SEO Training

Online Dating is becoming ever more popular in Ireland.  There are absolute parallels between those seeking partners online and those who are potential customers for your business.

They are all looking for something that attracts them.  Think of an online dating site as a shop.  Some of the products have pictures (and according to Jill McGrath over at MaybeFriends.com, these are the ones that get most attention).  If you are looking for a potential dating partner online, then you are most likely to click on a picture of somebody who is attractive and has a nice picture.  Translate that back to your business.  What can you learn from that?  It’s simple.  Good product pictures are essential to boost sales of that item.  I have seen far too many sites that use pictures they have taken themselves under bad lighting conditions.  Even the most lovely packaging is going to look shoddy if the lighting is bad and the background is not clean.  Get pictures from the manufacturer, or invest in hiring a photographer for product shots.

Same product, but if you were buying speakers which picture would you click on? The professional photograph or the one I took using my mobile phone on my desk?

What about if you sell a service rather than products?  Pictures are still important.  In fact, the links between online dating and selling your business can be even closer here.  People are attracted to people.  Getting stock images of attractive people to associate with your product makes sense, and costs practically nothing.

Back to our online dating analogy.  Once a hopeful browser has clicked on somebody they like the look of, what comes next?  (slow down, slow down).  Next comes finding out more about that person.  This is where text comes in.  In the case of dating, this is the text that somebody writes about themselves as a profile.  It is where the person has an opportunity to sell themselves as a person to a potential partner.  There are two ways in which this can be approached.  You can just put in your information, or you can actively sell yourself.  Indulge me for a moment while I give an example:

Bare Information: My friends say I am attractive.  I am easygoing, have a good sense of humour and like nights out and nights in too.

Selling: Thanks for clicking on my picture!  I’m a passionate about music, and love my nights out clubbing or going to gigs.  When it comes to romantic nights in, I like to cook with soft music playing in the background , and if it all goes wrong I know some good take-aways!

I think the difference is fairly obvious there, and the same goes for products / services…..

Bare information: Desktop speakers with volume and tone controls

Selling: Discreet desktop speakers that provide surprisingly good sound quality worthy of much higher end speakers.

Of course, from an SEO perspective, both contain the keywords “desktop speakers”.  Selling does not mean forgetting your SEO… it is about increasing conversions from visitors to sales.

Here is the difference between online dating and selling products or services: If you are on a dating site, and you have not put up a picture, and your profile does not sell you, it is not necessarily the end of the road.  You can still contact people, and possibly overcome the bad first impression you gave.  If you are selling a product, that’s it… you’re out of luck.  It is sale or no-sale time, and if you have not done it already now, you are never going to sell to that customer.

Just as dating is about getting to know someone, learn to trust them and developing a bond, before the sale goes through of your product online, you will probably need to earn some trust too.

If you are getting to know somebody you like and they seem to be holding back things, then you are going to be wary of them.  Likewise, if a customer cannot find your contact information, privacy policy, returns policy, registered business number or delivery information, they are less likely to trust your site.

First impressions last.  If you meet somebody you have met online, then how they present themselves on that first date will form a lasting impression. the same goes for your website.  If it looks even slightly less than professional then that is the lasting impression you are giving of your business.

This may all seem a bit far away from SEO training, but SEO and Online Marketing are linked.  There is no point having a site that ranks well if it does not appeal to your target audience.  Your customers come first. Those who forget this in the pursuit of SEO alone run the risk of becoming the internet equivalent of the old cat lady! (I’m not sure exactly what that is – suggestions in comments please).

So you own a small business.  You probably have much larger competitors and gaining a foothold seems like a huge uphill battle.   Rejoice – the internet is here.

Competing as a small business can feel like an uphill battle, but the internet is the great leveler

The internet is the great leveler.  Contrary to the opinion of several women I know. . . .size does not matter.  What matters is how well you use the (largely free) resources at your disposal. A SMF can punch way beyond its weight online, helped by the fact that budgets are nothing like as large as those needed for traditional media.

Small business’ tend to be run by experts in their fields.  If you did not have unique selling points you would not be in business.  Those unique selling points may be superior service or a superior quality product.  You know it, you believe in it.  How do you get the world to sit up and take notice?

SEO is essential.  If your website cannot be found you will not gain any attention.  Further more, it is important that your website reflects your core values.  People buy from people.  This is still true on the internet.  You must make a personal connection.  A shoddy website will have all your hard earned visitors leaving as quickly as they arrived.

There is a temptation to use cheap web publishing services.

