TwentySix2 Marketing Blog

I have a relatively new client that just bought a skin care products e-commerce company last spring.  He hired us this August to do web design and SEO, and we just finished re-designing and launching a new site for the skin care products company.  If I do say so myself, the new site is tons better looking than his old site, and the e-commerce technology platform is way better than his old FrontPage site with Google Analytics.

But I digress…  My client bought this skin care products company, which has been around a few years.  The company owns 4 other websites that have some decent traction in the search engines. 

So the question is, if you bought this e-commerce company…

• What would you pay?
• How would you decide on the value of the assets?
• How would you decide on the value of the 5 websites?

Well, my client hired a CPA consultant, and they looked at many different businesses before choosing this e-commerce company.  My client didn’t tell me, but lets pretend he spent $1 million.  That translates into $200k per website.

A CPA might look at sales and top line revenue.  If the business revenue is $200k per site, is it worth 1 times revenue?  Maybe, maybe not.  But that kind of value equation is left up to a CPA. 

The equation for figuring out the value of a website is way different.

Some factors that make a site valuable include:

• Short, Keyword Rich Domain Name - Shampoo.com would be quite valuable, assuming a lot of people search for “shampoo” online.  HairCare.com might be even more valuable, if more people search “hair care” than “shampoo”.  Unfortunately, most of the good, short, popular, keyword rich domain names are long gone.
• Age of Domain - if the site’s been around a long time, that’s good.  Google penalizes new sites just of being new.  If it were as easy as buying a $10 domain, doing some SEO tags, and that’s all it took, I would own a thousand online businesses - but it’s not that simple.
• Link Popuarity - the hardest thing to do, hands down, when marketing any site online is to get other sites to link to your site - free, reciprocal, paid, whatever.  If you can buy an existing domain with thousands of links to the site, this is considerably more valuable than a brand new domain with no links to it.  Trust me on this, it’s valuable.
• Depth of Content - if a site is only 20 pages deep, there’s not much there you can’t do on your own without buying a site.
• Google PageRank - is the site a 5, 6, or 7 Google PR.

Website considerations:

• Site Usability - if the site is easy to use and converts well, then great.  If you have to re-design the site, that’s something to consider in your cost of acquisition.
• Customer Conversion Rate - what is the site’s conversion rate - 2%, 3%?  Two percent is a little above average for an e-commerce site.
• In-House Email List - Smart ecommerce companies ask customers for their email addresses.  A business that has thousands of loyal customer’s email addresses on file is very hard to beat.

Search engine marketing considerations:

• Natural Search Rankings - What are the top 100 keywords most relevant to the site?  How well does the site rank for these keywords in Google, Yahoo and MSN?
• Paid Search ROI - How well has paid search marketing worked for the site?  What is the cost per lead or cost per sale?  What is the return on investment?

Historical reporting considerations:

• Website Analytics - Does the site have at least one year’s worth of visitor tracking data?
  • Monthly Visitors - How many unique visitors does the site get each month (not hits)?
  • Seasonality - What’s the best time and worst time of year for the business?
  • Visitor Sources - what percentage of visitors come from natural search, paid search, email and direct to the URL?
• Marketing ROI - Has each online marketing effort been tracked and measured in the past?  What has worked or failed in the past?
• Online Marketing Costs - What are the monthly carrying cost associated with each marketing channel spend - paid search, paid links, paid directories, banner ads?  Is the an SEM vendor in the mix or a key SEO guru employee?

E-commerce technology considerations:

• Shopping Cart Technology - What shopping cart is used?  Can it measure important details like cart abandonment rates?
• Email - Are email addresses collected?
• Live Chat - Does the site have live chat so customers can instant message customer support?

A CPA might overlook these items, but they are much more important than sales.  A company that spends $300k a year on paid search and generates $600k in sales is not worth much if their markup is 100% and their only web traffic comes from paid search advertising. 

The next time you think about buying an e-commerce company, call a search engine marketing company and ask them to take a look before you call your CPA.

According to Technorati, there are over 80+ million blogs and counting.  So how do you start marketing your blog so that it stands out in the clutter?

