Your boss just read an article on the benefits of online communities…

You know, how online community members visit Web sites nine times as often, stayed five times as long, and represented 65% of sales.

or maybe

how 89% of mid to large sized companies have adopted at least one of six community-building tools, such as blogs, wikis, social networking, or content-tagging.

so now he's asking

"What about our website? Shouldn't we have an online community?" (Damm you McKinsey! Now I have to come up with an online community strategy).

Developing an online community strategy is a HUGE endeavor.

All too often businesses think that if they call it a "community" their website will magically transform itself into a community. And when the traffic and sales don't present themselves, they're left wondering what went wrong?

so what makes a website a community?

1) The community must satisfy a need

Generally there are three different types of communities:

a) Those that satisfy the need for information (i.e. sphinn, car enthusiast sites, etc.)

b) Those that satisfy the need for support (i.e. weight loss groups, cancer support groups, etc)

c) Those that satisfy both needs for support and information (i.e. when I was pregnant with my first child I joined an expecting club - we supported each other with information about our pregnancies and loving support)

It's important to identify what kind of need your community is going to fill up front. This is because you will have to build the right community components or infrastructure to support that need.

If your community's need is for information, then an article library may have worked in the old days. Today, that need for information is more likely to be served using a wiki or pligg type type solution.

If your community's need is for support, then you need to make sure that you build profile functionality combined with easy communication between members like the ability to email or IM your community friends.

If your community's need is for both information and support then you'll want to evaluate if one is more important than the other. If they're equally important then you'll want to make sure that both types of infrastructure are equally prominent in your community.

2) User participation or interaction

Giving people the ability to comment on your blog is a good start. But a community it does not make. And signing up for your email list does not make me feel like I've just "joined your community". Especially when I'm spammed regularly by your sales offers and incentives afterwards.

One- sided conversation is the most common mistake that I see with Corporate Websites. They are initially built to sell a product and then Community is just a label that's slapped on as an afterthought with little or no effort given to meeting the needs of your visitors.

User participation can be built into your community in many different ways:

• Comments - not just on your blog but elsewhere on the site too.
• Forums (think Digital Point)
• User Reviews (think Trip Adviser)
• Social Networking (think Facebook and LinkedIn; even Stumbleupon)
• Content tagging (think Delicious)
• Content Aggregation (think Flicker)
• Content Aggregation Plus Ratings & Reviews (think Reddit)

Remember to make sure that you build your interaction in a way that solves the particular need of your community (don't guiding principles make life easy ?)

3) Ability to get to know other community members

It is impossible to build a community based on the visitors' lone interaction with the site.

A community needs members.

The ability to get to know other community members is a critical element in meeting a need for support.

But companies must think beyond profiles.

In regular life we are defined by our actions not words. Online, our words are our actions. You will learn much more about me by looking at my comments, by the content that I submit to aggregation sites and by my user reviews then you will ever learn through the crap I wrote in my profile.

There are many ways you can build the ability to get to know other community members:

• Avatars - people are visual. It's difficult to make a connection with an alias, handle, or even a name. I can connect with an aviator even if it's anime or a pair of red shoes.
• Allow user feedback through comments. Encourage it through a point type system like SEOmoz. Remember your voice tells me a lot about you… people gravitate towards like-minded people.
• Conversation - Social Networking capability like the ability to email or IM members is a great way to allow your community members to get to know each other.
• and yes, User Profiles :). Especially where the profile can be further personalized through pictures and videos and free form comments (not just filling out a few profile questions)

4) Have a reason to go back

The most popular communities make you feel like you will miss something important if you don't go back regularly.

The more stagnant your website the less reason people have to go back to it. The converse is true with a community. The more active your members, the more your visitors will need to go back regularly.

So if new information, conversation, content is the carrot then you must build incentives into the design of your community:

• A Visitor Usage Statistics are easy to implement and go a long way. When I first joined Stumbleupon I felt painfully new having less than 100 stumbles. This was incentive for me to become an active user in the Stumble community.

• A Community Statistics readerboard can provide incentive as well. This is because being in the top percentile of content contributors, commenter's or voters can help to position you as an expert in your industry.

The more prominent the stats the more incentive they create (to a point). Focus on the positives or it will be a disincentive if new community members are too obvious.

• Points system for contributing where accumulating points gets you additional privileges in the community.

This can be as simple a concept as allowing do follow links after 5 comments or as complicated as allowing access to premium content if a threshold of points is maintained.

• The ability to elevate your status in the community (member, gold member, moderator, etc) based on your participation can also provide incentive to be active.

Understanding your visitors needs and staying true to these Guiding Principles of Building an Online Community will help you to successfully transform your website into a vibrant Community.

traduction francaise

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

Key Elements of an Online Community Strategy

You decide it's time to take better advantage of that traffic by giving your site a face lift.

The next thing you know, you've fallen out of the SERPS and you're left shaking your head, not quite knowing what happened.

It's an all too common scenario. To us Marketing People it was just a "face lift" a "re-skin". We didn't really make any major changes that should matter to the search engines.

No reason to let our SEO team know in advance that we're making these changes. After all, it's still the same site.

or is it?

Google doesn't think so.

The search engines (and Google in particular) are all about trust. We talk about trust in human terms. For humans trust is difficult to define. It's part of our feelings. Some might even say it's influenced by intuition. But the Search Engines don't have feelings and intuition.

They have to take something that is very much subjective and make it entirely objective. What we call "trust" for the search engines is really a mathematical formula (algorithm) that is looking for enough "cues" to determine it's next course of action.

…… If I visit your website and see this….. then I should do "A"…….

…… If I visit your website and don't see this….. then I should do "B"…….

