The #1 Potential Barrier To Success

It can be long or short, but don’t skip the creative brief. Explain the background and needs of your project with a simply worded creative brief. Include research if you have it, or explain what research you expect the creative team to do. If your creative brief will be verbal, then alert your team that they may want to record the conversation. Some simple points to cover before the project starts:

• Company background, audiences, the near-term goals of the business, and the competitive landscape
• Why this project is important to the business, and what would happen if the project is not completed in a timely manner
• What the end user should feel and do if the project is completed in an ideal way

Communication Styles – What’s Yours?

Once you’ve hired a creative, let them know how you prefer to communicate. Whether by text, email, phone, in person or skype, choose what works for you, and let them know your preferences.

Welcome Them To The Team

Working side by side with a large team can be an exciting change of pace for creative folks, especially for outsourced creative talent who may be used to working without daily supervision. Introducing new creatives to key people in your organization can help foster a sense of teamwork that can pay off in the long run if their motivational fuel runs low.

Connect On Social Networks

Personal recommendations on LinkedIn are one of the best ways to show appreciation to members of your creative team. But everyone knows that you can’t recommend someone without first looking them up and requesting to connect. Once you are comfortable that you have made the right choice in hiring, connect personally with your creatives on LinkedIn and other social networks to provide an added incentive to perform professionally and to do great work.

High Energy Helps

New ideas flow best when energy levels are high. If you or team members are losing focus during a long meeting, consider splitting up your meetings or calls so you don’t try to cover too much in a single session.

A Change of Scenery

Have you been holding meetings in the same conference room or meeting space for a while? To stimulate their creative juices, introduce your creative team to new environments by holding meetings occasionally at a satellite office, a different conference room, or by touring a new company installation or construction groundbreaking.

If Things Get Off Track

Resolving problems such as a missed deadline, or receiving creative work that just doesn’t work, can be uncomfortable to say the least. If a milestone is missed send a timely reminder and request a follow up. And if the creative solutions are off target or just plain ugly, then give your team a chance to resolve it by providing you with new or revised ideas. Let them know that you are focused on the end result, and want to avoid similar problems on future projects. And if they have concerns along the way, encourage them to take them to the top before any hard feelings develop.

Discuss Budgets at the Beginning, Middle and End

Great creatives are not often great accountants, and tend to want to focus on innovative ideas instead of the intricacies of complex project budgets. Both managers and creatives should have a clear understanding of what the effort will cost, right up front and in writing. Budget ranges, project phases, hourly costs, or inclusive fixed fee arrangements are all fine, as long as both managers and creative staff are on the same page and keep the budget discussions open as the project progresses. If budgets are tight consider providing some examples of the quality level that is expected, so that your creative team doesn’t try to invent everything from scratch. If you take the time to explain how important the budget is to your project, you can tap their creativity in coming up with innovative ways to change things around to be more cost effective while still meeting your goal.

How to Quickly Remove A Former Employee From Your Website

One of Many?

If the former employee is currently displayed on a page with one or more others, then this could end up being quite easy. Just remove them from the page and you’re about done. Confirm that the “meta description” and “meta title” areas don’t contain any of their personal information. For good measure also remove their primary image from the site’s image collection.

Their Own Unique Page

If the employee had their own page on the company website, then completely removing it from the site is a good start. But, since copies of most online content are stored in search engine’s memories, you may want a more immediate separation between brand and individual.

Get Them Removed from Google, Quick!

A 301 Redirect can be sued to tell search engines that the content has been moved permanently. 301 redirects, for any outdated URL, can be created by your website admin, WordPress plugins, or IT team. Rather than using the 301 Redirect to send visits back to the homepage, the 301 can serve up a replacement page to future visitors who attempt to access the ex-employee’s page. Pages such as a Team Overview or About Us are good candidates for use as replacements, to help visitors get back on track and accessing profiles of just current team members.

Keep Their Blog Posts?

If having some old blog posts by a former employee is problematic then consider removing the post or changing the post’s authorship to a generic author name if appropriate.

Get Them Removed from Google, Quick!

Make sure that the site’s dynamic sitemap is linked up and sending notice of revised and removed page content, directly and automatically to Google and Bing. Both have a verified Webmaster Tools area that is used to link your sitemap. Once logged in you can also request specific pages be hidden from appearing in SiteLinks, which are the subsection links that sometimes appear beneath the main website link, usually when a website is the top most relevant search result.

