As promised, here is Number 3 of my all time, Top 5 Landing Page Optimization Recommendations (see Numbers 4 and 5):

#3 Landing Page Optimization Recommendation
Choose 2 strong product or service benefits to test

Testing to improve your landing pages and improve conversion can be a daunting thing. What do I test? Where do I start? It’s like trying to make a cake without the recipe. Most companies get together with staff and then guess what their customers need to see to make a purchasing decision. Understanding what compels your customers to go from a click to a conversion is one of the most important aspects of improving your website performance. Take 2 strong product or service benefits and test them against each other. Test the content in the headline and in the body copy. You can use Google Website Optimizer to execute the test. Other than very expensive focus groups, this is the best way to discover what is most important to your potential customers and what they need to see to compel them to complete the sales cycle. You may be surprised at what you learn!

How to start:
*Choose your top 2 converting landing pages
*Choose 2 things to test (headline, body content, image, etc.)
*Implement test
*Track results
*Launch your new landing pages with the best converting site elements

#3 Landing Page Optimization Recommendation
Choose 2 strong product or service benefits to test

Stay tuned in the next couple of weeks for #2 and #1!

Try it and send me a comment about your progress!

When we engage with a new client, one of first content strategies we recommend, regardless of online objectives, is implementing a blog.

In the wise words of my best friend, “Why wouldn’t ya?”. If you have reasons you think would prohibit you from starting a blog, leave me a comment and I’ll see if we can dispel your fear.

Top 10 Reasons & Strategies for Starting a Blog:

1.
Reason
It is the easiest way to publish content.

Strategy
Use WordPress to host your blog (or blogger, or typepad) Inexpensive or free tools.

2.
Reason
Its the easiest way to communicate one on one with your customers.

Strategy
Create a mission statement for your blog so you have a purpose.

3.
Reason
If youre content is good, your content will go viral.

Strategy
Get involved with your online community so its easier to make your content viral

4
Reason
Its great to be known in your online community as an expert.

Strategy
Spend time on other blogs within your online community so youre known for being a respectful, contributing member.

5
Reason
It’s a great way to understand your customers’ needs.

Strategy
Read all comments and incorporate feedback into your business goals.

6
Reason
It’s a great link development strategy.

Strategy
Create an interesting, entertaining or funny blog that will generate buzz for your blog (and brand).

7
Reason
It’s a smart way to get your team involved in your brand.

Strategy
Have a regular post where other authors can contribute. (SEOmoz does Whiteboard Friday, great video content that I watch religeously).

8
Reason
It’s a great way to syndicate your content.

Strategy
Optimize and publicize your content with Feedburner (use the email subscriptions widget for folks who aren’t comfortable with RSS readers).

9
Reason
It’s a great way to grow your house list.

Strategy
Once visitors have signed up for your blog, ask them if they’d like to receive other content (newsletters, white papers, etc). Just be sure you do it at the right time and after you’ve created value for them.

10
Reason
It’s a lot of fun!

Strategy
Have fun and be creative when you’re writing your blog posts, your enthusiasm and love for your brand will be contagious;)

Speaking of enthusiasm and love for blogging, read this great post 17 Habits of Highly Popular Bloggers.

As promised, here is Number 4 of my all time, Top 5 Landing Page Optimization Recommendations:

#4 Landing Page Optimization Recommendation
Keep your creative and content consistent between points in the sales cycle.

One very prominent theory about online conversion is that creative needs to carry “scent” throughout the sales cycle. If you create a PPC campaign or home page with the word “cool blue widget”, keep that product description throughout each point of the sales cycle, including:

• PPC optimization
• Landing page optimization
• Sales path optimization
• Email copy optimization

Don’t tell people “Try our cool blue widget” on your AdGroup, then “Check out our groovy blue thingy” on your landing page, then send out an email that reads, “Test out our awesome blue gadget”. Searchers need the assurance of consistent language between touch points. Carry this “scent” throughout your creative and your potential customers will respond. Create content that you know works (always test!) and use that content consistently to describe your product or service and persuade your potential customer.

#4 Landing Page Optimization Recommendation
Keep your creative and content consistent between points in the sales cycle.

Try it and send me a comment about your progress!

Thank you first to SEMPDX for choosing MEDIA forte marketing to speak at their SearchFest in March. I’m really excited and encourage anyone who has an interest in learning about search to attend (read the interview about search marketing and social media).

