Ask the SEO Guru

Guruisms for the week of 02-03-09

The extrovert in me loves online marketing because there are as many things to sell and ways to sell them as there are the sum total of human experience.

The introvert part of me loves online marketing because there is no failure. There is only missing projections and not hitting your numbers. The only way to fail is to quit and that is not failing, that is quitting.

Why Am I Not Converting?

Well, the short answer is --- you are thinking about you and not about them. Or even worse, you’re not thinking at all.

Do you have ANY idea how much money gets spent on market research? Trying to predict whether a new product will be a big hit or a big flop, or whether, “you deserve a break today” will sell more burgers than “I’m loving it”.

Don’t feel bad.  It was more of a rhetorical question anyway since I don’t actually know the correct answer and apparently neither does Google

But I can say with considerable confidence it is a XXXXload!!!

Naturally, the vast majority of us online can not even come close to being able to afford what it really costs to conduct, accepted in a scientific sense, marketing research. I’m not talking about running keyword suggestion tools while we rub our chins looking at AWstats and tell ourselves we are doing behavioral analysis. I’m talking about conducting surveys of a cross section or your target market, (do you know who you’re target market is? Some companies pay millions of dollars just to find that out). Eye tracking, psychological profiling, demographic analysis or even neuromarketing.   Anyone happen to have a MRI I could borrow?

Do we tell ourselves that stuff doesn’t really matter or do we try to expand our scope of expertise and keep raising the bar on what we CAN do? No one has to look at very many websites, big or small, to see that the vast majority of developers have built sites that pay VERY little heed to anything beyond flash templates or placing the target keywords in the title tag. And that is only the “GOOD” sites. 

So we might as well just forget about it and keep pursuing a philosophy of “if one is good then a million must be better” I suppose? Well ---- one little issue with that prospect is that million it takes to be better keeps getting increasingly expensive every day. The only winner in that game is google adwords. Maybe there is another answer?

Maybe we can’t afford paying a cross section of Americana to submit to neuro testing to tell what makes their frontal lobes light up when they see an Izod logo or to pay college undergrads to stand in front of department stores and interview walk-in traffic. Should we just give up because it sounds too hard?

Is our only logical choice to just accept that 2 buyers out of every 1000 uniques, (point zero 2 percent),  is about average and 2 out of 100 is really pretty good, ( a 2 percent conversion rate)? Or is there something we CAN afford in terms of money and time that would actually give us more time and more money in our pockets than what we have now by simply using some simple steps and a dash of common sense to increase conversion ratios by factors of 10?  

Everyone Keeps Telling Me I Need To BRAND My Site But No One Is Telling Me How To Do It

Yeah I know.

If you are like me, you struggle with the concept of branding and how it applies to my little site. I always thought of branding as Nike or McDonalds. I thought it meant that you had to have enough money that you could shove your logo up the brains of as many people as possible with all the subtlety of an enema with a 3 inch hose. But it’s not nearly that complicated, expensive or difficult to get people to sit still for.

Let me tell you a short story I got from a man I like to consider a friend. Hi name is Martin Lindstrom. The story I got from him explains branding in a way that makes it much easier to wrap your mind around exactly what it is and how you apply it to ANYTHING.

You see, we all as humans, ascribe a greater value to things we perceive, logically or not, to be in some way special.

 Suppose today is your 35^th birthday and I give you a beautifully wrapped small box with a bow on it as a gift. You smile so wide I’m afraid you’ll knock off an ear but as you open the box you find inside a single small gray rock. The kind of dull, gray rock anyone might find lying on a roadside. “Thanks a lot”, you’re sarcastically thinking.

But what if I then told you that it’s not just any old rock but a one-of-kind historical symbol. It is a piece of the Berlin Wall that was smuggled out of the country only days after the wall’s destruction that re-united East and West Germany back in 1989. You now own a talisman that represent a global event. The end of the cold war.

“Wow, thanks a LOT man”, you say, with genuine enthusiasm now. But as you hold it and admire it for a second I say, “I was kidding you man”. That rock didn’t come from the Berlin wall. It’s a LOT more exceptional than that. It is a one in million at least!

I say, "I have a really good friend that is a scientist for NASA and a few days ago he gave me that. It’s a rock from the moon when the Apollo 11 mission with Neil Armstrong made that historical walk on the moon. You remember? Well, they brought back a bunch of sample data and once they were examined they were stored but they never allowed the public to have them or even view them. It just so happened it was your birthday and I thought of you". 

Now you are literally at a loss for words to verbalize your appreciation. But the mact of the fatter is, I found a rock by the roadside, threw it in a box and wrapped it pretty. It's just a rock.

I’m not advocating lying to anyone. That was not the point of the story. The point of the story is that when we brand things with something else seen as a positive thing,  we see them in our minds as more special or valuable than they actually may be.

