Companies have long used magazines, newspapers, buildings, signage, billboards, vehicles, radio and TV to reach their target audience and build brand awareness.  Internet and search engines have opened the door to reach out to customers and changed the nature of marketing forever.  The majority of Australian businesses are failing to make the most of this shift, either because they haven’t given web marketing the attention it deserves or they haven’t found a web marketing company who can provide the right advice and expertise.I have set out to explain some common mistakes both large and small businesses make when investing in marketing their business online.

Firstly let’s look at 5 criteria you need to fulfill to take full advantage of Internet marketing:

1. Does your website appeal to your customers?
2. Does your website create trust?
3. Can your customers find your services?
4. Does your website convert customers into sales?
5. Does your website generate enquiries from phrases other than your company name?

No company would invest in any marketing without clearly defined objectives, scaled against KPI’s and a projected return on investment. It is amazing how many times companies enter the world of online marketing blindly overlooking the 5 key elements outlined above. Poor site architecture, archaic CMS systems that are not able to be indexed search engines, and out-dated design are all commonly seen. To be successful online your company needs to encompass everything from persuasive web design, search engine optimisation (SEO), mobile phone usability, and reaching out to your customers through social media channels such as Facebook, YouTube, Google+ and Twitter.

Does your website appeal to your customers?

Does the content and images you have used on your website match your customer’s needs? You need to view your website as a machine to create leads. Your content should take into account your customers buying motives, how they are feeling, what emotional attachment they have related to your service and how you can convert that into sales or enquiries. If your customers see that you understand their needs they will be more likely to reach out to you for advice.

Many companies overlook the importance of keeping their website up to date, technology moves incredibly quickly and you need to consider setting aside a yearly budget for keeping your site looking fresh. For most customers it will be the first impression they have of your business.

2. Does your website create trust?

Many companies still invest heavily in magazine and newspaper advertising, but are you keeping your marketing effort consistent across the board? Does your website support your other marketing activities? What is the bounce rate for your website? For example, your bounce rate can show how well your customers are engaging with your content, products and services. It is important to create, maintain and update your website and to be aware of the metrics that demonstrate its success (or otherwise).

Are you finding ways to reward loyal customers?  You might know your company is the best at what it does, but are you portraying that to your clients, how do they know who does and who doesn’t offer a good service? With a growth in social media and company blogs, you have to opportunity to reach out to your customers and engage with them, you can offer hints, tips and let them know of new developments within your company, products and services, while building a brand and trust online.

Many people who search online will initially be carrying out an ‘uneducated’ search meaning they have a problem and want to find a solution. If someone visits your site from typing in a phrase related to your services, what impression does your website give of your business?

If you are an online retail shop trust is a huge factor in converting customers. Prominent phone numbers, easy to access contact forms, returns and shipping information and secure checkout is imperative.

Design, layout and imagery should all be personalised to your target market.

3. Can your customers find your services?

The most important point here is to try and understand search engine optimisation (SEO) and why it is important to invest your money in it. SEO is about making your website great. It is not about tricking search engines and achieving quick results.

The most successful SEO campaigns involve establishing a brand online, and stable search positions long term. This will always require time and effort. Many companies will relaunch their website and then consider SEO. This is a huge mistake. A website has to be built with SEO in mind. The site architecture, design and structure needs to satisfy you as a business owner, your customers and with equal weighting search engines.

A company would never plan to open a retail store with no parking, that isn’t easily accessible to your customers, and establishing if there is a market for your product and service in that area, the same stands with launching a website. Integrating SEO into your website design will allow you to identify your competition, how competitive that area of the market is, your target market and what you could realistically expect to achieve online.

Assuming you can put your website online and it will be found is a very common misconception. For your website to generate you enquiries / sales you firstly need to be found for phrases that relate to your services. There are two types of SEO campaign, the first being a national campaign this type of campaign tends to lend itself to online shops and large companies in the service sector. The second type of campaign is a regional campaign, where companies are targeting a local market. Only through identifying keyphrases people search for and ensuring your site appears on page 1 in the search engines will your business succeed online.