My good friend and colleague Ruud, understands that changing everything changes everything. He often describes it like this…..

You're walking down the street and you bump into an old friend. Except that your friend has gotten extensive plastic surgery and he looks nothing like he used to. He's shaved his head. His face is totally different and he's wearing weird clothing.

His voice is the same and he swears it's him. But you don't quite trust what you're seeing right away. You need more cues.

It's the same as the search engines. You can make changes to a site, but you need to leave enough cues so that SE's know it's still the same site. And they don't have the benefit of intuition. It's all math.

What to consider when building your Website Transition Plan?

If you're making changes to your site and you don't want to risk losing your search engine positioning then there are some critical steps that must be taken.

#1 - What to do with your URL's - The best case scenario is to make sure that your urls stay the same. You may think that your urls are staying the same but you need to watch for hidden changes:

• If you decide to reorganize your sub-folder structure this will change your urls.
• If the programmer needs to move from .php to .cfm then this will change the urls.
• If you decide to make the naming convention of you urls' more intuitive then although this might be a good move from an SEO and Usability perspective, it's still changing your urls.

If it's not possible to keep your url's the same or if you decide that you're better off moving to intuitive, keyword friendly urls then you need to 301 (not 302) redirect each page of the old site to it's new destination on the new site.

Note, your CMS may be able to do this using a .htaccess file (assuming you have apache based server) to do a bulk redirection.

#2 - Content Changes - If you want to make massive changes to your content fine but remember the cues. If your site structure is changing, your urls' are changing and now you want to make massive changes to your content then you will risk the search engines losing trust in your site.

#3 - Internal Link Structure - If you are making changes to your site structure don't forget to anticipate the impact it will have on your internal linking structure. Internal links tell the search engines what's important about your site. Plus they help to distribute the link power to your more important pages.

#4 - Timing - To minimize the risk, you may wish to consider implementing changes on a phased basis. Change the content, wait a month or two for the search engines to reconcile / come to terms with the changes. Then change the site structure / urls / do the redirects.

#5 - The plan doesn't end once the changes are implemented - You will want to make sure that you're watching the search engines and your server logs closely in the days and weeks following your site changes.

Look at your server log files for 404 pages or any other signs that something was missed or went awry. Monitor the search engines to make sure that they are indexing your new pages as they should.

By understanding the cues that the search engines look for, and anticipating what could go wrong in advance, you will be able to formulate a transition plan that minimizes the risk of change while maximizing the effectiveness of your site!

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

Website Transition Planning Critical When Making Changes

You've decided it's time to get online and what easier way than by starting a PPC campaign? Google has made it so simple that with a few clicks you are well on your way to Digital Marketing Success.

except

you seem to be spending a lot of money.

and

you're not really sure if it's making you money.

Here are the most common mistakes that I see when we take over a Small Business PPC Campaign:

1. Setting up your campaign as per Google's Default settings. I love Google. Their interface is awesome and their customer service rocks. But let's face it. The defaults are set up to maximize revenue for Google. Sometimes that means that you'll make a lot of money too. But sometimes it means that you will not be running as efficient a campaign as you could be.

2. Trying to Stretch your Budget too far. I don't care what kind of PPC genius you are, there is no way that you can stretch a $5.00 per day budget across North America.

I didn't make this up. I've someone try this. Twice.

Think about your cost per click and your budget. If you're averaging $1.00 per click then that gives you roughly 5 clicks per day. You need to make those clicks as targeted as possible.

3. Content Network. Google has the content network set up as a default that you have to opt out of. But the content network is not right for everyone. I've seen many situations where the content network has eaten a significant portion of the budget with a very low conversion rate. The Content Network can be hugely successful for some businesses. But it's not a "set and forget" type of campaign.

4. Geographical Targeting too Broad. There is a distinction between where you want to do business and where your target market is. Just because you could conceivably ship your widget anywhere in the world does not mean that a guy in Istanbul wants to buy it from your Iowa business.

By not focusing your PPC Budget to the geographical area where you're most likely to convert, you're wasting budget that could be used to increase your bids, broaden your keywords, keep you in the market longer, etc, etc.

5. Geographical Targeting too Narrow. This mistake is less common but I still see it a lot. There are many businesses that only sell within a small geographic area (less than 5 miles) . Think Local Businesses like Dry Cleaners, Tutors, Vets, etc. You definitely need to narrow down where your ads are served (as per #4 above) but Google isn't that precise. So if 1 mile is your geographic radius, try setting your geographical radius to 10 miles.

6. Launching with a very complex an account structure. The more complex your account the more difficult it will be to to determine what's working and what isn't. You can always build out ad groups and keyword lists after you have a better sense of what's working and what isn't.

7. Running your entire account under one campaign / one budget. Just as too complex is a problem too simple can be problematic too.

Geographical targeting is set at the campaign level so is your daily budget. You may have some high ROI products that you want to target broader geographically or High Performing keywords that should get more allocation of budget. Setting up more than one campaign will allow you to do this.

8. Not employing Day Parting. If you have a large budget and can afford to be in the market 24/7 then great! But for those that have to make budget decisions, Day Parting can be your best friend. If you're a B to B industry it's likely that you can maximize budget by only running ads 9-5 Monday to Friday.

Keep in mind that time of day targeting is set by your timezone so if you're on EST but California is a big market for you then you're going to have to take Time Zone differences into consideration.

9. Not enough ad groups. Ads are differentiated at the Ad Group level. By segmenting your keyword list into themed groups of keywords and then writing ads that specifically target those themes, you can have a huge impact on both your Click Through Rates (CTR) and Conversion Rates.

