David Young | Branding Blog - Marketing Advice and Advertising Strategy for Local Business Owners

Pencil Twirling

This video reminded me of a blog post I wrote almost 4 years ago on adding fancy-pants features to web sites just to show off. Hehehe.

 

Ding Dong SEO Gone Bad

I'm gonna tell the long story. If you want the short story, skip to the last paragraph. Dinner last night was at Elway's, a bajillion-star restaurant inside the equally starred-up Ritz-Carlton in downtown Denver.

After serving us some amazing steaks, the waiter asked if we wanted desserts. We all declined. He then said, "Look, we're kind of famous for our Ding Dongs. I'm gonna bring you one for the table to sample. You shouldn't miss this."

I've talked about Word of Mouth advertising quite a bit and one of the best triggers is unexpected generosity. The Ding Dong rocked. Awesome. It's the reason I'm writing this story. Yes, I'm giving Elway's some WOM love because Max the Waiter gave me a quarter of a Ding Dong. At $9 on the menu, the dessert is likely made up of less than a dollar's worth of butter, flour, sugar, cocoa and yum. So, for the cost of a few pennies, Elway's got a blog post, a Facebook conversation, a tweet...and it's just the day after. Be remarkable. Be generous.

Now, for the SEO lesson.

After I posted this pic on Facebook, my Australian Wizard of Ads Partner, Craig Arthur, asked, "Is that a chocolate spider?" I thought I'd help him out by posting a link to the official Hostess site. Right now (I hope they change this) the Ding Dong page at Hostess has a video of Ashton Kutcher doing a "Ding Dong Doorbell" stunt and absolutely NO a brief description of one of their best-selling snacks of all time. I'm sure that some genius figured out that they weren't ranking as well as the Ding Dong article on Wikipedia and said they should leverage Ashton's use of a similar phrase to garner some SEO traffic. ARGH. If I wanted Ashton Kutcher, I'd type that into Google. The official Hostess page was in second place, but offered little relevancy. A photo of the box, but no real description of the product. I'm not even going to link to their site because I don't want to reward this kind of stupidity. I have no doubt that this blog post will soon be on the first page for a Ding Dong search and at least I offer a story and a rant about a better Ding Dong than Hostess makes. Go do the search. Let me know when they come to their senses. I'll edit in a link for them. ;-)

Contextual Linking: Your web site is NOT a strip mall

How stupid would it be to buy or build a giant strip mall and put different departments of your business into each storefront? How stupid would it be to not put the department names on the doors, or not tell the customer service employees inside the store where the other departments were located, instead requiring shoppers to come back to the main (home) storefront to get directions to each department? Can we agree that would be the dumbest way to build a business?

I had someone tell me the story of their web site the other day and they had done a lot of things right. They have a great design, built on a solid platform with all of the proper technical features. They got a domain that perfectly matched their biggest target keyword phrase. They have good traffic from the keyword. They have a ridiculously low bounce rate at around 1%. Unfortunately, they're not converting traffic to leads at more than 1%.

When I looked at the site, they had no contextual links in their copy. Other than the nav bar, there was no way for a visitor to get to any other page on the site once she had read to the bottom of a page. I'm not a huge fan of those big SEO footers, but at least that would have given a visitor another way to click through to different pages. How is this different than my doomed strip mall?

What's a contextual link? Just link on natural phrases in your copy that move people to different pages in your site. When they are skimming and scanning, they'll find the words that interest them and click. Outsiders (web "experts") who look at sites that I've put together often say they have too many links in the copy. Customers who use the same sites to solve a problem praise us for how easy it was to reach their goal. I'm siding with the customer on this one. You can build your strip mall on your own.

NOTE: There are no contextual links in this story. Don't you wish I'd included some as an example? Isn't it boring compared to other posts you've read where the writer linked all over the place? Wouldn't it make sense for me to link to examples of sites I've built? What if I've impressed you with my strip mall metaphor and you want to hire me? I guess you're on your own. You're smart. You'll figure it out, IF YOU HAVE TIME AND PATIENCE.

photo credit: DannyBen

Congratulations to the Bootstrappers!

Congratulations to my friends Rich Christiansen and Ron Porter, who have sold their SEO firm, Castlewave and will now proceed to take life easy until the next business-building bug starts to itch.

