Immanuel Kant defined enlightenment as “The emancipation of the human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error.”   The term enlightenment reminds me of the small business owner and his undeveloped view of internet marketing and more importantly, how he and his company fit within today’s internet dependent culture.

Now don’t take that comment as a negative view on the small business owner or small business in general.  I love the average small business owner.  I am a small business owner and this segment is my client base.  More importantly, small business marketing and in particular, internet marketing, represent all that is possible in a free market such as the United States.  Anything is possible.  A newly created or existing small business can obtain substantial sales growth, reinvent a brand, or simply achieve market penetration just by successfully marketing over the internet.

If all of my pro-internet ramblings are true, then why do so many companies struggle with branding themselves on the internet and bringing in tangible sales?  A lot of prospects I talk to claim to have little or no website traffic and no real financial gain from their internet marketing efforts.  But why?  Why do so many make this brutally honest claim?  Because they are not yet enlightened!  They remain ignorant of the true meaning of internet marketing and they are immature.  They cannot see the true state their website’s or how this website compares to the gazillions of other websites on the internet.

I do my best to enlightened people with my overly frank assessment of their website, SEO, and competitive position.  Yes my phone conversations are as unfiltered as my blog posts.  Even with my openness, I many times fail to reach the small business owner because he/she is not yet ready for self-reflection.  They are not yet ready closely review the true nature of their marketing efforts or even look to see what the perception of others might be.

If you are a small business owner and you are still reading my post, good for you.  You have stepped onto the path of enlightenment.  You have taken the first step.  You’ve accepted my harsh comments as “passion” and not “arrogance”.  My unfiltered assessments are meant to provide value and my passion exists because I truly believe in what the internet can offer for those who embrace it.

When performed correctly internet marketing can liberate a company.  It liberated me and it has liberated my clients.  It can take transform or even create a business in a relatively short period of time.   But small business marketing on the internet takes effort and it takes knowledge.  You just can’t whip a WordPress website or blog up and call it good.  You have to extend you reach and touch your audience.  You have to work at it and do so in the right manner.

So now the question must be asked – have you embraced internet marketing?  I didn’t ask if you had a website, I asked if you’ve embraced the internet and all that it offers you as a small business.  I don’t know is not an acceptable answer.  Self-reflection can be both power and painful.  But the journey of browser-based enlightenment will end with a large reward.

Enlightenment Begins With Ten Simple Questions

1. Where do you show up in the SERP (search engine results page)? Think about what keywords or phrases people would use to locate your website and Google these terms to see if your website shows up on page one of the search results.  Please don’t tell me you are on page three, because page three does not matter.  Very few searchers ever look past page one.  And please don’t search for some obscure term a crackpot SEO consultant told you to optimize for back in 1985.
2. How many websites (other than your own) link to your website? If you have a Google account and can use Google Webmaster Tools, the answer is quick and obvious.  Since I know most small business owners have no idea what I’m talking about, we’ll go about it the old fashion way.  In Google’s search box insert link:yoururl.com.  Does anything come back in results?  Google won’t show all links, but you’ll quickly see if any exist.  And some should exist.
3. How many websites (other than your own) mention your website? You can view this on Google by simply inputting your full URL in quotations.  And how many did we find?  Five or ten is not stellar performance, so please don’t start smiling yet.
4. How valuable are the links or URL references that you found? Hopefully you discovered something tangible and not a bunch of outdated or irrelevant information.  Or worse yet, a bunch of negative reviews you didn’t know existed.  Inbound links and website references should exist in quality website properties and be relevant to your target market.
5. How is your company and website listed in local search directories? Here I am referring locally focused websites like Google Places, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Foursquare, MerchantCircle, etc.  Do you have a listing and if so, is it accurate?  Remember, if you don’t claim your local search listing, someone else can and will.
6. Are you active on any social media websites? Social media refers to Facebook company pages, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.   Do you have an active account and when was the last time you updated anything?  Is your Facebook page filled with spam or is it filled with content your target market would actually want to see?  And the most important question – do you interact with your online community?
7. How is your blog looking? Yes I said blog, because the world loves blogs and Google does too.  Blogs provide a means to communicate with website visitors in a conversational manner.  Proper blog management is critical to internet marketing success.  So do you have a blog and if so, how often are you posting fresh and worthwhile content?   Do you provide an easy method for visitors to share your blog posts to social media or content tagging websites?
8. How healthy is your RSS feed? An RSS feed is a listing of your recent content and/or blogs, which is used to distribute your blog posts to other websites.  Do you have one and is it active and accurate?  How about an XML sitemap for that matter?  Similar concept but used my search engines.
9. When was the last time you commented in a forum or on another website’s blog post? Again, blogging is conversational.  Conversation requires two-way dialogue.  This means you to your visitors and your readers’ comments and/or feedback back to you.  It also means other bloggers to you and your feedback to the blogger.

