Do you remember the legendary movie from the 80’s, the Karate Kid?  The other day I was thinking about what I could be for Halloween and came up with the idea of being Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) from the Karate Kid.  I watched a few movie clips on YouTube and I couldn’t help but notice how Mr. Miyagi’s (Pat Morita) training program relates to a fundamentally sound Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy for an organization.

If you can recall from the movie, Mr. Miyagi takes Daniel under his wing and trains him using uncharacteristic techniques such as waxing cars, sanding a deck, painting a fence, and painting a house.  Mr. Miyagi has a fundamental karate mindset that has proven to win and trains Daniel with the long term benefit of being a successful karate fighter.  On the other hand, Daniel’s enemy Johnny was trained by the Cobra Kai Dojo.  The Cobra Kai has a quick win plan to teach their students to punch, kick, and cheat that ultimately fails in the end.

Like Mr. Miyagi’s training program, SEO is invariably a long term process using fundamental factors to determine rank, with time as an element in the calculation.  In a nutshell, this means it’s not plausible to think you can rank #1 in the search engines overnight.  Effective SEO takes time, and shortcuts today may cost you dearly in the long run.

So when it comes to your organization’s SEO strategy, avoid the Cobra Kai gimmicks and offers that will guarantee you overnight success.  Look to the Mr. Miyagi’s of SEO that will provide you with a long lasting benefit for your SEO strategy.

Wax on, Wax off!

Melissa Mackey, Online Marketing Manager at Fluency Media, provides ClickZ with insight in the October 9th article, “Yahoo! Now Filters Ads in Search Results Too.”  The article describes how Yahoo! has now added the ability for a publisher’s ads to be filtered in the search results.

According to Melissa, “I think it limits competition and gives a huge preference to big-name brands like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Buy.com, and the like.  This effectively cuts off the lesser-known advertisers who may have a great product and offer, but lack the household name.”

Melissa Mackey is a veteran PPC marketer that helps clients get maximum ROI from paid search.

Is Your Professional Service Firm’s Website Optimized for Clients to Find You?

Are you in the professional services industry and looking for ways to generate more business?   Have you considered how many of your potential clients might be using the web to search for the services you or your firm can offer?

Whether you are an accountant, architect, lawyer, physician, or other professional, in today’s market, firm owners in professional services are stressing the importance of client development and always looking for their professionals to generate more business.  Let’s face it, the competition pool is getting bigger and one way to get ahead of the competition is to ensure your firm is appearing at the top of the search engine results as more people are turning to the web to search for services.

After working in a large law firm and experiencing a website redesign, I know that one of the most important tasks facing the website development team for producing a great website is the look and feel.  Managing partners analyze the branding, the content, and the layout to make sure the potential client has an enjoyable experience while viewing the website.  This makes perfect sense, but without looking at how clients actually get to your website in the first place, you’re missing the big picture.

Did the potential client type your website name into the address bar that they got from your business card?  Did they do a Google search for your firm’s name?  Did they do a Google search for a firm in your city or did they do a general search for your firm’s particular specialty?  There are countless ways a potential client might get to your website.  The big question is, will your firm be at the top of the search engine results?

Let’s use a simple hypothetical – Company ABC is looking for a trademark lawyer in Chicago to work on the company’s trademark application.  They go to Google and search for “trademark lawyer Chicago.”  They see that XYZ Trademark Firm is the first result on the first page of Google and Company ABC has heard good things about XYZ Trademark Firm, so they click to view XYZ Trademark Firm’s website and eventually set-up an appointment.  If XYZ Trademark Firm had not been at the top of the Google rankings, ABC Company probably would not have viewed their website and wouldn’t have contacted XYZ Trademark Firm.

So how do you get to be at the top of the search engine results?

One major aspect to help with your search engine rankings is through search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the process of making a website more relevant for targeted keyphrases, as well as more accessible to the search engine spiders – search engine programs that read site content.  With increased relevancy and spider-readability, search engines will rank the site more highly in the search results for targeted phrases.

SEO tactics for professional service firms such as effective keyword research, title tag optimization, meta description optimization, and web-friendly content are a few aspects your firm should include during the website redesign process.

Importance of Top Rankings

SEO-Scientist.com conducted a study on the percentage of clicks in connection with the ranking on the first page of Google.  Here are their results:

• 50.9% of users click on the 1^st ranking
• 21.7% of users click on the 2^nd ranking
• 15.1% of users click on the 3^rd ranking

This means that only 12.3% of users are even bothering to click past the top three listings.