You may remember me writing about their book and their courses. They started Castlewave as a living case study for their book. Here's an excerpt from their blog:

As all of you know, this business was created with $5,000 to prove the principles in the book. CastleWave indeed was profitable from day one, generated over $1MM the first year at 50% margin and this past year did apx $1.4 MM. We have offices in both NYC and Utah and presently have 23 employees and apx 30 active clients ranging from smaller companies like Bank On Youself to large customers such as OpenTable and IMax.

It's been a lot of fun and quite educational enjoying their friendship and working with a few mutual clients. I can't wait to see the next chapter in their lives unfold!

Another Benefit to the Radio + Web Marketing Strategy

I've talked a fair bit about the strength of using radio (or any other off-line medium) to drive search for your business's name, or your "brand."

The primary benefit is that prospective customers will not find your competitors when they're searching for you.

There's another very strong benefit that I haven't mentioned. It's a bit more complex because there's not much you can do about it. It all takes place in Google's mighty brain, and on your own browser...as explained by SEOmoz.

Personalized search is now on by default. This means that every click, branded search, and expression of a "brand preference" or "brand affinity" in Google's results is likely to result in preferential biasing towards that domain in future searches. A "Google" Pontiac message during this Superbowl wouldn't just send users to their site, it would also mean that tens of millions of searchers would now be "personalized" towards that domain.

This means the more I search for your brand, the stronger your brand will show up in my own searches, on my own computer. This doesn't apply to search results across the web because it is a part of "personalized search" which is an individualized component of Google's system. It's the kind of thing that used to feel kind of creepy to us, but now that we're desensitized, and now that they aren't so blatant about it, feels ok.

Humorous sidenote...if you spend a lot of time Googling your competitors by name, you'll likely see their results go up, and your brand decline on your own computer. Frustrating? Yes. Worrisome? No.

SUGGESTION: If you dominate search results for your name, instead of telling people to "click over to acme-heating.com" start telling them to "Google Acme Heating!"

If you have a generic name like "Denver Heating and Air," this isn't likely to work for you because a search for your name will also show all of your competitors as well.

The truth is, most folks will search for your name anyway because it's easier than remembering your exact domain. Even if they do remember your domain, they're just as likely to type it into Google as they are to type it into the address bar. That's why "google" is one of the most searched phrases on Yahoo and vice-versa. Given the choice (or not knowing the alternatives) people will do the easiest thing.

So, tell them in your ads to do the easiest thing!

Here's the old Pontiac commercial they mentioned in the SEOmoz article:

Prosound: On-Hold Messaging for Smart Business Owners

We launched a new client web site last week for ProsoundUSA.com, a company that specializes in improving the phone experience of your customers. Instead of just providing "on-hold messages" and those automated attendant systems that we've all come to hate, ProsoundUSA owner Chester Hull makes it his business to learn about yours BEFORE attempting to tell you what your message should be.

In fact, he takes it one step further and will evaluate how your living, breathing, real-life staff is doing on the phones. His phone evaluation service costs just $149 and if it saves just one sale, would be worth it to most businesses. Followups include not only his message writing and production, but customized phone etiquette training for your staff.

I don't normally gush like this about clients, but Chester is a kindred soul to those of us who believe that building a brand is more than just a cool logo and a funny ad. Chester knows that a brand is built only at that place where the customer's world intersects with the business's world. The phones are often the very first point of contact.

If delivering an outstanding experience to your callers is important to your business, Prosound is your first stop. Take a listen to his on-hold message samples and you'll understand how he's different. And, be sure to subscribe to Chester's on-hold marketing blog, he's got a lot to say about your phones.

About the web site...

Chester hired Wizard of Ads Partner Paul Boomer and I to re-design his old site from the ground up using our Persona-based approach. As Chester will tell you, the effort of putting up a site using this methodology is about 80% under water.

That is, we spent a great deal of time getting to understand Prosound's customers and their motivations...what points of information are important to them and in what order. Only after we understood his business, could we begin to map out pages, sketch out designs and get to the point where most web developers begin their process.

Kinda sounds like the same approach Chester takes, huh?

Here's the "after" shot of Chester's site:

 

And...here's what it looked like before:

Ok...let's roll the credits:

• Persona based web architecture...Dave Young
• Graphic design...Paul Boomer
• Copywriting...Dave Young, Paul Boomer and Chester Hull
• CMS platform...Wordpress MU installation by OM4

Web + Radio = Good Brand Strategy

For a local business, optimizing a web site to compete against your local, regional, national and international competitors can seem a bit daunting, to say the least.

Wouldn't it be great if your most valuable web traffic arrived at your site because they were looking for YOU and not your category? Trust me, it's great.