10. Think about your industry’s overall presence on the internet. Are you and your company visible? To be considered an industry leader or even a local industry hero, you have to participate.  You have to be seen and you have to engage.  While your target market may not be visiting your industry’s benchmark websites, the search engines do and they should find you there when they visit.

Most likely you’ve read through this list and realized your internet marketing activities can be greatly improved.  Brace yourself, because we haven’t even looked at your competition yet.  I can only pick so hard and for so long at you without feeling a little guilty.

For right now I’ll let you stew over my ten questions and in my next blog post we’ll take a look at your competition.  And while you may tell yourself you are as good as your competition, you will be surprised to know you are wrong.  Dead wrong.

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.

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.

I ask a lot of questions about the current and future state of their sales process and marketing programs. While these questions are informative, I definitely have a few questions that are my favorites. In particular, this would be four questions focused on their current website. I like this set of questions because they’re very informative and they are “raw”. I can tell many clients write the first thing that comes to their minds, which is priceless. Some answers have me laughing out loud. I don’t mean the LOL kind of laugh; I mean the tears coming out of my eyes kind of laugh.

I believe my clients’ candid responses are representative of most small business owners and how they feel about their outdated and lackluster websites. While most small businesses owners don’t spend their day thinking or talking about their websites, when asked, they will provide feedback. Unfortunately the feedback is usually far from positive.

Tell Me What You Don’t Like About Yourself

To illustrate my above statements, I thought I’d return to my questionnaires and pull a few client responses. You’ll see the average small business owner does not have a whole lot of admiration for their website and their current internet marketing presence.

Below are a few candid responses from real clients:

1. What does your website currently do well?

• Nothing…Or at least very little. It’s a personality free online business card.
• There is lots of information and it does convey our brand.
• Well it is doing something right, because we are getting business from it. Other than that, there isn’t anything I am particularly proud of.

2. What does your website currently do poorly?

• Doesn’t engage visitors, there are no differentiators, and it doesn’t clearly describe our products.
• The e-store has never generated revenue.
• It is basic and comes across basic.
• Lacks traffic.
• It looks like I did it myself and I did.

3. Are there any aspects of your website that you love?

• Love might be strong.
• Not really.
• No.

4. Are there any aspects of your website that you hate?

• It is out of date and information is difficult to find.
• Yes, but can’t point to one specific thing.
• Not necessarily, I think we just need a facelift and a more optimized site.
• All of it.

If you read through the responses, you’ll notice no one is overly excited about what they have presently and no one provided anything really positive about their existing website. The one client who said he just needed a “facelift” received a completely new website and it is actually one of my favorite web design projects because the before and after was so dramatic.

I Love You and Hate You All at the Same Time

As much as I love small business owners, I hate them at the same time. I love working with this segment, because they need me and they like me. They really really like me, as Sally Field would say. They like me because I’m opinionated and I’m not just a web designer. I’m a marketer and a salesperson and an SEO consultant and a WordPress geek all wrapped up in one. I like the companies who need a lot of help, because I like to help. It’s why I quit my real marketing job and started my own firm.

On the flip side, I hate small business owners because so many of them live in a bubble of self-denial. This is even true of my good friend Jason, who is a small business owner here in Michigan. He’s weathered through the rough period and will make it through, because he is smart and he is a good man. But he is in denial. Jason doesn’t put his website’s URL on his business card, because he says the website is so bad. His wife, Megan, regularly makes fun of it and we all laugh about it over Friday night drinks.

But the real problem is Jason needs a new website. He desperately needs a new website and I’m almost to the point of designing one for free because his is so bad. His wife and I have talked about hacking his current website and just surprising him with a brand new WordPress website.

Jason says no one goes to his website, so he doesn’t need a new one. Really? Jason I love you, but no one goes to your current website because it is ghastly and it isn’t optimized for search engines, visitors, or anything else. And let us not forget you are ashamed of it, so you don’t even tell anyone it exists. Jason doesn’t know the potential results a new website could bring, because he is living in 1975. A time when half of America didn’t use the internet to research and buy things. Just for the record, he is only 36 and he should not be stuck in 1975. I could prove to him that real ROI is possible, but to do that I’d have to put down my beer and have a real heart to heart with him. And quite frankly, he isn’t ready for it yet.

