Is Search Engine Optimization Always a “Must-Do”?

Published on August 23, 2010 in Search Engine Optimization, Small Business Marketing, Web Strategy and Web return on investment. 0 Comments

I’m finally on the road to recovery from my surgery and catching up on a lot of reading.

Econsultancy had an interesting blog post a couple of weeks ago about the levels of search engine optimization for SME (small and medium-sized business) websites in the UK. They found that 60% of SME marketers are not currently investing in SEO.

Among Econsultancy’s statistics on this:

  • 20% of marketers know about SEO, but choose not to allocate any budget for it.

They also comment:
“These businesses should be looking to correct this as, implemented well, SEO has the potential to be a very important and cost-effective sales channel. Also, competitors that have invested time or money in SEO may be gaining an advantage.”

(Note: to keep my posting reasonably brief, I’m quoting a very small segment – for the full viewpoint, please read the complete article).

Strong words – but I’m wondering about the makeup of the businesses in the sample. The author seems to imply that all SME’s would benefit from better search engine placement. I’m not sure that’s true.

In my presentations to Vistage SME CEO groups within the US, I’ve met, for example:

  • businesses who are so niched that they know all of their potential customers, and the market knows of them;
  • businesses who do all or almost all of their work for government agencies, so marketing is a very different ballgame;
  • businesses who don’t want to be found by the general public due to security concerns – either their work is classified, or their operations might invite protests or attacks (one of my recent groups included a company which provides animal testing for drug development).

In my experience, search engine traffic can also produce widely differing qualities of visitors, depending on the products or services being offered. I’ve never found it especially helpful for professional service firms (content marketing is much more powerful for folks selling expertise), but it’s great for selling yo-yo’s!

So if your business is one of those mentioned in the report, or if it would have been if you were UK-based, before you take this rebuke to heart, I’d revisit your marketing strategy, desired markets, and known business constraints. Perhaps you are one of the few for whom search engine optimization is justifiably not a priority.

New Web Strategy Video – and Signing Off for a While

Published on July 12, 2010 in Blogging, Miscellaneous Musings and Small Business Marketing. 0 Comments

I’ve been really bad about posting to this blog recently – and the only excuse I have is that I’ve been feeling pretty lousy.  Tomorrow (July 13th) I am scheduled for major surgery which will hopefully resolve all my issues, and I’ll come bouncing back!

I’m very happy that my surgeon is Dr. Paul Indman, who I blogged about a few months ago (see “the Emotionally Connected Doctor’s Website”).  Actually Dr. Indman turns out to be an accomplished blogger as well as a wonderful doctor, and he has a new addition to his Web presence at eFibroids.com

The good news is that my new video footage “Web Strategies That Win” is finally off the press. These are excerpts from a program that I presented recently for 600 small business owners. We’re hoping that more of this material will be available soon on YouTube and Vimeo.

You can also listen to recent interviews that I did about “Leaky Boat Websites” for “Business Expert Radio”, and for the Women’s Business Entrepreneurs’ site “CremeMagnolia” (look for the “Titan of Industry” section).

So with that, I’ll sign off until August (unless I’m feeling really spunky sooner!) Have a great summer, and keep your website leak-proof!

The Small Business Marketing Joy Summit

Published on June 16, 2010 in Small Business Marketing. 0 Comments

I’m taking a quick break from my usual posts to announce an exciting upcoming happening which I’m honoured to be a part of:

On June 28th, I’m teaching at an online event designed for small business owners, solo practitioners, entrepreneurs, and anyone interested in growing their business – the free Small Business Marketing Joysummit. I’ll be joining a really amazing group of 10 speakers who are experts on everything from SEO to web strategy, sales, business planning and competing without discounting.

The full lineup is:

  • Mitch Axelrod – author of the New Game of Business
  • Tim Berry – CEO of Palo Alto Software, Business Planning Expert
  • Joyce Bone – Millionaire Mom
  • Ann Michael Henry – Productivity Chef
  • Kent Lewis – Founder and President of Anvil Media and Formic Media, SEO Expert
  • Delia Passi – CEO of Medelia, Inc. and Founder of Women’s Certified, Selling to Women Expert
  • Sarah Petty – Boutique marketing expert
  • Melanie Benson Strick – CEO of Success Connections
  • Crystal Williamson – Technology Coach and Guru

and me, of course! Each speaker has recorded an hour of solid content – mine was about “Leaky Boat Websites – and How to Prevent Them”.

