Internet Marketing|Seo|Blogging|Website Traffic

If you are an SEO consultant, or if you are responsible for purchasing SEO services for your organization, the ideas discussed here may be the most important ideas you read this year.

In a nutshell, the SEO industry is changing. We have integrated linkbaiting and social media marketing into our SEO toolkits, but now it’s time for the “step.” It’s also an end to a cycle—we know (to a great extent) what search engines want and how to give that to them. But as search marketers, do we know what our clients want? And as media buyers hiring SEO firms, do we know what options we have?

In the next two months (it is early April 2007 as I write this) you will read a wave of articles talking about “niche SEO.” I urge you to follow this wave closely—if you embrace it, you will be part of the new breed of SEO. If you don’t, you’ll be playing catch up by the end of the year.

What is niche SEO? The best way to answer that is to show you.

Do you have industry-specific SEO knowledge?

If you give a competent SEO a specific industry and 30 minutes, he can tell you:

·How competitive that niche is
·What the top keywords are
·Top ranking sites in that niche
·Where to get topical links from
·Untapped sub-niches (by comparing keyword popularity and relative competition)

That’s impressive, right?

Now if you handed the same assignment to an SEO with deep knowledge and experience in that industry, he could tell you, in those 30 minutes:

·Who the top link sources are
·The sites most likely to link to you (and how to get those links)
·The linkerati and how to attract their attention
·The top bloggers and their background (I’m talking names, history, email and phone contacts)
·The top communities in terms of traffic and influence—and how to use them
·Where to buy ads for traffic
·Niche-specific monetization opportunities
·Trusted information sources
·The misinformers (spammers)
·50 linkbait ideas
·Top traffic sources (and how to get traffic from them)
·How to segment and target sections of the linkerati without alienating the rest

Is this something that a ‘generic’ search marketer can find through research? Yes and no. Yes, because ultimately the resources being used are the same. No, because it takes too much time.
Knowledge, experience and an established network in an industry are the three main checkboxes your prospective hires will have to tick.

Why/How “Niche SEO” is Better Than “Generic SEO”

A real world example, to show you how powerful niche SEO really is:

On 4 and 5 April, there were two key sports-related incidents in Europe. During two soccer matches (one on each day), visiting fans clashed with the police inside the stadium. The common factor in both incidents is that the visiting fans were English. The incidents have raised serious security concerns within the game and because of the police involvement, it can (and probably will) turn into a diplomatic crisis as well.

These are serious events, but as news goes, it is also an opportunity for a smart marketing to provide unique coverage of these events and gain market share as a result.

The ideal way to do this would be to:

·Find videos related to the incident—clips from TV coverage in the English media, in the Italian and Spanish media, and video footage taken by fans
·Connect with fans visiting these matches and get their input
·Provide full (and immediate) coverage of all news related to this incident
·Pull out historical information that relates to such violence and do a timeline piece
·Find academic research on soccer hooliganism and refer that in your articles
·Start and manage discussions on this topic in different forums, using your profile and referring to your coverage/articles to drive traffic to your site
·Use your media contacts (that cover soccer/sports news) to promote your site
·Contact leading soccer bloggers with targeted pitches about your content related to this issue
·Contact podcasters in your niche and give them exclusive information in exchange for coverage

Who would be the ideal candidate to do this? Someone who:

·Knows which forums fans frequent and has a strong profile in those communities.
·Knows where to quickly get news and video clippings of this incident.
·Has a strong social network in the soccer news industry that includes media contacts,podcasters and bloggers.
·Has historical knowledge (through experience and as a fan) of soccer and specifically, similar issues in soccer.
·Knows the best strategies of promoting content in this sector.

Versus:

A crack team of linkbaiters and search marketers who will charge you $500 per hour but will then spend the next 10 hours—$5000 of your time—learning about the niche while other news sites cover the breaking news and eventually become the main hubs of discussion around that topic.

The choice is yours.

Where do you stand? If you’re a search marketer, you can be a ‘generic’ SEO or you can pick a handful of industries (through personal experience) and specialize in them.
If you’re a business owner or someone looking to purchase SEO services, the main three
questions you should ask the next SEO company are self-evident—do they have the

·Experience
·Social network
·Background knowledge

you need in your industry?

The success of your business will depend on those answers. There is much more to talk about on this subject. To follow the discussion, use Technorati to track “niche SEO53.” And if you want to criticize/discuss this topic further, find me Google my name54 and I’ll be glad to answer any questions you have.

Ahmed Bilal

Being the best usually means working with the best. Where would Johnny Carson have been without the support of Ed McMahon? You think Batman had a serious chance against Two-Face
without Robin (assuming he isn’t played by Chris O’Donnell, of course)?

Creating a sidekick with Chewbacca caliber seems impossible, but what if it were as easy as installing a few lines of code or typing in a username and password? Wouldn’t it be great if you could figure out what keywords people actually are typing into search engines and clicking through to your site? And how about what pages they are clicking through to the most?
Hallelujah! It really is that easy to access this kind of information.

