By: Evan Pattak
In the earliest days of the Internet, deploying your Web site as a marketing tool was as much voodoo as it was science. Companies designed pretty sites, threw in a few interactive features as they became available and hoped for the best. Today, Web site marketing has become a sophisticated and hotly competitive arena; indeed, some e-commerce companies rely on it exclusively.
“Everything I say about this area has to be qualified by the word ‘today,’” says Tim Sweet, Senior Sales Consultant for Sewickley-based Nauticom Internet Services who also teaches fine arts at Grove City College. “I can’t guarantee that it will be the same tomorrow or five days from now. It’s such a dynamic environment.”
Rick Gardiner, Senior Vice President and Managing Director of bbdigital, the interactive group of Downtown-based Blattner Brunner, says one key to the exciting activity in e-marketing has been the return of the discipline to marketers.
“The interest in e-marketing is unbelievably strong,” Gardiner says. “Eight years ago, it was marketer-driven. Then it was taken over by IT departments. In the past few years, it’s shifted back to marketers, who have a much stronger understanding of technology. That’s what driving the creative and messaging.”
In this fast-paced world, a vital objective for small and mid-sized companies is search optimization, that is, ensuring that their sites rank highly among the major search engines so that they’re prominently placed in search results. You may have the coolest site in the world, but it won’t do you much good if it’s displayed in the sixth position, fourth page of results. That’s “Cyberia.”
Maximizing your position, though, is a complex piece of business, if only because the criteria the major search engines use to rank sites are at least as evolutionary as e-marketing itself. Says Abu Noaman, CEO of Elliance, the North Side-based e-marketing services provider:
“Every time something became legal, people began adopting it and the algorithms changed. They started using keyword repetitions and keyword stuffing, then search engines said text would be part of the equation but not all of it. We’ve identified about 12 different options on how to place yourself on top of search engines.”
A good way to launch your quest for those top spots is to undertake research on keyword searches. The major search engines - Google, Yahoo, MSN - share some of their data on how many searches they’ve processed for given keywords; if you can’t find what you need there, try utility sites such as Digital Point Solutions (digitalpoint.com), which provide that information for free.
“If you find out what keywords people are using, you can find windows of opportunity in the market,” Sweet explains. “You want to find one that has some traffic. If it generates only a handful of queries, why go after it? But you might find high- or moderate-volume searches for which there’s little competition, a hole in the marketplace. That might be an area that will yield some results.”
When Nauticom undertook its search, it noticed that the key word “Pittsburgh Web Design” appeared to provide just such an opportunity. From there, the company went to work, creating a title and more that incorporates the magic keyword.
“We like to associate the keyword and the brand in our title,” Sweet says. “That way, it’s not a surprise to people. Then, the description tag adds a little more detail. Three times in that title and description they’re seeing ‘Pittsburgh Web Design.’ The URL is ‘pittsburghwebdesign.net.’ That all goes to better conversion. It says to users, ‘That’s exactly what I’m looking for.’”
All that effort paid off. Search for “Pittsburgh Web Design” on Google and you’ll find the Nauticom site listed at the very top of the results.
Once you identify a promising keyword, you can craft your site to dovetail with that keyword. This is no small thing since, search engines appear to consider site relevance to the keyword an important criterion in ranking. Sites overloaded with visual effects at the expense of copy may lose rank and position as a result.
“If a site is all graphics or a complete splash site, it will be problematic for getting results,” Sweet confirms. “You’ll need some site development to make it more user-friendly for search engines. They’re looking for text that can be indexed and attempts to make a judgment about relevance to a particular keyword. A certain amount of keyword density is helpful. They’re also looking for quality link relationships - who’s linking to the site, the page rank of sites linking to your site. That’s an indicator of relevance as well.”
While the most coveted targets of optimization strategies are the Big 3, which generate an estimated 95 percent of all searches, regional and sector-specific search engines can figure prominently in your plans as well. Noaman notes that search engines have emerged for sites that specialize in audio-for-broadcast, blogs and shopping, to name only a few categories. Other new search engines may be nation-specific and therefore prime targets for companies pursuing international business.
“For those clients, we would optimize the site for the international market,” Noaman says, “package and present it to different countries in different ways so that the subdomains would be operational in those countries only.
Also important are sites such as Open Directory Project (dmoz.com), which Sweet calls “indirectories;” they’ll include your site in their listings and, since hundreds of search engines troll the dmoz.com directory, you may reach the Big 3 through this indirect route.
“There are complex layers of search engine relationships,” Sweet says. “Most people haven’t heard of dmoz, but it’s really important in the whole search engine mix.”