10. Not enough Ads in your Ad Groups. Writing targeted ads for each ad group can be a difficult task (it can be a little boring too). But think about it. Customers will click on the most compelling ad. If your ad is less compelling than your competitors, then you won't sell any widgets.

You know your customer and you know what sells…so why write more than one ad per ad group?

Because if you don't then you can't test different messaging. Trust me when I tell you that you will be surprised by the results and you will learn something new about your customers.

11. Using very Broad keywords. Broad keywords tend to be used by people early in the buying cycle. Think about the difference between "Vacation", "All Inclusive Vacation" and "Bermuda All Inclusive Vacation". Generally we find that people using very broad keyword queries are very early in the buying cycle, in the Learning Phase. As a result, conversion rates for these types of keywords are very low. Yet broad keywords tend to cost the most.

Narrower, more specific keywords tend to be used by people who know what they want and are closer to the Purchase Phase of the Buying Cycle.

I've seen Broad keywords eat 50% of a Small Business budget without any conversions. In this scenario, by not bidding on those expensive keywords the client reduced their spend by half while maintaining the same # of Conversions and Doubling their ROI.

12. Only utilizing Broad Match. Broad match is another default in Google. It allows Google to display your ads for variations, plurals, related words etc. If you are only using broad match, you may find that your ads are buying you low quality clicks.

13. Not using Negative Keywords. Negative keywords can help you to make those broad match keywords more effective by telling the search engines not to display your ads for irrelevant searches. Think about our vacation example above. A cruise line may wish to go after the keyword "cruise" but put a negative on "Tom" and "Penelope" i.e. not "Tom Cruise" or "Penelope Cruise".

14. Not Bidding on Your Brand Name. You may think that you don't need to bid on your name because your customers "should know" to type .com beside your name in their browser and go directly to your site.

Don't count on it. People will type www.companyname.com into their search query. You don't want to miss those clicks. Unless your company name is "Dell" or "Sony" chances are your branded terms will have a very low Cost per Click. They'll also be your highest converting keywords.

15. Not Bidding on Misspellings of your Brand Name. If branding is important to you then it's really going to hurt to bid on misspellings of your name. But remember that only the guy spelling it wrong is going to see that ad. They're not going to know any better anyway.

Consider this, if someone hears your ad on the radio you can't be sure that they'll know how to spell your company name. Bidding on misspellings increases the effectiveness of your offline advertising too.

16. Dynamic Insertion. Dynamic insertion puts the keyword that the searcher used into your ad title. If you do it well then dynamic insertion can increase your CTR significantly. For example, if someone does a search for "Kids Duvet covers" and they find your ad that says "kids duvet covers"; the average searcher is going to think "wow! these guys have exactly what I'm looking for" and click on your ad.

But a word of warning. Dynamic Insertion can go horribly wrong too. Make sure that you test your dynamic insertion ads with some of your own searches to see how they're showing up.

17. Maximum Bids. If you set your maximum bids too high you will pay more per click than you need to, especially if you're using broad match. If you are the only one bidding for a keyword, you should not be paying $1.00 per click for it. Try $0.10 an see what happens.

18. Bidding for the #1 Spot. There is little question that the number 1 spot does garner the most clicks. But Volume of Clicks is not your objective - it's sales. If people are comparison shopping you may find that a lower position, but still above the fold (like #3) will cost less and have a higher conversion rate . It's important to test the ROI on various positions.

19. Boring Ad Copy. Do a few keyword searches and most of the time you will find really boring ad copy. Your ad is what compels people to click. Make sure you give them a reason to click. Look at how your ad reads versus the competition. Would you click on it?

20. No Clear Call to Action. It's psychological. You need to tell people what you want them to do next. Numerous studies show that clear calls to action increase both CTR's and Conversion Rates.

21. Not testing small changes to the same ad. Writing a few different iterations of the same ad and measuring the results of those changes can have a huge impact on conversion rates. According to MSN, "Buy Now" will perform 171% better than "click here" in the education sector.

22. Testing too much at once. When you set up your PPC test you need to think of how many clicks you need to get before the test is statistically significant. If the 99th person clicks on an ad, you will have a 1% ctr. It is entirely possible that the 100th person could click your ad too, giving you a 2% ctr.

That's pretty straight forward. But now let's pretend that you want to do some multi-variant testing of 3 titles, with 3 first lines and 3 different second lines. That's 27 different tests. To even allow for 100 clicks to each of the tests that will take 2,700 clicks. If you are in a low volume high ROI industry then it's possible that this test could take months.

23. Sending all of your traffic to your home page. Home pages are typically not your highest converting page. If you're sending people to your homepage chances are they're going to have to search for what they're looking for. With every click you make your traffic take, you will lose people. Why not send them to what they told you they were looking for in the first place?

24. Ignoring Quality Score - Quality Score has a huge impact on your campaign's performance. An improved quality score can increase sales while reducing costs. It can take time to improve your quality score (i.e. by setting up individual landing pages) but it's usually well worth it.

25. Not finding a way to track conversions. If you don't do e-commerce on your site it can be difficult to figure out how to track conversions. But whether it's through a online inquiry form or a unique phone number, tracking conversions is critical.

Your highest CTR keywords may never convert. If you can't measure conversions, you could be wasting a ton of money.

26. Measuring Success through the wrong Metrics. Which would you rather have? A 10% CTR and a 2% Conversion Rate or a 5% CTR and a 3% Conversion Rate?

Let's do the math. Let's assume 1000 impressions per day at $1.00 per click and $50.00 value per conversion.

a) Scenario number one would cost us $100 and make us $100 for a break even ROI

b) Scenario number two would cost us $50 and make us $75 for a 50% ROI

version Francaise

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

Small Business PPC - 26 Mistakes That Cost You Money

Marketers need to start allocating budget over but to do so requires more reason than just intuitively “knowing” that it’s the right thing to do. Unfortunately marketers are currently ill equipped to sell social media internally to their stakeholders.

