Lead-Gen SEO

How money is this guy?  So money.  His employer should just pay this guy to rap around their client’s topics as linkbait.  CHUCK, IF YOU READ THIS send me a note.  I need someone to rap about tax debt resolution services as some linkbait for a client

Video immediately below and then my “lessons learned” to paraphrase it (his rhyming skills are too fast to catch everything the first time).

1. Your campaign is not working if you aren’t generating leads. Okay that one is easy.
2. Don’t waste money bidding on vague keywords.
3. While fixing your conversion rates, considering pausing your campaign.
   (Mo Says: First pause your ads, no more hits on your card. Money don’t grow on trees, at least not in my yard.)
4. Make sure to include some adjectives in your PPC ad text.
5. Understand your competitive position online

- Is your site complete?
- Is your deal sweet?
- Competitive industry… can you compete?

6. Start with yo’ meat. Talkin’ bout your content.
7. Make sure your text is right for your audience, not just search engines.  Don’t forget you want conversions, not just higher quality scores (on the PPC end) or rankings (on the organic end).
   (Mo Says: After all, they the ones that grab the phone and call.  The search engines won’t do anything but crawl.
8. There are two steps to conversion.  The first is online conversion - from visitor to lead.  The second is generally offline (reminder we’re talking lead generation here) - call your leads promptly.  Be cordial and charismatic.  Don’t be satisfied in doing a great job with online conversions if you are dropping the ball in converting those inquiries to new customers.

Moral of the story:
With lead-generation conversions are all that should matter to you.  To quote Mo again “I’d rather get 100 clicks and close 35, than get 1,000 clicks and only close 9.“

I just finished helping someone with an issue where they were trying to map blog.companyname.com to show their blog at companyname.textpattern.com. This is very similar to what I did with custom domain mapping with WordPress.com and GoDaddy, except its with TextPattern (not WP) and was a subdomain not a domain itself.

Here was the process that worked for us in this case:

0) Go through the wizard for “Domain Mapping” in TextPattern. Control Panel > Site Access > Domain Mapping. If doing a subdomain from your site to your TextPattern site, than put your entire blog.yoursite.com as the “domain” to map to yourblog.textpattern.com.

1) Delete anything you have in GoDaddy that relates to domain masking, subdomain masking, etc. Step 2 will take care of all of that. Make sure there is nothing else that will interfere. It could also be called “domain forwarding” or something. Edit: It is called Domain Forwarding

2) Delete any A records for “blog”. Do this even if you already called GoDaddy or TextPattern support and they told you to do this. They are wrong. This is needed in GoDaddy for domain Forwarding but you don’t want to do that. For mapping a CNAME subdomain you need to delete the masking (step 1) otherwise the forwarding takes precedence and your CNAME will never kick in.

3) Create a new CNAME entry. It has two parts. Where is says “host” put “blog”. No http. No www. Just “blog”. In the second part where it says “points to” put companyname.typepad.com. Again, no http. No www.

4) It may take up to 24 hours to kick in, but it usually does with 3-4 hours. Should be working by tomorrow morning. You may need to reboot your PC though for it to kick in as sometimes browsers cache the old method even if you try to dump your cache.

In this case, it was actually up and running within about 30 minutes. Good stuff. Many thanks to this article which was hard to find on the TextPattern site, but was helpful.

Also, if you do this and do the wizard part in Step 0, put “blog.companyname.com” as the “domain” early on in the wizard. Otherwise it will try to map your root domain and that won’t work if you are trying to map blog.companyname.com to your TextPattern blog.

Lastly, don’t let anyone at GoDaddy or TextPattern tell you that you can’t have it mapped the way you want it. You can. Its just not something that they are really familiar with. You can have your TextPattern blog (or your WP blog too I believe - not sure about the subdomain though on WP but 99% sure) “live” at blog.yourwebsite.com and keep that URL such that no one ever sees the something.textpattern.com version. Better for SEO. Better for Branding. Better.

