Say you’re the busy owner of a website selling artichoke-flavored dog biscuits — Barkichoke Treats, let’s call them. You’ve got a product dogs love and a handsome website with the very latest e-commerce bells and whistles, all ready for business.

The problem: customers aren’t finding you online.

You go to Google or Bing and search for “vegetarian dog biscuits” and “artichoke puppy chow” and all you see in the results is the competition: Organic Tail-Waggers, Livaroons, and Aunt Judy’s All-Soy Snackies. Plus a lot of celebrity vegetarian dog foods lines from Tony Danza and Cher.

You know you need to do better or you’ll be out of business. But how to go about it?

Advanced Web Ranking to the rescue. Advanced Web Ranking is a powerful and efficient bit of software that shows you how you search engine ranking on various key words, across all major (and many minor) search engines, and then helps you make the changes you need to rise to the top.

Advanced Web Ranking is a desktop application — you start by downloading the basic software from advancedwebranking.com. That gives you the ease and power of running things from your desktop instead of from the web. We started by downloading a free 30-day trial that had all the full functionality we needed.

The heart of the application is simple: enter websites for yourself and the competition, enter “vegetarian dog biscuits” or whichever keywords you want to track searches for, and finally, pick the search engines for which you want to see results. (In our tests, Google, Bing, Yahoo and Alexa were automatically selected as the default search engines.) Then turn AWR loose to do its thing and help your website ranking.

You’ll get results like Current Rank (showing the position of your website against the competition for each search engine and keyword) and Top Sites (showing the position of each website as retrieved from various search engines, including the evolution of those positions over time). The AWR Overview function puts it all into one big report.

With that as your starting point, you can go as deep into the weeds as you like and as your bottom line demands. Advanced Web Ranking allows multiple projects so you can monitor various websites and keywords at one time. Keywords can be imported or added one by one, and it’s easy to get suggestions based on the keywords you already have. They have a great keyword research tool. You can also see how things are playing in different Google countries, and there’s a long list of long-tail search engines you can also work with. AWR now monitors Google maps results for first-page rankings, and as maps and hand-helds become ever bigger sources of searches and customers, this is crucial.

The look and feel of Advanced Web Ranking is slick and intuitive. It’s easy to enter keywords and search engines, and rather fun to see the system grinding through the updates for all of them. Advanced Web Ranking does an admirable job of keeping you updated about what’s happening at all times.

Advanced Web Ranking has three levels of service — Standard, Professional, and Enterprise — plus an extra Server level that allows multiple clients to connect remotely to the same database. Prices currently range from $99 (for Standard) to $599 (for Server). If you’re serious about your search engine ranking — and serious about selling those dog biscuits — it’s well worth the money.

Ranking: 8.5 stars out of 10

There is an Adwords beta named contact form extensions. It basically captures lead information right there from the PPC text ad. It looks super cool, check it out below.

You have to be in the top spot, and most likely already pay a pretty high CPC. You will be paying more than anyone else on the page as a matter of fact. However, how great is it to be able to get right to the chase here? The lead is submitting their info without having to navigate to your contact form (is it buried in your site? is it a pain in the ass to fill out?). Depending on how testing goes, it could be a big motivator to keep your PPC account in good shape and your site in order for the best QS possible.

As always, contact Kelley or I if you need help with AdWords.

Here we are, finally! 2010. Twenty-ten. Two-thousand and ten. Whatever you want to call it. I am back in the office and ready to rock on my SEO projects. We have the best clients, ever, really. We were also informed that we cracked the Top 50 SEO’s list from topSEOs.com. They rank lots and lots of agencies and categories, so it was nice to get a mention.

Our focus this year really is to keep uber-focused on Small Business SEO. For the majority of our clients, we are tackling local optimization issues and helping them reach their target market by keeping their content, code and link building efforts up to date and efficient. Reputation Management has been a bigger issue lately, especially since Google’s Real Time Results have launched. Random Tweets can appear seemingly out of nowhere onto the SERP’s. It keeps us on our toes and more importantly keeps me busy. I don’t want any extra time to lay around and watch Glee or go to the gym or shop. Noooooo way. Ha!

