My SEO is crap but I'm busier than ever

That's what the local San Fernando Valley artisan laughed as I gave him my money. 

I was looking for a local skilled professional and knew that if I used Google I'd just get sponsored results and the big chains.  So I used Yelp and searched around my zip code and read the reviews.

This behavior is going to become more and more common - and yes - there are pros and cons of the whole review thing and no you shouldn't stop adding content and improving your website's search engine visibility, but...

Getting customers to help you

The most powerful thing a customer can do for you - aside from give you money - is to write positively about you on the internet - and the most dominant place for that is Yelp with Foursquare making a strong play for second place.

Make it part of your plan

As part of your marketing plan for 2014 (you are writing one of those yes?,)  you might want to allocate more time to those two networks. 

If you've got no idea where to start or would just like to be efficient and not waste time making rookie mistakes, email me or give me a call on 310 980 2499 and we'll have a chat.

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Image Credit: SEO by Sean McEntee on Flickr

Written while listening to "God Knows" - published next week on music2work2

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How Google Works

Take Away

Updating Your Site Improves Your Visibility

Google’s mission statement is to “organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” As a search engine, Google’s job is to read the entire web, receive a request from you, and then decide which single page across the pool of the fifteen billion best matches your search. This is a tough job, and Google can only do as good a job as we (those in control of website content) do.

There are two basic parts to the search engine, the bot and the indexer, and they have a bee and hive sort of relationship. The bot is the bee, and it spends all its time reading the internet. It makes no decisions, but simply trolls the internet and collects information. The bot then feeds the indexer (the hive) all the data it has gathered, and the indexer then decides which results should be shown for which searches.

The first step in SEO is ensuring that the bot is interested in reading your site. Since the bot is responsible for reading the internet, it has to make decisions as to where its time is best spent. If you put a new site live today, and the bot indexes it tomorrow, then again in a week, then in three weeks, and then six, and if, each time it visits, it sees that your site has not changed, it will begin to visit your site less frequently.

Your Website is Not a Chicken!

…or a Ronco Rotisserie Showtime special for that matter.

Oh I know – you paid enough money to have it look good and have the copy all “SEO’d” and everything, and yes, your designers have made it really easy to add content and even talked to you about a content strategy, but you're busy - and now that it’s done can’t you just Set it and Forget it?

NO!

Well – you could of course, but then after 6 months you won’t have generated any leads and you’ll have confirmed your inner suspicion that this whole blogging content stuff is nonsense and you'll go back to spending money on feel good marketing that doesn’t work – but you’ll feel better.

Don’t believe us?  Just ask Eric Smilay of Smilay Properties who started a content strategy on his website a year ago – his year on year figures are up over 500% - page views per month have moved from the hundreds to the thousands – did he Set it and Forget it?  No!

We'll be chatting to Eric in the next couple of weeks and will post about how he overcame the inertia that often kills the execution of a small business content strategy.

It’s not just about the blog posts

Yes – the core of your content strategy is going to be writing new posts – adding new video, images etc – and yes you’re going to be thinking about who the audience is and what they want to hear.  However, there is something that is even easier to do and often time more effective

Recycle and improve your existing content

When you look at your weekly stats (you do look at your weekly stats don’t you?) you’ll notice that there are certain pages on your website that always seem to get traffic.  Could be that post you wrote about the decline in the Bolivian talcum powder industry or that insider’s look into the world of extreme Lego.  Whatever – there are people out there who are regularly finding that article and are enjoying it.

Revisit it – can you improve it – can you make it read more easily, add an appropriate image, should you offer a translation, what can you do to make the experience for the reader better?  Not only that – can you add a link to another relevant article on your website, do you have a service or product that would be useful to people who like this kind of content?

It’s a living thing

The days of Set it and Forget it are long gone and even though there will always be hour long infomercials on products that you really don‘t want but that seem too good to pass up at 3 in the morning – switch that shit off and go and look at your website.  If you're not treating it with a little love and content, you'll lose any benefit it might have provided.

In the immortal words of Jeff Lynne:

It's a livin' thing,

It's a terrible thing to lose

It's a given thing

What a terrible thing to lose

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Transform and Roll Out!

While writing this post I couldn’t get the image of Megan Fox...err – scratch that – Optimus Prime out of my head.  The key word here is Optimize – Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn’t about adding stuff that you don’t already have – it’s about making what you do have better.

In the same way that a gaudily colored truck can transform into a mobile battle station complete with Ion cannon – you too can transform your website into a highly ranking, customer catching cash funnel – all by following a few simple rules:

Take Care of the Tech

You’re not a website developer – you’re an attorney, a baker, a life coach, a marketer – whatever – it’s not your job to know how to set up your website correctly.  All you need to know is that there is a right way and a wrong way: HTML code should be structured correctly, page URLS should use real words and create hierarchies, H1 tags should be used, pages should have easily modified titles, descriptions, keywords and tags and content should be quickly distributed across different platforms and networks.

We recently ran across an agency that was going to charge a client $9,000 to ‘SEO” the very website that they themselves had built.  If I could have fallen off my chair I would – but I was already on the ground laughing over their definition of wireframes and site plans.  If you are having a new website built – all of this should be taken care of – if you’ve got questions – ask us – we’re always happy to give you an opinion.

