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WebTrenz Newsletter Volume 002  ·  September 2009 · e-mail us: sales@ecomdiversified.com · website: WebTrenz/Ecom Website

Where Is Your Money Going??

With the economy and things seemingly still getting worse, we continue to ask the same question. Where is our money going? Are we getting our money's worth with not only our company website, but in advertising in general? What we have learned over the last five years or so is that many advertising medias no longer prove to be profitable. A good example of that is the phone book yellow pages. In fact we recommend that most companies only spend the minimal amount of money to simply list their name in the white pages and skip that $4,400 full-page ad cost (according to the Direct Marketing Association website). Funny enough, open the phone book. People are still advertising there and yet according to many research firms, less than 10% of all people open a phone book anymore for any reason. So what does all of this mean? It means that we need to pay attention to where our money is going and making the best of every dollar that we spend. There are plenty of opportunities out there for effective online advertising that will find itself in front of your target market. Then, the rest is up to you... answering the phone, closing the sale, or if you sell online exclusively, keeping the potential customer at your website shopping. We are dedicating this issue entirely to effective advertising and creating an environment or website that will attract and keep people coming back. After all, good advertising simply gets the customer to call or to visit your website. The rest is up to you... or for that matter, us if we are helping you manage your online presence. Anyhow, that is why we put out newsletters and other white papers. We want you to succeed.

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How Does Website Optimization Help?

Website Optimization is generally defined as organically or naturally improving the volume of traffic to a particular website or set of website pages, as opposed to search engine marketing which deals directly with paid inclusion.

I am not making this article about whether you need SEO performed on your website or not, but more on how to get it going and where. At this point in the game, I am hoping that you already know that whether you sell online or not, you need SEO and SEM to drive traffic to your website and increase business. If you are not doing this by now, you have a lot of homework to do.

So in preparation for this article, I went out and spent a few hours looking at various companies that claim to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for $49 or $89 or whatever. The first thing that always comes to mind here is the question... Would you go to a place that advertises $89 laser eye surgery? Trust me, they are out there. The same thing applies to your website. Even some of the largest hosting companies out there advertise some form of SEO for pennies on the dollar. We have often found that these are the same companies who rank so poorly themselves in the search engines that they prove they cannot lead by example. Others advertise these rates, yet pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year having professional experts manage their SEO for them. So either way, any true SEO expert will tell you that there is no free lunch.

Choosing the right person to help you with your website marketing is paramount. Choosing the wrong person will cost you money, sometimes much more than you will ever expect. Having the wrong person working on your website will not only cost you the money you are paying the person to "help" you, but it will also cost you the business you have lost due to poor rankings, improper link sharing, bad revenue sharing, etc. Make sure the person or company you choose has been in the industry for at least 8-10 years. Here at Ecom Diversified Technologies, we have been doing this since 1996. We spend thousands of dollars a month researching and keeping up to date with the latest changes and newest technology in the industry. Our customer's success depends on it.



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Creating A Pay Per Click Plan


Understanding Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising is as important as investing in your business future as anything else nowadays. First and foremost, paid search is an amazingly powerful channel for capturing existing demand in the online marketplace. Like other advertising such as yellow page ads, people are only going to see your ad when they are in the market for your particular product or service. Yellow page ads or PPC ads are not going to make someone interested in taking karate lessons, but they will help a person who has searched for karate lessons find your studio and possibly make the decision to use your services.

Creating a plan is important, but there are also limitations to how that plan should be created. There are analysts out there that will tell you that they can create 6-12 month plans and predict purchasing indicators for your business. Other than predicting that there will be a rise in sales during periods such as Thanksgiving, Christmas and other normal surges in sales, it is often impossible to predict these types of changes. And in terms of creating an online plan for advertising to meet those unforeseen changes, is in most cases futile. This is not to say that you should not plan for trends and expected periods throughout the season where your business naturally increases in sales and to react to those increases with discounts, sales, coupons, banner creation, advanced changes to your keywords in your PPC advertising and such. Those plans need to be well in advance of these trends so that the changes are in place to allow for keyword changes along with search engine changes, which often happen within 7-10 days or less nowadays. If you want to do this right, hire a professional. We can consult with you on your Search Engine Marketing needs for less than a few hundred dollars, and the effect of that consultation could change the way you do business. We have helped many clients increase sales across the board anywhere from 15-30% annually.