If you are a small business owner, take a moment and look back at the list of comments from my clients. No traffic, no revenue, out of date information, and lack of information are all symptoms of old websites or poorly designed websites.

If you are still reading this blog post, you know in your heart, your website is also bad. It may not be as bad as my friend Jason’s website, but you know you have problems. So sit back and take a good look at your website, your current marketing efforts, and your overall internet marketing presence. After doing so, you can tell me what you don’t like about yourself and I can tell you what I can do to help.

If you’re on Twitter, feel free to drop me a tweet with your thoughts at @WebSavvyMrkting.

A lot of small business owners launch their website with the simple goal of using the site as an information portal and a mechanism to talk about their company. It is basic human nature to be egocentric. The problem with this methodology is that it generic. Simply talking about yourself isn’t a differentiator for your website, product, or service offering. It doesn’t compel your website visitor to take action.

No matter what the search criteria is, a typical internet user can visit hundreds, no millions, of websites that all present the same type of information. Users are numb to this approach and their average time on a page supports that they are inundated with bland web copy. By following the same route as the masses, you lack the ability to grab anyone’s attention. Because I believe each and every website should stand out and grab attention, I’m a huge fan of presenting your offering via a mix of problems, solutions, and requests for action.

The Solutions for Marketers and Small Business Owners

In a recent blog post titled A Box for Every Website Visitor, I discussed segmenting your website visitors into personas or categories and then documenting each persona’s pain points or needs. That, my friends, is only the first few steps in my master plan of website design. In the next step, we must move onto brainstorming how your product or services offer a solution to each personas’ individual needs.

If you are a divorce lawyer, quantifying a persona’s needs is fairly simple. If you are a B2B company and you sell complex products, your task is a bit more difficult. That being said, this step in my web design process is still difficult for both the lawyer and the B2B marketer. Most B2B companies have an internal marketing team who is well aware of each persona’s needs. Generally they can articulate and document needs by a given persona if asked. The attorney on the other hand, doesn’t have to segregate his target market, but he lacks a pool of marketing professionals. Thus this task is difficult even though his offering is fairly straightforward.

So what’s the B2B marketer and lawyer to do? Both should create a matrix similar to the example I provide below. By forcing yourself (or team) or document personas, pain points, solution, and call to actions, you begin to formulate your future website map on paper.

Planning Your Website Based on Individual Personas

The Service Offering

Let’s dig deeper into a sample website design for a law firm. After populating the above table, the lawyer now has a clearer image of what information to present. Now he needs to consider how to present this information.

• If the attorney’s target is family law for women, he needs to immediately connect with the website visitor on the home page via familiar images and verbiage. One would imagine the images would include women so that a female visitor would immediately see the website in question provides services to women like herself.
• Once the website visitor has been “interrupted” with a graphic, the attorney can present compelling text to encourage the woman to click to a page that will provide further information about her specific pain point. We will assume our female visitor is already divorced and needs a post judgment modification of child custody, financial support, or parenting time.
• So assuming there was text on the home page to quickly illustrate this is an area of expertise and it had proper navigation options, we will also assume the woman clicks the correct link and moves to a page dedicated to this topic.
• Once on this keyword focused page, the website copy should quickly provide a synopsis of her problems and then provide the solution (or services) which will help provide resolution for her.  In this specific case it would be modifications to her existing child custody or support ruling.
• Finally, after presenting the solution, the page copy should offer an appropriate call to action that will encourage the woman to immediately perform an act. In this case, I would imagine it would be to call the law firm for a consultation.

Assuming the law firm has done a quality job in it’s assignment, the website visitor should take action or bookmark the website for further follow up.

The Call to Action and Close

So how do you know if your current website manages this process correctly? Visit Google Analytics and view your inbound traffic by keyword, the pages visitors migrate to, and the pages of exit.

In our above example, we would view inbound traffic for “child support modifications” and review the path the visitors take. If you received ten visitors for this term and they never move beyond the home page or a keyword specific page, you know you have a problem. You – the lawyer – need to take your own action and you need to consider redesigning your website.

It is as simple as: Persona Identification -> Articulate Needs -> Identify Solution by Needs -> Provide Appropriate Offering -> State Call to Action.

When you break the process down, it is straightforward and very easy to execute.

For example, I know I can pretty much tell my best friend anything and she’ll continue to love me, which is an example of our boundaries and expectations. I know what she is expects from me and what she can give me in return. We have a mutual understanding of respect that has grown over the last decade.

