Does SEO Really Matter in Website Design?

Yes, yes it does.  My project plan doesn’t allow for website design to begin until we’ve gone through keyword discovery, created a keyword rich sitemap, and defined our call to actions.  Only after we know the full scope of the project does the graphic artist and coders begin work.  It is that patience and due diligence that makes the project a success.

The below graph shows a large increase in website traffic two months after go live.  The website went live September 30th and by the end of November the website traffic had increased 353%.  That’s a pretty big shift in traffic in just sixty days.

The below graph separates out the traffic increase into traffic that is solely based on keywords (or organic search traffic).  In this example, it is showing just Google search traffic.  This illustrates that huge traffic gains can be obtained by good old fashion content creation and focused web design and blogging.

What Else Was Included in the Project?

My client is someone who originally approached me a year before we actually started the web design project.  He had known of my work through his competitors and others within his industry.  At our first conversation, he told me I was too expensive.  I’m okay when people tell me this and it does happen a lot.  I know I am more expensive then many other web designers – especially WordPress designers.  This is because my team makes sure we design and build websites with personas, organic SEO, and conversions in mind.  We don’t just customize an existing WordPress template, we create one from scratch and we make sure it is 100% designed to the client’s needs.  We also make sure the entire project is based on search engine optimization, a competitive analysis, and hours of keyword discovery.

A year after turning down my pricing this client resurfaced.  I believe he had tried some lower cost SEO options and some website tweaks that didn’t quite work.  His traffic was still low and his visitors were not converting.  This time around he was willing to invest both time and money into the project.  This time around he obtained results that included a 350% increase in traffic.

Our website design project included:

• New logo
• Complete keyword discovery
• Website pages were created based on keywords
• New custom design for the website and blog
• Design built out in WordPress via the Genesis framework from StudioPress
• Each website page and post were given optimized meta titles and descriptions
• Performed an inbound linking campaign
• Integrated social media to help build branding and inbound links
• Professionally designed newsletter

And the Winner Is?

Both the client and I are winners in my mind.  The client may have paid more than he originally anticipated, but the initial outcome if most likely better than he expected as well.  I win because I was able to stay true to my methodology and keep SEO closely tied into the web design process.

If you’d like to learn more about how Web Savvy Marketing can help with your website, visit our website design or WordPress portfolio pages for more information.

Since I run into this often, I’m sure the average website owner does too.  If you’re trying to decide between updating your existing website or moving towards a full website design, I’d encourage you to ask yourself five quick questions.

1. Do You Have a CMS Package?

If you’re wondering what the heck a CMS package is, it means content management system. Which really refers to a user friendly way to update your website. And when I say user friendly, I mean easy enough that the average person could update page text, write a blog post, and modify an image.

Popular flavors of CMS consist of open source WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. I am a WordPress girl and have dedicated by firm to creating WordPress websites and supporting WordPress users. That being said, Joomla and Drupal are also good packages and both have their place in the market. Each CMS package have different niches they fill and each can be an excellent solution for creating a new website.

Do people really use CMS for website design? Yep and way more than you think. WordPress powers 14.7% of the top million websites in the world. And 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress.

I digressed a bit. The point I wanted to make is that CMS packages give you control over your website and your online marketing. If you’re stuck living with an HTML website that is impossible to update, then you have a problem.

2. Is Your Website SEO Friendly?

This is a huge factor if you rely on your website to generate traffic through organic search. One of the core reasons I love WordPress is because it is very user friendly. If configured properly, it will create search engine friendly URLs, alt tags, unique page descriptions and titles, XML sitemaps, and the beloved H1 tags and bolded text. All are needed for courting Google and Bing properly.  WordPress makes it very easy to stay compliant with search engine rules and helps guide you along the way.

If you can’t answer that question yourself, go to WebsiteGrader.com and see how they grade your website. My website is a 99/100. Most I query are a 50/100. If you’re less than 90, you have problems.

3. Is Your Website Functionally Robust?

Complete a list of functional desires and compare it to what you currently have in place. Can your website manage your wish list without consuming your entire marketing budget in code changes? Can you add to this functionality or do you have to turn to a high priced coder each week?

Now take your requirements list and compare that list to WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. One of these CMS solutions will meet your needs and all are excellent choices. Especially if you’re currently stuck with an HTML website.

Remember the usage numbers I provided for WordPress? You’re probably wondering why it’s so popular? There are over 15,000 plugins available for WordPress and that means 15,000 opportunities to add to the core functionality WordPress offers. Many of these are free and they usually have an easy one click install right from the admin panel. Good stuff for me and the million other WordPress users.

4. Are You in Charge of Changes?

Do you control your website? That may seem like a silly question, but you’d be surprised at how many people don’t know exactly who created their original website, where they are, or how to reach them. Another frequent compliant I hear is the developer has a 30 day backlog and a simple text changes cannot be made for 45 days.

That, my friends, is a major problem. Internet marketing is fast paced. Last year Google made 500 changes to their algorithm, which means we webmasters needed to also adjust. If you can’t get a hold of your webmaster or if you have no access to the website, you’ll fall behind on search engine compliance and you’ll also be a lager to your competition.  The goal of CMS based websites is to keep you in control.

5. Is it Easy to Use?

Assuming you are in control of your pages and you can access the backend to make modifications, is it easy to do? Can you figure out how to update text, add a page, or create a blog post? Can you add images, products, or change your navigation structure? You should be able to if your website is built within a CMS solution.

But I caution you on picking your developer and making sure they fully understand the CMS package. Back in December I wrote a blog post about my sister’s experience with selecting a WordPress designer. The post Fifteen Questions to Ask Your Future Website Designer goes into how she had a pretty blog that didn’t quite the level she was expecting. Needless to say, my development team rebuilt the entire thing for her this month because the original designer did not code to WordPress best practices. He hardcoded a ton of functionality that should have used WordPress’ user-friendly menus and widgets. It’s been eight months since she received the original design and after months and months of frustration, she is just now capable to making changes.

My sister’s project was a worst-case scenario and this is typically not the case. Generally when you hire a reputable designer for WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal – you actually receive a very user-friendly website.

Conclusion

If you answered no to any of the above questions, consider moving to a CMS.  And don’t forget to locate a reputable website designer. Review WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal to see which CMS package you like best. Ask around and review some website portfolios. You’ll find someone you like and the money will be well spent. You’ll end up with a SEO friendly website, that looks modern, and that you can actually update yourself.  All very good things.

What Lies Beneath is Always So Scary

At the end of our discussion I promised to review his website and dig further into his online presence. I’m not going to offer to help or even send a proposal, unless I know what help is needed. So I dug further and I did a fairly deep review of his website and his online activity. What I found did not make me happy.

As I reviewed his website, I realized his osCommerce site had some significant problems with core functionality. He didn’t have basic SEO features like an XML sitemap, H1 tags, SEO friendly URLs, canonical links, etc. What was worse, I realized his website only had products and all the product descriptions were duplicates of other websites’ content. So to sum it up, he had a website full of duplicate content that was also missing some fundamental SEO components. Oh what lie beneath is always so scary.

Pulling Off the Band-Aid

Sure I can help with social media, but in some cases I won’t. What? Really? You turn away business and future clients? Ah yes, yes I do. In some cases social media is only going to partially help and in most cases, the prospective client isn’t looking for partially as an outcome. He wants a game changer. He wants real results that provides real ROI. This gentleman wanted an immediate increase in traffic that would occur right before his peak season happened in October and November.

My proposal included setting up a blog, setting up social media accounts, and fixing his SEO. I quoted working with his existing webmaster to fix the website and I quoted rewriting his product descriptions so he had unique content. After reading through the proposal the prospect requested a call to discuss. Great I thought. I didn’t offend him with calling his baby (aka SEO) ugly.

Sins of the Past Always Cause a Stalemate

The discussion went okay. The prospect said the proposal was right on and the costing was completely in line with what I was proposing. Great. Yes I do think “great” a lot during the whole prospecting phase. He said he agreed that he did need everything that I proposed. But – oh why is there always a but in these calls?

