NOTE: For the topic on how and where to insert your primary keywords, see the article Keyword Placement for SEO.
Secondary keywords are your related and popular, but not primary keywords. They are they are the ones from your keyword research that were determined to be your 4th thru 8th level choices. All of which was determined from a combination of which keywords have the most relevance, are the most popular, and have the greatest potential to draw qualified traffic to your website.
In particular, your 4th thru 8th level keywords are important not only because they are highly relevant, but also because they are essentially the balance of the related search terms within your area of business that get a high enough level of searches and interest from potential buyers to be worth targeting agressively.
Put in a different way, ranking for search terms that do not get enough interest will not bring new traffic and beyond your recommended primary keywords, these secondary recommended keywords are the only ones left that get enough interest to be capable of bringing significant new traffic to your website.
One question that often comes up here is: But what if there are more than 8 important, high-traffic keywords for my business?
The simple answer is that for most small business websites the focus will be on a limited product line or set of services. For example, children's apparel, household furnishings, or hair styling and esthetics. If your business is larger and less focused, there may be more than 8 essential keywords for your business, but each focused area will have no more than 8.
Again, why the limited set of 8? A couple of reasons. First, as English speakers in North America, we tend to use the same small set of words to describe products and services so that we understand each other quickly and easily. People use those same words when entering queries into a search engine.
Yes, there may be more than 8 different phrases to describe household furnishing, but the point is that the vast majority of the time people use the same few terms. The trick is to discover exactly which 8 terms and in what order of popular use.
In this context, you can see that bothering with the last few terms in your top ten list may not be worth the effort as they are used so much less often and that brings us to the second reason for the list of 8. Which is, that search engine evaluate your site based on how relevant they think it is to users searching on terms related to your business. So, the more you effectively use the important terms the better.
The flip side of this however, is that effectively using the most important terms means that you will not be able to effectively use the less important terms. That is, only so many keywords can go into your page titles and headings, links and lists, first paragraphs on a page, etc. Trying to target too many will be being ineffective at all of them. Thus, we're back to your top 8.
For effective SEO, it is essential to place the primary and secondary keywords you will be targeting into positions of prominence on your website. Specifically, your top three keywords should be placed as follows.
Site URL (Website Address)
Placing your top keyword into the site or root URL of your page can have an extraordinary positive impact for SEO.
The reason for this is that your website address is the first thing that Google looks at and considers about your website. And, to Google’s way of thinking, which is to program its algorithms and search engine spiders to emulate what humans consider relevant and easy to understand, your overall website address is potentially the most important piece of information.
Why? Because if you include topical information in your URL, you make it unavoidably noticeable to visitors what your website is actually about. To Google, relevance is king, so in their review of your site seeing your topic area info in your URL is like see a large, easy-to-read business sign hanging over your front door.
The next question and the one that reveals why so few organizations do this, is: “But what about branding, ease of recall, and ease of typing in the URL? Won’t having a long URL with keywords in it cause problems?”
The answer is a simple redirect will let you enjoy the best of both worlds. In the case of Sparklift Internet Marketing, to get the best ease of use and branding as well as the highest SEO benefit from placing its top keyword in the URL, the web address that is included in promotional materials is www.sparklift.com; however, when you enter this URL, you are redirected to www.sparkliftinternetmarketing.com, which includes the top keyword ‘internet marketing’.
This is a legitimate use of a website redirect that Google does not consider spamdexing or the use of a black-hat doorway page or duplicate content, because www.sparklift.com does not include any content or collect any visitor information. It simply passes visitors along to the actual website address, which is the one that Google indexes and which appears in Google search results (see Fig. 1).
Meta Titles
EXAMPLE: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"><title>Home: Internet Marketing & Website Optimization Victoria BC - Internet Marketing & Search Engine Optimization Services</title>
Your top keyword, and preferably your top three keywords if possible, should be placed in the meta title of your top five to 10 most important pages -- these are the titles that appear in the colorbar at the top of every web browser window (see Fig. 2).
Fig. 2
NOTE: When searchers type simple terms into Google without additional instructions to the search engine, Google searches as follows: first, for pages that include the term exactly as typed; second, for pages that include both or all words the closer together and more prominent the better; then for pages that include any of the terms in positions from most to least prominent.
• As visitors move deeper into your site, you can begin to place your secondary and potentially your additional keywords into the meta titles as appropriate and relevant.
