StayOnSearch

I recently did an interview with Emily Maltby from CNN Money for their “Website Remedies” section.  

Feel free to check it out.

How To Make Your Website Pay Off

As we all know, content development is a big part of any successful SEO strategy. That is why your initial keyword research is so crucial. If you optimize content for keywords that are not being searched, than what’s the point?

The key is to identify silos or groups of searched keywords that are related to each other and develop pages for each set of keywords. Not only will your pages be better optimized for search, but they will be more targeted for the end-user.

For Example:

Let’s take a company that sells awards and engravings. On their website, they have 3 pages devoted to their products. They include Corporate Awards, Crystal Awards, and Sports Trophies. For each of those pages they are very well optimized for those keywords and are seeing some nice traffic. However they may be missing out on lots more!

Now in my keyword research I noticed other similar keywords to Corporate Awards that were being searched often.

I noticed that the root word “desk clock” was being searched a lot, with different words appended to it. This tells me that I should devote a page strictly to desk clocks I sell.

Round Desk Clock

Triangle Desk Clock

Engraved Desk Clock

Desk Clock Award

For crystal awards I found that people were searching for “crystal paperweights”, along with other types of paperweights. So this tells me that I should develop a page devoted to paperweights.

Crystal Paperweights

Glass Paperweights

Marble Paperweights

Diamond Paperweights

I also noticed that people were searching for specific types of sports trophies. This tells me that I should develop pages for baseball, football, hockey, etc….

Baseball trophies

Baseball Awards

Baseball Player Trophy

Baseball Team Awards

If you take this same concept to whatever products and services you sell you should start to see an increase in the number of keywords you are ranking for. The “silo” concept is directly related to optimizing for the long tail.

There are plenty of free event services out there on the web that you can use to create, manage, promote, and track local events. Here are a bunch of free services that will help you market your next event online.

Eventful

http://eventful.com/

Eventful will allow you to search, create, promote and track online events in your local area. Search by location or category to make it easy to find the events you want to attend. You can also keep track of your favorite events by added them to your calendar. Eventful will also all you to create a profile, group, and friends list to stay in touch with family, friends, colleagues or industry leaders.

Madeit

http://madeit.com/

Madeit is more of a web based events management software, that will allow you to create an event, promote it, and manage payments. Because they manage payments, they do charge a transaction fee. They make it extremely easy to get started by filling out some basic information about you and your event. They will also provide the tools to plan, manage, and promote your event, manage ticking and more.

Meetup

http://www.meetup.com/

Meetup is probably the most mainstream event website on the web currently. Meetups niche is allowing people to create local groups and “meetup” at local establishments in the area. Their goal is to create an environment that is easy for industry people and groups to meet, interact, discuss, and share topics that matter to them.

Upcoming

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/

Upcoming, is a service provided by Yahoo! Create, manage and track your local events in your area. Upcoming makes it easy to become friends with people who share the same interests and passions as you do. You also have the flexibility to create public or private events, depending on what type of crowd you are looking for.

Zvents

http://www.zvents.com/

Zvents is more of a broad local search, allowing you to search for restaurants, venues, performances, movies, meetups and more. Their goal is to allow people to discover all sorts of things to do in their local town, city, or state. With their advertising network, this may be a great opportunity to market your local listing.

.

Center’d

http://www.centerd.com/

Center’d is geared around connection people, places and plans. They want to make it easy for local people to interactive with each other. It is also extremely easy to organize all of your local friendly, events and plans with their simplistic navigation. Center’d is relatively new, compared to some of the other event sites, however they have already made a huge splash and are looking to keep add new features to the site.

If anyone knows of any other event sites similar to these please comment on my blog. I would love to add to this list

There are plenty of good SEO tools out there, both free and paid, that will help you analyze on-page and off-page optimization. One of the most important factors of modern day optimization is link building and finding one-way links from relevant, authoritative websites.

So what is the best way to find sites that are relevant to your site and will more importantly help increase your search engine rankings?

Trackur, a tool developed by Andy Beal (of Marketing Pilgrim), is primarily used to monitor and manage your brand online. It has been mentioned as Google Alerts on steroids. You enter a keyword or brand name and the tool will scour the web for websites, blogs, forums, discussion boards, videos, images, and social media sites for any mention of the keyword you are looking for. It will display up-to-date results that are easy to browse and sort. You can also filter words that you do not want to show up, save searches, export results, bookmark items, email alerts, etc… The tool was mainly meant to quickly identify any mentions of your brand, products, services, or keywords across the web.