A year ago this gentleman worked with another SEO consulting firm. I told him I could see that some SEO work had been done on his website. After all, all the products had unique meta titles and descriptions that used keywords and they were within character limits. The problem was he said he couldn’t tell what the SEO consultant did and that the ROI wasn’t there. He was still relying on his pay per click campaigns and they were expensive. He didn’t get ROI with the last SEO consultant, so he was hesitant to move forward with me. Snap! Not great and in fact a total bummer. Foiled by an SEO consultant I’ve never met and never will meet.

I am now at a stalemate due to sins of the past from another SEO consultant. I am saddened to say this happens a lot. This happens a lot more than any of us good SEO consultants would like. There are a lot of SEO consultants out there that stink. They have good intentions, but just don’t know what they’re doing and the clients don’t get the results they need. It is very difficult to convince someone to trust you when another, less educated you, already burned them. And I can’t blame this gentleman for being cautious. I would be too. Thus we are at an impasse, a stalemate, and what feels like a dead end.

Time for a Hard Decision

In our follow up call he asked that I review the proposal and that we take baby steps towards the end goal. What are some small things we could do to help drive traffic and could prove me as knowledgeable to him. I told him I would review the proposal and follow up. And I did. I’m sitting in New York at a conference and still thinking about this prospect.

Unfortunately there isn’t one set of tasks or changes that are going to drive the result he wants. He needs his website fixed for the missing SEO elements so Google will embrace it. Google won’t embrace it unless he has unique content that continues to grow. And he needs inbound links, which will come from blogging and social media activity. In my heart I don’t believe any of these things, set apart by themselves, will produce results. It just won’t work.

The mom in me wants to take care of his SEO and fix him. I want to heal him from head to toe. But I can’t. Social media or any small part of his proposal is a band-aid and it isn’t healing him. It is temporary and it would leave him without results.

He isn’t ready to take the leap of faith with me because his last leap ended up with him falling without a net. I get that, but it doesn’t change my view of his current situation, my desire to help, and the experienced internet marketer in me saying doing a tenth of what was proposed will not help.

It is time for me to walk away. Oh I hate when this moment occurs and I realize it is the best course of action. A business associate always says he “hates to lose” and me walking away would kill him. But winning a client and not achieving the results he wants is not winning. Well maybe in Charlie Sheen land is, but not in Rebecca land.

I am now off to write the goodbye email. The “I wish you luck” email. The “come back to me if you change your mind” email. Some may take this gesture negatively, while others may take it positively. I don’t know and I can’t control his reaction. I can only stay true to my beliefs and the business ethics by which I live.

In some cases, the social media band-aid does nothing more than cover the scary stuff underneath that will continue to sit there and fester and grow more and more ugly. While some may choose to apply this band-aid, I will not. I want to heal.

On Saturday morning I was drinking my coffee, surfing the web, and reading blog posts. Yes I am an SEO (aka nerd) and this is what we do on a Saturday morning. As I explored the web I happen to run across a blog post on Bing’s Webmaster Center blog. I’ll be honest, I don’t even know how I got there but I did and I was happy I did. I started reading a blog post from Duane Forrester. Then I found another and another and I was impressed. I was impressed with Duane and with Bing. It was good content, transparent, and written in a way the average person could digest. All things I love and appreciate.

I’ve been blogging for a very long time. I like blogs and I recognize good blogs when I see them. Google’s blog posts are one of the reasons why I’ve been such a Google fan. I like to know the rules and what is expected of me as an SEO consultant.

Duane’s posts are good and while they are not currently receiving the retweets and likes they should, if he keeps blogging at Webmaster Center, they will in due time.

Recent Bing Webmaster Center blog posts I found of interest were:

• You love links. We love links. Build for the right reasons.
• How To Build Quality Content
• Keyword research: a wise investment of time
• The Power of Local – why small, local businesses matter so much
• Social and Search: A Small Business Primer

All four are things I blog about and care about. I try to get others to read and care about them too. They are elements of good white hat SEO and the big part of what makes the internet awesome.

But why have the SEOs and internet marketers not been tweeting, liking, and sharing this content? I think they are like me and we’ve kind of gotten lazy. We’re getting much to reliant on Google, Danny Sullivan, and Matt McGee. All sources I love, but we need to broaden our horizons a little more and our horizons need to include a little more Bing.

While I am publically apologizing to Bing, I do think Bing still has a huge uphill battle. Bing is still recovering from the MSN flop and still trying to position itself as a true competitor to Google. But it can and I think it will. Competition is good and I welcome it.

Now I just need to get my fellow SEO consultants to pay a little more attention to the underdog.  Goliath (I mean Google), as much as I love it, needs the competition.  In the end, that competition will be good for SEOs, search quality, and the ultimate users.

But keyword research doesn’t have to be some big crazy formula.  I read a lot of SEO articles and blog posts and the internet is full of great content and advice for performing elaborate keyword research.  While this works, the activity of keyword research doesn’t have to be so convoluted that the average person can’t do it. It just needs to be a methodical.

I’ve worked with or developed both large and small websites.  Some have 20 keywords and some have 2,000 keywords.  Regardless of the volume of keywords or web pages, my process remains the same because it is scalable.  More importantly, it is a process that the average person can perform.

Fifteen Steps to Developing a Targeted List of Keywords

1. Write down keywords and/or phrases you would use to search the internet for your products or services.
2. Now go to Google and input those terms into the search box.  Look at the bottom of the page of search results and review what Google is suggesting as “related” search terms.  Write down those words too.  You can also look to your left on the page to see if Google is suggesting “something different”.
3. Your next step should be a visit to Google’s Insights for Search, which shows related terms and trends for a given search term or word.  Input your top keywords and document anything of interest.
4. Now consider your existing website.  Go to your Google Analytics account (if you have it) and review your keyword traffic for the last year.  Don’t just look at high volume traffic, but also consider the lower volume traffic that you’re not doing very well on from a search standpoint.  Document any keywords that you would like to score well on in search.
5. Next you should head over to Google Webmaster Tools and look at your Search Queries.  Similar to that of the Analytics data, don’t just look at keywords your performing well on.  Look at everything and document any words or phrases that you should score on.
6. Now visit your competitors’ websites and write down any keywords and/or phrases your competitors are targeting.  If you’re not sure what these are, look at their page titles, sitemap, and actual page URLs.  Note this will only work if your competitors have a good SEO strategy.
7. By now you have a fairly long list of keywords.  We need to see how these fit into the real world of search.  If I’ve learned anything over the last nine years of SEO work, it’s that I don’t know what people search on.  I can only make assumptions and then validate my thoughts against actual search volumes.  I validate my suspected keyword list in Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool.  To do this, all you have to do is input your list of potential keywords into the box and let it rip.  You can either go broad with results or narrow it down to exact.  Just make sure you stay consistent.
8. As I pull my keyword volumes, I put them into an Excel spreadsheet and I create one very large list.  I don’t pay much attention to volume at this point, because I don’t want to get distracted.  I just keep loading up the list with keywords, volumes, and competitiveness.
9. Now that I have my list of potential keywords and volumes, I set is aside.  I walk away and move onto something else, because at this point I’m fairly burned out on keyword research.  When my mind has cleared, I return to revisit my list.  If the list is really long, I remove any keywords on the list that are below a certain level of volume.  If I have thousands of keywords, my pain threshold may by 500 searches per month.  If it is a small list, this may be reduced to 50.  It is very relative and based on the industry and target market.
10. The next step is to score each word for relevance.  You need to look at each work and think about it’s relevance to your actual products or services.  You can give this a high, medium, and low or you can use a number scale.  Whatever works is fine, just make sure it clearly shows which words are important and which words are irrelevant or less important.
11. Once I’ve scored my list of relevance, I create a weighted score for each keyword.  I typically take the relevance score and multiply this by the actual volume.  You don’t have to get overly fancy; you just need to be able to see a combination of relevance and traffic volumes.
12. Now I start ditching keywords.  I’d like to say I don’t, but I do.  I’ve been going this for so many years, I can just “see” issues or anomalies.  I see trends and I can see if something is just not right.  Maybe the keyword has other unrelated meanings (you can check this my Googling it) and the traffic volumes are distorted.  In other cases, it could be it is so broad it just doesn’t work.  This is where I start overriding my client’s wishes and I do so because my instincts tell me to do it and they’ve hired me because of my experience.  So far no one has fired me for this practice.
13. Now I take a step back and I look at the list.  What keywords have strong volumes, are closely matched to the client’s offering, and are not polluted with excessive targeting by competitors.  I view this as “picking your battles”, which is similar to what I do with my kids.  You can only win in so many places, so you have to target what is important.  This comes back to my gut.
14. Now I pick three really competitive words with good volumes that I believe we can win on with effort.  Long-term effort and not overnight effort.  These are our big boys and the words we will hammer until we win. Note that the number of three could be 100 if your website is much larger.  Again, this process is varied based on industry, geography, and target market.
15. Next I pick about seventeen secondary keywords.  These are long tail or less competitive words that are still good, but not necessarily the biggies.  These phrases we’ll be able to win on quicker, but they won’t have as high of volumes as the three we just picked.  Just as I mentioned above, this number varies.  It may be seventeen or it may be 2,000.
16. Finally I go through the list to see what is left.  I try and assign these to blog posts, tags, or categories.  Wherever possible, I provide clients with suggestions on possible titles for blog posts so we are capturing the keywords.