Website visitors, however, do not offer than same continuity. Unlike my best friend, the average visitor gives you about 30 seconds before they make a decision and put your website and company into a box. Your box can quickly become the “expert”, the “clueless”, or worse yet, the “has been”. Website visitors have short attention spans, multitasking lives, and they simply have to much data thrown at them to weed through useless rambling and ill contrived text.

When I sit down with a prospective website design client, I always ask about visitor personas. A visitor persona is simply a box for your website visitors. It helps segregate your web traffic into manageable groups similar to what I do in my personal life. Personas help define your target market and helps web designers formulate a design that direct a more precise marketing message to the various personas.

When a client and I brainstorm website personas I usually ask a lot of questions and before you know it, we have our personas. By default, personas vary greatly between B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to consumer) companies. A B2C company will have personas that include characteristics like gender, age, education level, or geography. A B2B company will have personas that include characteristics like industry, management level, and organizational department. Regardless of B2B or B2C segmentation, defining a website’s visitor personas will help place prospective users in a box.

Why would a web designer or company want to segregate their web traffic into boxes? So the marketing message can be tailored to each persona or group of visitors. Once you have your personas defined, you can create unique messaging targeted to those personas, you can better articulate your offering, and thus convert more web traffic.

Once you’ve defined your personas, put yourself into the box. Think about why your visitor might land on your home page, what might they be looking for, and what might they need to hear to encourage them to take action.

Two Very Different Website Persona Examples

• B2B Example – Over the years I’ve worked with a lot of B2B technology companies. There personas many times get defined into boxes that include IT, finance, users, and the c-level team. I don’t care what service or product you offer, those four groups digest and respond to information differently. They also have very different “pain points” or needs. Different pain points mean completely different marketing messages.
• B2C Example – Since I’m a technomommy, my B2C example would be cereal. General Mills has placed their target market into boxes. There is the kid box and the mom box. Kids want to hear tasty and see colors and chocolate. Moms want to hear nutrition and see grams of sugar and see value. Both are your demographic and both have to be targeted from a marketing prospective. Let me just say, I’m certainly not buying Lucky Charms for myself, which proves the five year is a clearly defined persona.

Figuring out your website personas and placing them in their boxes is the hard part. Once you do this, their needs and their wants begin to quickly materialize.

I so strongly believe in website personas, I will not even consider the aesthetics of a new website until I do a deep dive into your marketing requirements. If I don’t know who we target or how many boxes we will have to satisfy, I can’t begin to think of possible web design options. It just isn’t possible.

So now that you know about personas, take a step back and look at your current website. Do you have them and do they convey the right marketing message? Unlike my best friend, your website visitors are not forgiving and they won’t give you a decade to win them over.

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.

She wanted a cute blog with minimal website functionality and that isn’t my strength. I’m a B2B or B2C girl who likes to work with small businesses and not so much individual bloggers. I wasn’t a good fit for her and we both knew it. While I did coach her along the website design process, she did pretty good all on her own. She found a great graphic artist who created an awesome WordPress design for her. I didn’t agree with everything he did, but I do think he answered her unique needs and she has a WordPress design that is perfectly matched to her needs.

This experience with my sister reminded me that different websites and blogs need different talent sets and while we web designers may want to be everything to everyone, we simply cannot do it. We have limits, areas of expertise, and a niche within which we fit. We have to acknowledge these limitations and strengths both for our future clients and ourselves. I didn’t fully understand this when I launched my internet marketing firm, but I do now.

So what should you look for when hiring a website designer? While this will vary based on your individual needs, there are fifteen criteria and/or questions that I consider fairly universal to the process of selecting a website designer. This may not be all-inclusive, but it is a great starting point for locating and interviewing a consultants or design firms.