However, I have found this brand management tool to be a great way to find sites to get links from. Just by entering keywords you are looking to rank for or are related to your industry, you can identify hundreds of sites that could potentially be quality one-way links or link partners. The great thing about Trackur is it allows you to sort by many different criteria. My favorite is sorting by “Influence”. Influence is Trackur’s Pagerank, it will sort the results by which sites have the most influence in terms of search engines. This will allow you to quickly find quality websites that search engines find important. I recommend that you draft up a link building request template that you can use to email webmaster and request a link. In your email, make sure to say specifically why you like their site and how their visitors could benefit from your site.

Trackur is reasonably priced considered it capabilities and value. They offer three different price tiers and a custom tier for agencies.

They also offer a FREE TRIAL so you can try it before you buy.

Like any company, you have a budget. So how do you know if you are putting your internet marketing dollars to good use? Unfortunately there is no secret formulate to follow that tells you what percentage of your budget you should be spending on each marketing approach. However there are ways to effectively maximize your budget.

When it comes to spending money on the internet there are dozens of ways you can go about it. Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, E-mail Marketing, Banner Ads, Video Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Pay Per Click Advertising, Display Ads, Classified Ads, the list goes on…. So where do you start?

Looking at a study done by eMarketer, you can see the trend of marketing dollars going towards Search.

More and more companies are beginning to realize that you can have the nicest website in the world, but if nobody can find it, what’s the point? Here is how I would break up the internet marketing budget. I separated it into 4 distinct parts.

Part I: Search Engine Marketing

Part 2: Search Engine Optimization

Part 3: Website Usablility/Testing

Part 4: E-Mail Marketing

Part I: Search Engine Marketing

You need to begin by doing your keyword research to see what people are searching for to find your products and services, that’s where search engine marketing comes into play.

More specifically pay-per-click advertising, is a great way to start driving traffic to your site quickly. You can set up a campaign in 30 minutes and immediately start driving traffic to your site. However the caveat is that you are paying for that traffic. Treat PPC advertising as a way to see what people are searching for. Go and bid on a few hundred relevant keywords that people would use to find you and see which keywords bring the most traffic. Also pay attention to which keywords are giving you the best conversions. I would spend about 40%-50% of your budget to PPC marketing for the first few months. Once you have enough data to see trends in the analytics, start to pinpoint which keywords are bringing you the best traffic.

Part 2: Search Engine Optimization

After you have identified that keyword, that’s when you want to start to optimize your website for organic traffic. Reduce your PPC budget to about 20% and put about 60% towards search engine optimization (SEO). Depending on what resources you have to work with, either have your in-house SEO or an agency work at building your organic traffic. Even though SEO is more of a long term strategy, it will pay off x10 or more, if you can get on the 1^st page of google for competitive keywords.

Part 3: Website Usablility/Testing

Now that you have a good amount of traffic coming to the site, you need to optimize it for conversions. Depending on what you define as your conversion (lead, sale, download, etc) you want to create a seamless user experience from the time they enter, to conversion. To do this, you need to test, test, and test some more. Try using Google’s Website Optimizer to run A/B or Multivariate tests to see which brings you better conversions. I would spend about 15% of your budget towards website testing.

Just to put things in perceptive, simplified:

Say you currently convert 3% of your web traffic. Each conversion is on average $500. So for every 100 visitors you are making $1500.

Now let’s say you ran a test to try and get more people to convert.

Now you are converting 6% of your web traffic. Again each conversion is on average $500. So now you are making $3,000 for every 100 visitors.

Just by doing a few tests and converting a few more people, you have doubled your conversions/revenue.

Part 4: E-Mail Marketing

Having a good in-house email list can be extremely useful. It can be great for sell-ups, promotions, news updates, special offers, incentive programs, etc… Harness your current client base and keep them in the loop as to what is going on with your business. Invest in e-mail marketing software or have a company manage it and start sending updates to your clients. Keep them up to date on new products or services you offer, current client promotions, timely offers, etc… Spend the money to have a designer create a custom made HTML newsletter template that will flow nicely with your website.

Internet Marketing Budget Breakdown:

Search Engine Optimization (60%)

Search Engine Marketing – PPC (20%)

Website Usability/Testing (15%)

E-Mail Marketing (5%)

Keep in mind that every company is different and different approaches work better or worse depending on the industry. This is just a good format to follow for companies looking to spend a good amount of their marketing dollars towards internet marketing.

I would love to hear how your company allocates your marketing budget and what has worked and hasn’t worked in the past.

If you are managing pay per click campaigns, both on an agency level or as an in-house marketer, you are constantly trying to figure out the best way to maximize your ad spend. Depending on what type of budget you are working with, you may be spending a few minutes a day or several hours a day trying to maximize your conversions. So at what point do you implement a bid management tool, if at all? This post will talk about how BMTs can help effectively manage your PPC campaigns, as well as help you judge when or if you need a BMT. Here are the 3 questions we will look at.

How do I know if a bid management tool is right for my company?

At what point do I need to switch to a bid management tool?

What features are available that I cannot get with Google, Yahoo, or MSN?