On the topic of education I’d also like to talk a little about the Search Marketing Basics Classes I’m teaching for Hood River Community Education. The Series includes coursework for creating keyword research, competitive analysis, link building, blogging and social media optimization. I taught the first class, Search Marketing Basics, last week and it was really exciting for a number of reasons. First, because the attendees knew more about search than I imagined (they knew the difference between paid and natural/organic search, they understood the importance of search, they grasped the process of how their visitors used search). Second, they had some work to do with the foundation of their search marketing, particularly with keyword research. I think a lot of companies still miss the point of good keyword research. You can’t be found online for “cool blue widgets” if you don’t use the words “cool blue widgets” in your title tag, description, page content, linking, etc. Just as importantly, it won’t matter if you’re found for “cool blue widgets” if your customers are calling your product “groovy blue waggles”. The definition of search is becoming larger and more encompassing as search gains traction as a traditional marketing technique and as it becomes more diversified.

The purpose of education is to empower. My suggestion for business owners looking to become educated in search is to invest in the foundation (keyword research/content) before you venture into other strategies, such as social media optimization (define).

Whatever level you are as a search marketer or business owner, you’ll benefit from attending SearchFest or our local community education courses, put it on your calendar!

SEMPDX, Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization of Portland, is hosting their 2nd annual “SearchFest”. They are offering one of the panelist spots for their Social Media Marketing panel to the best pitch.

Since I do so love my top 10 lists, here it goes:

TOP 10 REASONS MEDIA FORTE MARKETING SHOULD SPEAK AT SEARCHFEST

1. I love SEMPDX! Great volunteer staff of founders and board members, their doing a great job of accomplishing their mission to inform and educate area businesses on the benefits of SEM to bottom line revenue and I’d be proud to help carry out that mission.

2. I’m speaking at the SMX West show Feb 28th so I’ll be in practice.

3. Media forte marketing is sponsoring a six-part business marketing series for community education including SMM.

4. My blog, Search Forte, is geared towards educating “regular folks” about search. My focus for SearchFest would be strategies and tactics that don’t need a full agency to launch, but can be implemented and monitored by the search-savvy business owner. My topics for this focus would include blog etiquette, have a blog with great content, respectfully participate in your blog community and come up with innovative and interesting ways to participate in that community (just like we do in real life;)

5. Social media is the hottest search topic, but I’ve been around search marketing long enough to know when metatags and descriptions were the hottest search tactics.

6. My favorite SMM tactic this month was the McLovin YouTube for Declare Yourself (I just watched SuperBad with my teenagers or wouldn’t have gotten this video-kind of creepy if you haven’t seen the movie, very clever if you have!)

7. My kids, Marcus and Taylor and are on the Hood River Valley High School Speech & Debate Team (Marcus is the captain). Let’s assume the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree;)

8. Education is the hardest part of our jobs as search marketers. Search marketing organizations and Search infographics are two of the best ways to educate people on such a complex and all-encompassing topic as search marketing. Education for SMM needs to be taught in the larger context of search so business owners can understand the value of SMM.

9. SMM can be a great traffic building tactic prior to a site redesign for a new client when their current site architecture doesn’t support SEO. If selected, I’ll donate and implement one free SMM strategy to my newest client, Swaddlekeeper, as well as one SMM strategy for current clients in various phases of their long-term search strategies including Avery, Cathedral Ridge Winery, Copper West, EZkem and Print and Mail Center.

10. If selected, I’ll donate a free 3-hour consultation and website review to the organization or company of SEMPDX choice.

Thanks so much for the opportunity to vie for a spot at SearchFest, best of luck to all other entries! Best, Lisa Williams Hood River, Oregon MEDIA forte marketing

I have worked in the web space for 10 years. Originally a freelance reporter for Pacific Northwest Magazine and the Statesman Journal, I worked with a small internet company, Surplus Direct (eventually purchased by software company Egghead), in 1997 as a writer and transitioned to the marketing department. I started media forte marketing in 1998 working with Joe´s Direct, a handful of niche sports-related sites. Media forte marketing roster includes clients from retail, service, hospitality and music industries. Clients range from a local boutique winery to Fortune 500 companies such as Avery Dennison and HP. I was featured in Glamour magazine, The Boston Globe, and Kiplinger magazine articles touting the new telecommuting trend started with internet business. I am a native Oregonian and my family and I have made Hood River our home for 11 years.

If you’re a marketer or business owner looking to learn about search marketing and you live in the Pacific Northwest, you have great educational opportunities through our local SEMPDX, Search Engine Marketing Professionals of Portland.

