by Stoney deGeyter
One of the complaints I hear most frequently from new and prospective clients is that they have no idea what their previous SEO was doing for them. As the owner of a Web marketing firm, I quickly realized that even if a client is getting results, communicating those successes to them is as important as the results themselves.
One of the great things about working in an online industry is that you don’t need to exclusively have local clients. In fact, most SEO firms such as mine get contracts from all over the country and even overseas. However, because of the distance, I don’t often get to meet clients in person; however, because it’s good communication, I find that doing so helps a great deal.
Being distant from clients has disadvantages. Because you can’t “swing by” the client’s office, or easily schedule time to get together, it creates an additional burden in the communication process. We have to double our efforts to make sure efficient methods of communication are in place.
Open Up Your Communication Options
So what is the best way to communicate with distant clients? Is it by phone, email, instant messenger, Skype or social media?
I think they can all be valid forms of communication, although none is exclusively the “best” method. How you communicate can be different for each client. In fact, they can all be used, depending on a particular need at a particular time. Find out which communication methods work best for you and your clients and go with that as much as possible.
Phone: This is clearly the more traditional approach, but no less effective or important. We find that email can be cumbersome or require lots of back and forth; sometimes it just helps to pick up the phone and hammer out details. Phone calls are much more personal and can really help when handling sensitive concerns.
Skype: Skype is great, especially if you are using the video and screen-sharing options. The downside with Skype is we often have poor connectivity issues that lead to sound or video loss. To combat this, we use Skype in conjunction with a phone call so we never lose audio even if we lose video. Skype is the best way to meet with clients “face to face” without traveling. It doesn’t eliminate the need to meet with clients in person, but it does provide an added personal level.
Email: There is a big push right now for companies to eliminate email for internal communications. I’m not so sure about that. Email is a great way to communicate on your time and allow someone else to respond on their time. Email is great with clients for the same reason. It allows a conversation to take place at the best time for each party involved so everyone stays as productive as possible.
Instant Messages: We don’t use IM a lot for our clients but we do internally. While it can be great to make instant contact, it is also the most interruptive form of communication and can lead to reduced productivity if you get too many IMs too often. Used properly, however, it can be a great way to have a quick conversation to answer urgent questions without the delays of email.
Social Media: I would never rely on social media to communicate with clients. It’s far too spotty to be an effective means of communicating anything of importance. If your clients choose to follow your Twitter, Facebook or RSS feeds, great, but I wouldn’t rely on a Facebook message to communicate with a client. Social platforms are great for pushing out good information that anyone, including clients, can choose to read or ignore. Anything important needs to be handled through other methods.
Can You Over-communicate with Clients?
When working on a client account, there can be a lot of communication as recommendations, consulting info, thoughts, ideas, approvals and updates that need to be shared. Is there an appropriate level of communication you should aim for? Should you be in touch with them daily, weekly or monthly?
If there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you can’t over-communicate. But each client is different and the level of communication they need varies. It’s important to find that place between what the client wants and what they need. Give them more than they want and never less than they need! After a few weeks or months of working together, you’ll get a feel for what is appropriate for the work being done.
What works for one may be different than what works for another, but if you find the best way to communicate with each client, you’re more likely to be sure they stay happy. If you have no clear ways to communicate with clients, establish internal guidelines that will provide the framework for consistent and effective communication moving forward.
Silence can magnify frustrations and inhibit results. But good communication covers over a multitude of frustrations and magnifies the positive. The time it takes to open up the lines of communication is far more valuable than the time itself, even if it is taking away from “important” work. Perception is everything and good communication improves the perception of your success.
Follow me+ at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.
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How Your SEO Communication Affects a Client’s Perception of Success
by Stoney deGeyter
Engaging in proper site SEO isn’t about pulling out a checklist that you can run through in a month, check them all off and say all done! A good optimization strategy consists of a variety of moving parts. Check one issue off your task list today and two more problems show up on your radar. Good SEO is kind of like an engine: There are many working parts, any of which can (and should) be improved, repaired or replaced to boost your vehicle’s performance. The more your engine is used, the more work there is to do to keep the engine in top shape.