A client of mine just sent me a note saying:

Jon,

We’ve seen a decent uptick in <region> area leads/conversions. I know we are spending more $ up there, what - if anything else - do you see happening?

As per usual, I spent some time revisiting the data and identified not one but many contributing factors. I could respond one of two ways to this question. The first would be to basically say “Well we’re doing a better job of targeting our customers and delivering them to better-converting, more relevant landing pages.” That’s basically it. That’s why we’re getting more leads and conversions. I probably should have written that. But alas, the good Lord did not bless me with a knack for brevity.

So here is what I found, more specifically. Note that I’ll paraphrase a bit from my email reply to the client, and also cut out a few points that were situation-specific and not so applicable to PPC-based lead generation and conversion in general. I also changed the regions and keywords as well. The client is in fact not a pizza shop. That would be e-commerce conversion, not lead-gen conversion. We don’t do that!

Hi <client>,

Many things are playing into this, hard to isolate just one:

1) The previous PPC campaign (prior to us) that was targeting Maryland was a national campaign that had keywords which included “Maryland” or other regional words. As such, this would effectively show the ad for a guy in California (not the region we’re targeting) who searched for “Maryland pizza shop” or for a guy who is actually in Maryland and searched on “Maryland pizza shop”, but not a guy in Maryland who just searched on “pizza shop”. Chances are that guy wants a pizza shop in Maryland… but its certainly possible he wants one in Iowa. Just not likely.

We have since paused that old campaign and our current one is regionally-targeted. This means it will show for a guy in Maryland searching on our targeted keywords (without specifying his location), as well as a guy in California who specifies something like “MD” or “Maryland” in his search phrase.

> Video about Google’s Geo-Targeting via AdWords

2) We’ve refined the ad groups and keywords we are bidding on in Maryland such that a greater percentage of the money is being spent on your core services now than it was several weeks ago.

3) I believe the ads are a bit more targeted now than they were previously to people in Maryland, in that they not only have something like “Maryland” or “MD” in the ad copy, but also will show “Maryland” under the URL b/c of the geo-targeting feature.

4) The landing pages we’re sending traffic to now (as of last month) are better matches for the content and also present a clearer “call to action” in my opinion. Thus better conversions. This is a result of the time we spent creating individual, targeted landing pages for each service type your firm offers.

5) By separating out the campaign (versus before us) into separate ad groups for each we’re taking people directly to what they are looking for. If they search on “thin crust pepporoni pizza” we’re taking them directly to that page, not just a page about “pizza in general”. Before everyone was going to the homepage and had to find what they wanted specifically. Now we take them directly to the page they are looking for.

Note: Don’t put a bunch of different keywords in one ad group! That will effectively force them all to the same page (unless you go through extra effort) and will also make it much more difficult for you to compare one type of service versus another in terms of their performance. Break your offerings down into 5-10 smaller buckets and make each of those its own ad group. You’ll be able to better-targeted and match your ad copy to the subject, as well as get higher quality scores for your resulting landing pages.

6) All of the above basically contribute to a lower CPC that we’re now paying. You were paying $10 per click in Maryland and now you are paying like $5.50. Plus I believe you’re getting better quality visitors too. Thus, more traffic and more leads for your money.

So there you have it. Side note on pizza… these pizza kits are yummy. Mmmm. Okay now back to online lead generation!

Earlier today I ran across a blog with a blogname.wordpress.com URL. I noticed it was ranking for a number of keywords that one of my sites ranks for. Its a lead generation niche that targets homeowners. Anyhow, the blog titles were blatant spam - all lower case, just random words that don’t make a sentence or phrase, etc. The body had just a list of keywords, and so on. Blatant blog spam.

The intent was to rank in Google’s blog search through keyword relevance and frequency. That is, they didn’t try to be the most trusted blog or blog post in order to rank, but rather they just posted 10 times a day so they would always be one of the 3 or 4 most recent posts for their chosen keywords. Some cheap auto-posting script could probably accomplish this.

