The First Simple Step To Search Engine Optimising Your Site

So you’ve defined your Most Wanted Keywords (MWK) and you know that your ideal customers are using those words and phrases to look for the products and/or services you offer in search engines.

How do we start making sure your site is screaming “Google, look at me, I’m relevant!!”

Your site’s Page Titles are one of the first things a search engine will look at when it is determining whether or not to include your listing.

Use them wisely and they will help towards improving your rankings and could also encourage a searcher to click on your link instead of someone elses.

We know Google is all about relevance – ie it only wants to show searchers results that are as close as possible to what they are looking for.

So if your Most Wanted Keyphrase is Garden Design Surrey we want to make sure that phrase is included in your home page title.

In most Content Management Systems you will be able to change your Page Titles in the “Page Properties” tab.

Write the title carefully making sure that while you use the MWK a couple of times you do so in a human friendly way.

Here’s an example;

Garden Design Surrey –  e-Vis Landscapes – Award Winning Garden Designer Surrey

There’s no doubting that this website is all about Garden Design in Surrey and our page title reflects that without being too spammy or ‘keyword stuffed’.  Not only have we optimised the title for Garden Design Surrey twice, but we have also  included Garden Designer Surrey, our secondary MWK.

If you are targeting more than one MWK then try and make sure all your main pages have unique page titles that include them once or twice.  You’ll also be making sure the content on that page is completely relevant too, but we’ll deal with that another week.

Optimising your site in bite size chunks means it can take a while for you to climb the rankings but it’s much more achievable than trying to do everything at once.

Your Marketing Goal for the Week

Have a look at the page titles of your home page and three other main pages.  Do they include your Most Wanted Keywords or Phrases?

If they don’t, rewrite the titles, trying to include them or slight variations of them at least twice.

Goal Complete!

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Do You Need More Customers?

Then find out how Online Marketing can help you promote your business affordably at my next Online Marketing Workshop:

Harness the Power of the Internet and Take Your Business to the Next Level – 30th November, Walton-on-Thames, Surrey.

Visit www.e-VisWorkshops.co.uk for more details.

Turn Your Browsers Into Buyers

Running a successful website is very much like having a real bricks and mortar shop.

When you start out it’s as if you’re positioned down a backstreet, hidden away from the majority of your shoppers.  Rent is cheap there, but the likelihood of your customers stumbling across you is quite small.

As you work on your marketing activities you slowly move your shop from that depressing backwater where the till barely rings towards the bright lights, hustle and bustle of the high street where there are much higher levels of footfall.

Except an internet high street (the listings on page 1 of Google) is even better than a real one – all the shoppers on your online high street are looking for a solution to their problems that you can solve!

So when visitors start coming to your website, what’s in your shop window to entice them in?  And once they’re in, what are you doing to encourage them to become loyal customers?

High Street stores spend millions making sure that once their expensive ad campaigns and costly location have tempted customers to their door that they then have a fantastic in-store experience and come away having bought something and wanting to return.

Your store can be no different – it must engage your prospective customers and entice them to buy and return, otherwise you’ll be shelling out huge amounts of time and money getting them there only for them to walk away empty handed.

Factor in the statistic that says the average website (including the really big successful ones) achieves a conversion rate of only 2-5% (ie for every 100 visitors you get between 2 and 5 sales/bookings or enquiries) and it becomes even clearer how much effort we need to put into making our sites encourage a sale or booking, rather than just hoping for the best!

So here are 3 key features that every successful website must have in order to turn browsers into loyal buyers:

1.  Eyecatching Headlines

When you’re surfing around the internet looking for a solution to a problem you’re dealing with (let’s say you want to find out how to promote your business using online marketing! ;)) when you click on a listing you want to know you’re in the right place before you waste any more time there and click away.

Some say we have less than 7 seconds to grab a browser’s attention, so having a bold headline or two which spells out what you do in a crystal clear way helps your visitor relax knowing they’ve come to a worthwhile place and spend time reading the rest of your copy.  Without that clear indication it’s too easy for them to move on.

