Is Your Website Copy More Important Than Your Information Architecture?

“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from his angle as well as from your own” - Henry Ford

The ‘other person’s point of view’ . When visitors come to your website, what is their point of view and can you ’see things from their angle as well as from your own’? It’s not easy…

“The only way on earth to influence the other fellow is to talk about what he wants and show him how to get it” - Dale Carnegie

When visitors come to your website do you show them what they want and make it easy for them to get it? It’s not easy…

Most website owners talk about themselves on their homepage - ‘Welcome to our website…’ sound familiar?

One of the key’s to understanding the psychology of online persuasion is know what your target market is looking for and giving it to them.

This sounds easy, but it’s incredibility difficult and explains why a 5% conversion rate on a website is considered good.

If 100 people walked into your shop/hotel/business and asked for some information about your product/service, would you be happy if only 5 of them became a new customer?

What’s meant by online psychology? I think it’s quite different to psychology off-line. For me best pratice web design, a hierarchy of web pages that actually makes sense and giving people what they are used to seeing is the starting place for ‘online psychology’. Give them a familiar experience, i.e. give them a feeling of  ‘this is the way a website should be’ …

I’ve read a lot about online copywriting and using psychology in your copy to impact on conversion, i.e. getting more sales from your website - the question I am left with is that which is more important to getting better than 5% conversion - better copy or better architecture?

I guess it’s a combination of both, but a poor website architecture can have a more destructive impact than poor copy.

Let’s look at a couple of examples - www.amazon.com and www.netaporter.com - do they put more effort into their architecture or their web copy?

The attention to detail on these two websites is amazing. Look at Amazon - at the top of the page there’s a search facility - search for whatever you want!

Search by department!
Have a look at ‘Today’s Deals’ or ‘Gifts & Wish Lists’ .

They make it incredably easy to find things on the website.

What about Net a Porter? Again some great architecture. Again a ‘Search’ facility at the top of the page. The navigation at the top brings you easily down into more information, e.g. Shoes ->All Shoes ->Flats ->Mid Heals ->High Heels -> Boots. The URL at this stage is http://www.net-a-porter.com/Shop/Shoes

These approaches look very simple to implement, but simple doesn’t always mean easy. Take a look at Nike.com

This is the URL of the homepage: http://www.nike.com/nikeos/p/nike/language_select/

Simple, clean, smooth architecture?

Now try and find womens shoes! How many clicks can you do it in? It took me 5 clicks to get to here -

http://store.nike.com/index.jsp?country=IE&lang_locale=en_GB&ref=http://www.nike.com&sitesrc=EMEALP&l=shop,women#l=shop,pwp,c-300/hf-788+791/t-Women’s_Footwear

So, on Net a Porter it takes me 1 click, on nike.com it takes me 5 clicks to get to the shoes ‘department’

Compare the two URL’s above (Nike.com and Netaporter.com) and image how much easier it is for the search engines to determine relevancy. I know Nike.com is a huge brand and they are obviously relying on that to get them traffic.

(Funnily enough though, if you search for ’shoes’ on Google.com, Nike.com appears before NetaPorter, maybe more to do with Vince.

In this case I know the brands are strong, but the Nike.com site is incredibly complicated for what’s it’s actually doing. The Net a Porter site immediately looks at my IP address, sees where I am and gives me what I want for that country. It takes Nike.com 5 clicks to get me to the right country page!

Remember, this is all before I start looking at the content or images.

Getting the information architecture right, i.e. simple to follow, has a large part to play in getting more conversions.

Thinking too much about the psycholgy of online selling, whilst ignoring basic navigation is not the way to go.

The use of so much flash on the nike.com website maybe appealing to those higher senses in the human brain, but am I likley to stick around trying to find those pages?

What do you think?

Have you seen examples of websites where it’s all about image.  Who’s to blame for websites with no/little information architecture - the website owners?

What about B2B sites, are these any different from B2C sites?

