1. Track organic results through non-branded keywords
   Ideally, the success of a Search Engine Optimisation program should be measured in relation to organic searches rather than through branded search results. Especially since SEO returns are based on the number of people who reach your website through searches for general and relevant keywords. Hence, your analysis must separate branded and non-branded keywords to evaluate the impact of your natural search strategy.
   Take for instance, if a sports clothes manufacturer, ‘ActivX’ converts a sale through an organic keyword search for ‘lycra tights’, then the sale should be attributed to SEO. However, if the same sale was converted through the keyword, ‘lycra tights ActivX’, then it’s possible that a previous sale or another marketing initiative resulted in this search.
2. Chart search data progress
   Review your natural search data trends on a weekly basis to understand the type of changes online or offline that are positively influencing it. You can do this by correlating updates to your website such as keywords, content addition, architecture and technology changes and SEO best practices, to understand which changes are significantly impacting your search results. It can take around 4 weeks for search engines to index your website updates and a couple more for these changes to translate in traffic behaviour.
   Another important thing to do is to track your branded keyword performance immediately after you launch a marketing campaign to assess whether or not the campaign is working.
3. Onsite conversions
   Traffic and high rankings on search engines are important; however they are not an effective gauge of SEO success. You could be attracting the wrong traffic and not successfully converting the right traffic. What is needed is a smart combination of drawing in the right traffic and succinctly converting it into a lead, sale and profit. Conversion rates will not rise without successful SEO elements like search engine referral rates, rankings, usability and site content, to name a few. While we’d like to focus solely on increasing conversion rates when optimizing a site, we have to lay the foundation that ensures conversion rates increase.
4. Offline conversions
   Businesses that generate sales leads through natural search must track and monitor the leads’ performance on a keyword basis. While the amount of leads generated by each keyword is easy to monitor, it’s difficult to assess the ultimate conversion rate of those keywords.
   A software company can judge a keyword’s true performance by validating its conversion rate. If this company drives natural search traffic to a landing page that involves filling out a form to request a quote. The sales team then follows-up on this request and try to gain the sale over phone or in person. Information on whether or not the sale materialises should be linked back to the original keyword. This data will help in accurately representing the success of your overall natural search campaign as well as your keyword’s performance.
5. Micro analyse keywords
   If you feel certain keywords should perform better than others, then it’s important that you minutely analyse the metrics associated with these keywords and their landing pages. Keep your eyes open for bottlenecks in the click-path and percentage drops in visitors proceeding to the next step, which could be associated with the design or content problems with the page, or irrelevance to the keyword.
6. Increase in-bound links
   Engaging online communities by participating in forums and creating blogs, as well as
   disseminating press releases, are effective means of building inbound links to your site, which can increase your search engine rankings and traffic. Monitoring these inbound links will not help you understand the amount of revenue your natural search strategy is generating. Instead, it will enable you to assess whether you need to adjust your outreach strategy, an important component of good SEO. You can gauge your SEO efforts by tracking the number of links it earns you.

At the end of the day, to ensure your business success, you have to constantly keep measuring and tracking your SEO efforts. It’s a never-say-die attitude that draws in the winner.

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Why Online Reputation Management (ORM) is Important

Your customers are no longer passive receptors of the information you disseminate to them through your website. However, with perceptive online marketing you can convert critics and disgruntled customers into your advocates and evangelists. While most customers make purchases offline, they take advantage of the internet to make purchasing decisions based on online research and reviews of customers who’ve used your products and services. Hence, it is very important to ensure that you have an ORM process in place to protect and advance your online reputation.

ORM involves tracking and managing how the online world perceives your product or service through the various online forums. When people say bad things about your product or service, you don’t just delete the negative comment and retain the positive ones. Displacing negative search results is not the solution to the problem, since it only resolves an overt issue, even as the root cause of the problem remains to be addressed in detail. A bad online reputation can reduce customer confidence and plunge profits. However, you must take a proactive ORM approach and incorporate good business practices by placing the right messages through focussed social media marketing and simultaneously deliver excellent customer value online and offline.

