Month 1: It’s All About the SEO

Although Google and the other engines index sites more rapidly than ever before, search engine optimization still generally takes the longest time to yield results, so this is where you need to start. If you didn’t already do your keyword research when you wrote your site content, now’s your chance. Make sure your pages are optimized, from keywords on the page to the title tags hidden in the HTML.

Oh, and while you’re starting your SEO efforts, also make sure you have web analytics of some kind installed on your site. Google Analytics is great for start-ups; not only is it powerful, but you’ll love the price (free!). No matter what package you use, make sure your analytics code is added to your shopping cart process so you can track sales and conversions.

Next, begin your inbound link-building campaign. Reach out to high quality, relevant blogs in your space and ask for links, or find blog posts to comment on with a link back to your site. Inbound links from quality sites are a significant factor in improving your search engine ranking.

Finally, if blogging is part of your online marketing strategy, start generating your content now. Incorporate your keywords here, too.

Month 2: The Other Optimization

You’ve optimized your site for search. Now optimize it for conversions. You should have some amount of traffic visiting you, and you’ve now got 30 days worth of site analytics.

Look for pages that need improvement; for example, ones with high bounce rates, indicating arriving visitors didn’t see anything they were looking for and immediately left. You can’t sell to a customer who runs away.

Pay particular attention to what’s happening in your purchase path.

• Are customers abandoning their carts? 
• Where? At what rate?
• What percentage are converting? 

Month 3: Start Spreading the News

Your site’s starting to rank in the search engines now and you’re keeping an eye on your conversion rate. Now’s the time to really start driving traffic.

• Increase the activities you started in Month 2.
• Keep up your blogging.
• Look for opportunities to comment on other blogs or guest post for them by monitoring relevant keywords using a tracking tool like Google Alerts.

Does your product or business have a newsworthy angle? Write an article about it and publish an online news release through a service like PRWeb or PR Newswire. Add yourself as a subject matter expert to Help a Reporter Out.

Finally, consider augmenting your efforts with paid marketing, like Google AdWords or Facebook ads. Because you know your profit per item or value per lead, and your overall conversion rate, you should be able to calculate your ROI on advertising. Try a small campaign first to test effectiveness; you can always expand it if it works.

What’s Your Recipe?

These are some of the online marketing tactics we employ at CDG Interactive to help our clients achieve success. (Contact us to find out how we can help.)

Now it’s your turn. If you’re a start-up that’s found success, or a marketer who’s helped a business launch online, leave a comment and tell us:

• What timeline do you follow?
• What tactics have worked best for you?
• How quickly have you achieved results?

[Photo credit: Bruce Berrien, Flickr Creative Commons]

What are you selling?

Sales people sell features, but customers buy benefits. Why we shouldn't discount emotional benefits from Branding Strategy.

Global Brands

What is a global brand? from Branding Strategy. This was recently interesting question to me since I was in an extremely rural part of Ethiopia for the past 2 weeks but Coca Cola was still pervasive.

Metrics

One of the most common questions we get is about measuring - either site metrics or social media metrics. Here are some tips on getting started from the Online Marketing Blog

60 Million Professionals Can't Be Wrong

When deciding on a social media activity mix, many companies forget about LinkedIn. The Online Marketing Blog offers some great suggestions about how to incorporate LinkedIn into your marketing mix.

Privacy Concerns

And finally, from the Onion - Google's "unsettlingly specific apology" about privacy concerns.

There were a few points in particular that stood out:

First, decide your business goals and then choose metrics that illustrate progress toward those goals.

And second, start with an hypothesis like, "Increased activity on Twitter will decrease call center volume and costs." Then measure that over time to see if it holds up. Just keep in mind that factors like annual sales are affected by so many factors that one activity can't generally claim credit (unless you're advertising during the Super Bowl), so that's usually not a good hypothesis to start with.

And the book included a hint that requires a little bit of extra effort up front, but will be well worth it for tracking purposes. When sharing links through a URL shortener, first create a unique URL using Google URL generator (or your analytics tool) including the parameters for the content and the social network where you plan to share it. Then use bit.ly or another shortening service to shorten the unique URL. That way you will be able to track referrals and conversion rates for each unique URL. Of course, that won't help you when others create shortened URLs for your content, but that will tell you something as well.

Have you successfully tested any hypotheses with metrics? What did you find?

While we can't claim attention from the New York Times, we were also recently able to capitalize on a buzzworthy topic--DC's recent back-to-back Snowmaggeddon storms--to drive interest and sales.

Here's how it happened, and what worked.

While much of the city was snowed in at home, CDG Interactive was open for business. Most of us telecommuted, but Creative Director Matthew Snyder was in the city and in the office.

Meanwhile, Art Director Jeff Walter riffed on the Snowpocalypse theme of the storms by creating designs and posting them online. When President Obama used the word "snowmageddon" to describe the weather, Jeff made a version for that, too.

The two creatives quickly realized they had great designs for T-shirts, not to mention a fantastic opportunity to test different marketing channels to promote their creations.

They uploaded the designs to a Zazzle store, then began driving initial traffic. Matthew used Google to search for blog mentions of the storm and related topics, like traffic and Metro information, then left comments that included inbound links to the store. Jeff posted links on Facebook and Twitter.

Once that seeding was established, Matthew sent out a press release via PR Newswire for additional link and SEO benefit, keeping the store in Google results.

