It may not seem like a big deal, but if your company does not already have one, developing a mobile website should be pretty high on the priority list.  Why, you ask?

Well, because now, more than ever, people are using their mobile devices to find information on the internet while on the move—an action that will only become more common over time.  Accessing the web via a smartphone can easily be one of the most convenient occurrences of modern technology, but it can just as easily turn into a frustrating experience if the user is not re-directed to a mobile site.

A mobile website is a site designed specifically to be accessed only from mobile devices.  This being said, the design and content are geared specifically toward mobile end-users… translating to less content, larger print, and print that fits on any mobile screen (so you don’t have to scroll from left to right).

How do I decide which content to include?

So, we’ve established that your mobile site cannot simply be a carbon copy of your regular site.  But, how do you decide what makes the cut?

Simple.  When people access information from their smartphones, it’s because they are away from their computers.  What, on your website, would be the most useful information someone would need on the go?  Your address with driving directions?  Hours of operation or a phone number?  Upcoming events listed with their locations?  An understanding of your business and the information people need to know about it while out and about should help you answer these questions and help you determine what stays and what does not appear on the “landing page”!  Always include links to your other site, full articles, etc., so that you don’t lose anyone who is looking for something in particular.  But, just don’t let everything clutter the page.

How do I create a mobile site?

Good news—it’s easier than you think! If you would like try a crack at developing your own mobile website, some great resources that can help you are http://www.mobify.com and http://www.mobisitegalore.com/. If you would prefer to consult some of the experts, the Mobile Technology Association of Michigan lists some good resources, here http://www.gomobilemichigan.org/resources/companies/mobile-web-developer.html.

Having a mobile site that is user-friendly and provides relevant information can put you ahead of your competition.  Go get started!

Announce Yourself: SEO Press Releases and How to Use Them

So, now that you’ve got your webpage proofed for SEO and Google love (Google Page Rank), it’s time to get found on the first page of search (remember, very few people look past the first page of results when it comes to Google search results).

One of the easiest ways to boost your Google Search Results ranking is by writing and submitting a SEO Press Release.

How It Works

Keywords.  If you ‘ve been following this blog, you’re probably sick of the term “keywords,” but know yours and understand how important they are.  A Press Release is one more place where your keywords appear and are associated with your site.  Your keywords associated with outgoing links (considered inbound links to your site) will direct more traffic to your site.

Getting Started

First of all, know that you can write a press release for pretty much anything.  Offering a new product or service?  Having a friendly competition or giveaway?  Don’t hesitate—write a press release about it.

You can pay for some PR sites like www.PRWire.com, or do a quick Google Search for free Press Release Websites, create logins, and write and submit away!

Tips and Tricks:

• Submit a few Press Releases and your page will “move up” in results pretty quickly.  To hold your place in the Google Search lineup, it’s not a bad idea to submit a few Press Releases per month.
• Just like your page, you should keep your keep your keyword density at about 3-5%.  If you use your keyword too much, you may get flagged as Spam.  You want to include it just enough so Google will find your page relevant.
• Take advantage of multimedia.  Don’t hesitate to use video, graphs, charts, and link to other relevant content on the web (like other people’s blogs).

Common SEO Press Release Mistakes:

• Too many Press Releases.  It’s not uncommon for SEO Press Releases (if done properly) to bump a site onto page one of Google Search Results.  However, getting PR-Happy can backfire if you write too many.  Don’t go overboard.
• Writing an SEO Press Release like an ad.  It’s important to make sure your Press Release is informative, tells worthy information, and offers something of interest to the reader, but it should sound like a short article, NOT a sales pitch.
• Littering your SEO Press Release with your keyword.  Not only can it get you flagged for Spam, but it will also bore your reader.  If someone is reading your press release and see only your keyword but no other relevant information, do you think they will follow the link to your site?

Press releases are a great way to get found on the first page of search results, follow these tips and tricks and you’ll find press releases are an effective SEO strategy.

How Do You Rank?  Google, PageRank, and How To Rank HIGH!

If you’ve been following this blog then you’ve received an education on keywords:

Keywords identified.  Check.
Keywords placed. Check.
Keywords=optimized for success.

What else is important in getting found, you ask? PageRank, has a lot to do with appearing in top search results.