Through ORM you can protect and manage your reputation by being actively involved in the outcome of search engine results and incorporating a 4-step process.

Analyse Your Online Space

The goals of ORM are high rankings and indexing in search engines for all positive content on associated websites. This will ensure an increase in your overall positive web presence, which will enable you to own top spots in search engine rankings for your brand. Thus, as a first step, you need to understand where you are placed in relation to your use of social media, search engine positioning and what the buzz on you in the online world is all about. In the same vein, you should analyse the core elements of your website and the online activities you are involved in that negatively affect your reputation.

Monitor Activity

People Googling your company name will often skim through all the links that appear on the results page and not merely the ones that lead to your website. There could be both positive and negative listings about your company on these links. At the end of the day, the general public moulds its opinions on how your brand is viewed through blogs, podcasts and opinion forums, necessitating that you monitor these online conversations. However, since it is difficult to continuously monitor everything that is being mentioned about your brand, you need an advance information system to alert you of all news relating to your brand, so that you can remedy it if the need arises. You can do this by:

• Setting up Google and Yahoo Alerts to track your brands mention in the news including the names of company, products/services and key employees
• View how your brands fare in blogs by participating in sites such as Feedster, Blogpulse and Technorati
• Monitor industry-related sites
• Customize RSS readers for brand tracking

Even as a monitoring system for your brand is set in place, you should also track news on competitor brands, companies, industry terms and general industry news. While monitoring is an essential strategy for addressing adverse information within your search engine space, its effectiveness is best realised through proactively influencing what people read about your brand in your space.

Optimise Content

You can protect your brand’s online visibility by optimising your content. Ensure that all your digital communications is optimised. This includes PR, marketing, SEO, HR, investor relations and related electronic content, which is publicly available on the web as well as across social media sites viz. text, images, audio, video; to enable listing of more branded content in the search engine ranking pages. This does not effectively put your brand in control and above negative backlash, but it places you in a much better position if such a situation arose. The more branded content in the search results, the more diluted any negative brand content will be.

Influence the Influencers

Finally, get actively involved in online conversations by participating in them to improve your brand’s perception and eliminate negative feedback. Regularly participate in your industry’s conversation by contributing to blogs and forums that cover consumer opinions and complaints, competitor attacks, social networks, counterfeit products and trademark infringements.

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@ Unique Product: Your product should have an edge over other products of the same line. It should be innovative with some special features, better utility, and most importantly affordable. It can soon become hot in the market if it is adapted by different stratas of the society. If people realize why your product is unique it will be successful.

Tip for E-Commerce: Search engines like google, yahoo or msn can help you find websites selling your product.

@ Competitive Price: Study your competition. Every entrepreneur should do his homework of analyzing the prices of its competitors. Your product is a new entry in the market; people will consider buying it only if it offers better utility at a comparatively lower price.

Tip for E-Commerce: You can find the prices listed on the websites along with the product descriptions.

@ Business / Commerce Platform: You need to opt for a platform that has low operating costs. If your business has low overheads then you can pass on the benefit in the form of low prices to your customers.

Tip for E-Commerce: Register a domain and establish your business on a website. That is E-Commerce!

@ Shopping Experience: Your customers should have an enriching shopping experience with you. You need to provide them clear instructions.

Tip for E-Commerce: You can incorporate a Free Shopping Cart in the initial phase. Once your e-business picks up, you can go on for subscribing one.

@ Good Customer Service: You need to understand; “What your customer wants”. After comprehending their situation effectively, you should deliver them with what suits their needs. Answering to their queries and clarifying their doubts should be done in the first place. Satisfaction of the Customer rather than high profit should be prioritized for building a strong brand name.

Tip for E-Commerce: You can make an interactive website, provide contact forms in your website, and give your email id, chat id, telephone number, mailing address etc so that your customers can interact easily.

@ Follow-up: Just selling your products to customers is not enough. As a business you should follow up and take feedback about the usefulness & limitations of your product. This feedback is gold since it can help improve your product. Next time your customers will experience better product utility. In this way you win life long customers.

