Its about the Conversions, stupid
July 17, 2009
Duh.
So I was totally excited recently to see one of my favorite clients site was now ranking like #3 in Google for one of our top keywords… its a 2-word keyword and is a big one in the industry. Its not terribly specific, but has a tremendous search volume associated with it, and sure enough a high ranking has been driving lots of traffic…
So I hopped onto Google Analytics to see “how much traffic” this keyword and our recently-improved ranking was providing. Over the period I selected, we had something like 700 visits to the site. I clicked on the “conversions” tab. Yeah… ZIPPY! Not a single lead from 700 visitors. Silly, really. So being that our goal is lead-generation, this effectively means that this keyword – which is now this client’s top keyword in terms of traffic volume – is trailing like several hundred other keywords in terms of its real value to the firm as a means of generating leads. Lots of crazy-long-tail keywords have brought us 1 and 2 conversions without even giving any thought to targeting those phrases.
This is nothing earth-shattering. I’m not an idiot. I walk around singing the mantra of “how many leads did it produce” instead of “how are we ranked”. But alas, even I can (momentarily) fall in love with a pretty ranking or a sexy traffic volume. Fool’s gold people, fool’s gold.
Now the silver lining here – or the justification rather – is that in a sense traffic is ALWAYS good even if it doesn’t convert. Why?
- Well shoot maybe it did convert…
- Maybe instead of filling out the form they called on the phone (we’re not doing call tracking on this particular site). Okay great.
- Or maybe they did a search on that big-volume keyword and found our site, and then remembered the company’s name and 2 days later did a search from another computer and became a lead. No way to track that back to the big-money keyword, but it still generated the lead.
- Traffic brings people… some of them have blogs or social network accounts or will email their friends.
- Basically the more traffic you get the more opportunity for word-of-mouth referrals, social media mentions, and some indirect or viral link building to occur which will help your site rank for that keyword and other keywords which may generate traffic and leads later on.
- So you rank for “generic phrase” and that gets you 1,000 visits… one of those guys has a nice blog and links over to you, raising your site’s reputation score. Now you site moves up 3 spots for “really specific keyword” and gets a few more visits that it was getting before, that produces 1 or 2 more leads.
Anyhow, just wanted to share some thoughts here. The point is that traffic, sure, is always a good thing… but when you run lead-generation websites you need to make sure you don’t fall in love with fool’s gold keywords that produce lots of traffic and no conversions, unless of course you can make the case in item #2 above.
I moved to the greater Charlotte area about six months ago, from Baltimore. The SEO community here in Charlotte is growing pretty quickly, and is turning into a reasonably cool scene. Since I basically work all the time and have practically no social life, local SEO meetups and the occasional networking lunch tend to serve as my social life. Sad. But whatever.
So I’ve had a few lunches with some local Charlotte SEO people – I even built a cheesy site that I updated a few times and have since neglected – but anyhow at one of these lunches I got together with Jason Broadwater of Revenflo. Jason is not a “Charlotte guy”. His office is in Rock Hill, SC. He’s from Rock Hill. For those of you reading this who are not familiar with the area, Rock Hill is about 25-30 minutes south of downtown Charlotte. If I were to start a web marketing business today in Rock Hill I’d pretty quickly narrow in on targeting the Charlotte market. Its a bigger market. Its more white-collar. Jason hasn’t done that. As a result he is basically on the board of every business organization in Rock Hill. He’s the man there. But barely anyone in the Charlotte SEO community (at least from the dozen or two I’ve talked with) have heard of him.
I was pretty impressed with Jason when we met for lunch. He’s not just bright – I meet a lot of bright people – he’s wise. Anyhow, somehow today I stumbled back onto a YouTube video of his. If you identify yourself as a marketing guy (as do I), you should get something out of this. I think he’s message of “say one thing loud and clear” is so true. You can’t be the cheapest, fastest, best, most custom, etc. If you are all of those you are nothing. Your prospects won’t believe you. Be one thing. Be that. Focus. Check out the video:
So what’s my company? Good question. We do offer organic search engine optimization services to help service firms generate leads online. That’s what we do. We don’t offer web design anymore, even though we could. We don’t sell hosting, even though we could. We don’t do email marketing (well honestly, who wants to do that anyway?). You get the idea. Our site is a few years old and so when time allows re-working the site will be our top priority, as its admittedly too generic. But talk to me and you’ll realize my strive to stay focused.