• Note that metatitles can only be 63 characters long with spaces. This one is 62.
Headings 1 and 2
After your site URL and meta titles, the next most important position to place your keywords is in the HTML heading tags: <h1> and <h2>.
In terms of relevance, placing a keyword in a primary or secondary heading shows Google that you are continuing to pay attention to placing information in an easy-to-understand hierarchical order and that the content under the heading with the keyword is likely to be highly relevant to anyone searching on that term.
In terms of showing Google that you have the perfect storm of information about a given keyword topic, having your top keywords strategically placed in the URL, the meta titles, and frequently in <h1> and <h2> tags of your website provides a very strong start.
Other Prominent Positions
In combination with the prominent positions listed previously, using the following other prominent placements for keywords will show Google that your site has a deep level of relevance.
These other prominent positions for keyword placement are: additional heading levels such as <h3> and <h4>; linked text; bolded and colored text; and, bulleted and numbered lists.
Body Text
It is very important to recall throughout your SEO implementation that in addition to placing the keywords prominently, they must also actually be used in the body content on your site in the context of providing valuable information to real people.
Google has developed highly advanced algorithms that analyze the content on your site and look at the interrelationships between what you say is important -- i.e. what you place prominently – and what you actual discuss in the body of your presentation.
One reason for this is that they want to identify and de-list spamdexing websites. The other, is that they simply want to provide the best and most comprehensively relevant results to their searchers.
So, in the case of two sites that Google otherwise ranks at the same value, it will give preference to the one that has to most in-depth discussion of the keyword topic in its body text.
In terms of specific guidelines for the number of times a keyword should be used in the body text of a page, a good target desnity would be 3-5 times pre page for your top keyword relevant to that page, and 1-2 times for any secondary or additional keywords that are relevant to that page and can be squeezed in.
The assumption here is that these pages would include a minimum of 250 words of body content. For pages that include significantly more text a guideline maximum limit for your top keyword as a ratio of all words would be no more than 1/25. For secondary and additional keywords, a ratio of 1/50 is always appropriate.
Additional Locations
In order to take advantage of Google’s specialized search tools for finding multimedia files, it is important to give your images, videos, and any downloadable documents such as brochures relevant, search-friendly names that include top search terms whenever possible.
One of the essential aspects of search that Google has grasped intimately and which has made them so popular is that search represents the thoughts, desires, expectations, and hopes of searchers.
The most successful websites are those that not only provide practical, relevant, easy-to-access, and valuable content, but those that provide such content on the topics that searchers are most interested in.
Thus, leveraging your keyword research to act as a guide to the topics that your website will provide content about can be a hugely powerful initial step to gaining high search engine rankings and to building the greatest possible traffic volumes and popularity for your website.
Choosing Primary & Secondary Keywords
For the greatest chance of success, your primary and secondary keywords should be those that are:
• Most relevant to the topics you intend to explore in the valuable content on your website.
• As closely aligned with the most popular keywords related to your topic areas as possible.
Number of Keywords to Target
For optimum results, a website should target no more than 5 primary unique keywords per 10 pages of high-value content. Likewise, it should target no more than 10 keywords total, including secondary and tertiary or ‘additional’ keywords per 10 pages of content.
NOTE: Microsites and landing pages intended primarily to enable pay-per-click marketing, rather than organic search engine optimization need to consider including more keywords. It is possible to achieve both goals at once, but in this article, we'll be looking at optimizing your website for organic search rather then pay-per-click.
Another proviso about the rough guidelines above is that a reasonably high volume of content is included on these 10 pages. That is, a majority of these pages should have a minimum of 250 words of content or more to support the targeting of so many keywords. If the total volume of content drops below that level, fewer keywords should be targeted accordingly.
Moreover, of these top 5 primary keywords and top 10 total keywords per 10 pages of content, only 3 should be targeted as critical keywords with the top keyword being the most prominent.
This target rate enables any website project to implement the maximum level of keyword density without the risk of either being perceived as ‘stuffing’ keywords (i.e. spamdexing) or losing relevance and rank by attempting to target too many keywords at once as a ratio of the total content provided.
Your Top Keyword
Your top keyword should be the one that is most relevant to the content you present on your website and should also be the same as or as closely aligned to the most popular keyword for your topic area as possible.