Tip for E-Commerce: Maintain a database of your client’s details, like their email id, birthday date, anniversary date etc. Send them wishes on these occasions and request for feedback on your products. This will help to build the basis of a relationship.

Comscore reports that retail ecommerce sales growth was only 11% in Q1 2008 compared to 17% in the prior year 2007. So you need to get cautious in following the above points with full efficiency. But you can certainly Start Growing with E-Commerce Now!

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Competitor study

Closely observe your main competitor’s websites to see how they attract their targets through their USP. Also, study their positioning on search engines, the keywords and URL they use. This study is not meant to be an end in itself, rather it should serve to enable you to identify how you can position yourself differently and draw competitor traffic to your website.

Keyed on target

On the face of it, getting the greatest number of hits vis a vis your competitors in the hope of drawing higher sales, seems the wisest thing to do. However, in reality it doesn’t work that way. You need to target as many people as you can from a specific target group by offering a product or service that is customized to them. It’s possible that your target market is geographically determined by region. In that case you must consider optimising your keywords for local search.

Supposing you have created water-proof socks through the use of breakthrough technology, you wouldn’t want to sell it to just about anyone, but rather to people who would best use it like mountaineers, trekkers, people living in damp environmental surroundings and such like. However, to do that you need to populate your website with appropriate content. Your web copy must include relevant information and keywords that will appeal to your target audience. Use long key phrases to increase your scope of being found in search engines when users search for information on your product or area of expertise.

Active forum participation

Search for online forums that are relevant to your product and join them. Be an active participant by engaging in discussions that will give you feedback on what your target audience is saying, their grievances and expectations. Transform yourself into a respected and authoritative subject matter expert by giving advice and sharing tips. Another means to further advance your objective involves including a link to your website in your forum signature to attract qualified traffic.

Once you have discovered your target audience and those who have the greatest need or affinity with your products or services’ your battle is half won. To fully win, you must continually work to engage these prospects and convert them into avid customers.

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A good Press Release should have a solid news angle, well written and followed by a targeted distribution. In the earlier times lengthy press releases were written mainly targeted to be distributed through mass media including newspapers, TV channels and radio stations. In the present day brief Press Releases are written in the reverse pyramid format, giving the most important information first followed by other details. Now Press Releases are distributed to the online media as well – News Sites, Niche Websites, Blogs, Online magazines, E-zines, Newsletters etc.

With the growing trend of publishing Press Releases on the Web, many sites and online businesses get the SEO benefit from it. The issuing website that distributes a Press Release gains Valuable One Way links, placement in the news search engines and increased traffic to the featured website etc.

Mainly due to the SEO benefit and popularity measure, many sites issue a Press Release.

Generally a Press Release is written in the following format:

Release Time: Mention the Release Time; e.g. For Immediate Release OR Embargoed until Date

Headline: It is the Title of your News Story.

Subheading / Summary: It’s a 2-4 sentence summary of your Press Release.

Dateline: It contains the date when the news is being issued and the hometown of the person / company launching the Press Release.

Opening Paragraph: It should answer the 5 W’s of Who?, What?, When?, Where? and Why?

Press Release Body: Contains the details of background information, statistics etc.

Boilerplate: It contains “About Us” information regarding the issuing person / company.

Call to Action: For getting complete information mention complete Contact details & Web Address of the media person at the end.

A Press Release can be distributed by following methods:

1. Manual Distribution: You will have to search for media contacts yourself.
2. Hiring a Professional PR Firm: If your budget allows then you can opt for a professional service.
3. News / Press Release Distribution Sites: Such sites are often free but some good ones charge you for distributing each Press Release.

Media Contact Databases:

• Burrelles
• MediaMagnet
• Bowker’s News Media Directory
• MondoTimes.com

Paid and Free Distribution:

• PRnewswire
• BusinessWire
• MarketWire
• PRweb
• WebWire
• EmailWire
• PR.com
• PRurgent.com
• Free-Press-Release.com

An estimate of Press Release Viewership:

As reported by http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm there are 1,463,632,361 internet users around the world. Therefore you may well imagine the scope of viewership your Press Release has on the Internet.