Okay I had 16 steps.  I tried really hard to stay at fifteen, but it didn’t quite work.

Now What?

So you have your list of keywords.  Now what?  Now you have to take a step back and look at that list and decide if you can create web pages to support the keywords.  If you compete in any level of ca ompetitive environment, you’ll need to have only one or two keywords focused per page.  In other words, for every keyword you need a page of content.  And not only do you need web content, you need to be able to weave those pages (aka keywords) into a sitemap that makes logical sense.

If this is your first go around at this process, you probably don’t have a list that can easily be whipped into a logical sitemap.  That is okay.  Just revisit the last three steps and adjust.

This is Your Plan of Attack

You have a list, which means you have the start of a plan.  This list and your future sitemap should be the basis for all internet marketing activity.  From your company or personal profiles on social networks to your inbound links on press releases, you need to consult this list.

And remember, you need to revisit your list and this process, because people change and search traffic trends shift.  Remember Web 2.0?  Well no one talks about it anymore and it has morphed into social media.  If you browse my website you’ll see references to Web 2.0 have gone away and social media is all over my website.

The important point is that you have a list of keywords and the start of a real plan. Congratulations!  You’re off to a great start.

And So I Began Blogging

If you read our Who We Are page, you’ll see a comment about us being earlier adapters of blogging. I personally have been blogging for many years and I was doing it well before it was considered mainstream or cool. At the time, I was the geek who spent her time – aka wasting her time – blogging. I worked for a small software company and I was the VP of marketing. I was the marketing budget. I was paid well and my salary was the sum of our marketing budget. No advertising, no outside web firm, no SEO specialist, nothing. If I wanted something to happen I had to do it myself. So I began blogging. And blogging helped give the company a 400% sales growth in two years. I was crazy in the minds of our decision maker and president. But he let me go and he let me be free. He gave me freedom to allocate my time where I deemed appropriate. He gave me autonomy and that independence brought out the blogger in me and helped drive sales growth.

In my head and heart I know blogging is critical to internet marketing. This is especially true if you are an employee of a technology company. I was back then and the woman I spoke with a week ago is too. I know B2B tech marketing. I did it for ten years and I know what works. Blogging works and I know it. It works for B2C and it works for B2B. It just works. In today’s world, to not blog is to not market. To not blog, it to not SEO.

Blogging is powerful. I’ve written a lot content for our website but they are pages. They are static and they are, well, boring. Blogging is real. When you read one of my blog posts, you are reading me. It doesn’t matter if I’m blogging about ERP software like I did years ago or about WordPress web design like I do now. I blog about past events or about the thoughts in my head about tomorrow. I blog about real life and about what matters to me. And in many cases, this reaches out and connects with someone. It connects because it is personal and because it comes from within.

It’s why I’m sitting on my first morning of vacation, writing and working. I’m passionate about my company and what my company can do to help others. I believe in blogging, just as much as I believe in my company. I believe both can help change the world, because it helps connect with that world via the internet. To not blog, is to not market. To not blog, is to give up.

I don’t want to give up on the woman I spoke with on the phone. I sent her a proposal for SEO and it included blogging. For her company to succeed on the internet, they have to turn their stale, three year old website into a fresh, blogging machine. They need to connect with their target market, their prospects, and their future customers.

My Blog Post is My Loon Call

As I type on my Mac I hear the loon in the background. The loon and his call is one of the reasons why I awake early. I enjoy his call and his connection. I’m not a loon and my voice doesn’t have the same beauty as the loon. But I can blog and at times my blog posts do. I’ve connected with people, with strangers, and I’ve made an impact. I know this is true because I’ve found many clients and customers through blogging and I’ve been doing it for many years. I’ve gone to trade shows and encountered people who read my blog and followed me and my company because of it. And when I left my old employer to launch my own consulting company, those people – my blog readers – came with me as clients of my new company. It’s been two years since I launched Web Savvy Marketing and I still have my ERP peeps show up as new clients. I’m building a website and long-term SEO campaign for one right now. The president knew me and my marketing expertise, because he read my blog posts years ago. That is powerful and more powerful than virtually anything else you can do in marketing.

I started my consulting firm in the midst of a recession. Looking back I now see quitting my corporate job to follow my passion was a major risk. It was somewhat crazy given the fact that I lived in Michigan and our state was going through the worst economic turmoil I could ever remember. In my heart I knew my company would succeed. I knew this even though no one else did. Somehow I knew I could do it and I could find clients outside of Michigan until our local economy shifted. My husband had faith in me and I had faith in the internet. When he asked me how I was going to find clients, I told him I was going to blog and blogging would bring me clients. My husband, the good man that he is, said he had no clue what I meant but that he had faith in me and he knew I could do it. And he was right. I could and I did. The company I created on faith is growing and expanding and surpassing anything I had imagined or had hoped for originally. While my husband will attribute this to my marketing knowledge and desire to help people, I attribute this success to the power of the blog and the ability of my blog posts to connect, to inspire, and to bring forth new business.

If you look at the dates of my blog posts, you’ll see an interesting trend. I blog and publish a number of posts and then nothing. I go quiet. I go quiet because every time I blog regularly, I obtain a bunch of new clients and then I get to busy to blog for a while. Once I get these companies quoted and moving along with my team, I have time to blog again and my cycle begins again. This drives my husband insane and he tends to view it was a broken process. I view this as a success and know this trend illustrates the indisputable power of the blog post.

The Case of Harry, the DIY SEO

Over the last week I’ve been talking with a guy named Harry about his blog and upcoming website launch. Harry was connected with me via a mutual acquaintance, so I’ve been reviewing Harry’s activities and giving him free advice. This is something I typically do not do, but I like our mutual business partner and I believe in Harry’s project.

Harry has an ultra secret website project and he has been blogging in an attempt to drive initial traffic and drive interest in the big reveal. Harry knows his competition and he has an idea what he’d search for if he were a potential visitor to his future website. Harry even put those words into Google to figure out the highest volumes.

Harry, like many others I speak with, thinks he is fairly well prepared. After all, he has his 80 or so keywords in hand, he’s blogging regularly, and he is considering keyword density within his posts. Heck he’s even content tagging and sharing his posts via Facebook and Twitter. He is making progress with inbound traffic, yet none of it is actually coming through his blog posts. By why would this be the case you ask? He’s doing everything right isn’t he? No, not really.

Harry’s intentions are excellent. And as a person, I think Harry is pretty darn cool. He is trying really hard to read up and SEO topics and learn from SEO experts. Harry is the average wannabe SEO expert. Although in Harry’s case, he is actually spending a significant amount of time trying to learn SEO and he has picked up a lot of information on SEO basics.

But that is the dangerous part. Harry cannot tell good SEO from bad SEO or white hat SEO from black hat SEO. He can’t tell real SEO advice from regurgitated old SEO advice. He doesn’t know an H1 tag from a meta description or an alt tag from cornerstone content. He doesn’t know about keyword mapping or XML sitemaps. Harry knows how to blog and blog very well.