Part of our role as Social Media Marketers is to explain social media to our clients so that they can in turn “sell” it internally to their stakeholders. When I talk about social media with a client, I break it down into easily understandable pieces. In essence, a formula….

Awesome Content + Right Vehicle + Network of Users = Thousands of Visits

Find your awesome content
Awesome content falls into three different types of social media content.

• Sensational content like Jerry Springer type stories
• News related content that usually fits into a particular niche i.e. Science, Technology or Politics.
• Resource type content. This is stuff that people will want to bookmark in case they need to review it later.

Quality content alone isn’t enough.

Like good PR, the SMM headline must be written to grab attention. As good as your content is, your headline must be compelling enough to cut through the clutter of thousands of other submissions. Add to that the fact that most people don’t read they scan.

But you can’t “bait and switch”. As tempting as it is to write a catchy headline, if the content doesn’t live up to the headline it will get buried. FAST!!!

+ Use the Right Vehicle
There are thousands of social media sites (maybe millions) and that number is growing every day. Many of them are quite niche i.e. There are many Social Sites in the “environmental” or “music” categories.

Each Social Media Site has it’s own demographic. It’s critical that you get a good fit between the demographic for your content and the social media site. Geography is important too. I.e. if you are looking for US traffic around the recent landing on Mars, then Bebo would be a poor choice as it’s heavily music related & much more UK.

The social media site has to fit the content too. For example, Stumbleupon can send tons of traffic to a site but the Page has to be capable of standing alone. If the content can’t stand alone (without the benefit of cues from the rest of the site) then the visitor will be confused and the submission will soon be buried.

+ Network of Power Users
Being plugged into a good network of users who are going to support you is critical.

To build a Power Profile on Tier I social media like Digg is a generally a full time job for EACH social media property. It is tremendously time consuming and is much less costly when outsourced.

Network. This is also critical. Part of the algorithm is that you cannot have one person who repeatedly submits content from your site. This is an unnatural pattern. This is another reason why it’s important to have tight relations with other Power Profiles who will submit content on your behalf.

= thousands of visits
If your content does well on the Big Three (Digg, Stumbleupon and Reddit), you can expect these sites to drive anywhere from 10K visitors for a lukewarm hot to 70K+ for Sidebar hot on Digg.

While Digg and Reddit tend to drive onetime spikes in traffic, Stumbleupon is not a “one and done” phenomenon. Really good content can have a comeback and go through an entirely new “wave” of stumbles. Stumble will only ever show you a website once so these are all brand new visitors

So what?

Being able to sell social media to your clients is a good start. But what’s even more important than that, is to be able to explain social media so that your clients can in turn sell it internally.

It’s only once stakeholders understand how social media works, that the budgets will follow.

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

Sell Social Media So That Your Clients Can Buy It!

But with formal SEO training not yet available on mass (i.e. taught in colleges), this growth is going to leave us with a talent shortage.

Essentially, large companies who want to get into this business are going to be forced to buy their way in.

In order to prepare your shop to possibly benefit from this increased M&A activity, it is helpful to have a sense of what factors will make you attractive to a perspective purchaser.

But one size does not fit all.

The evaluation of a one man shop is entirely different from that of a large Agency .

THE ONE MAN SHOP
There are many one man shops that are hugely successful. In fact many of our most authoritative industry experts are sole proprietors.

Like it or not, YOU ARE the business. Your business has little value unless you come with it.

Potential buyers - Your potential buyers are likely those looking to “buy talent” and/or credibility. A new entrant to the SEO Industry can say that they’ve been "doing SEO" for as long as you have.

What makes a one man shop desirable?

1) Reputation / Brand - To be attractive to a potential buyer in this scenario, you MUST have a well known name in the industry. Ideally, you will have case studies from recognizable brands. Further, active participation in the industry increases your credibility as an authority.

2) Re-occurring Revenue Stream - A re-occurring revenue stream will also be important to your valuation as it is likely that your price will be a multiple of your revenue. Moreover, your established business (re-occurrent revenue) should be sufficient to pay for your future salary.

3) Top Line Revenues - An EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) calculation doesn't make a lot of sense to a one man firm as sole proprietors typically realize their profits as they are earned vs reinvesting.

In this case, a calculation should be made based on a multiple of top line revenues.

SMALL TO MID SIZED SEO FIRM (2 – 30 people*)
If a new entrant is looking to fast track it's success by"buying the talent" that it requires then considerations around the size and strength of your team will be important.

1) Team Attributes - How many years of experience does your team have? Do you have high turnover? Do you have senior people filling key roles in your business?

2 Process - Process is also an important consideration. A new entrant doesn't want to just buy talent, they want to buy the secret recipe……

• How do you sell SEO?
• How do you manage the work flow process?
• Who is accountable for what aspects of the process?
• Do you have checks and balances in place?
• What does your reporting look like?
• And to what degree is it automated?

3) Cash Flow - Cash flow will be an important consideration (nobody wants to buy a sinking ship) however if you're having trouble collecting on your receivables, many companies will assume that once they take over, they can do a better job than you are (rightly or wrongfully so).

LARGE SEO AGENCY (30+ *)
For a large SEO Agency, factors that make you attractive to acquisition focus much more on hard calculations than the softer considerations of small to mid sized firms.

*Note: There are lots of web design firms who claim to be in this category when in fact only a handful of their 30 person shop actually do SEO. This article differentiates between firms with an SEO component versus a dedicated shop of 30+ people who only do SEO.