Use the Right Words

You might refer to your business as an “Artisanal Horticultural Hideaway” – your customers however are typing the words “Flower Shop” into the search engines.  If you’re not already familiar with it – you must spend a little bit of time with Google’s Keyword Finder tool – it’s free, it’s easy and actually quite fascinating.

Write down all the words you think that describe your business – then go to the online tool and see how many people are searching for these terms.  Because the tool displays words that are used in similar searches you will often find that people use a different word for your business.  Find the most popular words that describe what it is you do and incorporate those words into your writing.

Use the Right Combination of Words

This is the whole “write like your customers speak” concept – often difficult for professions that use a lot of Jargon.  When you’re in the keyword finder you’ll see that Google shows not just single words but a series of phrases – these phrases are what people are typing into the search engine.

Studies have shown that people who arrive on your site from longer keyword phrases (3 to 5 with 4 being the optimum) convert better.  The thinking goes that the more detailed their search (i.e. the more words they use) the more serious they are about finding a solution – and if you can match their phrase then they will be more serious about you.

Get People to Link to Your Site

The more people that link to your site the better; get some heavyweight well established site to link to your content and your search rankings will increase dramatically.  But there’s only one way to ensure that people will link to you.

People don’t recommend crap to their friends – they recommend stuff that adds to their knowledge, that makes them laugh, that makes them feel good about passing it on.  There is absolutely no point in having some 3rd party firm writing generic content about your business – in the old days before everybody was a publisher this might have had merit - nowadays if you publish the same boring crap that everybody else is producing then people will learn to ignore you.

Transform and Roll Out

A new content strategy absolutely works if you are passionate about your business and can put that passion into words.  Read your content before you post – does it resonate, do you believe yourself, would you stand by the article in front of Megatron and fight for its authenticity?

As we’ve written before – times are changing and you need to change, adapt and transform to keep your business on top.  Fortunately this brave new world only wants to hear about why you love what it is you do and how you do it.  Forget the marketing speak, start writing, write from the heart, write with your customers words and phrasing, transform yourself and roll out!

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Content – Are You Sure You Can Handle It?

You get it!

Adding quality content to your website is the best way of moving up through the search engines – whether it’s text, video, audio, images – whatever – so long as it is relevant and interesting – the more new content you add the more likely it is that people are going to talk about you.

So why do the vast majority of people find it so hard to actually follow through and do this?

Producing Quality Content Takes Time

The majority of our clients are small to medium size businesses – if you’ve got less than ten employees it’s unlikely that you have the budget for a dedicated online marketer – so – whose job is it to write the copy for the website?

We can guarantee that the person with Marketing in their title is rushed off their feet with traditional channels - the longer term ROI of online / social media marketing just doesn’t stack up in the short term; phone a client or write a blog post – guess which one loses?

Writing Quality Content is a Skill

We’ve written this before but it’s worth repeating: just because you watch House religiously doesn’t mean you can diagnose your own illness and a passion for the Practice doesn’t make you a lawyer. Sure you’ve been writing most of your life but it doesn’t mean you’re any good at it.

Writing for the web is different than writing a letter or an essay or even a marketing brochure – there is a structure and an underlying logic to writing a blog post – it isn’t hard to learn but like the professions above, you have to practice it to get good.

Setting Yourself Up to Fail

As a small business owner myself I think the reason people struggle with producing copy is that they don’t allocate a significant value to it. Because they’re smart and capable individuals they look at the act of producing web copy and assume that they can do it themselves - why pay someone for something that you’ve been doing since you were three?

Of course what happens next is that life gets busy, time gets short and if they do actually allocate time to write they suddenly find that it’s hard to convey what they want in an interesting way. Be honest – if you have ten things to do – which do you do first – the ones you know how to do or the ones you have to work at?

Outsource the Writing of Content

We’re working with a couple of different clients who have some copy for their sites but need it optimized for SEO – keyword phrases researched, text tweaked, re-presented and organized. Good copywriters can charge anywhere from $35 an hour up to the $100+ - we tend to work with people in the $50 to $75 an hour range and are delighted with the quality we receive.

If you can establish a relationship with a writer who over time gets to know your business – where you can have a 15 minute Skype conversation with them where you relate the idea of what you want to get across – maybe provide a couple of links to sites – have them produce the copy, tag it and then post it to your site – how much is that worth to you?

This of course has sparked the idea for the next post – which will talk about online marketing spends shifting – I wonder what companies are doing with the hundreds of dollars a month they were spending on “SEO” – link building, multiple sites, etc – do you think they’re now spending it on copywriting?

Image Credit: I WANT YOU to write blog posts! by Search INfluence on Flickr

New Content Consulting - Part 2 - Content Strategy

Content defines the relationship between you and your customer; Content is how people learn about you, it is how they find you and it determines whether they choose to spend time and money with you.

Content about your business is everywhere; it may have started on your website but ends up in search engines, personal blogs, Twitter streams and Facebook walls. You can determine what content you create, but once it is published you have no control over how it moves or over what will be created as a result.

Kilted Chaos works with businesses to get them thinking strategically about content; we offer expertise in designing and developing platforms on which content lives, we help businesses plan their internal resource and train staff to best use their time when creating, distributing and reacting to content.

Contact us to see how we can help you...