Posted in Conversion | 2 Comments »

Will ‘Vince’ steal your Google rankings?

Google recently announced a change to their algorithm, not an update (which is a bigger thing!), just a change. It appears that a Goolger named ‘Vince’ was instrumental in making these changes; hence the change got named the ‘Vince’ update.

Matt Cutts - Head of Google Web Spam team and all round Google communications vehicle was asked to explain a bit more about this change.

The question was put to him,

“Can you verify that Google is putting more weight on “brands” in search engine rankings? If the answer is ‘Yes’ — what is Google’s definition of a brand?”

So Matt starts answering the question in typical political style, explaining that Google don’t really think in terms of brands, they think more in terms of words like:

• Trust
• Authority
• Reputation
• PageRank
• High Quality

He goes on to say that the Google philosophy on search results has been the same since the beginning of Google, i.e. when someone types in a search phrase, Google wants to return the highest quality results in it’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

Interestingly, he then classifies some of the different types of searches:

• brand
• informational
• navigational
• transactional

Regardless of the type of search entered, high quality websites are what Google is looking to return.

Matt explains further that this ’simple change’ to the Google algorithm will impact on only a small number of queries and will have no impact on long tail queries, i.e. longer search phrases.

So, what is the definition of a high quality website, Matt explains it as having the following attributes:

• A great website
• Become an authority in your niche
• Get links - naturally!
• Get talked about
• People enjoy

If you’re left wondering does this change really impact on anything, the answer is yes - for certain keywords!

Maybe, recent comments by Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, can shed a bit more light on the subject…’The internet is fast becoming a “cesspool” where false information thrives‘

Mr Schmidt went on to say,

“Brands are the solution, not the problem,” “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”

“Brand affinity is clearly hard wired,” he said. “It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component.”

If you’re competing against keywords that are relevant to bigger brands, expect the ‘Vince’ change to start stealing your rankings.

What about you? Have you seen some of your rankings slip lately and bigger brands gain traction?

Posted in Search Engine | 4 Comments »

Is Social Media more effective than traditional SEO?

This question seems to popping up a lot recently and it’s something that was referred to indirectly at last weeks Search Marketing World conference in Dublin.

The basic premise for an Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign is that if you optimise your website, you’ll get more traffic - eventually. The quality of that traffic will depend on the quality of the keywords you optimised your website for - were they the right keywords? Were they the keywords that your target customers use? The quality of the keywords used will really be a reflection on the effort put into keyword research and PPC testing to find the keywords with the best conversion stats.

SEO is not an exact science, but a lot of the ground work required to optimise a website is very similar, regardless of the website involved. After the keywords are agreed on, the content is optimised with the keywords, the website’s architecture and structure are reviewed and improved as necessary and a link building campaign is started. Over time, as more optimised content is added and more links are built up, the traffic starts to arrive. You then get into the analytics analysis and conversion analysis.

You can outsource most of the tasks required in SEO quite easily and the SEO professional only needs a basic understanding of your business to optimise your website -for the most part - there are exceptions.

So, what’s the difference between this approach to attracting more traffic and a Social Media campaign? What is a social media campaign? How do you define the steps? Where do you start? Again, a question similar to this was posed at the conference last week (it was more along the lines of reputation management, but it still fits the context here) - the answer that was given was that the first thing you need to start doing is — you need to start listening. Listening?

Let’s say you pick the same keywords from the SEO campaign, take them and put them into Google Alerts. Start listening to what people are saying about your business, your products/services/industry. Learn not only what people are saying, but also where the comments are coming from, are they coming from a particular sector, country, blogger, website? Then look at the tone - are they generally positive comments, negative comments - neutral?

Once you know what’s being said and who’s saying it, start to pick a few of the better know social websites, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, set up a profile and start talking. Some social websites suit a particulart target audience, e.g. LinkedIn would be seen as more of a professional networking social website, whereas Bebo is used more by a teenage audience.