Here are some basic blog marketing tactics:

• Post regularly (we’ve been slack lately - too busy)
• Claim your blog on Techorati
• Submit you blog to Google Blog Search
• Sign up for Feedburner
• Create keyword rich headlines, such as “Marketing Your Blog“
• Link to other well know blogs 
• Add WordPress plugins for SEO
• Submit your blog URL to paid directories with categories for blogs (Yahoo, bCentral, BOTW, JoeAnt)
• Submit a search engine friendly press release about your blog throught PRWeb
• Build links to your blog
• Comment on other blogs
• Setup Google Analytics and track your blog
• Print your blog on your collateral / Add it to your email signature

For more advice on marketing your blog, check out these entries on marketing your blog from ProBlogger or TopRankBlog.

Have you ever had a moment of narcissism and Googled yourself? You might be surprised at what you’ll find. It’s amazing how fast your words can get picked up, twisted and turned around and BAM…you’ve got bad press, leaving you to sit there, saying, “wait, I had press?”

Because information is no longer sacred and because privacy seems to be a thing of the past, you and your good name may be a target for malicious burglary. That’s right, I said it, there are name burglars out there. And not only can they take YOUR name, but your company’s as well. Good news? There is a great solution to this criminal problem.
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Forums are these wonderful little creations that open up all sorts of topics to anyone with a question or just gathering information. They are usually niche-oriented because a forum that catered to all the questions anyone needed answered would be called the “Chaos forum.”

SEO is one of those industries that you can’t really learn everything about because it is constantly changing. I began my job a while ago and I still struggle to keep up with all the new lingo, tips and tactics that SEOers come up with daily. So, I go to a forum to check out latest news and happenings.

Do not be afraid of them! Forums are a way for everyone to advance their knowledge of a subject. If you ask a question and let current users know you are new, they will most always be kind to you and offer some REALLY great advice (just make sure your post is original. Sometimes they get a little miffed at repeated questions, which is understandable).

So without further ado, here are my top picks for SEO forums to get started in:

Guaranteed, any question you have has already been asked in one of these places, so do a little digging, read the posts and comments and you’ll probably come out of the forum way more educated than you were going in and good luck! –>

Most everyone has a blog, or two. There are about 75 million bloggers out there and the one thing we all have in common is the desire to gain readers. We write to inform or entertain and we want our words to be read by others.

But how can that be done you say? I have compiled a list of five ways that readers will turn into your trusty right hand (wo)man:
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Every now and then people in this industry, like most others, get together for a little shindig, an awards ceremony. I was poking around for local and national award shows and came across this little gem, appropriately named SEM Awards.
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A new Google Apps tool has been released that is designed for small- to medium-sized businesses, and now you can have a Google search box on your website that allows visitors to access search results from the website, or websites, that you choose. It is called Google Custom Search Business Edition, and it provides an alternative between the “already existing Custom Search Engine, a free, ad-supported service, and Google Appliance, a hardware device selling for prices starting around $2,000 which customers manages on themselves”. Since your website does NOT have to be running Google ads to use the Business Edition application, you have the ability to turn off the ads produced by the Custom Search Engine service, and you can also customize what your visitors are looking at, similar to Google Appliance.
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Below is an article I wrote to be inserted into a newsletter of one of our business affiliates. I thought it would be a good way to explore, on a very basic level, what we do as internet marketers for those of you reading our blog but perhaps not receiving the newsletter. It’s very basic information but sometimes metaphors help:

Internet marketing is a practice of reviewing and repairing websites. It’s an offering of recommendations to solve problems associated with low rankings and improve a site’s appeal to targeted audiences. During the review period, internet marketers are sometimes bearers of bad news, taking on the disheartening task of informing website owners they have an “ugly baby.”
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I was reading an article on Sphinn and thought it would be helpful to our readers. The article offers advice to any people or companies seeking to hire an SEO firm. The information contained is very valuable to anyone who’s not so familiar with internet marketing and it offers great advice for the selection process.

(I thought number one was a particularly handy tip, as some SEO firms will try to lure clients with an unguaranteeable guarantee. Beware of that!!)

So if you have time and are searching for an SEO firm or just want to know things to ask for future reference, here is the article.

During my daily reading of Search Engine Land I was reading Google Free Fridays and Danny Sullivan mentioned his new product, Sphinn.

I took an initial look at Sphinn and all I have to say is wow, it’s great. Digg is for the techies, Reddit is for random weird stuff but Sphinn is a collection of articles from all over the place about SEO! What a great and NOVEL idea. So if you need an extra resource to get a glimpse of who’s who in SEO or just learn a little more information, this is a fantastic starting point. Kudos to you Danny and the rest of Search Engine Land. A product the web can be proud of!