How?

There are theories to work from and a lot of ratios to share to generate leads, but I wanted to take the opportunity to ask an actual customer.

Actually, he couldn’t remember what it was but overall he preferred to call us. The site fit for what he wanted to do.

When I hear that type of statement, it tells me that the path was intuitive to the customer and it was very natural to use the site and continue down the conversion path. You don’t necessarily remember how you use stairs. You just do. If there’s stairs, you know how to go up them. You don’t think about the height of the step, which leg to lead with and what momentum you use to thrust yourself against gravity while heading forward to continue up the stairs. A website should aim to have that type of intuitive nature in usability.

For something to be intuitive it has to have a connection with a person’s problems not with the company itself.

For SEO purposes, it is the keywords that play into this type of web architecture. Keywords are the words the customer would use to describe their problem. Keyphrases are the most common sentences that people use to describe their situation.

Several companies seem to prefer to optimize on their company name. That type of thinking results from a lot of branding strategies. However, when people don’t know who you are, you are left with what you do.

So now your site speaks to your customer.

For SEO purposes, it is the conversion formthat speaks the value of your Internet marketing. If your website has just one way to contact your company, you need to put a form on every page you want to measure. This helps track all your efforts and how people use your site. You’ll be able to see how to change your site and enhance as more people use it … or don’t use it or still can’t find it.

Now your site is a tool for your customer.

For SEO purposes, your site should be a part of a group of websites of similar industries or groups supporting a cause you work toward. Linking to and from websites that support each other help establish credibility as well as bringing each other higher in the search engine results pages.

Now your site establishes a sense of security for the customer.

Keeping your site in a very usable form for your visitors will make your site increasingly relevant against your competition and will naturally bring your site higher in position over time.

Oh the joy!

The situation:

This client is wanting to build a niche site on his pet photography business. As a professional photographer on several topics, he was wondering what niche generated the most revenue. He had decided that the pet industry was lucrative.  If dog costumes have a thriving industry, then photographing them is right behind it.

This client is also an avid Apple product consumer. Any iProduct is bought at time of release and thoroughly broken-in before the general populace reads about it online. Because of this, he was willing to adapt his life to the iPad, but there proved to be a problem.

He has his site built in Flash. He told me “I know you don’t like flash, but…” I countered saying that I actually like Flash. It’s fun! But Apple hates Flash. Google doesn’t crawl flash. That’s two heavyweights against one.

All it took was to see that tiny little blue box in the middle of his new productivity tool to see that he wasn’t going to get a visitors.

If you want to see how Google sees your site, type in your url in the search box, hit enter and click “cache.” You’ll see the latest snapshot of what Google sees. A flash site will show up a gleaming blank white.

So now the redesign begins, but how do you design that capitalizes off your SEO campaign?

First, there is something every company needs to consider. One site cannot be everything to everyone. Having multiple sites with different focuses will help, but if you just want one site, lets look at some best practices.

1. The F
People tend to read in an “F” pattern as they scan a website. This means, the top left corner is a prime spot. Some people put a click-able logo that always leads to the home page, but why not a very succinct call-to-action with the logo: “Download Now” “Schedule Now” “Get Fixed Today” “$25 off coupon!” It’s a prime piece of real estate to not utilize.  The “F” is probably the most important part of this list.

2. User-focused content
Your site’s main purpose is to generate leads and sales. It is not to tell people your story. A story doesn’t pay the bills, a sale does.

3. Horizontal Navigation
Main navigation across the top makes it easy for your site to be used.

4. Three columns of content or large quick links
Again, user-focused content comes to play here. Instead of “who we are” and “where we came from” and “where we are going” have “Problem X? Solution X!” “Problem Y? Try Solution Y!” “Problem Z? Solution Z!”

5. Vertical Navigation
I call this “Expert Navigation” I would use for more long-worded solutions that are common to your clientele like:
- Spring Tips for your Home
- Freeware Alternatives to Commercial Software
- Solution Y Testimonials
- Solution X Student Discounts

6. Header and Footer Optimization
A header and footer of your site are consistent across every page. Think about what you want to be known for in there and you’ll help it index correctly.