Start writing about what you know about, whether you’re writing for yourself or your company - start writing and engaging with fellow social media writers. What can you write about? Anything and averything. You soon start to build a following and soon you begin to see patterns in where posts and comments are coming from, who’s posting a lot, what’s being said.

Nearly as a by product of all this communication, you’ll start to notice that traffic is appearing on your website that is being driven by social media. Traffic arrives either by people checking out your profile or by backlinks from you to your website.

Social media should not be confused though with just another sales channel - it’s more organic SEO than PPC - if the only thing you’re trying to do is sell using social media - well, maybe you should stick to the PPC or more traditional marketing techniques.

Social media is not a perfect science either and generally speaking, people who are great at social media are not great at SEO. SEO is a more technical discipline, more behind the scenes. Social media is all about communication and meeting new people and learning more about them. In this sense, it’s much harder to outsource a social media campaign. Again, as with everything there are exceptions - some of the SEO showbiz types naturally lend themselves to social media - but not all.

If I was drawing up a job spec for an SEO specialist and a Social Media specialist they would be very different profiles.

So, back to the original question - Is a Social Media campaign more effective than an SEO campaign? I’d say no, neither is better than the other - in this case the sum of the parts equals the whole, one without the other is leaving you exposed somewhere.

What about you? Have you tried one without the other? What social media websites are you getting the best results from? Do you just stick to SEO on your website?

Posted in Social Media Marketing | 15 Comments »

Start tackling your SEO project with 3 Simple Steps

Interleado have just added page level reporting to the ‘All in One SEO Workbench’ - SEO Software delivered as service.

This new functionality will allow search professionals and website owners to immediately identify the top 3 SEO issues that are potentially stopping their website from attracting more traffic.

The SEO Workbench currently analyses 20 SEO factors, the focus at the moment being on the analysis of backlinks, internal and external links and some content scoring factors. Additional SEO factors will be added on an ongoing basis through 2009.

What are the 3 simple steps…

Step 1

On the SEO Workbench dashboard, you can easily see what the top 3 issues, i.e.

Click on the issues you want more information on, let’s click on ‘Insert your keywords in your Title tags’.

Step 2

Next you can immediately identify what keywords are not in your Title Tag.

3 keywords are in the title tags and 7 that are not - there’s the first task to look at implementing immediately.

What about the 3 keywords that are in the title tag - can they be optimised further?

Get a deeper insight by choosing from a drop down menu, let’s pick the keyword ‘outbound telemarketing’.

You are presented with the following table - the target is to move all the ‘traffic lights’ to at least orange or ideally green.

This table shows you:

• At what level the URL is at, e.g. is it the homepage (level 1) or further down the hierarchy?
• Is the title tag unique, or are some of your title tags duplicated?
• How frequent is the keyword in the title tag
• How prominent is the keyword in the title tag, the closer to the beginning the better for your website in terms of relevancy and click through rate on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
• How long is your title tag - is it too long, too short?

When you are using the SEO Workbench you’ll find a short tutorial on how to construct a well crafted title tag just below the table shown.

Step 3

Implement the changes to fix the highlighted issues.

Done!

Each month as you work on your Top 3 Issues, your website will become better optimised and more relevant for your keywords.

The search/seo savvy professionals amongst you will have noticed that our service doesn’t cover all SEO issues - yet, - the top 3 issues are chosen from the 20 we analyse.

Some of the issues we highlight are low hanging fruit, like meta data, but some will be harder to tackle, like link building.

As Interleado progress through the year expect to see more SEO factors added, especially around content analysis and website architecture.

Visit our website to try the service out on your own website or a clients website.

Posted in SEO Software | 7 Comments »

The best charging model for professional SEO services?

Let’s start with the basic premise - you pay for something on the assumption that you receive something back for your money - a benefit of some kind - a return on your investment.