Finding the Trail of Digital Breadcrumbs

Once the company website content is scrubbed it’s time to do some search engine testing, to see what results come up. How unique is their name, and how closely is it associated with your brand? Depending on the quantity, visibility and positive/negative sentiment of the links that appear in search results, you may want to update external sites and also consider creating some new branded content to hopefully push older content downwards in search. Creating a social media policy ahead of time can also help by clarifying the obligations for employee and employer upon termination of employment.

Hopefully your business website is using informative online content to highlight the depth of the talent within your company. If not, then getting a plan together for what to do when an employees leaves should give you the confidence to start showcasing your staff more often online.

Are you an attractive “follow” on Twitter? First impressions are key to the organic growth of your twitter audience. The words and images you use on twitter help portray the public image of your business, similar to your best outfit on a first date. Put the finishing touches on your twitter account with these tips:

Don’t Focus On Numbers

For most businesses having a large number of twitter followers alone won’t bring business results. What is needed is an engaged audience. Follower numbers are mostly useless in judging the real-world influence level of a tweeter. A prolific tweeter with 50,000 followers posting 20+ tweets daily using automated tools can be impressive to some. What impresses me is an account engaging with a smaller audience.

You Have a Face For An Avatar, Right?

People find it easiest to make an instant connection if you have an avatar that shows a human face. But plenty of businesses are exploring online marketing opportunities through branded twitter accounts. Brands with logo avatars do have to work a lot harder to be seen as human, without the benefit of a face in their twitter avatar.

Send Out Trust Signals

Whether you’re using a logo avatar Your twitter should certainly showcase your business. But be sure to include some informative and resourceful tweets too. Whether you mix in selling messages once every 5 tweets or once every 100 there’s no certain recipe for twitter success. The more your twitter feed is not all about you, the more easily you’ll attract new followers.

Be A Resource

Do you have some resourceful tweets in your lineup? Educate, inform, delight, or amuse – tweets that are clearly focused on the needs of your audience help build trust right away.

Don’t Over-Measure

I used to be analytics-obsessed. What started me on the path to recovery was a skype chat with twitter friend @terrinakamura, a leading graphic designer on twitter. She shared with me that she tweets without consciously focusing on Retweets or click-through rates. She has more experience with social media than most 10 tweeters combined, so her comment made me reconsider my approach. She helped me realize that we are our own best judge of what’s appropriate to tweet. It may not be popular, may not get shared, retweeted or engaged upon – but we should tweet content that genuinely attempts to help others while also fitting our brand message.

Twitter Traits That Prospective Followers Can’t Resist

Be Obviously Generous

There is something irresistible about tweeters that show generosity and promote others. Do they have a few Retweets in their stream? Do they share others blog posts? Are they engaging and sharing their interests with others? Offering support, answers, commentary? This is someone who is building a genuine community and could become part of mine.

Have At Least One @ Message

If you’re trying tweet something of value, then most who preview your account will be likely to follow you, as long as at least one @ message is also present. A classic tip from my twitter friend @HilzFuld explains exactly how public @ messages work.

“If you start a tweet with @, only the people that follow you and the person you just mentioned will see that tweet.”

When @ messaging someone you are limiting your audience to just those that follow you both, it is shows a less sales-oriented style which can be attractive to prospective followers. Twitter conversations show the world your diverse interests. Discussing topics within your industry can help broaden your network as well as explain your business focus.

Accounts that converse online with other tweeters portray authenticity. Having a genuine, non-automated public @ message in your stream will often build a small degree of instant initial trust with potential followers. On the flip-side, if they’re not directing any tweets at other tweeters, that tells me that they are unlikely to engage with me either. If there are no public @ messages in the last 20-30 tweets this shows that the account doesn’t engage with people very often if at all – so they are less likely to engage with new followers. When someone previews your stream on the web interface twitter by default shows only the last 5 tweets. Popular twitter management tools like Hootsuite show a few more. One of the benefits of socializing with others on twitter is that you’re likely to have public @ messages showing when someone previews your account.

Get Listed… A Lot

Twitter lists help tweeters who follow lots of accounts avoid their cluttered home timeline and allow them to follow or monitor their favorite tweeters in different categories. Lists also allow you to easily monitor someone’s tweet stream without the need to follow them. The number of people that choose to add an account to one of their public lists is a solid indicator of quality. Although twitter’s web interface no longer shows the total number of lists that a tweeter is on, Hootsuite and other twit-tools allow you to see the total number of times they are publicly listed.

What Turns Off Twitter Influencers?

Follow More than Follow You

To have maximum appeal to other quality twitter accounts, try to follow at least 10% less than your total number of followers. Twitter allows an account to follow more people than follow them, by about 10%, before you reach an actual following limit. Accounts that are pushing right up against this limit do not seem to be adding much value to the twitter community – often they seem to be using automated tools to try to grow their following rapidly.