This keyword should appear in a majority of the most prominent positions on your website as determined by search engine spiders – recall that search engine spiders attempt to emulate what real people find to be the most important indicators of what is relevant on your website.
Other Primary Keywords
As previously indicated, there should be only 3 critical keywords for any website project. This means that after your top keyword, it only remains to choose the second and third most popular and appropriate keywords to round out you critical keywords list.
Beyond the extra traffic that successfully targeting your top keywords would brings, it is also important to note that your top keywords are more important in a hierarchical sense than the less popular keywords.
That is, if you look at the top keywords in your list and compare them to the others, you will see that the others typically follow from the top few into more specific topics.
Creating a site with a clear and sensible hierarchy is one of the essential guidelines to effective SEO provided by Google itself. Therefore, it follows and has been the experience of Sparklift Internet Marketing that websites that successfully target the top hierarchical keywords, are also much more likely to be ranked for the less popular related keywords.
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posted by Kristjan Butler at 11:26 am - 0 comments
It is definitely the case that the most important elements of SEO are: First, how you use the keywords that you have determined thru research are the most popular and relevant for your products and services, followed by... Second, how popular your site is in terms of inbound links from relevant websites and the importance of those sites.
So what else is important?
Here a quick overview of some critical items that should be included on any SEO-optimized website, but which are not specifically keyword or link popularity related.
Each subsection will state Google’s specific guidelines and then provide some additional detail on how to make your site SEO-friendly in practice – since, as mentioned in other blog entries, Google does not provide much of this detail itself.
HINT: What is available can be found at: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769.
For the sake of economy, the diverse reasons that follow in this article as to why these specific non-keyword, non-link-popularity SEO recommendations are helpful and do work are only elaborated briefly.
In summary, Google writes its search engine algorithms and programs its search engine spiders to approximate the human understanding of practical, relevant, easy-to-access, and valuable as closely as possible.
With this in mind, the recommendations listed below are based on a professional SEO-consultant understanding of some of the ways in which Google goes about doing this.
1. Website Architecture
Google states in its guidelines that you should:
“Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link."
Here are some details regarding the most important ways to follow this guideline and be effective for SEO.
1.a. Navigation
• Create a clear and limited set of top-level, primary navigation choices – typically 5-7 at most and have the actual navigation links in text.
• Think of your primary navigation choices – typically those aligned horizontally near the top of the page – as options that set up channels of related information. I.e. if it’s related it is contained within the channel, if it’s not, it isn’t or at least not at length.
• Secondary navigation, if there is enough content to warrant it, should relate to the information within the specific active top-level channel. Likewise, it should be limited to 5-7 choices at most and be kept to the left or in some cases to the right of the page and be noticeably different from the primary navigation – one case where more than 5-7 sub-nav choices in OK is with a list of Blog entries, which is acceptable to be quite lengthy and have many articles list in the style of a sub-nav.
1.b. Static Text Links
• The easiest way to include static text links from one page to another and ensure they are included on all pages is to make your primary and secondary navigation choices static text links themselves.
In this context, ‘static’ means HTML code that search engine spiders can interpret, rather than JavaScript, Ajax, or the like.
• Beyond text links for navigation, it is also beneficial to include occasional links from within the body text of a page when referring to topics contained in other top-level channels.
2. Orientation Tools & Resources
Here are a few additional pointers to make your website search engine friendly and which are not directly related to keyword usage or link popularity.
Google has the following to say about providing orientation tools and resources:
”Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.”
2.a. Site Map & Site Search
Recall that Google writes its search engine ranking algorithms and programs its search engine spiders to approximate how people interpret the information on a website and what people might consider to be practical, relevant, easy-to-access, and valuable content.
In this regard, Google is ever mindful that people are easily confused, often get lost, and always appreciate a map to help them find their way.
Therefore, in the hypothetical situation that Google feels that two different website are otherwise of equal value, it will give the higher ranking to the website that contains a properly implemented site map.
To get the most value and ensure the best potential of high ranking, a site map should be accurate, up to date, and provide enough detail for a person to figure out where to go next to find what they are looking for.
Another way to add SEO friendliness to your website it to augment your sitemap with a site search tool. Many out-of-the-box site search tools are available. Indeed, the best third-party tool and most Google-friendly would be the one that you can licence from Google itself.
2.b. What’s New
As with site maps, Google gives preference to websites that include an up-to-date and detailed record of what has been added to the site since its inception or at least since the What’s New page was added.