Last night, they sponsored a Hot Seat, a site review which allows business owners and marketers to submit their sites for review by a panel of professionals. This is one of the best ways to get a better understanding of how to improve your website, not just for search, but for usability as well.

Whether you have a site that generates millions or generates awareness (like one of the sites up for review, Donate a Life Northwest) you’ll get practical advice you can take back to your development team. Here are a couple of recommendations:

*Create simple calls to action on your home page. At search shows and with clients, I’ve gone through this process and 90% of the time, this piece is missing. What do you want people to do on your site? If you want visitors to pick up the phone and call you, give them your phone number, don’t make them search for it. If you want them to schedule a consultation, create a form that makes it easy to do that.

*Submit your xml sitemap to Google. Go to Google Webmaster Tools and follow the simple directions for submission. Vanessa Fox (speaker and the founder of Google Webmaster Central) recommended creating a script to resubmit xml sitemaps rather than remembering to manually resubmit.

*Examine your keywords and be realistic. Sometimes the most trafficked keyword for your industry is nearly unapproachable. Remember that “tail” terms can be even more powerful since they’re likely to generate intent that matches your service and be less competitive than “head” terms. Vanessa wrote a terrific blog post about this phenomenon.

Want to do your own Hot Seat? Do a mini focus group. Sit down with users or potential users of your site and create a dialogue about the site experience. What do you think you’re supposed to do on the site. Was it easy to find the info you were looking for? Is the site credible and trustworthy? Try this exercise just once and you’ll walk away with “ah hahs” that can improve site experience and conversion.

Don’t miss the next SEMPDX Event as well as the upcoming SearchFest in March. It’s a lot of great speakers from the big SES and SMX shows but in our own backyard and for a fraction of the price.

Since involvement with the search industry in 2001, we’ve used the SERP define as part of our reporting criteria to clients. It is one way to gauge effectiveness of natural search efforts. Once we show page one placement for a keyword or phrase then we show the amount of visits generated by that placement, then behavior of that traffic and the conversion of that traffic, pretty straightforward.

Now that personalized search define and custom SERPs are more common than ever, the search industry is left without a metric that it has used to dazzle current and prospective clients. It’s exciting when you can tell a client that they are #1 on Google for an important search query, but what do we as an industry do now that SERPs are difficult to replicate? What I see on my query is very likely to vary from what my client sees because of customized results. We can run the reports with personalized search off and advise clients to do the same so we can be on the same page, but results for their potential traffic will vary due to custom results that can be driven by geography, bookmarks, past queries and other information because engines want to drive the highest level of relevance for users.

This is great for users, but it can present some complexity for search marketers. This change in the search algorithm define places us in the same situation as more traditional marketing efforts. We can still monitor our visits and track them back to the engines, then proceed to return on investment and conversion. Though some search marketers may fear this transition we should be excited about it. We are now left to embrace more traditional, grown up methods of success like quantifiable growth, roi and increased revenue for our clients.

There are still many search marketers that point to their client SERPs and congratulate themselves for being masters of the universe. The real power of search lies in helping our clients complete the sales cycle (or other conversion goal), not just giving them placement on an engine. What does personalized search and custom SERP’s mean to SEO? Maybe it means it’s time for search to grow up and take its’ rightful place among traditional marketing strategies. Growing up means getting more responsible, and that’s good news for the industry and our clients.

As I’ve enjoyed the holidays, I’m reminded about how important foundational elements are to so many things. When it comes to preparing a great meal, there’s no fancy color coordinated table setting that will make up for a bad cut of meat. When it comes to hosting a party, it doesn’t matter if the food and cocktails are perfect if you didn’t invite people you like. It’s difficult to build anything sustainable on a rocky foundation. I meet with many business owners who want to skip the foundation. No matter where you are in your search marketing efforts take this quick quiz and determine if your foundation is solid and ready for building.

1 We’ve done thorough keyword research
2 We have good information architecture for our website
3 We have link popularity through strategic linking
4 We can be found for the keywords we’ve defined for our business
5 We know which search queries result in conversion
6 We understand our analytics
7 We send natural search traffic to other pages besides our home page
8 We have a plan for continued improvement
9 We’ve done competitive analysis and know what our competitors are doing
10 Our search goals are quantifiable so we can determine return on investment

If you don’t have these foundational elements, take some time to create a plan that addresses each. If you have mastered these elements, it’s time to start landing page optimization. We’ll talk about testing next post!

