1. Use plain-speak to describe it.

This extreme probably has the lowest amount of friction. You have a chance to describe the product in the customer’s language. People tend to like hearing things in language that they can understand.

The downside is that you may come across as bland or unoriginal.

2. Make up a mystical brand name that may have little to do with the product itself.

As Seth Godin puts it, you get to own a term that describes your product. Google, Yahoo!, and countless others did this just fine.

The downside is that no one’s going to be typing your brand name into Google if they don’t know who you are. That part will depend even more on your promotional skills if you take this route.

Looking at this through an SEO lens

If you’re brand new and want to reach out to people with less effort, then option #1 is probably the way to go.

Consider this scenario for portal software that I’m working on building. Right now, the project is code-named Administrivia. Kind of catchy in a way but perhaps too much of a mouth full. And the name doesn’t really describe what the software does.

What happens if I keep that name when I release it into the wild?

1. People will tweet about it, calling it Administrivia.
2. People will blog about it, calling it Administrivia.
3. People will link to it, calling it Administrivia.
4. My product will start ranking very well for the term “administrivia” in Google.
5. The buzz will wear down when people move on to the next fad (as they do in the tech world).
6. My product will be stuck with a great ranking for “administrivia.” This could be good or bad depending on how well I can get the word out, but I get no second chances.

Consider step 4. The word “administrivia” has an actual meaning:

administrivia (plural administrivia)

1. Administrative details that must be dealt with in order to do more interesting work.

   Administrivia take up two hours of every day.

   Administrivia takes up two hours of every day.

So people will be typing that word into Google looking for the meaning of the word as well. Wasted traffic from people who aren’t even looking for my product.

A SEO-friendly approach

If I look up a few search words in the AdWords Keyword Tool, I end up finding this interesting set of words:

What I’m building is described by some of these words, like enterprise portal, portal software, and portal system.

So what if I name my product Enterprise Portal?

1. People will tweet about it, calling it Enterprise Portal.
2. People will blog about it, calling it Enterprise Portal.
3. People will link to it, calling it Enterprise Portal.
4. My product’s page will start ranking very well for the term “enterprise portal” in Google.
5. The buzz will wear down when people move on to the next fad (as they do especially in the tech world).
6. My product will be stuck with a great ranking for “enterprise portal.” People will continue to search for this generic phrase, whether they know about my product or not.

The important part here is that the product name assists natural linking behavior. Bloggers and industry analysts are more likely to link to your product with the name of the product as the link text. If your product has a weird name, that’s what you’re going to rank for in Google.

You can fight this by trying to get links with link text that’s different than your product name. But this is an uphill battle. It’s a lot of work getting other sites to link to yours with text that you want. Many SEOs fight this battle day after day, and the smart ones secretly wish this were an easier task.

A compromise: mixing the two

Another way of looking at this: what if I name it Administrivia Enterprise Portal? This is a compromise. I’d venture to guess that linkers will sometimes call it “Administrivia Enterprise Portal,” but I’m guessing that some or most will still refer to it as “Administrivia” alone. Tweets only allow 140 characters, and people tend to be lazy when writing, so they will find shortcuts.

It’s still your choice

Of course, this is all still your choice. Nobody is twisting your arm to brand your product one way or the other.

Sometimes worrying about search rankings and SEO can be quite maddening. But it is another tool in your toolkit. Being found by your customers is important, and many of them turn to Google first. So you may as well squeeze every little bit of value out of your product name that you can.

Technorati Tags: business, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, glass case, internet marketing, product development, search engine optimization, Search Marketing, seo

But when done properly, I’d argue that SEO can help. It’s not just about making a “semantic” website, a skill that web designers tout way too often. There are some ways that SEO can help with the user experience when done the right way.

1. SEO helps you speak the customer’s language

Don’t you feel more comfortable when someone speaks your language? How much more settling is it to see the phrase you typed into Google appear in the headline of the page that you clicked on? How much more comforting is it when the content answers the exact question that you were asking?

