Marketing Technology Blog

There are many in the social media world out there that judge a blog’s success by metrics of engagement such as comments. I don’t. There is no correlation between this blog’s success and the number of comments on it. I do believe that comments can impact a blog – but because it’s not something you can directly control I don’t pay attention to it.

If I wanted comments, I’d write link baiting headlines, controversial content and snarky blog posts. This, in turn, would lose my core audience and target the wrong people.

Three business blogging conversion metrics I pay attention to:

• Search Engine Results Page Conversions – Many experts focus on how much search engine traffic you received… but not how much traffic you lost. If you write flat post titles and your meta data isn’t compelling, you may make the top of the search engine rankings but people may not be clicking your link. Write post titles that convert traffic and ensure your meta descriptions are packed with keywords and a great reason to click through! Utilize Google Webmasters to analyze these results.
• Call To Action Conversions – First time visitors are landing on your blog and either leaving or looking to do business with you. Are you providing a path for them to engage with your company? Do you have a prominent contact form and link? Are your address and phone number clearly identified? Do you have compelling Calls To Action that visitors are clicking on?
• Landing Page Conversions – After your visitors are clicking on your Call To Action, are they landing on a page that makes them convert? Is your landing page clean and void of unnecessary navigation, links, and other content that aren’t driving the sale?

Your prospects have to convert at each step of the way in order for you to acquire them as a customer. You must attract their click on the search engine results page (SERP), you must provide them relevant content to gain their trust and compel them to dig deeper, you must provide them a path to engagement – like a compelling call to action (CTA) and you must provide them with a means of contacting you – like a well-designed, optimized landing page.

Compendium Executes on these Best Practices!

1. First: The search engine result for Calculating Business Blogging ROI, Compendium has the second spot and is well written – sure to attract some traffic!
   
   Note: You’ll notice that Compendium has the second result for the search and not the first result. If the page title had Compendium Blogware at the end of the title rather than the beginning, the date and author info were dropped, and the meta description had more compelling language, they might even be able to squeeze out the top ranking result. (It is great that the meta description starts with the keyword, though!) Those changes could double or triple their conversions from this search engine results page.
2. Second: It’s a nice concise post that directs attention to two additional resources to calculate the Return On Investment. This is a solid, relevant post, though!
   
   Note: One way of improving this may have been to actually provide a third resource – the actual call to action to the ROI Toolkit.
3. Third: The call to action is absolutely beautiful and relevant to the copy on the page, and is a clear path to find additional information!
   
4. Fourth: The landing page is absolutely flawless – providing supportive, compelling content, a short form to collect contact information for the sales team, and even some prequalifying questions to get a feeling for the prospects budget and sense of urgency.

The marketing team at Compendium is incredible at fully leveraging their own tool. I know for a fact that Compendium gathers more leads via search results and their own blog than any other source. No doubt it’s because of the fantastic work they do at testing, retesting and optimizing their conversion path. Well done!

Full Disclosure… I own shares and helped start Compendium Blogware (thank goodness they didn’t go with my logo!)

In the past few weeks I’ve spoken with quite a few companies who are trying to deploy strategies to overcome negative search engine results regarding their companies, products or services. It used to be possible to maintain a perfect brand years ago. If bad things happened, you could pay to get rid of the problems or sweep them under the rug so no one could find them.

This doesn’t work any longer. The prominence of social networks, business review sites and blogging has provided the upset customer with a huge sword to strike at the heart of your brand. Customers are rioting (sometimes for good reason) and the brand manager is feeling helpless.

Brand perfection is dead.

It’s no longer the choice of the brand manager or the CMO to maintain the integrity of the brand. It’s now the responsibility of every employee in the organization. Don’t try to break out the big sticks or the tear gas, either. One overzealous corporate attorney sending a cease and desist can set the Streisand effect in motion.

These companies look at me helpless, wanting me to assure them that I can fix their problem. It doesn’t work like that. It won’t ever work like that again. Brand perfection is dead. Reputation management, transparency, and great customer service are the brand manager’s protective gear. If your company wants to build a great reputation, it starts with great customer service.

If you want to kill a bad story in a search engine results page, you need to work much harder as a company to make some good stories make the results page instead. Much, much harder.

Likewise, the day of manipulating consumers as if they were mindless zombies is over, too. Consumers now read, listen, discuss and research their purchasing decisions. The good news is that consumers don’t expect perfection anymore… but they do expect honesty. If you have a product ratings page that’s full of 5-stars, some research has been shown that consumers won’t find the reviews credible. In other words, you could be losing customers if your brand appears perfect. Wow.

Brand Imperfection

We can’t control the message unless we can live up to the expectations of what we wish our brand to portray. We can’t cover up our faults anymore, we have to be open about them. The age of brand imperfection is among us – and to succeed we must be open and honest about our products and services… good or bad. When your company doesn’t live up to expectations (which will happen), you must react swiftly to correct the issue. I would encourage you to respond to negativity on your own turf, though. Direct the traffic where you have the microphone rather than rewarding a resource who may not deserve the spotlight.

If your company has a negative search engine result, encourage the customers who are champions of your brand to promote you on their own sites, their profiles, their networks and/or their blogs. You can’t get rid of anything negative on the Internet anymore, but you can promote the positive.

When your company lives up to expectations, you’ll find it a lot easier to manage your brand effectively.

Trying to get into a search results page for a specific keyword term can take a lot of work. I’m surprised at the number of local businesses, though, that don’t take advantage of Google Local Business. I worked with my favorite Indianapolis Coffee Shop, The Bean Cup, to get good search engine placement… but the first step was to ensure they were listed on Google’s map:

If you do a search on Google for coffee shop Indianapolis, before any search results come up a map appears with all of the local coffee shops in Indianapolis.

Getting on this map isn’t a matter of popularity, it’s simply a matter of registering for Google Local Business. Registering and identifying your location on Google Local Business puts you on popular Google Search engine results where a map is displayed – as well as puts you on the map with Google Map searches.

There are a ton of options available as well – uploading photos, coupons, phone numbers, hours of operation, etc. The validation process is pretty simple… Google makes an automated phone call to the business number you’ve supplied to ensure you’re real. If you have an automated phone system, you can opt-in for Google to mail you a validation card. Once you receive the card, just log into your account and enter the verification code.

What are you waiting for? Put your business on the map today! Did I mention that it’s free?

There… I said it! I said it because I see all of the money spent on search engine optimization by small to mid-size businesses and I think it’s a racket. Here’s my view of the search engine optimization industry:

The majority of Search Engine Optimization falls within writing great content, attracting authoritative backlinks to that content and following a few important best practices. These are all basics that anyone can follow – but most do not.

I still see a slew of new sites hitting the market that are image heavy and text light, that don’t utilize simple elements like headings, subheadings, etc… and don’t put a simple sitemap that a search engine can crawl. These tips, which I’ve written about over and over on my blog and see over and over on other blogs will get your site 99% of the way.

The fact is this: If you write frequent relevant content that incorporates keywords and phrases that searchers are looking for, your site will be found. The impact of that content will dwarf any tweaking that any SEO expert can achieve. Stop wasting your money and start writing content!

So many folks like to argue the secrets of search engines on things like URL length, outbound links, nofollow, etc, etc… but they’re only playing in the 1%. Sure, for some businesses, that little 1% can be the difference in millions of dollars… but for you and me, it’s bunk.

The other secret of the industry is 99.99% of your competition doesn’t have a clue what they’re doing. Write relevant, compelling content and you can win the battle on search.