Last Tweet is 30+ Days Ago

So you left town. More than a month ago. Bring your smartphone, tweet a photo from Paris every week or two. But if you stop tweeting your following won’t grow much, unless you’re a real-world celebrity.

Your Strategy… Be Open To Changes

Curator vs. Creator

Simply tweeting links to helpful information is a good way to get started on twitter. Become instantly credible by showcasing your expertise by authoring your own content. Create content that you enjoy and that showcases your specific expertise. Photos, videos, blogging, e-books, informational graphics – whatever you’re good at and will enjoy creating over and over.

The Ideal Frequency… Is One That You Can Maintain

Whether you tweet once a day or once a week, it helps have a consistent frequency that you can maintain even when your businesses is at its busiest.

No Wrong Way To Do It

Are you focused on delivering quality, helpful information to your online audience? Then you can’t wrong on twitter. There are so many ways to compose a solid tweet. Your audience is unique, but one constant is they’ll appreciate quality and continuity.

Don’t Obsess Over Your Twitalytics

Regardless of which online tools you use to manage your twitter there will be lots of data to analyze to help judge what works and what doesn’t. I’ve used most of the free tools that are available to see which tweets get the most sharing, and from who, and also to judge optimal times to tweet. But smaller businesses with fewer followers should focus on providing value and spend less time on twitter analytics until the account has enough data to accurately analyze.

Finding Your Mojo

Twitter is an excellent place to be authentic and be yourself. What interests you in business and in life? Tweet about it. Find what works for you personally. Mix that in to the needs of your business audience. Then start experimenting and find out what yields the best response for your business.

You’re Doing Fine… As Long As Your Audience Can Answer This Critical Question

Could your online audience answer the simple question: “What do you do for work”? Make sure they can, by tweeting about topics within your industry and specialty. In the past when I tweeted less design-related content I found that most would not know precisely what I do (I’m a graphic designer and branding consultant, by the way). So now I focus on sharing more design-related information.

But What Makes Them ‘Loyal’?

So you’ve worked hard to add personality and professionalism into your twitter, maybe even started creating content to showcase your business strengths – now what? Just keep at it. Consistency is one of the most important elements in building a loyal social media following.

It’s true:

“You are only as good as your last tweet”

So keep those quality tweets coming! Keep an aye on what your audience seems to prefer and respond to. Fine tune your tweets to focus more and more over time on the needs and desires of your audience… and you can’t go wrong.

The Launch Party

Although I am not physically present in client offices on the day that we launch their website, the way I envision things, the entire team toasts the bubbly and congratulations pass around for a website well done. The designer and developer bask in the glow of their thank you emails. The marketing team ends the day on a high note, and everyone goes home with a relieved smile and a slight headache.

So what happens the next day? Don’t let your website lose momentum – invite your entire team to participate in getting your new site jump-started, with these three steps:

1. Coordinating Your Pit Crew

Are you taking advantage of all the resources around you? Identify the people most interested in the success of the website, and try to involve each of them in some way. Keep each member of your team motivated with lots of updates and occasional homework.

2. Getting Up To Speed with Content Creation

Every business has a different marketing strategy – share yours with your entire team so they can support the company’s online goals as they participate in content creation. The heroes of your content marketing efforts could come from anywhere: from leaders with the most product and customer knowledge; to the all-important company photographer(s); to prolific writers and other creatives.

• For management, suggest that they write a new blog post, or rewrite a website landing page.
• For less experienced staff, consider assigning them the important role of photo librarian. Organizing and updating the marketing photo library makes the job of content creators and writers easier, and also gives new-hires better understanding of the company’s marketing efforts.

What are your customers most common questions and concerns? Fuel their interest in your new content by focusing on customer needs first. Whether you plan to update your site once a month, or even twice a year, plan ahead so that you have time to brainstorm for catchy titles and research engaging visuals, and to get committee approval if needed.

3. Getting Under the Hood with Training

Is the website set up to support your ongoing marketing efforts? WordPress and other tools may already be configured. Website backups and claiming of various Google properties may not be. Ask your launch team to explain what has been set up, and if they have any simple tips to boost website performance.

Once your website team completes your site, log in and get familiarized with the content creation toolset. Start by getting trained on how to add and manage content, from whatever training source you prefer. As a web designer I include personalized training sessions soon after launch. I find out what tasks clients wants to handle internally, and help outsource those that they don’t. As new people get involved, occasional skills tune-ups will build their confidence and effectiveness.

Wash, Rinse and Repeat!