1) Scalability - The strong team you were proud of as a small to mid sized SEO firm is expected of in a large firm. For a large SEO agency to be attractive for acquisition, organizational structure is critical.

Can the structure be replicated easily for growth? Are there established training programs in place?

2) Cross Sell Opportunity - New entrants will be looking for "fit" with their existing markets.

• Is there an opportunity to cross sell between the acquiring company's existing clients and your products?
• Is there an opportunity to sell between your clients and the acquiring company's products?
• What about clients? Do you predominately service mom and pop shops while your perspective buyer mainly targets enterprise sized clients? Your firm will be less attractive if the purchaser is discounting too large a proportion of your business due to "lack of fit".

3) Technology - Have you invested in proprietary technology that would benefit the buyer either by providing them with a competitive advantage or reducing costs?

Not only does an investment in technology give you an edge against the competition but it also shows long term strategic thinking.

The actual calculation
Keep in mind that there is a difference between book value and market value. A traditional "by the book" valuation will typically end up being a multiple of your EBITDA. Six times EBITDA on the low end and twelve times EBITDA at the higher end.

But EBITDA isn't always the most fair way to measure value. When companies are growing really quickly, profits tend to be lower or non-existent. This does not mean that your company's value is non-existent.

This is why in a pressurized environment like SEO, a calculation based on a multiple of your top line revenue may be the more appropriate measure even for large SEO Shops.

At the end of the day, what you're worth really boils down to how much you're willing to sell for. And with the industry booming, algorithms changing, new markets emerging - it's still very much the wild west out there.

so…

…how do you put a price on fun?

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

Huge Growth + Talent Shortage = Increased M & A Activity

Except that we’re poised for some serious growth.

SEO - Introduction Stage - Starting about 1998
Companies who were around in the introduction stage often had to build product awareness and develop a market for SEO.

In the early ‘2000’s, many of our clients had just build their first websites. This was a significant investment for them and they thought that now that they have a website, the online sales would just flow in. Many didn’t realize that they had just invested serious coin into an over-priced business card. Because nobody could find them.

At this point, there was little consistency in the product. And as the algorithm got more complex, the SEO offering varied more. Some companies were offering to “submit to hundreds of search engines” (some still are) whilst others were offering usability, analytics and site architectural input in addition to on-page and off-page SEO.

SEO - Early Growth Stage - we’re still just at the beginning of it.
In the early growth stage, smart SEO companies are beginning to think about building their brand and to increase market share.

Demand is increasing as more customers understand the benefits of “getting found”. There is some competition at this stage but because the market is broadening so much, competition is limited and there is still a huge amount of camaraderie within the industry.

10 years into it, it’s easy to assume that our industry is more mature than it actually is.

We’ve only just begun.

Customer Implication
Demand has already started to increase but it is going to skyrocket. And it’s going to come from all types of business from very small customers to Enterprise type of businesses.

Up until recently, the neighborhood dry cleaner didn’t care if someone across the country found their website because they deal within a 5 km radius got very little benefit from optimizing their website. Now as search gets much better at localization, those local business will become much more serious about the opportunities online

It is also likely that we'll see a lot of growth from Enterprise clients. These clients previously resisted SEO due to the complexity of working within legacy back-end systems. As technology increases and back-end systems become less expensive for more capability, we’re going to see companies replace their antiquated CMS’s with SEO friendly options.

Another change that this stage of the product life cycle will bring is in our relationship with the client. As SEO becomes a bigger part of the mainstream marketing mix, our customers will become more and more knowledgeable about SEO (we're already starting to see this).

We'll move from having a sales / consultative role to being a thought partner. Our clients will have a good understanding of what needs to be done but they'll outsource it to us because we're more efficient at implementing.

Competition Implication
With high growth in revenues, low barriers to entry, and no certification required, the SEO industry is prime for attracting any and all new entrants.

There have always been new competitors. But the face of our competition is going to change greatly. Up until now competition has focused primarily on small start ups and web design firms who decide to add a search component. Some stick around but many are wiped out with the next major shift in the algorithm.

This phase of the SEO life cycle is going to attract better capitalized, stronger competition from many sectors. These new entrants are attracted to SEO by the potential for profits not by the fit with their offering.

We are already starting to see traditional media firms seek to protect their eroding revenues by grabbing a slice of the online pie. But WalMart has shown us that future competition could be anyone. And it will be.

No all new entrants are attracted by dollar signs. There are also companies that are feeling increased pressure to offer a more well rounded package. As the integration of offline and online marketing services increases, customers are putting more pressure on agencies to handle the full scope of their marketing spend including the online component.

Although we’re already starting to see increased competition, many existing SEO companies aren’t feeling the pinch yet because demand is also increasing.

One implication of increased demand coupled with new entrants to the market is the impact on supply. We’re starting to experience a shortage of experienced SEO talent

SEO talent is a scarce resources. And this scared resource is not yet being renewed at a fast enough pace. Whilst some colleges are starting to offer digital media / internet marketing diploma, these grads know very little about what it takes to optimize a website.

Moreover, what they do know is limited to theory. It’s one thing to know that links are important to ranking. Its an entirely different thing to know how to effectively build links.

So what?

Who cares where we are in the product life cycle?

Although we’ve already experienced a lot of growth, this growth is nothing compared to what we’re about to experience.

In this next stage of the SEO life cycle, we’re going to see shifts in our clients, competition and product offering. Knowing that this is coming, will allow you to prepare.

If we know that face of our competition is going to change from other small to mid sized SEO's to large Agencies and Enterprise size companies in totally unrelated industries then we can prepare for this by determining how we're going to differentiate ourselves from the new entrants.

