Better Search Results for Larger Websites

May 4th, 2010

Increasing Google Indexed Pages by 50-100 Causes Double-Digit Lead Growth

Our analysis of over 1,400 firms shows a clear positive relationship between pages indexed by Google and the leads a company generates; companies with more indexed pages tend to generate more leads.

To represent the relationship between Google indexed pages and leads, we divided customers evenly into five categories based on number of Google indexed pages. For each of these categories, we graphed the median number of monthly leads. We used median instead of average to lessen the impact of outliers.

Monthly Leads Number pf Pages

Monthly Leads Number pf Pages

The graph above shows the strong positive correlation between the number of Google indexed pages and median leads. More specifically, it reveals that an incremental 50 to 100 indexed pages can cause double-digit lead growth up until customers reach several hundred Google indexed pages. Customers with more than a few hundred indexed pages appear to be in a league of their own as median leads are more than 2x that of the prior category.

Is Company Size a Factor for Growing Indexed Pages?

It might be reasonable to think that only larger firms have sufficient resources to create hundreds of pages that make it into Google’s database. To test this, we calculated customer size mix for each category of indexed pages. Our proxy for customer size is number of employees.

What we found is that size is not a critical factor for achieving significant volumes of Google indexed pages. Size and number of pages are mildly positively correlated, mostly in the extreme categories of Google indexed pages. While HubSpot’s large customers formed the biggest group with 311+ indexed pages in Google, small and medium-sized customers together outnumbered large ones in this category. In addition, small customers formed the largest group with 176 to 310 Google indexed pages.

Company Size and Number of Webpages

Company Size and Number of Webpages

Marketing Takeaways

Marketers are likely to ask: What are techniques for growing the number of Google indexed pages on my site?

  • Build page volume: consider starting a blog to quickly increase number of pages
  • Improve each page’s optimization as per Google’s methodology to maximize chances of having all of your web pages included in the index:
    • On-Page Search Engine Optimization: placing keywords in the right places on web pages such that Google and other search engines know what each page of your web site is about, and what keywords to rank you for
    • Off-Page Search Engine Optimization: building inbound links from reputable sites, thus demonstrating your popularity to search engines

It is interesting to note that the number of inbound links did not have a meaningful relationship with leads. Inbound links did correlate well, however, with unique visitors. This implies that for those interested in generating leads, quality of sites vs. quantity is more important when building inbound links.

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dave@d4bmarketing.com
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Re-designing your website? Basics Checklist.

March 17th, 2010

1. Take the time to set meaningful goals for your website. Is your site meant to generate leads, sales, be informational or all of the above?

Your website has a larger impact your business than ever before, and a redesign should be considered not because you are tired of the design but because your want to increase its value as an essential part of your sales, marketing and business development strategy. Spend time planning the business goals for the website. Is that goal more visitors, leads and customers or is the site to educate and inform customers?  Every decision you make should be focused on improving those goals. With clear goals in mind, you can spend less time worrying about the color of the background, and more time worrying about things that will improve your results.

2. Preserve your assets. “If it ain’t broke don’t…”

There is no shortage of ways a website redesign can have a negative impact. Your existing website has assets that you have built up. These assets help your prospects find your website and help you turn them into leads and customers.  You need to find out what those assets are (great content, keywords you rank for, inbound links to individual pages, conversion tools) and protect them carefully during the redesign. Many “web design experts” get this wrong. They are design experts not Internet marketing experts.

3. Spend resources on great content not unique design.

There are more than a billion pages on the internet. One of them has a design that will work great for your website. Copy it! The design should be good but the content should be great.

4. Create content regularly.

For many marketers, this is the toughest one. Enlist everyone in your company to contribute. Record presentations, update collateral and product docs, video your presentations, trade shows, speaking gigs and of course blog! The search engines like content, the more the better. A larger site, based on the number of pages, will outrank a smaller site in the search engines almost all the time. If you have more content, on average you will have more website visitors and grow your business faster. Tweak existing content to keep it fresh, you don’t always have to create content from scratch, update and leverage older content. So, build a strategy to continue to add more and more content to your website over time.

5. Plan for upfront for SEO

In many cases how the search engines find you or Search Engine Optimization is an afterthought and it should not be. Plan upfront to make your web pages search friendly and carefully research and select your keywords. Build sections around your keywords and remember more pages are better.