So, you have assembled your team, started creating content and scheduled training. Blog posts are being started, by your top customer service and sales people. And cameras are getting warmed up for upcoming tradeshows. At whatever speed you are making progress, at least you are getting started! With the right mix of people involved, your website will be headed for the winners circle.

Design: Training Your Website Review Team

Who do you turn to for design advice? While there are many many tools available to perform testing and analysis, sometimes the data raises more question than it answers. So if you make many of your design and marketing decisions “from your gut”, then welcome to the club! I encourage everyone to go with their gut first and foremost. But for your most important marketing or website changes, it’s comforting to be able to share it with your family and friends pre-launch, asking for their suggestions. Any feedback is good feedback, right? Wrong! In order to squeeze the most actionable business insights from their comments, you’ll want to carefully select a review team and give them a framework to provide helpful comments:

• Explain the characteristics of your target audience, and ask them to act the part of that demographic.
• Try to get them to consider every question you ask from the perspective of the target audience.
• Simple questions, such as “which do you think would persuade my audience best, version A or B?” are more easily measured than open-ended ones.

Lucky you if a professional website designer is among your closest friends, to give you a professional perspective. But the very best reviewer is an actual client or someone who closely fits the demographic of your audience. Regardless of who you choose for your team, the extra time that it takes to train them will pay off when they start giving you more usable feedback.

Fine Tune: Your Content Strategy

It’s easy to see how your site is ranking for your highest priority keywords by taking a quick look at your Google Webmaster Tools “Traffic / Search Queries” tab. If your target terms aren’t showing up here try checking your rank using a rank tracking tool. Now that you know what Google considers you relevant for, and where you rank, create content with a short list of target keywords in mind. To improve your ranking for your target terms, include them in prominent areas of your site. But don’t force the keywords in — just keep adding content. And ask yourself before posting:

• does the content help inform and educate?
• does it make sense to the intended audience?
• is it high quality, creative and entertaining?
• does it contain the target terms?

Search engines may change the way they rank sites over time, but consistently posting high quality content will never go out of style.

Analytics: Link Up Your Webmaster Tools

Google Analytics continues to add features to help website managers to better understand and improve their sites. Many of the more advanced views now require your Google Webmaster Tools account to be linked up in Google Analytics. Not sure if you’re accounts are linked up? Try viewing Traffic Sources / Search Engine Optimization and you may see a message saying “This report requires Webmaster Tools to be enabled” with a button that says “Set up Webmaster Tools data sharing”. Clicking the setup button and linking the correct Google Webmaster Tools profile now allows search term impressions and clicks to be viewed right in your Google Analytics dashboard. Even if you don’t plan to look at your Google Analytics right away, take this step now.

Research: Never Stop Spying On Your Competitors

Just like having a target keyword list in critical in judging your search-engine success, creating and updating a competitor “watch list” can help you with tactical decisions and allocation of marketing budgets. The same type of ongoing analysis that you perform on your own site can easily be performed occasionally on your competitors or other best-in-class companies, to see where they lag behind your offering, where they are improving, and where they meet or exceed your efforts. Google Alerts is a decent place to start with monitoring competitors and your own brand mentions. Alexa.com and Compete.com both offer free comparison data, just plug in your site then a few example sites and see approximately where you rank for traffic. Charts and data from Compete and Alexa are often inaccurate, at least with their free offerings, so use it for general research purposes only.

Monitoring: Your Site’s Health

Help Google stay up to date on changes to your content structure by occasionally checking your Google Webmaster Tools under Diagnostics for “Crawl Errors”. If you see any 404 Page Not Found errors, a 301 Redirect can be added to redirect traffic from the old URL to a similar page on your current site.

Keep up with other site performance tips over at the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Ideally, for the shortest possible development time, deliver the content to your web team at the beginning of the project, before the design is even started.

Practically though, many website projects do not have the luxury of having the content ready at the beginning of the design & development process. With more businesses crafting their website content in-house, the reality is that the right time is when the customer says it’s right.

Once a website proposal is approved, it’s typically two weeks before a client reviews the first design drafts, and a few weeks later the design is approved and the code is complete. If a quick website launch is desired this is an excellent time to kick your content plans into high gear.

Get Your Content Motor Running

So who’s writing your website content? Occasionally I get to work with my writer to create a client’s website content. It’s a fun challenge to become fluent in a client’s industry, find the right style and tone, and tell the story of the brand. But the fact is, more clients now supply us their own content than not. If you’re the one writing your website content, and you find that it’s taking longer than you’d like, then consider this:

You Could Be Halfway Done Before The Writing Is Even Started

Having even a portion of the content completed can be a relief to the person in charge of completing the website content. Review all your past marketing efforts and identify which content can be reused or re-worked. Got a sales brochure? Even if it’s outdated, there is likely some wording that can be grabbed from there. Traditional or online advertising, and even scripts from radio or TV ads can all be multi-purposed for use on your new website.