This is nothing terribly new… But here is what was different - they had some very nice, reasonably professional videos in each post. They were their videos too, not just something generic scraped off of YouTube.

I had to think - why such a low-end method (spammy auto-posting blog entries) that delivered such a high-end (nicely done videos) form of content? It seemed clear that the intent was for the content to be the video. By not really having any text they just wanted you to find their site via search and then watch the video. In this sense, while its search engine spam using WordPress, it was still a “relevant” result. Usually when this is done its crap on both ends.

I wonder how well the video converts traffic? Do users overlook the spammy headings and text? Do they even notice it?

Anyhow, I was logged in to WordPress at the time, so I had that little blue bar that lets your report a WP blog as spam. I clicked it. The form asked me why it was spam, and I basically said what I’ve typed earlier in this post (10 times per day, just a bunch of keywords and no actual thoughts, etc.).  About 6 hours later I got an email from a guy at WordPress saying the suspended the blog.  The email address it was sent from has “TOS” in it so I’m guessing their decision is based on whether or not it violates the WordPress.com Terms of Service… which I suppose would make rather obvious sense.

I’m now thinking about how much time the videos must have taken to make. They were clearly relevant, decent content. Perhaps I jumped the gun in reporting them? I don’t think so, it was still abusing the WordPress system. I admittedly don’t know (or care) about the letter of the law, but I’m guessing the WP guy that decided to ban them was the real judge here. You can just call me the whistle blower.

Anyhow have any thoughts or experiences with how well video helps convert traffic? How about when the content and rest of the site are low-end? I would think pairing high-end video with high-end layout/content would be best, but perhaps the other method steers eyeballs to the video which (using multimedia) can make a stronger impression.

I hope to soon touch on this topic much more in-depth. But in the meantime there is a great article I’d like to share that I found by Todd Miechiels via Blue Collar SEO.

> Better B2B Web Copywriting Lowers Your Cost of Sales

On a side note, I very much like how Todd brands and positions himself.  He is the founder of an SEO firm though now positions himself as a B2B Internet Marketing consultant… who happens to have a very strong foundation in search marketing.  I’ve been contemplating this myself lately, especially after Aaron Wall’s suggestion as well as just looking at what exactly I do.  Aaron’s post said:

If you are new to the SEO field and want to excel online, call yourself something other than an SEO. Using the label SEO invites arbitrary monitoring and punishment, and there are too many plastic personalities in this field willing to dime out a friend in exchange for a wooden nickel.

I’m not an SEO.  I’m an internet marketer.  SEO is merely one of my tools - but I don’t want to be associated with those spammy SEO’s who neglect things like branding, conversion, building quality sites, etc.  That’s not what I do.  I should do a better job of communicating that message despite my internal pull to focus at all costs.

A colleague referred me to this page offering some SEO Whitepapers.  I haven’t read any of them.  I’m sure they are very good though.

But once you are involved in the SEO industry for a while, the whitepapers - much like SEO conferences - begin to all say the same thing.  The truth is SEO itself is not rocket science.  Its simple.

1. Create really great, unique, valueable content about all the various aspects of your topic.
2. Code your site with a good understanding on on-page SEO, CSS, information architecture, conversion and usability.
3. Get a lot of other really great websites in your topical area to link to your site.

Note that I said SEO is simple, not easy.  It can be damn hard.

Content - The challenge here is creating “really great content” if you are an SEO person or agency.  You likely know nothing about the topic.  Thus, you must rely on a copywriter.  That copywriter likely knows nothing about SEO.  Now in a perfect world the copywriter understand the value of SEO, and you work together peacefully and harmoniously.  In reality, you are too damn busy and so are they - so it doesn’t work out as nicely as you’d each like, and someone often ends up compromising.  That aside, I’ve yet to find a copywriter than can provide me with the quantity and quality of copy I want, at a price I can afford.  Truth is there is no shot - I have a never-ending appetite for content.