4. Does your website convert customers into sales?

Google Analytics is a brilliant tool that allows you to track how many visits and from where your website has received. Without this it is impossible for you to assess your sites SEO performance and ROI, the most amazing aspect of online marketing is you can measure everything.

Google Analytics will give you insights into keyphrases that people are finding your website through, if you are an ecommerce store you can track where you are losing people in the checkout process, find which pages that people are landing on and leaving immediately (bounce rate) allowing you to look objectively at your website and make improvements.

Using the information in Google Analytics you can:

• Find ways to improve conversion rates
• Establish which keyphrases convert into sales or leads
• Find where traffic is coming from, search engines, branded, referring sites e.g suppliers
• New keyphrases you can target
• Establish which pages of your website are not engaging with your clients.

Google Analytics is a fantastic tool with almost limitless information that every website should have in place.

5. Does your website generate enquiries from phrases other than your company name?

There are certain elements used by some design companies that will make your website look fantastic, but a search engines will not be able to pull the information they need in order to present your site to your potential customers. If a search engine cannot associate the content on your website with a specific query they will not give you a suitable ranking.

Search engines love content and they need content to answer people’s questions. Most companies will naturally rank in search engines for their company name, this will be due to the domain name of your website, it is also likely that the page title, meta description and first heading on the page will have information containing your company name.

Brand related searches will always be important to any business, but a successful website and internet marketing strategy is more than this, it is lead acquisition, and can greatly increase your company’s revenue. Without an effective SEO campaign that targets specific keyphrases your company will never see the full benefit of owning a website.

A successful website is completely reliant on visibility across the web. If you are in the process of re-launching your website be sure to connect with an experienced internet marketing company for advice and guidance, they can explain how best to structure your website to adhere to search engine best practices and potential keyphrase opportunities. Without being visible your website will never show its true potential.

Arthur Jones made millions of dollars widely based on one simple theory: the Minimum Effective Dose. The Minimum Effective Dose (MED) refers to the act of discovering the smallest possible dose which achieves the maximum possible result. A real world example of this can be seen when one attempts to boil a jug of water. Once the water hits 100 degrees and begins to boil, it is has hit its MED. If you continue to boil the water you are simply wasting your time and resources, as the extra heat will not make the water ‘more boiled’.

Finding the MED for your Search Engine Optimization campaign is crucial to ensure that you don’t waste your own time and your companies’ resources. While going out and building 100 links in a day may seem productive, the MED suggests that this level of link building is not only pointless, but actually detrimental to your campaign. Strategically spreading your efforts with high quality resource over a period of time will produce far greater results than simply playing Russian roulette with Google’s algorithms.

Arthur Jones made a fortune by finding the human bodies’ Minimum Effective Dose. If you adapt his theory to your SEO campaign, who knows? Maybe you could make your own fortune… simply by doing the Minimum amount of Effective Business.

Every time I hear it mentioned by my team it takes me back to my first days of working in a completely new job, and it makes me wonder if our clients feel the despair when they hear it? Now I see it as a daily challenge that keeps my job evolving and interesting.

What is an Algorithm?

Each search engine has their own weighting system to establish if a website has the information searchers might be interested in. This is an algorithm, and they comprise of several hundred different signals that search engines will use to assess the value of a website. For the sake of simplicity if we said a website is judged on 10 factors, an algorithm will give each factor a different weighting. Some factors will be worth more and some will be worth less. Some very basic factors that are taken into account are the architecture of your website, how the content on the website is structured, images that have been used and are there any other resources over the internet that have linked back to your site to verify it’s trustworthy?

There are many small updates, Google has said they update and alter their algorithm almost daily and in the last year have made 500 changes in the quest to deliver searchers with the best results possible. Most of these updates will go unnoticed, but there are some larger fundamental shifts that if you are not staying ahead of the curve can be devastating to your business.