What is the minimum amount of information a buyer needs to take the next step with your product or service? Focus on anticipating and providing answers to their most pressing questions first. Whatever you do, don’t spend all your time perfecting your About Us page. Focus on creating content that is all about the customer and their needs.

Are You Thrilling Your Audience?

Everyone website visitor is unique. They want to get a quick impression of your business before diving deeper. Some appreciate text, especially if it’s short and easy to understand. Others prefer images and video over words. Either way, one thing’s for sure: website visitors have an increasingly short attention span. Your website just a few seconds to capture visitors attention and establish trust so they will consider exploring further, and taking the next step of contacting your business. Check out a few best-in-class competitor websites to see how similar businesses are handling photos and videos. If your budget allows, consider using professionals to capture your photographs and video. And consider that even images or videos with lower production qualities are better than none at all. The web is a forgiving medium so get busy with your photo editing tools to color correct and improve dark and shadowy photos.

Training The Content Creator

Even when my team is not providing the client’s website content we still want to work as closely as possible with the client and their content providers, to make sure the content fits the design and supports the client’s marketing goals.

For the client’s writing team I suggest:

• Simplify the navigation
• Build internal text links
• Shorten or break up long paragraphs of text
• Create titles that contain keywords from the approved keyword target list
• Avoid using PDFs, which are not as user-friendly as content on the page, or a modal window

For the client’s photographer:

• We provide page layouts showing the exact cropping needed for each main photo
• Communicate the the need for ultra-horizontal cropping
• Make sure unlimited image usage rights are transferred to the client
• Request the highest resolution possible for best quality at any size

Ensure A Rapid Web Launch by Avoiding Perfection

Avoid creating an encyclopedia on your business at all costs, there is no need for the A-Z of your business before the visitor has even expressed interest. Visitors will warm up to your website quicker if the information is bite-sized, scannable, and lays out the features in terms they understand. Create content that respects the visitor’s time and addresses their specific needs.

When finishing up your website content, keep a careful eye on perfectionists to avoid delays. The web is different than a one-time sales presentation or widely-distributed printed piece. With modern websites the content management system, or CMS, allows website managers to edit and improve the content instantly. Hopefully the ability to edit the content will pacify any perfectionists on your team.

Now it’s time to find out what keywords are popular in your niche. Choose your favorite keyword research tool and dive right in! The Google Keyword Tool is a good free option. The actual reported volume numbers are higher in Google’s tool than with other keyword tools, but if you ignore the specific numbers, the relative volumes are identical from tool to tool. Other keyword research options include:

• Find real-time suggestions by typing the beginning of your term into the search box in Google and YouTube to see what their “instant” feature suggests
• Peruse your top competitor’s websites to see what keywords they mention most.

Start with terms that are highly relevant — terms that your website visitors would use when they’re looking for exactly what you do. Create lists of possible keywords, then roughly group them by type and search volume. Beware of search phrases containing one or two words, which are highly competitive and also less likely to convert into customers. Terms with three or more words are likely to be closer the sweet spot for lead generation. Even though the multi-word phrases often have much lower overall search volume, they will deliver more qualified visitors to your site.

Branded vs. (Potentially) Lead Generating Terms

Let’s take fictional entity Bob’s Builders, a builder of custom homes in Pasadena, California, and operated by Bob Stevens. The different search terms used to get to the website can easily be grouped into Branded and Potentially Lead Generating keyword categories.

Branded terms will likely make up a good portion of the keyword traffic:

• bob builders
• bobs builders pasadena
• bob builders los angeles (not everyone knows Bob is in Pasadena so they use the metro area term)
• bobs builders la (people in Los Angeles often type LA)
• bob stevens (many people know Bob personally but not his company name)

Terms with lead generating potential might include:

• custom builders pasadena
• commercial builders pasadena
• custom builders glendale (an adjacent community)
• builders pasadena

A business website will typically rank well already for most branded terms. Where things get interesting though is with the potentially profitable, lead generating terms.

Your (Changing) List of Target Terms

So you’ve researched for hours, reviewed your competitors’ sites, and you’ve got a pretty tight list of target keywords for your site. If you haven’t already asked your marketing team for a “keyword wish list” do it now. Keep things simple initially and focus on phrases that the site is currently showing up on the SERPs for. Google Webmaster Tools gives decent data on what terms the site is ranking for and also the terms that are driving your website traffic. The rank checker tool from SEOmoz gives slightly rosier results, showing SERP placements about 5 better than Webmaster Tools.