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Carve your niche

Big businesses have big requirements to cater to and larger markets to target. You can transform your small business size into an advantage by focussing on a niche market and profit from it. First, identify the niche you are able to best service. This makes your life much easier as you can rank for keywords that are directly relevant to your narrow niche. Even if your niche is already a competitive one, you can still figure ways to attract traffic to your website.  Take for instance the entertainment industry, which is by far a very competitive arena. However, were you to market your rock fest within a clearly-defined geographic area, the level of competition would be much less.

Personalise customer interaction

Mainly because of the enormity of the scale of business, big businesses tend to lose touch with their customers, who more often than not end up being dissatisfied because of poor customer service. As opposed to a small business, where customers can connect directly with decision-makers. You need to capitalise on this facet of personalised service, instead of shying away from the fact that yours is a small company and trying to impress your customers by portraying the image that you are way larger than you are. Use your advertising copy and title tags to emphasize the benefits your customer gains because you are a small enterprise viz. ready availability, personalised service, accountability, etc. If you take pride in your business and walk the talk, you’re bound to succeed.

Innovate and adapt according to market trends

It’s much easier for a small business to change their plan-of-action based on market dynamics, compared to a large business. Try to gain the first-mover advantage in spotting the latest trends through which you can target new markets and gain new customers. Make use of keyword tools and other research mediums to gather insights in markets that show great potential.

Self-fund the business

Generate a self-sustaining business process where the growth is aligned with your revenues. Looking at this approach from the lens of SEO implies focusing on revenues. In a pay-per-click optimisation scenario, you research your profitable and weed out the unprofitable ones. Following which, you pay only for keyword clicks that draw in revenues even as you cut back on clicks that don’t attract conversions. Based on the research output, you can confidently launch an SEO strategy that focuses on profitable keywords.

Partner to progress

While big businesses face several hurdles like legal hassles and indefinitely prolonged tie-up procedures, small businesses because of their lean framework are the ideal candidates to partner with. There are manifold advantages such alliances can deliver on the SEO front – link to their website, issue a press release to announce the partnership, join forces through common sales literature to market joint offerings. Get proactive with your partners, respond to their needs and they will more than happily link market for you.

Working at staying small can actually be a profitable business strategy – With agility, speed and personalisation on your side, there are things you can do which a large business would find great difficulty implementing. Eventually, size does help make a positive difference if you’re a small business with a smart SEO Strategy.

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It is in our interest to ride the wave of optimism despite the current global financial meltdown that’s trying its damndest best to turn us into pessimists.

We should take a lateral view of our SEO strategies and demonstrate the clear value that can be derived through them. For instance, unprecedented but regular shifts in ranking algorithms by major engines are passé for most of us; however it’s time we took a closer look at the shift in the search audience’s criteria during a downturn and in general.

Searches focussed on price-sensitivity and value

You must think like a searcher and understand that your customers are bound to tighten their wallets across all sectors. Consumer searches will shift dynamically, making price sensitivity a popular focus on search engines. Thus it makes better sense to optimise for phrases that incorporate terms like ‘special sale’, ‘20% discount on A’, ‘cheap B’; especially if you are in the commodities space. Other sectors can modify searches by incorporating terms like ‘compare’, ‘recommended’, ‘best’, etc to get more eyeballs. Top ticket items like luxury goods will take a backseat on searches for a while.

Stress on measurable results

As against traditional advertising which lacks a viable measuring mechanism, search engine marketing offers a tracking system that’s bang on target. Be it PPC, email marketing, SEO, listings, etc; online marketing gives you detailed metrics on how your customers can find you, what they’re doing on your website and whether they are making purchases through you. You must take these RoI benefits into consideration when you have to make a choice between traditional and online advertising.

Negate risk

Even a small element of risk can turn customers away from you, doubly so during a recession. You can overcome this by gaining your customers trust in varied ways, reassuring them by showcasing certifications, awards and favourable reviews on your website. As well as through customer testimonials, expert opinions, whitepapers and case studies on your product or service that validate the fact that you are a trusted, safe bet during a crisis economic situation.