6. Include a blog, RSS and Video

Any website redesign should include these basics in the upfront planning of the new site. They are must have items for a successful website and it has never been easier to incorporate these elements. A blog is a great way to create content on an ongoing basis, and to start to converse with your customers and establish you and your company as subject matter experts. RSS allows new content from your website to be automatically pushed out to other websites and people, increasing the reach of your brand.

7. Plan your Landing Pages

Landing pages are the page people are directed to when you want them to take an action such as registering, buying something, signing up for an offer. Designing good landing pages that are clean and direct your visitors to take the desired action is critical; to meeting your goals.

8. Plan for conversion testing.

The key to driving your conversion rate and the number of leads you get from your website over time is to constantly improve the effectiveness of your conversion tools – this usually means your landing pages.  If you build a completely static website and have to go to a consultant or IT person each and every time you want to set up a new landing page or to change an existing page, you might be limiting your ability to quickly experiment and improve.  I am a believer that some sort of system that lets you edit content and build landing pages without having to know coding is a good idea.

7. Monitor, Analyze and Tweak, Tweak Tweak.

We have come full circle.  If the goal was to increase visitors and conversions, then that is the metric we should track.  What does this mean?  It means if the CEO hates the new design, tell her to go pound sand and show her your improved lead conversion metrics.  If your creative director says he loves the new design, ask him to explain why you are now getting fewer leads and why you should not change the website back to the old one.

www.d4bmarketing.com

for a free website evaluation email dave@d4bmarketing.com

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Questions & Comments you Must ask your Web Designer

March 17th, 2010

It is 2010, should your web designer understand how the Search Engines work and the “on-page” elements of a good SEO strategy?

Yes they should, yet many of the designers I work with both directly and indirectly are not at all knowledgeable regarding SEO and ultimately your business goals. Your designers need to completely understand both the high level business goals and tactical goals of a website. In many cases the goal is to complete some call to action: a sale, a phone call, a registration or a download.

If potential customers can not find your site, well then, how are those calls to action going to happen?

Every website should have search engine optimization best practices employed. It should be an absolute pre-requisite of your marketing department and therefore your web design staff. There is no reason not to try to capture as much organic search traffic as possible, is there?

That being said here are a few must ask questions and suggestions for your web designer(s):

  1. What technology is going to be used to design the site? Certain technologies like Flash are not as search engine friendly as others and unless there is a real need to use it, it is unnecessary and should not be used.
  2. Websites need to be search engine friendly by having: a sitemap, strong internal linking from page to page, a robots.txt file to help the search engines navigate the site.
  3. Proper URL naming conventions should be used. Use descriptive terms in your URL’s so someone seeing it knows what you do or are selling
  4. Proper use of the “nofollow” tag to let the engines know not to crawl certain pages of your site that have limited SEO value
  5. You need to provide your designer with the proper meta tags and meta descriptions for each page on the site. Do not use duplicate meta tags and descriptions.
  6. For shopping sites:
  • If you have a category page, for example shoes, then each product within that category should have a separate page to maximize the number of keywords you can optimize on.
  • Split Categories into as many logical pages as possible. Have separate pages for black shoes, white shoes, and boots etc, therefore each can be optimized for those relevant searches and rank highly in the search engine results page.
  • Make sure whatever shopping cart product is used can support descriptive terms and phrases for your products, that can be easily edited.
  • Make sure your shopping cart can support Google Analytics
  • Make sure your shopping cart allows for user defined page titles, and page headers. Some carts force you to use category names and product names as your page titles and headers. This is not good!
  1. Leave room in the footer section of each web page to repeat your page titles as H1 or H2 headers.
  2. Include Google Analytics code in each web page for proper tracking and reporting.
  3. Build flexibility into the design to leave room for changes and growth. Your website is a living thing, think Beta, and it must accommodate regular changes to layout, text, aesthetics and navigation.

If you are not going to use an SEO specialist to help optimize your site, then make sure that search readiness is an important part of your designer’s specification. It is much easier to incorporate a solid search strategy when building a site, then changing the site afterward to accommodate that strategy. Plan up front and have your designer fully involved in the ultimate goals of your website.

Questions: email dave@d4bmarketing.com

www.d4bmarketing.com

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Survey: Inbound Marketing Cost Per Lead Is 60% Lower Than Outbound

February 17th, 2010

So, how can your organization lower its marketing costs by 60%?