For each top keyword track success organically by looking at two metrics:

• Goal Conversion Rate for the Conversion Goals set up in Google Analytics
• Successful form fillouts

If your business is using paid search, you’ll have a different list of keywords to target specific to your paid search campaign. Issues of organic ranking, competitor activity, and bid cost will help define ideal target terms for your paid search campaign. One benefit of paid search is the keyword analysis opportunities that you get once you have paid for top placement for terms that the site would not normally rank for. There will always be a few terms that the site is struggling with organically, and a modest PPC budget can help by boosting the site’s visibility for terms it’s ranking poorly for.

If a term is not leading to visitors filling out a lead capture form, and the visitors from that term are not hitting the conversion goals, then it may be time to eliminate the term from your list. If you have accumulated enough visitor data to make an accurate assessment, and all signs point to failure, why keep trying? I’d say it’s time to dump that keyword, or put it on the back burner and try again later once your site has enough new relevant content to satisfy those visitors.

Look At Your Keywords Through A Profitability Filter

Ideally the terms you select for your initial keyword target list will appear in your website analytics with enough frequency to make the sample size large enough to allow for accurate analysis. Once your site is engaging visitors who enter for one term, it is likely that it will start to rank for an expanding list of search queries over time.

You are on the right track when your site is ranking well for a term, your website analytics show profitable visitor behaviors for visitors enter using that term, and you can attribute form fillouts to the term. If these things are not happening then refocus your efforts towards more profitable terms.

Create A System for Monitoring and Measuring Your Results

Moving forward, carefully consider visitors arriving using branded terms versus lead generating ones. Visitors entering using branded terms are likely to already be aware of your company. They may be a current customer, brand advocate, or strategic partner. As you are studying your website analytics for lead-generating activity, it is ideal to segment off as many branded terms as possible. For many sites the company name is a leading search term. Choose the clear volume leader and create a Custom Segment in Google Analytics. After clicking Create Custom Segment, select the Keyword dimension, then select Does Not Contain, then type in your top branded keyword. Why exclude brand-related keyword from some analytic reports? Because they are just downright boring, that’s why!  More importantly, segmenting allows you to better analyze the behavior of your prospects. Prospects are not as engaged with your content as your customers or advocates, and they do not necessarily have a favorable opinion of your company… yet!

Does Anything Need Improving?

Once you segment out branded traffic you will get a better picture of the behavior of your sales prospects specifically. How they interact with your site will likely show you a few areas that need improvement. Testing new website improvements is the final critical step in finding long-term success online.

There are countless additional ways to find profitable keywords. The goal is to have one or more profitable keywords working for your site and generating leads for your business. Once you have established your site for one term, focus on doing it again and again, one keyword at a time. How is lead generation working on your website? Please share your tips below.

Our Customers Say Our Site Looks Great… But Will It Generate New Leads?

By now even the most conservative businesses are interested in attracting a share of online searchers to their site. Will these visitors eagerly consume your site’s content? Will they give you a call, buy your product or service, support your cause? What does it take to turn your website into a lead-generating machine that keeps your phones and email humming? It’s easier than you think to get started…

First, Define Your Key Audiences

Everyone wants something different from your company’s website. The company’s marketing team may want excitement and social media integration. Sales may want to add product feature lists and company background info. Management may just want to “out-web” their competition. But what about the most important audience, your website visitors? Every website has a diverse set of users, all looking for slightly different things. It’s important to define which audiences are most important to the business, then tailor your navigation and content to suit them.

So What Makes a Conversion?

To make informed decisions about lead generation activities, different types of websites will have different measurement challenges to prepare for. E-Commerce websites can use the sales numbers as an easy way to see how the website is performing. For companies with with longer buying cycles such as B2B a prospect may visit the site multiple times before purchasing.

If your site attracts thousands of website visitors it’s a complete success, right? Hold up! You need to check a few things first. Looking at the website’s visitors, many of them will have entered the site using a specific keyword in their search engine to get to the site. Where we can connect the visitor data to a specific keyword we can analyze the profitability of each search term, using some popular metrics:

• Bounce rate: higher bounce rates may indicate that the site lacks relevancy for the keyword they used;
• Time on site: are users engaging with your content, or are they leaving immediately;
• Number of pages visited: you’re on the right track to profitable traffic when a search term shows above average “time on site” combined with higher than average pageviews;
• Conversion goals met: how many and which goals did visitors achieve for each of the site’s most popular search terms – this is a especially helpful metric to judge keyword effectiveness.