7. Every link goes to its own content
If you have a link about car stereos, then that page needs to be all about car stereos. It doesn’t need to mention other accessories. Keep each page hyper-focused.

8. Entry forms on every page
Every page should have a form for a visitor to fill out. The home page, the content pages, even the about us page. You’ll see very quickly how people respond on which page.

9. Don’t go too deep
It’s astounding to me that sites I have measured have 50+ pages and yet those pages are rarely seen. The conversion forms from item #3 and the contact us form are the biggest converters on one client’s site. In fact, the people who don’t necessarily fit into the “3 main categories” go to the “contact us” where i have less required information and a big enough text area for them to spill out their problem.

Keep the customer in mind, make it easy for them to contact you, make it pleasing to their eye motion and you’re on your way to building a great lead generation site.

Review your top content pages

What are the pages that people are using the most? How long are they staying on them? How are they using them? You may be shocked to find that some people don’t read every page on your website. With the pages that are rarely visited, or never visited, take a look at where they are placed on your site.

Are they more than one click deep into your site?
Is it focused for one message?
Do they have strong calls-to-action on it?

Expand opportunities by adding more content akin to a top performing page on a new page with alternate title tags and keywords. Even though Google can pick up on some synonyms, it’s not perfect.

Review your returning vs. new visitors

Low numbers of returning visitors may point to a lacking website or it might be a sign of growth. Sounds vague? Well, it depends on the type of site you have. If you are a content-providing site and your returning visitor number is non-existent, you could theorize that people are not thrilled after seeing your site and moved on. If your new visitor number is low, it could mean you have a loyal fan base, but you aren’t growing as much as you could.

Review your focus

Your website needs to reflect your business model, not emulate the latest in Internet fads. Some things may make sense to add, but others make no sense and can distract your visitors from buying something from you. So make a strong case on why you should add extra content like a weather forecast, sports scores, headline news feeds, stock tickers, funny pictures, social buttons, games and affiliate advertising. Keep your visitors on a path to an answer they need. Don’t turn your site into another Yahoo or iGoogle.

Review your customer paths

Take a hard look at your website and map out where each customer-type you have would go on your site. Match that to your site overlays and hot spots and see if you need to corral visitors into a tighter path. Remember, you want people to make a decision on your site – to use you now or use you later for each path on your website.

As you continue in your SEO campaign, increasing the conversions of leads from your SEO efforts will become a win-win for you and your customers because you are focusing on giving them what you want.

How do SEO results compare to PPC results?

Both are measured differently, so you can’t really say one is better than the other. For quick fast results, PPC can get clicks to your site, but retaining visitors is tricky. For Organic SEO, repeating customers and clients is outstanding, but the road to get there is longer. You can see how both can be applied for an immediate successful marketing campaign.

One Website’s tale in Organic SEO

There was once a nice little website of a local contractor that touted the wares of its vendors. Shiny images of machinery filled the gallery with text of the company’s history. The average email contact was about 1 a week on various types of client’s needs. The business relied heavily on mail drops, radio and outbound calling.  Success was moderate, but there was a slight downward trend.  So they turned more energy to the website – uncharacteristic for their industry.

Usually, a website redesign could boost the visits and email contacts, but SEO would enlarge the pool of web surfers to come into the site.

The Redesign List
1. Dumped the vendor products to focus on branding the contractor
2. Focused content on what the end-user wants hitting the pain points
3. Segmented the website with different paths for different customers
4. Contact forms for all customer paths and products

Why the fuss?

For #1: To show why they are the choice, rather than a shelf for a vendor product
For #2: People need a solution to a problem they have, not a success story
For #3: To show how people are using your site and what people are wanting most
For #4: To make it hard for people to leave your site without making a decision

Of course they could have left it like that, but they wanted to enlarge the pool out there to capture those people searching for solutions they could provide.