PageRank is Google’s way of deciding how important a website is. PageRank (PR) is roughly determined by the number and importance of links pointing to your website.  Think of every link directing traffic to your website as a “vote” to increase your PR.  With every link to your website, your PR potential goes up!  The quality of “votes” is also important and taken into account when your site is ranked.  Websites with high PageRanks of their own help your PR more than websites with low PageRanks (although, no “vote” hurts).  It’s not the only factor, but it is an important one taken into account by Google when your website is ranked for search.

PageRank is determined by other things, as well.  One thing that’s for certain—Google is looking out for your customer!   Pages that provide a better user experience are given a higher PR.  So, it’s important to keep your customer in mind when you’re creating a design.  This means that usability needs to be simple, to the point, and interesting.  It also means that the keywords you are being found for need to match the content of your website—Google will not have trickery!

What YOU Can Do To Increase Your PageRank:

-        Become active on various social media platforms.  Use Facebook, Twitter posts, and blog commenting all to link back to your page.  Linking back to your page will add value to your site and PageRank.

-        Add more pages to your site.  Your PR potential increases with the increase in number of pages to your site.  The more pages your site has, the more opportunity your page has for a higher PR.

-        Link to your homepage as much as possible, and include the “http:” http://www.yourhomepage.com.  If you link to www.yourhomepage.com/html www.yourhomepage.com/index, and yourhomepage.com, although YOU and I know that these are all the same page, Google will see them as different and calculate separate PageRanks for them.

What HURTS your PageRank.  What NOT TO DO:

-        DO NOT copy and paste content from another site.  Google does not support plagiarism and even if you’re quoting someone or something, keep it short, because it will hurt your calculation.

-        Don’t have ads running on your landing page.  Google sees these as directing traffic away from you.  These hurt your PR.  (And, why would you want to redirect someone from your first page?  You have worked really hard to get them there.)

-        Don’t list your keyword over and over and over again.  Your keyword should have a density of 3-5% throughout your site/page.  If your keyword density is too high, Google’s “feelers” will flag your site for spam (which means all of your SEO efforts were made in vain).

-        Keep your website and pages on your website focused.  If you’re a small company selling products that vary drastically, feature them on separate pages of your website.

Thank you to Janak Mehta of PREasy for his discussion on SEO at Pay Per Click Club.

Optimizing the keyword you wish to be found for must be well calculated.  Once you have chosen keywords with high search volume and low competition, it is wise to do some background checking to make sure the future with your keyword is looking bright.  Google Insights and Google Trends are two free ways to check out the history of your word and where it’s headed.

Let’s begin with Insights.  Head on over to http://www.google.com/insights/search/#.  When you arrive on this page there will be a place for your term, and drop-down menus to the right which allow you to customize by location.  If you’re selling books on Amazon and most of your sales base is across the United States, then you would not need to customize your location beyond “United States.”  However, you’re a local business, like a chiropractic office, it’s important to see what’s happening where people will be looking for you.  As an example, let’s search “Chiropractic” in “United States>Michigan>Detroit” over the past 12 months.  Your search will yield a few different measuring tools:

1) A graph that will show the popularity of people searching for your term over the designated period of time you chose.

2) Interest by Region. In our Chiropractic search, for example, we are shown how cities within the Detroit area compare.

3) The search terms themselves—the actual keywords searchers are using, and the terms that are being used more and more.

One easy thing to spot with these results is the popularity of your keyword… and the graph makes it easy to do this.  IF your graph has a steep or consistent negative slope (inevitable if we were trying to sell VHS players over the last 10 years), it’s possible you’ll need to look for new keywords that people will continue to search for.  Our “Chiropractic” results graph indicate that peoples’ desire to find chiropractors over time is pretty consistent.

Clean past and present?  Let’s turn to what Google thinks the future holds.
Google trends (www.google.com/trends) will allow us to predict the future of our term.   Let’s continue checking out the Chiropractic Market in Michigan.  After typing “Chiropractic” into the search bar and choosing the geographical area of United States>Michigan, you will see a graph showing the trends of the search term in the past.  To the right of the graph will be the most recent relevant news relating to your search term, and below will be the cities in your area that Google predicts will be up and coming.  It looks like the Upper Peninsula will be in need of chiropractic services in the future!

