The Ultimate Guide to Web Marketing Success

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Table of Contents Indroduction...................................................................1 A GUIDE TO SUCCESS

Part One...........................................................................3 ENHANCING YOUR WEBSITE

Part Two........................................................................... 6 RANKING ON SEARCH ENGINES

Part Three......................................................................12 ENGAGING SOCIAL MEDIA

Part Four........................................................................15 BUYING PAY PER CLICK (PPC) AND RETARGETING ADS

Part Five.........................................................................17 LINKING FROM DIRECTORIES AND EXTERNAL WEBSITES

Part Six............................................................................18 GOING MOBILE

Part Seven.....................................................................19 MEASURING SUCCESS

AN INTRODUCTION TO SUCCESS

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veryone wants their business to be a success. You want to rank high on Google, get tons of leads, and have high conversion rates. Congratulations, so does every other business with a website and a marketing team. So now what? How do you turn the goal into reality? The simple answer is through a lot of smart marketing choices. “Smart” marketing on the web typically involves a mix of site optimization, link building, off-site content development, and social media. Unless you The Ultimate Guide to Web Marketing Success

are a super-whiz, you’ll need the help of a web marketing firm to pull it all together. And frankly, even if you are a super-whiz, your time will be better spent building your business, rather than monitoring your link count and making sure the right keywords are being used for your online press releases. A lot of trust goes into a healthy relationship with your web marketing firm. Hopefully, the firm is a good one; because if it’s not, you’re going to end up wasting a good deal 1

An Introduction to Success of money – and this time, with a so-called expert telling you how to waste it. The better option is to have a good sense of the strategy to get your rankings sky-high, and then taking your time to vet a solid marketing partner who will get the job done right. This guide will show how you can make your business, large or small, successful on

the web. It is by no means a comprehensive or set-in-stone document, and while it discusses what is important today, it doesn’t guarantee it will work tomorrow. That is why it is vital that you have a web partner you can trust to ensure success; they should be constantly staying one step ahead of what it takes to be successful on the web.

But Isn’t That What I Pay My Marketer For? Sure, but if you want a successful marketing plan that will back your product 100%, boost your site traffic where it will count, and earn you top rankings in the search engines, you need to know exactly what areas to pay attention to. You probably brushed past it, but the most important word from that last sentence is: “Earn.” Search engines don’t reward you with rankings just because you built a site. You have to prove to them you are worth ranking: businesses that follow the rules and provide the resources that add the most value to the search engine’s service are the ones that get rewarded long-term. Knowing those rules and how to leverage those resources will help you safeguard your investment in your website and marketing – and keep a weather eye out for where changes might be necessary. The following are recommendations and tactics to help your online presence to be successful, and it is the combination of these tactics working together that will make this work.

The Ultimate Guide to Web Marketing Success

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PART ONE: ENHANCING YOUR WEBSITE

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he quality of your website is obviously a huge factor in your online success, but what exactly “quality” means may not be quite as obvious. If you think about what Google’s job is, it’s to present the user with the best set of results for the search phrases they typed in. To do this they have to show top results that contain the best content relevant to what the user typed in but also can provide the best user experience.

The Ultimate Guide to Web Marketing Success

At the same time, your website needs to be able to convert your visitors into leads and hopefully sales. Professionally designed websites are much more likely to convert leads than are low quality sites, but a suave look alone is not necessarily a guarantee that your design will do its job with both the search engines and your visitors. The following our points are some important factors that should be a part of your website.

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Enhancing Your Website

1. Professional Design

2. Engaging Content

A professional website design is imperative for success. An attractive website will not only be taken more seriously, but will also engage visitors more effectively. Keep in mind how you stack up against your competition. If your competitors have well designed sites and you have a poorly designed site, which one are visitors are more likely to choose?

One of the keys to providing a good experience is great content. Your content should be well written and meet the needs of your audience. If it doesn’t, your site visitors will get frustrated and leave your site. It’s also important to write to the level of your audience. If you are a doctor and prefer language that is more clinical, this could be a complete failure if your audience needs things spelled out and easy to understand. Keep in mind that what makes sense to you may not to your customers. Be prepared to “dumb it down” so everyone can understand and connect with you and your product.