His intentions are good and he is putting in a lot of sweat and tears into the process, but he is trying to catch up and compete with SEO consultants (or entire in house teams) who have a decade or so of SEO experience. He is also trying to compete with heavy hitting websites.

I looked up the competitors Harry gave me and they’re heavy hitters. I mean they have huge traffic volumes, thousands or inbound links, and in some case millions of indexed pages in Google. Harry has a huge uphill battle. He is not only competing against an experienced SEO consultant and his in house teams of minions, his competitors already have a ton of inbound links, indexed pages, and web traffic.

So can he compete? Yes he can. He has a different value proposition, he is unique, and he has a business plan. The problem is he does not have an SEO plan. He has a list of highly sought after keywords and that just isn’t the same thing as an SEO plan. It isn’t a strategic, methodical plan to compete keyword to keyword with the big boys. It is a valiant effort, but at this point it is an effort in futility.

The Case of Rebecca, the SEO Consultant

I’ve been doing SEO and website design for about eight years. In the earlier years I made a lot of mistakes. Thankfully my industry was as new to SEO as I was and my competition was still trying to figure out SEO just like I was at the time. I muddled through, read a lot, and performed a whole lot of trial and error stuff on my own website. Then I read more, talked to some experts, and worked on some more websites.

Then shazam! I finally felt like I had it together. I didn’t just know some stuff about SEO, I actually had a very detailed project plan for building SEO friendly websites and performing ongoing search engine optimization. I really knew my SEO and better yet, I knew my SEO stuff worked. I had gone against the big boys and I had won. I had bruises and war wounds to prove it. I also had Google Analytics data to prove that I knew what I was talking about. I went to battle and I came out alive and stronger than when I went in.

Remember – my battle and my SEO journey was eight years in the making. And remember, I made a lot of mistakes along the way. While I’m confident now, I wasn’t eight, five, or even three years ago. I wasn’t until I started looking at the SEO of other SEO consultants. And then I knew I had it and I wasn’t just claiming to have SEO knowledge. I started to see SEO everywhere I went on the internet.

But What About Harry and His SEO Efforts?

I’ve tried to get Harry to take a step back. I’ve tried to teach Harry some best practices over the last week. Unfortunately, I just can’t cram eight years of SEO experience into a few emails over the course of a week. Harry, smart as he is, can only digest so much. And I, giving free advice to a peep, can only allocate so much time.

I don’t know what the future holds for Harry and his website. I know his project has some fabulous potential, but I’m currently not involved in his website project. It has been in the works for a while and I just met Harry a week or so ago. It is hard to take my 90+ step website development plan and force it on Harry and his team midstream. I would personally suggest the entire group take a time out and sit down so they can reflect and consider the ultimate goal. That goal is to go head to head with the big daddy of their industry and make an impact.

So how does Harry make an impact? To do that, they need a thorough, well crafted, and completely integrated website design, SEO, and social media plan. SEO doesn’t come before or after design, it is part of the entire process from initial thought straight through to the website’s end. It is a living and breathing plan that matures with the website, the website visitors, and the industry in which is competes.

SEO is a journey and not a destination. I’ve chosen to take this journey and dedicate my professional life to it. I believe in SEO and I truly believe with all my heart that SEO is a journey worth taking.

July 27, 2011 – Author Update on Barry the DIY SEO: Last week I met with Harry in person.  I also spoke with his team and we discussed their project and the need for SEO from start to finish.  I am now actively involved in the project and it is a massive one.  Harry is ultra cool and a mix of artist, technical guy, and good old fashion brainiac all wrapped into one.  He is my new SEO BFF and is great at jumping into ideas I present.  If our relationship continues as it has over the last week, Harry will have an awesome website that will drive substantial traffic.  Their concept for it is amazing and they simply needed a professional SEO consultant to step in and allow Harry to focus his priorities where they are really needed.

Make no mistake, internet marketing is a battlefield.  You’re going to war against a million other websites and you need to have sufficient weaponry to compete and to walk away unscathed.  You need to know your enemy, you need armor for proper defense and you need a clearly defined plan of attack to win the online battle.

When was the last time you performed a marketing recognizance mission?  Have you looked at your competitor’s website recently?  Or even their general internet activity?  I’m always surprised that many small business owners, CEO’s, or marketing executives do not make this part of their overall marketing strategy.  I do this with my own company and with ever client that contracts me to design a website or engage in an SEO project.  I want to know the websites they compete with so I know how to best position them.  I want to understand the battlefield so we can plan an effective attack.

If you are a website design client of mine I expect you to take the time to perform your own marketing recognizance mission.  Since I will be doing one for you, I expect you to do one too.  I want you to look closely at your enemy and I want you to be prepared as we enter into battle.  Why does it matter?  You need to intimately know the enemy.  Your website visitors will know your enemy, so you should too.

In previous blog posts I’ve mentioned my client questionnaire.  I ask clients to complete this before we begin our engagement.  In many cases, I email prospects the document with the proposal so they know what they are in for and so they have realistic expectations of my marketing philosophies and me as a website designer.  The vast majority of these people don’t “get” why I require this step until they review the questionnaire.  It then becomes crystal clear that internet marketing is a war and that they are currently going to battle with a toothpick and not a armored tank.

So do you have a toothpick or an armored tank?  Most likely you cannot answer this question yet, so take the time to evaluate your armor.

Review the Website Battlefield

• Identify your key direct competitors
• Identify benchmark companies within your industry
• Review competitors’ websites
• Review benchmark companies’ websites
• Identify strengths and weaknesses of the competition
• Identify strengths and weaknesses of the benchmark companies

Evaluate Your Armor and Prepare to Plan Your Website Attack

• How does your current website and online presence compare to that of your competition and the benchmark companies?
• List elements of your competitors and benchmark companies’ websites that you would like to incorporate into your new website design and build.
• List gaps within your existing content that need to be addressed and consider the timeframe and resources required to develop said content.
• Evaluate your internal resources and their ability to create a website that can address your gaps and weaknesses.
• Evaluate your budget for obtaining outside assistance for web design, build, and optimization.

Review the Online Battlefield

• Is your competitor using pay per client (PPC) ads and if so, what keywords receive the largest portion of their ad budget?
• Is your competitor’s website designed around a set of core keywords?
• How does the competitor score for these core keywords in organic search results (i.e. natural search not attributed to paid placement)?
• Is your competitor active in social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Quora, LinkedIn, or YouTube?
• Is your competitor actively blogging and/or guest blogging on other websites?
• Is your competitor utilizing content marketing strategies for lead generation and potential sales?
• Is your competitor actively engaged in inbound link building?
• Is your competitor utilizing a drip marketing campaign or regular newsletter campaign?
• Is your competitor active on local search directories and are their profiles optimized?

Evaluate Your Armor and Prepare to Plan Your Online Attack

• What competitor keywords best align with your organization?
• What other keywords should you consider and target?
• Can you afford a PPC campaign?
• Do you have the knowledge and staff for organic search engine optimization?
• What changes to your existing social media activity needs to take place to level-set you and your competitors?
• Do you offer any unique and authoritative content to help differentiate your from your competitors?
• How does your blogging efforts compare to your competitors?
• Are you utilizing content tagging websites and RSS feed automation?
• Do you have the knowledge and staff for a link building campaign?
• Do you have a newsletter and would this apply to your target market?
• Have you claimed your local profiles and are they optimized?

As a website designer and SEO expert I cannot completely prepare you for battle.  This is a joint effort and we need to collectively prepare for and fight the battle together.  I can help in your internet marketing war, but I’ll need you to help in this effort.

One of my first website clients was a referral from a friend.  This client was going up against some savvy competitors and I knew he had a steep climb.  I built him a WordPress website and tried my best to prepare him for the battle that lay ahead.  With his new SEO friendly website I gave him armor.  Unfortunately he failed to plan his actual attack and he didn’t even walk onto the battlefield.  He sat in his little bunker doing the same things he had done for years.  He did not take the competitive analysis I had done seriously, nor did he believe in social media optimization, inbound link campaigns, or virtually anything outside his existing practices.  One year later my friend keeps asking me why the website did not grow in search traffic.  What?  Really?