Most websites today have some type of analytics installed that their SEM is overlooking (Holy missed opportunity, Batman!). While your eyes are glazing over at the thought of reading an article about analytics, I’d like to make an argument that they are more than just numbers. Analytics tell a story, and they just might be the sidekick you’re looking for.

I like to consider my client’s analytics data as a story, with 4 major chapters that build off of one another:

Chapter 1: Keyword Analysis

Looking through the thousands of keywords (hopefully) that visitors clicked through to your site on can provide you with a wealth of information that should strongly impact your SEM campaign. In the beginning you can use these keywords as suggestions as to what you should be targeting. It is a great way to dive into the mind of the customer and get a better understanding as to what language they use when describing your product or services.

Your internal search engine is like a golden ticket into the mind of your customer. You know they are interested in your services, and now you get to see what they think right keywords are. Closely analyze these keywords, and see where you could be targeting them and if they would bring in enough traffic to merit such a focus.

During your campaign, these keywords are a great measurement to determine how effectively you are using your targeted terms on your site. Analyze the long tail keywords and make sure you are focusing on the best terms. How can you tell which terms are the most important?

Chapter 2: Tracking Your Visitors

What good is ranking number 1 in Google for “Batman” if none of your visitors take action or “convert”? Your best keywords are the keywords that lead the visitor to your page, and once they get there, they click through to the rest of your site. Your analytics makes it simple for you: 50 visitors came from Google searching for “Batman,” and 0 clicked through to the rest of your site. 15 visitors came from Google searching for “batmobile die cast car” and 10 of them clicked through. Data like this tells us we need to refocus our SEM campaign to focus on the language the customer is using, not just the terms that bring in the most traffic.

Don’t overlook what keywords your visitors are coming in on from the other search engines either. Obviously most search engines have their own ranking algorithms. Use that to your advantage by analyzing the keywords your visitors are coming in from on each the engines. I’ve found great keywords that I didn’t even know I was ranking for in MSN, but I was nowhere to be found in Google. Once I knew it was important, I was able to work it into my SEM campaign.

Also included in Chapter 2 is tracking where your visitors came from. Are your paid links actually sending targeted traffic to your site? Are your links doing anything more than improving your rankings?

Chapter 3: Page Analysis

Your analytics sidekick also gives you the invaluable information of learning at what point the customer leaves your site. Was it something they didn’t like on the page? Did they think your shopping cart process was frustrating? If you find enough people leaving your site at the same point, you should put up a red flag and take another look at your page. Your best option might be to do some user testing. Regardless, you want more than traffic, you want conversions.

Looking at the pages that your visitors are clicking away from should also raise a few eyebrows. Are they finding their answers on this page? Should we expand on our content? What relevant
internal pages should we be linking to in order to make it easier for the customer to find what they want?

And while you are tracking your visitors click path, you should be able to calculate the ROI of your current SEM strategy.

Chapter 4: Measuring ROI

Identifying which keywords, search engines, links, and even email marketing campaigns are generating the highest percentage of conversions from the traffic they send is a great way to
measure your campaign ROI. If conversions are down, or aren’t improving the way you want them to, then you might want to consider modifying your current campaign.

Are the costs of your SEM project justifying themselves? If you’re like P. Diddy—writing lots of checks and still not “going platinum”—then you should be reconsidering your strategy and your investment in general.

Having the ability to see which keywords and sources are bringing you the best traffic is an invaluable resource. You need to know where to increase spending and where to focus.

Analytics are a constant measurement resource identifying which search strategies are working and which strategies are failing (or making no impact at all.) Don’t try to fight your competition shorthanded. You have an invaluable sidekick just waiting to help you. Don’t ignore your analytics. There are plenty of great free resources and great analytics blogs to keep you from being frustrated, and to maximize your analytics potential.

Taylor Pratt

Let’s face facts: our clients only care about SEO if it brings them business.

There are many times that we SEOs get hung up on search engine position and the ensuing traffic that should come from a top spot. This is all fine and good and is great for our own personal satisfaction, but what does position and traffic really do for our clients? The answer to this question is simply, absolutely nothing.

I have worked on many sites that I was able to get listed is some really choice positions in several large search engines. This position also generated quite a bit of traffic for each one of these sites day in and day out. The only problem with this comes with the client’s question, “If I have all of these hits, then why doesn’t anyone buy from me?” This is the point that I had a revelation; SEO doesn’t mean squadoosh without appropriate marketing strategies being implemented on the site.

There are a few important things that we forget when going about our SEOing on a client’s site.We forget that if the site is not appealing then their clients are not going to click to buy. We need to use a little psychology when helping a client out. Don’t be afraid to do a little research about the specific type of business that you are trying to promote. (other than just keyword research) I do this by asking myself a few questions.