A final way to maximize your position is to buy it, that is, to pay the fee for a sponsored link or a prominent results position. Because of the expense, most companies prefer natural or organic optimization, but there may be times when purchasing position makes sense. Notes Gardiner: “It may seem on the surface that you don’t want to spend hard earned dollars to do it, but if you took the time to figure out how much you’re spending on natural optimization, maybe buying your way in is a better way. At our company, I can’t afford to buy ‘Web Design Agency.’ But I can afford to buy ‘Pittsburgh Web Design’ or ‘Atlanta Web Design.’ That may be useful as local search becomes more prevalent.”
Your strategy for optimization depends, at least in part, on your goals. “The real secret is understanding your business model,” Noaman says. “Then you can determine what your strategy should be.”
Hmm. Understanding your business. Thorough, timely research. Effective use of resources. The technology may be cutting-edge, but the approach to these tools doesn’t seem so new-fangled after all.
While you pursue your optimization plan, also consider these aspects of Web sales and marketing that the experts regard as critical:
GET UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL WITH YOUR E-CUSTOMERS
There was a time when you could determine how many hits your Web site received but little else about who was clicking. Now, tools that can help you learn more about your customers and on-line visitors are plentiful and within your budget.
“Large companies had a monopoly on being able to connect with customers effectively and fast and get all sorts of intelligence and metrics,” Noaman says. “Guess what? Small and medium-sized companies can do the same with the explosion of e-marketing tools. They’re taking advantage of Web-based applications to build intimacy with their customers.”
Among the vehicles Noaman often recommends are surveys and sweepstakes to help you attach faces and preferences to those heretofore anonymous users.
“You can create a survey in about five minutes,” Noaman says. “Within 30 minutes, you can have a survey with results tallying up. Sweepstakes used to be a long, involved process. Now you can create one in half a day, run it for about six to 12 weeks and have results tallied automatically.”
Once you know who’s participating, you can narrow the universe of prospects to those who seem most interested in your company and products.
“I call it ‘Ping, Plan, Launch,’” says Noaman. “You can capture the kind of intelligence that allows you to know who’s opening, who’s clicking through, who’s participating, who’s registering. All that can be done in several hours. That kind of thing was not really possible several years ago.
“These are potentially hot prospects. You can’t call 10,000 people, but you can call these 100 people who are interacting most deeply with your pieces. These are shortcuts that weren’t available to small companies before.”
When you begin tracking results, you may be inundated with data. To best exploit this treasure trove of information, Gardiner suggests, keep your eye on the main chance.
“Tracking software has become much more sophisticated, but in order to get there, go back to your marketing objectives,” Gardiner says. “I counsel our clients to have three or four goals to track - say, newsletter registrations, downloads of a white paper, visits to the site’s education section - then see if they’re having an impact. If you keep it to a manage-able number, you’ll get results pretty quickly.”
SEGMENT YOUR SITE
“Everybody who comes to your Web site is not the same,” Gardiner notes, “so you need to get them to the relevant sections. A lot of our redesigns lately recognize that it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach.”
To appeal to a broad variety of visitors, you may require sections that serve as “destination” pages even as they enhance the site as a whole.
“A lot of it comes down to content that interests users,” Gardiner says. “We spend a lot of time trying to understand end users, what engages them. Sometimes it’s one step removed from the actual product. If the product is tractors, maybe it’s not tractor information that moves them but gardening tips.
“This may not be as formal as the old focus groups, but if you really understand customer interests, that tends to drive promotional offers, whether you’re going to send information via e-mail or in a newsletter format. All those things tend to drive your strategy.”
MEASURE YOUR CONVERSIONS
Gazing at your beautiful Web site may give you a warm and fuzzy feeling, but in the hotly competitive tech sector, you need colder calculations. How many clicks are you converting to sales? It’s now possible to determine that, although what counts as a conversion isn’t necessarily uniform.
“For my company,” Sweet says, “a conversion is, did they fill out a contact form and start a sales process? The ultimate conversion is done off-line. But the ultimate conversion for an e-commerce company is, did they buy something?”
Monitoring conversions will help you evaluate the effectiveness of your Web site . . . and improve it where necessary. That means regarding your site as a sales tool and not just an informative, attractive portal to your company. Says Noaman:
“If this is a machine, you need to ask, ‘How effective is it? How can I improve my conversion rate?’ There’s a lot of research saying that design accounts for only 20 percent of a site’s ROI. The other 80 percent is information and content-strategy. Design is important, but more important are persuaders, dialogue devices, knowing your audience and being able to deliver the right type of influencers at the right time.”
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