In these times of shorter attention spans, fractions of a second are crucial. Would you rather your customers spend time unpacking your “ME ME ME” jargon or spend that time doing other things with your website? The choice is up to you, and many make the choice to stick with the jargon. (It’s surprising how much of this that you still see. Or maybe it isn’t so surprising.)

2. Customers are looking for you in their time of need

The act of the customer finding you is valuable. It’s empowering. It’s why people love hunting for information, products, and services all on their own in Google.

While social media and other forms of marketing are good at generating demand, there’s something to be said for handing the power over to the customer. It’s not either/or.

3. SEO helps people find what they’re looking for

Of course, this goes south when you’re not actually offering what the searcher is looking for. That’s actually a great way to associate negative feelings with your brand!

You must do your keyword research carefully and make sure that you find that balance between what you offer and what the searcher intends to find. When this is done judiciously, it’s a powerful thing.

Can SEO be found elsewhere?

A lot of good SEO practice can be found in other disciplines. Great product designers can build something that people can’t help but remarking about. Great web designers can make sure to honor accessible design, design great experiences, and coach you on best practices for the Web. Great copywriters and subject matter experts write content that’s worth reading. Great PR professionals can get people talking and linking.

All of this must be encouraged. I’m right on the sidelines cheering on these leaders.

But search marketers can give you that extra bit of insight to help you find opportunities in your marketing strategy. The real risk is in finding someone who is honest and good at it.

Technorati Tags: ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, internet marketing, marketing, search engine optimization, Search Marketing, seo

On Tuesday, I posted instructions on measuring organic keywords that send traffic to a given web page. At the end of the post, I gave the caveat that the traffic reported to you isn’t necessarily for just that page.

So what do you do if you want to know a more precise number of visitors referred to a given page by organic search? Fortunately, there is a way to get to that number in Google Analytics. But again, it’s not very easy to get there. I will show you the way.

Report on number of visitors referred to a given page by organic search

You don’t know if your work on SEO is really effective until you report on the traffic driven by organic search. Recording the number of visitors referred once a month is a great way to see whether or not your efforts are paying off.

For bonus points, if you have a Goal set up, you can also find out the conversion rate for visitors referred by organic search.

For this example, we will report on the number of visitors referred to the home page of ColdFusion on Wheels from organic search. Hey, because it’s an open source project, I won’t make anyone angry by sharing these details.

How to set it up in Google Analytics

This time, we’ll get a precise number of visitors by using a Traffic Sources report in Google Analytics. Start by clicking the Traffic Sources link in the left navigation.

Next, click on the Search Engines link that appears in the left navigation.

Now that we’re on the Search Engines report, find the non-paid link just below the giant line graph. Click it.

This will show you stats for how much organic traffic was sent from each search engine.

To show how many people landed on each page, find the drop-down marked as Dimension and set it to Landing Page.

Now you will finally see a list of URLs that visitors have landed on and how many visits there have been for your chosen date range.

If the page that you’re interested in doesn’t appear in the list that appears, try searching for it in the Filter Landing Page Containing search box at the bottom of the page.

Note that if you’re reporting on the index page of a section (index.html, index.php, home.aspx, etc.), you will need to find the backslash / record.

In our example, we can see that 463 visitors have been referred to the home page by organic search over the past month.

If you have Goals set up in Analytics (highly recommended!), we can also report on how effective that landing page is when people land there from organic search. Google Analytics can tell you how each landing page works with up to 4 different goals.

Taking a look at the Goal Conversion tab, we can see in the example that visitors who land on the home page from organic search download the freeware file 8.24% of the time.

This is a very powerful report because now I can set a goal to increase that conversion rate next month. Imagine that: actually using web analytics to drive better business results!

One of the caveats still applies

I’ll repeat the first caveat from the last post. It still applies to this scenario as well.

Caveat #1: Inconsistent links on your site

Unfortunately, if you have multiple links on your site that point to the same content, you could have a problem with getting to the metrics that you want.

For example, if you have links on your site to each of these

• /products
• /Products
• /products/index.html
• /products/

then those URLs are going to show up separately in Google Analytics. This applies to mixed case variants.

The best way to avoid this problem is to go through your site and use a consistent linking convention. I prefer all lowercase with a trailing slash, as in <a href="/products/">Products</a>. If this is too painstaking, you may just want to see which version of the URL that Google search results are sending users to, for starters.