A poorly designed website runs the risk of turning people off and contributes to a high bounce rate where people coming to your site and leave immediately. Search engines can see high bounce rates, and if your site does not hold visitors, they will interpret this as a poor user experience and reduce your site’s rankings. Beyond visuals, effective design structures your website in a way that makes sense to the search engines on a code and navigation level – a site with poor navigation and badly built code will turn the search engines off just as prone to confuse users and increase the likelihood of loading problems. The Ultimate Guide to Web Marketing Success

Well-written content will not only keep visitors on your site longer but will also help your site rankings in the long run. Remember to write content for your audience – not for you, not your staff, and not for the search engines.

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Enhancing Your Website

3. User-Friendly Navigation

4. Fast-Loading Pages

The goal of any site should be to get people to it, then lead them down the path of interest and hopefully to contact you. Once someone finds your site and is impressed with your design and content, the goal should be to get them to relevant content pages for specific services they are looking for. At every level, they need to find it easy to act on the information you provide – from a clear navigation structure that gets them quickly to what they need, to information and visual design that put top priority on guiding visitors to respond. The key is to keep them constantly engaged while they navigate through your site. If people find it difficult or time-consuming to locate what they need, they will give up and move on to another site.

Almost everyone’s pet peeve online is clicking on a search result and then waiting in front of a blank screen while a page loads. Regardless of how pretty your site is or how good the content is, if your site loads slow, it creates a terrible user experience and both your website rankings and conversion rates will suffer as a result. It is vital you have a good hosting solution in place for your website, as well as a website design firm that understands the importance of fast loading pages. Cheap web hosting can cost you in terms of better rankings and new customers, so invest in a quality hosting environment for your website.

The Ultimate Guide to Web Marketing Success

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PART TWO: RANKING ON SEARCH ENGINES

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veryone wants their business’ site to be on Page One of Google but getting – and keeping – that ranking for the searches that count is not so simple. It starts with a good-quality site as described above, but also relies heavily on your ongoing efforts to prove to the search engines you are worth ranking.

How Search Engines Work Search engines like Google have automated search “spider bots” that “crawl” or “spider” the web. In plain English, their automated systems scan, analyze, and adjust their master indexes for millions of pages every day. A key part of this process involves the bots identifying important search words,

The Ultimate Guide to Web Marketing Success

and maintaining up-to-date indexes for each of these daily, so when a user types in a search phrase, Google calls up that index to present results to that user. First, the basics: Your web vendor should be registering your site with the major search engines to essentially “invite” them to come index your pages and content. Here you can see how the steps listed above in the Enhancing Your Website section become so important: when the search engine does come to your site, it is collecting a lot of data about your pages, content, and visitor statistics. But beyond that first step, the important thing to keep in mind is that the search

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Ranking on Search Engines engine isn’t just coming to your site once. They will continually come back now that you are “registered” with them; and the next time they do, they are going to look specifically for what you have done differently since their last visit. If everything about your site is the same, they will move on. If they see new content and new data they can index, they will re-index your site. Frequent updates are just one step in showing the search engines you are taking a vested interest in making your site the best possible resource for your most profitable search words. If they come and see you have added all-new content about a certain subject, they will now include this new content in their index, note the change as positive – and over time, this will help improve your rankings.

The Ultimate Guide to Web Marketing Success

If you take a step back and think about what Google’s main job is, it’s to present the user with the best possible results when they type in their word combinations. The problem? You and every one of your competitors are vying for top rankings on Google, so the engines use a series of mathematical algorithms (Google uses over 200) to determine who deserves to rank higher than the others. By continually adding new and unique content about your products and services, you will show Google you are doing your due diligence to make your site the best possible resource for your products; not just in terms of how well you cover the content you provide, but also in how you stack up against the competition.