Just to give you a basic definition of what a BMT is. A bid management tool is normally a web-based application that helps you to manage your PPC campaigns in one universal location.

So let’s start with the first question…

How do I know if a bid management tool is right for my company?

Agency Side

For agencies who offer PPC services across multiple engines you may want to think about investing in a bid management tool. In the beginning, you may be able to get away with managing all of your clients, however once you reach a certain point you can find yourself doing double or triple work. Set up campaigns, manage the campaigns, pulling reports, all has to be done 2 or 3 times.

If you are managing accounts who spend anywhere from $50k and up, you may want to think about a bid management tool. At some point these accounts get so big that it either takes more PPC managers or a BMT to effectively manage these campaigns. The reality is that there are only so many accounts you can manage at one time, and if accounts are bidding on thousands of keywords it will take more of your time to manage them.

If you have clients who leave you responsible for getting results, may want to think about investing in a bid management tool. There are many features that BMT’s will allow you to control that the engine interfaces will not. If you have clients who want to know exactly how much a cost per lead is or if the client does not want to spend a specific amount per lead, down to the keyword level, you may want to invest in BMT.

Client Side

A few things you need to look at is your overall marketing budget.

Are you spending a good amount of money on online marketing…more specifically PPC? Does a good amount of your revenue come from PPC? Are you advertising on more than one search engine or planning to do so? Do you have someone dedicated to managing your PPC campaigns?

If you answered yes too many of those questions, there is a good chance that you may want to invest in a bid management tool. Once you can start to see that PPC advertising has become an effective marketing platform you probably want a tool that can help you run those campaigns more effectively. A BMT can pay for itself just by saving you wasted ad spend.

At what point do I need to switch to a bid management tool?

Agency Side

Once you have a full-time dedicated PPC specialist who is managing 10 or more accounts. Like I said before, for the first few accounts it may be easy to manage them on multiple search engines, but then it comes to a point where it is overwhelming and counter-productive. It will save you money in the long run because your PPC specialist will be able to monitor more accounts and you will not need to hire a 2^nd specialist to help. Also keep in mind the size of those accounts. If you have 10 accounts that are only spending $250-$500/month, you may not need it, but it you have accounts spending thousands of dollars a month, then you should.

Client Side

Once you start spending more than $50k and bidding on thousands of keywords you may need to invest in a BMT. If you are spending that kind of money every month it is worth it to spend $1500/month on a tool that will help you maximize that ad spend. When you are advertising on 2 or 3 search engines it will save you an enormous amount of time to be able to create a campaign and push it to all 3 engines, than manually creating campaigns for each engine. Same goes for changes to campaigns, if you have to make a minor change to a campaign, you can go in and push the changes to all engines.

What features are available that I cannot get with Google, Yahoo, or MSN?

Since these features will apply for both agencies and clients, I will list them for both.

• Rule-Based Optimization: If you do not want to spend over a specific dollar amount for a lead you can control that.
• Aggregate Data & Reporting: See combine data and reporting for all search engines combined.
• Universal Changes: Apply changes to campaigns over all search engines.
• Manage All Campaigns: Manage campaigns in one centralized location.
• Integrated Keyword Research Tool: Most BMTs will have tools that you may use within the application to generate keyword lists. If you are already paying for a keyword research tool, this can save you the cost of having to subscribe to paid keyword tools.
• Campaign Optimization Tool: BMTs use a different algorithm to optimize your campaigns. They take into account multiple factors when giving you campaign optimization tips. There has been some debate over whether or not the Google campaign optimizer is giving truthful suggestions. Don’t forget that Google is getting paid when you up your daily budget.

After reading this post if you feel that a BMT is right for your agency or company I would highly recommend looking at these tools and seeing which is right for you. For the most part each of these tools are similar in price and have the same type of functionality. Ask each company for an online demo to see how the interface works and what differentiates themselves from the others.

Here is a list of BMTs that I recommend, but by all means take a look at others if you’d like.

Acquisio

ClickTracks

Atlas

Lyris

SearchForce

Keep checking back for my next post when I will talk about different web analytics tools and when you should switch to a professional analytics solution.

If you are a search marketer, you may want to think about joining a few of these professional organizations. They can provide some good exposure in the industry, as well as help get authoritative links into your site.

Here is a quick list of places to look into.

American Marketing Association

SEMPO

Direct Marketing Association

Word of Mouth Marketing Association

eMarketing Association

Interactive Advertising Bureau

Email Experience Council

Better Business Bureau

Viral & Buzz Marketing Association

Your Local Chamber of Commerce

Driving people to your website is only half the battle. Once you get them there, how do you lead them to where you want them to go on your site? Having a well designed website will help give your users a great experience, find what they are looking for and be more inclined to lead to a conversion.

Here are some helpful design tips to keep in mind when developing your site.