Fifteen Must Ask Questions for Your Future Website Designer

1. What CMS packaged do you use? Is it open source or proprietary? If you don’t know the definitions of those two terms, research them and you’ll thank me later. Open source means the website design software it is widely available, while proprietary means it is solely used by the website designer. Proprietary would also mean the website designer probably wrote it himself and the website itself is HTML based. What doesn’t this mean to you? Open source means you are free to update and select website designers at your leisure. Proprietary means you are tied to your website designer for life. The only CMS I use it WordPress, because I feel clients should be able to come and go as they please and not based on my needs or wants.
2. Can your design portfolio meet my esthetic needs? Remember my sister who wanted a cute farm blog? She needed a graphic designer, not an internet marketing expert. Take a look at my WordPress portfolio. Do you see anything cute? Nope, you see business and branding. Now you understand why we didn’t bond over her WordPress design project. If you are looking for a new website designer, review the potential designer’s portfolio well before you reach out to them for conversation. You’ll save both of you a lot of time and frustration.
3. Do you adhere to web design best practices? This may seem silly, but not every web designer understands best practices. Usability is still huge issue with even the best graphic designers. My sister asked me if she should add a “key to help explain her social icons” and my response was “any website that requires a key or tutorial is not based on solid design or best practices” then I told her to change the icons. Cute is great, but functionality and usability trump cute any day of the week.
4. As a web designer, how knowledgeable are you with organic search engine optimization? If you think you can worry about SEO after design, think again. Strong search engine optimization begins with website design and the architecture of your website or blog. Rush ahead with design without thinking about SEO and you’ll regret it long-term. I won’t even start designing a new WordPress website without first having a full understanding of a client’s marketing needs and SEO objectives.
5. Do you use social media and do you feel it is important? Don’t skip this question, because social media is not going away anytime soon. In fact, it is growing at amazing rates of user adoption. Facebook, Twitter, and locally focused websites like Foursquare are taking over the internet and they are powerhouses of traffic and engagement. A new website should embrace social media and encourage engagement. Your new website designer should be active on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. If they aren’t, then you ask yourself why and if they can really serve your needs.
6. What exactly are your project deliverables? Can they meet my individual needs? Let me return to my sister. She hired a graphic designer and he delivered. She didn’t hire a website developer. She got exactly what she paid for, which was a beautiful WordPress website design. She didn’t get hosting set up, organic SEO, page build out, WordPress plugin set up, Google Analytics integration, an XML sitemap, a robot.txt file, or even submission to the search engines. She didn’t pay for it. She also didn’t ask for it. She’s a newbie so she didn’t really know she needed all of that other “stuff” and she has me to help coach her along. But not everyone has a free website designer on call, so decide what you need and make sure your potential website designer can deliver it. Your new website won’t produce results if you can’t figure out how to get your content uploaded or submit your finished site to search engines.
7. What is the full scope of your services offering? This is a big one, because similar to project deliverables, designer capabilities are as diverse as clients’ needs. If you need copywriting assistance, organic SEO, or even assistance with public relations, you typically won’t get this from a graphic designer. My sister didn’t need any of these, so a graphic designer was perfect for her. Most small businesses need a full service design house or an experienced internet marketer. They lack in house marketing resources and need someone to provide a complete website development project with the option for post-launch support. Know your own needs and make sure you pick a firm that meets those needs in both the short-term and long-term.
8. How would you categorize your project management skills and what tools do you use to manage website design project? What? Isn’t it the client’s job to manage the website project? Honestly, most clients don’t comprehend all of the steps necessary to launch so expecting them to manage unknown deliverables is unrealistic. I provide prospects with a written project plan and then once they sign on as clients I transfer this plan to Basecamp so we can jointly manage the project electronically. I learned this the hard way unfortunately. One of my first clients was classic for expecting me to write content, locate images, and do way more than our contract called for when signed. He lied about project volume and frequently told me he did not know “it” was his responsibility. I learned my lesson and now I list of tasks and assignments in Basecamp and assign owners so there is no room for misunderstandings. This helps me stay organized and it helps my clients see the immense list of to do items that need to be accomplished to launch successfully. It keeps us both on task and on target.