SEMCLT Rocks, and Thanks for the Cake!!!
June 5, 2009
So if you’ve talked with me for any bit of time you’ll quickly learn that as much as I love playing on the internet, social media, etc., I think there is tremendous value for online marketers in getting together in-person and having a chat. Meetups, Tweetups, Networking Lunches… whatever. All good stuff.
For the past week or so I was totally psyched to attend the most recent meeting of SEMCLT (Search Engine Marketing Association of Charlotte / Charlotte SEO Meetup Group) – which was held last night. I RSVP-ed maybe two weeks ago… then on Monday I flipped the calendar to June and saw I was already committed!!! My wife and I have friends that came into town last night and are staying for a couple of days. So sadly, I had to change my RSVP to a no. #crushed
So this morning while my wife and our out of town guests are sleeping, I’m on the computer (of course). I hop onto Twitter and see a zillion (like 6 or 7 or something) @jonpayne replies talking about “my cake”. Huh? What cake?
This cake:
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- SEMCLT
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- Les and Keith
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- more cake!
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- yummy cake at SEMCLT
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- not cake… link bait???
The cake was for me!!! And I was not there. How incredibly thoughtful! And how bad I feel for not being there… Its probably a good thing though, as I may have pounded the whole thing before anyone else got a taste. I can put me away some cake.
The references to “Master” are a funny little play on my perfectly acceptable request that everyone refer to as either “Master Payne” or “Jon Payne, MBA” following my completion of the MBA program at Loyola and recent graduation. Just “Master” or “Supreme Being” will also work. I was just trying to be funny by saying that… but its starting to stick!!!
So anyhow please accept this blog post as my humble “thank you” and expression of appreciation. What an unbelievably kind gesture.
Many thanks to whoever was behind this (I have my suspicions…) and sorry I missed you @NC_SEO, @keithschilling, @LesPorter, @FredSexton, @DavidKyle, @RoyMorejon, @CoreyCreed, @learningSEO, @ericfransen, @MaggieHyde, @brettbum and everyone else who attended. I won’t be a no-show next time!
- The Master
Interesting Bing Search Results for the SEO Crowd
June 2, 2009
In follow-up to my thoughts on SEO for Bing, here are a few interesting Bing search results.
Google Bombs now work in Bing! George Bush’s bio is #1 in Bing, after years of conversation about its presence in the #1 slot in Google and then Google eventually taking care of the situation algorithmically (we’re told). How did they not manually test this keyword? If you are relatively new to SEO see this and this. If you have been doing SEO for more than a couple of years its near impossible to have missed this. I used to use this in all my presentations and seminars as an example of the power of inbound anchor text.
This is hilarious. Google is not in the top 10. Neither is Bing. Nor MSN or Live or any of Microsoft’s brands. That’s right. Yahoo is the only one of the big 3 in the top 10, and they are #8. The #1 through 3 slots go to Dogpile, Altavista and a page of recommended sites on the Cal-Berkeley domain.
Thoughts on Bing as Related to SEO & Optimization
June 2, 2009
So by now you’ve heard that Microsoft launched Bing a couple of days earlier than what was (most recently) expected. I’ve read a few other SEO news bloggers who’ve summarized the initial feedback saying it was generally positive – that Microsoft had improved their search product over the most recent Live search product, though it likely wasn’t a Google killer. In fact, many would say that there is no search product that would be a Google killer. I’d probably agree. I think the only thing that would de-throne Google anytime soon would be some sort of PR crisis or major technical lapse. I don’t see either happening.
That said, an improved product from Microsoft (Bing) could increase their share a bit more, and it seems like that is the idea behind Bing. Microsoft seem to have realistic expectations here.
Okay so enough about this background… what’s Bing mean to people who practice SEO and online lead generation for a living? Well after about 30 minutes of messing around with it here are my thoughts…
Q&A: How do I do Keyword Research?
May 22, 2009
I’m chatting with a marketing consultant who is looking to bring me in for the organic SEO piece for a couple of clients of his. He is going to handle the PPC campaign as well as a few other items more on the branding, messaging side too. Smart guy, understands lead generation, market segmentation, etc. He wants to do some keyword research for his client this weekend and has not done much of this before, so he asks me to basically tell him what he needs to do and what tools he should use.