You can register now, and gain online access to all 10 speaker recordings at no cost anytime on June 28th. Or (disclaimer – I do get a part of these proceeds, but a part also goes to Kiva which is a wonderful cause), you can buy the complete set of 10 for only $49 before June 27th.

Check it out!

Restoring Vintage Napoleon Hill Video – But Where’s the Web Strategy?

Published on May 30, 2010 in Leveraging Content and Web Strategy. 0 Comments

My good friend Ed Primeau of Primeau Productions, Inc. is one of the top video production experts for speakers. He has recently been asked by the Napoleon Hill Foundation to digitally restore some films of Napoleon Hill presenting in the 1980’s. Ed describes the painstaking restoration process on his blog – it’s a fascinating read.

However, Ed doesn’t mention in his blog post that he also has a remastered 9 CD collection of Napoleon Hill’s entire “Think and Grow Rich” lecture available for purchase from his online store.

It’s funny – Ed has been designing and producing my videos since 1997, so you think he would have heard enough of me by now to know my mantra “Every page of your site should have a strategy” ;-)

In other words, it’s quite possible that folks reading about restoring Napoleon Hill videos might also be interested in restored audio materials from the master orator. So there should be a clickable link between the blog posting and the online store product description on Ed’s site to ensure that he makes the most of opportunities to leverage different aspects of his content.

We’re currently working on some new demo material that I just recorded, so Ed’s getting another daily dose of my key ideas. Meanwhile, I’ll keep encouraging him to apply for himself the messages that he’s so great at marketing for others!

United Airlines Online Satisfaction Survey – a Study in How Not To Do It?

Published on May 13, 2010 in Emotional connections, Web Usability and Web copywriting. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

I have to admit that I often rant about airline Websites, especially in my “Emotional Connections” program – in fact, the whole idea for my “How Does Your Website Make Me Feel?” schtick was sparked by a page on US Airways’ site back in 2001.

This morning hit a whole new low when I received an invitation to complete an online survey about the Mileage Plus program from United Airlines in conjunction with InsightExpress, LLC. Since it promised all of 250 miles if I complied, I decided to give it a go.

Why was I so irked? Let me count the ways:

  1. In order to access the survey, I needed to enter my Mileage Plus number. That’s OK, but the first question in the survey was: “What’s your Mileage Plus number?” Wait, didn’t I just tell you that?
  2. The survey seemed to run incredibly slowly – I frequently had to reload pages, and every time I had to re-enter my response. I don’t know if this was my connection, or if they underestimated traffic levels . . .
  3. There was only one question per page, and no indication of how many questions there would be in total, or how far along I was in the process. Every time the page hung, I thought about giving up, but continued in the hope that it would soon be over (and that I’d get my 250 miles).
  4. Every question required a checked radio button, or a rating on a scale of 1 to 5. There was no free input anywhere, and no place that asked why I responded the way I did. Which made me even more frustrated – don’t they want to know what about the program makes me “Strongly Dissatisfied”, and more so than last year? How can they fix anything if they don’t know what the problem is – or maybe they don’t really want to know what the problem is?

There’s an art to conducting online surveys, both in keeping people engaged and on track, and in designing the questions so that you get quantifiable and useful feedback. I’m sure there’s plenty that I don’t know about what United were trying to achieve here, but as a customer being asked about my satisfaction levels, it left me even more unhappy.

Oh well, hopefully I’ll enjoy spending the 250 miles!

The Top Three Strategic Business Blogging Mistakes

Published on April 28, 2010 in Blogging, Social Media and Web Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Yesterday I had a great conversation with self-described LEED geek Chris Moline, of Commercial Carpets of America. Chris is a former journalist, and has an information-packed blog about green flooring and carpeting.

Chris asked me what I saw as the most critical mistakes that business bloggers make.

Apart from the obvious one (which I model perfectly) of not posting frequently enough, there are two issues that I see all the time when I review a blog from the perspective of strategy and return on investment:

  1. Lack of clear branding and identity statements for the new visitor. If your blog is well indexed, a lot of people are going to find you via search engines. They’re coming to you with no context, and absolutely no idea of who you are or what products and / or services you offer. So you need to include some positioning at the top of your template so that they can easily find out more about you and your business.
  2. Lack of leverage and compelling calls to action. If this is a business blog, then presumably you’re writing it to attract new and returning customers. If you’ve ever heard me speak, you’ve heard my mantra “Every page of your site should have a strategy”. For every single piece of content, you need to decide what outcome you want from visitors – whether it’s to go to your Website to see more details of a product, or to send you an e-mail, or to sign up for your RSS feed. And you need to provide plenty of clickable links within your text to encourage this.