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Do You Have a Keyword List?


This seems like a simple enough question, but is it? Have you ever generated a list of keywords from your product line or the services that you offer? For example, if you are a hair and nail salon in the Orange County area. If you have a website, by now you should have a complete list of keywords that you have generated at some point from the various aspects of development or continued marketing of your website. Those keywords might be as easy as your company name or a little more complex such as particular hair or nail designs that are in style. Those terms might also be ever changing, as the fashion and style industry changes month to month. That being the case, have you updated your website with these new keywords? Have you updated your pay per click marketing with those new terms so that your potential clients find you when they search for your services? There are many factors that go into search engines indexing your website. One major contributing factor is a website that has consistent and new content added on a frequent basis. Adding your keywords also do not necessarily just mean adding them to the META tags on your website. In fact, Google announced this week in their online blog that their search engine does not even use keyword META tags as a part of indexing websites for their search engines. What does that mean? That means that you need to incorporate those keywords into the text and information that you place on the pages of your website for Google to even factor it into their rankings. This is something that 90% of all people do not even consider in the development of their websites... or better yet, don't even realize. Yet, not knowing this, and ranking poorly in the search engine result pages cost companies millions of dollars each year. How much money is your company losing?

So, having a keyword list is a major factor in not only knowing what people are searching for when it comes to the products and services that you are marketing, but in making sure that the search engines even list your company when they make these searches. It is like opening a phone book yellow pages and not having a clue where your product or service should be listed. And let's face it, if you are not listed among the top 10 results for critical keywords in your industry and location, chances are 80% of your potential business is going to your competition, regardless of whether you sell a better widget or repair it better. The one thing that I cannot tell a client enough is that the Internet is the great equalizer. There is no better place for a small mom and pop company working out of the garage has as good of a chance as a $10 billion dollar company with a 500,000 square foot warehouse. It comes down to the website you develop, the way you rank in the search engines, and how well you set up your pay per click advertising. Everything else is secondary.

How do you put your keyword list together fast and easy? Well, first and foremost, don't bother using those computer based keyword generators. They will not achieve the results that they claim they do. The easiest way to achieve productive results is to sit down and write out a list of what you would look for if you were a potential customer looking for your company. From that list, start plugging it into Google and Yahoo, along with others and see what your competition is doing right that you apparently are not. It is a process. Plug in "Orange County" if you are in Orange County, or "Yorba Linda" if you are in Yorba Linda and so on. Try "Orange County Hair Nails" or whatever particular keyword applies. Build your list upon that. We also suggest putting these keywords in order of importance. As you build your list and start your online advertising programs, you will need to use the most relevant keywords and place values to them.


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What Do I Use To Track Website Traffic?


Right now in the industry, the best product on the market is Google Analytics. More importantly, it's free. It is also fairly easy to set up and you can get real-time statistics from the website within the first few hours of having the account set up.

The first thing you need to do is find out whether your web developer has already set this up for you or not. There are two easy ways. The first being of course, ask him or her. Secondly, you can go to your website and take a quick look at your source code on your homepage. Here is how you do it...

Open a browser window such as Explorer or Firefox. Go to your website and once you are looking at your homepage, click VIEW and then SOURCE, if you are in Explorer. Hit CTRL-U if you are in Firefox. This should bring up the "source" or code for the webpage that you are currently on. From there, hit CTRL-F and search for "google-analytics.com" and if you find a few lines of code/text that has that website in it, chances are you currently have Google Analytics loaded and installed on your website. If you have a person doing the web development for you, ask them to assist you in getting access to that information. They can provide you real-time access to those stats if you have a Google account, which is free to set up and access.