Happy New Year everyone! I hope to keep up this resolution I have to blog at least 3-4 days a week. Let’s see how I do this year.

After reading this great article about the importance of your website and how it looks, I thought I would share what I read with you.
It is so extremely important for you to have a professional looking website—especially if you are hoping to bring in many visitors and turn them into paying customers.

Here are some tips from the article that you should definitely keep in mind:

1. Make Sure Your Website is Visitor Friendly

You need to make sure that your users/customers are able to find what they are looking for quickly and easily. Having a great navigational system will help do this. Most websites show their navigation bar at the top of the page or on the left-hand side. It’s a good idea to stick with this placement since most people are used to this type of navigation.

2. Make Sure You Focus On Your Customer Needs

Try letting your potential customers know how your product or service is going to benefit them, instead of trying to sell your business to them. Make an effort to emphasize the benefits of what you are selling. Focus on writing this on every page of your site. Show your potential customers that you can help them with your goods or services–don’t try to sell visitors your products or service.

3. Make Sure You Have No Spelling Errors!

Making sure your website has no grammatical or spelling errors is extremely important. This shows professionalism and the credibility of your website.
Also make sure that all your links are working properly and displaying correctly.

4. Show Credibility

It’s important to show that your website is trustworthy, reliable, and credible. You can do that by including testimonials from your current customers to show your potential clients. This will show potential clients that you provide a great product or service and how happy your former customers are with your service. Make sure the testimonials are real and if you can, provide contact details of the person who gave you the testimonial. If you don’t have any right now, you should really try and get them! Just email your customers and ask for their feedback on your business and service. Most happy customers will gladly provide this.

5. Includes Contact Details

Make it very easy for your customers to contact you. Place contact information in as many places as you can. Create a special “Contact Us” page, and include your details in an”About Us” page and also at the bottom of each page. You should include the following information: business name, physical address, mailing address, telephone, fax, email, emergency number, website address and most importantly, don’t forget to include your business hours.

6. Offers a Money Back Guarantee

Remember, you are trying to take the risk out of doing business with you. You want potential customers to feel safe and comfortable doing business with you. The longer the guarantee, the more effective it will be. It could be 30 days, 60 days, 1 year or lifetime.

7. Provides Information People are Looking For

Content is still the most important thing. If you’re not providing something, someone else will! If you don’t provide it, someone else will. Try to include as much information as possible such as detailed descriptions and prices of your products and services, free resources, articles, reports, ebooks or anything relating to your industry, service and products. This will help to ensure that customers will keep coming back to your website, even if it is just to get information. The more people visit, the more they will remember you as an expert and the next time they are ready to order your products/services, you will be their first choice.

Consider giving your website a makeover if it contains any of the following:

1. Flash intros, revolving globes, bevelled line separators, animated mail boxes,
2. Pop up or pop under boxes.
3. Autoplay music.
4. Wording such as “You are the 27th visitor”.
5. Date and time stamps, unless your website is updated daily or weekly.
6. Busy backgrounds.

You have to ask yourself if your website portrays the professional image that you want your customers to see? Did you provide all the information that you think your customers may want or need to know?

Great things to think about!!

I just read a helpful and interesting article about this—is Facebook right for your business and how do you know?
Well, we all know that one thing is for sure—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and really all forms of social media is here to stay, so the best thing to do is accept it and learn how to use social media to your benefit. So how to you know if a social media site like Facebook is right for you and your business? How do you know if it will help benefit your company?

According to this article I read on SitePro News, it all comes down to three things essentially.

First, do you think there are enough people on Facebook that have an interest in your area of business for it to be worth your while? You should try to think about not only clients but also other business connections. Is your profile set up the right way? Are people visiting your site when they see your profile? How long does it take to get a new client this way—what is the value of it? Things to think about…

You can experiment with Facebook. Check to see if there are enough people who need your services. Search for group and check local networks on the Marketplace page.
Check to see if there are people in your area that would “be your friend” who would need and use your services.
Try to not get too aggressive with your promoting—just let them know who you are, what you do, etc and after having a few conversations with them, send them information about your services-maybe a discounted coupon in case they would ever need those services. If you turn your initial conversation into a sales pitch, some people may be turned off.

