This week The Age ran this interesting article by Clare Kermond, outlining the massive changes in online shopping . . . featuring the massive increase in use of smartphones to shop online
RETAILERS are being urged to have mobile-friendly marketing strategies as new research shows the rate of conversion from making an inquiry to buying something is many times higher via mobiles.
Too often, I hear people in business giving up on just about any form of marketing strategy with a knowing “That won’t work in our type of business.”
Well here’s one that will work every time: Gift Vouchers.
Gift Vouchers work every time
Gift Vouchers have been with us for decades, and yet very few businesses make use of their full power.
These days, being in business for x years, being ‘professional’, offering ‘expert’ services and all the other stuff people say in their ads is taken for granted by your target market.
In fact, most of the things people use to describe why people should deal with them, and not the competition, is boring, passe and is the bare minimum anyone in business should be offering.
There are lots of ways to use vouchers. Here are just a few.
1. Join up with someone in your industry, but not direct competition to you. You might service cars, so team up with a car detailer. He gives a voucher for your business, you give away vouchers for his. This needs to be carefully structured so as to ensure mutual benefit.
2. Pay a discounted price for vouchers to someone else’s business in exchange for the promotional benefits they will get from your advertising. For example, the same car service centre in point 1 might buy $100 vouchers from the detail business, but only pay $50 each for them since your advertising campaign will benefit the detailer’s business as well.
3. Buy vouchers from high profile businesses. Offer a $50 Bunnings, Myer or Office Works voucher bundled with a set package for your business. Something like “Book in for a service between now and the end of the month and we will give you a $50 Bunnings voucher, FREE “.
Whichever way you go, never forget your *Conditions Apply. And publish them on your website where people can see them. This covers you against that dreary type who is always looking for something for nothing.
It’s not the fact that web designers tend to be bad at SEO that’s the problem – in fact I’m glad they are otherwise there would be no work for people like me. The problem starts when they claim that they do understand it, partly in order to secure the work.
And for the record, whilst I wholeheartedly appreciate that there is a distinction between designers and developers, I have found each are guilty protagonists, so I apologize if I use these terms interchangeably. If pushed I would also say that your average Mac user knows far less about SEO than your average PC user (and take from that what you wish), but as I am about to explain, having a little knowledge could well be worse than having none at all.
Generally, when you ask a web designer what he or she knows about SEO – if their sun-starved faces don’t completely go blank – they may talk about title tags, pretty URLs and maybe even a sitemap.
What’s for certain is that they won’t discuss anything other than the on-site technical aspects of their websites.
That’s fine – these are important parts of optimization and many designers don’t even get that far. I’ll go further and say thank goodness that the days of frames are long gone whilst the irony of not a single Flash website showing up in Google for the phrase “Flash website” isn’t lost on an SEO.
So, let’s consider a typical scenario. Along comes your average relatively clueless client to a web designer studio and they (or their sales team) go through the sales process, show them how great their existing clients’ websites look and demonstrate their excellent hosting plans as the client nods along enthusiastically to the sales patter.
Five minutes before the sales meeting closes, the clients ask about this SEO they’ve read so much about. The design team issues a final gush about how all their sites are search engine friendly and will easily be found by the spiders and what’s more, they even install Google analytics for free! And so the deal is done.
Six months down the line and sales on the client’s site are lackluster, traffic is low and the return on investment is negligible. Along comes an SEO, and before he can even say “Your site has canonicalization problems and no call to action”, the client’s defences are up. He’s already “had SEO done” and it didn’t’ work – anyway, he’s now spending his marketing budget on Yell.com and an advert in the local press.
Thank you, Mr Web Designer – another potential client gone, another website without a marketing plan and another detractor of SEO as a profession.
Let’s flip this around and ask an SEO about Web Design and – if they even find the time away from their ridiculous workload to answer – they may talk about HTML, headers, bodies and footers and maybe a bit about PHP or CSS. Ask them if they can also provide a website and they would have no hesitation in referring you to someone else who knows better – probably someone they are connected to through a LinkedIn account.
In the same way a car mechanic might be a dab hand at making a vehicle go faster, he wouldn’t for one second assume he’s also best suited to then race it. Web designers have to detach what they do from anything to do with what a contemporary SEO would do.
Web designers are hurting the search marketing industry at the very source. When clients whose understanding is only as good as the person who is telling them think that SEO is what web designers do, we’re at the bottom of a big uphill battle.
This is the fundamental problem – web designers are the gatekeepers. They are client’s first port of call and because their work is what the client sees and understands, it is they who influence the site’s design and functionality.
It’s generally up to the SEO to then clean up the mess and rectify the oversights the developers and clients between themselves have left. This is never good news – just as no mother likes to hear that their children are ugly, no web designer likes to be told their site needs changing.
The following list skims the surface of what a good SEO will do for their client. Immediately, it is clear that our responsibilities go way beyond onsite optimization and whilst the term SEO remains, our role and scope is considerably wider ranging. If there is a web developer out there who considers all of these aspects, then good on you – but I doubt you have time to do all this as well as design websites.
Two parts of what an SEO provides are largely ignored by web designers, much to the disaffection of their clients: Keyword Research and Traffic Acquisition.