As you can see, appearing on the first page of a search engine isn’t always enough.  To capture the majority of search traffic, being in the top three results is key and the further from the top your website appears in a search, the less likely someone is going to click to your website.

With the implementation of a strategic SEO plan, professional service firms will provide considerable value and generate more business by making sure potential clients are viewing the firm’s website first no matter how clients search.

Check out this great article on DM News by Fluency Media’s own Melissa Mackey, where she talks about how paid search can influence your non-search conversions.

http://www.dmnews.com/The-great-influence-of-PPC-on-non-search-conversions/article/146636/?DCMP=EMC-DMN_DigitalInsider

Why Writing for the Web is Important

Writing tactics which work well for conventional print media don’t always translate to the web, for the same reason that what works in a magazine ad probably wouldn’t be the best for TV — the web is simply a different beast. Writing specifically for the web is at the core of optimizing your site content to achieve maximum conversion potential.

People read web pages differently than print

Most users scan content on the web, rather than reading word-for-word as they would a print article.  The majority of a web page’s copy gets skipped — one study shows that users only read a maximum of 28% of page copy. This percentage gets even smaller the more words a page contains.

The web experience is altogether different from that of traditional print — typically, people actively choose how much time they spend where, navigating to content they see as more valuable and away from any content they see as an obstacle to their information retrieval goals.

Writing for the Web: Guidelines

Catering to users’ goals & behavior with your website copy can dramatically increase the usability and conversion potential of your site — and can be a big boost to your Search Engine Optimization efforts.  For web-friendly copy, be sure to:

• Write concisely — cut copy in half, and then some
• Focus on user benefit — Avoid lengthy prose or overly promotional “marketing speak”
• Focus on one idea per paragraph, one theme per page
• Begin with your most important ideas; follow with supporting content
• Use bulleted lists to clean up text
• Use headers & subheaders to organize
• Include informative keywords/phrases within the beginning of each header
• Use hypertext links within copy — link out to resource pages as well as to relevant internal pages as appropriate
• including informative keywords/phrases within hypertext links (do NOT use “click here”)

Web-friendly copy gives you an SEO boost

Everything that works well for web-friendly copy will help your site with SEO, and it’s no coincidence, given that search engines rank sites according to what will be most valuable to users. For example, eliminating unnecessary copy increases keyphrase density on your most important search terms. Search engines also view keywords in headers, bulleted lists, and hyperlink text as more important, as well as those towards the beginning of each element (header, paragraph, page).

Getting started with web-friendly copy

Still not comfortable giving your tried-and-true homepage copy a makeover?  Use Google Website Optimizer to test serving your new, web-friendly copy to a small percentage of your site visitors & see what happens.  Then measure the success of your new copy by looking at metrics such as:

• Bounces
• Average time spent on site (use to calculate maximum % read rates)
• Links to other pages on your site / partner sites
• Conversions & other user actions

Chances are, you’ll be impressed by the results.

Email is unique in that it’s a low cost, high performance channel that can be used to really learn about your database.  By developing an ongoing testing plan, you can collect some valuable behavioral data on your consumers that will inform all of your programs.  (Check out this ClickZ article on using the applying the scientific method to behavioral marketing across all digital channels: http://www.clickz.com/3633553)

Testing means more than a haphazard A/B split every month or two.  It means developing a long term plan and sticking to it.  The good news is that the method has already been developed – it’s the Scientific Method, used by scientists of all kinds the world over. 

Here are the 6 steps to the method, and how to apply them to your email marketing plan: 

1. Make An Observation – Identify the metrics that you want to improve.  Pick one at a time, and start with the one that is the easiest, and will make the most impact.
2. Ask A Question – Determine what elements of your email affect the selected metrics. (i.e. if you’re looking to boost open rates, you might want to take a look at your subject line)
3. Form A Hypothesis – This is where you decide what you’re going to test against your standard.  Don’t enter into this step blindly – do your homework and make an informed guess on what the B version is going to be, and why it should outperform the A version.  Write down your hypothesis. 
4. Conduct an experiment – Run your test, and do it right.  If you’re testing subject lines, then make that the ONLY difference.  Don’t tweak the copy or change the offers or move the CTA.  One thing at a time – that way you’ll have fully attributable results.
5. Evaluate the results – When the numbers start pouring in, pull out that hypothesis you wrote down, and use it to evaluate the data.  Did your B version outperform the standard A version on the metric you were testing?
6. Do it all again – So you found your winner, the better of the two, and have improved your program.  But, there’s something out there that’s even better, that’s going to boost performance even more.  How do you find it?  By continuously repeating the process.