2.  Clearly Presented Offers and Packages

New visitors do not want to have to click around very much to get to your offer.  Put brief details about special offers, packages and gift options on your home page and quick links from there to the pages which set them out in more detail.

Also make them easy to find and get to from your other pages as these days not everyone will find your site through your home page alone.

3.  Include a Bold, Bright and Clear Call to Action

It’s so easy to forget to ask for a sale, but this tip applies to all your marketing activities.  Make it really obvious what someone must do to start the process of working with you.  These can be bright buttons, or even subtle text links but they must say something like;  Buy Now, Book Now, Enquire Now, Sign Up, Join Up etc etc.  Simple, clear and concise.  A confused customer NEVER buys!

There are many more ways to ensure you turn more of your browsers into buyers and I go through some of the most important ones at my Internet Marketing Training workshops.  These small group, boutique workshops takes place in Walton-on-Thames and will give you a really good overview of online marketing and how it can help you promote your business cost effectively.  If you’d like to book a place on the next one, please Click Here.

Your Marketing Goal for the Week

Have a look at your website’s home page and ask yourself these questions:

1. Is it completely obvious what I do for my customers?
2. Have I included brief details about my offers, packages and gift options?
3. Have I used a bold and clear Call To Action?

Goal complete.

Now spend some time rejigging your pages a little to make sure they do include these features.

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Do you need more customers?

Then find out how Online Marketing can help you promote your business affordably at my next Online Marketing Workshop:

Harness the Power of the Internet and Take Your Business to the Next Level – 30th November, Walton-on-Thames, Surrey.

Visit www.e-VisWorkshops.co.uk for more details.

How to Help Google Find You – Part 2

Six Easy Ways To Get Inbound Links To Your Website

Is your site appearing on page 1 of Google for your Most Wanted Keyphrase yet?  If it is, well done!  Go and treat yourself to a latte before getting stuck into fulfilling all those orders!  (Orders and bookings not coming through as fast as they should?  Then look out for my next article on how to help turn your browsers into buyers, coming soon.)

If your site hasn’t made it to page 1 for any of your search terms yet then one of the main reasons could be a lack of good quality inbound links.

Some say proactively getting inbound links is now even more important than keyword focussed content in terms of where Google will rank your site.

Making sure your content and site is optimised for your keyphrases is still vitally important, how else do search engines know what your site is all about?  (Find out how to research which key search phrases are the most important for your business by reading last week’s post How To Help Google Find You)

But it’s likely that the 80:20 rule applies, with inbound links being the most valuable factor at the moment.  Without good quality links pointing to your site, the chances of it getting a free listing on the first and most important page are extremely slim.

Yahoo seems to attach far less importance to inbound links so it can be easier to achieve high rankings there, the only problem is most people use Google – so that’s where we need to focus our efforts!

The average Google page – excluding paid for ads – offers between 10 and 12 free listings to websites which they deem to be most relevant to a particular search query (you’ll see these listed on the left hand side of the page).

If the search term you want to be listed for is very sought after, you’ll really have your work cut out.

So make a start now by finding out how many inbound links the companies that have already made it to page 1 have and where they got them.

To get a reasonably good idea of how many inbound links a site has, use the Yahoo site explorer.  Visit Yahoo and enter the following query into the large Web Search Box:

link:www.your-competitors-website-address-here.co.uk

Yahoo will show a list of websites that have a link pointing to that site.   It doesn’t show all of them but it certainly gives you a clue about how many your site needs to be in with a chance of reaching the same position!

So start getting those links.

Here are 6 good ways to start:

1.  Speak to the owners of other businesses you know and like and ask if they would like to do a reciprocal link swap with you.  Make sure they can return the favour and that they are a good fit for your brand.  Never offer a link on your site to a company you don’t know, have never heard of or can’t recommend.  These requests work best with business owners who actually know you and can vouch for your service.