If Google Analytics is not setup on your website, we suggest that you take the time to set it up and use it. The great thing about creating this for your website is that it will provide you an in-depth look at not only how many people are visiting your website, but it also tells you where that traffic is coming from and how long they stayed on your website. Additionally, other stats will show what pages have been visited, how many and what percentage of people came to your site and only visited one page, as well as many other useful stats.

One of the most useful statistics is the keywords section. Google Analytics will tell you what keywords each of your visitors typed in to find your website. Keeping track of and collection of this information is paramount in creating and maintaining your pay per click (PPC) advertising programs.

Google Analytics has an entire section of their website dedicated to explaining how to set this free service up on your website. If you would like to take a look at how to get all of this going for your site, go to: Setup Google Analytics.


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What Are The Best Pay Per Click Programs?


      
  • Google AdWords
    If you are a small company on a budget and really don't have any experience in the world of pay per click advertising, this is probably the easiest and best place to start. We cannot stress enough that having a professional help you with this process is in your best interest. However, if you feel that going it alone is something you want to do, start here. We suggest setting a small daily budget for yourself to start with and then work with the numbers as your results increase. Google is well known for giving coupons away for the first $25 free. You just have to search around for them.

      
  • Yahoo Search Marketing
    As with Google, Yahoo has a very easily managed program that you can configure and get going with within a relatively short period of time. As with Google, Yahoo has options to run your ads throughout their various sponsors and affiliate websites. If you are new to all of this, be careful with it. The money will add up quick and if you don't do your research, you will find that the money will go faster than the results coming in. That is why it is good to know your keywords and the value that you want to place on each.
      
  • MSN Ad Center
    MSN is noted for having some of the best converting traffic in the PPC market. It is a little more involved in getting things going if you are new to this, but we recommend this as an option to mix in with your Google and Yahoo campaigns.
      
  • MIVA
    MIVA is one of the best underrated PPC advertising programs out there today. This is a recommended PPC program for those who have worked with the other top three programs prior to moving into this realm. Ultimately, all five of these campaigns are very good overall at converting traffic into results for your company if you configure things correctly.
      
  • Search Feed
    Search feed is a great targeted lead generation with an alternative to traditional PPC advertising. We suggest working a while with the top three before moving onto Search Feed or others like it.


    Overall, again we cannot stress enough having someone consult with you prior to starting any type of PPC program. As professionals, we go to SEO/SEM seminar after seminar or conference after conference to learn what we do. If it looks easy, then we are doing our jobs right. As mentioned in other articles, we have consulting packages available for you and your business where we can put the entire PPC programs together for you and get you going to a point where you can take over the management of the program. You would never attempt to operate on your own broken arm or leg. We do not advise doing the same for your online business needs.


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Who Is Winning The Race?


The top search engines continue to battle over who is best and the claims they make that allegedly make them the best. Google by far still has the largest market share with over 70% of the market. Then comes Yahoo and now Bing. Interestingly enough, in a recent statement at the end of July, "Yahoo! and Microsoft announced an agreement that will improve the Web search experience for users and advertisers, and deliver sustained innovation to the industry. In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies' premium search advertisers." This in itself will change the landscape for search engines competing for second and third place spots in the search engine market share. The agreement will undoubtedly help both Yahoo and Microsoft as they climb their way up, cutting out a largest piece of Google.