The SEO List
6. Getting a list of prominant keywords in their industry
7. Claiming their local business listings online and filling out the profiles
8. Installing Google Analytics
9. Incorporate Keywords into title pages
10. Adding more pages based on the keywords with contact forms

What’s the purpose of those steps?

For #6: To find out the words people are actually typing in to find the stuff you provide
For #7: To be listed in local listings
For #8: To track your website’s traffic and where people come from to get to your site and how they use your site
For #9: Letting the search engines index your pages according to your keywords rather than “home” or “welcome.”
For #10: Maximizing the amount of opportunities for your site to be indexed as well as spreading a large net for potential customers.

The results after a year:

Astounding. Since there were no analytics with the first website, the redesign clocked in at bringing in an average of 30 visits a day. Through different calls to action, the 1 email contact a week grew to an average of 3 a day. After 1 year of SEO and Local SEO efforts, the average visits increased to 80 visits a day and an average of 7 contacts a day. Because of the results, the company is cutting down on direct mail drops and look to more internet solutions.

Could it have been more? Absolutely, there were many SEO methods that could be implemented, but the local competition didn’t change anything on their sites so the high placement was acheived quicker than average.

As you look at your site, just ask “what do you want it to do for you?”

Flash has been a favorite of web designers for years and the bane of SEO experts for just as long. The argument of whether or not content organized within a Flash object (such as navigation menus) seemed to find a somewhat compromise. Google stated that information within Flash objects can be indexed and are working on it, but the whole point might be moot with Apple’s reluctance to have Flash run on its devices.

I had two instances where flash was causing me trouble:

1. I had an ad built for me and it was put in Flash. This ad was going to be on a highly trafficked site where ads did really well on conversions in the past month. But now I had a choice. Anyone with an iPhone or iPad would not see this ad. Is it worth it? I didn’t think so, so I had them change the format.

2. While reading a blog, they wanted to share some content – a “hey, check this out” piece of viral content. Since I was reading it on my iPhone, I couldn’t view it. At the speed of social media and blogging content, to ask myself to go back and find whatever that was seemed counter-productive.

What’s this have to do with SEO? Visibility

The point of SEO in marketing it to get your service or product that’s represented by your website in front of the most relevant eyes as possible. Let us assume that Google was able to index Flash object and all the content they contained just as fast and accurate as they do with regular text. Besides the thousands of skills of graphic designers becoming hotly desired, the level of effectiveness suddenly changes to the power of Apple’s market share. If the iPhone was the only Apple device that didn’t support flash, that segment of the population could be ignored. Now with the iPad launched as a mobile-computer-type-thing, it increases the possibility of people who didn’t want an iPhone and get an iPad.

Ok, two devices now … really popular devices, not supporting a particular platform. Content and websites are not only not search-able, they don’t even come up. I was once thinking about letting flash objects on my sites, purely for decoration, but now I’m not so sure. Mobile versions of sites are fine, but an iPad allows for a full site to be seen. This guyditched the Facebook app for the iPad for the actual Facebook site.

What’s this have to do with SEO? Volume

Where is your target audience? How can you get the most people in that demographic? What are their computing habits? When I was designing CD-ROMs back in 199x, we had to design the programming that could be handled by the slowest possible computer in our targeted demographic. I still do this today. Right now my target demographic is strictly surfering compatiable. They don’t update their flash players, adobe readers or browsers. They may or may not have broadband. And they are completley paranoid about pop-ups. So my sites look “older” in the terms of web standards. I use a lot of text, hypertext, no java or flash and my sites rank high and people here like them. They’d get blown out of the water in another region (maybe) but it’s all about serving the needs of your target audience in the way most relevant to them.

I don’t know how this will all end. Will Apple grab ahold of dominant market shares and throw Flash into obsolesence? Will Adobe make flash so ubiquitous that Apple will have to continue to ignore it or allow it? Will Google swoop in with a killer app that will catch both Adobe and Apple off guard? Since this an SEO blog, I’m keeping my eye on what Google is doing.  And if you are wondering how your site can be seen by the most relevant people to increase your sales, I’d suggest you do the same.