And if we know that there is going to be increased pressure on skilled resources then we should be developing in house training programs now.

The future is now. And it's only just begun.

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

SEO is about to Grow Up

But for large enterprise sized clients, a local strategy is one for a particular country. Multi nationals typically are faced with the decision:

Are they going to have one overriding strategy for all markets

or

Are they going to have a local strategy (including different products, pricing, etc) for each market (country) that they play in.

and how this question is answered has a HUGE impact on your Search Strategy (at least it should).

Why is a Local Search Strategy Important?

Google gives preference towards local websites within the search results. Canadian companies get special treatment on .ca; Brit's on .co.uk and recently American's on .com.

As the search engine algorithms change, it is very likely that more weight will be given to local factors. Although it is currently very common to see a handful of large powerful sites dominating the results on a multitude of extensions, in the future it will become more difficult to rank in another country.

How does Google determines a websites nationality?

There are many factors that help the search engines to determine the nationality of a website:

1. the extension - is it a (.ca); (.co.uk); (.com.au); (.com); ect, etc.

2. Hosting - where is the site hosted?

The best way to be considered local to a particular extension is to either use that extension in your url or be hosted in that country.

If you have a .com and are looking to rank outside the US, beware of your hosting solution. Hosting companies may appear to be local when in fact they're hosted in another country themselves.

Other signals to the search engines that help with the nationality of a website include:

3. Google Webmaster Tools - country selection

4. Whois - address of register

5. Contact us page

6. More difficult to control but - the country that most of your links are coming from. For those of you who outsource most of your link building to another country, this could have serious implications in the future.

What are the considerations when determining whether to adopt a Local Search Strategy?

Essentially there are three major alternatives to evaluate. Each with it's own pros and cons.

1) Do nothing – try to rank with the .com

Pro’s

• Do nothing is an alternative that should always be evaluated. It’s the least costly of the alternatives (at least from a developmental standpoint) as there is no need to invest in a new website.

Con’s

• This alternative is more viable if you are already a hugely powerful site.

If you're not, then chances are that it may take a lot of time and effort to catch up to your competitors. Sites that rank well for reasonable competitive terms on many extensions typically are older sites (5 to 10 years old) with typically '000's of links and '000's of pages indexed.

• This strategy may work in the short term but may be less reliable 2 years from now. If the search engine algorithms evolve to take more of a local market strategy you may find that you lose your ranking in countries that are not your local market.

2) Set up geographic specific pages using sub domains

For example http://targetedcountry.clientname.com. This strategy would be supplemented with a link building strategy focused on pointing links to the sub domain.

Pro’s

• It is possible to associate the sub domains with a specific region to Google

• Sub Domains can be hosted separately from the parent domain so can make local to the search engines.
• Also, you can define geographic region in Google’s webmaster’s tools at the Sub Domain level so targeting a specific country is do-able.

• There is speculation that there may be a “sharing” effect on the link building so that links built to the Sub domain benefit the Parent and visa versa. If true, then this might reduce the “sandbox” effect on the sub domain.

• From a branding perspective, this solution allows a company to keep it's brand intact as each country lives off the Company's domain.

Con’s

• There will be a lot of work involved in setting up the new domain including creating new content specific to each domain.

• There is likely be some "sandbox effect" on the new sub domain. This is an important consideration as it will impact the ability for the sub domain to rank within a period of time.

• This alternative splits up the link building effort across multiple urls

3) Set up entirely new websites for each country

Pro’s

• This is probably the best way to rank in any one country over the long run

• This is definitely region specific to the search engines.

Con’s

• Unless you had the foresight to buy up a bunch of domains years ago, it is unlikely that you will be able to obtain all of your brand's domains for each extension that you need. If you haven't' already done this DO IT NOW whether you're considering a local market strategy or not.

• If you can't get all the url's that you need then there will be some impact on your brand.

• There will development cost and time involved in setting up new websites for each market.

• There is likely be a "sandbox effect" on the new site.

• This alternative splits up the link building effort across multiple urls

Ultimately there is a lot to consider when determining 1) if a local search strategy makes sense for your company and 2) how best to implement it.

This is definately a case where one solution does not fit all.

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

Adopting a Local Search Strategy for Multi National Clients

but

despite how cool their new blog is…. despite the increase in readers, traffic, comments, etc.

at some point,

your client is ultimately going to turn to you and ask

"What about sales?"

Because unless your client is running a CPM model or is really big into branding, at the end of the day; the only thing that really matters to your client is conversions.

Is this blog making me money?

How do you get your Blog traffic to convert? First and foremost, sales tips are worthless if you don't follow the 10 Golden Rules of Blogging.

But the 10 Golden Rules of Blogging alone won't get you sales. They're just table stakes to make it even possible to sell.

1) Follow Jeff Quipp’s tips for Building Authority:
People want to buy from the best. Strive to be an expert in your field. Even if you sell a commodity product where "the best" is really just better marketing, then do that. Build your online authority and you will be perceived as "the best".

Use your blog to develop a specialty in a particular niche of your industry.

As Jeff says, this is a difficult balancing act. You don’t want the niche to be too narrow that you limit people’s perceptions of your abilities (not unlike type casting to some actors), though too broad and its near impossible to establish yourself as an expert, and less and less likely over time.

Reach out to others in your field. Or as Jeff says, be an uber networker. One great way to do this in your blog writing is to find other industry blogs to link to when writing your posts. Many blog platforms will ping them that you've linked to them.

2) Follow the Loop Strategy in your post writing.

The Loop Strategy suggests that we never want to leave the visitor without telling them what the next step is. There are no dead ends because each page leads to another page.