I hope you find these reports useful and another way to drill down to measure the performance of your search marketing efforts. Please consider subscribing by RSS or email to be alerted when I post more tips in the future.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, glass case, google analytics, internet marketing, keywords, search engine optimization, seo, seo reports, web analytics

Every now and then, it’s good to report on the keywords that are referring users to a given page on your site. Let’s say that you optimized a page for [blue widgets], are now ranking for the term, and you want to see if it’s driving any traffic.

Google AdWords lets you measure your PPC keyword traffic easily, but it’s not so obvious how to do the same for organic keywords in Google Analytics. Let me show you what I think is the best path to setting up a report.

Report on organic key phrases used to get to a given web page

My organic SEO work has focused on taking a single web page and optimizing it for a key phrase or two. I’ve wanted to take a given page and see what keywords searchers have been using to get to that page. If the page is ranking well for a given key phrase and my reporting shows no traffic generated by that phrase, then it would be an indicator that I’d probably want to try something else (or figure out why no one is clicking to get to my page)!

For example’s sake, let’s say that I’ve optimized my blog’s home page for the key phrase [chris peters]. (Imagine that!)

How to set it up in Google Analytics

There are many different ways to approach reporting on your metrics in Google Analytics, so let me show you the best path to take in reporting on organic keywords.

Once you’re in your site in Google Analytics, click the Content link in the left navigation.

Next, click Content Drilldown.

If the page you’re interested in reporting on doesn’t appear in the Content Performance area, go ahead and search for the folder name in the Find URL search box at the bottom.

Once you’ve found the page you want to report on, click on it. (Note that if you’re reporting on the index page of a section (index.html, index.php, home.aspx, etc.), you will need to click the actual backslash “/” link to pull up the correct page.)

You should be on a report called Content Detail: [Your URL here]. There is a drop-down called Analyze that defaults to “Content Detail.” In that drop-down, select “Entrance Keywords.”

On the Entrance Keywords: [Your URL here] report, click on the Show: non-paid link to the right underneath the main graph.

At this point, you will see a list of keywords searchers have used to arrive at a given page, along with traffic metrics. If you look at my example, you’ll see that I’m pulling a decent amount of traffic for my name. (Considering that not too many people are looking for me.)

If you would like to automate this particular report, you can click the Email button at the top of the report to have it sent to you daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly.

Keep in mind that Analytics allows a limited number of automated reports, so you may end up in a situation where you’ll want to prioritize which reports you want to automate.

Caveats to organic keyword reporting in Google Analytics

Caveat #1: Inconsistent links on your site

Unfortunately, if you have multiple links on your site that point to the same content, you could have a problem with getting to the metrics that you want.

For example, if you have links on your site to each of these

• /products
• /Products
• /products/index.html
• /products/

then those URLs are going to show up separately in Google Analytics. This applies to mixed case variants.

The best way to avoid this problem is to go through your site and use a consistent linking convention. I prefer all lowercase with a trailing slash, as in <a href="/products/">Products</a>. If this is too painstaking, you may just want to see which version of the URL that Google search results are sending users to, for starters.

Caveat #2: Keyword reports in Content area aren’t just for a single URL

Content reports in Google Analytics behave a little strangely. When you report on keywords for a particular page like this, it doesn’t just show you keywords that caused the user to land directly on that page from search engines.

So if a visitor searched for your company name and somehow ended up on the target page, then that keyword is counted in this report. If you see anything that doesn’t make sense in your report, try searching for that word and seeing which page does come up.

Just a couple things to keep in mind.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, glass case, google, google analytics, internet marketing, keywords, organic search, Search Marketing, seo

My favorite sentence:

Many SEO consultants offer more SEO services than just content so if you already have a professional SEO writer you should ask that writer if he or she also does SEO consultations or provides other SEO services.

Your SEO consultant when providing their SEO service should never SEO consultant write just for the SEO search engines, but your SEO consultant should provide SEO consultations on providing SEO services to write for people. SEO services.