Sorry about that. Believe it or not there was a time where people would patiently wait as a website would load all its text, frames (frames?), and images. If there was video, they would click and wait in anticipation for this information that did not exist on their hard drive to come onto their screen.

I remember a commercial about the first residential offered broadband packages featuring a man who was use to clicking and then proceed to do chores. He would going to walk the dog, take out the trash or make a pot of tea. It was normal. When he upgraded, he clicked again and made the motion to leave and do a chore – but the site loaded to his surprise and a big smile crossed his face and he settled into the world of world wide webbery.

The Smile.

What is interesting to me about this story is that the man was used to the dial-up experience, but one he tasted the sweet speed of broadband his experience level changed. My brother-in-law switched to broadband before I did and when he’d come over and hear my U.S. Robotics Modem go “SHHH-EEE-ANNG-OR-ANNG”
he would twist his head in a puzzled expression and say “wait… what’s that strange sound?” Needless to say, once you go broadband, dial-up becomes excruciating. More speed means faster time surfing which in turn sets a webmaster to provide a satisfying user experience.

The Stuffer.

With this broader bandwidth, people found that they didn’t have to squish their graphics into tiny sized files in only a few colors. This actually began a downward spiral of sloppy un-economic web design. Too put it simply, if you are getting out of debt by being on a budget, you don’t throw the budget out when you get a raise. The increase in bandwidth isn’t a license to design your site with bulky graphics.

The Slowdown.

Chunking your website with graphics and gobs of javascript isn’t excusable because most people are on broadband. In fact, 40% are still on dial-up and the purchasing power of part of that demographic is might be very strong.

The Solution.

Your website should be sleek in load time. Imagine everyone being really impatient. Imagine everyone being paranoid about viruses being loaded in addition to a website. Add all those up and you have a strong reason to ditch your complex website for something that is pleasing to look at and easy to navigate while loading in milliseconds. Keep it simple.

The SEO result.

Slower Loading sites are most likely noticed by Search Engines. For instance, Google Webmaster Tools even calculated the load time of your site. If those numbers are gathered, they have to be doing something with them. If your user experience is resulting in high bounce rates, that will most likely be taken into consideration. You may have great on-page optimization, but if the load time is greater than 1000 milliseconds, you could be doing compromising a lot of your SEO efforts.  Test your site and see how fast your load times are for others.

What is Information Architecture?

You’ve probably heard the term before. You also have probably heard a definition for it, or have one of your own. From my experiences, information architecture definitions often vary from person to person. In terms of our discussion, information architecture will refer to the organization of online content into groups and the associated creation of a folder structure or end-user navigation.

Why is Information Architecture so important?

The benefits are clear. Having an organized and hierarchical folder structure can allow you to efficiently perform maintenance to your site. This is also part of Amber’s 10 Ways to Build Your Website with SEO in Mind. There are few things more frustrating to a web developer than having to work with an unorganized site, or at least a site they don’t understand the structure of. Likewise, developing a clear end-user navigation ensures that your users will quickly find what they are looking for. But these aren’t the only audiences that will use your site. You’ll need to consider how a search engine will interpret your architecture.

Think of your URL as one long keyword, for example:

www.hardware-site.com/fasteners/screws/phillips/1-inch/.

A user will have a much easier time finding that page through search because the content is hierarchically organized and contains the right descriptive keywords for the folder names. A site could similarly be organized as follows, with a user ultimately having to browse a page full of many types of screws:

www.hardware-site.com/fasteners/screws/

This same logic applies to your navigation. Allowing users to narrow down their queries via your navigation allows them to also see all of the options available in an organized structure, rather than many types of a product on a page.

A site may also attempt to rely on their site search functions to deliver users to the correct content, but if their site isn’t correctly organized they are purely relying on keywords. In this case, the information architecture can help sculpt search results and deliver content to users that might not otherwise find it. Conversely, you can also help to eliminate irrelevant results that only appear because they have a few of the right keyword combinations. Organizing content with the correct architecture points the search engine in the right direction as to what is relevant to the search query.