With that said, there are some basic components of every SEO campaign (not to mention a really big checklist) that form the foundation of a successful campaign. Anyone who’s been around SEO for any length of time already knows these “basics,” but they bear repeating for anyone who is unfamiliar as to where to begin with their SEO effort:
SEO & Keyword Research
Every SEO campaign starts with keyword research. It’s critical to uncover and organize your core terms and extended phrases in order to create the optimization road map moving forward.
The SEO uses keyword information to create customized titles, descriptions and page heading recommendations, along with editing the content of your pages to make them more keyword friendly. The SEO can use your existing content and rewrite it specifically to integrate the keywords selected, as well as improve the sales conversion funnel. Text edits should includes internal linking to other important pages as well as adding strategic calls to action if necessary.
As keyword performance is measured, additional recommendations should be provided, tweaking the pages to improve rankings and conversions.
Information Architecture & Usability
SEOa should regularly be reviewing site analytics information in order to seek out and uncover site architectural issues that hinder your performance in the search engines. Using this information, they can provide specific recommendations and solutions that will build better site architecture, remove duplicate content, fix problematic HTML and a whole lot more.
The mission here is to make your site search and searcher friendly on all levels.
Content Review
A site-wide content review provides strategic recommendations designed to help you produce content that better relates to your audience, effectively uses frequently searched keywords and improves the overall sales message being delivered. The goal is to create engaging content that informs, educates and sells your products or services while also attracting visitors through the search engines.
Content development doesn’t assist SEO alone, but also improves your sales process and your link and social media efforts. Without great content, your site really doesn’t deserve great search engine placement.
Link Building
Your SEO should research your and your competitor’s link landscape and provide you with a variety of linking opportunities to pursue. These opportunities include lists of sites, directories, blogs, and other strategic sites and the best approach for establishing a linking relationship that compliments your optimization efforts.
The SEO works to establish contact with these link opportunity sites and lays the groundwork for a (linking) relationship, submits linking requests and negotiates link placement, among other things.
Social Media
Developing an immediate and long-term social media strategy is critical to leveraging your blog, Twitter, Facebook and other social streams to your advantage. In conjunction with the SEO efforts and content strategy efforts, the social strategy pushes content in the most effective way, monitors reputation and boosts SEO performance through keyword and link targeting. Part of the social media strategy is to create a publishing calendar that can help you keep moving forward and not get caught in social stagnation.
Analytics & Conversion Optimization
SEOs need to regularly review your and your competitor’s Web data to understand search performance and user trends. With this information, they can provide additional insight and strategy recommendations that assist on-page optimization, link building, social media and content development.
Based on the analytic data and findings, the SEO can conduct a/b and multivariate testing designed to test various performance and conversion options. Selecting the best performing options provides the ammunition needed to continually improve your site conversion rates.
These are just the basic fundamentals of a solid web marketing campaign. Each area noted here can produce a plethora of actions, reactions and recommendations that are designed to continually propel you forward in the search results. This is by no means an exhaustive list of the tasks in each of these categories, but it can give you a good place to start.
Follow me+ at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.
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Where to Begin with SEO? Start Here!
by Stoney deGeyter
It seems to be getting more and more difficult to define what exactly SEO is. Is it on-page optimization? Link building? Conversion optimization? Or is just about rankings, and leave the rest of that stuff to someone else?
I think it’s some of both and a little of all. SEO has to focus on more than just “getting rankings” and must use the knowledge of the search engines to bring together all the various online marketing elements into a singular web marketing campaign. People seem to be using the term “inbound marketing” more and more to describe this integrated approach.
Businesses today need much more than an SEO agency. They need a web marketing firm that looks beyond rankings to help clients set online growth goals, develop strategies to achieve those goals and measure the success of those strategies along the way. Those goals are achieved through a variety of online marketing channels.