Next, does your company have an RSS-capable site that is updated frequently?
If so, having a Facebook profile just gives you another place to share your RSS link.
You can import your blog posts and there are also applications like NetworkedBlogs that will help your blog posts get exposure from interested readers.

And finally, do you already have friends, clients, business associates, etc. who are already using Facebook? Try connecting with these people! That is the great thing about Facebook-how you can build and cement relationships with people that you didn’t think you had much in common with. Facebook helps as it functions as an “ice-breaker,” acting as the initial contact between you and someone you want to interact with.

So it’s really a matter of whether you are willing to get something out Facebook and whether the available traffic is targeted to your business. This may not work for everyone since everyone doesn’t want to use Facebook in this way or do the work necessary to have it work for them in this way.

But with a little research, you can determine whether or not Facebook could work for you and your business and what kind of role it could play.

Good Stuff!

I found a great article about this topic this week—about how the effect of social media on SEO is changing so much. It used to be that figuring out how to develop link bait that had the best chance of making it on the front page of social news sites was the thing to do. While this still works and is a good tactic, there is so much more that social media can do nowadays. With sites like Facebook and Twitter, it is possible to build high quality links by using networking and information sharing techniques.
Twitter specifically is being used as a public relations outreach outlet—and it’s effective.

This kind of PR is becoming a new technique for promotion and link building.
It is also a widely believed that social media will be major source of ranking in the future for search engines.

If social media signals would begin to be introduced as a ranking factor, this could allow the search engines “leverage the wisdom of the crowds”.
If users who previously couldn’t vote for content via links from web pages now are able to vote with their tags, bookmarks, clicks, and ratings—this sends a strong signal to the search engines. It also does not simply rely on one web site owner linking to another.

Some don’t believe that social media signals will completely replace links as a ranking signal-but rather complement them. So a link from a highly trusted site will still be considered highly valuable, and at the same time, a number of mentions across many social media sites would also be a strong signal.

For SEO, this means that the skills required to succeed in an SEO project is increasing. There will be a lot more data for the search engines to use, so this is good news for them, and all the while increasing the challenge for SEOs at the same time.

The companies that understand social media and how to use its services as part of a broader PR strategy will most likely get an early advantage over their competition. Knowing this and acting on this can definitely bring some immediate benefits in terms of market exposure now, and most likely will bring a significant advantage of improved search engine rankings in the future.

Good things to keep in mind!

I just came across a great and very informational article about different ways to improve your site conversions. This gives you nine different things you can do to try and make more profit from the same amount of website traffic. Making more money from the same number of visitors? Who wouldn’t want to know how to do that, right?

You should think about these steps before you start spending more money to generate additional traffic—first try doing what you can to improve the traffic that you are already getting.

1. You need to have a good way of measuring what you are doing, what is working, etc . You need to know how you are performing before you are able to fix or improve something. Google Analytics is a free tool offered by Google that offers detailed statistics about visitors to a website. You can sign up for a free Google Analytics account or another no-cost or low cost tool to develop your metrics and analytics.

2. Try to create landing pages that are both campaign specific and keyword specific. If you separate related keywords into smaller ad groups, and then create a landing page for each of these ad groups, your conversions will almost definitely be higher. If your keywords and landing pages are thematically related, this will most certainly help your conversion rate.

3. Try testing different ad copy and headlines in your landing pages. This could be one of the quickest, most effective ways of showing improvements. Having compelling ad copy can increase conversions and should not be overlooked.

4. Testing your pricing is another important way to see a huge difference in conversions.
Try and test your prices in both directions—raise and lower your prices by a certain percentage and see if that makes a difference. If your goal is trying to maximize customer value, then the highest converting price may not be the best. So if you decide to lower your prices by 20% and you see your sales double or triple, your increase compensates for the price reduction. If you raise your price by 40% and only see conversions lower by 10% then you will have more than compensated for the drop. So it’s a good idea to test in both directions.

5. Measure your website load time—make sure the speed at which your website is loading is appropriate. This is often overlooked, but it is extremely critical when trying to reduce bounce rate. There are many online services that will measure you load time for you—and then from there you can reduce your load time (if needed) by removing items that are redundant, compressing images, etc.