As users of the internet most of us take search engines for granted, we don’t need to understand what an algorithm is or how it works. We type in a word, and the search engine gives us the answer to our search, we read around this subject and find more specific words relating to our original search, and we continue to learn and refine the words we are searching. This is perfect and exactly how a search engine should work.

As a website owner to ensure ongoing success in search engines it is important that you, or the company you hire is continually researching the industry and constantly evolving your website in line with the latest developments. Getting on to page one is only half the battle, you need balanced strategy, pre-empting changes and working to predict the shifts in the algorithms weighting system. That way you won’t see a huge loss in your websites rankings just maybe a fluctuation of one or two places.

I was recently trying to figure out why even though my keywords were preforming well, they weren’t attracting enough visitors.

After looking at the analytics and researching the competitors, it hit me. What if I’m not optimising for the right keywords? And if they are not the right keywords then, what are the right keywords?

I had to do a bit of research to figure out the keywords I should be optimising for, or at least the ones my biggest competitor were optimising for.
That’s why today I’m going to share with you one helpful tool to help you spy on your competitor and specially get the right keywords!

Let’s start with Adwords Keyword Tool. Although you can’t spy on your competitors with it, I don’t want to start writing about spy tools without naming this one. It is a pretty good tool to get an idea of how many people locally and globally search for certain keywords. However it is always smart to research your competitors and learn what keywords they are using and if possible which one is performing better on their sites.

To do this there are a few good spying tools that you could use, I particularly like using Alexa, it is quite straightforward and easy to use. Their information is fairly accurate, however it won’t show the traffic stats if your competitor’s site is ranked >100,000. Personally I don’t mind this as I’m mainly interested in the keywords driving traffic to my competitor’s site.

Once you are on Alexa just look for the analytics and you’ll find all the keywords that drive traffic to your competitor’s site and their ranking. The statistics are updated monthly and having access to your competitors queries statistics is priceless.

I recommend you research your top 5 competitors on every keyword you think would bring traffic to your site as their top queries may vary. Write all the keywords down and choose the ones that bring the most traffic to your competitor’s site.

Having access to your competitor’s analytics is invaluable, every SEO company knows this. Your competitors have probably been optimising for some time and know what works and what doesn’t. Don’t be afraid to skip a few trial and error steps to get the best keywords for your site!

Many SME’s have noticed a demise in this form of advertising. In a bid to find the new way to reach out to customers it’s likely you heard about the growth of the web, and your “best friend put you in touch with someone down the road” that could build you a website. Unfortunately this website has now sat around for a good few years and you have never had a single enquiry. You have solidly made up your mind that internet marketing does not work for your business.

For anyone who grew up with The Secret Garden among their favourite childhood books (if you didn’t it is well worth a read), you will know that when Mary found the key to the garden this is when she evolves into a young girl full of spirit and friends are drawn to her. But this did not happen overnight and the garden took months of work to transform it, and at the same time Mary blossomed from a lonely spoilt girl into a well loved child.

The reason I have used that analogy is that a website is very much like The Secret Garden, the missing piece of the puzzle was the ‘key’, or in the case of your redundant website the key to success is SEO. Gradually over those initial months you will start to see rankings appear on page one, you will see traffic increasing, and within a year you will see your website in full bloom.

The hardest time as a client is the initial 3 months of a campaign. As consultants in the first 3 months relentlessly trimming the over grown grass, pruning trees, digging flower beds, and planting bulbs. Weeks and weeks go by and there seems to be very little happening, but then after months of toil, numerous wobbles as a client, and reassuring chats with your SEO consultant, suddenly spring arrives. Your keywords are no longer fluctuating between page 2 and 3, they are sitting comfortably on page one. Now you can start to see the significant impact SEO can have on driving traffic to your business, your once abandoned website is reaching out to new customers and generating enquiries and the first 3 months of doubt melted with the last of the spring frosts.

There is no doubt that a website is a fantastic marketing tool for most small to medium enterprises (SME’s). Unlike more traditional methods of marketing, the boom in internet based searching has opened up a huge market to businesses that could never afford to compete on a large scale before.