Setting up Conversion Goals in Google Analytics can show how engaged visors are with your content and help discover which keywords are most helpful to the business. There are countless ways that GA conversion goals can be set up, from one simple goal like “Visits to the Contact Us page” to a maximum of four sets of five goals each, which can help track behaviors of different website user groups. After you have segmented and analyzed your visitor traffic, it should become clear which are profitable visits and which are futile ones.

Tracking Your Emails

One easy way to track leads generated from your website is to just monitor the contacts arriving via your website’s lead capture forms. How many did you get in a month? Compare that to your unique visitors for that month. Now, turn this into an ongoing tracking and measurement activity. Extra credit: Consider what elements on the site or form page could be changed to encourage more form submissions?

About Those Form Submissions

By tracking visitors successful completion of a lead capture form, you will quickly find that certain keyword terms have little chance of leading to a new customer. Knowing which keywords your form completions come from is critical in fine tuning your keyword target list over time.

So…… Did You Close ‘Em?

Is your sales and marketing team in synch with your website support team? If so, communicating sales closure rates back to your marketing and website teams can help them understand and focus on lead sources that deliver the most qualified prospects.

Improve The Tools To Improve Your Results

For larger companies who are making significant investments investment in online marketing, paid monitoring and measurement tools may be a good choice.

How is your website doing in delivering leads? Please share what’s worked for your business in the comments below.

The Site Appeals To The Business’ Target Audience

Of course for this to happen, the business owner must define who buys their products and services. Create a short list of audience types and include the most important characteristics such as industry, position, age, gender and how comfortable they are with technology. What types of information might they want to view first?

What marketing approaches have worked best for the business in the past? By reviewing your past successes, your designer will gain a better understanding of what appeals most to your target audiences. Be sure to maximize consistency across all media by providing samples of electronic and print marketing pieces that you currently use and that the site should support and coordinate with. If the business has official colors and fonts the site should utilize them. The company logo should be provided in a high resolution format for best quality appearance. If the designer will be providing a new logo design during the website design process, you may want to provide a short list of “brand attributes” to help in the design of a new logo. Write down words that describe the company’s strengths, such as Fast, Friendly, Easy To Use, Innovative, Professional, Fun, Efficient, Creative. Stock and custom photography can be used to highlight the most important aspects of the business. Any custom marketing photos owned by the business should be collected in the original, highest resolution format you have. The designer will usually adjust and enhance the colors in your photos if they have any color quality issues. Some typical file formats for high resolution logos and images are JPG, EPS and TIF. If possible avoid using the GIF file format, as it is less likely to contain high resolution data.

The Site Features Technology, Functionality And Content That Serves The Visitor

What types of features and functionality will the site have? How will the client and end-users interact with the site? What specific action(s) do we want the visitor to take? A basic understanding of how the main features will work is needed by the designer, especially if they will be creating wireframes or comps of the customized features for the development team to use. Providing links to examples of sites that have similar functionality can jump-start the process. Sometimes off-the-shelf solutions can provide more complex features at a lower cost.

Some designers will tell you that a glossy, fresh design will knock your customers socks off and therefore increase your business leads. Okay, I’ll admit it, I love a great looking site as much as the next guy. And who doesn’t like new leads? But a professional appearance is less important for the success of a website than the content. Sure the design of your website is important, But the content is what the site visitor is there for. The information must be be presented in ways that respect the phases of the buying process. Careful attention should be paid to producing the highest quality content including text, audio and especially video. Adding social media feeds can increase engagement on the site, but too many feeds will increase the time the website takes to load.

The Site Ranks Well For Keywords That Attract Customers To The Business

How important is your site’s search ranking for your business? Some businesses thrive on search engine traffic. Others direct customers to their site and don’t plan for online lead generation. It is important to discuss the business model and search performance goals with your designer, so that their subsequent recommendations can support your goals. What keywords do you think will draw customers? Starting with your list the designer and development team will recommend additional relevant popular keywords. Once the keyword list is approved by you the content and site pages can be optimized for the terms, allowing targeted visitors to find your website when searching online. For a website to generate visitor traffic, your keywords should be used in the main navigation buttons. For example, let’s say you’re an interior designer. You may have been considering a main navigation button called “Services” to tell your customers all about your service offerings. If there are many other interior designers in your region currently on the first page of the search results, then your designer may suggest that you name that navigation button “Interior Design Services” to give your site a better chance of ranking well.

So You’ve Given Your Designer Everything They Need – Now What?