Keyword research should be the starting point of any web build. If you do not know what your prospective customers are looking for, how do you know what words the site should be optimised for? Formula One designers consider the tracks their cars are going to go around before they build the cars. Fisherman consider what fish they are after before they choose the nets they use. Why wouldn’t a website be built and optimized for the words they need to target?
The second and most important part of SEO which web designers fail to recognise is how the site is going to generate traffic. How and why should the site you are building get traffic and make sales? Pretty images and compliant code doesn’t get you very far.
Web developers rarely consider the strategy of how to make this happen: whether the solution is ultimately through content marketing via a blog, attracting inbound links through link bait or integrating a solid social media strategy, making these decisions before the site is built makes a huge difference to any website’s ROI.
Each party cannot be expert across the other’s discipline. It is important that each party has an understanding of the other.
What Web Designers need to concede and explain to clients is that whilst their sites may be search engine friendly, they are not offering SEO.
To claim anything else undermines our fledgling profession and misleads clients. We have enough bad SEOs doing that already!
I’ve had a whole bunch of enquiries over the past couple of weeks about building back links. I was about to write something, and just as I was settling in I came across this little gem from Brick Marketing.
Writing by Brick Marketing in Link Building
The second phase of an SEO campaign, after on-site optimization, is ongoing link building. Links from quality websites establish trust with the search engines. What’s important to recognize is that there is a right way to build links, and a wrong way to build links. Sometimes a website owner can get so wrapped up in it, that they can take a link building strategy to the extreme and enter a gray or black hat area. Because it’s good to get a refresher every once in awhile, let’s take a look at some of the most popular link building strategies and outline what should and shouldn’t be done.
Article Marketing
While it once was acceptable to write one article and post it on hundreds of article sites, the Google Panda update nipped that practice in the bud. When it comes to writing articles for link building purposes, focus on quality rather than quantity. Write for end users, not the search engines and instead of posting on hundreds of low quality article sites, find one good niche industry site that accepts guest submissions and post it there. Not only will it help your link building, but it will also improve traffic since the audience is more relevant.
Directory Submission
Some SEOs are eliminating this tactic from their link building strategy completely because directory links hold far less value than they used to. However, as part of a diverse link building strategy, there is still a place for directory submission. The key is to find the right directories to submit to. Instead of wasting your time submitting a site to twenty low quality directories that barely get any traffic and probably aren’t even U.S. based, spend your time researching a few niche industry directories that target audience members actually visit to find the product or service that you offer.
Blog Commenting
Blog comments are a great source of links, but you need to be commenting on the right blogs and you need to be commenting the right way. Writing “Nice post!” on any old blog isn’t going to get you too far. In fact, it will probably just get you sent to the spam folder. Spend time researching industry blogs and industry related blogs and leave thoughtful comments that contribute to the conversation. Blog commenting isn’t just about getting a link, it’s about building your personal or professional brand across numerous websites.
Press Release Distribution
Submitting a press release with keyword anchor text links is only beneficial for SEO purposes if it gets picked up by numerous sites and the only way that will happen is if the press release actually shares newsworthy information that is interesting. Don’t try and pass an article off as news. If you don’t have anything new to share, just hold off on writing a press release until you do.
Most of the times we talk to our customers about how to optimize key pages for conversions we find out that it is very important for them to get as many customers as possible and not to lose any. There are several different ways to achieve conversions, but the basic steps common to all of them is have your visitor go to a landing page and perform the action you desired so you get the conversion.
You might wonder what landing page actually means. To give a simple definition among many, we can say that it is a page which is designed to attract and convince visitors to take the action desired by the owner. This action can mean to buy something right away, to subscribe for a free newsletter, to call the number on your screen and so on.
It can happen that your website is not selling any product online, but just promoting a regular physical shop, or if on the contrary it has so much to offer that you cannot put in one page. In these cases we recommend running a strong SEO campaign so all pages of the site can eventually make it for a landing page.
It is important that visitors spend as much time as possible on your site so they get familiar with your products and services, because the longer they stay the closer they are to make a conversion. This can be achieved in several ways.
A good way to do it is to insert squeeze boxes besides the content where the visitors can either insert their email or link to your contact page. To make it even easier you can have the actual contact form inside the squeeze boxes so the visitors don’t have to leave the page to fill in the information.
Making good headlines on all the pages is another point to keep in mind. It is not only your home pages that should generate sales so use the potential of each page and choose attractive headlines that could convince your visitors to buy.
How you write your texts is also of great importance. The message you send has to be clear, concise and appealing for the visitors. Do not use long texts unnecessarily and keep things simple. If you must lay down an explanation that cannot be made short it’s ok to make a long text as well, but apply the same principle of keeping ideas easy to follow and easy to understand.
Call for action whenever you have the possibility. Remember that sometime the little thing matter most. Make yourself available for your visitors at all times, by having your contact information at hand for them in the header or footer of your pages, so they don’t have to navigate away to look for your contact details if they need to talk to you.
It is very important to keep in mind that the purpose of each page is to turn the visitors into buyers. So when you think you got the trick how to do this use it on all the pages of your website.
Just like when you start a business, when you make a website you have a goal in mind. Whether you want the visitors to make an online purchase, dial a number or click on a link, you should make sure that all your pages are designed to convince your visitors to take the desired action. Think of each page as a landing page will bring you closer to success.