Strengthen surrogate marketing – drive traffic to channel partners

A lot of B2B products and solutions are marketed through channel partners, like distributors and representatives. However, during a financial crunch most of these partners don’t feel compelled to make any investments in the partnership. It makes prudent investment sense for you to drive qualified traffic to your partner’s sites. A cost-efficient measure, it is a smart online marketing strategy.

Bear in mind the changing industry horizon while optimising or revising pages for channel partners. Focus on targeting prospects who are seeking to purchase your products and services by including buyer’s guides, FAQs, checklists and consumer evaluations.

Let me know if you experience an upswing in sales after incorporating these recession-friendly SEO suggestions. Till then, hold the fort!

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I’d like to share with you some smart and simple tips to improve website conversion rates that have succeeded for my customers. A common error that most website owners indulge in is to focus only on attracting traffic. But if little efforts are made to rectify simple website issues, it can lead to huge improvements in conversion rates. Listed below are my 5 quick tips to take your website visitors to the next level.

Easy accessibility and navigation

As soon as a visitor lands on your website, he must immediately be able to identify who you are, i.e. what business you are into and how you can benefit him. Use bold headlines and short paragraphs to catch his attention, as readers online tend to quickly scan text instead of reading through word-by-word. In this way your website is accessible and easy to attract attention to anything that is relevant rather than distract visitors away from your site.

Time is money

This adage works well for you as well as for your customers. Don’t waste your visitor’s time by trying to extricate irrelevant information, especially something that would involve the discretion of the user and impinge of his right to privacy. While it is prudent to collate critical information like shipping address, payment terms, etc; give your visitor the option to fill in less important information if he wants to instead of making it compulsory.

Initiate interest with information

Any credible eCommerce website will do more than merely function as an online catalogue. It will include relevant information on the product the visitor shows interest in purchasing. This information could be in the form of articles, customer testimonials, product reviews and the like. It will serve to aid him in the initial stages of his product purchase decision-making process.

Honesty, the best policy

Be direct, don’t beat around the bush as far as your product and pricing is concerned. If a product of yours will not be available in stock for a while, be honest enough to mention it. Rather than incurring the loss of a frustrated user who after having read all your product details, adds it to his cart and proceeds to the checkout payment process, only to discover that the product is out of stock.

This is true even for pricing, when visitors discover that delivery or shipping pricing is an added expenditure in addition to the cost they will incur on the product purchase. Ideally, it makes sense to display approximate delivery costs of countries your products are most often delivered to.

Clear Call to Action

If a user decides to buy a product from your site; he needs to add it to a shopping basket by clicking on a button or a link. However, this crucial button needs to be visible to him without the need to scroll, as several visitors are uncomfortable with scrolling. You should have an ‘Add Product xyz to your basket’ button, bold and around the top of the page. It need not be ‘in your face’ type of attention-grabbing call-to-action, rather an evident and visible one. This helps in a definite increase in sales as your visitor feels guided into the next step in the buying process.

Above all, make a concerted effort to differentiate yourself from your competitors by defining your product USP (Unique Selling Proposition). Because, finally this is the basis on what you target visitor to your site in the first place – converting them into customers is a matter of great attention to detail in creating a memorable customer experience.

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Defining web success

I believe defining website success is a very subjective issue and consists of what success means to you and your company. It can imply different things to different businesses and institutions. While, in general, success for most businesses is more often related to the profits they derive through their website, in reality it is not the case for everyone. For instance, a banking website can measure success on various fronts, from enhancing customer service, to increasing online transactions and product sales. However law enforcement agency’s website would exist to simply disseminate essential public information, while a news portal may target traffic to justify its advertising rates. Therefore, for your website to succeed, you need to develop it with the desired goal in mind and figure out the most appropriate way to measure its success.

Now let us consider the other metrics you can incorporate to effectively ensure your website’s success.