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Ranking on Search Engines

Keyword Strategy Depending on whether or not you have engaged in any kind of SEO before, you may have heard of something called Target Keywords or Keyword Strategy. This combined with the previous section on creating engaging content is your recipe for success. Think of your keyword strategy as the battle plan for your online success. While you could come up with a huge list of keywords that you want to rank for, the likelihood of your ranking for all of them may be close to nothing. For instance, if I am a furniture store in Boise Idaho, the likelihood of my ranking for just “Furniture Store” or “Leather Couch” is next to impossible when stores all over the country are aiming for these search terms; however, ranking for “Furniture Store Boise” or “Leather Couches Boise” is much more realistic and more likely to bring in paying customers, so these should be a part of my keyword list. Any keyword strategy should have an initial set of 10-20 terms that are your near-term targets, and then another list of 10-20 terms that will be future targets once you start ranking for your initial list. Try to go for some of the “low hanging fruit,” or the more specific terms that have fewer searches first, and then expand out The Ultimate Guide to Web Marketing Success

to more aggressive (larger-volume) terms. When the search engines assess how they will rank you for a given term, they take into account some of the same factors they used to assess you for the terms you are already ranking well in – and they value your high rankings for those smaller terms, too. In the long run, the more low-hanging fruit you can grab now will just make it easier to get the larger volume terms once you do go after them. One red flag to watch out for: A good SEO team should not be asking you about keywords. They should be doing the research based on your business and location and recommending keywords to you and detailing the search volume associated with those keywords. Once approved, they should be integral to your entire strategy to create the content on your site as well as ongoing search marketing tactics.

On/Off Page Efforts Unless you haven’t been paying attention up until now, you’ve probably got the subtle hint about how important your site content is and how the strategy of keywords and content combines makes your site a powerful force in proving your value to the search engines. In addition, our earlier discussion of quick-loading pages,

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Ranking on Search Engines user-friendly navigation, and professional design all come into play to ensure your site’s success. Google sees everything how long people stay on your site, how well your content is written (and if it is unique to just your site), how often you are adding good content to your site, and so on. These on-page efforts are what, over time, is going to get search engines to send traffic to your site.

work on off-page tactics, posting content on a flower store’s blog isn’t going to do me much good. I want to find bicycle-related sites. Blogs, user groups, clubs, etc. that talk about your industry and products. When you do this, Google sees your good content on your site, your good relevant content on other sites, and is going to be rewarding.

Now let’s discuss tactics online that are off of your actual website. Google doesn’t look at your site in a vacuum; it also looks at how your site relates to other sites. Are people referencing your site by linking to it from their articles and blog posts? Are you making a meaningful effort to contribute good content not only to your site, but also to other relevant sites out on the web?

Follow-through is key. Once your site is optimized, has good content, and is searchengine friendly, the best thing you can do to prove your value to the search engines is to use ongoing tactics, both on page and off page to show them you are continually improving. A good SEO vendor will have ongoing recommended search marketing tactics that they carry out on your behalf every month to ensure success over the long haul.

A very important word we just used is Relevant. If I am a bicycle shop and want to The Ultimate Guide to Web Marketing Success

Back in the bad old days (and unfortunately still today), shady SEO companies stuffed content (on page and off) with keywords and used random backlinks in order to drive up page rankings. Google has taken huge steps to penalize these sites, and today these tactics don’t work long term. Businesses who employ marketing firms that try to game the system may think things are going great and this SEO stuff is a “waste of time,” but sooner or later Google will pull the plug and may even ban a site that uses “black hat” SEO tricks like these.

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Ranking on Search Engines

Local Search, Reviews, and Topic-Specific Results

your company, and optimizes your website for your local campaign.

You’ve probably noticed that searching on Google in the past couple of years has evolved significantly. Now when you type in something like “Chicago Pizza,” you have not only organic search results, but also local results and a Google map with pinpoints showing locations. This new local search has become another important factor in your site’s success, not only because it’s on page one of Google but it’s also pushed many sites that used to be on Page One of Google to Page Two, which makes a huge difference in traffic to your site. How huge? Data analytics firm Chitka estimates the advantage in clicks on Page One vs. Page Two is about 143%.

Whether local or national search is your long-term goal, because Google has such a high level of trust from consumers, Google reviews are more important than ever. Anytime you see a local search showing up on Page One of Google, you also see the number of reviews that company has within the results. Reviews have become an important factor in how and where you show up on the Local results.