In that same time-frame I launched a website for another client who did go to battle.  In his battle he was fighting against some of the biggest companies in America who had huge internet marketing budgets and a large number of internal employees dedicated to reaching page one search results.  This client not only went to battle with my armor, he kept me on to help him plan and execute his attack.  We were a force to be reckoned with and we beat the snot out of his competition.  Everything we did had purpose, we planned our attack and executed it as planned.  His search traffic grew almost 500% in one year and he even stopped spending hundreds of dollars each month on PPC ads.  But he reinforced the armor I provided, he prepared a strategic marketing plan, he went to war with eyes wide open and he fought and fought hard.

Initially the client I feel was a failure crushed me.  At first I felt like I failed him.  But then a fellow and very wise WordPress consultant reminded me that I cannot fight a battle for a client who does not want to go to war.  There are potential clients and situations where I have to retreat because I’m trying to win a war with someone who simply wants to spend his days sleeping in his bunker.  It was a hard lesson, but a valuable one.  I try to identify those people early on and I avoid them at all costs.  We are not well matched and we have two totally different views of internet marketing.

Don’t let yourself fall asleep in the bunker.  Rise up, go on a marketing recognizance mission, plan your attack, build your armor, and go kick your competitor off of page one search results.  It is possible.  You just need to decide if you have the fight in you and then you have to rise up and fight.

In our conversation he provides obscure long-tail keywords to illustrate his SEO tactics are working. He also tells me he lacks traffic and real revenue resulting from all the time he has allocated to his SEO research and implementation efforts. He finally informs me that he cannot allocate a large budget to SEO. Hmm, I think we have encountered a conundrum.

Why is this the case? Is the small business owner really SEO savvy or is he lost in a web of SEO confusion? I’d say both. He knows enough to make him dangerous. I generally see very old SEO practices being used and many times black hat SEO tactics. Duplicate content and multiple URLs are popular trends, as are bolded words and keyword stuffing. While duplicate content, bolded words, and keyword stuffing top the list of most used tactics for the do-it-yourselfer, the bigger issue and much more difficult problems reside in the website’s architecture.

The website – typically designed and written by the small business owner – is dated and is riddled with structural issues. Content is difficult to locate, duplicated, and irrelevant to the user or keyword focus. There is no hierarchy or silos to content, the website domain is set to expire, the website lacks permanent redirects, there is no sitemap.xml file, and the in-house SEO (business owner) has never heard of Google Webmaster Tools or Google Analytics. Those examples are real and all are from a prospective client’s website I reviewed this week.

So what should the do-it-yourself SEO worry about? A lot. I do think it is important to mention that the do-it-yourself approach only works if you have little competition. Real SEO is done by an SEO expert who not only is immersed in SEO each day, he spends hours per week educating himself on the latest trends and algorithm changes. Since this is impossible for the small business owner, it is also impossible to expect tangible results from haphazard SEO efforts.

To Achieve Solid SEO Results, You Need to Open Up Your Website and Look Under the Covers

The following ten questions are just a sampling of architectural SEO elements. If you manage your own website and you are a SEO do-it-yourselfer, you need to know what these questions mean and the answers to each. If you don’t, you need professional assistance from an SEO consultant.

1. Have you ever done a keyword analysis?
2. Does your website have a clearly defined structure for assembling pages and/or blog posts?
3. Can you easily locate all the content available?
4. Did you include keyword usage within the meta data and unique to each page or post?
5. Do you have a robot.txt file?
6. Do you have a sitemap.xml file and has it been submitted to Google Webmaster Tools?
7. Are you using Google Analytics and do you know what your current website traffic look likes and how your visitors utilize your website?
8. How long has your domain been registered and how long until it expires?
9. Does your website have permanent redirects in place?
10. Does your website have multiple H1 tags per page?

Most likely you cannot answer these questions and you’re still hesitant to spend money on professional SEO help. I encounter this frequently and I’m asked to “justify” the cost of my SEO consulting services. When I’m asked this I think about my accountant. I have an accountant to do my personal and business taxes, even though I have an accounting degree. But I don’t specialize in accounting and I have no desire to do so. I don’t know the latest tax regulations or the ins and outs of the tax code. I don’t want to know it, which is the reason I never pursued the professional once I left college. I can no more accurately assemble my business taxes than the small business owner can perform his own SEO. My time is better spent on what I can do well, and for me, that’s WordPress web design and organic SEO.

I’ve justified the cost of my accountant (accounting degree and all), so it is really up to you to justify the cost of SEO services. And just like taxes, doing SEO wrong can be worse than not doing SEO at all.

I’m not a website snob and I value the small business owner and his desire to bring sales in through the internet. I think internet marketing is critical for many small businesses, because it is relatively cheap compared to other marketing tactics. The problem is most small businesses owners want you to market a website they designed themselves or one that has not been updated in five or more years. My professional opinion is although I’d love their SEO retainer, it would feel as though I was taking their money and providing nothing in return.

Organic SEO rocks. I believe in it and I’ve earned a living off of it for many years. But search engine optimization will only go so far. You have to have a decent website to present to visitors once they arrive.

To illustrate my point, I’m going to use Randy as an example. Randy called me on Monday and asked me to “make his phone ring”. His words. I told him I could, but we’d need to address his website and SEO together, as SEO alone will not work. Randy didn’t believe me at first, so we had a frank discussion about his website and what it presents to visitors.

If a small business owner even thinks about engaging in an SEO campaign, he needs to first look at his website and ask himself a few questions. I think fifteen questions can really help determine if an SEO campaign is needed or if he needs to start first with a website design project. Let’s step through my fifteen questions for website owners to see how Randy’s current website stacks up.

Fifteen Questions Every Small Business Owner Should Ask Themselves

1. What is the first impression your website gives to a visitor?
Stress. One word describes it for me. As soon as I arrive Randy’s website a video starts playing and replays everything I hit the home page. I don’t like background noise and the video literally stresses me out.

2. What is the first thing you notice?
Links and lots of links. Randy has done his own SEO and his home page has nineteen links within four paragraphs of text. It is overwhelming and worse yet, it is keyword stuffing. He has multiple links to the same page and simply uses different keywords for each link. Keyword stuffing = Google penalty. It is not helping him from a search standpoint and it does not help facilitate a positive visitor experience.

3. Does a thirty second review of the home page articulate what your company is all about?
Yes. I definitely know what he’s pitching.

4. Does the website speak to your target audience and/or visitor personas?
Not so much. His text is written for search engines and not the user. As the visitor I see red and lots of it. The text is red, the links are underlined red words, and I struggle to read the actual text. The home page is a flood of information and it does not distinguish one visitor from another.

5. Does the website visitor have a clear understanding of what he/she should do once landing on the home page?
As the visitor I’m told to “CALL NOW XXX-XXX-XXXX”. Unfortunately that is all I see. Randy has a lot of content and videos available, but I struggle deciphering where to go. I’m simply overwhelmed. I believe part of this is because all the lovely red text (yes even content) is centered. The yelling caps is also a problem, as it is an immediate turn off. I don’t like people yelling at me. Painful, simply painful.

6. Is navigation easy and clearly defined for the website visitor?
Yes. Once I get past all the red text and view the navigation bar, my options are clear.

7. Is it usable and bug free across all major browsers?
No. That would be a big fat no. It is “broken” in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. I didn’t check IE, because I’ve already validated three browsers, so a fourth is just salt in my wounds. Boxes hang over text, text hangs over text, and there is about eleven inches of a blank page at the bottom of each page. That is just the beginning, but my point is illustrated so I’ll stop.

8. Are the “call to actions” clearly defined and compelling?
I know I’m suppose to call and I know I should “submit a case”, unfortunately the submit function on the contact page is covered with text. The bigger issue is I have no compelling reason to call or give my email address.

9. How does your visitor engage with you?
As I’ve already stated, there are instructions to call. There is a contact box on the home page, but it just states “Submit Your Information” without explanation on why I should submit. It is more about me giving than the firm actually engaging with me.

10. Does the website properly project information about your current product and/or service offering?
I think the website does provide information on his service offering, although because of the large amount of coding issues, multiple parts of the service descriptions are difficult or impossible to read.