Again, in a hypothetical situation where Google considers two websites to be of equal value, it will give preference to the one that has a What’s New page or section.
2.c. Contact Info Page
In keeping with its ongoing and constantly advancing quest to index and rank websites that it thinks people will like (i.e. find valuable), Google understands that people like to be able to easily find contact information on a website, so they can call someone if they feel like it.
Much as any organization may wish to limit the number of frivolous calls from the general public, it is important to put an email and phone number on your website, even if they simply lead people to an answering service or an automated email responder that directs them to additional information that they can find on the website.
The most SEO-friendly way to implement this on a website is to have a dedicated Contact Info page.
For the purposes of ranking for local search, it is also important to include a physical address on your contact page.
3. Footer & Tertiary Navigation
Another important place to insert contact information as well as any links to pages about legal details, privacy policies, terms and conditions, etc, is in the footer that appears on every page.
NOTE: As with the Contact page, for the purposes of ranking for local search, it is also important to include your city/region info and a link to your contact info prominently on every page, typically in the footer.
Placing this important but off-topic information in your footer accomplishes three things:
• It enables visitors to get a quick snapshot of your contact details without visiting the Contact page.
• It shows Google and human visitors that the website likely represents a genuine, legitimate organization that must take legal matters into consideration.
• It saves you from having to put these links to pages with off-topic content into the main or secondary navigation of your site where space and attention is at a premium.
In late 2003 to early 2004, Google began pursuing a decision to make a major change to the way it ranked websites.
As part of this decision, it implemented a series of dramatic rolling updates to its search index algorithm that had the world of search-engine-generated e-commerce spinning for months and is still being grappled with by the industry to this day.
Some businesses felt like the rug was pulled out from under them as they mysteriously disappeared from high-ranking positions and sometimes ended up nowhere in site – with previously regular revenue streams down to a trickle.
Others enjoyed new, unexplainable (and often brief) glory and new revenues at the top of the ranking pile. Many complained loudly while others boasted unjustifiably.
As a result a fair amount of media buzz was generated throughout the industry and reverberated into the discussions of the general public.
Throughout the period of the Great Shift, Google remained implacable in its decisions to continue updating its search algorithms without revealing details of what it now considered more or less important about a website and thus how websites were ranked.
Its primary stated reason for the updates, from which it never wavered, was that the changes were implemented in order to provide what it called “the best possible results for its users”. But many popular and seemingly legitimate e-commerce sites lost out significantly in the process.
What few additional details Google provided were centered on a professed desire to reduce the rapidly growing phenomenon of ‘search engine spam’ (a.k.a. 'spamdexing').
And, it appeared as though it was fairly successful in this regard. That is, Google become even more popular to the general public because its search results were ever more relevant to the goals the searching public wished to achieve.
However, in the months that followed the Great Google Shift -- as the search-engine-generated e-commerce world picked up the pieces -- industry analysts and the media began to put a more comprehensive story together.
The consensus several months out was that beyond reducing search engine spam, Google had implemented the wholesale changes to its search algorithms for two related reasons:
i. It wanted to provide stronger recognition for the fact that a majority of users were primarily looking for practical and/or entertaining, non-commercial information.
That is, they were performing research and/or using Google as an alternative to traditional media such as TV. In other words, they were not always and not primarily shopping.
ii. During this time, Google had finally found a viable revenue model in its AdWords system. From 2000 and leading up to 2004, Google had become wildly popular, but had continued to burn capital at an extraordinary rate as it had not yet figured out a way to monetize its immense traffic volumes.
With AdWords in place, the system whereby businesses can pay to have their text ads appear next to the ‘organic’ algorithm-based search results, Google finally had a way to make money.
So, the cynical view in the media and amongst businesses who were now ranked lower or were non-existent in search results was that Google had penalized them in order to force them to pay for traffic using the AdWords system.
The place to start when it comes to understanding professional SEO practices is Google's Webmaster Guidelines for what makes a good, indexable website.
Beyond Google’s guidelines, professional SEO practices should be based on research-based knowledge and previous successes. Make sure to ask questions to ensure your SEO expert is truly knowledgable and follows ethical seo practices.
For the most part professional SEO practices are not mentioned specifically in Google’s guidelines. There are four primary reasons for this with the last three being related to the first.