In PPC (Pay Per Click) you pay money to Google, Yahoo, MSN…etc and in return they give you clicks, or traffic or people visiting your website. It’s quite easy to measure - you pay more - you get more traffic.

So, what happens with SEO - you pay more - you get more traffic - Hmmm, well not necessarily.

What you get at the start of an SEO campaign is a commitment that a serious of SEO actions will be taken on your website - and that based on previous actions on previous websites - X is likely to happen - X being more traffic.

Granted some more experienced and confident companies will not take your money at the start of the SEO campaign - they are confident enough to wait until X has being delivered. They invoice only part of the total at the start and then invoice you the majority at the end of the campaign.

In this case the supplier is taking more of a risk. What happens if Google decide to update their algorithm, as they recently appear to have (putting more emphasis on branding and semantic indexing enhancements)? The supplier of SEO services runs the risk of delivering professionals SEO services without the client seeing the return promised.

The challenge here is to implement a charging model that works for both the supplier and client and to define how to acurately measure the ROI from SEO. I believe there are three approaches to measuring ROI on SEO and these three methods could be combined into a standard model that can be used as a charging model for SEO services.

This model is shown graphically below:

Three different charging milestones;

1. Milestone 1 - SEO Changes - charging based on implementing on page and off page SEO, e.g. keyword research, meta data, internal links, image optimisation , architecture (CSS, HTML, Broken Links), body text, link building - a flat charge based on hours, i.e. one hour to implement new meta data = charge equals X
2. Milestone 2 - More Traffic - charging based on X percent increase in traffic. Naturally a baseline is agreed at the start of the campaign and closely monitored thereafter. X can be incremental, i.e. 10% increase in traffic is charged at Y, 20% increase in traffic is charged at Z…etc
3. Milestone 3 - More Sales - charged based on extra sales made through the website as a result of milestone 2. This can be hard to measure as new clients may contact the company through email or phone. Easy to do on an ecommerce site. Also, new clients may only start buying after the campaign ends, in order to avoid cases like this it’s better to agree on a 12 month SEO campaign from the outset.

Now let’s look at the model proposed above.

1. Pay X for the implementation of the SEO factors that need work

2. Pay X after 6 months based on the traffic generated

3. Pay X after 6 months based on the additional sales generated through the website

This model reduces the risk for the client as they can monitor what work that is initially being carried out on their website. The supplier can cover their costs through the campaign only invocing for what work is done. The real differentiator is when it comes to the SEO results - the better the results the more you should/are likely to pay.

What about your experiences?

What charging model have you used in the past?

What charging model have you used to pay for SEO services?

Posted in Organic SEO | 15 Comments »

SEO is the modern version of Snake Oil

Hmm, indeed, the modern version of snake oil, as reported by John C Dvorak over at PC Mag.

Mr Dvorak explains to us that human readable URL’s don’t give you any advantage, nor does he think that social media is all it’s cracked up to be and don’t get him started on tagging!

So, what’s the real empirical evidence here? I mean, I’ve naturally a vested interest in saying that SEO is more relevant today that it was 10 years ago, when keyword meta stuffing was the number secret (not!) to getting that page one listing. But is there any real evidence that says employing SEO techniques, on a consistent basis to your website, will actually result in your website getting more traffic or less traffic?

What evidence does Dvorak put forward?

He says,about using a human readable URL,…

“With the new long URL you get the date and the headline of the post. In some instances with a long headline it’s ridiculous. Besides, the second URL is cumbersome, long-winded, and impossible to type by hand. It is supposed to be search-engine friendly and more likely to get the attention of Google. Check out the fact that 90 percent of the blogs and major Web sites all use this supposed trick to get attention.”

Ok, so you get the date and headline - useful, maybe, maybe not.

The human readable url is too long - do people actually type url’s anymore? Cut and paste surely…anyway I digress.

Is using human readable url’s good for you visibility? The article goes on to say that his website dropped from 1.2million page views per month to 900,000 and it took him months to recover.

