The Ideal Web Site – Part 4 of a Series

The Ideal Website is Attractive Enough

Effective Internet marketing follows the 80/20 rule; where 80% of your investment is ‘Super SEO’ (promoting the hell out of your website and brand online) and where only 20% is the website itself.

• A pretty website without top rankings on Google, Yahoo! and Bing/MSN is pretty much useless.

• An award-winning website without traffic just plain sucks. They cost more money and take more time to design, so without traffic (sales)  they become a bigger liability.

• A drop dead gorgeous website that does not convert visitors into qualified leads or customers has failed as an advertising and marketing medium. Period.

An attractive website is only worth a damn when it provides a positive return on your investment.

Are we against sexy design and design awards? Absolutely not! My own epiphany came about seven years ago when one of our clients received a beautiful award for the website we developed for them. My customer called me to congratulate me on the design achievement, but then lamented over the site’s poor performance on the bottom line. I reminded him that we had proposed an aggressive SEO and online marketing campaign but he had declined. On further reflection I realized it was my fault. I’m the internet marketing professional, I know what really matters when it comes to ROI and I hadn’t absolutely insisted on a program to drive traffic to their site. I had allowed the client to invest their entire online marketing budget on an award-winning design and there had been nothing left for assuring the site had traffic or the ability to convert traffic into customers.

A good website is ‘attractive enough’ that visitors feel they are dealing with a solid, reputable company. When search engine rankings and other sources of traffic are in place, and the site is generating enough sales to more than offset the cost of additional design, it may be time to revisit the design with a facelift. If your site isn’t in the top ten ranking positions for all of your primary keyword search terms, put your money into SEO, social networking and link building, not a flashy media presentation few people will ever see.

» Need a website makeover?

The Ideal Web Site – Part 3 of a Series

The Ideal Website is Search Engine Friendly

Over 80% of the traffic on most successful websites will come from being listed on the first page (top-10) on Google, Yahoo! and MSN. The rest of your traffic will typically come from PPC (pay per click) advertising, inbound links from theme related websites and being listed on the second or third page of the top three engines. If your site isn’t listed in the first three SERPs (search engine results pages) your site should be considered ‘invisible’ to the Internet.

Most sites aren’t search engine friendly. They don’t rank well because they don’t deserve a top position. They have very little content and the content they do offer isn’t considered of much value to searchers. Typical ‘toot your own horn’ ad copy on the home and about us page, tables of prices, forms, Flash photo galleries, JavaScript widgets, most short description shopping cart pages, etc. are not good content.

Search engines love fresh unique content that is rich in naturally occuring keywords, internally linked to other theme content in the site. Content should be added at least weekly or even daily. Great content encourages naturally occurring links from other theme-related websites and trackbacks from blogs. Over time a website or blog will accumulate hundreds or even thousands of posts and/or articles.

Developing quality content involves a commitment. Many companies have several bloggers or a designated writer. If your company does not have anyone with the time to create content on a consistent basis, there are SEO copywriting services and web content writers that will help make your site search engine friendly.

» Need some help with SEO?

The Ideal Web Site – Part 2 of a Series

The Ideal Website Targets the Right Keywords

One of the biggest mistakes website owners make is targeting keywords that are unlikely to provide a return. Achieving a #1 ranking on Google for a keyword search term nobody is searching for is a waste of time and money. For search engine marketing, keywords fall into two major categories: broad generic (head) keywords, branded and regional (tail) keywords. The stiffest competition is in the short head keywords.

If you entered the head keywords ‘storage products’ into Google today you’d see over sixty-one million pages indexed. That’s a lot of competition. In the top five you’d find Rubbermaid. For a company with almost unlimited marketing resources very generic keywords may be worth pursuing. We have a client in the Vancouver area. By choosing regional (tail) keywords we have been able to secure the top position on Google for ‘vancouver storage products’. The amount of traffic received for their SEO dollars has proven to be a good investment. Pursuing top rankings for ‘storage products’ with the budget we had to work with would have been a poor investment, with little or no returns. If you entered ‘spacesaver storage canada’ today you would discover that these branded (tail) keywords also returned a #1 ranking for our client.

Whether you’re pursuing organic rankings or pay per click traffic, selecting the right keywords can be one of the primary decsions that determine your online success. Keyword analysis is the starting point.