 2. Create great content and post it on your site or blog.  If it’s useful other people will want to link to it.  When you write something good, tweet about it, put it up on your Facebook page, your Linkedin profile and add it to social bookmarking sites so others can find it.

3.  Submit articles, reports and press releases to article and press release directories and make sure you include a link back to your site in the resource box.  When online publishers pick up on your article and want to include it as a resource on their own site you’ll be rewarded with a high quality link back.

4.  Submit your website to relevant, high quality online directories, although a bit time consuming this is a great way to start, making sure you avoid dodgy looking ‘link farms’.

5.  Check  out your competitors links using the Yahoo tool we talked about before and see where they got their links.  Can you get one there too?

6.  Write guest blog posts and add useful, relevant comments to other people’s blogs.  Both of you will benefit from the interaction and new content and you’ll usually get a link too.

There are lots of other ways to build your links but these 6 are a great way to start.    Without these valuable inbound links the most important search engines may well ignore you, because to a search engine like Google, each link counts as a ‘vote’ for you and they’ll want to see that other people think you’re worthy of that valuable top spot before they reward you with it.

Your Marketing Goal for the Week:

Get three inbound links to your site today.  Start with these sites which will give you a free listing:

www.FreeIndex.co.uk, www.iSurrey.co.uk and Google Places

Goal Complete.

Now aim to get 2 – 3 new links per week.

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Next Online Marketing Workshop:  Harness the Power of the Internet and Take Your Business to the Next Level – 30th November, Walton-on-Thames, Surrey.  Visit www.e-VisWorkshops.co.uk for more details.

How To Help Google Find You – Part 1

How to choose your Most Wanted Keywords and phrases (MWK’s)

Chances are if you’re not sure what words and phrases people are using in the search engines to find your kind of product or service, you won’t be using them on your site.

If you don’t use those specific words and phrases on your site, Google won’t think you’re relevant for them and there is very little chance that you will be rewarded with a sought after free listing which is displayed on the left hand side of a Google results page when someone searches on that word or phrase.

So how do you choose your Most Wanted Keywords or phrases (MWK’s) for your business?

Every day, millions of consumers use Google to find a solution to their problems.  Google knows exactly what we’re searching for and magnanimously (?!) shares that information with us in the form of the Google Keyword Selection Tool.

Use it well and this resource will help you discover what words and phrases people are using in the search engines to find your products or services, how much competition there is for those phrases and even how much it is likely to cost to advertise.

Let’s say you have a landscape gardening business.

Google helps us find out which words and phrases people are searching with to find garden designers.

Fire up the tool by clicking here:  https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Enter all the possible words and phrases that you think someone with a weed ridden garden might search for.  Some examples could include:

• Garden design
• Gardener
• Gardener surrey
• Landscape gardener
• Landscape gardener surrey
• Garden design surrey

Etc etc.  Include variations of the phrases, geographic locations if you want a local business and plurals.  When you’ve exhausted every possible variation you can think of, enter them into the Word or phrase box, with one on each line.

Type in the characters you see in the captcha code box (this ‘weeds’ out the spammers) and hit search.

Now before you get too excited, stop and click on the box which says Exact Match on the left hand side, this puts all your words into [brackets] and only shows you the results for people searching on those exact phrases.

Next sort your results by clicking on the ‘Local Monthly Searches’ column.  This will show the keywords and phrases with the highest number of searches in your area first (edit your location using the ‘Locations’ link further up the page if it is not showing your country.)

The bar chart shows that the competition for all these phrases is fairly high (hover your mouse over the competition bar).

If you want to find out how much it would cost to advertise your garden design business on Google, then sign in to your Google account before starting your research and a new column with average cost per click charges will appear.

By narrowing your search down geographically ie Garden Design Surrey, your numbers reduce dramatically but the relevance of that search for you increases too, especially if your business is going to be specific to a certain area as Garden Design would be.

