One of the most important things I do is help my clients figure out the words a searcher is likely to enter when looking for what my client offers.  I often use the example of what we do with sensitive paper documents, most of us call that “paper shredding” but the people in the industry call it “document destruction”.    These phrases refer to the same thing but they results returned by Google are different.

The answers in my example are close but not exactly the same.  The difference gets larger for harder to describe problems.  Understanding what we mean versus what we say is a very complicated task.   Search engines have come a long way in helping us find the information we want but they aren’t good enough, yet.

I don’t disagree with what Danny Sullivan says in his blog – Could Google Play Jeopardy Like IBM’s Watson but I think he underestimates how Watson could impact search.  While they might be slightly biased the IBMers over at Writing for Digital wrote the 3 Ways Watson Manifests the Future of Search blog post.  Their post highlights how they think the Watson technology will help search.   I tend to agree with where they think it will go.

Watson isn’t about to replace Google anytime soon.  I do think the folks at Google and Bing will use this major PR win for IBM as incentive to make their search engines produce better results.

Getting the content out of Blogger wasn’t hard.  There is an export feature that allows you to easily export all of your posts.    The new blog runs on WordPress which has an import feature.   After a couple of steps the data was in the new blog but what about the URLs?

Redirecting URLs from Blogger is essentially impossible and Blogger wants it that way.  Blogger isn’t trying to lock you in to their platform.  They make it easy enough to move to another platform but what they don’t want you to do is redirect your URLs.  Why not?  The short answer is spammers.   Blogger is a free platform so ANYONE can use it.  By anyone I mean honourable and not so honourable people.   The spammers of the world will set up thousands of free blogs only to redirect them to some less scrupulous site.   It is for that reason that Blogger doesn’t want you redirecting URLs from Blogger.   This is a problem for real businesses that started using Blogger because it was easy.

My recommendation to you is that you don’t start out with a Blogger blog for your business.  At some point in the future you WILL regret your decision to use Blogger for your corporate blog.    If you really want to use the blogger platform then make sure you use a custom domain from the outset.   With a custom domain you have more options in the future on what to do with your URLs.

In talking to my client I explained what makes me different is my ability to think like a prospect.  I am not encumbered by the curse of knowledge that my clients seem to have when it comes to their business.  Many of my clients have forgotten what it’s like to not know that their product or service exists.  To deal with this I have use a process called Symptomeering.

Symptomeering (sym-to-meer-ing) is the process of identifying symptom based keywords that your target audience uses to explain the pain they are experiencing.  These symptom based keywords are then aligned with your offering in order to drive actionable traffic to your website.

The process looks like this:

Symptomeering Flow Diagram

I had one of the owners of WatServ as a subscriber to my SEO newsletter.  He liked the content and forwarded it to his partner.  This led to a first meeting and ultimately WatServ signing on as a client.   There new site is under construction.

In 2007 Facebook had over 600 million internal searches per month.  According to Comscore and others Facebook has doubled in unique visits from this time in 2009.   Facebook is clearly a primary destination for many.   How are you taking advantage of people that are searching on Facebook?

YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social sites also have their own search engines.  Yes, some of the content from these sites can be found in the major search engines but do you want to rely on them to expose your content?   What if a visitor never goes to the search engine but rather uses the internal search engines?

In real estate the sales adage is: location, location, location.  This can also be applied to search marketing.  You must be found where people are searching.  You can’t tell some where to search.  All you can do is ensure they find you wherever they search.

Mobile Subscribers:

• Rogers 8.6 million
• Bell Mobility 6.8 million
• Telus 6.6 million

Rogers reports that 35% of its subscribers are using smart phones.  Let’s assume that this is the same percentage across all providers.  That’s 7.7 million smart phone subscribers, in Canada alone.  

When was the last time you tried to view your corporate website on a smart phone?

At the very least you should make it easy for someone to find your contact information when they are using a hand-held device.  Treat your webpages like letterhead, put your phone number on every page.