These days, you are optimizing your site not just for the plain organic search results, but for the “complete picture” of every type of link and resource that Google might or might not integrate on its topic-specific search results page. The content you present needs to be complete, relevant, and involved with other discussions on the Web – but you also have to take control of the other available resources that the search engine recognizes as authorities for your search topic. Just two examples: it’s extremely important that your web vendor properly sets up a Google Place page for The Ultimate Guide to Web Marketing Success

Getting reviews isn’t as hard as you think, and it can be as simple as following up with a customer via email and asking for a review with a link to your Google profile. Your web vendor should be able to suggest other tactics to solicit positive reviews successfully. Feedback control seems like a source of concern to many companies just starting 10

Ranking on Search Engines out in SEO, and there is some validity to this. Keep in mind that anyone can go out and say anything they want about your business, and unless you can prove it to be false in a court of law, there isn’t much you can do about it. However, the goal should be controlling the mix of messages in your reviews – not fighting down every bad review or avoiding managing them

The Ultimate Guide to Web Marketing Success

altogether. While you want to encourage happy people to review you, don’t fret if you don’t have all good reviews. A reasonable level of variety only makes your business look more “real” because not everyone is perfect. If you do have more negative reviews than good ones, then at that point you do need to worry: get going to get good reviews as soon as possible.

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PART THREE: ENGAGING SOCIAL MEDIA

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nless you have been hiding under a rock, you’ve probably heard the term Social Media. Most people instantly think of Facebook and Twitter, but social media includes a broad range of virtual networks people use to interact with content. Social media activity on sites like blogs, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, Reddit, and online forums can potentially help your site, but how and where (and even if) to focus your social media campaign will depend on your business. Some social media activity is well worth your time, and some of it you can skip completely.

Why You Need It Many businesses make the mistake of expecting social media to give them nearly effort-free resources where their content is

The Ultimate Guide to Web Marketing Success

sure to “go viral” and stimulate the masses to do all the work of sending people to their site. This is unlikely, to say the least. In reality, social media is a set of incomparably powerful tools that link you to the heart and pulse of your customer base. They can be one of the best avenues for you to tell a compelling story, and one of your best opportunities to identify where and how you may need to adapt. Social media is just one support beam in the overall structure of your efforts to operate your business in a way that proves your value to customers, and optimize your site in a way that proves your value to the search engines. In and of itself, however, it is not a reliable platform to generate a proven source of revenue for most businesses.

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Engaging Social Media

Why You Don’t Need It Social media can be a real time waster; even more problematic, it’s incredibly difficult to show true ROI from social media tactics, except blogging. Just because you have a bunch of fans or followers doesn’t mean they are brand evangelists, or even real consumers of your product. According to Facebook, on average only 17% of your fans will see any of your updates. This is because its EdgeRank algorithm focuses on displaying content in newsfeeds that users are most likely to interact with. If a user is a fan of your page but doesn’t interact with your posts, that fan will essentially become a ghost. Some businesses aren’t suited for a social media presence other than a blog. If you are an attorney or podiatrist, do you really

The Ultimate Guide to Web Marketing Success

think people are going to want to follow your office’s posts and show their friends what kind of legal or health problems they have? The point here is that each new marketing method needs to be evaluated objectively. It’s not about how many “views,” “likes,” or “shares” you have. It’s about how many dollars you have coming in from customers. Your website is where the sales are, so social media needs to drive people to your site, and not be the end destination. Spend the time to investigate these social outlets and determine if they truly make sense for your business or if a vendor is pushing you to do it for reasons that don’t apply to your target audience. Make them show the ROI in it before you approve the work – and if they can’t, focus instead on what will pay.

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Engaging Social Media

Two major areas where many businesses may benefit:

Facebook, Twitter, and the Rest

On-Site Blogs

Realistically, the majority of businesses will do fine with just a Facebook presence. Any firm that tells you that you need “it all” regardless of your business type and staff resources should leave you scratching your head and asking more questions. Depending on your business, you can generally aim to focus on two basic functions for Facebook: (1) maintaining a fan base where you can keep conversations going about your product or service, and (2) advertising specials. If your business has a huge customer service force, Twitter could be beneficial because it allows higher-volume, real-time updates and interactions between your followers.