Give your search, internally and externally, an advantage with the right structure and information architecture.

What Navigational Searches Are

Navigational Searches are when a company name or URL is typed into a search engine instead of the address bar.  For example, if a company was named ConglomCor Pastry & Soda Company a navigational search would probably include searches such as

“ConglomCor”
“Conglom Cor Pastry”
“Conglom Pastry Soda”
“ConglomCor Pastry & Soda”

Navigational Searches not only are used to find a company’s website, but also to find specific parts of a website.  Habits of Internet usage are getting more diverse.  People are expecting web pages to have certain things such as company history, latest products, deals and news.  Navigational searches for this type of search for my example company would be:

“Conglom Cor latest deals”
“Conglom Cor Offers”
“ConglomCor Pastry News”
“ConglomCor Soda Coupons”

The Value of Navigational Searches

Does optimizing for Navigational Searches make sense?  This depends on the brand awareness a company or product has.  Optimizing for a name that is not known doesn’t make sense if no one is typing it in, but once branding starts to take a hold of your campaign, it would be good to fill in some navigational SEO gaps.

Using your analytic software, such as Google Analytics, should give you a list of keywords that people are using to find your site.  If that list contains your company name, URL and/or products, it is important to realize that people are finding you using navigational search.

For example, a website I work on has the following breakdown:

While the big blue section makes me giddy, it’s actually the data behind that section that makes your next step for SEO critical.  In my own list of keywords that were used to find this site, the top 5 phrases were actually variations on the company name.  Since this website is relying on Local SEO coinciding with other media such as Radio, TV and Direct Mail, the Local SEO is benefiting from the constant branding.

How to Incorporate Navigational Search into your SEO Plan

Adding Navigational Search to your site can be summed up into a few items:

• Put URL or Company Name in Title Tags
• H1 Tags should be clear on what the page is (deals, news, discounts, history)
• Website copy should enforce the keywords used in their respective H1 Tags along with the company name

Once you optimize for Navigational Search, you’ll be able to capture traffic from another segment of Internet users – the Navigational Search Users.

Maybe I’m preaching to the choir, but in short, this means your SEO campaign can’t be based on rankings and traffic alone! As marketers utilizing the search engines to sell products and services, we need to know how to optimize our websites for increasing conversions, and improving bottom-line revenue. Over the next 2 weeks I will discuss how to incorporate conversion optimization into your SEO campaign with user experience and design considerations, making data driven decisions to increase conversions and revenue, and why you should “never stop testing.”

Part 1: User Experience

At the core of conversion optimization is improving the user experience. How does a potential customer flow from search query to landing page to lead or buying process to conversion? Here are some guidelines for improving the user experience for conversion optimization:

• Keyword-Landing Page Connection: It all starts with relevancy. When you optimize your website for keywords, are you optimizing the right page? When a potential customer enters their search query, clicks on your organic listing and comes to this page – is it relevant? Does that keyword appear in a headline, the body content? More importantly, does the content speak to the search intent of that keyword? If it is a product related search, can the customer easily find the product on this page? Think about it.
• Conversion Oriented Design: A lot can be said about how the design and usability of your website affects conversion. But there are some specific elements you should be concerned with. I’ve written before about conversion oriented design looking through the lens of a PPC landing page, but many of the same principles apply to SEO. Are the primary elements of your keyword-targeted pages placed where the user can find them at first glance? By this I’m talking about keyword-rich headlines and copy, product images (if necessary) and conversion triggers. Are there barriers in the way of the customer finding your conversion path? Barriers can be anything from out-of-place images, video, etc. that distract from the conversion. Design your pages in such a way that the elements of the page lead the customer to the conversion trigger. Most importantly, is the conversion trigger obvious? Make your buttons, text links, what-have-you easy to find (but don’t be obnoxious!).
• Clarify the Conversion Process: This is all about setting the proper expectation for your potential customers. What information is required to become a lead? If you’re running a product sale, what exactly is the customer getting (if you have multiple promotions, be sure that it is clear which promotions belong to each product)? What are the next steps? By setting clear expectations of the conversion process, you will ensure that your visitors have all the info they need to become a customer!