Branding simply means identifying one thing with another. You get people to do that by telling a story. It doesn’t HAVE to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars showing cute kids jumping in Grandpa’s lap to share a happy meal thereby getting you to associate a greasy cheeseburger,(with some brown substance that may or may not be meat), with the warmth, caring and love that a Grandpa can give. So, if you eat this particular low-priced fast food of the presumably meat persuasion, you can feel like Grandpa loves you. Nice ending to a good story huh?

You can brand anything. I just branded this article above, (and myself), by implying that the author of the book I mentioned was a friend of mine. I did it intentionally for illustration purposes hoping to show a good example of not needing a lot of money to create a brand. It just takes a little planning and forethought. Sometimes even a three thought may do.

I did not say Martin Lindstrom was a friend of mine.  I said a man I LIKE to consider a friend. I’m sure he doesn’t know me from a roll of toilet paper, but I enjoyed the book so much that when I think of this guy and what he did, I actually do LIKE to consider him a friend.  BUT whatever the purpose, it had an impact on your perception even if it was sub-conscious. It altered the way you perceived the content and the author. For better or worse, that is branding. Associating my name with his is an example of branding.

So how do you associate your personality, your website, product or service with something else. Things like, reliability, quality, family values, religion, superstition or anything else that makes people buy the things they buy? Keep in mind, negative branding can be just as powerful as positive. What do you think they are doing when the give the Pepsi challenge trying to get people to select Pepsi over Coke? Think they are trying to make Coke look good?

First of all, if you have not taken the time to identify your target market, then keep doing what you’ve been doing and shoot for that million hits to get that .0002% conversion ratio because doing anything will probably not result in much of an increase until you have a pretty good idea of who you are wanting to do it to. Of course you can always get lucky AND don’t forget the G’s quote at the top of this post. You don’t really HAVE to do anything except not quit to keep from complete failure.

But if you do have even a vague concept of who is most likely to be your customer then you can start telling a story using words, graphics, videos, sounds, layout, colors etc.  that will most likely get that target to start associating you with something else that stimulates an impulse to be a part of your story.

If you look honestly at your index page, does it tell a story or does it just repeat the same boring crap anyone can find on 100 other sites about the same topic. See, even if you don’t tell a story at all, you are telling a story that brands you as the same as the other crap! When they think of you, (probably for not more than a few seconds while they look for the back button on your site), they are thinking of all the other crap. You’re building brand whether you actually want that brand or not.

My next installment is going to be about how you can use sound and or graphics to stimulate some somatic response in your visitors and that alone may shoot your conversion rate through the roof!

If you are not familiar with the term subliminal messages, maybe now would be a good time to start doing a search or two on the subject as we will be discussing that very shortly.

Peach Y'all

kem cho

The “anti-seo”,SEO Guru

Additional References

Buy-ology - Truth and Lies About Why We Buy by Martin Lindstrom

READ IT!

All Marketers are Liars by Seth Godin

READ IT!

Why We Buy - The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill

It MUST be Wednesday. We’re havin fish sticks for supper ain’t we?

Guruisms for the week of 23-02-09

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

Aldous Huxley

 The True Cost of SEO

While there are a great many heated debates regarding the scope of what SEO entails, it is generally accepted, (that means not argued over much in SEO communities),that SEO’s basic function is the traffic generation from organic, (mistakenly used to imply free), search engine results. The truth, while admittedly brutal for some, is that more times than not, traffic generation is more cost effective if you simply buy it. PPC has it’s merits.

That statement may seem odd coming from a man who has capitalized significantly on “organic” placements but it is only because I am one of that small percentage of netizens who actually does know the real cost of those “free” placements.  That voice of experience is telling you the truth now; whether paying for PPC, purchasing  prospects from affiliates, or hiring the assistance of an SEO ---- you ARE paying for traffic. Well, --- If you got lucky and hired the right seo anyway. If not, then you’re just paying.

Would you like to know the secret of figuring out the true cost of SEO for yourself?

 It’s ROI. Return on Investment

THAT is what establishes the value of traffic. Duh! We all knew that right? Then why are there so many really crappy websites all scrambling for top spots?

The truth is that all traffic, regardless of where it came from, is worth something. At the very least, an effort. But the word something is a very broad, very subjective term.

I may be running the risk of a death sentence by the grammar police here but I feel this MUST be said. To me ----

It ain’t worth a squirt if it don’t convert

Your business will die if they don’t buy

If it don’t convert – it don’t work

Learn to convert - It doesn't hurt

Made my point yet?

So I’ve conceded, all traffic, ANY traffic, does have some inherent value. However, if you are  able to use logic to come to a conclusion and are able to rise above the din of the blinded few, then maybe you can agree with me that those 4 grammatically flawed euphemisms above have value as well.

If you can agree that the end goal of any traffic generating strategy should be increased conversions, (hopefully resulting in increased profits), then the idea of increasing conversions has to have at least equal appeal to increased seo, (whatever that is),efforts.

Think about this.