Remember that small, local businesses do not need huge numbers searching for them on Google, a few can keep you very busy indeed, but the larger the search numbers and lower the competition the easier it will be to gain traction and visibility in that market.

You also need to think about the commercial value of each phrase.  You might be excited to see in the suggestions that Google helpfully provides below (which will help you expand your research and comes up with ideas you might not have thought of) that the word ‘Garden’ has 33,000 people searching for it in the UK each month with only medium levels of competition!  But is this word being typed in by people who need someone to design their outside space?  Unlikely!  This kind of term is too vague to target, we want phrases that indicate that someone is looking for something to buy and is ready to make a booking or place an order.

Of course the numbers that Google gives us need to be taken as indicators of need rather than a hard and fast calculation of the number of customers we are likely to get.  There are many more factors at play here; once you’ve found your niche you need your site to appear on page 1 of the search results (no mean feat!), your description needs to entice someone to click on your listing and then your site needs to convert that browser into a buyer.

But once you know the main keyword or phrase that most of your potential customers use to find products and services like yours then you can focus your site content on those specifically and start working your way up the rankings to page one.

Once you’re on page one, your business listing will be seen by your hottest prospects exactly when they are looking for a solution to a problem that you can provide, and better yet, when they click on your listing it will cost you nothing!  Well worth the effort involved in getting there.

Your Marketing Goal for the week

Research the exact keywords or phrases that most people are using to find your product of service using the Google Keyword Selection Tool.

Choose a maximum of three which have the most searches and lowest competition – these are your Most Wanted Key Phrases.

Now write them down on a sticky note or blu tack them to the wall.

Goal Complete.

From now on, whenever you write new content for your website, blog, social media accounts, articles, PR and advertising, include these phrases naturally in your writing.  Over time Google will come to find that your content is entirely relevant to that word or phrase and subject to a few other factors will start to feature links to it whenever someone types them into the Google search box.

Tip:  Don’t overuse your keywords in your writing, always remember you’re writing for humans not just search engines!

NB: If you’ve already done this,  it might be time to do it again!  People’s search queries change over time and depending on seasonality and trends.  Top up keyword research  is worth doing every 2-3 months.

Next Week:

How To Help Google Find You – Part 2

I’ll be talking about the second most important thing you HAVE to do if you want to appear on page 1 of Google for your Most Wanted Key Phrases.

How to Quickly and Easily Research Your Business Ideas

[This article was previously published on the www.mumandcareer.co.uk website – a fantastic resource for working mums.]

Fans of Dragon’s Den, will be forgiven for thinking that to set up a successful business you need to have a Eureka! moment and create a fabulous new invention that no one has ever thought of before.

Well that’s certainly one great way to do  it, take as examples the impressive Cara Sayer who invented the very wonderful, Snoozeshade and Elisa Everitt and Vickie Bryars who have just launched a clever scooter hand warmer  for kids – Scootearz, but there is another way – provide a product or service that is already popular and in demand.

But how do you find out what that thing is and how much demand there is for it?

Market research is the answer but before you click away at the thought of standing in the middle of a shopping centre, clipboard in hand there is a simpler and less mortifying way to start.

Get yourself a coffee and settle yourself comfortably in front of the computer.  Google, as is so often the case, has the answer.

Every day, millions of consumers use Google to find a solution to their problems.  Google knows exactly what we’re searching for and magnanimously (?!) shares that information with us in the form of the Google Keyword Selection Tool.

Use it well and this resource will help you discover how many people are searching for your product, how much competition there is and even how much it is likely to cost to advertise.

Let’s say you are interested in gardening and quite like the idea of setting up a garden design or maintenance business.

Google helps us find out which words and phrases people are searching with to find gardeners.  We can also find out which is more in demand – garden design or maintenance.

Fire up the tool by clicking here:  https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Enter all the possible words and phrases that you think someone with a weed ridden garden might search for.  Some examples could include:

• Garden design
• Garden maintenance
• Gardener
• Gardener surrey
• Landscape gardener
• Landscape gardener surrey
• Garden design surrey

Etc etc.  Include variations of the phrases, geographic locations if you want

a local business and plurals.  When you’ve exhausted every possible variation enter them into the Word or phrase box, with one on each line.