Two years of data are clear: Do more  inbound marketing! Yet puzzlingly inbound lead generation seems somewhat neglected as it is generally around 50% of total lead gen spend. Companies continue to throw large budgets at cold calling, email, trade shows and other outbound marketing vehicles in the face of declining returns and increasing costs.

I read many statistics and surveys that indicate more companies are spending money on organic search yet so many of the companies I speak too have not even employed the basic foundations of a solid organic search strategy such as “on page optimization.” Shouldn’t every company’s website be optimized at this point, shouldn’t in be a basic marketing requirement?

HubSpot’s 2010 State of Inbound Marketing report, being released today, shows that Inbound-dominated organizations average 60% lower cost per lead than outbound-dominated organizations!

cost per lead

The report is based on a survey of 231 people involved with or familiar with their business’ marketing strategy. Hubspot asked them to provide their average cost per lead, then compared the cost-per-lead for organizations that focus on inbound marketing (Social media, blogs, PPC, SEO) to the cost per lead for organization that focus on outbound marketing (direct mail, telemarketing, trade shows).

This year’s cost-per-lead results are remarkably consistent with the 61% lower cost per lead that Hubspot found a year ago when we conducted the same survey.

This Survey highlights the need for every company to have a cohesive inbound marketing strategy and that having SEO, Blogging and other Social Media marketing channels fully deployed with adequate respources is a must as important as your inside sales force.

Contact us anytime to discuss: dave@d4bmarketing.com 917-355-5953

or visit http://www.d4bmarketing.com

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How to Choose High-Yield Keywords for Software Company Lead Generation

February 9th, 2010

Many software companies today are not employing best practices regarding SEO, and in my opinion, are leaving some of the most qualified and cost effective leads on the table. There are obviously many facets to SEO; I would like to cover a topic/tactic known as Keyword Selection which I have deployed successfully at two software companies. The result was that each company saw organic search traffic grow more than 45% in a short period of time, and have seen conversion rates in excess of almost 6% on that traffic (conversions in both cases meant registering for a trial product).

Companies tend to gloss over keyword selection with an,” I know the keywords for my business. I don’t need to spend a lot of time on this.” An extensive and thoroughly researched keyword list will result in Google indexing more of your keywords, better search page results, and increased traffic to your website, and should be the foundational basis for a cohesive SEO strategy. For software companies that sell technical products such as developer tools, infrastructure software, and virtualization tools, keyword selection can be of paramount importance to a productive SEO strategy.

Here are a few essential questions and thoughts to consider during the keyword selection process:

1)      Are you putting yourself in the shoes of your potential customer and the search terms they, not you, would use when searching for the goods or service you provide? You might call what your product does “Business Transaction Management,” but does your potential clients refer to it by the same name? Is that the term your users are searching on, or one that Gartner is looking to propagate?

2)      Technical users frequently search on technical phrases such as error messages and terms that contain how-to and download. They also search for very specific issues, i.e., “VMware IO Problems.” To increase traffic you need to create optimized pages on your website for error messages and specific deep-dive problems your product solves.

3)      Use the Google Keyword Tool and Google’s “searches related to” suggestions on the bottom of most search pages to research keywords. Google’s Keyword Tool enables you to view search volumes and competition for terms, and will help you discover research and select deep-dive search terms.

4)      Dig deep & assess your competition. Get creative and think beyond the obvious broad keywords. Targeted keywords lead to more qualified prospects, and pick keywords where you can win. If IBM and HP dominate a certain keyword, you likely can not win, so think about derivatives of the broader terms that the behemoths go after.

Case Study

D4B Marketing did a SEO project for an Open Source Java Tools vendor whose target audience was Java developers. At first the company had tried optimizing the website for the broad terms that generated massive search volumes such as Java, Java Development Tools, and Open Source Java. They quickly realized that they could not win (a win being on the first page of the Google search results page) against the likes of IBM, Sun and HP, whose deep content, well-established sites, and massive inbound links, made them unbeatable. Deeper research and analysis illuminated three revelations and a solution:

  • The initial broad search terms were attracting junior developers, who were looking to download free tools, get basic how-to information, or the newest version of Java.
  • Senior developers, the company’s target, searched for more specific phrases, such as actual error messages and detailed descriptions of the issues they were experiencing.
  • We noticed that these error messages had commonalities and we created web pages specifically optimized for these error messages and the very specific problem descriptions that the senior developers were searching on. The new pages quickly made the first search engine results page, generating excellent qualified traffic that converted at a very high rate.