Technorati Tags: blooper, bloopers, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, funny, glass case, search engine optimization, Search Marketing, seo, Writing

Google wants to put the best in the world at #1. People with Ph.Ds work long hours to figure out how to make it so. When the best answer or company isn’t in that top spot, Google has failed their job.

Enter SEO, the discipline of getting more exposure (or better rankings) in search engines. When a company is trying to trick their way into the #1 spot, they are never going to meet their own expectations. Sure, there are some valuable “wins” by pursuing SEO, especially if you have a product, service, or information that matches what the user is looking for. The way your website is built could potentially get in the way of that.

But most don’t get that it’s a long-term effort to win that top spot that so many others are fighting for. And those who seek the shortcuts are going to get what they paid for in the long run. Remember all of those very smart and talented Google engineers that are fighting against you.

How do you win then? Work hard to create a resource. Give more value than you capture. Do something that others want to talk about. It’s not a goal for the lazy or the impatient. And it’s not about tricks.

Technorati Tags: google, internet marketing, search engine optimization, Search Marketing, seo

Human-friendly URLs

Search engines value URLs that are friendly to humans as well. They encourage URLs that could be spoken over the phone to someone or could be shared in an email without needing to span several lines.

Take this ridiculous URL, for example. It really is worthy of the ridicule that it received on the Late Show.

If you have URLs like this on your site, then you’re using a technology produced by a provider that just doesn’t “get” how the Web should work.

Hyphens as word delimiters

Long ago, Google’s own Matt Cutts revealed that Google officially recognizes hyphens as word delimiters in URLs. If you are using underscores between words instead, then Google is treating separate words in your URLs as all the same word, all smooshed together.

From a user experience standpoint, using hyphens in URLs makes sense as well. If your URLs get published as links in documents and on other webpages (which happens often), then underscores are hard to read in the context of an underlined text link.

Look at this URL, for example. Having trouble seeing the underscores because of the underline?

http://www.domain.com/some_url_with_underscores/

Cool URLs never change

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, wrote an informative article about the design of URLs. He argues that if your site’s URLs are designed thoughtfully up front, then you should never need to change them. He gives several examples of how you could accomplish that goal. Give it a read and pass it along to your web designer.

What to do if your URLs do need to change

You will get to a point where you redesign your website, and this may require some URL changes along with it. Or maybe you’ve broken some of Berners-Lee’s guidelines like exposing your web technology through your URLs. (Like technology never changes. Right…)

What do you do when you need to make your changes? Well, you have 2 options: 301 redirects and 404 not found pages.

301 redirects

Sorry for the jargon, but 301 is the code in the Web world for a permantently-moved URL. Along with a 301 code, your web server tells the visitor where the page has moved.

A web browser like Internet Explorer sees the code and new location and automatically loads the new URL. This is great for a user who has an old URL bookmarked or who stumbles across a page on another site that links to one of your old URLs.

A search engine also does something very practical with a 301 redirect code. It takes these actions:

• Indexes the content at the new URL
• Removes the old URL from its index
• Assigns all “ranking power” of the old URL to the new URL

If you just delete the old URLs without doing 301 redirects to the new content, you are hurting your search rankings and potentially alienating users who have bookmarked your old URLs.

Don’t overdo it with 301 redirects

One thing to consider is that browsers ignore 301 redirect chains that are more than 5 items long. Sometimes you’ll have a URL that redirects to another URL, which then redirects to another URL. After a chain of 5 such redirects, the chain of redirects will stop working.

As a result, I recommend being very conservative about the use of 301 redirects. Only use them if you absolutely need to change your URLs. Trust me. Multiple redirects can start piling up after a while if you’re in an environment that requires a lot of change.

404 not found pages

404 errors are probably more familiar to you as a web surfer. 404 means that the page cannot be found. These errors are most appropriately used when your content doesn’t have a suitable replacement URL.

If you get rid of content and there is not reasonable place to redirect it to, then that is a good time to declare content bankruptcy and have the web server throw a 404 error. But only do this as a last resort. When was the last time that you can recall being happy about getting a “page not found” error?