Here is what the market share looks like from month to month:

2009 Google Yahoo! Bing Ask Total
2009 09 70.46% 16.73% 9.28% 2.50% 98.97%
2009 08 70.24% 16.96% 9.44% 2.37% 99.01%
2009 07 72.07% 17.00% 7.31% 2.58% 98.96%
2009 06 74.04% 16.19% 4.99% 3.15% 98.37%
2009 05 73.66% 15.55% 5.64% 3.81% 98.66%
2009 04 72.68% 16.29% 5.67% 3.96% 98.60%
2009 03 72.13% 16.56% 5.50% 4.02% 98.21%
2009 02 72.11% 17.52% 5.55% 3.47% 98.65%
STATISTICS ARE PROVIDED BY HITWISE.

We reported in our last newsletter that we felt that Bing, Microsoft's new search engine (formerly MSN Live Search) would start grabbing market share and rise to the top very quickly. As you can see since February of this year, Bing has gone from about 5% market share to about 9% market share. Experts agree that this number will continue to increase over the next six months.


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Links That You Can Use!


Here is a list of links that you need to move forward with your site submission and PPC advertising needs. These links change from time to time, so depending on when you are reading this newsletter and clicking on the links, they may or may not have already expired.

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Definition Corner



AdWords:
 Google's CPC (Cost Per Click) based text advertising. AdWords takes click through rate into consideration in addition to advertiser's bid to determine the ad's relative position within the paid search results. Google applies such a weighting factor in order to feature those paid search results that more popular and thus presumably more relevant and useful. Google has also started taking into account the quality of the landing page and applying a quality score to the landing pages.
Algorithm:
 An algorithm is an operational programming rule that determines how a search engine indexes content and displays the results to its users.
Back Links:
 Back links are inbound links pointing to a web page. Also referred to as Inbound Links.
Conversion:
 The act of converting a web site visitor into a customer or at least taking that visitor a step closer to customer acquisition (such as convincing them to sign up for your e-mail newsletter).
Cost Per Click (CPC):
 The cost incurred or price paid for a click through to your landing page.
CSS:
 Cascading Style Sheet - used to control the design of website.
Dynamic Rotation:
 Delivery of ads on a rotating, random basis. Dynamic rotation allows ads to be served on different pages of the site and exposes users to a variety of ads.
Google Analytics:
 Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool offering detailed visitor statistics. The tool can be used to track all the usual site activities: visits, page views, pages per visit, bounce rates and average time on site etc. But it can also be used to specifically track Adsense traffic. Therefore helping webmasters to optimize Adwords adverts based on where visitors come from, time on site, click path and geographic location.
Hidden Keywords:
 Keywords that are placed in the HTML source in such a way that these words are not viewable by human visitors looking at the rendered web page.
Hits:
 A download of a file from a web server. Hits do not correlate with web page visits. Every graphic on a web page counts as a hit. Thus, a single access of a web page with 20 unique graphics on it register as 21 hits - 20 for the graphics and 1 for the HTML page. Web metrics guru Jim Sterne says hits "stand for How Idiots Track Success." People who talk in terms of hits are usually either ignorant or are trying to snow their boss into thinking the website is doing better than it really is.
Homepage:
 A homepage is the main page of a website. Like a cover of a book or the front of a store, its function is to welcome people and to inform them of the overall purpose of the website. The homepage offers an index of navigation that organizes content and leads to other parts of the website.
HTML Source:
 The raw, un-rendered programming code. It can be accessed in Internet Explorer by going to the "View" menu then selecting "Source".
Impression:
 The number of times your search ad is served to users by search engines.
Internal Links:
 An Internal Link is a hypertext link that points to another page within the same website. Internal links can be used as a form of navigation for people, directing them to pages within the website. Links assist with creating good information architecture within the site. Search engines also use internal text links to crawl pages within a website. The way internal links are structured will impact the way in which search engine bots spider and subsequently index pages.


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LEGAL INFORMATION: Although we try to edit these articles for content and accuracy, we cannot always guarantee their content is 100% accurate. Should you use any information contained in this newsletter, you do so at your own risk. All information contained herein is not intended as specific advice, but as a general point of discussion. Should you find an error, please e-mail us.