11. Does the website discuss your visitor’s pain points and your matching solution?
No, not really. The website talks about the services and the industry itself. It does not connect with the visitor on a personal level or try to relate to their problems or pain points.

12. Do you offer anything to visitors or do you just demand something from visitors?
There is a page of “Resource Links” but these are simply links to industry websites that are not written for the average website visitor. They provide little if any value. So the website itself does not provide or give anything to the visitor. It does demand that I call (in all upper case letters) or give my email address. Since it gives little and wants something as soon as I arrive, I’d be very hesitant to take action.

13. Is the website Web 2.0 friendly?
There are no references to social media, the blog link takes the website visitor to a completely new URL on Blogger. Instead of using the blog to bring people into the website, it takes them away. There is no RSS feed or sharing options. The videos are hosted on the domain and do not utilize YouTube. This website is barely making it with Web 1.0, let alone Web 2.0.

14. If you were the website visitor, would you pick up the phone and call?
Nope. The nature of Randy’s service offering requires the visitor to feel that Randy’s firm is an authority figure in his industry, that he and his colleagues are trustworthy, and that the firm is highly knowledgeable in their area of expertise. In my opinion his website does nothing to convey these characteristics. And, there are plenty of his competitors who do, so I suspect the visitors will simply move onto another service provider.

15. Does your website help or hinder you from obtaining your company goals?
My opinion is the website hinders Randy’s goals. I’ve talked to Randy and I liked Randy. His website does not make me feel the same way. It is dated, difficult to work with, and does not tell me what I need or want to know. That feeling transfers over to Randy and his firm and makes you feel the firm is old, hard to work with, and will not communicate with me as needed.

To SEO or Not to SEO

When I spoke with Randy, I told him I would not take him on as an SEO client. I said I would take him on as a web design client with SEO at the forefront our redesign goals.

Why would I turn business away? I only want a client to retain my SEO services, if I can help the client obtain their goals. Randy’s goal was to make his phone ring. Encouraging Randy to spend money on SEO consulting, while knowing full well his website is horrendous, it unethical. Or at least to me, it feels as though I’m stalking unprotected prey. He’d be wasting money, because any traffic I drove to his website would leave and not convert. Thus in the end, my SEO services would not reach his ultimate goal of new clients.

I have to provide Randy a proposal tomorrow for a website redesign. If Randy decides to decline a website redesign and goes with another SEO firm, I’m okay with that outcome. I may not like it, but I know I tried to level set his expectations and steer him in the right direction. The rest is up to Randy.

This weekend I looked back at SEO related statistics for a B2B website I launched in November of 2009. A full year has passed and I wanted to see the progress this company made over a twelve-month period. After launching the new WordPress website, the client retained me to work on their internet marketing efforts. It helped free up time for the client, it gave their internet marketing a cohesiveness it would not have had otherwise, and it gave me time to nurture my new baby. I believe it was a good year for SEO and Google Analytics agrees with me.

The Data Doesn’t Lie

I decided to dig into Google Analytics and pull data for December 1st, 2009 through November 30th, 2010. What fun to review your work and reflect. Okay I have to qualify that, as it was partially my work. The client did a tremendous job following my suggestions and coming up with some of their own. They were a content machine, which helped facilitated my SEO consulting efforts. Without the collaboration, the growth you will see would not be possible.

The data shows there was substantial growth across organic search engine traffic, referrals, and direct traffic. I’d want to see a growth in all three areas because it shows we built branding along with organic search traffic from Google. What I love most is there was no pay per click activity after December. Since organic SEO traffic grew rapidly, I was able to talk the client into ditching his PPC campaign.

The Formula for SEO Magic

At this point you’re probably wondering how we did it. It wasn’t magic or SEO voodoo. We didn’t participate in any link schemes or comment spamming or even paid links or advertising banners. We simply focused on providing quality content, while also letting organic SEO and visitor personas lead the way. We tried to consider what our visitors would perceive as valuable content and we tried to make sure we looked at all personas (or visitor types) that came to the website.

While this list won’t cover everything we did, it will hit the SEO highlights:

• We performed a complete keyword discovery prior to website launch
• We selected three critical keywords, ten high additional high traffic keywords, and a bunch of long-tail keywords
• The website and blog were mapped based on visitor personas and keywords
• New WordPress website design and blog
• We focused on one keyword per page
• Each page had a unique and optimized title and meta description
• We included deep internal links through pages and blog posts
• We included keyword rich links that pointed outside the website and kept them to no more than three or so per page or post
• We performed an inbound linking campaign with very targeted pages and keywords

From a content perspective, we made sure we had a diverse set of “things” being added to the website each week. Due to this Google went from spidering the website occasionally to indexing new blog posts and pages within an hour.

Our keyword rich content included the following types of distribution:

• Two to three blog posts per week
• Monthly press releases
• Bi-weekly webinars
• Polls
• YouTube videos
• Industry reports
• White papers
• Podcasts
• An industry directory with rating system
• Weekly newsletters

A Plug for Social Media

The interesting point to our efforts was the use of social media, which is not always embraced by B2B companies. Of the top five sources of website referrals, four were social media websites. And even more interesting is that Facebook was third on the list.

Neither Facebook nor Twitter had a huge number of “likes” or “followers”, yet both drove a substantial amount of traffic over the year. I’ve previously blogged about social media being conflicting and that you cannot judge your social media success through simple metrics such as likes and followers. This client is a perfect example of why this is the case.

What About Conversions and Revenue?

Now if I were reading this blog post, I’d be asking about conversions, new customers, and revenue. So let me qualify the growth by stating the client had a great year in 2010. The company added significant headcount and came close to doubling revenue.

Whenever we would have our monthly call, we’d talk about traffic and then I would ask about leads, new customers, and sales. I wanted to make sure the client was getting the right traffic. Although I will admit, as an SEO consultant, your first instinct is to get caught up in traffic numbers. You have to deflate your head long enough to ask the client if the traffic is producing value.

The Take Away for Marketers

I want to clearly state that this SEO case study is a best-case scenario. The client and I were in complete sync, we knew each other going in, and there was a strong level of trust. I had worked in his industry and I could run on my own without supervision. This type of freedom in SEO is not the norm. An SEO consultant needs monitoring and the client needs to be involved.

Industry experience aside, the real take away is the content. Without the content, I could not have spun my SEO magic. I had to have content to market and without it, the project would have flopped. I would have had to write the blog posts, which would have distracted me from other tasks and it would have stifled the creativity and momentum.

What’s Your Magic Formula?

I believe in organic SEO and while I don’t consider it voodoo, I absolutely believe it can do magic when you have good content and the SEO project is executed properly. This client is a perfect example of that magic.

If you’re an SEO consultant, I’d love to hear your thoughts on my formula.  SEO is a moving target and I know there is always something new to learn.  Leave a comment below with your thoughts or send me a tweet on Twitter at @WebSavvyMrkting.

As we discuss a custom bar and bamboo flooring (I’m a bit high maintenance I’m told), it reminds me of my SEO clients. Like myself, they themselves have a pain threshold. While we both share budget constraints, their SEO pain threshold is also associated with internal resources, project timing, return on investment, and anticipated payback period.

Similar to my long list of remodeling desires, the small business owner can quickly run through his wants. He wants to meet his marketing goals and this typically means increased website traffic, better branding, additional leads, better conversions and engagement, and at the end of the day, he wants an increase in revenue and profit. Unfortunately, he also usually lacks internal marketing resources and internet marketing expertise. He doesn’t have a clue what an H1 tag is, an alt tag, meta, or how to improve his inbound links.

Measuring Your Threshold of SEO Pain

So if the small business owner doesn’t know SEO and doesn’t have an internal resource that is a tech-savvy do-it-yourself type of girl, what’s he to do? He is going to have to hire someone to fill the role in-house or he is going to have to outsource this task to a seasoned professional. But before he runs to Google and starts searching for an SEO consultant, he needs to ask himself a few questions and formulate some concrete answers.

1. What are the most important internet marketing goals that need to be achieved?
2. What is the timeframe for achieving these goals? Is this a firm, must have date or it is a desirable date?
3. What internal resources are available to allocate to this project?
4. Do the available internal resources have the technical and marketing aptitude for accomplishing the goals?
5. What is the available budget for this project?
6. What is the required payback period for the project? How soon is ROI expected?