SEOs must use the skills they have to provide needed recommendations to get clients the results they want, regardless of the avenue it takes to get those results. SEOs are there to help you build the most optimized, search- and searcher-friendly site possible; this attracts visitors, builds engagement and, ultimately, converts those visitors into customers.
Why Collaboration is Essential
Successful SEO is not the responsibility of any one person, but is a collaboration between the marketers, the developers and the business managers. If any one group fails to fulfill their part in the process, the success of the online marketing campaign also fails. After all, we don’t rank websites, Google does.
Over the past five years search engines have added an increasing number of signals that factor into the ranking performance of a website. Google boasts there are more than 200 ranking signals being used, and at any time there are anywhere from 50-200 different versions of the algorithm in effect. The weight of each of the search signals vary by industry, website and even the individual as locality, personalization, social networks, relevance, comprehensiveness, freshness and speed all factor in and even change on a daily basis.
It takes much more than an “optimized” website to get good rankings. It takes a great website! That means great design, great usability, great content, great customer service, great architecture, great optimization and time. You can have all the right pieces for a great website but time is still a crucial factor.
For search engines, ranking a website is about trust. The more the site is trusted in all the areas mentioned above, the better it will rank. But as with any relationship, trust takes time to build, and, unfortunately, there are no shortcuts.
Building a Great Website
Much of what Google or other search engines consider a “quality website” deemed worthy of a top ranking falls outside the scope of traditional SEO (i.e. adding keywords to the page). The SEO and web marketing team must help you set the strategy (or work with you to do so), make recommendations, and seek out ways to improve your site based on known algorithm criteria, personal experience and historical testing. These recommendations must then be implemented if you want results.
It’s not about temporarily achieving top rankings because you’ve outsmarted the algorithm, but rather to build a site that deserves top rankings because your website is better than the competition and you’ve established the trust signals to prove it. SEO firms today must be web marketing firms that do SEO (and social media, analytics, link building, etc.). The goal is to help you build a better website. No, not just a better website, a great website!
Call that SEO if you want. Some are now calling it “Inbound Marketing.” I just call it good Web marketing!
Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.
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SEO is Out! Inbound Marketing is in?
by Mike Moran
Facebook comments are now being indexed. That might sound like a small thing, but SEO gurus know that it is one more step in Google’s road to conquering a very difficult problem: understanding everything a developer can do with JavaScript.
by Mike Moran
Image via Wikipedia
Often, I work with businesses trying to determine the return on investment for their online marketing. For e-commerce companies, it’s not that hard. They can use their Web analytics to see how many people are coming to the site and how many actually convert by checking out. But what if you sell offline? Then it’s not so easy.
Just about any company can put a special phone number on their site that appears nowhere else. If anyone calls it, you know they came from your Web site, so you can tie that eventual sale back to your Web marketing.
Small B2C companies need to find a way to link their online activity to what they do offline, often that involves some form of couponing. If you allow your online activities to discount your prices, or add a free gift, or provide some other service, just require the customer print out the coupon and present it when they buy.
For B2B companies, it’s usually more complicated, although couponing can work for them too. For many B2B businesses, they do face to face or phone sales through their own sales teams, or, more commonly for small B2B firms, manufacturer’s representatives. They usually find themselves passing leads that they hope the sales people will close.
At big companies, they follow these leads with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, where the lead is tracked at every contact point and evaluated as to how close they are to a sale (and what can be done next to get them over the line). Most small businesses don’t have such systems because they are expensive, but in recent years some very inexpensive CRM systems have appeared that give small businesses a way to use CRM, too. Highrise and Zoho CRM are both used by small businesses to track their prospects through to a sale. If you can hand off your online customer activity to your CRM system, then you can follow your online marketing to sales, just like the big boys.
Many small businesses fail to close the loop from Web marketing to sales because it is hard. But that omission keeps you from knowing which marketing activities are working and which ones aren’t. If you make this extra effort to track your sales, and your competitors do not, you’ll have a leg up on them that will supercharge your online marketing.
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How can small businesses measure offline sales?