Posts Tagged ‘increase website traffic’

Re-designing your website? Basics Checklist.

Wednesday, 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

Tags: , ,
Posted in Inbound Marketing/Lead Generation, Keywords, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »

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

Tuesday, 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

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Keywords, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »

Increase Website Traffic with Thorough Keyword Research

Sunday, 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

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Keywords | No Comments »