If your site enjoys an average conversion rate of .05%, meaning 1 out of every 200 unique hits converts to a desired action, then which is better in terms of return? Increasing traffic to 1000 unique hits to get 5 sales, OR increase conversions to say 10% or 20 orders out of every 200 hits?

WHOA THERE COWKID, we’re not through thinkin yet.

What would you think the cost of generating 5 times more traffic would be compared to increasing conversions to 10 %?

Now, which approach do YOU think makes more sense?

The reality is that whether you think more traffic or more conversions is better ---- you’re right! I’m not trying to argue or put your mindset into a spin. It’s your site, your business and your money. Spend your time and money any way you feel is best for you and guess what? You’re doing the right thing --- for you anyway.

For me, I’ve found it exponentially less expensive to increase conversions IF you can afford it. Once you know you can convert, THEN spend money on generating more traffic. If you go about it that way, you should actually have revenue to invest generated from your efforts instead of stolen from your mom’s purse. (vague adolescent reference added so you don’t think I’m talking about you . If you don’t have generated revenue from your efforts then you lose more money with each passing day and more traffic is only going to make you lose more money faster.

3 Second Back Button Boogie Defined

When an internet user elects to click a link from a source document, be it a search engine, an email, a blog or forum, it is a conscious act. To use an index finger to push a mouse button indicates a response to an emotional stimulus. It indicates the expectation of finding data related to that stimulus at the destination.

In other words, when someone clicks a link they are expecting to find something that relates to the specific reason they clicked the link in the first place.

  So How Do I Stop the 3 Second Back Button Boogie?

The concept is simple, the application --- ahhhhh, not so much.

If you are converting at 3% or less, you are going to have an increasingly difficult time maintaining your margins for the long term if that model depends on generating more and more traffic.  I know, I know, we all read on seo frogs, (forums and blogs), that so and so has been #1 for years or that the “other” guy just doesn’t REALLY know seo. Well, I DO really know seo, (whatever that is), and I also know that webmasters and programmers no longer rule the cyber roost. The cowboy site jockeys of yesterday have traded in their undershorts and bathrobes for Birkenstocks, (http://www.birkenstockusa.com/), and their khaki colored cargo shorts while punching the clock at their 9 to 5 for the suits. As in all things media, eventually, marketing rules. Maybe that is as it should be. Whether it should or not, it does.

The web is getting more competitive every day and each day we see it becoming a battleground with better trained, better equipped, better financed warriors. AND, the more profit there is in your I-only-need-a-2%-conversion-rate-to-make-a-profit web service, the more that targeted traffic is going to cost AND the cheaper your corporate competitors are going to be selling the same goodie as you. YIKES! Not a pretty picture huh?

So what are we to do? Hire the next SEO who talks about metrics without telling you what to DO about them once you analyze them?  Hire $500 an hour consultants to tell you to post more on twitter? Give up and go back to environmental engineering?

HERE’S AN IDEA. WHY NOT LEARN HOW TO INCREASE CONVERSIONS?

All is not gloom and doom. Yes it is going to get more and more competitive and you are going to have to learn to figure your ROI to know how far you want to go and in which direction, but it’s not that hard.

I know you don’t have to look very far on the net to find articles and posts, (or if it is an seo community, childish name calling and circle jerks of the textual persuasion), extolling the virtues of metrics and analytics. AND they are virtuous indeed. The problem comes in when asking, “ok, I see I have 9% of my hits coming from Zimbabwe, and 22% of those come in between 1400 and 1700 hours, soooooo now what”? It’s the now what that doesn’t get talked about too much.

Well, I’m going to talk about the now what. Figuring out how to use ANY information you can get to increase conversions doesn’t have to be that hard. It CAN be as hard, (and as in-depth and expensive), as you let it be and the more you can afford the better, BUT you don’t have to be a MNC,(multi national corporation), to be able to analyze data to develop a strategy and then execute effectively. Worried about doing it right? Don’t worry,#1. You can’t do it wrong because if you do, your numbers go down. #2. If your numbers go down stop doing that  

The great thing about the net is that those kind of numbers used to cost a LOT of money thereby raising the cost of the service or product being sold. Corporates still spend a GREAT deal of money on those kinds of numbers, (but it is changing), which gives you at least a small advantage.

Now it is so cheap that any single mom sitting in her underwear, (ummm, give me a minute here until I get this image out of my head), at her computer can compete with all the money and power any corporate can bring to bear when it comes to research, data organization and analytics within her market. Again, the trick is what to do about the numbers you get.

You can trust me when I tell you, If I can do it, ANYBODY can do it.

In my forthcoming blogstallments, I’ll tell you how I use referrer based ad delivery, subliminal messaging, learning curves, superstition and religion to increase conversions at a minimal cost and without needing another four years of college.

Kem cho Y’all

(I’m an Okie learning to speak Gujarati)

MAJAMA

The Guru

I’d like to leave you today with some wise words my Mother told me as a young boy. I hope it serves you as well as it has served me over the years.

Boy, if you don’t stop flipping that gawddamn clicker I’m going to slap your ears off!