9. Are you comfortable with my brand and do you understand my marketing message? This is important to small businesses because they frequently lack an in-house marketing team. If there in not a full-time marketer to monitor the brand and message, someone needs to do it and it falls on the web designer. Your website fails if it doesn’t grab your audience and convert them into your desired outcome. No messaging and no conversion equals failure. While industry experience is not always necessary, if you have a sophisticated product or service, then it is needed. I have had multiple clients within the ERP industry because I was in the ERP industry for eight years. I not only was a marketer for an ERP software developer, at other times I demonstrated the product, sold the software, and trained users on it. I got the concept of ERP and I understood CIO-speak and selling to the C-level decision maker. While this isn’t important to every industry, it is to the ERP industry and you need to get C-level selling to help craft out an effective website that can sell a product the size of an ERP system. If you fall within this type of niche, then you need to thoroughly interview your future web designer to make sure they “get it”. If they don’t, it isn’t their fault. Just keep looking until you do find someone who gets your industry and your product or service offering.
10. Do you think we have a good rapport with each other? Yes, I’m asking if you like the designer. I receive calls from people needing websites and they are so opposite of my personality I don’t even quote the opportunity. I am passionate about internet marketing, I really do know my stuff, and I will tell you when I think you are off base and headed down the wrong path. If you don’t like this approach and simply want your designer to unconditionally agree with you, then I am not the right website designer for you. Run, run away from me quickly. On the other hand, you may find me refreshing and you may like my passion and conviction. If that is the case, we are destined for a long-term and successful relationship.
11. What is your availability? Are you accepting new website design projects? Some of us are really good at what we do and we fill up for months. Many times throughout the year I’m at capacity and I feel as though my head may spin off. Other times I’m not and I’m open to new projects and/or consultations. If you’ve found someone of quality, don’t assume their schedule is wide open and they can start immediately and devote 40 hours a week to you. It most likely won’t happen. Ask your potential designer for a possible start date and how long the project will take to go-live. If they cannot meet your timing constraints, thank them for their honesty and keep looking.
12. Are your terms and requirements flexible? I don’t mean yoga flexible, I mean “go with the flow” and gets the idea that life and business happens. I have a new client who had a family emergency come up and he dropped off the face off the earth in mid-December. I told Steve I understood and we will pick back up once he gets his mother-in-law back on the road to recovery. He has a business to run and his mother-in-law just took the free time that was slated for website launch. I get this and I also get that I am not his top priority. I may nag at you, but I understand you need to keep your business running even if I’m waiting on content. I get you may need to reschedule our appointment three times due to your client needs. I don’t like it, but I get it and I’ll work around it. All I ask is for you to allow the same should my five-year-old son come down with the bubonic plague.
13. Can you work within my budget? This is a big one. My sister’s graphic designer was contracted at a fourth of my standard rate. I didn’t understand how he could do this until I realized our deliverables were completely different. In life you get what you pay for and website designers fit within this theory. Reduced budget means reduced deliverables or reduced abilities. You cannot expect the best of the best on a shoestring budget, so be realistic and find someone who meets your financial constraints. WordPress consultants range from $50 to $300 per hour and WordPress websites can range from $500 to $50,000. If you only need a $500 website, then great, but know you are getting a $500 website. With most things you purchase, it is relative. My pricing falls into that middle of the road category of $100 per hour and websites ranging from $3,000 to $15,000. I believe my rates match my skill set and my target market. While I’ve given free websites to nonprofits, I don’t discount and I don’t believe in cost creep. If you can’t afford me, I understand and I believe you should continue to look until you find a consultant that can work within your budget.
14. Can you provide references? While many of my clients come from referrals and I’m happy to provide clients to speak with prior to signing contracts. Not every website designer can or will do this for prospects. This is especially true if they are just starting out in website design. If the potential website designer was referred to you by a trusted advisor, you really don’t need additional references. If you randomly found the designer via the internet, you should validate their abilities with a reference prior to signing contracts. In doing so, please be respectful to your potential designer and their clients. Don’t ask for a reference unless the designer is your chosen partner. In my case, most of my clients would be C-level executives who are busy, so I only provide their name to prospects if needed. Their time is valuable and the reference is a gift so I try my best not to abuse it.
15. Do you want or can you support long-term relationships and website support? I firmly believe long-term relationships are a privilege and not a right. I need to earn your business and in many cases I want to earn your business for the long-term. That being the case, not everyone wants or needs me long-term and this is okay too. Hire me on retainer, by project, or even hourly. I don’t care, because I’m fairly flexible as long as me calendar has availability. But I am not every web designer. Not every graphic designer or website consultant wants or can support long-term clients. If you need support after launch, make sure you’ve asked your future website designer if they can or want to manage you as a client moving forward.