It is all well and good having a beautiful website, but without SEO finding your website is like finding a book in a library with no index.  For a website to generate you an income you need to target searchers through the use of specific words relating to your services. From a client perspective you have just had a beautiful website created, and now someone wants to come along and play with the carefully written content, you are perfectly within your rights to ask why?

In order to understand this, we need to think about what you want to achieve with your website, the kind of business you want, the kind of enquires you want to gain, and the areas you want to serve? Once you have considered these factors then we need to consider what words a person would look for if they needed your services?

At this point I am going to stop calling them words and phrases, and we are going to drop in a little bit of industry terminology… from this point forward they are known as keywords or keyphrases.

Here is where the challenge begins. A successful online marketing strategy needs to satisfy both the search engines and the searcher.  A search engine does not see what the searcher (or you or I) see’s. There is only one thing a search engine is interested in and that is content.

This content needs to meet some important criteria. Firstly it has to be structured in a specific way, and secondly it has to be UNIQUE. In order for a search engine to present your website for certain words, it has to be able to associate your content with your chosen keywords.  This is can only be achieved by having plenty of high quality, unique content relating to your business with chosen keywords distributed naturally throughout the text and headings.

Search engine is satisfied, you have given them lots of interesting information about your business and the services you offer. You have now put the foundations in place for the future performance of your website.

As a web design and SEO company, we also need to consider your customers. This might be the first impression they have ever had of your business. As a searcher if they have landed on your site from a specific keyword, they are already looking for your services.

Once they are on your site we need to gently encourage them that you are the company they need to use. There are a number of methods of doing this. Call to action is a big factor, a big visible phone number, creating trust through testimonials, a quick contact form that is very easy for a potential customer to complete. Use of images and company slogans will further increase trust.

As a very brief overview you can see there are fundamental differences between what a search engine and a user want from a website. A search engine is all about content and presenting useful information, and a user needs buying motives and trust to choose your business over the other 10 websites on page one.

In the marketing industry, there is a common school of thought that relates to the best way to market a product to the client.  In the past, there was a heavy focus on simply shoving a product or message down the consumer’s throat.  While this idea was in part successful, it was heavily flawed by its ability to only have a one way conversation.  The concepts in marketing have since evolved, and through many twists and turns have finally ended up in the concept that the majority of marketers use today.

Using an effective CRM system is the industry standard today to approach marketing due to its ability to allow engagement with clients in an open dialogue, or a two way conversation.  Customers no longer are simply referred to as customers, or broadly referred to as an age group or gender or anything else.  They are no longer simply sold a product only to hear nothing else from the company.  This seems crazy now, as we know understand that it is much harder to gain a new customer than to retain an old one.  Customers are INDIVIDUALS, and should be treated as such.

Once this theory is understood, the purpose of using Social Media as a business tool now becomes clearer.  Social Media services like Facebook, Twitter and Linked In now provide the platform to interact with their consumers as INDIVIDUALS.  Not only that, but companies are now provided with the opportunity to increase their touchpoints by creating an ongoing relationship with their consumers, increase advertising, increase public relations, build their brand, increase their reach… the list goes on.

It’s not just Marketers that understand this theory – Google does as well.  Over the past few years, there has been a strong change in Google’s algorithms that places a heavy influence on Social Signals.  This means that INDIVIDUALS now get a say on what ranks higher in Google, a vast change from the times where marketers and directories ruled the rankings.

Those who wish to stay at the top of Google are now faced with a tough choice – to adapt their SEO to include social media, or to fall behind the pack.

In many cases this forethought will get you the leads you have aspired to achieve, what do you do if it doesn’t…

Due to your well thought out SEO campaign you have successfully targeted your big generic phrases, and you have a long tail keyword campaign in place because we all know no two people will search for phrases in the same way. You have the traffic in excess of 20,000 people visiting the site each month BUT of this traffic over 60% are landing on your site are bouncing straight off. You can see that figure glaring at you every time you log into analytics.

Google Blogspot has an excellent article about identifying which sites are sending you the most traffic that bounces, and also how to identify which pages people are most offended by, but for me that doesn’t answer the question of why, and what is it that 60% of my traffic is looking for that this website is not offering them?

