TwentySix2 Marketing Blog

I am always amazed at how many large, publicly traded, B2B companies have inadequate websites and how many of them have the same issues and challenges. They have millions of dollars in sales revenue, but no one seems to own the success or failure of the website. That’s one thing about small business entrepreneurs - they will do whatever it takes to get to the next level.

1) Improperly Naming Products and Services
One of our large technology clients (we help both large and small companies) provides ‘disaster recovery services’, but they call it ‘availability services’. There are thousands of monthly searches performed on “disaster recovery” and no searches for “availability services”, so why would you rename a service and confuse potential customers? The amazing thing is that this client has a Google PageRank of 7 out of 10 and tremendous link popularity, so even though “disaster recovery services” is a very competitive keyword phrase, they could easily rank well for it in natural search. All they have to do is call a spade a spade and stop trying to invent a new word that no one uses or understands.

2) Poor CRM Tools
I would say that over half of the B2B websites we work with have poorly implemented CRM tools, or none at all. They spent the money on Salesforce.com or some other CRM tool, but no one seems to be accountable for it working properly. With today’s technology, both large and small companies can track web leads and even in-bound phone calls and tie them back to their source -natural search (search engine and keyword), paid search (search engine, campaign and keyword), website link, email link or other. With today’s technology, marketers can calculate the ROI of every online marketing channel to the penny. With today’s technology, B2B companies can exchange product information, videos or whitepapers for customer contact information, so they can segment web visitors by product or service and drip market to them based on their information needs.

3) Poor Content
People use the Web to find information on companies and their products and services. The more content you have to help a visitor make a buying decision, the better chance you have of converting them from a website visitor into a buyer. Most B2B web visitors want to know the answer to two questions: 1. What questions should I be asking to properly evaluate each vendor in this space? 2. Why are you better than all the other vendors? We have whitepapers that tell potential customers the questions they should be asking other search engine marketing vendors or web designers. We even have one on how to write an RFP. Do you think a potential customer appreciates the free education? Do you think they are more likely to do business with our agency versus another agency that just sends them a proposal?

4) Lack of Content
The cool thing about search engine optimization (SEO) is that you can do a little research and figure out what keywords your customers are searching for online. Ideally, if you want to be found for 200 keywords, then you should create 200 unique pages of content. If you don’t use a keyword on your website, you won’t rank for it. All you have to do is figure out the information hat people want and build content to provide it. There are lots of strategies, like FAQs, whitepapers, blogs, case studies, landing pages and more. You just have to give visitors what they need to make a buying decision so they won’t go elsewhere for the information.

The bottom line is that the Web is a very powerful tool if you put the energy and effort into doing everything right. It’s a little work, but it pays off in more sales and profits.

The three ways our team stays smarter than our competitors is 1) testing online marketing tactics on multiple websites and coming to our own conclusions, sharing our knowledge internally with one another, and reading blogs from the best and the brightest. One of the better blogs I read on a regular basis is The Future Buzz. Adam Singer wrote a great blog the other day on 77 Insights from More than a Decade on the Web, Daily.

While most of the 77 ideas are based on the world of blogging , the ideas I found most relevant to the online marketing business were:

7) People hate flash - especially influencers
14) Telling stories that are unique, novel or in some way remarkable can always cut through the clutter
22) Content trumps design
23) A vast majority of web designers still can’t create Google-friendly sites
24) Knowing traditional graphic design doesn’t make you qualified to do web design
25) Search advertising is exceedingly effective if you know how to use it right and have a good product
31) People love lists
35) The most passionate professionals in every industry blog
39) People with mobile devices are far more efficient at spreading news than traditional media
45) E-commerce requires patience and good leadership/strategy
52) There are still newcomers, but eventually such a thing won’t exist
56) You don’t need to spend insane amounts of money to develop a popular site, product or web destination, but you do have to have a strong strategy, purpose and goal
70) People will always take the path of least resistance
71) With design, less is more
76) Just because you build it, doesn’t mean they will come

Other ideas I would add to the list are:

78) Every site should have clear calls to action, such as buy online, complete a form online, register for a blog or newsletter, or download a PDF
79) All webmasters should install Google Analytics (even if you use another tool also) and use is to track what channels drive visitors to execute your site’s calls to action
80) Most large companies waste for too much money on paid search
81) If your website has a Google PageRank of 6 or higher, then you should focus a large majority of your marketing budget on good content and search engine optimization – it will pay huge dividends
82) If your site is B2B, you have to measure online leads from the web and track them through closing offline with a CRM tool

To see a list of some of the blogs I read on a daily basis, visit Blogs for Small Business CEOs.

When we started teaching people about search engine marketing back in 1997, Google wasn’t even invented yet and the only paid search engine worth paying for was called GoTo.com (which became Overture and then Yahoo!). Instead of 3 or 4 search engines to worry about (Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask), there were 30 or so search engines we had to monitor.

When our sales people called people to pitch search engine marketing, prospects would almost always say “What’s that?”

Fortunately, today almost everyone knows what search engines are and most people understand how search engine marketing can grow their business.  The question we get these days is “What can we do, in addition to searh marketing?”

Here is my top 10 list of things to do outside of search engine marketing:

1) Link Build - Find sites that are topically relevant to your business and ask them to link to you.  Reverse engineer where your competitors get their links from and get links from those sites too (try link:www.domain.com in Yahoo).

2) Create Content or Tools Worth Linking To - in the online marketing world, they call this link bait.  If you are a mortgage broker, create a cool mortgage calculator.  If you are an online marketer, create a free website ranking tool.  Just create something cool that other sites will want to link to.

3) Start an In-House Email List - next to search, an opt-in, in-house email list is rated as one of the best ways to drive sales.  We have some e-commerce clients that generate 20% of their business from sending out email blasts once a month.

4) Write Ariticles - if you want business prospects to find you online, write expert articles about your industry.  Submit them to the top article distribution websites and get your name out there.

5) Use Online PR - find something interesting to tell the world about your business and submit it to the most popular online PR sites - PRWeb and BusinessWire.  Make an announcement about your latest big deal or the Fortune 500 client you landed.  Just have something to say.

6) Start a Blog - there are over 70 million blogs on the Web.  Why? Because it’s easy to start a blog.  If you have something valuable to put out into the business world, start a blog.  It will help you add valuable content to your website, it will help you position your business uniquely above the competition, and it may even make you famous.

7) Market Your Blog - there are over 70 million blogs on the Web.  If you want anyone to read your blog, you better spend some time marketing it.  Register your blog with the top blog search engines - Technorati.  

8 ) Work on Social Bookmarking - social networking sites like Digg, Furl and Del.icio.us are the latest rage.  People use these sites to vote for great content they find on the Web.  Vote for your own stuff and get your friends to also.

9) Update Your Website - getting traffic to your site is only half the battle.  Getting visitors to take your desired call to action (make a purchase, complete a form, sign up for a newsletter) is the other half.  If your website conversion rate is 1%, you can double your sales by making your website better and increasing your conversion rate to just 2%.

10) Network - Get Out There - for most businesses, customers still come from relationships. Get out there and press the flesh!

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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