In your town, your name is your brand. It is built on only two variables:

Your reputation in the marketplace (built up by direct customer experience), and to a far lesser extent the anticipation of that experience that you PROMISED by your advertising. 

Those who think that a brand is built solely on advertising and marketing are fools. In fact, the quickest way to go out of business is to promise a lot and then deliver a lousy experience. Your reputation will tank and your advertising will accelerate this process by getting even more people to try you. All of these people will be happy to tell others how bad you are.

If your advertising does a good job of creating enough interest, people will seek you out when they need or want your product or service. They are no longer doing this in a dead-tree phone book. They are doing it on line. 

A new study released by the Radio Advertising Bureau has confirmed what I've been telling my clients for years; your best prospects will be those who search for you by name.

Simon Redican, managing director at the Radio Advertising Bureau, said: "The internet has become an incredibly important interface for customer marketing but the problem is that it also allows access to all your rival's brands which means the key challenge is to ensure that customers seek out your brand specifically - marketers are increasingly turning to offline media to direct consumers to their brands online."

The radio ads drove on average 34% of the total brand browsing for an average of 10% of the media budget which the research said means the radio spend was on average four times more effective.

Barber said the findings are highly significant for brands where the internet "provides the crucial final stage" of customer buying and radio advertising offers these brands the chance to "turbo charge" the marketing process.

Most of the Search Engine Optimization strategies have you believing that the only way to win is to dominate the keyword phrases of your industry or category. This is amazingly expensive for a small local business. And, the fight is never over because everyone is going after the same phrases.

On the other hand, moving your money out of print and yellow pages and into local radio, coupled with a convincing web site that is easily found on a search for your name offers a more lasting solution in the quest to establish your local brand. 

How does this work out in real life? I just got off the phone with a retail client of mine who has been using this strategy for about 6 years. In his informal check of his competitors, most of their December sales were down as much as 20% over 2008. Anyone who did as well in 2009 as 2008 is very pleased. My client had an 11% increase in his December gross sales along with an 18% gain in gross profit, meaning he didn't give away the store to make the sales numbers.  We are very pleased.

How to Profit from a Higher Bounce Rate?

It's simple. Put your phone number in your banner. The phone rings more and the bounce rate goes up.

I get tired of web gurus telling people that they should make sure their bounce rate isn't too high. Some will cite studies that quote an average bounce rate. Some will say things like, "Obviously a high bounce rate means your site has low relevance to visitors, and so to capture more of those visitors you can work on making your site more relevant."

Here's the rub…comparing YOUR bounce rate to somebody else's is simply bad math. The only important comparison to make with your bounce rate is to compare it to the past. If it changes, dig deeper into your web analytics to find out what is going on.

So, how will putting your phone number in your banner increase your bounce rate?

And, why is this good?

If you are a local retail or service business and you are doing other advertising in your market, you will no doubt be enjoying traffic (you do have a web site...please say yes) from visitors who have searched for you by name. (The good news about this is that when they search for you by name, they most likely won't find your competitors.)

Many of those visitors are coming to your site for one reason; to find your phone number. If you bury it on a "contact" page instead of making it prominent, you create friction for your customers who are already convinced they should call you. If they are forced to click through to find it, your bounce rate drops because these visitors don't count as a bounce.

If you put it on your banner, a visitor can find your site by searching for your name, see it on your banner and stay on your site just long enough to dial the phone. Your analytics program will count this as a bounce.

I would count it as making the phone ring.

Wouldn't you like the phone to ring more?

Crikey! What's next? The Eye of Sauron?

Microsoft Surface Sphere

Why your retail store needs a good web site, even if you don't do e-commerce.

Thanks to Holly at GrokDotCom for finding this article on SearchEngineWatch.

Media measurement company, Nielsen Online, conducted a survey to examine the relationship between online research and offline purchases. They found that 80% of participants who had recently bought consumer electronics from a brick and mortar store whose site they visited first.

• 53% bought from the site where they spent the most time.
• 58% would choose the internet if they could only use one channel to conduct product research on consumer electronics. Only 25% chose the brick and mortar store.

I get asked all the time about the importance of having more than just a first generation "my nephew built it" web site for your LOCAL clothing store, plumbing shop, cafe, bank, insurance agency, etc. My answer is always, "I can't believe it's 2008 and you're still asking that question. " But, some people will only listen to the numbers.

The numbers are still speaking. They haven't changed their minds. I can help you.