My reply:
Hi XXX,
It’s tough to teach “how to do keyword research” via email in 5 minutes… But here are some resources and a rough recommendation of how to go about it:
Step 1: Brainstorm
- your client’s site
- your intuitive list of keywords you are thinking of (no tools, just your brain and imagination)
- your client’s intuitive list
- list all the “services” your client provides
- list the various sub-topics or features related to each service
- talk to sales guys and learn what the customer is looking for
- review your existing Google Analytics data for keywords currently referring traffic
Step 2: Competition
- your client’s competitors sites
- do a few searches for your initial list… check out the sites that rank well… what else are they targeting?
- use tools like www.spyfu.com and www.keycompete.com
Step 3: Organization
By now you should have a decent length list of lots of random keywords with very little structure or organization. Look at the keywords. Again, use your brain and no tools right now. How can you break this list down into 4-5 different categories? What do the keyword phrases have in common? How are they different? What are the common themes? What are the different “parts” of the keyword phrases?
Step 4: Keyword Combination Tool
http://www.ranks.nl/cgi-bin/ranksnl/tools/key_combiner.cgi?duo=1&charset=
Identify the various parts of the keyword phrase and break it down… For example, with kitchen remodeling contractors you could break it down into two groups:
a) kitchen remodeling, kitchen renovations, kitchen remodels
b) contractors, companies, firms, remodelers
Then use the tool to create all the different combinations. Additionally, you might want to use this to combine your root keywords “kitchen remodeling contractors” and “kitchen remodeling companies” with all of your regions like “DC” and “Maryland”. Make two lists, and combine them.
Step 5: Google Keyword Tool
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Use this to gather search volume data once you have your lists. This tool will also make recommendations for new keywords, but don’t rely on that. Do it yourself first via the above steps, and any new words you find here are a bonus. Otherwise you’ll go down a narrow path and miss lots of stuff. You need to use the human brain first, then the automated tools. You can also use other data sources like WordTracker and KeywordDiscovery but for you purposes just use this tool for now. Use the “average month” number for your keywords and use the “phrase” value rather than the broad or exact (its a dropdown you must select).
Step 6: Sort & Prioritize
Sort the keywords now according to search volume. Then, starting at the top (highest volume) go through them and assign a number from 1 to 10 that indicates how likely it is that someone who searched on that keyword is a perfect match for your client. 10 means its almost a sure sale. 1 means its not very relevant at all. I would probably give “kitchen remodeling” a 2 or 3, whereas I’d give “kitchen remodeling contractors” a 4 or 5 and maybe “kitchen remodeling contractors in Washington, DC” an 8 or 9. Pardon the shameless plugs there, but hey they are totally relevant!
Step 7: Pick Your Targets
For PPC you will probably use most of these and then refine them out based on cost and performance (ROI) over time. For SEO you can’t practically target a ton of keywords, so you have to pick the ones that are the most worthwhile. You’ll also take into account 1) competition and 2) your current situation. If its a new website you’ll need to target “long tail” keywords. If its already pretty strong with a bunch of inbound links you can go a bit less long-tail.
Also see: My Updated Opinion on Various Keyword Research Tools
I would typically estimate 4-5 hours per client here. Its easy though to go much higher or lower. Also, I would recommend that you probably do the data collection part on your keywords BEFORE adding in the various regional words. Otherwise you’ll get a bunch of low numbers that are either “no data” which isn’t helpful to you, or they will have actual numbers but be highly prone to skew since its such a small data set. Thus, run your data collection to identify whether “kitchen remodeling” gets more search volume than “kitchen renovation”, as well as what the magnitude is there, and then make the (relatively safe) assumption that if “kitchen remodeling” gets 3x the search volume of “kitchen renovation” than its probably pretty likely that “kitchen remodeling DC” will get somewhere in the range of 3x the search volume that “kitchen renovation DC” gets.
Okay so that was 15 minutes… helpful???
Lead Gen for Automotive Industry
May 11, 2009
Had a couple of calls with Paul Rushing from ISM in Training. Paul commented on a recent post about managing clients, and we decided to pick up the phone to compare thoughts, notes, etc. In general, Paul is a great guy and really knows his stuff in his niche of SEO and lead generation for the automotive industry. We mainly spoke about managing an agency and running a business in this space, rather than the nuts and bolts of actually doing SEO and optimizing for lead generation.