Page-views versus time-on-page

Visitor page-views per visit are an indicator of how attracted your visitors are to your website. If you’re selling products through your website, a 1 to 1 ratio is bad unless the purchase button is clicked. The amount of time people spend on your website can help you discern if they are merely skimming through your content or reading your entire editorial. Though a longer duration cannot always be taken as a guarantee of your website’s effectiveness.

Lead-in versus web views

Your website’s aim may not be product sales, but possibly you are a service company where you’d like to disseminate service-based information through your website. Based on the information visitors discover on your website, you’d like them to contact you. In this case page views will be of no consequence unless they translate into leads. You should then focus on an SEO campaign that will probably bring you 50 potential clients rather than a 1000 page views that give you no leads.

One-time versus repeat visitors

If your website draws visitors back over and over again, it implies that there’s something that attracts them to return. Casual, one-time search visitors and stumble-upon social media draws cannot be considered as a yardstick of website success.

Traffic versus bounce rate

The bounce rate is a critical usability metrics and the best part is its available free through Google Analytics. This means if your website attracted 100k visitors from StumbleUpon with a bounce rate of 95%, in reality only 5.000 actually visited your site. Therefore, a website with reduced, but targeted and quality traffic combined with a low bounce rate would prove to be more effective than a website with huge traffic numbers.

Conversion ratio

There are times when you want visitors to recommend your website, participate in a survey or campaign, subscribe to your online newsletter or merely join your mailing list for future marketing opportunities. In this case, it is essential to measure this subscriber list as it can transform from a prospect to a customer evangelist in the near future. Ensure that you keep them on your radar through possibly including an RSS feed to track, inform and convert them to customers.

There are several ways to track your website’s effectiveness – it all depends on your business goals. If you have any interesting analytic techniques that may have worked for you, feel free to share it.

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A) Strategize

Do a thorough analysis of your current website design and marketing strategy and establish the areas you need to focus on. You must source information or ideas that will help in future website ranking efforts. Without an initial analysis it can be difficult in the long run to establish the outcome of your efforts.

B) Competitor analysis

Understanding your competitor’s niche is critical in enabling you to create your unique selling proposition. Study the varied keywords your main competitors are showing up under on various search engines. This will help you determine how you want to position yourself as well as select additional keywords or phrases to use on the search engines.

C) Keyword research

Everyday millions of keyword queries are carried out on search engines. Analyse different keyword and phrase combinations that are apt to include within your site copy and design elements. You can collate keyword data using industry keyword tools like Wordtracker, Overture Suggestions, Google keywords etc.; as well as through site query statistics and actual search engine queries that users use to search websites.

D) Design basics

A fulfilling online shopping experience is a fundamental requirement for an eCommerce website visitor. Visitors should be able to access the appropriate page in a minimum of one or two clicks. The focus of an eCommerce web design should primarily be about the layout. It is crucial to catch the visitor’s attention and the areas that attract them when accessing a web page. Research on this topic suggests that the middle left side area draws great attention, followed by the portion at the centre of the page. These layout techniques create a simple navigation path for the visitor.

E) 1) HTML Sitemap

Create an extensive HTML sitemap for visitors to navigate as well as for those who are disabled or use text-based browsers. Sitemaps are web pages consisting of your most important and content rich pages. A sitemap will also assist search engines in discovering all your website content, so that they can scan it to include within their search results. Large eCommerce sites have several pages that need indexing and can really benefit from a sitemap.

2) XML Sitemap

You also need to include an XML sitemap to enable search engines to regularly track your content and product updates. These sitemaps are special files that contain links to the most important sections and pages of your site. XML sitemaps can be transmitted electronically to major search engines. While dynamic sitemaps are optimal, manually updated sitemaps can also be useful. eCommerce stores that require updates of their catalogues at regular intervals must consider incorporating an XML sitemap to enable search engines to find new products and the updated old ones.

Finally, ensure that you include simple and clean navigational elements and a site search that are easily accessible. Link all your pages back to your homepage and help pages like FAQs, forums, blogs, etc. Cross-link your topical content across your website so that search engines can pass the value to other content rich pages and users can easily find the content they are looking for. Google transfers the Page Rank (PR) to other pages on a site if you link one page with PR to another page with related content.

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