6. Keep your sales process as clear and as straightforward as possible. The less confusing it is for the user, and the easier it is to navigate to the sale, the better. You can check your metrics and analytics and find out how visitors are navigating your site and if/when they are leaving your site. From there, delete any unnecessary steps. Try enhancing your sales copy and the call to action. Insert some testimonials to capture business. If you clearly identify the path to the sale, the less resistance visitors will display and the better chance you have for more conversions.

7. Third-party testimonials boost conversions—it has been clearly proven. If you add testimonials (they can be highlighted quotes, letter, or short blurbs) to your different landing page variations, sales pages and even shopping cart pages, you will no doubt notice an improvement in your conversion rate.

8. If you understand your customer’s experience with your website and the mind of the market, you can get a better idea of what you need to improve on in order to increase conversions. Try placing an order on your own site and go through the steps of an actual customer. Identify anything confusing or missing that would hinder a conversion. When you identify why you are not converting, then you can make any improvements that are necessary to improve your conversions.

9. Keep tracking of everything! Keep track of what changes you are making, when you are making them, how you are making them, and why you are making them. From there, you can chart your progress, review it periodically and continue to finesse so that you are getting the optimal amount of conversions.

Great list of things to keep in mind when trying to increase your number of conversions.
Try these things first—before you go and spend more money trying to generate more traffic.

Great article I just came across about SEO campaigns and how to set expectations for them especially now during this difficult economy.

It talks about setting real expectations for your SEO campaigns. You shouldn’t freak out if you’re not listed on page one of Google’s search results page right away. SEO isn’t simple and there are a whole slew of things that affect the positioning within the search engines. Moving toward the top of those listings is going to take some time and effort. It’s not going to happen over night. Some people tend to get frustrated because the results are not instantaneous like it is with pay-per-click. SEO is an effective, long-term investment, but the results are going to take some time. If you know this and understand this right off the bat, this will help you know what to realistically expect from your SEO campaign.

First page rankings depend on many things such as keyword competitiveness, link popularity, and content volume. You need to know that your listing is not guaranteed a page one result in the SERPs and that you cannot simple “move” your organic listing to page one. Making sure the person who approves the budget for SEO understands this should help you from the beginning.

Make sure you are measuring the right thing. While increasing the number of visits from the search engines should be a goal of your SEO campaign, it shouldn’t be the only data point you want to measure to prove the value of your campaign. Take time to identify your calls to action and know what your conversion goals are. What is your company trying to measure? What is their goal? Once you know that, you can then measure each conversion point within the sales funnel.
Maybe it’s a request for more information, a newsletter sign-up, a brochure download, or an application submission. Having all this data and being able to tie it back to other reference points with your SEO program will help you prove the value of the increase in search engine traffic.

Setting a baseline to measure progress over time is extremely important.
Don’t forget that the search engines need time to index your web pages.
Try looking at month-to-month comparisons as opposed to daily comparisons, as the month to month data tends to be more realistic. Understanding the month-to-month implications of your SEO efforts is important. Don’t give up on your entire SEO plan just because you notice a slight dip in one day’s results after you have changed something, like the heading tags, for example. Looking at the day-to-day data can be interesting and even become quite addictive, you should make a habit of comparing the month over month data.

Make sure you understand what’s working and what isn’t working. Keeping a log of the dates on which you implemented each SEO activity can help you do this.
Any data that you can tie back to your SEO activities will help you justify your need for SEO—especially now when budgets are so tight.

In summary, if you are setting realistic goals, measuring your performance towards reaching those goals over time, and if you are identifying key conversion points, you should be on your way to having success and longevity with your SEO campaign.

I just watched a really good introduction webinar on Google Website Optimizer tool. You use this tool to test different variations of your landing pages and then you determine which version is generating more conversions for you. This is a great tool—and it’s free!

They went over some common misconceptions about using WO in this webinar and I want to address some of them here.

1. Many people think that you need an Adwords campaign to use Website Optimizer.
You do not. You only need to have an Adwords username and password, but you do not have to actually run a campaign.