Well Thought-out Navigation

It’s pretty standard to have a top navigation or horizontal navigation or both, depending on how deep your site is. Whichever navigation you decide on, make sure that you have categorized things appropriately. Try and segment your products/services in a manner that it will be easy for users to find what they are looking for. It is a good rule of thumb to have the user only have to click no more than two times to find what they are looking for. Studies have also shown that if you have more than 7 sub-categories for each category and will hurt the usability of the site because there are so many choices.

Website Layout Consistency

Creating a consistent layout throughout your site will help your visitors navigate through your site. If your navigation was at the top of your homepage and then it jumped to the side on an interior page, it can be very frustrating to users. Same thing with your content, if your content is moving all over the place, it can make it hard for that reader to consume the information.

Keep your navigation, content, calls to actions, contact us, graphics, and images all in consistent sections of your site.

Call to Action Buttons

These are some great examples of call to action buttons.

Easy To Read Content

SEObook.com does a great job at creating easy to read content throughout his site. He breaks his content up by using bullet points, numbered lists, bold/italic headlines, color variations, and short descriptive sentences. Remember, people scan the web for information. If they see a headline that appeals to them the will read on. Create gripping headlines and make it easy to consume.

Using pull quotes can also help grab the attention of the reader. These are great if you have a testimonial or quote from someone who has tried your product or service.

Easy To Find “Contact Us” page

Make it painfully easy for someone to contact you. The last thing you want to do is get someone interested in your product or service and have them struggle to figure out how to contact you.

Have those “contact us” buttons lead to a well optimized contact form. Check out a post I did a few months ago on how to optimize contact forms for better conversions.

Good use of whitespace

Having whitespace will help break up your content and make things easier to read. If your website is cluttered with lots of text and other graphical elements, it can be overwhelming to a user. Use whitespace to help separate different sections of your site.

Flash Elements

People think that flash is bad just because it cannot be picked up by search engines. However using small elements of flash can be very useful and help keep the user engaged in your website. Search engines are also improving at being able to index flash. However, do not add flash just to have flash on your site; have a goal in mind. Use flash to help convey your marketing message, showcase a product/service, a special offer, or a promotion.

Target Different Market Segments

Segment your buyers by creating targeted landing pages geared towards each of your segment buyers. By having content that is unique towards a specific market, it will help keep the user on your site longer and lead to more conversions. The more targeted that your content can be towards your niche market, the more likely it will be to convert those users.

Notice in this flash element they are targeting different market segments that they cater to.

The newest projection for US Online Advertising Spend was just released by eMarketer. From the newest projections by 2013, online advertising will be a $59 billion dollar industry. I have added some previous projections to show how their predictions have been pretty accurate.

With the economy being where it is today, it looks like the projections were not as high as they were originally estimated. However you will notice that after 2009, spending will start to rebound and keep its rapid increase in online advertising.

October 2007 Projections

March 2008 Projections

August 2008 Projections

Here are a bunch of great resources you can use to create your own free website with no programming experience necessary.

Google Sites allow you to create websites collaboratively. Making it simple for multiple users to add file attachments, information from other Google Apps, and creating new content to a website. Google Sites uses a user-friendly template, making it painless for users to modify/update content, change the design, and share information.

Google Sites Example

Squidoo allows you to create what they call “lenses”. A lense is simply a one page website that allows you to express yourself about anything you would like. Write an article, create a company profile, make recommendations or just share information about a passion you have.

Check out the Lens of the Day

Hubpages is an internet community where people can easily write and publish content about any topic they want on the internet. Similar to Squidoo “Lenses”, Hubspot has “Hubs” which allow users to write pages on anything. People within the Hubspot community can search for pages of their interests, add content of their own, and rank other hubs within the social community.

Hubpage Hub example

Geocities is a Yahoo! service allowing you to create your own website. Their free online tools and step-by-step page wizard helps you publish your site with no programming skills necessary. They also let you personalize your url and customize your design to add some flare.

The Tripod site builder allows you to create blogs, photo albums, and websites. Tripod makes things easy for novice web users or professional developers by offering their HTML editor which allows you to edit the code that it creates when you make a new website. Like GeoCities, Tripod allows you to create a unique url for your website or blog.

Tripod example

Freewebs offers over 300 templates to choose from, you can create your own personalized website, blog, forum, or guestbook. Features include a site manager to control your pages within your website, easy page editor to modify your pages, and a file manager to add images, video and files. If you are looking to add e-commerce to your website, Freewebs can help you implement that functionality into your site.

Freewebs example

Weebly’s drag and drop interface allows for fast and easy editing. Create custom layouts, upload YouTube videos, add your Flickr photos, even add Google Adsense to your website. Create a unique url, find a design template that fits your style, and manage your pages all in one easy to use interface.

Weebly example