The one social media outlet where you can never go wrong is a business blog. Every time you write a new blog post, it’s an opportunity to utilize your target keywords and write more good content on your site. (Provided your blog is a part of your site. If it isn’t, it should be.) Every blog post is a new addition to your total site content, and reiterates to the search engines you are trying to make your site better and better – but don’t just stop at your blog. Seek out relevant (there is that term again) blogs of others where you can guest post. Chances are they welcome the additional content, and it helps the both of you.

The Ultimate Guide to Web Marketing Success

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PART FOUR: BUYING PAY PER CLICK AND RETARGETING ADS

Pay per Click (PPC) PPC are the ads you see in search results when searching for specific terms on Google. (SHOW EXAMPLE) It’s a form of paid advertising that allows you to create short, text-based ads that people can click through to your site, and traditionally you pay a fixed price per click. In other words, if someone clicks on your ad, it costs you; if they don’t, you don’t pay anything. While many firms think PPC is essential for online success, the more realistic (and generally more profitable) approach is to see it as a complimentary tactic to your original goal of organic rankings. PPC can get you more traffic to your site, but it has

The Ultimate Guide to Web Marketing Success

a history of bringing more “tire kickers” or less-interested people than organic search does. How to make sure your profit outweighs the risks? If you are a brand-new business with a brand-new website, PPC is a great way to get your name out there until you are rewarded with organic rankings. Once that does happen, typically that is the time to cut your PPC budget down.

Re-targeting Re-targeting is new on the scene and is essentially advertising out to people who have already visited your site. Re-targeting companies like Adroll keep track of visitors who have come to your site and then display

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Buying Pay Per Click and Retargeting ads for your business to them as they visit other sites. It’s a very powerful medium, as it is bringing people back who have already shown interest in you, and it is shown to be much more successful than traditional PPC advertising. Several sources indicate it can be eight to 10 times more effective than traditional PPC, as measured by click-thru rates.

The Ultimate Guide to Web Marketing Success

If you do engage in either PPC or retargeting campaigns, to milk each click for its full worth you will need to create special landing pages to market directly to these visitors. It will not only help in the conversion process but also help you track the success and ROI of these campaigns.

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PART FIVE: LINKING FROM DIRECTORIES AND EXTERNAL WEBSITES

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o matter what your industry, someone likely has a directory based on it and wants to sell you a listing on their site. Some industries have dozens of directories, and businesses are harassed weekly by those directories’ employees soliciting their business. There are a few ways to help weed out what is worth your investment. If you have a good web vendor, they should be managing making recommendations on what is and isn’t working. If they do, trust their judgment and send them all the solicitations - they will be able to assess where to expect more value, prioritize, and come back to you with recommendations. If you web vendor does not do this, here is an easy way to see if it’s worthwhile: regardless of what your business is, go to

The Ultimate Guide to Web Marketing Success

Google and type in one of your important keywords. Does this directory come up on Page One? If not, why is it worth your hardearned money? The important thing to keep in mind when investing in any kind of external website or directory is to optimize and measure. Just like you would optimize your website, you also want to optimize your off-site-profiles with the same target keywords you would use in your other search marketing efforts. In addition, you want to ensure you can track traffic from each directory website to measure return on investment. Your web vendor should be able to help you with this; it is very easy to set up a unique, trackable URL for every directory site where you have a listing.

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PART SIX: GOING MOBILE

ecently there has been a huge push to get your site “mobile friendly” or create a custom mobile site so visitors from smartphones and tablets can browse your site as easily as people on larger-format computer. While it’s tempting to want to jump into the mobile realm and invest in a mobile site immediately, your best bet is to let site metrics determine the necessity. If you have Google Analytics or some other stats program, you can likely see what percentage of mobile traffic is coming to your site, regardless of whether you are optimized for mobile or not. If your mobile traffic is 25% or more of your total site traffic, you should consider a mobile site for those visitors; that number is only likely to grow as more and more people make smartphone and tablets their primary means to connect.

Keep It Simple A good mobile site gets the message across with simplicity and easy navigation. Keep in mind that your visitor is on a much smaller screen, so they need to be able to navigate with their thumbs. Large, centered icons, and eliminated clutter helps reduce accidental clicks. Simple navigation and minimal, vertical-only scrolling are musts.