Think about the most logical path for the consumer to take. If I enjoy this content then I’ll probably like that too. Build the next step into your template. Don’t add new content without thinking about what it relates to. Link it to the next step. This will substantially increase your opportunity to convert.

3) Make sure you have an "About Us" section in your Blog

Depending on your product or service, some people will jump right the buy, but others may want to know a little more about you.

Picture this. I found your blog through a long tail keyword search. I read your post about Rugs, Plastic Products, Petroleum, whatever and it really spoke to me because that's my industry too.

I find myself thinking wow. Why haven't I heard of these guys before? Who are they? And sadly, I'm left wondering because there is no About Us page. And if you're afraid to tell me who you are - then I don't trust you.

4) Use a Landing Page to ask for the sale

If you've given your reader really useful content, there is nothing wrong with linking out to a product page if that product is related to your article.

The Weight Loss Industry is really good at this: for example, do a search for "green tea, weight loss" you will find a plethora of helpful informational articles about the benefits of Green Tea for weight loss. Pretty much every one of these articles was written by someone who is trying to sell you Green Tea.

Does this bother me? Not if the article was useful. Make sure you give thought to color, language and placement when designing the landing page.

5) Make sure you have a call to action on the page you link to not in the blog post.

There are many possible ways to do this:

1. Just ask for the sale. Include an order now button beside the product information (The Direct Close method)
2. Use a deadline. For example, "product will be going up in price by July 30th (The Time Driven Close).
3. Make an offer. i.e. order these two products and save 20%. This makes the buyer feel like they're making a smart choice or saving money (The Concession Close Method).

Whatever method feels right for you, make sure you use persuasive writing techniques like Brian suggests.

Getting you blog traffic to convert is really just a matter of applying successful marketing techniques to your Blog. The trick is knowing what's appropriate for a Blog and what belongs on a separate page.

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

How to get your Blog Traffic to Convert in 5 Easy Steps

Next week I'll write about How to get your Blog Traffic to Convert (part five in a 5 part series on Blog Strategy with a focus on clients). But before we can cover that, you must follow these basic principals if you want to your blog posts to convert:

The 10 Golden Rules of Blogging:

1. Start with an SEO friendly infrastructure. Word Press for example has so many useful plug ins such as Netconcepts SEO Title Tag 2.1 that make life (and Marketing) easier.

If you are going to be using social media then you consider having the buttons available below each post.

Consider this, you write a stellar piece of content that is very social media worthy, you submit it to Digg and it's getting votes. If you don't have a Digg button you are probably missing out on votes. People want to read the piece and Digg it. Are not as likely to Digg it if they have to go back to Digg to do so.

Socialize Me! Wordpress Plug in is helpful for helping to build friends and your community. blah, blah! technology reviews this plug in well here.

2. Make sure that the design of the blog looks like a blog. Your client will want to make sure that the blog maintains the site's overall look and feel. This is very important but it's easy to go overboard here.

Don't keep too many aspects of the Site's overall template so that the blog looks more like any other page on their site and not like a blog. A blog should be written in a more relaxed tone than your regular pages and it should look more relaxed too.

Save the Ads for the rest of your site.

3. Write a Killer Headline EVERY time – Headlines have a huge impact on whether your Blog is going to cut through the clutter. Whether your reader finds you through their RSS reader, a keyword search or through social media, a killer title can make the difference of whether it’s going to get clicked on or not.

4. Keep your posts scan-able. Only 16% of people actually read blogs word for word … the rest (84%) merely scan. Make your posts more scan-able by utilizing:

• Lists – easy to scan and read, and typically interesting. Paragraphs are often too difficult or time consuming to read, and are actually avoided.

• Formatting - Use bold, CAPITALS, italics, underlining, to emphasize points. Don’t go overboard as you run the risk of frustrating your reader. Also consider changing font size, color and style to draw your readers eyes to your main points.

• Headings and Sub Headings - Large, Bold words that act as visual cues of what is happening in the subsequent content are effective ways of drawing readers further into articles. Make these intriguing, yet descriptive

• White Space - lot's of it. Give your copy room to breath.
  

5. Try to keep the length of blog posts between 400 – 700 words. An easy rule of thumb is limit your post to one major idea per post … if you're trying to cover more than 1 idea, break it into a series of posts.

6. Get to the Point - be succinct in your writing.

7. Use Pictures/Images - Research shows that readers eyes are drawn down the page by relevant pictures. As Michael points out in don't forget the images and video, it only takes less than minutes to locate, apply tags to, etc an image for your post.

(From www.ishkur.com)

Good quality images can make a site look incredibly professional. The converse is also true, for example, in most cases clip art is just not appropriate for a Business Blog.

8. Build Credibility by linking out. - the more you link out to other notable sites, the more educated you look as a blogger. Guilty by association can be a good thing.

Plus, when you link to another blog post, that bloggers platform will ping them with your link or trackback. Linking out is a great way to get the attention of other industry authorities.

9. Make sure you disclose relationships where necessary (don’t pretend). It's a lot easier to Manage one's Online Reputation by avoiding mistakes versus fixing them after the fact. Most social media issues arise from people pretending to be something that they are not.

Perception is everything. I have no idea if Max is who he says he is but Max's travelog from the Guardian got of hundreds of negative responses to his explanation of who he is and why he's blogging.

10. If this is a business blog then write for your reader. You can take a lot more leeway with a personal blog, but the average commercial blog reader doesn't care what you had for breakfast.

Think about needs your readers looking to satisfy? It is possible to come up with really good content ideas for even the most challenging of industries. Remember that good content adds to the body of knowledge. The days of keeping all your knowledge close to your chest are gone.