If you are looking for an SEO guy for your auto dealer than get in touch with Paul! Thanks Paul!
So what can you take out of this? Its simple, remember that while email and social networking are great… try picking up the phone every now and then. Most of my clients tell me they close sales much better when dealing with prospects on the phone, plus when it comes to networking you can discuss a lot more and pick up on things that you just can’t pick up on when sending text communications back and forth.
Two Jobs in One?
I’ve recently been interviewing a number of candidates in a search to find someone to add to our team at Ephricon as an SEO Account Manager. This person will do two main things:
1) Work with clients: Communicate with them… develop strategy, desired outcomes, action plans, etc. Report to clients on results, etc.
2) Do the actual work: Aside from communicating and planning, they’ll actually do most of the SEO work for these accounts – link building, on-site optimization, etc. In some cases this may even extend to moderate copywriting and actually publishing new webpages, in other cases the clients and/or third parties handle that.
So anyhow, I like to have one person do this job. Other SEO agencies break this into two roles – with the first person being someone who essentially spends their day on the phone communicating with clients, writing reports, managing relationships, etc. and the second person actually doing the nuts and bolts like writing title tags, making copy tweaks, building links, etc. I don’t like to break it down like that, b/c I think too much gets lost there. I feel the guy doing the work is too far removed from the client and it creates unnecessary layers of communication, etc. The tradeoff is that its harder to find one person who excels in both of the two above areas than it is to find two separate people. Some might argue you’ll almost always have to compromise slightly in one area on the other if you opt for one person.
What is the Right Number?
So in the process of having phone calls, emails and interviews for our new job opening, I’ve talked with a number of people who currently serve similar job functions. Some just “do the work”, so just “manage the clients” and some do “both”. I’ve gotten a couple of people that have done SEO for a total of 1, 2 or 3 sites in their entire careers… maybe as they were an in-house SEO person, etc. And then I spoke with one girl who currently manages 100 ongoing accounts, and two other guys that manage about 50 each. Those sound like really high numbers to me.
At Ephricon, I’m looking to have each person manage roughly 8 to 12 clients at most… and probaly more like 5 to 7 to start. If you do the math on managing 100 clients each month, you maybe have only 1-2 hours each month per client. If the client calls and wants to chat for 30 minutes you are left with no time to actually do any work!!! That being said, our client load of 8 to 12 (ish) probably is too high for some firms where the scope of their engagement is more comprehensive than ours, and its probably too low for other firms. If you are charging $250 per month per client than you really can’t afford to anything more than a couple of hours of basic SEO for that client each month, so you’d better have a large number of clients.
If I had 100 clients to personally manage I wouldn’t be able to swing it. I wouldn’t even remember half of their names, and I’d easily spend 8-10 hours per day on the phone alone. I’m too verbose. I’d never get any “actual work” done. That’s why we landed on 8 to 12. For me its enough clients that you have some diversity, yet few enough that you can remember their names and dedicate a nice chunk of time to each of them every week. Plus you can list them all on one sheet of paper or one dry-erase board 
As such, we’ve tailored our service-product offering to fit a certain level of scope and price point to fit this, and then we target prospective clients that are looking for our level of scope. If you need 40 hours per week of SEO consulting than we can’t help you – I’d suggest that you’d be better off hiring someone in-house or hiring another firm that does that level of scope. Each person there probably only works on 1-3 accounts (hopefully). That said, if you only need 2 hours per month of effort we can’t do that either – you should probably go with one of these firms where they each handle 100 clients. Success in that environment seems to require established processes, checklists and automation. If you are somewhere in the middle, than we may be a fit
So clearly my opinion is that 5, 10 or 15 clients is probably an okay number of clients/projects for a full-time SEO person to manage at one time. 100 sounds way too high to me. 1 or 2 sounds too boring to me. But I’m totally biased. Obviously this is all relative to scope and level of involvement. For instance, at Ephricon we not only make recommendations but for about 75% of our clients we actually make the changes ourselves – FTP to the site, re-code what needs to be re-coded, post new content, etc. If we got away from that and just made the recommendations and then passed them on to someone else to implement we could probably handle 20 or 25 clients each.
Your Thoughts Please!
So a few questions for everyone:
- Do you “manage the accounts”, “do the actual SEO” or “both”?