Coding - This one ain’t too rough.  Brush up on HTML and CSS standards, on-page optimization fundamentals and conversion/usability topics and generally this is the one I find most firms can really rock.  That’s the problem though, rocking this is simply the admission fee - it won’t differentiate you or set your site apart from the crowd with respect to search rankings.  Everyone else is doing it too.

Great Links - Simple in concept.  And sure, if you have a cool tech site about Steve Jobs or something you’ll be in good shape.  All the techie kids at Digg love that stuff.  Sphinn too - funny stuff about SEO or the internet is great link bait.  As is anything fun, entertaining or controversial is easy.  Try getting links for something boring.  A nice boring accounting firm.  Give that a shot.  And no, you can’t change the firm’s entire offering or marketing strategy - nice thought in principal though, but good luck getting someone to buy into that on Day 1 of your campaign!

Admittedly I’m taking a negative tone here.  That’s really not me.  I’m just trying to illustrate the point though that anyone with more than a reasonable amount of experience with SEO will often agree that what to do is not their problem.  How to do it within the business confines that exist is the real challenge.

How do we make a regular, ordinary accounting firm interesting enough that other sites link to them?  How do we do so while still keeping with the scope of a realistic campaign (you can’t hire a guy from Enron to join the accounting firm!).  How do you apply the principles of SEO that are fairly simple, and implement those items in such a way that is better than your competition, thus setting you apart?  That is the real challenge.

That is SEO.

Anyone can write TITLE tags.

I’m a liar.

Exactly two days after saying I wouldn’t switch my 1.5 week old blog from Blogger to WordPress.com (hosted version) I did just that - transferred it over.  Let me quote myself:

Taking everything into account, I’m going to lean slightly for the WordPress.com option. However, not strongly enough that I would consider converting over this blog which I just set up a few days ago through Blogger.

Liar.  I switched.  Why?

• Comments - I wanted comments to “live” on my domain.  With blogger, they were in a pop-up box that was on a URL tied to the blogger.com domain.  This means when people add comments I would get no search engine boost for new content, additional text, etc.
• Trackbacks - Blogger doesn’t have them.  I felt like the kid who wasn’t invited to the cool party.
• Static Pages - No “pages” in Blogger.  They are in WP.  I like them.
• Categories - I’m a second-go-round blogger.  I blogged alot a couple of years ago and was used to “categories”.  Since I’ve been MIA someone came up with “tags”.  They are foreign to me.  Even worse is “labels” in Blogger.  What exactly are they?  Tags or categories?
• Friendlier URLs - I’m way anal about URL’s.  Way anal.  I couldn’t deal with the “.html” at the end of every URL in Blogger.  That’s unnecessary.  Its not a .html static page, so why pretend that it is?  Just make it a nice clean directory clone with a “/” at the end.  This drives me nuts.

So how difficult was it?  Well, it wasn’t.  WordPress has a nice Blogger import feature despite the fact that Blogger says “Blogger doesn’t not have an export feature.“  The catch - technically its not exporting anything, but WordPress gets authorization from Google and logs in to your Blogger account and pulls out the data.

But this next feature was way cool…

I mentioned the URL formats are different - Blogger using the .html at the end.  Get this - WordPress actually sets up 301 redirects.  If you are an SEO nerd like me, well having your blog set up 301 redirects for you is about as cool as it gets.  I wish I knew this would happen though - as it would have saved me like an hour of time messing with DNS as I was trying to split off the www into a separate CNAME record so I could create a little .htaccess file and manually set up the 301’s myself.  Geeky.  Silly WordPress did it for me - though its not perfect as a few of the URL’s don’t seem to match up perfectly.  Thanks to the 301 header check tool I can troubleshoot this though.  Check it out:

Precursor

So I had this post written and queued up to post today, but I decided to switch my blog from Blogger (hosted, custom domain) to WordPress.com (hosted, custom domain) and while the import went great, the way that Blogger handles HTML in the body of comments did not come through nicely and as such I’m not going to call out the UK-based SEO agency who I was going to rag on (in a fun way) for comment spamming my new blog and several other SEO blogs. They are off the hook, this time!