1. Google is typically secretive about exactly how it ranks websites and so does not provide details about advanced SEO tactics, but only general guidelines for success and specific rules for what is not allowed.
2. Because of the lack of clear guidelines, many companies and organizations do not effectively implement SEO practices because they do not know how and/or have not budgeted for expert advice.
3. It is fairly well known that Google regularly changes its algorithms for ranking websites – as often as quarterly. This can make expending resources on SEO a difficult choice for many organizations because the same SEO project that is a success in one quarter may potentially become a failure in the next without the reasons for either success or failure being well understood.
4. A minority of less-ethical providers in the SEO industry focus on finding shortcuts to gaining rank in Google search results without doing the hard work of providing genuine, practical content that people value and recommend to others.
When discovered, Google punishes the websites and companies that use these unethical practices by delisting them and often publicly denouncing them. The most famous example to date was probably the delisting of BMW's German website due to deceptive SEO practices.
The result is that many organizations are overly cautious of SEO for fear of being delisted and/or being associated with any negative public attention.
Despite the general lack of understanding of how to be successful with ethical SEO and the challenges of working without specific guidelines from Google, the fact remains that successful, ethical SEO that achieves high rankings in Google is not only possible, but actually highly probable if professional practices are followed.
The truest and most successful route to high rankings in Google is to provide genuine, practical, and valuable content to the public.
To do this means implementing SEO practices that clearly show search engines like Google that you understand what people want and are in the business not only of providing it, but of making it as easy as possible for them to find it.
Successful SEO is therefore not at all about using tricks or artificially manipulating keyword insertion to gain advantage.
What successful SEO is about is using the keywords that people are searching for in:
• The context of providing valuable content on the keyword topics in question.
• Positions of prominence, such as navigation, titles and headings, so that Google search engine spiders and people can quickly determine the relevance of your content to their search queries.
• The text on your website.
With this in mind, be assured that all the recommendations made by Sparklift Communications Inc. are based on previous successes, accepted industry standards, and Google’s guidelines for legitimate SEO practices.
Here is the big picture on what drives sales conversion rates for different types of businesses, why online sales is so much different and online conversion rates so much lower.
Plus, why understanding this will not only help you feel better about your current online sales conversion rate, but also enable you to truly understand what makes a great or even a fantastic online conversion rate. OK?
Your "natural" conversion rate is a function of the type of product you are selling in relation to the type of store you are selling it from and your ability to maintain the existing confidence visitors have in your when they enter your store.
Natural or “Predictable” conversion rate can be expressed in the following way:
Natural (Predictable) Conversion Rate = Product Type (Need vs. Want) / Store Type x Customer Confidence
As you delve into your research and start exploring what the online sales experts have to say, you'll find that some of the most prominent of these experts will quote figures similar to the following:
About 70% of "shoppers" intend to buy when they go shopping and the average retail conversion rate is about 50%, so it sounds like most retailers are doing a pretty good job.
But, they then say that across different types of online businesses, only about 2% of these "shoppers" convert.
YIKES! This is called "The Leaky Bucket" and the implication is that if you are at or near this online conversion rate you are doing a really poor job of converting visitors to your online store.
Not only that, but the implication is that there is also potential for earth-shattering geometric growth to bring you up to 50% conversion or perhaps even more!
While this may not be an outright lie -- because it is usually only implied rather than stated overtly -- it is totally misleading.
And, not only is it misleading, it is intended to instill a sense of fear and panic about your abysmal online conversion rates while at the same time giving you a false sense of hope that maybe one day your website might convert at 40%, 50%, or even 60% like a lot of retail stores if you only figure it out and consistently do a good job.
And what happens next? These same experts go on to tell you that a 10% conversion rate should be your minimum goal. That anything less is not really good enough.
So, what happened to the 40%, 50%, or 60% online sales conversion rate like the retail stores? And, why is 10% "good" for online sales?
I'll start by saying that in fact, a 10% online sales conversion rate is not just "good" but fantastic! And, that if you get there, you have all but maximized your conversion and achieved the best possible result!
But why the dramatic difference between offline and online sales conversion rates? And why is 10% fantastic for online?
To get to that answer, let's have a quick look at another common contention amongst sales and marketing experts.
Which is that is that sales is simply and strictly a transfer of confidence from the seller to the buyer and that consequently all sales are essentially a matter of persuading prospects to have confidence in you.
As a general rule and philosophical approach to sales, this is a big oversimplification.
