7 Sites to teach you SEO techniques
Dec.19.2009 
When we first started using online marketing many moons ago, our main focus was on paid search (Google AdWords et al) and our plans revolved around creating campaigns, bids, clicks, conversions etc.
Whether you are a complete beginner or you an SEO master, these sites have enough of a back catalogue and regular new information to keep you going for months!
- http://www.seomoz.org/blog: Starting as an SEO agency they have used their blog to position themselves as a global resource for the industry
- http://www.seobook.com/blog: A mix of practical advice, industry news and personal opinion
- http://searchengineland.com/columns/: one of my favourite sites, the columns section covers all aspects of search marketing
- http://searchenginewatch.com/sew_archive_experts&type=sew_experts/sem-101&issue=2009: Really good introductory articles to various aspects of online marketing
- http://www.wolf-howl.com: This site has been around for years and it mixes advice with commentary and personal opinion
- http://econsultancy.com/blog: The volume of posts each day can be a bit too much and some articles don’t go in to a lot of detail, but the percentage that do hit the money make it worth it.
- http://www.toprankblog.com/: Good traditional ‘how to’ blog with some great advice for all levels of knowledge
How to increase conversions by reducing your visitors perceived risk
One of marketing’s most important functions is to reduce the level of perceived risk a potential customer may have about your service or product. Weighing up ‘risk’ is a big part of the consumer’s decision making process, sometimes it can happen in an instant (e.g. low cost or regularly purchased items such as baked beans) or sometimes it can take months or years (e.g. one off high value items such as buying a house), and everything else in between.
There are 6 different types of risk:
- Physical risk (Will it physically hurt them or anyone else?)
- Functional risk (Will it work how they want it to?)
- Social risk (Is it socially acceptable within their circle?)
- Psychological risk (How does the product fit in with their perception of themselves?)
- Financial risk (Can they afford it?)
- Time risk (Is the time it takes to buy the product worth the effort?)
Your aim should be to use your website to provide visitors with the information they need to overcome their perceived risk.
Contact us, find us & about us pages
No one likes to spend money with a faceless company with no clear way of getting in touch if there are any problems. Easy to find ‘contact us’ and if you have offices, ‘find us’ pages show people there is someone on the other side. Equally ‘about us’ pages help to put you and your website in to context along with adding a personal touch, especially if you use photos of yourself.
Money back guarantee
The inability to see a product or touch it is one of the major hurdles people have to get over when purchasing online and a product can look very different in the real world to the image on the website. You can help reduce the financial risk by allowing them to return it and get their money back. This also goes for services.
Demo of product
In a similar vein to the point above, screen shots are not always enough for some visitors. Being able to ‘test drive’ the service before they commit to a purchase is a major plus for many visitors and will increase your conversion rate.
3rd party endorsements
Having your product endorsed by a business or personality well regarded in your field will reduce psychological and social risk by creating a sense of trust through your association with them. This can be as simple as listing your blue chip suppliers (e.g. Microsoft) all the way up to getting a celebrity on board (e.g. a football apparel website hiring a footballer)
Testimonials, case studies & customer comments
Being able to see there are existing (happy) customers is important to potential customers because they don’t want to feel they are alone. You can help to Increase the credibility of any comments and/ or testimonials with the person’s names, links to follow and putting the date of their comment to show how fresh they are.
Heritage
The knowledge you are dealing with an established and stable brand is important to customers because they associate that with being trustworthy. Few website owners can claim “Since 1908” but because the internet is so new and sites come and go so quickly, a web site as recent as “since 2004” can feel like an old horse!
Write an online survey
Surveys are great ways to collect data about pretty much anything to do with your website for example, how people use your website, what they think about your services, how they rate your products. However, writing a good survey with results you can analyse and data you can actually use is not as simple as many people think.
Below is some advice and a few tips on writing a survey for your website.
Keep it short
No one wants to be faced with dozens of questions especially online where attention spans continue to fall. To ensure as many questions are answered as possible and reduce the drop out rate aim for 10 questions or less. If you decide to split the questions in to multiple pages don’t create so many stages it feels like they are climbing a mountain and always let them know where they are in the process e.g. step 2 of 5.