Comment Spam - Sucks, But Come On - At Least Do It Right!!!

Now, what is spam and what is not spam is a matter of opinion - to some degree. If you have a blog you likely get a ton of spam - and most is easily identifiable. Its often not even actual sentences but just a ton of links. Some spammers though are a bit more intelligent, and they’ll offer comments like “Great post, thanks!”. These are done in automation, and are specifically generic so that its not obvious that they didn’t actually read your post.

Fine. This is nothing new. Transition…

The only thing worse than spam is poorly-done spam!

That’s what <company> has done. They put a link in the body of their comment (decent idea), but their code was funky - it inserted a BR tag at the end of the URL, making the URL invalid and thus the link wouldn’t count for them for SEO benefit.

Okay this was not fair. I don’t know that <company> or someone who works at <company> did this. Someone did. They posted links to the <company> website. It could be someone who does not work for them.

So once instance does not a spammer make. In fact, two doesn’t necessarily either. I’m using this term more playfully here - this group could be a nice group of people and if so I’ll buy them a beer or something.

This isn’t a unique incident though. I see it all the time. Its like they would rather do 100 crappy comments quickly (and only format their URL correctly 10 times) than do 20 legit comments and get 20 links (yes, I know they are all nofollowed anyhow).

Here’s an incident of a company doing exactly this, on this post by Jim Hedger. Full disclosure - I also posted a comment on that post.

The moral of the story is at least three-fold:

1. The is a semi-spam that isn’t really traditional spam. This is a good example. They actually posted legit, thoughtful responses. To that extent, its not really spam. On the other hand, they do seem to be using links to their interior pages on their comments.
2. If you do this (shoot I’m guilty on occasion myself!), make sure your URL is valid. Defeats the point if not, and silly guys like me will take it and run with it.
3. Question: At what point is it spam? These guys “sort of” added a legit comment so perhaps I should let them off the hook as just frequent commenters who happened to choose to post links to their own site in every instance? Certainly this is way different than the typical poker comment spammer.

Certain professions - even certain segments of marketing - necessitate fast turn-around, instant response, and an on-call expectancy.

SEO doesn’t. At least it shouldn’t.

PR - yes, most definitely. If you have a crisis on your hands the media will determine just how big or small a story it becomes within 24-48 hours. By 72 hours its too late. Most any crisis management expert will tell you that you need to do three things to make the best of the situation.

1. (over) fix the problem
2. (over) apologize, sincerely
3. do it immediately, yesterday even

Note number three. If you are in a PR role you should get used to this. The same may be true if you combine SEO with PR, in what is apparently termed SEO PR.

But what if you are into SEO for Lead Generation? This is basically what my firm does - utilizes SEO, PPC and other online marketing activities to generate leads for service firms. Day in, day out. Month in, month out. Its a long-term strategy, not an emergency-driven or crisis-mode type of game.

Let’s not make arbitrary deadlines in lead-generation SEO. Further, let’s not get worried about one day early or one day late. 10 days, fine. 1 day, silly. Organic SEO for lead generation is a long term strategy.

So the impetus of this post was this… A contractor I work with was doing some copywriting for a project we have. She completed 90% of it on time (early by my count) and a few days went by and I had not seen the other 10%. I sent her an email, and she replied basically saying “hey sorry I got sidetracked, I’ll have this to you later today”. I told her to take her time and she got it to me the next day, making a note to thank me for my flexibility:

Give these a try–let me know if there are any changes you need me to make.

Thanks again for your flexibility!