To see what I mean, let's have a look at what is really going on and examine the "natural conversion rates" for different types of businesses as well as:
• why achieving your natural conversion rate is mostly about maintaining your visitors' existing confidence in you
• why a 2% online sales conversion rate is OK, 5% great, and 10% fantastic
The fact that someone shows up in your store means that they automatically have a modest amount of confidence in you. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t come into your store in the first place.
How does that work?
Well, let’s look at the graph below and go thru the relationship between product type and store type and see what goes into the decision of a person to seek you out in the first place and decide to come to your store and how that leads to the conclusion that when they actually show up, they already have a moderate pre-existing level of confidence in you.
To start with, for many types of ‘offline’ bricks and mortar stores how much confidence a visitor might have in you doesn’t matter. That’s because the visitor needs what you sell and has no choice but to buy from you.
This is the case in remote locations and for items that are necessities. A bush camp canteen or the last gas station before a desert highway are good examples. The conversion rate for these kinds of stores is at or near 100%.
Next down the line would be something like grocery stores. We all need groceries and while we have lots of choice about which grocery stores to go to, when we decide to go into one the number of times we leave empty handed is negligible.
Further on down the line in examples of how product type and store type are the primary drivers of conversion rate, rather than a transfer of confidence, we can look at something like a department store.
Here there is a greater mix of discretionary items along with necessities, so the typical conversion rate of a department store is lower than a grocery store.
And so on down the line for clothing stores, jewelry stores, stores for specialty items and so forth. For each, the proprietors expect lower conversion rates than for department stores and grocery stores because their products move further and further toward the want side of the equation, rather than the need side.
As this happens, visitor confidence does become a larger part of the equation, but it is still true that if someone shows up in your store they have a moderate pre-existing level of confidence in you and it is simply your job to maintain that confidence to reach your natural conversion rate, rather than to start from zero confidence and have to build them up the whole time.
Not only do they have moderate pre-existing confidence, but they have something else going on that is critical to understanding offline vs. online conversion rates.
When someone shows up in your bricks and mortar store, they bring with them a certain level of commitment. After all, they have spent a considerable amount of time, effort and resources to get there.
Yes, a lot of visitors may just be browsing as they pass thru the mall your store is in, but in most they would not come in at all if they were not in the market for your goods sometime soon. They definitely want to buy stuff and they are going out of their way to look for it, so they are committed and confidence is only part of the picture.
Which finally brings us back to website conversion rates. Let’s start with examining commitment to purchase in terms of websites. When people are shopping in a mall or walking thru a shopping district, it is a significant physical effort to get from one store to the next.
On the internet, this is much less the case. Their level of commitment is definitely much lower, because now we are only talking about the expenditure of time and mental effort, no walking around required. This means lower commitment.
Now, let’s look at confidence. Even if you accept as argued above that the transfer of confidence is not nearly as big a part of the picture in bricks and mortar shopping as some experts want you to believe. Surely, it’s a big part of buying online.
But here again there is a strong argument to be made that really it is the maintenance of confidence rather than the transfer of confidence that is at stake.
And how does that work? Simply this: people have a great deal of confidence in their search engines to provide them with relevant results. When they click thru to your website after finding you at or near the top of their search results, they expect your site to be relevant to what they are looking for because they have confidence in their search engine and that confidence transfers to you.
Provided you can simply maintain that confidence, you can reach your natural conversion rate, which is somewhere around 5% for most online businesses and doesn’t that sound good compared to where you are now?
And after you achieve your natural conversion rate, then you can work on increasing confidence and getting to the starry heights of 10% conversion or beyond, but don’t let anyone scare you into thinking that is your minimum acceptable level. Plan for a natural conversion rate and you’ll be OK.
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posted by Kristjan Butler at 12:56 pm - 0 comments
This blog entry could also be called, "how a keyword near the bottom of our top 100 list got Sparklift Internet Marketing a speaking engagement with the world's 3rd most popular online book vendor, Abebooks."
Admitted not a great blog title, but that is essentially what happened. How? Why?
Well, a lot of good things can and will happen when proper keyword research and insertion is part of your website project. Here's how it worked in this case.
While preparing to launch the company website in the fall of 2006, Sparklift reviewed and updated its keyword research information several times.
One of thes patterns that emerged during the process was that an important subset of keywords related to internet marketing and search engine optimization had to do with 'online copywriting'.