URL design

As you can see, choosing URLs for your content is no trivial task. A URL seems like a simple part of the Web, but it is also one of the defining elements of the Web. It’s imporantant.

Putting some thought into the design and maintenance of your URLs can keep you ranking well in the search engines for years to come.

Technorati Tags: ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, design, glass case, internet, internet marketing, marketing, search engine optimization, Search Marketing, seo, urls, web

In this mini-series, I will be talking about running a Google AdWords campaign. I will cover quite a bit of detail about keyword research, writing ad text, creating landing pages, maintaining your campaign, and reporting and metrics.

Your landing page is a crucial part of getting customers to take action after clicking on one of your AdWords ads. There’s a good chance that they didn’t read too much of your ad, so a lot of your persuasion needs to take place on your landing page. And you didn’t really have much space to get your message across in a ridiculously short text ad, did you?

Why a landing page?

In the early days of AdWords advertising, a lot of companies were advertising for specific products and then pointing the ad to their company home page. This leads to poor results.

If a searcher clicks on an ad for Product X, then they expect to land on a web page that talks about Product X. Hey, you’re paying money for this specific segment of traffic, so you better give them what they want!

What a good landing page looks like

Well, the optimal landing page for your campaign is probably going to look different for almost every type of situation that you encounter. And unfortunately, you don’t know what a good landing page is until you try something.

The best thing that you can do is start with something simple. Create a landing page that offers only one action, be it selling one product or signing up for one thing like a newsletter. Don’t try distracting the user with too many different options. It should be clear to them what your page is about upon first glance.

Sometimes your product or service page will be good enough to be a landing page. Sometimes you’ll need to create separate landing pages for each ad group that you find keywords for. Sometimes a single landing page for your campaign will work just fine.

The point is that you’re probably not going to do so well right out the gate.

13 tips for writing the ultimate landing page

Copyblogger has a great article about writing the ultimate landing page. To sum it up, here are the 13 tips (they had bonus tips) that they listed:

1. Make sure your headline refers directly to the place from which your visitor came or the ad copy that drove the click.
2. Provide a clear call to action.
3. Write in the second person – You and Your.
4. Write to deliver a clear, persuasive message, not to showcase your creativity or ability to turn a clever phrase.
5. You can write long copy as long as it’s tight.
6. Be crystal clear in your goals.
7. Keep your most important points at the beginning of paragraphs and bullets.
8. In line with #7, people read beginnings and ends before they read middles.
9. Make your first paragraph short, no more than 1-2 lines
10. Write to the screen.
11. Remove all extraneous matter from your landing page.
12. Don’t ask for what you don’t need.
13. Assume nothing. Test everything.

It all comes down to tying the experience back to the ad that referred the visitor. This is why you may need to create separate landing pages for each of your ad groups in your campaign. You may need to tell a separate story for each of your groups of related keywords.

For example, if you were advertising on cheap toilets, then you probably wouldn’t want to offer up your most expensive toilet. For expensive toilets, create a different landing page that offers one of your higher-priced items.

Experiments and A/B or multivariate testing

If this is your first shot at paid search, the best thing that you can do is to create a couple different versions of your landing page. This is referred to as an A/B test. Then all you need to do is create 2 identical Ad Texts in AdWords, except point the Destination URL for each to your 2 different landing pages. Let it run for about a week and see which landing page is yielding better results.

There are just so many things that you can experiment with that you just need to jump in. Try testing the effects of these elements:

• Presence or absence of navigation
• Offering a special deal (if sales are your goal)
• Adding sub-offers for those who may not be interested in your primary offer
• Positioning of graphics and buttons
• Length/detail of copy
• Different headlines

The main point is to only test one variable at a time. If you want to see if having navigation on the page affects results, create 2 landing pages:

1. One with navigation
2. One without navigation

If you try changing too many different things at once in a simple A/B test, you won’t know which page elements in particular caused a change in performance.

Tools like Google Website Optimizer can also help you test many variables at once. If you’re testing more than 1 variable, then it’s called multivariate testing.

Keep in mind that the more variables that you want to test, the longer that you’ll need to run the test in order to get more meaningful data.

This is part of a mini-series

Read the rest of Mini-series: How to run an AdWords campaign.

