Big thank you to Chris Elwell, Claire Shoen, Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman for allowing me to present at SMX West.

It was a great experience and I was happy to meet Damien and Fionn. Hope to see everybody at SMX Advanced in Seattle.

SEMPDX hosted their 2nd annual SearchFest yesterday. Speakers included Rand Fishkin of SEOMOZ, representatives from Google and MSN as well as a host of talented Search Marketers from around the country. I was pleased to see some local friends from Hood River and I met a lot of new people, either learning about search for their company or their own agency.

The conference focused on search strategies such as link development, social media marketing, website usability, analytics and even international SEM. It was fun to see how some local entities are using search marketing to grow their businesses. Dan Harbison of the Portland Trailblazers shared how they’re using their website to increase visibility of the team, improve public perception of players and even sell season tickets.

I presented on Marketing 2.0 Issues including Online Reputation Management issues that occur using Social Media Marketing. Though all three panelists have vastly different client bases, a lot of our recommendations were shared-spend time researching the social networks you’d like to engage, have thick skin, have fun, be a good community member, don’t spam, give more than you take. Marty Weintraub of AimClear had great advice for dealing with bullies, while Janet Johnson shared insight into helping companies with B2B focus leverage the power of social media marketing.

For those of you who missed it, shame on you and plan to go next year;) but know that SEMPDX holds great networking and educational events year round. Check out their upcoming schedule.

Also, big thank you to Benjamin Lloyd of Amplify Interactive and the whole SEMPDX team that made the event possible!

Though our business focus is Search Marketing, at the end of the day our job is to help our clients grow their businesses online. It’s not enough just to help drive traffic to a website through natural search, the traffic to your site needs to convert.

For some companies, conversion is a sale of a product or service, for some it’s getting the visitor to call and schedule an appointment. Regardless of what you want people to do on your website, it’s important that you create a website that asks people to do what you want them to do. If you want to improve the performance of your website, do try these 3 strategies:

1) Be a visitor to your own site, try to sign up for a newsletter or order a product. Was it easy, what would you do to improve the process? Think about your website goals through the eyes of your visitors.

2) Look at your website analytics. Make this a regular part of running your online business. Look at your statistics, how many people visit your site monthly? What is your bounce rate (define)? What is your conversion rate (define)? What are people doing on your site? Where do people abandon the order process?

3) Choose one element of your site to test or improve. Once you’ve reviewed your analytics, choose one important page on your site and make a change that you discovered during your website analysis. For example, if visitors are abandoning after they get to the credit card page, make sure instructions are easy to understand. Do you have authorize.net or other respected credit card processing companies seal? Is there a link to your satisfaction guarantee or return policy?

Make a commitment to spend a couple of hours each month being a visitor to your own site. Create a process for champion/challenger improvement and testing of your landing pages. These simple changes can have great impact on your bottom line.

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.

In honor of one of my favorite films, “High Fidelity”, I give you number 5 of my all time, top 5 landing page optimization (define) recommendations.

#5 Landing Page Optimization Recommendation
Match a search query with the product or service the searcher is pursuing

The main reason for optimizing a landing page is to improve the user experience and to improve conversion. I’m constantly amazed at how, in SEO circles, focus is on search traffic, but not enough on what happens when that traffic gets to your site. Natural search traffic is the sweet spot, you’re likely to get traffic whose intent matches the solution/service/product you provide. Awesome! But if you want to convert that click into a conversion, you need to carry the “scent” you established with the search query that led to the visit.

For example, if I go to Google and type in “buy DaKine surf bag” The first query takes me to an online store, Tactics. This is a nice looking page, but it doesn’t take me to a page to let me “buy DaKine surf bag”. So what do I do as a user? Normally I’d bail and go back to the search results and see if I can get any closer to my need, but for the purposes of our experiment, I keep looking-I click on Surf Accessories, I see pads and leashes, not bags, then I click on the other 2 links available under the DaKine Surf Shop, Car Racks and Straps, not there, my only other option, DaKine Rash Guards, not there. I click on surf shop, not there either. To their credit, if I use their internal site search, define the DaKine brand and type in surf bag, I finally find the bags, but under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble. This defines the need for landing page optimization and the need to carry “scent”.

In a perfect world, I would have been taken to this page, a page I couldn’t find in my initial search.

So what’s my recommendation:

#5 Create site flow that supports search “scent”

If you want to be found for “buy DaKine surf bag” make sure that the traffic you push to your site can easily find and buy a DaKine surf bag. It sounds simple, it’s not. Spend some time analyzing your analytics and learn what your top converting pages are, then improve them. There are some great tools to make it more simple. Use Google Website Optimizer (or engage an SEO firm that does). It’s a great free multivariate and A/B testing tool. Learn what elements on a page help convert your traffic to customers and begin getting better results from your website. The first step in this optimization process is making sure that you carry the scent from the search query to the page you deliver. Next time I’ll give you my #4 of my all time, Top 5 Landing Page Optimization Recommendations.

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!