Three things happened at this week’s Search Engine Strategies show in Chicago that make me think that search is becoming mainstream. First, one of the keynotes called attendees “traditional search marketers”. How exciting to have the descriptor “traditional” next to a job that’s only a dozen years old. Second, one of the keynotes was Professor Emeritus Don Shultz from Northwestern University giving direction for search marketers to become integrated into the traditional marketing mix. Third, companies are creating their own internal search marketing departments. So what does this mean for you as a business owner? Search is becoming a more organized, respected discipline. This means there are higher standards within the industry holding search marketers accountable for the results they provide their customers. It also means that more education is available for clients. One of the biggest complaints of clients new to search marketing is that it is an almost mysterious discipline and companies are writing big checks to almost unknown entities for a marketing medium they don’t understand. Make sure that the search marketing agencies you engage have shown results and referrals for their customers. Educate yourself. Sign up for search marketing newsletters through ClickZ, Bruce Clay or attend a local search marketing organization meeting (in Oregon, that’s SEMPDX) so that you’re asking the right questions when you’re ready to hire a search marketing agency. Lastly, include your search marketing agency into your traditional marketing planning. A great deal of synergy exists when all marketing departments work together to optimize efforts. As search becomes mainstream, prepare to reap the benefits of search maturing and, as importantly for your business, expect the same level of accountability from your search marketing efforts as you do from your traditional marketing efforts.

Last month, I wrote a post, Top 10 List “Why 70% of SEOs Suck” and, as the Search Commander pointed out, this list works both ways. So here’s it is, Top 10 List “Why Some SEO Clients Suck”

10. They want to do search marketing because it’s the cool thing. Unencumbered by real business reasons, they decide that they’ll give their first born child and 30% of their marketing budget for search ranking.

9. They don’t take time to learn the steps to good SEO. They underestimate both the complexity and the nature of SEO and they put less effort into an SEO Campaign than they would choosing a breakfast cereal.

8. They hire their cousins’ best friend because they heard he knows how to do SEO. Clients need to learn to ask the right questions, the most important of which is, “What have you accomplished for your clients”. They also need to ask more than the question about page one placement. Ask how search efforts have improved the bottom line.

7. They sit you down and ask “How do you do search marketing”. Really? If I do construction, would you sit me down and ask me how you build a house? Let’s say, just for argument sake, that I’m a contractor and I answer that question. I would give you the highlights, “We work with an architect to make plans and build the home to specification, we’ll need your help selecting materials, paint colors, tile, fixtures, appliances, etc.” Now let’s assume I’m a search marketer, when I explain that we start with understanding business objectives, then we do keyword research, competitive analysis and create a site with solid site architecture and exceptional content that facilitates strategic linking, they’re disappointed. It’s like it’s a secret club, and they just want the special handshake. That’s not how it works Spanky. (Spanky and Alfalfa, The Little Rascals, anyone?)

6. They want something for nothing. Ninety percent of proposals I submit to potential new clients get this reaction, “We can’t afford that”, without understanding what the value of an SEO campaign will net the company. They want you to build them a Mercedes and charge you for a Yugo. It’s our job to create a relationship between the cost of the campaign and the return on investment for clients and help them make decisions on acceptance or rejection of a search marketing budget based on ROI.

5. They consider using black hat search marketers. SEO clients should beware of search marketers who scream “Get your website number one on Google for $49.95!” and though their business savvy encourages them to run from such ploys, they can be swayed to engage in these practices just to get placement.

4. They want instant results. Good search marketing strategies take time to implement, we make short and long term goals for our clients so they can begin seeing results, but building a site with solid site architecture, relevant links and exceptional content take time, THEN it takes time for those strategies to get rewarded by the engines.

3. They want to do it themselves. I have 2 clients that came to me for proposals, went away to do it themselves, then came back to have it done the right way. Some clients believe “SEO isn’t rocket science, I can do it myself”, and spend a token amount of time learning about it and implementing a partial strategy that gets little result.

2. They think you just do it once. Good SEO/SEM requires long-term commitment. You don’t just do it once and turn your back on it, just as you wouldn’t buy one TV spot on the Super Bowl and quit other advertising campaigns. Products change, search queries change, competition changes, your SEO/SEM Campaign has to change and evolve as well.

1. They haven’t been educated. The number 1 reason SEO clients suck is because we haven’t done a good job as search marketers of educating them. I hate to pass the buck back to the industry, but that’s where some of the responsibility lies. We make it our job to educate our clients, give them achievable results and deliver. Maybe SEO clients would suck less if SEO’s suck less;)

Happy Thanksgiving!