Simple note, but it got me to thinking. Why is everyone on such a deadline mode? Maybe its just my vantage point, but I think we’re all too stressed out and too focused on later today and tomorrow that we miss the big picture. Sacrifice long term success for short term gains? Silly.

My reply:

Thanks! And no problem. I try not to be one of those “the sky is falling and we’ll all die if we don’t have this page tomorrow” types of people. SEO takes so damn long to show results anyhow that one day either way seems rather trivial.

I’d rather have you not think of me as a thorn in your side so that the one time I actually do need something quickly I don’t look like I’m crying wolf!

I think its important to have your contractors like working with you. Sure you pay them money. Some people view this as a license to be demanding and push around their contractors. I think that is short-sighted. You have to remember that your contractors typically work with several other firms besides just yours. This means they have choice. Especially with SEO - its in such demand. Its better to be their favorite partner than their least, because then they are more likely to help you out and go the extra mile when you really need it.

How to get your contractors to love you
These are a few things I try to do:

• Send a small gift card to them every once in a while
• Don’t always try to negotiate down their price
• Every once in a while tell them to add 10% to their price b/c you want to make sure they are getting taken care of
• Pay their invoices within a day or two of receiving them

That last one is easy… unless you are talking about a ridiculous cash-flow issue, I think its something simple you can do. Still the same cost, but it helps make their lives easier. People like getting paid quickly. Instant gratification.

I’m not just being soft here, if your contractors think of you as their best client, than you’ll find that they quote you better prices (b/c you are less of a pain in the ass factor). They’ll do your work first b/c they know they’ll get paid more quickly. In general, a better all-around relationship and it really doesn’t cost you anything more monetarily.

If you (as an individual or freelance consultant) or your company is looking to set up a blog as a “marketing tool”, I encourage you to strongly consider tying that blog to your existing website or another domain that you own, rather than a third-party hosted subdomain (like http://ourblog.blogspot.com). Why?

1. It looks more professional
2. You maintain control over the asset (the domain) - you own it
3. It ties in more directly with your existing website
4. The SEO effect of inbound links to the blog can (if on the same domain) help all other pages on your site, and visa versa… rather than splitting your link juice.
5. No reason not to

With that, I’ll share with you a brief dialog that prompted this post:

Client:

A colleague of mine owns a small software development company and I recently noticed that he has started the BLOG thing…

My Reply:

Blogs are nice tools and tie in nicely with SEO in that they

1. attract links
2. make adding and updating content easier and thus lead to more of it

However, I would have advised your colleague to tied his blog into his brand name - either at http://blog.companyname.com or a new domain like http://www.companyblog.com. This way he would “own” the domain.

Using your own domain with WP or Blogger is in fact very easy to do even while still using the convenience and ease-of-use of hosted platforms like Blogger or WordPress.com (as opposed to more full-version applications that you host on your own server like full-blown WordPress or TextPattern).

The key to online marketing success with blogs is two-fold (to over-simplify):

1. you must stick with it
   a few posts a week for a long time. don’t burn out too fast. don’t expect overnight miracles.
2. realize what a blog can and cannot do
   it helps build relationships with your market, and it can help position its authors as experts in a field. its NOT very successfully used as a direct sales or lead generation tool. if you position it as that you’ll be disappointed. its much more indirect, and often that’s hard for someone with a serious sales background to embrace.

I probably should have added “3. become part of the blogging community within your topic/niche by commenting on other blogs, issuing trackbacks, linking to other blogs when appropriate and sharing in the conversation”.

If you are going to half-ass it, a blog is probably just going to waste your time. If you are willing to dedicate some time to it though, it can be a very useful tool for highly qualified lead generation (directly - as you have branded yourself as an expert) and also will help with your site’s SEO efforts, which in turn further helps generate new leads. In this particular case, the client has a very good understanding of both the technical and softer-marketing aspects, and so it could be an excellent tool as part of their online marketing strategy.