Using one of the simplest searches in Google Analytics (which I will come to in a second) you can start to build yourself a spreadsheet of long tail keywords that people are finding your site for, the pages that relate to these phrases (using the advice in Google Blogspot) and set about putting pen to paper or furious typing to amend your woes and finally give your readers what it is they want.

If you go to “Traffic Sources” > Keywords > View Full Report. Click on “Bounce Rate” so your order your list of keywords by 100% bounce rate. This will give you some really nice longtail keyword combinations that your visitors are already finding you for, and you are failing to answer the questions they have.  Using this information you can either improve the content on the relevant pages, or use the query as a basis for your blog posts.

If you want to gain further insight into your pages: Content > View Full Report > Order by Bounce Rate > Cross Segment by “keyword”. You can then add this to your main analytics dashboard for future reference.

Give it a try, it will give you endless months of blog titles, you are increasing your user experience, and lowering your bounce rate. I could have saved myself a lot of head scratching thinking of what users might want had I thought of it sooner!

Matt Cutts has clarified that moving forward Google aim to adjust the mix and focus more on other ranking factors that reflect company branding. So on top of the basic signals a well optimised site already follows, such as a well built website, link authority, high quality content, gaining a respectable page rank, keyword rich domains, how else can we start to show a websites worth?

Company branding and social interaction is big on the cards at the moment. It is yet to be seen or quantifiable how much worth this truly has but with SEO you have to evolve and live and learn as you do. In 2006 Twitter was launched, “Twitter” didn’t mean a thing “Tweeting” was something birds did annoyingly early in the morning. Due to branding across the web this domain now has more value and you would be hard pushed to find someone who has never heard of Twitter. Twitter and Facebook are now an integrated part of many companies internet marketing campaigns.

Customer Reviews has always been important in any form of marketing, word of mouth recommendations will always hold weight in people’s minds. There are numerous outlets to attract reviews for your site, but as a website owner this is something you must be actively involved with. Offering clients an incentive to leave you reviews on sites like Ekomi and Google places, Yelp to name a few. Reviews are part of the new revolution of links.

I don’t think we will ever move away from the classical SEO ranking factors of onsite optimisation and high quality industry specific anchored text links. As search engines add more to the mix SEO’s are going to have to add more strategies to their tool bag, a multi pronged approach is what it will take to ensure ongoing success for your business on the internet.

To start brainstorm a list of keyphrases that you think reflect your company. Research these through Google and establish if your competitors are using the similar phrases, take a sneaky look at their meta data. Your phrases need to reflect what your buyer will look for.

Below I will make suggestions of free simple tools I use every day for keyword suggestions.

• 1. Google Suggest – Annoying as I find it when searching myself, it gives users a reason to move away from a more generic phrase to a more specific refined version. It can sometimes give you some useful insights into other options you should consider.
• 2. Google Adwords – One of the best free tools, providing monthly searches based on averages over a 12 month period. It can also give you various other suggestions. It is important to note that if you are looking into organic optimisation to change the “match types” to “exact.
• note that if you are looking into organic optimisation to change the “match types” to “exact.
• 3. Google Insights – Will highlight seasonal trends and fluctuations, it will also highlight growing related areas. My only complaint is the statistics are not absolute, but it can help you prioritise your keyword strategy.
• 4. Feedback from your staff, they might just have one little golden nugget that clients ring up and ask about on a frequent basis.
• 5. PPC – Ok so technically I have lied a little as this is not free. But a small PPC campaign can sometimes really help you drill down into phrases that will work well organically for you.

In the grand scheme of things search volume is important, but more often than not the keyphrases with the largest search volume will be more generic phrases and not necessarily buying phrases. You need to find a combination of both phrases that will drive traffic to your site helping you establish brand reputation, and those little golden nugget phrases that are going to convert into sales for your company. Once your campaign is underway you can start to review your Google analytics data to begin to fine tune your phrases for the ones proven to work best for your business.