Before you even begin to search for available SEO consulting firms, you need to have a firm grasp of your pain threshold. We search experts come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Some of us are big and fat and require $300 or more per hour. Some of us are small and lean and only require $100 per hour. Some are even smaller than that, but I would not recommend searching the bargain basement with this type of project.

The key to launching internet marketing project successfully is to know your pain threshold and your expectations. More importantly, it is to make sure they align and are in sync. Once you have a solid grasp on your needs and wants, you will quickly be able to decide which type of SEO firm is within your project scope and budget.  This will not only speed the search for right SEO expert, it will help the small business owner find a suitable fit.

Why does it really matter?  For me, I only want to engage with you if I can help you and help make your project a success. To determine if that is possible, I have to obtain an idea of what success means to you. Most small businesses I speak with have not thought this far ahead. They know they have issues with their current website or web promotion efforts, but they don’t have a good feel for expectations.

An internet marketing campaign can be a huge endeavor or it can be a quick refresh of what you currently have in place. Until a needs assessment is done and project scope is defined, it is difficult for any website designer or SEO consultant to truly provide feedback on project budget or timing.

Common Internet Marketing Goals and Objectives

A typical internet marketing campaign can focus on improving six or more different goals, although I really think most projects can be broken down into five distinct areas.

1: Revenue

I’ll be honest, I’m not a big fan of this goal because I think it is simply to broad. Everyone wants to increase revenue and there are many ways to accomplish this, so I’d rather clients be a little more specific so we can truly focus on tasks that will deliver tangible results. Narrowing the revenue goal to say increased profits via a reduced sales cycle would be more specific and would help us collectively target the right tasks within your internet marketing campaign.

If increasing profits and a reduced sales cycle were your primary goal, we could provide additional information (or better information) on your website for prospects so that they could be better informed before they reach out to you as a new lead. This could be through navigation changes, defining personas (your target market) and filtering content, or by providing clearer call to actions.

2: Branding

Branding is definitely an internet marketing goal I like and one that is problematic to companies of all sizes. Most small businesses don’t think about branding until they encounter a specific issue or talk to someone engrossed in marketing like I am. I believe in personal branding, corporate branding, and branding of your product or service. For small businesses, the internet provides a world of opportunities for increasing brand awareness.

If increased branding is your goal, we can work on your website, your SEO efforts, your social media usage, local search directories, your public relations, etc. I could go on and bore you to death, but I’ll stop. The point is you’ve given me a pain point that I can target with a solution.

What I also like about branding is that it is a measurable goal that we can track and quantify. From mentions in social media outlets to inbound links to your website, to searches for your company name or product – you can see changes and track improvements.

When I originally started my business, no one Googled my company name because it didn’t exist until I thought of it. Since creating my company and actively marketing myself on the internet, there has been a steady increase in searches for my company name. This means there are mentions of my company on the internet, someone has read it, and someone is trying to locate my firm to learn more me or my company. As a small business and a marketer, this makes me happy because it shows my efforts are working and I am making progress on my branding efforts.

3: Lead Generation

Increased lead generation is another business goal I love. Not only is it absolutely traceable, it is how I originally found my way to SEO, website design, and internet marketing. Years ago I was a salesperson for a small technology firm. My product was good, so I could easily close new business if I had prospects. Unfortunately, I just didn’t have enough new prospects and leads. The cheapest route for me to obtain additional leads was to teach myself internet marketing. I’m proud to say I did, I viewed the process as fun, and I found my true passion.

I used a CRM software package to track the source of my leads from origin to close. I could tell you exactly how many leads came from the internet and their close rate. The internet leads were farther along in the sales funnel than any other lead source and they had the highest close rate. This only fueled my fire to increase my internet leads. I went from virtually zero internet leads to the internet accounting for the majority of my sales in no time. I also helped the company grow 400% in two years. For me this proved lead generation was not only a great goal, but a goal you can obtain and measure along the way.

4: Product or Service Sales

Utilizing an internet marketing campaign to increase product or service sales is an admirable goal. It is both obtainable and there is something to measure, so it makes me, the marketer, happy. If you came to me with this goal, I’d want to brainstorm to discover why you think your sales are lower than their potential. Is it your website or is it lack of inbound traffic? Either one is fixable, we just need to narrow our focus and plan our attack.

5: Visitor Conversions

One area most small business owners overlook in website design is conversions. A conversion is the method of migrating your website visitors into prospects, sales, registrations, or whatever else you want the average visitor to do once they land on your website. While everyone “gets” the idea of conversions, many people forget about the concept during a website design project.

The key to a strong web presence and functionally robust website is defining your design and navigation around what you’d like your website visitor to do upon arrival. Most likely this will include multiple paths built around an individual persona (or visitor type). When you take a moment to consider your options, the process usually becomes quite clear.

Small website design changes can have a big impact on how you convert website visitors. An example of this is a newsletter sign up box. A lot of small businesses put this below the fold (low enough on the page you have to scroll to see it), which significantly decreases usage. Move it up to the top of the sidebar and you should exponentially increase your conversion rates. Change your wording to better articulate why people should sign up and again increase your conversion rates.

I had one client go from about 250 new subscriptions each month to around 700 simply because I changed the sign up box verbiage and placed the destination content more prominently on the website. The change was so drastic I was kicking myself for not thinking of this earlier in the year. I love this example because it shows how three minutes of coding can have dramatic and long-term results.

6: Engagement

Engagement is a total buzzword these days for us internet marketers. I use it with hesitation because of this painful truth. Buzzword or not, engagement is a valid and measurable goal.

So what does it mean for the small business owner? It refers to your interaction with your prospects and clients. While some will view this as simply “likes” on Facebook or “followers” on Twitter, I view it as page interactions on Facebook, Twitter mentions, content sharing, blog comments, client reviews, etc. The modern web is filled with opportunities to interact with your target market.

While some skeptics view engagement as marketing fluff, internet users in 2011 will expect engagement and interaction from the brands and companies they follow. Actually they demand it and if you plan on ignoring the goal of engagement, you’ll quickly find yourself in trouble.

So What’s Your Internet Marketing Goal?

I really think your goals will vary based on your individual situation, your industry, and your product or service offering. The important lesson in this discussion is that you need to consider your business goals before you spend time or money on any internet marketing campaign.

Remember when most people had no idea what social media was, what it meant, or why it mattered? Well that time has past and now social media’s little brother, local search, is the next golden child of search engine marketing. Unfortunately, most people and businesses don’t have a good grasp of what local search entails, how to implement it into their marketing plans, or even how to execute it successfully. I’d like to say there is a magical wand, but one doesn’t exist. I believe solid SEO and local search optimization takes some time, planning, and good old fashion work.

Local Search Does Matter to Small Businesses

• SERP Domination – Google Web Savvy Marketing, you’ll see that my website and company dominates the search engine results page (aka SERP). Seven out of ten of the listings are mine. Google Michigan WordPress Consultant and you’ll see the same type of results. That is how it should be, especially if you are a small business. You need to be front and center for any search that takes place related to your company name or your core product and service offering.
• Organic SEO – While no one knows the exact algorithm used for delivering search results, but we do know inbound links, URL mentions, and keyword rich tags matter. So how can a small business garnish those from reputable sources? Local search directories are an excellent place to start. You can see in the table below, Brownbook.net, Yellowbot.com, Mojopages.com, Manta.com, and Hotfrog.com are all great for providing inbound links, keyword rich profiles, and they’re all indexed by Google.  This all helps in your search engine optimization efforts.
• Reviews – Positive or negative, reviews matter to small businesses. While not everyone is taking the time to post online reviews, some people are and they aren’t always positive. In the land of geeks, we call this reputation management. So who’s watching your online reputation? If you are a small business owner, that would be you. You need to search for your company name and address to see what pops up in the search results. I’ve done this with prospects and clients, only to find negative reviews calling their services “horrible” or “worthless” or even “unethical”. Were these businesses any of those things? No, not really. But the person who left the review was angry enough to write an extremely negative review. In about 99% of the cases you can’t remove those comments, but you can diffuse them by responding to them and by encouraging other clients to counteract them with something positive. In many cases, these negative comments show up on page one of Google when you searched for the company name. Nothing chases away potential customers like a longwinded, overly negative review.
• Traffic from Local Search Directories – I think of all the benefits, this is actually the smallest one, or at least right now. I believe the actual search volume and inbound traffic is currently low, although I suspect this may very well change in 2011 as many of these local directories mature and gain a loyal following of users. Even though the volume is low, if someone searches for my service offering, I want to be listed.
• Branding – I’m listed on MerchantCircle.com and another business owner called me because he saw my business name and location. He wanted to know what type of marketing his “neighbor” did, so we talked for about an hour. That is branding and it was effortless on my part to achieve it.
• Referrals – Local search and social media is the new customer referral program. I have given referrals, have requested referrals, and have won new business across Facebook. Why? Because someone asked, someone answered, and I was there and had an online presence. Friends knew I was a WordPress web designer, because of my Facebook profile and company page. They could see work samples and they knew they had a resource close by and one they knew. As a mater of fact, I have meetings with two companies this week because one of their employees knew me, and my service offering, from my Facebook activities.