Technorati Tags: Advertising, adwords, campaign, google, internet marketing, landing page, landing pages, marketing, ppc, Search Marketing, Writing

In this mini-series, I will be talking about running a Google AdWords campaign. I will cover quite a bit of detail about keyword research, writing ad text, creating landing pages, maintaining your campaign, and reporting and metrics.

Another crucial element of your Google AdWords campaign is the ad itself. You only have so many characters available to express yourself, set the searcher’s expectations on your offerings, and get the searcher enticed to click.

The strategy

In my post about AdWords keyword research, I instructed you to break your keywords into different groups. There are a couple reasons for doing this:

1. If you can align your ads and landing pages to the different “themes” of keywords, then your message will resonate better with searchers.
2. AdWords has a relevance-scoring system called Quality Score. If your keywords are well-aligned with your ads and landing pages, then Google will charge you less per click and rank your ad higher.

I felt the need to split the 2 seemingly similar reasons out because I think that we still need to consider the first point. Focusing just on Google’s Quality Score can sometimes lead you down the wrong path.

Now we can craft our ad texts with our keyword groups.

Writing the ad text

Writing an ad for Google is kind of like writing a Haiku. There isn’t a whole lot of space to get your message across. Here’s what you have to work with:

So what do you want to do with this limited space?

First, add in as many words from the “keyword theme” as possible. When people see their search words bolded on the page, there is a higher likelihood that their eye to be drawn to the ad. This is especially important for the headline.

Next, try to add some actionable text in the ad as well. If you’re offering a white paper, saying “Free White Paper.” If you are offering a sales promotion, say, “Save 33% Today!” If neither of those are the case, then put in your unique value proposition. You get the idea.

Tip: Stand out from the competition

If you’re in a competitive niche, beware of writing ads that look the same as everyone else’s. The eye is trained to focus on elements of the page that are different, so if your ad looks the same as all the others, it will likely be ignored.

Take this example from a search that I ran for email marketing:

What’s the difference between all of these ads? Why should I click on one versus another? There’s little here that would compel me to make my choice one way or the other.

Sometimes it’s great to use the target phrase as the headline. Just make sure that it’s not everyone else’s strategy!

How to STAND OUT

Like I said, the best way to stand out is to be different. Although your ads are text-based, there are a few tools in your arsenal besides just using the searchers’ terms:

• Numerals draw the eye. Display a special price, a performance metric (“80% faster”), a discount rate, or whatever you can think of. Put it in your headline and/or ad text. Use the numeral characters. Don’t spell the numeric words out!
• Capitalize the first letter of each word. I’ve run multivariate tests using Capitalized Words versus non-capitalized words and got better click-through rates with the capitalized ads. Feel free to try running 2 different versions yourself to see which works better.
• Use a friendly display URL. If your website’s domain name is perfectpcrepairs.com, spell it in the ad as PerfectPcRepairs.com. It’s readable and more memorable.
• Use of special characters. Google doesn’t let you use too many special characters, but you can usually get away with adding in something like a chevron (») or double greater-than’s (>>). This is especially great if your product or service involves movement.

Test several ads

As I alluded to above, you should try out different ads and see what works best. What gets the most clicks? Which drives the most conversions? Based on your goals, pick the top performer. Then try tweaking it even more.

Then be sure to monitor performance and the competition after a while. Things are constantly changing in this landscape, so you need to be on your toes.

This is part of a mini-series

Read the rest of Mini-series: How to run an AdWords campaign.

Technorati Tags: ad, ad text, ad texts, ads, Advertising, adwords, google, google adwords, internet marketing, marketing, ppc, search advertising, Search Marketing, sem, Writing

And this is only the top 10,000 most popular terms. There are tens of millions of different phrases that people use.

This is a pure demonstration of a principle called The Long Tail. This principle says that focused niches make up more of any economy than the most popular items. An example: 60% of Amazon’s revenue is generated by products that are not popular.

What does this mean for you, small business owner? It’s great to be small. You should pick a narrow focus and then own it.

And you will win. Even on Google.

Technorati Tags: business, google, long tail, marketing, seo, small business