- What’s best? Should one person do everything, or should their be a project manager and a separate production team?
- How many different SEO clients and/or different projects do you manage at one time?
- What other criteria or considerations matter here?
How Does Time of Day Affect Conversions and Lead Generation?
April 21, 2009
One of my sites generated our first lead in a new category late last night. One of my partners sent an email saying:
“Who shops for _______ at 12:16am???”
So I got to thinking… 12:16am is late, and the product here is sort of random. My inclination is that if you are shopping for this product at 12:16 am you are not just casually browsing. You are looking to take some action. That is the perfect site visitor. So I wrote a longer response:
<< begin response >>
Consumer traffic is totally like that man. People have to work during the day, so they oftentimes are only able to do their personal shopping at night.
In fact I find that people do lots of “shopping” and “browsing” during the day, but lots of “buying” at night. I once saw someone make a huge mistake… they had a B2B site and put their PPC campaigns on pause on evenings and weekends, figuring that people weren’t at work then and therefore wouldn’t be buying. They were “sorta right”. Most of the traffic was during that time, so even though their ads only ran like 40% of the total hours in the week they still got 80% of the traffic potential, and thus only saved 20% of their total cost by turning the ads off weeknights and weekends.
But the mistake was this… Read the rest of this entry »
The vast majority of my firm’s clients provide either a service or a high-involvement type of product that is not typically bought via an e-commerce store. As such, the client websites are all lead-generation websites. Their primary focus is to generate leads that are then in turn used by the sales team to communicate with the prospect and close the sale. Generally speaking, my criteria for what I will call a “lead” tends to be a bit more strict than most.
When I use the term “lead”, I’m generally talking about an opt-in, direct consumer-initiated action where they are specifically requesting more information from the client. The most common manifestation of this is the prospect doing a search, finding the client’s website, and then either picking up the phone to call the client or filling out a contact form to request more information about the services, pricing information, etc. That’s what I think of when I think “lead”.
I know this is a rather narrow definition, and discounts a lot of other great types of leads that are less-direct, but still quite valuable nonetheless.
Anyhow, when working with a new client I often find myself recommending that they add a contact form to their website, if they don’t have such a form already. Anecdotally, I’ve seen this improve conversion rates and, just as importantly, improve the ability to track effectiveness of campaigns and use that data to improve the campaigns.
We just started with a new client this month, and here is what I emailed them regarding a contact form:
Hi <<Client>>,
I’d very much like to add a contact form to your website, a short form asking just a few pieces of info like name, email address, phone number and service they are interested in, etc. Here are the reasons I’d like to do this:
1) Improve Conversion Rates – In general, I’ve seen contact forms improve the conversion rate of visitors-to-leads for the vast majority of clients. The main reason is that it enables prospects to take action during off-hours. Especially with a service like yours, there is a good percentage of your traffic that is visiting on the weekends, or very late at night. If their only option is a phone number, they won’t call b/c they expect no one to answer the phone. Additionally, you also will get the “goofing off at work” crowd which is actually quite significant – people who are spending a few minutes while at work researching personal stuff, and they don’t want to call b/c their coworkers will hear, but they are happy to fill out a form to make initial contact. You currently have an email listed on the site as well as a phone number. Again, a form is one better than that. For some people just having an email address is to vague. Its not a strong enough “call to action”, and since it doesn’t prompt the user with questions sometimes they don’t know what to write. On your end, a form submission is better b/c you can ensure you have the 2-3 pieces of information you really need from a new contact. With an email they might leave something out such as their phone number or the type of service they are interested in.
2) Better Tracking – We can track all form submissions in our analytics package. We cannot track phone calls or emails sent via the email link in the same way. With forms, I can gain valuable data and learn which keyword phrases bring you the most leads, not just traffic. Often we may find that keyword abc brings 100 visitors and 3 leads, whereas keyword xyz brought only 40 visitors but 6 leads. Without the form tracking we would think keyword abc was better and deserving of more attention. With the form tracking we clearly know that keyword xyz is more valuable to you.
Convinced yet?
Upon writing this I realized most of the evidence I have is in my head and in my experience. There is a client we started with about 2 years ago that went from 2% to about 3% conversion rates when moving from email to form. We did not leave the email up so this was email address vs. form rather than email address vs. (form + email).
Who has hard data on this? Any case studies?