Give them a reason to take part
Provide a strong incentive for the participant to complete the survey and give you their contact details. For example, if you are running a survey to benchmark your industry you could give them access to the results or if it is a survey about your service a competition is always popular e.g. Win a laptop.
Structuring the questions
How you structure your questions will make the difference between having data you can apply and having a large spreadsheet sitting untouched on your computer. Some tips include…
1. Don’t weigh the answers in favour of a certain answer e.g. Excellent, Very good, Good, Poor (3 positive and only 1 negative)
2. Don’t put “don’t know” or “NA” as an option in middle (e.g. 3 of 6), it will make statistical analysis a nightmare. Put it as a separate option at the end
3. Avoid leading questions e.g. “Do you agree that…?”
4. Keep the question specific e.g. don’t use words such as “Occasionally”, “Often”, “Regularly” etc. What they mean differs from person to person
5. What does average mean? Don’t use it for the sake of it
6. Don’t fall in to trap of asking two questions in one sentence. “Did you buy our red balloon and what did you think of it?”
Open and closed questions
Open questions allow the respondent to answer a question with no limitations on what they can say e.g. “What do you like about your current supplier?” A closed question has a limited number of responses to choose from e.g. “How would you rate our customer service?” Very Good, Good etc.
In theory open questions provide you with more qualitative data but they can be difficult to analyse. If you have thousands of responses you will have to go through each one grouping the answers to be able to spot any common themes. Closed questions make it very easy to analyse the data but you could miss out on some valuable feedback.
Piloting the survey
Good practise dictates you should run a pilot survey to test the questions amongst a limited sample before launching it to the general population. Doing this will highlight any problems with the questions and any in data collection and analysis.
Choosing the software
There are literally hundreds of software suppliers to choose from covering all the stages of planning, implementing, distributing and analysing your survey.
Suppliers include:
• http://www.zoomerang.com/
• http://www.keysurvey.co.uk/
Think local… act local
The big point I want to get across with this post is to not fall in to the trap of thinking because you have a website you have to act like a global or even a national service provider.
If you want to trade on a national level it will cost a lot of money and there will be a lot of big fish out there to compete with. If you get work further afield, great, but my advice would be not to go chasing it too hard too early.
Why…
- Local advertising is significantly cheaper than their national counter parts and a lot more targeted, which leads to…
- Reduced waste. This refers to waste in terms of the people looking at the advert as well as money. If you only supply services to Yorkshire, then having the advert seen in Cornwall is a waste of your money.
- There is much less competition. For example on Google the search term “bouncy castle Nottingham” brings back 37,000 results whereas “bouncy castle” displays a massive 1.42m results.
How…
- Your local British chamber of commerce and business link organisations are gold mines for both business resources and putting you in touch with potential customers. A good idea is to find out when they have their events to put local suppliers in touch with potential customers and go along. Also research whether they send out emails to local businesses you can advertise on.
- Optimise your website’s SEO for the geographic locations you are targeting. For example instead of <title>Bouncy castle hire</title> be more specific and use <title>Bouncy castle hire Nottingham, Derby & Leicester</title>
- Directories such as the ‘ic’ or ‘touch’ networks tend to be displayed prominently in localised search engine results. Research the most popular online directories for your area and niche and submit your site.
- With relatively small geographic locations from which to report the news, many local papers are news hungry and if you have an event, promotion, new product, re-launch etc to promote you could get yourself in.
- Put an advert or at least a free entry in the Yellow Pages (both online and traditional book directory) and BT’s business phone book. A lot of buyers still use these to find business suppliers.
- Google AdWords does not have to be a national medium. Use the ‘geographic targeting’ options to only show ads to people in your target area (i.e. no ads shown in areas you can’t supply therefore no wasted clicks etc)
- Buy a list of geographically targeted email addresses from companies such as www.marketingfile.com and use a HTML mail shot to promote your services. (You can find a good article about designing HTML emails here)
- After you finish a job always post the invoice and put in a collection of business cards so they can pass them on to their contact