The number one question I am asked during the development of a website is “when will it be done?”. It is in the best interest of both the client and designer to launch the new site as quickly as possible. To make sure your website gets done on time, focus on a few simple steps:

• Get a head start by writing your content while you are interviewing web design companies. List any ideas you have for possible content that could be created. The website team may recommend new content be developed to boost online visibility or to meet the needs of your website users.
• If you are providing all the content, set a date when it will be ready for the development team to add to the site. If all of the site content is ready around the time of final design approval, then the development team can more easily adhere to the established timetable.
• Once the website is started, have your website team create a production schedule, and have them supply an updated schedule if the completion date is expected to change.
• Communicate with your team to make sure they have what they need to move forward throughout the various stages of production.

The After Launch Plan

Consider who will provide website hosting and ongoing tech support. How will email hosting be handled? If the developer handles the website they can be more accountable for the success of the website including email issues, database functions and up-time.

Ready, Set… Launch!

So you’ve followed the tips above and your successful website is ready to be shown to the world. To help judge the long-term success of the website you may want to consider looking at visitor statistics using a tool such as Google Analytics. Provide analytic data from your previous site, if available, to your website team so they may study keyword data and take a snapshot of how the old site performed prior to the launch of the new one.

A big thank you to our client Ovaleye Cloud Services for originally publishing this as a guest blog post on their blog, Preparing to Work With a Web Designer.

First, Check Your Local Rep

What happens when someone “Googles you” or your company? Control what you can by claiming your Google Places listing. You can edit the details of the listing, add images and links your YouTube videos. To confirm that you are authorized to edit the map listing, Google will send a postcard to your address with a PIN number on it. After entering the PIN into your Google Places account your enhancements will start showing up on Google Maps.

Take The Vanilla Out of Your Google Analytics

Yes, Google Analytics is free, but to get meaningful insights a few things should be configured. Hopefully there is already Google Analytics tracking code installed on the old site. If not, it may be worthwhile to install it on the old site. In the time leading up to the launch of the new site some decent traffic data could accumulate.

Benchmark the performance of the old site by noting the site’s past general and specific keyword traffic. A year out from now when you are studying analytics, having the legacy benchmark data available will allow for more meaningful analysis and allow you to more easily judge ROI for the new site.

Set up groups of Conversion Goals. Goals can be configured in a variety of ways to track the important conversions on your site. Set up a bunch, they’ll help you judge how engaged your visitors are with your content, and will especially pay off when you are analyzing which keywords are most valuable. One of the simplest approaches is to set a goal for important pages on your site like product-specific pages, specific service pages, and contact forms.

Establishing a few Custom Segments will also help you gain more accurate insights than looking at all visitor data at once. For instance if you only do business in the State of California then why look at visitor statistics for the entire world? Create a segment that includes just your service area. Try one where all “branded” keyword traffic is factored out, or where a geographic region is isolated,

301 Redirects

Creating 301 redirects takes anyone who tries to visit your old site URLs right to the new site. With the redirect code in place, visitors who try to visit “mysite.com/oldpage.html/” get instantly transported to “mysite.com/newcontent/” – nifty! Don’t redirect all pages to your new homepage. Redirect your old About/Company section to the corresponding new one, same with Contact Us and all the rest.

Get To Know Google Webmaster Tools

There are too many great features within Google Webmaster Tools to mention here, but the first thing to do is submit your sitemap. Your website will have one or more sitemap addresses, which you’ll want to submit to your Google Webmaster Tools sitemaps area. Check later to make sure the sitemap’s status is green. Once this is done Google will index the new site faster and your new pages will appear in the search results instead of your site’s older “cached” pages. While you’re at it, go ahead and sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools and submit you sitemap there. Bing supposedly drives decent traffic so may as well get indexed there too.

Do The Robot

Create a “robots.txt” file to disallow specific folders. Also use it to allow or disallow your site’s images to be indexed by Google Images. Also useful to make sure your wp-admin page does not show up in Google’s index.

Get Visitors Back On Track WIth A Helpful 404

Even the most vigilant website manager will still occasionally find visitors encountering a “page not found” error on their site, also known as a 404 error. Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools diagnostics can both help pinpoint problems. When the inevitable happens and the error page does display, you’ll wish you had created a branded 404 error page. Make sure visitors know that you care about their experience on your site by including a sympathetic “oops” or “we’re sorry” or whatever message is most appropriate for your brand. And include some helpful links to help them find what they’re looking for.

Got Uptime Monitoring?

Signing up for mobile website hosting downtime alerts from a service like Pingdom will let you know if your site goes down, and for how long.

The day after launch, check to make sure that Google Analytics data is accumulating normally. Now go get back to your vacation! Need some reading material? Go study some analytics tips from the GA sage Avinash, at his blog.

Have some website launch tips for us? Please share them in the comments below!