Type in the characters you see in the captcha code box (this ‘weeds’ out the spammers) and hit search.

Now before you get too excited, stop and click on the box which says Exact Match on the left hand side, this puts all your words into [brackets] and only shows you the results for people searching on those exact phrases.

Next sort your results by clicking on the ‘Local Monthly Searches’ column.  This will show the keywords and phrases with the highest number of searches in your area first (edit your location using the ‘Locations’ link further up the page if it is not showing your country.)

The bar chart shows that the competition for all these phrases is fairly high (hover your mouse over the bar) and that there are many more people looking for garden design than maintenance which might help inform the way you choose to set up your business.

If you want to find out how much it would cost to advertise your garden design business on Google, then sign in to your Google account before starting your research and a new column with average cost per click charges will appear.

By narrowing your search down geographically your numbers reduce dramatically but the relevance of that search for you increases too, especially if your business is going to be specific to a certain area as Garden Design would be.

Remember that small, local businesses do not need huge numbers searching for them on Google, a few can keep you very busy indeed, but the larger the search numbers and lower the competition the easier it will be to gain traction and visibility in that market.

You also need to think about the commercial value of each phrase.  You might be excited to see in the suggestions that Google helpfully provides below (which will help you expand your research and comes up with ideas you might not have thought of) that the word ‘Garden’ has 33,000 people searching for it in the UK each month with only medium levels of competition!  But is this word being typed in by people needing someone to mow their lawn?  Unlikely!  This kind of term is too vague to target, we want phrases that indicate that someone is looking for something to buy and has a credit card in their hand.

Of course the numbers that Google gives us need to be taken as indicators of need rather than a hard and fast calculation of the number of customers we are likely to get.  There are many more factors at play here.  Once you’ve found your niche you need your site to appear on page 1 of the search results (no mean feat!), your description needs to entice someone to click on your listing and then your site needs to convert that browser into a buyer.  But, if you’re in the early stages of finding your business idea, then this tool is a valuable resource that can help you narrow your ideas down to products and services that are in demand in your local area.

It’s also the first step in search engine optimising your website – once you know the main keyword or phrase that most of your potential customers use to find products and services like yours then you can focus your site content on them and start working your way up the rankings to page one.

There is no replacement for real time, real person feedback and market research, but that can come further down the line.  Get started researching your new business now, you never know, your Eureka! moment and idea for a fab new invention may well appear soon after!

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Next Online Marketing Workshop:  Harness the Power of the Internet and Take Your Business to the Next Level – 19^th October, Walton-on-Thames, Surrey.  Visit www.e-VisWorkshops.co.uk for more details.

How to get your Surrey Small Business noticed

Running a small business on your own or with a partner can be overwhelming!  Not only do you have to manage your day to day work and family life but you also have to keep on promoting yourself regularly to avoid that feast or famine cycle.

Using online marketing techniques efficiently can really help reduce the amount of effort you need to put into marketing and dramatically reduce the amount you spend on advertising.

But how can you help your website get found in the search engines and then convert your browsers into buyers or enquirers?  How can you keep the momentum going and stay in touch with those customers and prospects turning them into repeat buyers and ambassadors?  And how do you manage an effective social media strategy without wasting too much time on it?

My practical Online Marketing Workshop on 19th October will address these issues and help you become more confident in marketing your business consistently and cost effectively using the power of the internet.

If you have no time and a small marketing budget then this jargon free workshop is for you.  To find out more and book your place, click here:  internet marketing surrey

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e-Vis Online Marketing Workshop:  

19th October 2011 – Walton-on-Thames, Surrey

Harness the Power of the Internet and

Take Your Business To The Next Level

Just £49 – spaces limited

Visit:  www.e-VisWorkshops.co.uk for more details and to book.