I’ve been reviewing traffic reports for a lot of blogs recently. Most of them exhibit one or more of these mistakes, and you can clearly see the result in the lack of response or good click-through rates. So take another look at your blog postings from your business strategy perspective – do you have a “Leaky Boat” blog?

Social Media Mentions: Do Negative-Seeming Words Harm You?

Published on April 14, 2010 in Social Media and Web copywriting. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I was listening to an excellent Webinar last week with Jennifer Laycock of MarketMotive. Jennifer was discussing tools that measure positive and negative mentions of your brand in social media.

So I idly went over to SocialMention, and did a search for myself (ego is a wonderful thing!) And I found that there are more actively negative mentions of me than actively positive ones.

Why is this? My assistant has been sending out my article on “Leaky Boat Websites” and it’s been included in a number of places online. Trouble is that an automated tool like SocialMention can only follow the rules it’s designed with – and so it sees “leaky boat” and classifies those words as negative.

Of course, this is a problem with any automated tools – remember years ago when AOL decided to clean house, and closed down a breast cancer support group because their name included a “naughty word”?

So I’m asking myself: “Does this matter?” Is it really important to us to get a positive rating from sites like SocialMention? And if so, does that mean that we can’t write any online copy that’s positioned to say “we can fix your problems” because the “problem” words can trigger the negative scores?

Social Media – What’s the Cost of Not Doing It?

Published on April 8, 2010 in Social Media, Social media return on investment, Web Strategy and Web return on investment. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I just read a very interesting blog from Robert Patterson of MMG Worldwide, talking about measuring social media ROI in the travel market.

I was especially intrigued by the discussion of non-tangible factors in calculating “return on influence”.

It all got me thinking that another interesting question to ask, especially if you’re still thinking about whether all this is worth it for your company, might be: “Can I quantify the opportunity cost of *not* doing this?”

In other words, using the travel example, could a hotel somehow measure how many nights it costs them not to be doing a Twitter campaign when the comparable hotel down the street is? Hotels are very upset about negative reviews, especially those of doubtful origins or motive – do they know for sure how much damage they do?

Perhaps the only way to calculate the negative side is to jump in and see what difference it makes – but the article got me thinking . . .

Writing Great Web Copy – it only Takes a Cup of Tea!

Published on March 28, 2010 in Web Strategy and Web copywriting. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I’ve been working for a little while now with Easthaven Group, an IT consulting company based in Aberdeen, Scotland.

Sheryl Newman, one of the Co-Founders, has been working on wording to define her company’s uniqueness for the value proposition that will go on their new home page. To be honest, she’s struggled a bit to get beyond the usual bland, generic “anyone could say this” platitudes.

Yesterday, she sent me an e-mail with some “thoughts” she’d been mulling. What she wrote was excellent, edgy, direct, and clearly stating how Easthaven’s approach is different from the competition. We can easily take this great start and polish it for publication.

Here’s the key – I asked her if she’d written this just “off the top of her head with a cup of tea” (she’s also a Brit!), and she said “Yes”.

I consistently find that writing in this way – just start by putting down what you’d like to say without judging or polishing it – really helps to get beyond the writer’s block issues.

Customer says “Can you Help Me?” You say “Nope!”

Published on March 15, 2010 in Emotional connections, Web Strategy and Web Usability. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I’m working with a b2b client on a major redesign of their Website. As part of this, we’re installing the Google site search engine (paid version!)

I wanted to see what happened if I searched for a product that isn’t listed on their site. Predictably, I got the following result:

    “Your search – [ search term ] – did not match any documents.

    Suggestions:

      Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
      Try different keywords.
      Try more general keywords.”

Now, I do think that in general Google Search is an excellent product.

However, this feels to me like the ultimate in “Non-Customer Service”.

Imagine a customer or prospect sitting across from you in the real world, and asking if you can help them with a particular product or service. Would you just say “No” and stop talking until they tried to ask their question again differently? Would you really make it sound like it’s their fault that they can’t find what they’re looking for in your store?

I certainly hope not – and yet, this is exactly what the standard “no results found” search utility does. This might be fine for Google itself, which is a generic search engine serving a huge and largely undefined audience, but it shouldn’t be how individual businesses respond to their visitors. At the least we need to be providing links to our knowledge bases, phone numbers or live chat access, and e-mail forms for easy enquiries.

My client’s Web developers are concerned that reprogramming Google’s source code so that we can do this would make it difficult to implement updates. So we’re stuck with giving our prospective customers a brusque “No” when they ask for help. I’m not happy . . .