So, what actually happened here? You have a URL http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=3100, and then change it to http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2005/10/20/hollywood-unions-want-cut-of-itunes-pie.

What is happening behind the scenes when you implement a site wide change like this?

The initial link that has been indexed is http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=3100, this is also the link that tons of people linked to, right? So, now the new URL is http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2005/10/20/hollywood-unions-want-cut-of-itunes-pie.

What happens if I follow the old link and there is no redirect setup? Bang! I get page not found. What happens when the search engine displays the old link and I click on it - Bang! Page not found.

Playing around with URL stings is not something to be taken lightly, as you have probably built up a lot of backlinks to pages within your website and the search engines have indexed all those links.

If you change your old link to new friendly human readable links you must ensure that you setup a site wide permanent 301 redirect that allows the search engines to re-index the new url’s over time and for people to be redirected to the new pages seemlessly.

You can also run a new sitemap.xml and upload it to Google Webmasters and let them know your new page structure.

The point is you have to tell the search engines that you have made the change.

I’ve no doubt that Mr. Dvorak’s traffic fell, but I don’t think it was because he was employing snake oil tactics - more like he didn’t realise the impact his changes would have - and that’s where you need your SEO Professional.

Posted in Organic SEO | 3 Comments »

Where is online marketing budget going today?

Vote today!

Posted in General | 2 Comments »

Will hosting your website outside your target country hurt your rankings?

Is it important where your website is hosted?

If you’re targetting a specific country, for example Ireland, should you have your website hosted in Ireland?

Are the search engines going to give your website more relevance if you’re hosted in your target country?

I used to think that you should have your website hosted in your target country, but have seeing 100’s of websites analysed by Interleado’s All in One SEO Workbench SEO Software during the last 6 months I’m not convinced anymore. In fact, in certain industry sectors, having a ccTLD for your target country no longer even seems that relavant either.

Let’s look at a very quick case study.

Imagine I have a keyword - 5 star hotel dublin - what is the configuration of the top ten ranked websites on google.ie - searches from the web?

Four of the top 10 results are not hosted in Ireland, the top two results - which get over 50% of the organic traffic - are hosted in the UK and there’s only one result in the top 10 with a ccTLD of .ie.

So, what does this tell us about having the correct ccTLD and hosting aligned to your target country? This is granted only a vert small case study, but more extensive analysis by our SEO Software has shown us that when it comes to certain sectors  - where you are hosted and what your domain extension is simply does not matter.

So, should you rush out and get the cheapest hosting option available if you’re in a sector that doesn’t give as much relevance to your hosted country? There is no real bottom price when it comes to hosting, getting a reliable hosting company to look after your online business is always recommendned though.

In terms of SEO though there are more pressing areas where you could be focusing on that will give you more bang for your buck.

What’s your experience of hosting - do you think it impacted on your ability to get good rankings? What sector are you in?

Posted in Organic SEO | 8 Comments »

Is Twitter an effective Internet Marketing Tool?

It’s just been announced that Twitter usage in the UK has risen 10 fold according to Hitwise. But what does this mean? Who’s using Twitter? What are people using Twitter for? Is it a fad, used by techies? Do real people actually use Twitter? Can it be used effectively by businesses?

Let’s look at the first question - Who’s using Twitter? I have to admit that about a year ago I thought it was a social network used only by those who had way too much time on their hands and had a constant need to be heard. I had it nicely labelled and in its box. It was a silly thing, not much use in the real world and certainly not useful in the real business world.

Ok, hands up! I was wrong. The people using Twitter are the people I need to connect with. They are the people at the cutting edge in communications. It may have started as (and still may be in some cases) all about  - ‘I’m going for a shower’ or ‘Taking the dog for a walk’ or ‘Time for bed’, but that’s changed.

Today, in my industry at least, it’s a place where you can connect with people, and in the business sense, connect with potential new clients.