Now that I’ve talked and talked about why small businesses need to embrace local search, the next question is what do they have to do to get themselves listed. While it isn’t brain surgery, there are a number of things to consider. The below table will list a number of popular local search directories and will provide a place to start. There are many more, but this list will give you a jump start. Once you review my list of local directories, read through my tips for claiming your local listing.

List of Top Local Search Directories

Local Search Tips for Small Businesses

• It is time consuming and labor intensive. Like real SEO, there is not a software program to run through all the local directories and place your profile properly. There are some companies and/or programs that promise to do it, but they only hit some of the local directories. Good listings take real people and time to create.
• Be prepared and have your with data ready. To add yourself to local search directories you’ll need some basic company information readily available. Stick it in Word and just copy it over as you complete each profile. Basic information requirements include company description, website URL, keywords or tags, RSS feeds for your blog if you have one, and your social accounts URLs (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin).
• Go cheap and don’t pay for premium listings. I like free. I believe pay per click is an addiction and I’m not a fan of premium local directory listings either. You don’t need them and you’ll be fine by focusing on the free directories and their local listing options.
• If nothing else, hit Google, Yahoo, and Bing. If time is an issue and if you can do nothing else but submit to a handful of local directories, start with Google Places, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local. I recommend creating a coupon for Google Places so your listing is indexed by Google. Google will require phone validation and Bing uses a post card (yes snail mail) so understand your listing does not go live overnight.
• Don’t forget niche directories (lawyers, real estates, doctors, etc.) if it applies. A lot of professions have a large number of specialized directories. Use them, because most likely they are dominating page one results on Google.
• Don’t forget geographical directories. For both users and search engines, make sure you query and add your profile to directories within your state or city. This takes more time, but the SEO benefits should be present once your local listing goes live.
• Seeing results takes time. Local search directories are massive, so by default, they take a considerable amount of time and bandwidth to crawl and index. My listing in Brownbook.net was indexed and appeared in Google within hours, but this is the exception and not the rule.
• You still need a quality website to convert visitors once they discover your local listing. I know there has been a great deal of hype around Facebook pages and people running businesses off these pages alone, but I don’t belive it. I think this claim is based on marketing companies trying to sell hype and their services. If you want someone to act off of their internet search, you have to give them something tangible to read (like my long blog post) and a real call to action. Driving a ton of traffic to a ten year old website that fails to describe your service or product offering does little value and drives zero revenue.

My Local Search Call to Action

So now what? Get yourself listed. You can use my list of local search websites to plan your attach or you can hire a local search marketing expert. Just make sure you do take the time or allocate the money to get it done. If you are a small business and you target a local market, you have to make sure your company is listed in local search directories. If not, your going to continue to lose business opportunities and clients and it will only get worse as 2011 becomes the year of local search!

Note: If you are a Twitter fan, you can follow my list of local directories on Twitter at @WebSavvyMrkting/local-search-directories.

Author Note on November 10, 2011:  The above table has been updated to reflect the new release of Google+ pages for businesses. While it is to early to tell the magnitude of Google+ business profiles, they should be included in any online marketing campaign and link building efforts. 

Flash forward twenty years and I now claim to be an Internet marketer who spends many hours as a WordPress designer and an SEO expert. I love what I do, yet still miss my first love of Psychology. Recently my two loves collided as I remembered Swiss-born psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and her book On Death and Dying. She outlined the five stages of grief a person and their loved ones go through when presented with death. I was reminded of this recently as I spoke with a business owner that reached out to me concerning his outdated website. The discussion and the desire to hang on to something beyond repair reminded me of the book I read so many years ago.

While letting go of your old, outdated website is not as traumatic as losing a loved one, it does represent change. Many of us tend to hang on to what is comfortable and easy and avoid a voluntary jump into the unknown. The small business owner is no different. While he may know his ten-year-old website is horribly outdated, the desire to change it seems overwhelming, unimaginable, and unnecessary. He steps into the first of five steps of grief.

A Review of the Small Business Owner’s Website and His Five Stages of Grief

1. Denial – My website is fine. No one comes to it anyway, so I’m not going to waste any money changing it. Who really cares about what is looks like? It’s my product (or service) offering that makes a difference, not my website.
2. Anger – If people don’t like my website than I don’t need to do business with them. I’m not spending thousands of dollars to have some web designer try and communicate my marketing message. I know what’s good for my business, not some graphic designer who spends his entire day on Twitter. SEO, local search, and Facebook. Who are these people and what the heck are they talking about? I don’t need any of that stuff.
3. Bargaining – Okay maybe my website is a little dated. I think I’ll update it myself and tweak it a bit to freshen it up. If I update the pictures from 1985 and put in a few keywords, I’ll be good to go. My cousin built his fraternity’s website ten years ago, so I think I’ll take him to dinner and ask him to help. It shouldn’t be that hard. I’m sure I can just make a few changes and get a huge impact without spending any money.
4. Depression – Oh my gosh, this website project is a nightmare. I don’t know HTML, I can’t locate the original website designer, and I have no idea how to strong content that people will actually read. I can’t tell the difference between CSS, PHP, and HTML. What do they mean Google doesn’t look at meta keywords anymore? I have no idea what meta is, let alone if Google reads it. What is black hat SEO? I don’t even know what SEO means, so how am I supposed to know if my website uses black hate SEO practices?
5. Acceptance – Yep, completely over my head. Need some help and need it now. My competition is killing me, prospects don’t know what I do or when I’m open, and anyone I do get to look at my home page runs away laughing. The time has come to get a professional web designer to overhaul the website and start fresh. 2011 is the year of my Internet debut.

While this list may be praised by some and criticized by others, it is a reminder of why so many small businesses struggle with their web. In the Unites States, 55% of people use the Internet daily with Americans spending an average of 60 hours online each week. With the growing availability of broadband and the increased popularity of smart phones and devices like the iPad, the level of Internet usage will only continue to grow. Small businesses cannot ignore the need for a strong web presence and that having a marketing plan now means reaching prospects and customers through the Internet.

Five years ago I would have agreed with most small businesses owners. Internet marketing was still difficult and not an easy task to accomplish. While I’ve been working with SEO and website design for years, technology didn’t really get small business friendly until the world of open source kicked it up a notch. Websites were expensive, you needed a graphic designer, and you needed an SEO expert to help guide you along so someone other than your employees would find your website.

Enter WordPress, the fast growing, open source CMS package that is launching everything from blogs and small business websites to fancy portals for stars and magazines and television networks. WordPress is my passion and the software that liberated me and countless other small business owners. We are now empowered to take website design into our own hands. Or, at least outsource the creation of the website, then manage it internally if we choose. We have an option. We can create a great new website that is search engine friendly and pleasing to the eye and for a much lower budget than we could ten years ago. We have choices.

If you are a small business owner who is stuck in one of the five stages of grief, visit wordpress.org and learn more about WordPress website design and your options. WordPress will allow you to create and manage your web presence in the same software as CNN, Katy Perry, Carnival Cruises, Lexus, and The New Your Times. Best of all it is free and you only need to locate a good WordPress designer to help get you started.