At first, these keywords seemed marginal at best, with monthly search counts as low as 1/100th the rates of the top keywords in the market niche.
BUT -- and this is the essential aspect to effective, professional SEO services -- we knew that these keywords while rarely searched, were extremely relevant to the services provided.
So, Sparklift decided to sprinkle these less important but highly relevant search terms into the body copy of various webpages whenever it was appropriate.
The result: a well-known local high-tech company found Sparklift online, called the same day, and offered to buy internet marketing training services during the first call, which was something that Sparklift wasn’t even directly selling.
The essential story here is that thru the efforts of sound research and effective implementation of keywords, Sparklift created an effective website geared to search engines and to making the sale.
So, the point is that if you follow the proper steps and write the copy for your website well, clients will find you and ask for your business and in the process make your life a whole lot easier.
And isn’t that the whole point of a website anyway, to enable prospects to qualify you as a provider and make 3/4 of the decision about buying from you before they even pick up the phone.
Google's uncanny ability to provide reasonable answers at a moments notice are the keys to its success." Google Power, Chris Sherman, c2005.
For businesses not selling products directly from their website — including consultants, contractors, service providers, and most independent shops – ‘conversion rate’ means the number of people that look at your website and then take the desired action, rather than complete a purchase.
This desired action is usually to pick up the phone and call you. So, if 100 people look at your website and five call, that would be a five percent conversion rate.
Of course, you still have to sell them when they call or email you, but if they look at your website and decide not to contact you then you have zero chance of selling them, right?
So, what is the most important aspect of your website that will get the phone ringing? Your copy! What you say about your products and services. Not the graphics or color scheme, or fancy gadgets.
As far as ‘value per sale’ goes as for consultants, contractors, service providers, and small shops – the quality of your sales pitch (read again ‘what you say about your products and services in your copy’) – is the largest contributor to the amount people are willing to pay for your services.
If there are standard rates for your type of work, then OK. Otherwise, the better your copy the more likely prospects will be to pay the price you ask or to bargain with you less.
Either way, what you say about your products and services is the most important element of your website and determines the value per sale you are able to achieve.
OK, here is another thing I want to clarify … And that is what I mean when I say ‘copy’ and ‘copywriting’.
By ‘copy’ I mean all the words on every page, what their purpose is, how they are arranged, and how they are formatted.
In this context, copywriting includes information architecture, typography, and words that appear in graphics. The point I want to make powerfully and clearly here, is that neglecting your online copy is a big mistake.
Here’s a little apocryphal tale to give you a better idea of what we are talking about here:
There was once a fish monger who was going to be opening his first shop soon, so one day when he was relaxing with four of his friends he mentioned to them what he was thinking of writing on the sign he would hang out in front of his shop: “Buy Fresh Fish Here,” he said. “What do you think?”
The first friend said, “Well, since nobody would be in business for long unless their fish were fresh, you don’t really need to say that. Take out “fresh” and you’ll save some space and money and you can make the other words bigger into the bargain!”
The second friend said, “Yes, that is good advice. In fact, since everyone knows that you are selling the fish, there is really no need to ask people to buy it. They already know that. Take out the word, “Buy” and you can save some space and money!
Then the third friend chimed in to say, “You know, I think they are right. And, while you are at it, why not take out the word “Here”. Everyone knows that the fish will be sold on site, so that word seems unnecessary to me!”
Finally, the fourth friend says, “Yes, this is all good advice. In fact, since you will have the picture and everyone will be able to smell your shop from a ways off anyway, there’s really no need to say “Fish” either!”
Naturally, copywriting is just one element of online sales from a mix of: page load times; overall look and feel; the relevance and power of images; usability of navigation; availability of other functions such as search; and where those products and services fit on the scale of want vs. need.
Still, if you can’t talk about your products and services in a compelling way and get your message across fast, why would anyone call?
If in your advertising you are willing to speak the simple, essential truth as plainly as you are able, and if you are willing to support what you say with illustration and example, meet me in the backyard. We'll start with a chicken dinner and then take over the world." Roy Williams, Wizard of Ads, c1998.
posted by Kristjan Butler at 10:23 am - 0 comments
Based in Victoria, BC, Canada, Sparklift provides internet marketing and search engine optimization services in English to small businesses throughout North America. Services include a focus on achieving immediate, effective results for local search.