The Ultimate Guide to Web Marketing Success

Make It Accessible Mobile sites need to be interactive and gauged for both vertical and horizontal layouts. Users may turn their phone or tablet vertically or horizontally to view your site. Your mobile site should allow people to get quickly to where they want to go. Don’t bog down the user by including every single bit of content your main site does – include just enough to get your visitor interested to visit your main site.

Make your mobile site easy to convert by focusing on information that will aid in conversion, like product details. Forms should be short and sweet and use checkboxes, lists, and scroll menus to make data entry easier. Make calls to action easy to act on: always use “click to call” functionality and the ability to jump to an interactive map for driving directions. Your mobile site should be a seamless experience. The more you can simplify the experience, the better engagement you will have.

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PART SEVEN: MEASURING SUCCESS

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e’ve saved the best (or at least the most important) for last. Too many businesses will do all or part of the above tactics we have been discussing above and fail to do the most important step in the process: Measure. Being successful on the web is a considerable expense to your business and it would be a shame to not spend a little more time and energy to measure the results of your work. Constant adjustment and content adaptation are important, but knowing which changes help you the most will ensure your strategy can adapt to hone in on what improvements are working.

Analytics No matter who you host with, your web vendor or hosting company should be providing monthly metrics showing visitation statistics on your site. Google Analytics is a great option for this, and it’s free and extremely robust. Your visitation data can reveal so many things about your visitors, it is vital you are reviewing this and putting the data back into play in your ongoing search marketing efforts.

came from—and much more. Your web vendor should be spending a considerable time each month looking at your web metrics and basing their ongoing strategy on what those numbers reveal.

Lead Tracking The next step after your analytics is lead tracking. The more you can put in place to track leads and where they came from, the better decisions you can make in your ongoing marketing campaign and advertising investment decisions. Your web vendor should be able to help you track leads with custom URLs, trackable phone numbers, and more. Any time you have a link on any kind of external site, you should have a unique tracking URL in place to assist your analytics program in tracking that link. If someone clicks from some other site to yours, it can be measured.

Analytics can tell you how many people came to your site, bounce rate (how many came and immediately left), what keywords they typed in to find you, time spent on site, popular pages, where they

The Ultimate Guide to Web Marketing Success

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Measuring Success Google Analytics will help you take your tracking one step further with Goal Tracking. Not only can you track the people coming in and where they came from, but you can set up Analytics to measure if they eventually filled out your contact form. Lead tracking is vital to help determine if your investments are working, and it doesn’t have to just be online investments. Magazine ads, yellow page ads, radio commercials, etc, can all be tracked into your website and contact forms.

ROI The final step in measuring success is determining your return on investment (ROI). Your web metrics and lead tracking tactics should enable you to calculate your ROI. This works for the web exactly the way it does for traditional marketing expenses: if you spent $1,000 on an external

The Ultimate Guide to Web Marketing Success

directory, you could calculate the number of leads received from that directory and then the amount of revenue gained from customers who came in from that site. If you had $10,000 in revenue from a $1,000 investment, then you have a 10 to 1 return on your investment. ROI is an important factor in measuring success and many companies overlook this final step but it can help you make smart marketing decisions in your ongoing campaign. With a solid site, reliable on-and off-site strategy, and the ROI and analytics to guide changes, a reliable SEO strategy will guide your site into focused, consistent growth that will feed exactly where you want it to: more leads, better exposure, and greater profit for your business.

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ABOUT SECTOR45 Based in Paso Robles, California, Sector45 is a boutique web marketing firm specializing in search engine optimization, direct-to-consumer online marketing, and online lead acquisition strategies. The team at Sector45 understands what it takes to succeed online, handling every aspect of your Web marketing and online business needs. We are committed to educating anyone doing business on the web on ways to market smarter. Whitepapers like this one, along with resources available on our website and blog, provide in-depth coverage of the web marketing topics that matter today. Most important to everything we do is being able to demonstrate a healthy return on all marketing investments. We believe strongly that educating yourself about your web marketing opportunities and challenges is an excellent investment in your long-term business success. If we can answer questions you have after reading this whitepaper or help in any other way, feel free to get in touch with us.