Rankings Are Only One Factor

One of the most common questions and internet marketing company gets asked is how high can you get my page ranked? Understandably, rankings and the pursuit of them generate a lot of heat but not nearly enough light. It’s like we have been sold a bill of goods that if your site ranks in the top 10 results for a hot search term that cash is going to come flooding into your business. The reality is that ranking is only one piece of a much larger puzzle.

There are a number of business who pay top dollar to get their site ranking well but then don’t consider the off-page factors that deal with how a human interacts with your content. Are your pages designed to be easy to understand? Is your site attractively designed? Is it intuitive? Do you have clear calls to action prominently located? These are all very important questions that you should ask yourself and your internet marketing company.

If you suspect that your site is built for rankings but not for all the other very important factors, contact us. We would love to talk with you and see how we can make your site a lead generating machine.

How Welcome Are Your Site Visitors

Cleaning up the house and putting out a welcome mat may suffice for an open house but making site visitors feel welcome requires more effort. The average time on site even for very engaging websites is measured in seconds. That means your window of opportunity for engagement is very narrow.

Many business websites fail to make the most of every visitor because they are built on the wrong strategy. You should never build a site to please the owner but to attract the customer. That is not to say that as an owner you should accept web design that you are unhappy with. What that means is that every inch of real estate on your site should be ordered to attract visitors and make them spend as much time there and engage as deeply as possible.

Here are a few points to keep in mind as you design or re-design your business website:

• Less is more – Many business owners like to cram as much info onto their homepage as possible. This is always a bad strategy. Always make your homepage content clear and concise. Don’t use three words when two will do. A good rule of thumb is to go through at least three rounds of trim-down before finalizing the content on your home page.
• Make your message easy to grasp – A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post entitled, The Alien Test. In that post I used the analogy of an alien landing and learning to surf the internet. If that alien could not grasp what your site is about in less than 5 seconds then your message is not being clearly communicated.
• Always have a call to action – On your home page and in or after every blog post, you should have a clear and compelling call to action. What is the point of making a great case for your product or service if you don’t give a visitor a chance to respond? It’s not about pressure its about opportunity. If you are offering something of value don’t be hesitant to let your potential customer respond.
• Have a strategy for follow-through – Nothing is more annoying than responding to a compelling ad and then never hearing back from the business making the offer. That is a huge business killer. Be prepared to handle the leads that will be generated from your site. Respond to them quickly and deliver on what your promise.

By implementing these strategies, you should be able to see improvement in visitor engagement and in your bottom line.

Marketing Automation

Marketing over the internet can at times be labor intensive. There are some internet marketing best practices, however, that can be set-up to be done automatically. The process of setting up marketing tasks to be done automatically is called “Marketing Automation”. The good folks over at Hubspot have put together the following infographic that breaks down how to do marketing automation effectively:

The Alien Test

There are many rules of thumb to apply to good site design. One of my personal favorites is the “Alien Test”. The alien test asks, “If an alien from mars landed on earth and visited your website could he understand what is about in less than 5 seconds?” How you answer that questions says volumes about how well your site is designed to generate leads.

The window of opportunity that your site has to hook a visitor and funnel them into becoming a lead is extremely narrow. One of the reasons for this is competition. If a visitor cant engage with your site quickly they can always go to another. According to website monitoring service Pingdom, in December of 2010, there were 255 million websites. That number is astounding especially when you think about it in terms of competition. Can you imagine trying to sell cereal in a store that stocks 255 million brands? That cereal better have more than a plastic toy at the bottom of the box.

The bottom line is just keep it simple. If your product or service is of sufficient quality you don’t need fancy images and tons of text to prove it. Don’t let your homepage content distract from what you are offering. Remember the alien test.

Site Design Versus Internet Marketing

Designing a website and marketing it well are in and of themselves two totally different things. Not all good designers are good marketers and not all marketers have a clue about good site design. Unfortunately most business owners are not sophisticated enough to be able to tell the difference.

What complicates the matter even further is how naive some business owners are about their website. Either out of inexperience or from bad input they operate on the assumption as long as they have a website, they don’t need to constantly monitor and improve it in order to maximize its effectiveness in generating leads. The fact of the matter is that to assume a build it and they will come posture is to assure that your site will never be anything more than an electronic business card. For many businesses that may be perfectly fine, but for others who wish to generate new clients through their site, there is another way.

A good internet marketer can analyze your site to see if it is designed to generate leads. He can comb through your site for visible and non-visible factors that will affect how a potential customer interacts with your message. He can also craft a strategy that funnels your visitors from where they land on your site to where they can send you their contact information. Good internet marketers stay focused on positioning your site to generate as many leads as possible. Sometimes this may require changes to the design of your site. If that is the case then you should also know what design capabilities that an internet marketing company possesses.

Whether you have a site, and need help marketing it, or you don’t have a site and don’t know where to start, be sure to understand the complementary but distinct relationship between design and marketing. And if any business claims to be a one stop shop, do a little research by asking for their portfolio and contacting their previous clients to make sure they are legit.

Internet Marketing Has A Periodic Table

There is no secret sauce when it comes to internet marketing. There are, however, some important factors that experience and testing have proven to be effective. The folks over at Search Engine Land have assembled these factors into the “periodic table” posted above. While some may disagree with a few of the particulars on this table, it does highlight the fact that in order to be effective at internet marketing, you have to consider many different factors and how they should all work together. It also demonstrates that to be a really effective internet marketer you have to devote lots of time and effort to doing the right things and avoiding the wrong things. This can be tricky for the hobbyist internet marketer who doesn’t have the time to understand what the right and wrong things are and why they matter.