I am all for value, but not at the expense of professionalism.  Your website MUST reflect your business.

SEO is not rocket science.

A small amount of SEO training will get you a long way.  This is particularly true in the Irish market where there is far less competition.  A company with 3 employees can compete with a company with 300 employees with a little time and effort.

My small business does not have the budget for online services.

Here is where you have to ascertain how useful internet traffic can be to your business.  Your budget for advertising in traditional media is spent on what works for you.  The same rules apply to the internet.  There must be a return on investment.  The beauty of the internet is that shoestring budgets are often more than acceptable.  It all depends on the amount of time you and your staff can dedicate to promoting your business.  I have got business’ off the ground for under €3k.  That includes a SEO friendly website, online marketing training and a solid foundation in SEO theory and practice.  More than that, the full amount does not have to be paid up-front.

We at webshed believe in training for small business.  We can show you how to make the internet work for you.  This gives you control and reduces costly errors.

Small business owners are passionate about their companies.  This makes small business’ a joy to work with.  Enthusiasm is infectious.

Make an emotional connection with your customers . . . but overdoing it could get complicated!

SEO training rarely incorporates the word emotional.  It should.  Your website is your shop window online.  It is where you sell your products and services.  It is where you market your ideas to a much larger audience than your actual shop (if you have one).

So how does the word emotional fit with SEO?  SEO is search engine optimisation.  It is making your website accessible for robots.  Not humans.  It works too.  Get it right and you will soon gain traffic through increased search engine rankings.  SEO is cold though.  It is concerned with keyword ratios, link text, and other non-human-friendly terms.

If you want to sell to search engines then SEO is for you.

If however you want to sell to a real live human being you are going to have to make some changes.  You have to reach a human emotionally.  Let me give you an example.  I want to sell SEO training.  I’m good at it and my customers get return on their investment.  Thus my prime keyword for this site is “SEO training”.  How do I write that to attract customers but keep my SEO efforts intact?

• Keyword – SEO training
• Search engine friendly – SEO training
• Customer and SEO friendly – Holistic SEO training – taking the pain out of connecting with your customers.

There are lots of other phrases that appeal to us people on an emotional level:-

• Liberate your website with Holistic SEO training
• Learn to love your website again
• Holistic SEO, Feelin’ good online
• Website Makeover – This time it’s personal

Different to the usual “Get first page on Google” offered by most SEO trainers.  Of course I could use that too.  The point is not to lose sight of who your customers are.  You are connecting with one individual person when they land on your site.  Do you make them feel welcome or do you give them a FAB overview of your products with no feeling for them to connect with?

Web sites tend to be written by technical people.  Thus lots of websites are more like technical manuals than sales brochures.  Get your marketing department involved in your website.  If you do not have a marketing department, at least make sure you are using a web designer that understands marketing and selling.  Most of all make sure they understand people.  Every business is a people business – particularly online, where it is that bit harder to make a personal connection and build loyalty.

Design your Website with SEO in mind. It is childs play really. . . . honest.

Web design and SEO should be symbiotic. After all, there is no point having a wonderful looking site if nobody can find it.  This site, by contrast, has no design whatsoever.  It can however be found.

Am I saying that SEO is more important than Web design?  Not really.  A good web designer will incorporate basic SEO into a site as they build it.  Not having any design (wordpress default style) is not a good thing though.  While the content on this site is good (or at least I try to make it good) a lack of design leads to me losing traffic.  This shows up as my bounce rate which is high enough for me to be embarrassed to print it here.

Of course there are other factors.  My writing style could do with an overhaul most of the time for starters.  There is no getting away from the fact though, that the first impression of this site is that it is unprofessional.  Nothing could be further from the truth in reality, but it is not a warm, inviting, friendly site.

This is not because I am not a warm, friendly or inviting type of person, it is purely down to how the site looks.

SEO will get a site noticed.  It will get visitors.  Keeping those visitors requires a little extra though.  Both Web design and SEO are extremely important.  The reason this site does not have any design is because I wanted to see the effects of bad design. The wordpress theme is not necessarily bad, but it gives an impression of little effort.  It also firmly aligns itself with spam blogs (splogs) by not altering the theme.  This is because the majority of splogs do not bother altering the theme either.

When I change the theme I expect to see a change in my stats.  That will not be for a while yet though.  I am not finished collecting data on the current setup.

For me, SEO is more important than design, but it is a mistake to ignore web design.  Equally it is a mistake to ignore SEO.