2. You will only need to create a WO account in order to use the tool.
This is not true. You will need to have a Google Analytics account in order to use the Website Optimizer. This is the only way that your results can be measured.

3. There is a big difference between an A/B-test and a Multivariate test.
Not really.
With an A/B test, you create two different versions of a web page or landing page.
The WO will automatically split your visitors to either page A or page B.
A/B tests are good to use for first time tests, layout tests, and pages that receive lower traffic.

With a Multivariate test, only one web page is created. You then tell the Website Optimizer which sections of this page you want to vary. For example, you want some visitors to see the page containing picture A combined with text B, and others to see the page containing picture B combined with text C. The Website Optimizer will rotate the content of the sections you indicated, so different visitors see different versions of the page. Multivariate testing helps to maximize conversion rates, discover winning combinations, and allows you to test dozens of versions of a page.

4. With an A/B-test, you can test only two versions of a page
The name A/B can be somewhat misleading, but in reality you can test an almost unlimited number of pages at the same time in an A/B test. You just need to specify that you have alternative pages when you are setting up your test. Google’s WO best practices suggest that you start testing with a small number of variations, but you can certainly test more than two versions.

5: With an A/B-test, you can test very different webpage-designs simultaneously
This one is actually true. You can create two versions of a website that are completely different, and then test which one converts better. It isn’t really recommended that you do this though because if one page performs significantly better than the other page you don’t really know what caused it. You won’t really know what to tweak on that page to further improve its performance.

Some best practices in testing that they recommended:

1. Test a small number of variations.
2. Test big changes.
3. Consider early indicators if you don’t have enough conversions.
4. Don’t jump to conclusions! Less than two weeks worth of data is no good—so be patient, don’t freak out, and allow time for the data to be collected.

The economic downturn has changed the behavior of many users when it comes to landing page optimization. While small, well-tested moves have generally been the best approach when it comes to optimizing, the state of the economy has forced many people to make changes to the way the have viewed optimizing in the past.

Now is a great time to optimize your landing pages! You should not only review all the best practices that you have used and applied in the past, but you should be willing to try some new things when it comes to optimization—things that maybe weren’t in the “old rulebook.”

Here are some examples that you may find useful.

Try being bolder!
You should be willing to try enlarging your call to action, placing it in a more noticeable, “out front” location. Your landing page should really be as eye-catching and as in your face as possible. Audience are very easily distracted, so you need to have something that will really reach out and grab them and get their attention. We know in the past, smaller changes were preferred when optimizing landing pages, but since times are less stable now, it’s worth considering a larger redesign rollout.

Be willing to add options.
Users nowadays are searching for a variety of needs. Marketers should try and remember that their audience is searching for more information and not just making purchases or commitments. Landing pages should be re-worked for a more info-seeking audience.

Keep an eye on your competitors.
In the past pay-per-click marketers have been aware of their competition but maybe haven’t focused too much energy on what they were doing. The main reason for this was that marketers couldn’t be sure at what level their competitors are converting or if they are even converting at all. But now IS the time to be paying more attention to your competitors. Watch for any new site functions they are using and if there are any changes in their content. You should ask yourself what user needs are your competitors answering. And then make sure your own landing page is also answering those user needs.

But there are still some best practices that you shouldn’t forget about completely…some are more important now than ever.

Always be testing!
This is especially important as you are making bigger and bolder changes to your landing page. Once you implement the change, you should allow for enough time for the relevant data to be collected, and then you can closely examine the results. You shouldn’t mistake bold changes for frivolous ones. Try and focus more time on testing the optimization techniques.

Stay calm.
Try and keep your cool, no matter what results come back. Many things are changing these days—including spending patterns and budgets, and so that has to be kept in mind. When you’re evaluating the performance of a landing page and collecting data and implementing changes, remember to keep calm. You will be in the right mind frame to make the needed adjustments.

This next year will see many changes to online marketing tactics—the PPC marketers who will be willing to change with the times are going to be the most successful.
Try and put your energy into making sure each visitor to your landing page becomes a customer. Landing page optimization is such an important element in a successful pay-per-click campaign. Optimizing, tweaking, and fine-tuning really may be the best thing you can do to survive a weakened economy.