When SEO, alone, is not enough

At Web Positioning Centre, we use a wide toolkit of measures to promote of clients’ sites – Organic and PPC, Managed and Viral Linking, Technical and content-based approaches.

They certainly take care of increasing traffic through higher positions on natural searches or carefully conceived advertisement campaigns. But sometimes we find we have to look more closely at a client’s Web site, too.

We can find, for example:

Usability issues such as menuing systems that thwart the visitor’s attempts to navigate the site.

Badly conceived sales funnels which serve to confuse and/or demand too many clicks. Sometimes it’s just too complicated to make a sale and the shopping basket gets abandoned.

Insufficient sales copy. Some e-commerce sites rely on photographs, alone, to make the sale. Their owners haven’t learned from catalogue selling, where the copy is the clincher. While our optimized content often tackles a large part of this issue, often we need to look at the site as a whole and produce non-optimized selling copy, as well as some more general and corporate material to ensure that prospective purchasers feel happy about doing business with our client.

We see SEO as the most important part of the online marketing for a site. But sometimes shortcomings of the site itself need to be addressed before a client can reap the full benefits of our work.

YSM becomes even more like Google Adwords

YSM (Yahoo Search Marketing) is junking the long descriptions in its ads. No longer do we have 190 characters to get over our message, but we have just 70, instead – the current short description.

I’ll leave it to YSM to explain why:

Why are we making this change?
We’ve found that ads written more concisely give users a better experience and generally get better results. Users are exposed to higher quality search ads and advertisers may attract more interested and enthusiastic potential customers.

I wonder if this is really true. Longer rubbish copy doesn’t get you anywhere, but longer good-quality copy normally out-performs shorter copy on line as it does off line. I think, instead, Yahoo! is just continuing to make YSM more and more like Google Adwords.

What happened to the idea of brand differentiation? Why should I ever buy a pale imitation of the original or the market leader, unless it’s significantly cheaper.

I do hope that YSM will tell me a compelling reason for recommending YSM to my clients – for Yahoo’s sake, as well as mine.

I’m passionate about avoiding cliches

Great copy – whether it’s optimized or non-optimized – shouldn’t follow fashion mindlessly.

Over the past week, I’ve received eight pieces of marketing telling me the company is ‘passionate’ about whatever they do – a company that sells outdoor equipment is ‘Passionate about the outdoors’, a financial services company was ‘passionate about saving me money’ and blah and blah. Someone on a quiz programme was ‘passionate about cooking’.

The word is getting almost meaningless. It’s certainly languishing in cliche-land.

You mustn’t just say what you think is fashionable – you’ll get swallowed in so many similar propositions (oops, I almost said ‘your customers won’t be able to see the wood for the trees’). You must instead appeal directly to your customers and prospects.

Go on. Do the hard work and start reaping the rewards.

Key phrase research can be so surprising!

One of my favourite parts of SEO is key phrase research – and, make no mistake, you do have to do the research. The obvious key phrases are just that – and so obvious that any group of people could get there with a little brainstorming.

So we research the high traffic key phrases that competing sites aren’t properly targeting. The niches that will make the site and our client’s business a success.

Yet these niches don’t have to be obscure.

I’ve spent this morning researching key phrases for a client in the… now that would be telling, wouldn’t it? Suffice to say that it’s a highly competitive sector of a very competitive market. And, you know what I’ve found? Relevant, high traffic niches so deep and inviting that I’m going to have to check them again tomorrow.

This is the exciting stuff. The start of how we’re going to get one over on the other guys!

Six points to judge effective Web site copy

When I’m asked to assess copy on a client’s Web site, here are some of the most important things I look for:

1. Does it read well? Obvious, but vital, when so much content is patently rubbish!

2. Does it accurately reflect the client’s products, services and strategy?

3. Are the benefits clearly expressed? Or, more fundamentally, do I understand what the site is about?

4. Is there enough copy for SEO purposes? 200-300 words on a page is a sensible amount.

5. Does the copy support the site’s SEO strategy? Has it been constructed to give leverage to the chosen key phrases?

6. Does the copy keep the visitor on the site? Have a look at the site logs and see where the exit (bounce) points are. How many pages are visited on each visit?

How does yours measure up?

Build a better mousetrap and the whole world will beat a path to your door

I bet you’re already groaning at the naivety of Emerson’s words. Back when I was foetus copywriter, it was one of the great un-truisms of the industry. Of course you need to let the world know about about their wonderful new mousetrap, that goes without saying, doesn’t it?

So why do so many companies (even large ones) invest so heavily in their better mousetrap and keep schtum about it? I’m talking, of course, about the money poured into Web sites, corporate identity and so on. Yet somehow at the same time, omitting to plan for a realistic budget for promoting the thing.

If you build it, the chances are they won’t come. There’s so much competition out there for both organic (natural) search and PPC (pay per click) that just about any site – established or new – needs to invest seriously in SEO/SEM, or few people will ever find their way there. And low traffic means low profits.

Internet marketing is as serious an undertaking as any other part of the marketing mix, and in an increasing number of cases requires a similar level of investment.

Unwelcome news? Maybe. But if businesses are going to be successful on the Net, they must understand the extreme competitiveness of the online marketplace. I’m afraid too many are simply failing to face up to reality when they put their plans and budgets together.

‘Being a good author is a disappearing act’

Crime writer Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing… is subtitled ‘Being a good author is a disappearing act’.

Read the piece. It’s good. Not good in detail about marketing writing (SEO copywriting, direct marketing or any of those things I do), but the thrust of Leonard’s article is absolutely spot on.

Why? Because 95% or more of the time the material I write for clients has no writer’s voice, and 100% of that material does not have my voice. At its best, copywriting is ego-less, transparent and doesn’t draw attention to itself – it will draw attention to the product, service or even the client, but never to itself.

It should be a painless, compelling and straightforward read, for many of the reasons Leonard applies to fiction writing.

Being a good marketing writer is also a disappearing act.

Why telemarketing stinks

Do you like being telemarketed at? I’m sure there is a proper lump of jargon, but I can’t be bothered to find out.

I spend a lot of time writing in my home office. Do know what I hear sometimes up to six or eight times a day? Our home phone ringing with telemarketing calls. And that’s on a line that’s registered with the appropriate opt-out body. On bad days, I just put the line straight on to voice mail.

But what does this kind of barrage of calls say about the companies involved? I think it says they couldn’t give a stuff about the people they’re phoning – butting in to their lives just because they want to sell double glazing or credit card insurance. It says they have products and services that they can’t sell in any less pressurized fashion. It says someone has discovered cheap offshore call centres in many cases.

You know what? It works both ways. I do my best to keep a mental note of the perpetrators. I then avoid them like the plague.

It seems I’m not the only person who thinks this way. I was listening to Seth Godin et al’s The Big Moo the other day. He mentioned a successful US-based financial services organization that doesn’t do telemarketing.

More power to their elbow!