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

10 Golden Rules of Blogging

You've sold your client on a blog and you've developed a Blog Strategy. Plus you've made the blog much more implementable by coming up with 30 to 50 Blog Post ideas. But for this Blog Strategy to be really successful, one of the most important things that you can do is to manage your clients expectations.

Metrics without some point of comparison are just numbers. What turns that meaningless data into useful information is having a point of comparison.

Blog Benchmark figures are difficult to find.

Typically it's only the top, very successful bloggers who make public their traffic figures, # of RSS feeds, etc. But for the average business blog, these are not a realistic benchmark for success.

In this post, I am going to provide business blog benchmarks. These benchmarks are based aggregate data across a broad range of clients.

1.) Common Measures:

Some of the most common measures of blog success include volume and engagement.

How many visitors does the blog get? Is that number increasing? Is it predominately repeat visitors coming in off your site or is your blog attracting new traffic too?

Number of visitors is really dependent on how broad your industry is. Small numbers are not a bad thing if this traffic is very targeted to your niche.

From what I've seen, average traffic benchmarks for a Small Business Blog = 1,ooo to 2,000 visitors per month; for Mid Sized Business = 10,000 - 20,000 visitors per month; Large, Enterprise-Sized Clients = 50,000 to 100,000 blog visitors per month. This is easily doable with a social media strategy.

What about engagement measures? Three great measures of how engaged your traffic is include Bounce Rate, Time Spent on the Site and Number of Page views.

While there are many factors that impact that bounce rate, as a general rule of thumb, you should consider a bounce rate below 20% to be excellent and over 60% to be fairly high. Between 20% and 60% whether these numbers are high or low really depends on what industry you're in and if you have a high number of RSS subscribers.

Google Analytics measures a bounce as "the percentage of single page visits resulting from this set of pages or page". This means that if you have a number of people sign up for RSS feeds, or read your blog daily. These "one-page-per-day" awesome visitors, will be counted as bounces.

Time spent on site is typically going to be much lower for your blog than for the rest of the site, particularly if your site is attracting a large number of return visitors.

Where time spent on site might average 4 or 5 minutes, time spent on your blog might only average 1.5 to 2 minutes. Time spent on your blog over 4-5 minutes (what would be considered average for the rest of your site) is quite good for a blog.

This is because it only takes about a minute to half read, half scan an average 800 word blog post. If your traffic is spending more than 3 minutes per visit and are visiting more than one post at a time then I'd consider your blog content to be engaging.

2.) Blogger Metrics

Most bloggers I know measure volume and engagement differently; in fact, RSS Feeds and Comments are darn near sacred.

Most people don't publish their RSS Feed numbers until they get a decent number of subscribers. For some that means subscribers in the hundreds, for others it means subscribers in the thousands. Either way, this gives new bloggers unrealistic expectations for how to define success.

RSS Feeds rely heavily on building momentum. The first hundred RSS subscribers will probably take longer to build than it will the next two hundred. This is because it takes a whole lot of inertia to power something from nothing.

For a Business Blog, building your first 100 subscribers is a great achievement.

Most bloggers will agree that there is nothing so satisfying as knowing that you've engaged someone enough to stimulate a comment. I think that it's because as bloggers we "put ourselves out there".

Maybe we're being as true to ourselves as we can be, or maybe we're really honest. Whatever the case, as bloggers we expose our vulnerable side and then…

nothing.

We have no idea how our readers responded to the post.

Unless they comment. Comments turn your blog from a one way dialogue into a conversation.

How many comments should you aim for? Highly successful blog with thousands of subscribers will routinely get 50 to 100 comments per post. These blogs tend to be the most visible but they're not a realistic benchmark for the average business blog.

For a new blog, getting one comment is an achievement. A solid stretch goal for your new business blog, should be to routinely get between 5 and 10 comments per post.
3.) Smoke and Mirrors Metrics

Some bloggers like to measure the "value of their blog". This metric doesn't really make sense for the average business blog though because they are unlikely to ever sell their blog. So if you're never going to sell it; who cares what it's worth?

Another measure of blog success often quoted is Technorati ranking. Technorati ranking is based on links to your site from other sites. For the typical business, this measure has very limited value. If you want to measure links to your blog then there are better tools to do this.

When used as a relative measure i.e. to compare your blog's ranking to your competitors; then technorati can be somewhat interesting. But it should be considered a relative measure not an absolute measure.

4.) The most important metric of all.

ROE "Return on Energy".

Apart from every other measure that I've discussed, the success of your client's blog really just boils down to return on energy. Is the blog making them more money than the next best way they could spend their time and money?

One really cool way to measure the value of your blog traffic is to use Google Analytics. In Google Analytics you can set up your conversion tracking to measure Per Visit Goal Value [the average value (based on goal value) of a visit to your site].

For example, if every visitor who hits your homepage is worth $1.00, you may find that every visitor who visits the blog is worth $5.00.

Basically the ROE of your blog boils down to the following: Is the blog traffic spilling over to the site and are those visitors spending money?

and

are they spending more money than the value of your time invested and/or the amount of money that you are investing in your blog?

As stated earlier, these are benchmarks based on the metrics I've seen.   I'd love some feedback on these benchmarks. What have you seen?

————————————————————————————————-
This is the fourth in a 5 part series on Blog Strategy with a focus on clients. This series will explore:

1. How to Sell your Client on a Blog Strategy
2. How to develop a Blog Strategy? What makes it a ‘Strategy’ versus just implementing a Blog?
3. How to Come up with Blog Post Ideas for Challenging Industries
4. What are realistic measures of success for your Client’s Blog?
5. How to get your Blog Traffic to Convert

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

Business Blog Benchmarks