That’s it for now. Next week I will discuss how to make data driven decisions for increasing conversions and revenue and the importance of testing.

What other user experience elements do YOU look at when optimizing for conversions? Leave me a comment and let me know!

Pagination is a way of organizing or numbering a lot of data within a webpage to make it more manageable and user friendly.  For example, if you go to nike.com and type in ’shox’, you could potentially get one webpage with hundreds of Nike shox all on one page. However Nike uses pagination, which allows the user to view 30 or so shox per page within 10 different pages.  (see screen shot below)

How does it affect SEO?

Pagination is basically a way of making a website with a lot of information (products or listings of some sort) more user-friendly in terms of browsing or searching.  Using Nike as another example, they use pagination by showing 30 or so shoes per page to their site instead of showing hundreds of shoes on one page to make it easier on the user to search and browse their shoes.  However, this isn’t so SEO-friendly. In fact, pagination in this way can essentially ‘bury’ product pages deeper within the site making them almost impossible to get crawled by the search engines.  Than you can kiss your potential rankings good-bye.  What you need to do is find ways to bring this buried content back to the surface of your website in a clean, user/SEO friendly way.

The purpose of doing this is to get the search engines to crawl these pages and to distribute page rank from highly crawled pages of your site to these deeper pages of your site.

Ways you can bring deeper content back to the surface is to create faster ways to get to the content.  You can add categories to your homepage or another page closer to the homepage to give quicker access to the deeper pages of your site.

Another way is to implement a good internal linking structure to your site by adding anchor text to your homepage and other pages and link to these deeper pages.  Again, this helps distribute Pagerank to these deeper pages that won’t typically get any Pagerank.  External linking is also another great way to get more traffic to these deeper pages. Find relevant sites that already have a great Pagerank to link to your site.

Some also think that pagination affects SEO in terms of duplicate content.  If you take the nike.com example, you may search for ‘red nike shox’ and get a page of red nike shox shoes. Then you may search for, ‘kids nike shox’ and get some of the same products in your second search in which the search engines find to be duplicate content – the same content showing up on different urls.

While some SEO experts feel that Google, Yahoo! and MSN have found workarounds for this, there are things you can do to prevent your site from having duplicate content issues from pagination.

One way to fix duplicate content issues is to use a 301 redirect.  This way you’re telling the search engines to crawl one page over another page.  For example, if Nike were to have a landing page of women’s nike shox from their homepage, but they also have another page from the women’s page that features the same nike shox, you could implement a 301 redirect to tell the search engines to crawl the landing page link from the homepage instead of the page from the women’s page which may change in the near future or not have as high a page rank.

You can also use a meta noindex tag to tell the search engines not to index the duplicate pages on your site. This is the preferable choice to use so you don’t get wrapped up in multiple 301 redirects which can hurt your SEO efforts. According to Google, if the Googlebot sees the noindex meta tag on a page, they will completely drop the page from their search results, even if other pages link to it.  Google does go on to say however, that because Googlebot does have to crawl your pages in order to see the noindex meta tag, it is possible for them to miss it index your page anyway.

In some cases, these duplicate content issues that pagination causes are within the page titles.  So some say that simply adding a unique value before the wording in your page title will help remove duplicate content issues.  Example, <title>Page 1 – Nike Shox</title>, <title> Page 2 – Nike Shox</title>, etc.

Whichever ways you choose to eliminate your duplicate content issues make sure you do it and do it quickly.  A cool tool to help you find duplicate content is the duplicate content checker.  This tool will not only find duplicate content on your site but will also find it on other sites for you.  You can also check your Google/Yahoo Webmaster Tools accounts and find pages within your site that have identical page titles and meta descriptions to fix.