Of course to really market your web site online, holistic SEO is the way to go.  Do not look at the web in terms of SEO vs Design, Adwords Vs SEO or Social Media Vs Adwords.  Look at it in terms of a marketing medium and bring in everything.  There is no more cost effective medium for marketing.  Use it to its full potential to sell your business.

In the last post I was discussing PPC budgets.  It is easy to think of PPC as the only thing to be included in online marketing budgets, but that is not giving the full picture.  This site is all about SEO training.  Some think of SEO and PPC as being interchangeable.  They are in reality two quite separate topics.

SEO can be seen as a gamble by companies when compared to PPC

I found some stats the other day about budget spends on SEO/SEM(PPC).  The results were quite startling.  In general, over 85% of an online spend is on PPC ads, most notably Google Adwords.  This leaves less than 15% of the budget allocated to SEO.  In this instance, when I refer to SEO I am talking about organic Search Engine Optimisation.

This doesn’t seem like a big deal until you realise that only 14-16% of clicks on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) are actually on the Pay Per Click ads.

Why are so many companies spending such a high proportion of their online marketing budget on something that only yields 14-16% of return?  Why are they not concentrating on trying to get a larger slice of the 85% or so clicks that are coming from “natural” listings?

The truth is that most companies have tried.  However, only some can be successful, because of the limited number of top positions.  For the sake of the argument, let us assume that success is your site appearing on the first page of results.  Let us factor in normal company politics and in particular the accountants. What is going to happen?

Well firstly, somebody, either from Marketing or from IT is going to mention that some work needs to be done on the companies web presence.  Discussion will take place about what needs to be done.  The answer will be “SEO, and we can try some adwords too”.  The accountants will hear, we need to do some “ghrjldjfsdkhf” and we can try some “alkjwonjaef” too.

It needs to be explained.  SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation.  It’s about getting the website up the ranks of google.  Adwords are online ads, where you only pay for each click – as little as 8 cents.

“OK, how much is SEO? Can’t the IT dept do that?”

Ah, but the truth is they have probably already tried.  They may even have had some success and claimed that it is not possible to do much better because of company size, the level of competition, the sun being in aquarius etc.  Put on the spot the only recourse is to offer that SEO is an expert area that requires dedicated consultants to push the site even further. (quite true really).

“Ok, so how much does a consultant cost?…”

“How much?????? And what results will they give us.”

Here they are going to be told that nobody can actually 100% guarantee results.

Let’s sum up.  You can have a fully budgeted spend on adwords, where you can measure results and ROI with ease, or you can spend what seems like a lot of money on an SEO consultant (compared with 8c per click) and have no guaranteed result.

What has been forgotten is that approximately 85% of your potential clicks are coming from the SEO work… not the adwords campaign.  Further more, once the bulk of your initial SEO work is done, so is the bulk of the expense.  Adwords keep charging as long as you need them.  SEO can be dropped for short periods of time without the same total loss of revenue.

Invest in SEO training and your IT staff can maintain and even improve your rankings on their own without the need for massive ongoing spends.

I am not against PPC.  Budgeting 85% of your online spend on adwords is not actually sound financial sense though.  It is aiming for catching a minnow instead of a tuna fish, and the spend is not exactly different over time either.

If you are spending 85% of your online budget on adwords, then your online marketing budget is wrong!

I've heard of a fire engine, but what is a search engine?

The difference between SEO and SEM is that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation while SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing.

Strictly speaking SEO means targeting just search engines.  It is concerned with getting your site as far up the Google, yahoo and Bing rankings for chosen keywords as possible.  Achieving that is done in many ways.

SEM on the other hand has several meanings in regular use.  Some think of it purely as PPC (pay per click) advertising campaigns.  These are the ads you see on the right of the search results in search engines, and occasionally occupying the top slots.  I like to think of it as much more than that though.

When I think of SEM the word marketing takes priority.  I like to think of Search Engine Marketing as encompassing SEO but taking into account the user experience.

Let me expand on that.  A site may be extremely well optimised from an SEO perspective, ranking well in the major search engines, but that does not mean that the site is a good user experience.

It is a mistake to put SEO ahead of user experience.  I’ll give you an example. The following is SEO optimised text

Car washing by the car washing experts.  At Car Washing Ireland we wash cars all day every day.  When it comes to car washing we are the number one car washing company in Ireland.  If your car needs car washing then you have found the right site.  Contact us and one of our mobile car washing units will be dispatched to you and one of our car washing experts will have your car gleaming.  You will be so impressed with our car washing that you will return to car washing ireland again and again.