· What colors drive the behaviors that this business needs? What I mean is red incites passion, and blue drives calmness, green sparks a thought of money. What does this business need to happen? A particular color scheme will really help drive the point of the site home.

· Have I made full use of a call-to-action in the title? I have found that the greatest response for a site is if the site title is set up as a call-to-action. If I can spark the interest of a potential client from the search engine content then I can definitely get them interested in the home page content.

· Does this business need products up front or would they benefit from a more detailed description of their service? Many businesses need to feature their products up front to drive a customer to an order section of the site, while other businesses need to properly describe their service to merely pique the interest of the reader.

These basic questions provide the opportunity to really focus concentrated efforts on conversion and SEO at the same time. Let’s be honest: our clients don’t really care about how many hits they are getting. They may ask about hits because it’s what we have trained them to ask, but the real issue is “How many customers are buying from me?” This is why focusing SEO in a way
that also touches customer conversion or marketing will ensure that your client will end up with a solid position in search engines and will be pleased with the number of conversions that they
receive from their site.

Once this is out of the way, I can start my normal process for SEO. Now, I know that some people may think that some of this is antiquated or more of the same but it does work none the less. I work the content to ensure that I have enough keyword saturation (and no, I don’t mean blast the page with keywords). Revising the content then leads me in to alt tags, text links, reciprocal links, and the same old stuff that we do day in and day out. To be honest I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel, I am only trying to make sure that each and every client becomes successful on the Internet and I think that many times we lose sight of that fact.

Now, I’m not saying that we all need to focus only on doing this or guarantee a certain amount of conversion for a client, but what I am saying is that by improving a client’s conversion rate we are simplifying the daily conversation, “You have blah, blah, blah, number of hits and that is great!”

At the end of the day, positioning in a search engine takes a backseat in our clients’ mind as long as we can bring them revenue from their sites.

You’ve just landed the big contract. You have been waiting over a month to get this client to sign their contract, and now that they have you can begin your traditional SEO process. You know what I’m talking about: keyword research, competitor research, building new content—the list goes on and on. All of these are vital to a successful SEO campaign.

So now you are 3 weeks into the project and you are ready to send the client some recommendations. You start your email off by telling the client everything they are going to need to change in order to achieve those desired high rankings: the JavaScript menus, they have to go; we are going to have to do some URL rewriting; and what were you thinking, using all of that
Flash?

You get a response a couple days later saying that they would like to put all SEO work on hold.They are not sure if this is the right thing for them now. They were very happy with the way the site looked; they just wanted to get traffic there now. If you are like me, your jaw hits the floor.You’ve already invested three weeks into this project and you are ready to really get the show on the road, and they want to stop? What did I do wrong?

Actually, it is not what you did do, it’s what you didn’t do. When you initially met with this client,did you do anything more than find out what their business does and browse around a little on their website? No—you didn’t do any real work on it, because you weren’t getting paid to. Of course they are willing to do what it takes to market their site, they came to you didn’t they? The problem is that we assume that a client will be willing to make changes to their site in order to achieve those high rankings. We make the same kind of mistake by assuming they will want to target those keywords that people are actually looking for, and not worry about branding. Well, I don’t think I need to tell you what happens when you assume.

So now that we have successfully lost a client, what are we going to learn from this? The answer is the creation of a wonderful evaluation—an SEO audit. At your first meeting with a prospective client you should ask them one important question: Would you be willing to let us perform an SEO Audit of your website for X amount of dollars?

The point of the audit is to bring to their attention all of the search-unfriendly practices they are using on their site, and to find out whether or not they are willing to change their ways. Stress the fact that it actually could be a cost savings process for them. Instead of paying you hourly or monthly to do all this work, only to find out that they have spent a ton of money on changes they don’t want to make, they can find out right away if SEO is for them for a much smaller cost. You still make out well because you were compensated for your time.

By bringing these issues to the table at the very beginning, you will also establish a greater line of communication with the client. They know what is going to be expected from them, and how much work they can expect from you. The business relationship will greatly benefit from a simple audit.

The important issues to include in your audit are the changes the client will have to make to their site and what kind of buy in they will have to get (e.g. from their legal department, which is not always about the audit itself, but telling them what they need to know and not being afraid to walk away from the table). Below is a list of architectural items to look at to help get your audit started.

Technical Site Architecture Issues

· Is the site being indexed by Google, Yahoo, and MSN?
· Do they have a black- or grey-listed IP address?
· Is the site in frames?
· Does the site use JavaScript?
· Do they have a CMS in place?
· How does the site perform in Internet Explorer vs. Firefox vs. Safari?

This is very important for not only you to have, but for the client as well. Show them where they stand, and where they are lacking. Remind the client why they need your help. They will be surprised how poor of a job they have done choosing keywords, and you will comfort them by telling them how you can help. The best part is that you will not have to worry about that horrible email or phone call saying that SEO is not for them.

Taylor Pratt