LinkedIn has a large audience of over 70,000 users.   Your audience is probably looking for you there.  It is also a great place for you to do basic background research on companies and individuals.  Here are 5 tips to get your research going.  LinkedIn provides free and paid services.  The free services will meet most of your needs.  The advanced service is for power users for people in sales, marketing and recruiting.

UPDATE

It looks like I’ve successfully ranked my experimental site for mechanical paper fastener at #2 on Google within 30 days of launch.  Now that the site ranks well what does that mean for traffic?  It has translated into 6 visit in the last 30 days.

I set up this experiment to highlight the fact that ranking high isn’t in and of itself a goal of my search marketing efforts.  My goal is to get you qualified traffic that will lead to a conversion.

From an business perspective my experience is tangible proof that using social media is one way to broaden your reach.  I follow a blog called Presentation Zen.   I saw a link to the Start With Why video on that blog.  I watched the video and bought that book.  I have also signed up on the Start With Why blog to receive communications directly from the author, Simon Sinek.  Ask yourself how can your business use this kind of approach to grow sales.  Just remember to start with why.

A couple of months ago I posted a Google Analytics presentation to Slideshare. The following are another four measurements Google Analytics can help you discover.

There are a number of reports in Google Analytics that can help the site owner determine visitor engagement.  A report I like to use for this purpose is the average pageviews report.  By monitoring how many pages a visitor looks at the site owner can get a sense of how engage the visitor is.  The average pageviews report can also indicate the presense of a navigation problem.  In most cases a visitor to a site needs to look at more than one page before they take an action.  How many pages they need to take isn’t always obvious.  From the average pageviews report the site owner can determine if their are too few pages being visited or too many.  Too many might indicate that users can’t find what they are looking for.

Pageview reports are an indicator of what is going on with your site but they don’t provide insight into what’s happening on specific pages.  Fortunately for the site owner Google Analytics provide several reports such as landing pages report and exit pages reports that shed some light on visitor behaviour.  Another helpful report is the navigation summary report.  With the navigation summary report you can see which pages were visited before the current page and which pages were visited after the current page.  Something I find interesting when looking at the navigation summary is to see how many visitors go back to a transition page in order to re-orient themselves on a given website.

Smartphones are all the rage but are people really using them to surf your website.  The short answer is yes.  Google recently added a report to Google Analytics that will show how many visits and from which type of handsets visit your site.   This report will give an early indication of whether or not your site should be made mobile aware.  The short answer to that question is also yes but with a little insight you can determine when to apply the resources to making your site more mobile friendly.

Okay, great, Google Analytics has lots of helpful reports but when are you ever going to look at them?  Unfortunately most site operators do not have an intimate knowledge of their site’s performance.  I haven’t done the actually analysis but my intuition tells me that 9 out of every 10 companies I deal with are not getting Google Analytics reports automatically emailed to them.   Click a button, enter your email address and Google will email you the requested report every month.  It’s really that easy.  Getting weekly reports can lead to report fatigue.  Who wants to look at the same report every week?  In addition to regular reports Google Analytics has a new feature that I think is indispensable.

Inside the new section of Google Analytics called Intelligence are tools that allow the site owner to create alerts for specific metrics.   Want to know if your visitor count spikes or drops?  Simple, create an alerts that let you know when visitors are 50% higher or lower today than they were yesterday.   Not all metrics are available via the alert mechanism but there are enough choices that you can build several reports to give you early warning of problems or successes your site is experiencing.

The types of reports I’ve presented here have been available in sophisticated and expensive analytics packages for a long time.  It’s amazing to me that Google offers this service for free.  The price is definitely right.   As with any tool it’s not always easy to master the tool such that you get maximum value.   I use Google Analytics everyday.  I can help you gain more insight into your site’s performance.

Please share this article if you find it helpful.  Be sure and check out my other Google Analytics presentation.