Web designers come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and flavors and we are definitely not a one size fits all type of offering. Don’t assume a potential web designer is good or bad until you can compare his or her skill set to your unique needs. What may be a poor designer for you, may be an exceptional designer for someone else.

Like I said, this list of qualification questions is my list and Rebecca’s view of the world. Your list may differ some and you may even add another fifteen questions or criteria onto mine. But that’s okay, because you are thinking about what is important to you and you are providing yourself with selection criteria that will help you narrow your search field. You now have a list of questions that will help you pick a website designer that is a good fit for you and your website project. In the end, that’s what matters most.

Social media is about engaging with your audience, increasing brand awareness, and providing value to the visitors who land upon your Facebook page or Twitter profile. Notice I started with the concept of engagement, because at the core of social media is communication. Social media is about communicating with your audience in a two-way dialogue and utilizing that communication to help meet your marketing objectives.

When I hear people or companies brag about their high number of Facebook likes or Twitter followers my mind wonders back to high school homecoming and the quest to be crowned the queen. While I had no interest in becoming homecoming queen, becoming the reining queen of Facebook would be kind of cool. But I digress. We are grown ups and this isn’t about counting votes and proving to the world that you are the most popular Facebook page within your niche. It is about good old fashion marketing delivered over the world wide web.

I am on my social media soapbox because I am tired of witnessing consultants trick companies into thinking a growth in Facebook likes or Twitter followers is success. I am annoyed because the unsuspecting small business owner will believe it and will pay money for little value and virtual no return. I am on my soapbox, because I want to help small businesses and provide tangible value.  I am angry because uneducated consultants are not just providing minimal value to small businesses, they are giving the rest of us a bad name and turning some small business owners away from social media.

I’m upset because it boils down to some simple math and a look at a few real world Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Sample Facebook Metrics for B2B and B2C Pages

One might look at website #6 and believe this brand is doing an exceptional job in their Facebook effort. After all, they have the most page likes, so they must be doing something right. Ah, no. Compare the percentages for B2B website # 1 and B2C website #6. The B2B brand is a lot more social media savvy than the B2C brand. While the number of likes for the B2C website is highest amongst the sample, the active Facebook page users and inbound website traffic from Facebook is very low. The B2B website has a much lower number of Facebook likes, yet has a much higher level of engagement both on Facebook and in traffic to their actual website.  Website # 1 is doing a better job because the page provides value or actual content.  Website # 6 just seeks out people to like it, but never actually puts anything on the page itself.

Sample Twitter Metrics for B2B and B2C Pages

Now look at the same two websites on Twitter. Both websites have a respectable number of Twitter followers, yet neither have an exceptionally high amount of traffic migrating from Twitter over to their actual website. I could go further into this data by providing mentions, tweet volume, and such, but I think I’m making my point and I don’t want to bore anyone to death.

What Do All the Social Media Numbers Really Mean?

This data can be diced and sliced in a variety of ways, but knowing these accounts like I do, I can conclude a lot just from the basic data I assembled above.

1. First and foremost, the number of Facebook likes and Twitter followers does not equal success.
2. Real social media success is more about engagement and less about the popularity contest.
3. If you don’t provide content in your social media efforts, you’re going to struggle providing value.  If someone visits a Facebook page that looks exactly like it did five months ago, the chances are they won’t come back and they won’t look further at you or your brand.
4. Look beyond the numbers within your actual social media account. Look at tangible conversions to new leads, new clients, and repeat customer purchases or interactions.
5. Before you engage in a social media campaign or with an internet marketing consultant, know what equates success. Don’t go by their promise to increase your followers of fans, because it means little if no one engages with your brand.
6. Use tools like Google Analytics to provide tangible metrics on website referrals, duration or depth of visit, goals, and conversions to see if your social media activity is making a difference and providing value.
7. You your own financials to see if social media is helping or hurting your bottom line.
8. Don’t listen to or accept promises that seem to good to be true. They probably are much better in theory than in real life. I can increase your Facebook likes by 1,000 by giving someone on Fivver.com $5. This won’t mean anything unless it converts to something tangible for your brand.
9. Don’t just focus on the short-term high of a promotion, event, or download.  I believe the B2C sector does this in many cases.  The B2C sector needs to take notice of their B2B counterparts who pay more attention to getting the audience back to their website to provide more value than just the one snippet in their status update or tweet.
10. Social media is an upward battle that doesn’t just materialize into ultimate success overnight. An audience capable of delivering ROI will take time to build.
11. If you’ve hired a social media consultant, validate their success yourself and don’t just take their canned reports or updates as success.
12. Review your new social media audience to validate it against your target demographics. Facebook has excellent reports for viewing geography, age, etc. If you sell medical products to the geriatric set in Michigan, 20,000 teenagers in India are not really going to bring social media ROI.
13. Not everyone is good at social media.  If you are concerned about your ability, hire an expert.  Just do so wisely.
14. You can’t ignore social media.  As much as I’m tired of hearing about the likes of Groupon, I know the company and their deals are here to stay.  Twitter and Facebook are also here to stay, so get used to it and embrace it.
15. Integrate social media with your website to both connect long-term with your visitors and to allow them to share your promote your content to their own network.  Good content will bring likes and followers.

If you haven’t yet engaged in social media, now is the time.  Just remember not every internet marketing consultant is legit, honest, or even educated enough to provide social media marketing. If you are outsourcing your social media, then make sure you pick someone who truly understands traditional marketing efforts, your messaging, your industry, and what you consider to be social media success.

Article Resources:

• Web Savvy Marketing on Facebook
• Web Savvy Marketing on Twitter

I just finished a call with a client, which is what led me to write this blog entry. On the call, we were discussing page content for his new website. Without realizing it, I found myself saying “Your website content is like a trade show. You have one minute to make an impression and keep a prospect’s attention. What do you say as you shake someone’s hand and make introductions?” His response was that his trade show pitch wasn’t at all close to what he wrote for the website page that discusses that same topic.

