding video too. They partner with trusted names and steer away from the shadier players in their market. Sponsor the WPBA, BCA, GenerationPool.com, AZBilliards.com – associate themselves with trusted names.

Steve Spangler, “Chief Mess Maker” (CEO) of Steve Spangler Science. Shows off his flaming wallet and how they took him to a private room at the airport. Steve is the originator of the Mentos + Diet Coke geyser experiment. Showing off some video of him on the Food Network, on the Ellen Show, on Denver’s 9News. Hilarious! Steve originally moved from public speaking for generating revenue to the website to do so. In 2005 the Mentos geyser things started to take off. How do you leverage this into a business that supports 30 employees? How do you go from an obscure backyard demo to an Internet phenomenon in less than 12 months? (i.e. get to 2 million + views on YouTube). In 2004 he wanted a redesign with some Flash but Stephan said no he wouldn’t do that but Netconcepts would create a blog instead. On June 1 2004 this amazing traffic spike happened. It was a brief mention of Instasnow and Steve Spangler Science on the blog BoingBoing. Stupid.com puts Instasnow on their stupidest products list and it gets on Good Morning America. Turned lemons (“bad press”?) into lemonade by blogging “It’s great to be stupid!” The blog is a perfect place for all sorts of great stories and testimonials like how Instasnow got a teacher out of a speeding ticket. Really important to write attention grabbing headlines on the blog: not “200 teachers engage in inquiry based science” but instead “Parents Beware: Teachers Gone Wild”. Not “Science project about pulling microscopic meteorites out of your gutter” but instead “A meteorite hit my house!” The blog post that really launched the whole Mentos geyser phenomenon, video news anchor wearing a beautiful St Johns outfit got covered with Diet Coke: “News Anchor Gets Soaked! Mentos Experiment Sets a New Record”. Where else would he put the fact that Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? called Steve and wanted to put a Mentos + Diet Coke question on air: the blog! Does the blog generate sales? Measured that and the answer is yes. Steve makes the Time 100 most influential people nominees list. Is blogging really worth the effort? It is! Currently blogging 2-3 times per week, have an editor helping find stuff to blog about. #1 in Google for “science experiments”. Big spike on Cybermonday. 3,000 inbound links. 4% of total traffic is from the blog, but 12% of sales are attributable to the blog! Now Steve is looking at expanding into Twitter. Amy Africa in the audience says: “I love Twitter!” but she’s being facetious. 1.8 million views on the Steve and news anchor Mentos + Diet Coke YouTube video. What should you blog if you want to make money: best-selling products, “Did you know?” product information loaded with keywords, company events – past and present, “Behind the Scenes” information, customer testimonials.

Ironic Google Ads Juxtaposed

I’m here at the ACCM conference. It’s been a fun show so far. Amy Africa’s session was hilarious and information-packed — awesome stuff! I presented on a SEM Lab (a site clinic) this morning. I was giving a tip to one of the site owners in the audience. Their most relevant keywords are very niche and hardly searched on at all. The more popular keywords weren’t really things that they offered, although those words were likely searches for their target audience. So I suggested they target these tangentially related keywords by offering a glossary of terms on their site. Each term, such as “market segmentation”, would have a page dedicated to it with not only a definition but also additional resources and links. Even better, they could make this glossary a wiki so that site visitors could add to and edit the definitions, thus encouraging visitor participation (i.e. “consumer generated content”!) and making the definitions more credible and more link-worthy because there was consensus from all the visitors. This really does work.

I showed the audience an example of this concept in action… specifically: SEO Glossary.com, a site that we at Netconcepts developed for marketing purposes.

We simply took a 12 page glossary of SEO terms that I used to hand out at conferences and turned it into a wiki. This site is ranked #1 and #2 in Google for “seo glossary”, among stiff competition, including Aaron Wall’s SEOBook. As I was explaining this in the session, I pulled up the SEO Glossary site and my co-panelists Matt Bailey and Detlev Johnson started laughing. I couldn’t figure out why they were laughing, so I had to ask. They told me: check out the Google ads on the page. On one hand, you have “Avoid SEO Malpractice: Know the Questions to Ask Your Prospective SEO Management Firm” and on the other you have the very dodgy sounding “Guaranteed Page 1 Ranking: Guaranteed Page 1 Rankings $49.95 No Charge Until You are on Page 1″. Oh the irony! It’s almost as if the first ad is referring specifically to its neighboring ad! I took a screenshot for posterity (the one shown directly above; the red arrow I added myself for effect )

An SEO “Contest” to Free Tibet?

Sometimes we in the search community get drawn into playful SEO contests where we compete with each other to rank for some nonsense phrase like “nigritude ultramarine.” That’s all fine and good, but it’s merely ego stroking. It doesn’t make the world a better place. What could we SEOs do for the greater good? One idea is we could help the Tibetans by raising awareness of their plight. And now would be an opportune time to do it, considering that the Olympics are right around the corner. As outlined in the SEOs for Tibet post on Changes For Good, the idea in a nutshell is to get SEOs to join forces and send a bunch of “link love” to a Tibet-related site like FreeTibet.org, in order to boost its rank in Google for “olympics” — thus raising awareness and perhaps spurring on demonstrations at the Olympics by attendees. For optimal results, the Tibet-related site would need to concurrently implement some on-page SEO as well and adopt “olympics” as a keyword theme on their home page.

An interesting idea? Does it have legs?

Art of the Link Bait

If you have been around social media marketing for any amount of time, you have heard the term “link bait.” It’s a great way to gain traffic, readership, and rankings — but what actually is it?

Link bait refers to something that grabs the attention of the blogosphere and makes people want to link to it from their blogs or tell their friends about it. It really can be just about anything, however, some link bait does better than others.

Two approaches that always seem to do well are controversy and humor.

The more simple piece to write, of course, is controversy link bait. Write something that a lot of people disagree with and you’re going to be talked about. Jason Calacanis is a master of this kind of link baiting. In my opinion you have to be careful how you use this tactic, as you can burn bridges much faster than you can build them.

Humor is a different animal. When you are trying to write a funny piece of linkbait, using humor you actually have to be funny — or at least more than just mildly amusing. I saw a great piece of humor link bait recently from Jane Copland and Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz: Google Search Results Missing from OneBox. I loved the search for “things rick astley would never do.” It was rather clever and funny. Now if only Google would actually return those mock results!

Other ways to bait for links include — tools (like blog plugins and browser addons), late-breaking news and scoops, original research, and photos that you’ve Creative Commons licensed.