Worried your search term is getting too specific?  DON’T!  You WANT specific!  Sometimes less volume of “landers” on your page is not a bad thing, IF the people landing on your page have landed in the RIGHT place!  We like to visualize this with this nifty dinosaur graph. 

Thanks to Left Click Blog for the image.

The Dino’s height represents the number of searches being completed (at the head), whereas the Dino’s tail indicates the generic (on the left) versus specific (to the right) keywords at the bottom.  Using more specific keywords puts you in the “Long Tail,” increasing your probability to optimize and be found by a relevant audience.  The longer the tail, the more targeted your keyword is toward the audience you’re going after.  A longer tail indicates that of the people who land on your page using those specific terms, the percentage of them that are valuable to you and your business will be higher.

The moral of the story; thoroughly research your keyword to see if trends appear to be in it’s favor.  And, longer tail keywords (phrases with numerous terms in them) target a more relevant audience and are more likely to be of higher value to you.

I spent years in customer service, so many aspects of managing client relations come naturally to me.  I’m writing this today because of a conversation I had with a fellow small business owner who doesn’t share my background in serving clients.  A client of hers sent an e-mail expressing displeasure at the rate her project was moving.  Immediately my mind started racing with thoughts of what the bigger picture may be.  Typically there’s more to the story than is revealed in an e-mail.

My first piece of advise was to not respond to the client via e-mail.  This complaint warranted a phone call.  Additionally, I advised her to take the tone of the e-mail with a grain of salt. One can’t hear voice inflection or tonality in an e-mail and frequently people aren’t gifted at expressing their emotions in writing.

Next I told her that no matter whose fault it is, she is to take responsibility for it.  If it was the client’s fault and the client is a reasonable, she will realize she’s partly responsible as the conversation unfolds.  If it was my friend’s fault, then she is to own up to it and find out what the client needs in order to keep the relationship and project on track.

Customer service isn’t always easy.  I think many small business owners find it challenging when they not only have to manage business development, marketing, production, administrative duties, etc., but they also have to manage dissatisfied clients.  It is time consuming, it is distracting, but it is worth it.  Frequently small business owners can turn a difficult situation around and wind up with a very loyal customer.

Pay Per Click is becoming more and more well known as a cost effective and efficient way of advertising. A lot of companies that are just starting to venture into the pay per click space are experience great results, but could experience even more return on investment if they would use the proper analytics to “close the loop.”

Let me explain by outlining a common scenario:

• Company does research and keywords, and bids on them
• They see some traffic come in, and sales go up
• Happy to get more sales they increase their budget and bid on more keywords

At face value this seems like a great situation (and don’t get me wrong, it is.) After all, this is how advertising has worked since it’s conception. You have a general idea of how many people saw your message, hopefully sales go up and everyone is happy. However their are some key metrics missing that could help close the loop between advertising and return on investment.

What You Should Do

Rather than upping budgets and keywords it would be more effective to spend the time to figure out how to measure the success of the campaign beyond just click through rates and traffic. This is done by defining what your “conversion points” are and how much those conversions are worth.

What is a Conversion?

A conversion put simply is when a user completes an action that you would like them too. This could be purchasing a product, filling out a contact form, or signing up for a newsletter.

Once you have assigned a value to those actions (for example, I a lead from a contact form is worth $100) you can then use that data in your adwords campaign to see which keywords/campaigns/advertisements are actually successfuly developing leads for less than $100.

A Closed Loop Lets You Optimize

This information gives you real time measurement on how well your advertising is performing. Based on this data you can optimize your campaigns in several ways, including:

• Lowering the bids of keywords that are not converting in a profitable manor
• Removing keywords that are not converting at all
• Altering/removing advertisements that bring a lot of traffic (expensive) but don’t convert
• Find what keywords do convert, and use them to find similar keywords to bid on

Difficult, but Important

Sometimes this is harder than it sounds. For example, developing a value for actions that may not have a direct monetary amount tied to them. This is actually one of the more common problems that companies are faced with. However if you apply this same theory to these actions you can get a better idea of what each action is worth.

For example for every 10 people who sign up to our newsletter we get 1 client. Each client on average provides $500 worth of profit over 5 years. This would mean that the break even point of a newsletter signup would be $50. The lower you can make your cost per conversion beyond this point, the more profit you will make.