Research your keywords before doing your on-page optimization. The results will be increased traffic and better qualified leads for your sales force!

Contact us anytime to discuss: dave@d4bmarketing.com 917-355-5953

or visit http://d4bmarketing.com/softwaremarketing.html

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Increase Website Traffic with Thorough Keyword Research

February 7th, 2010

With much of the supposed expert talk these days revolving around social media and its SEO application, I think that “on page” optimization has suffered some neglect. Yes, the thought leadership, fresh content, and inbound links generated from social media are certainly germane to any SEO discussion, but many companies I speak with are forgetting the importance of keywords and their usage in website page titles, headers, body text and footers.

When keywords are mentioned, I think many people immediately think “OK, I have my keywords, I know my business,” now how do I deploy them on the page? While how and where your keywords are used is something that should receive the proper amount of attention, I’d like to circle back to keyword selection. Well conceived and researched keyword list will result in Google indexing more of your keywords, better search page results and increased traffic to your website

Have you researched your keywords? Have you really, really researched your keywords?

Here are a few questions and thoughts to consider during the keyword selection process:

  • Are you putting yourself in the shoes of your potential customer and the terms THEY, not you, would use when searching for what it is you sell or the service you provide.
  • Have you used the Google keyword tool to research keywords? Google’s keyword tool enables you to see search volumes and competition for terms, and will help you select appropriate terms good terms.
  • Dig Deep: get creative and think beyond the obvious broad keywords. Targeted keywords lead to more qualified prospects
  • Assess your competition on keywords. Pick keywords where you can win.
  • Get Local. If it’s relevant- include your town and or county in the terms you choose to optimize for.

I am working with a company that creates designer flip-flops that are embellished with crystals, symbols, jewelry and other decorative items. When we first started their keyword project, the first two keywords the company gave me were: flip-flops and sandals. I said, “That’s great, those get a very high volume of searches, but you are competing against very well established websites and there is no way of getting on the first results page.”

I went through the questions and thoughts above with the company and our research indicated that there was great search volume and much lighter competition around more specific search terms such as: embellished flip flops, crystal flip-slops, rhinestone flip-flops, decorated flip-flops etc…

We optimized pages for each of these and the project has been a success! The number of keywords Google is indexing for the site has risen by over 100% and organic traffic has risen over 60%.

Research your keywords before doing your on page optimization! Expand your content and optimize for three keywords per page and watch your traffic increase.

For more information visit:

www.d4bmarketing.com

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Do Business Owners Know What SEO Is?

February 7th, 2010

So, I’ve been actively speaking to business owners of all size business from global behemoths to local services business like electricians, doctors etc. I’ve spoken to an extremely broad spectrum of industries from the aforementioned electricians and doctors to High Tech, Entertainment, Plastics Manufacturing, Designer Clothing companies and too many more to name and I have found a shocking lack of knowledge regarding search engines, how they work and how a business is listed in the search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing) results for relative searches.

Even more flabbergasting is that this lack of search engine knowledge is not unique to the small businesses and sole practitioners but applies equally to large business with proportionately large marketing staffs and budgets. An informal (very) poll and survey of the respondents websites showed that:

71% Were not doing any “on-page” optimization, I was scared to even ask if they knew what that meant for fear of offending some of the higher level marketing people. 84% of respondents had no defined SEO strategy. 76% Thought they should be doing something about it but were not doing so actively. 100% Wanted more inbound leads from search.

You tell me, where is the disconnect here? 100% of the respondents want more leads but an overwhelming majority really don’t know how to go about it or are squeamish on pulling the trigger on a coordinated on line marketing campaign? Extracting budget from companies relative to search and their websites seems challenging but it should be a “no brainer” spend. Shouldn’t it?

I’m not sure, but the entire two week process has left me alternatively scratching my head in bewilderment and excited that online marketing consulting is just scratching the surface of the potential demand. Does anyone have anecdotes to share about there findings?

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About D4B Marketing

February 7th, 2010

D4B is focused on helping you generate more revenue by using Internet Marketing in a cost effective and measurable way. Call now for a free website and online marketing evaluation. Start getting “Word of Mouth” and inbound leads now.

D4B Marketing offers extensive lead generation services.

Go to www.d4bmatketing.com for information on our competencies.

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