Actually, that is terrible SEO.  I have exaggerated it hugely.  The point is that SEO optimised text is not necessarily particularly readable text.  If the quality of English is high, then you use different words or phrases to describe the same thing.  This is at odds with SEO, where you want to repeat your key phrases.

The object is to achieve good legible text that a user will read, while retaining a keyword density that is reasonably high (though not much above 5% of total text).  It would be entirely better for both SEO and the user experience to write the above text with far fewer instances of “Car Washing”.

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is all about S......elling!

SEM is more holistic.  It encompasses good SEO techniques for on page content (but not at the expense of the user experience).  It also covers Social Media as well as PPC advertising and even banner or button advertising.  Search Engine Marketing is about selling your site online.

A lot of SEO’s make the mistake of using the meta description purely to put in keywords.  Same goes for the page title.

In the case of the meta description it is fairly likely that google does not include that text in any meaningful way in its ranking algorithms.  I am not saying that you should not put keywords into the meta description or page title, but use them to better effect.

Better effect means using them to sell.  To stick with our car washing example, The title can be “Car washing Ireland”, the meta description could read “Get your car washed at home or at work.  We come to you.  Discount for online booking”.  No key words.  Just good descriptive text that helps sell the service.

The whole reason for this post was because I am writing about Social Media and somebody asked me “what has social media got to do with SEO training?”.

Well these days you can’t market your website online without at least paying lip service to social media.  And if you know your stuff (or get Social Media Training) then you can really make it work for you in a big way.  Look at what happened with the Susan Boyle clip on You Tube.  She became an overnight, international sensation, from a clip of an audition!  Wow.  That just does not happen with traditional media.

Why do companies invest thousands of euros in SEO training?  It’s all part of their marketing mix.  SEO is marketing.  Therefore, SEO is SEM and SEM includes SEO.  By the way.  I’ve just broken a rule there.  I’ve overused the phrases again (my site may pay for all this bad SEO!).  I was only playing with words, but be careful.  Remember we are dealing with dumb machines (no matter how good the algorithms are).  They do not see a bit of word play, but rather an attempt at keyword stuffing, which can hurt your ranking.

So, SEM is all about selling.  SEO is just about trying to get better ranking on Google et al.

One of these days I’ll learn to write short concise posts, but I hope that I’ve cleared up the difference between SEO and SEM somewhat.

Social Media Training, No sweat required!

Social Media Training?  What do I need that for?  That’s Twitter and other nonsense isn’t it?

If you are in business then you need to learn, and learn before your competitors.  Let me put it in old world terms….

If you open up your newspaper and see your competitors adverts plastered all over the pages, with no reference to your own business you would not be happy.  If you see a competitors advertisement on the television, and you are not advertising on it yourself, you would equally be a little worried.  Then you wake up in the morning and on the way to work notice that the $!@%’s have advertised on billboards too.  Who is going to take more revenue, you or your painful, advertising competitor?

The online world is no different when it comes to exposure equaling success.  Here we have a medium that is in just about every home and workplace in the developed world.  The potential for increasing your exposure is giganenormous!  The competition is, however, fierce.

Ok, so there is a lot of competition, are there any upsides?  Absolutely.  What was your budget for PR and advertising this year?  What if you could reach the same number (or many more people) and all it would cost you is a bit of time, and maybe some outlay on bringing in somebody to train you (which just saves you time and points you in the right direction).

Not convinced of the need?  Lets take a look at what is happening in recruitment right now.  I have chosen recruitment because I happen to be in the thick of it, and recruitment is at the cutting edge of online developments.  First we saw a reduced spend in traditional media like newspapers.  Before the internet took off newspapers are where everybody looked for jobs.  Then came the big job boards.  They made a lot of money, charging for every job posted on them.  Now there is a not so subtle shift occurring once again.   Recruitment Agencies are beginning to use social media and it is being so successful for them that they can afford to drop some of the expensive job boards.  They are saving money and finding the results fantastic.  Obviously this is not true of all of them.  This is where Social Media Training comes in.  You can waste lots of time on social media if you don’t know what you are doing.

So what should you be doing?  In Ireland there are three main sites to focus on.  They are Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin.

In following posts I will explain how they interact with each other, and how to harness them to help your bottom line.

In the mean time, if you want quick guidance and training on SEO and Social Media, drop a comment on this post. Do not forget to leave your email address and a telephone number! (No numbers will be published online)