Finally, to maintain the traffic momentum, he set up a small buy on Google AdWords, targeting words related to the storm, such as "Snowmageddon" and "Snowpocalypse."

The result? An effort of 3-4 hours of time and less than $200 of expense ($80 for the press release, $100 in AdWords) yielded sales of over 250 shirts. And valuable data on the timing and use of PR, advertising and marketing channels to drive traffic and revenue.

Your Turn

• Have you capitalized on a buzzworthy topic or event to drive interest to your site?
• What worked for you?
• What didn't?

How Search Is Changing

In this edition of SEOMoz's video series Whiteboard Fridays, "How Search Is Changing," Rand Fishkin explains how recent moves by Google indicate that the social graph will become as important as the link graph in determining search ranking. What does this mean for businesses? That social media may become as important as search marketing.

Also in search news, John Battelle considers the implications of Google's recent purchase of human-powered search site Aardvark.

10 Goals to Measure on Your Landing Pages

Whether for pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns or organic search, you should be using landing pages to guide your users toward a conversion goal. But what can you measure as a goal besides sales? Megan Leap of Search Engine Journal has written a list of "10 Types of Landing Page Goals."

Complicators vs. Simplifiers

The always entertaining Ad Contrarian, Bob Hoffman, starts a 4-part series on Complicators vs. Simplifiers in advertising--and why the Complicators are winning.

Outsourcing Company Blog Posts

In our recent series on starting a company blog, one of the aspects we covered was the content for the blog itself--and how to generate it. One option is to recruit outside resources for writing posts. Marketing Sherpa offers 6 tips for outsourcing your blog.

Online Wedding Planning, Google Docs Style

Did you get engaged on Valentine's Day? Here's how to plan your wedding with Google Docs.

[Photo credit: Matti Mattila, Flickr Creative Commons]

That means we sometimes (okay, usually) need to scale back our lofty ambitions for top-to-bottom redesigns, custom application development, whiz-bang widgets, etc, etc, etc. But the good news is, you can do a heck of a lot to improve your web strategy on a modest budget and an aggressive schedule. The key is to focus on what will give you the most bang for your buck; that is, what makes the most sense for your business goals.

Here are five ways you can quickly improve your web efforts:

1. Test your competitors' sites.
Before you start revamping your own site, take a look at what your competitors are doing. After all, as usability guru Steve Krug has asserted, your competitors have gone to the trouble of building fully-functional prototypes of what you’re trying to do. Check out what other companies are doing right, and what they’re getting wrong. Better yet, do a few rounds of testing with real users. A single round of testing on competitors’ sites can yield a wealth of ideas for improving your own.

2. Analyze your web stats & do an SEO review.
You’re site’s doing you no good if nobody can find it--or more to the point, if the right people can't find it. Analyze your current web statistics to find out not only how many visitors you’re getting, but how they got there, and how long they’re staying on your site. If you’re getting plenty of eyes on your “About Us” page but nobody’s hitting your product pages, it’s time to figure out why. A good first step is to do a comprehensive search engine optimization (SEO) review. Do all of your pages have clear, consistent titles? Are you optimizing on the right keywords? Do you have a strategy to cultivate inbound links? Developing and implementing a robust SEO strategy may help you just as much—or even more—than a comprehensive redesign.

3. Revamp your email strategy.
If you use email to reach out to your target audience, make sure those efforts are yielding the best results they can. There are a variety of methods you can use to enhance the effectiveness of your emails—from changing the layout to testing different subject lines to investigating email list buys. And if you’re not directing all of your outgoing emails to custom landing pages that focus on customer conversion, well, you need to. (Happily, once you have a landing page template set up, it’s fairly easy to tailor it to tweak it and use different versions for different messages.)

4. Develop a social media action plan.
Social media is the current great big shiny object everyone’s focusing on right now. Your boss may have already come to you and said, “We need a blog!” or “Why aren’t we on Twitter?” But whether you’re just dipping your toes into the roiling waters of social media or have already done a cannonball straight in, you need to have a thoughtful, fully articulated strategy that includes, among other things, your company’s “rules of engagement” on social media, the channels that you plan to use, who will be responsible for providing your content, and how you’ll track the success of your social media efforts.

5. "Redesign” your content.
Time and again people say that “Content is king” on the web, but more often than not it gets short shrift. The truth is, your site’s success will rise and fall on the quality of its content (and by that, I mean not only text, but also audio, video, and graphic assets). And quality content requires constant care and feeding.

Be honest. When is the last time you really looked at the content on your site? I’d be willing to bet most people couldn't tell me exactly what's on their site right now, much less what their plans are for developing new content.

If that sounds like you, then get thee a content strategy. Identify your primary business goals and objectives and analyze the degree to which your current content is helping you meet them. Then, develop a plan for removing or archiving old or useless content; creating newer, more effective content; and maintaining content once it’s online. This is a hefty effort to be sure, but it’s much less costly (in terms of time and budget) than an full redesign. And really—can you afford not to do it?

So there you have it. Five ways to pump (--clap--) YOU UP on the web. They all require some effort, and may require some money, but they’re all far more cost effective than going for a gold-plated, diamond encrusted redesign. Oh, and if you need some help executing any of these ideas, I know of a fabulous, award-winning agency that would be happy to help!