The reason I came to this illustration is that this client is from a B2B technology company. The writer of the content speaks at an educated level and tends to go into significant depth on the “how” when writing content. In actuality, he simply needs to discuss the “what” and more importantly, the “what’s in it for me”. He’s absolutely great at demonstrating his product and is very good at explaining the technology behind his offering, but the web page isn’t a demonstration. You simply are not afforded that much time. It is a handshake or an introduction.

My ten-year-old daughter is, in some ways, like my client. I call her the “clock builder”. If I ask her the time, she doesn’t just give me the time. She wants to build me the entire clock to help illustrate how she reached the point of knowing the time. I love her to death, but she is way too much like me. We are clock builders by nature, which is good if you are a clock builder but not so great if you are writing content for a basic web page.

Back in my early twenties a sales manager at my first job said “Rebecca why can’t you just tell me the time? Why do you always have to build me the clock?” He was right. Many years later I still want to build everyone the clock. I have to make a conscious effort to simply just tell them the time. I’ve learned to adjust my clock building tendencies when I’m writing content for a website, although I still struggle with building the clock for my husband or friends.

The pages of your website only give you enough time with your visitor that is equivalent to a handshake. They are brief moments that allow you to connect with the visitor’s needs or wants. You must provide enough in depth verbiage to offer value, but not so deep of content that you make the visitor feel like they just fell into a graduate level course at Harvard.

My client is a smart man and not a clock builder. I suspect he will have a much easier time adjusting than I did years ago.

When I originally accepted this project, I could see Google had indexed about 1,000 pages within his domain.  While it would take some time to migrate and optimize this many pages, I was up for the challenge.  The goal is to give him a more SEO friendly site that he can maintain himself in WordPress. If that meant throwing in some plugins and optimizing 1,000 pages, so be it.

Last week I reviewed his Google Analytics reports, dug deeper into his content pages, and investigated his existing website’s structure.  Through Google Analytics I could see he didn’t have 1,000 pages, he had about 10,000 pages.  Why were they not showing up in Google’s index?  Well I figured this out a bit later as I reviewed page by page content on his existing website.  Of these 10,000 pages, about 3,000 or so are the exact same pages.  Okay, three different pages, but applied to 1,000 different products.  You may be asking yourself so what and thinking I am a drama queen.  To me, the drama queen, all I saw was a big red flag waving with a large Google logo hovering overheard.  This was trouble with a capital T.

These 3,000 plus pages represent duplicate content to Google.  Why would Google cloud their index with 3,000 pages of the exact same content?  Google won’t do it.  It would simply corrode the overall search results, which would frustrate Google users, so Google is not going to do it.  Google will also most likely penalize the overall site for this mass amount of duplicated content.

I have already told my client I will not migrate this duplicate content.  The SEO consultant in me cannot do it, because I know it is wrong.  The website designer in me won’t do it, because I know it will degrade the user experience as well.  So I get to now explain this to my client and hope he understands that my intentions are good.

Now I will return to his website, his Google Analytics reports, and to the broken sitemaps to see what else lurks beneath the covers of this existing website.  I believe my 3,000 pages of duplicate content is only the tip of the iceberg and I am afraid the Titanic is getting ready to go down.

Thankfully, I was wrong.  WordPress liberated me and it has liberated many website designers and business owners around the world.  It is liberating because it is free and it is easy enough for normal – non website designers – people to use.  WordPress is robust enough to create elaborate websites, while simple enough an in-house marketing person or business owner to add content and update.

A case in point is a client that just launched a WordPress website.  The client is an ERP consulting company based out of Denver, Colorado.  More importantly, the client had a limited website needed to upgrade because the company is rapidly growing.  I proposed WordPress and the client agreed, then they jumped fully into design mode with me as we added plug-in upon plug-in to do such things as automated imports of news feeds, polls, quizzes, videos, events, live chat, and on and on.  As a WordPress website designer I love this enthusiasm.  It is great to offer a suggestion that your client not only likes, but that they build upon with their own ideas.

At the end of this project my client has a website that is robust, functional, and has solid growth potential.  They can maintain it internally or hire a million different WordPress experts around the world to jump in at anytime.  They are liberated and a little open source package called WordPress made this liberation possible.

The client and their transformation reminds me of a saying my Grandmother always said.

Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today.  Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime.

A normal website is a fish, but WordPress is the lesson of fishing.