I’ll share with you an example of this. I placed a news item on the IIA’s website recently promoting our latest advanced competitior analysis functionality.

A business saw the news item and promptly signed up for a free trial. A day later I got an alert from Twilert, a free service that notifies me by email if someone has mentioned a keyword that relevant to me on Twitter.

I was then able to see that the reference to our keyword was by the company who had signed up for the free trial. I was able to contact the person from the company and start a conversation.

It was much easier to connect this way than through email or a phone call. It’s hard to explain exactly why, but connecting through twitter seemed less formal - more genuine?

This example may be old hat to Twitters who’ve being using Twitter for a while now, but what about all those newbies out there who still think it’s a fad and will soon be consigned to the scrap heap.

Well, I’ve news for you, this social media website is a whole new way of engaging with your customers.

I recommend you jump in straight away!

But the way, it’s also a great way to meet people in your own industry - just search on a keyword and find people all over the world who have a common passion for what you do.

What has your experience of Twitter been? Have you used it in your business?

Posted in Social Media Marketing | 8 Comments »

You need to be a virus!

Maybe not literally, but it’s a good idea for next year’s Halloween costume.

If you run any kind of blog or social media projects you DO need to spread the word of the articles you are posting. You need to make them viral. Viral marketing is the online version of “word-of-mouth”. Yes, the image of a virus spreading through someone’s body is completely relevant in this case – you want your posts to spread across the blogosphere, Twitterverse or whatever other kind of word you can think up to encompass the part of the social media world you are trying to take over.

The thing about trying to make your contributions viral is that they might not react in the way you expect them to. You could create an article expecting people to be swarming all over it in the next 3 days; and sure enough you get some traffic from it but nothing else really happens. Or you may post a small opinion piece you don’t think people will take much notice of and when you check your analytics the next day everything has gone mad! Conversions, links and comments galore. You just need to keep an eye on where the links are coming from and what people are actually saying.

Should you get good responses, then it’s a good idea to reach out again and thank people, keep the relationships going. Dr Pepper has recently released a video on YouTube for their new diet soft drink “Diet Cherry Chocolate” and is a great example of the good results you can get from a well done viral campaign.

If the responses aren’t so great, again you will need to reach out and try to rectify or explain or even just acknowledge that there are differences of opinion. An example of a viral ad going bad is the Motrin ad targeting mothers. Instead of getting mothers to buy the product, the mothers were offended and let the Internet know how they felt, causing a bad reflection on the company and their products. Motrin were able to try and rectify their mistake later on because they saw the uproar on Twitter.

Social media is about relationships and viral marketing thrives on those relationships.

You can try to predict how things will turn out by doing trend reports to see what subject or keywords are being searched for the most at the moment. You can also read the blogs in your chosen industry or browse forums, scan through your social bookmarking sites and see what type of articles are getting the most votes. Then, if you know enough about those subjects or have an opinion on what’s going on write about it!  If you have neither – research!

Example of unpredictability: I actually wrote an article a few days ago regarding some Twitter tips. I thought it would get a few comments at least, but after 3 days there weren’t any and I was quite disappointed. But then, after a comment I made on another internet marketing blog, I got my first comment - from the owner of that blog. I also got a retweet on Twitter, which grew to another retweet…and another etc. I also got some good responses on an internet marketing forum from a similar article I posted. I didn’t expect people who are already using Twitter regularly to have such an interest in the article. It was a great surprise to see that I connected with people I hadn’t expected to.

By seeing which articles are the ones that go viral you also find out who the largest percentage of your reader base are, what level of knowledge they have, why they visit your blog etc. It’s a good way to learn about your users’ behaviour and target it.

Remember to keep an eye open for Interleado’s next golden child – the online reputation management and press release tool. It’s going to be released in the next month or two and will round off your SEO site analysis perfectly by telling you what people are saying about you brand, services or products.

Have you got any viral marketing experiences to share?

Posted in Social Media Marketing | No Comments »