Small Business SEO & SEM

Search engine optimisation and digital marketing for small business isn’t easy. For big-brands people love linking to them without them having to ask, even without them deserving it in many cases.

Small business don’t have that luxury, that’s not to say that the smaller guys can’t compete, they just have to work harder and smarter to get their share of attention online.

Some of my favourite small business SEO tips are below, some are mine, others are from people who volunteered their own ideas on Twitter.

1. Optimise for local search. Figure out who are the authoritative citations within your city - ie touchnottingham.com via @APSG
2. Concentrate on local search and longer search terms as these give more of a chance with a smaller budget. Google Maps add is a must in your town! via @StuartFlatt
3. Be active online. Forge relationships with blog owners, find journalists on Twitter. These contacts will be invaluable when it comes to getting coverage.
4. Write content that’s relevant to your business and your customers & keep it up to date. via @picseli
5. Get your analytics package in place as early as possible. The more data you have the more you’ll be able to analyse your marketing decisions.
6. Utilise your current relationships - reciprocal linking is not perfect, but still has a good effect on local search (imo) via @CMaddison
7. Brand yourself as an expert. Write informative articles about your industry. Post them on your site, ask to have your work published on others.
8. Try to focus on conversions rather than rankings. Too many small business owners are obsessed with being first, rather than focusing on profits. via @CMaddison
9. At the very least ensure your page titles are unique and relevant to the content on them.
10. Don’t scrimp on your website, a less than satisfactory site may save cash in the short term, but it’ll cost you in conversions.
11. Build your list - capture customer data, segment it, test it and contact them regularly (not too regularly) with useful information, articles, links and offers.
12. Consider using Adwords for initial data collection / keyword selection - find your best converting/most profitable keywords for under £100 via @CMaddison
13. Build trust - make sure you’re easily contactable, make sure your site has a prominent address and telephone number on each page, explain why your buying process is secure.
14. Find out who your competition is, then find out who links to them using Open Site Explorer - get those sites to link to you.
15. Setup Google alerts for your business name. Make sure you monitor these, it’s a great opportunity to ask for links when people forget, or to network with people who are already talking about you.

Don’t forget to follow up

As much effort needs to be put into offline follow-up as your website itself. You are the main event of your website, and whether or not you follow up enquiries is a huge reflection on your organisation as a whole.

Check out this comic from The Brads

I like to use a website contact form because they’re quick and easy. It’s not always convienient to pick up the phone, especially when you may be on hold for half an hour.

Lately I have had a couple of enquiries for Camden City Council. Although I get an instant confirmation email (from no-reply@camden.gov.uk) it includes a disclaimer reading “If you do not hear directly from the team involved within 10 working days you may contact the Central Complaints unit direct on….”
If it was suitable for me to call them then I would have in the first place, but for whatever reason I have chosen to email them, and it’s not unreasonable to expect a reply. I still have not had a proper response from them about my enquiries.

Likewise, an enquiry to Traid for some photos following a revamp event I attended fell on deaf ears - I didn’t even get an aknowledgement.

These are just 2 examples; unanswered enquiries happen all the time. It’s so common that you’re probably thinking “Well that’s what you get from filling in an enquiry form.”

But I have huge faith in websites, and I know encouraging contact is the main goal of many sites - so why is this rudeness acceptable and website enquiries go ignored?

Janey at Basically Black is an example of how to do offline follow-through well. We recently did a survey of her customers and almost everyone said how friendly and helpful she had been with choosing sizes, placing orders and managing returns.

It’s no surprise she’s seeing a lot of repeat customers and verbal recommendations - and it’s a shame others are missing the trick.

So you think you’ve got a search engine friendly website?

One of the first tasks we perform when working with a new client on search promotion is a health check of the website.  The idea is to make sure that the way the site is built does not hamper its performance in search engines.

Business owners and managers don’t have time to learn technical jargon, so if their web developer puts keywords in the URL then the “search engine friendly website” box is ticked.  There’s a bit more to it of course, and here are some pointers……. (more…)

My favourite sites for December 2009

 Hi, I’m Belles and I do the business developement and marketing at Datadial.  Part of my role is to surf the net for sites that need our help!

Having looked at a range of sites, from basic to imaginative ones; I have 3 favourites that pop to the forefront of my mind for December.  I especially like these for their design, products, colour and simplicty:

www.mungoandmaud.com 

I was drawn to this site, because of the unique name.  I loved all the textures and choices of products and I’ve passed it on to all my friends with dogs all shapes and sizes!

www.hunkydoryhome.co.uk

Clean, sharp site which shows off funky, quirky and very original asseccories for your home.  

www.yeovalleyorganic.co.uk 

This site made me want to dive into the picture and soak up the open space! I love all their delicious foods and inspiring recipes.

Happy Christmas!

The Biggest (But Lesser Known) Online Marketing Myths

Recently I seem to be coming across a lot of popular misconceptions being churned out, both by business owners who have unfortunately been told or have read incorrect information, or even, and more worryingly; people who write about digital marketing or SEO in the mainstream or industry press. Below is a collection of my favourite online marketing myths, feel free to add your own in the comments.

Content is king

Yes, it is correct that all websites need good content, and ideally need good content being added on a regular basis. However the “content is king” mantra seems to have misled people into thinking that ALL you need to do for your marketing effort is to add what you consider to be good content. Content needs to be optimised, content needs to be linkable, content needs to be publicised, content needs to be linked to. Lots of great content remains ignored and unranked as it is passed over for more mediocre but better publicised and linked-to alternatives.

Build Multiple Sites

You have one website that’s doing very well, if you add another you’ll double that success. Add 10 new sites and you’ll be retiring in the next 12 months right? Wrong. Ten more sites will mean 10 times the marketing effort and budget, and ten times the cost. Having one site with 1000 pages of content on it with 1000 links will perform far better than the same content and links divided between two sites.
By consolidating content and links onto one domain you will increase that domains trust and authority, which will mean it’ll rank far higher than it would if the resources were split across two properties.
The only time I would advocate building more than one site is for strategic business reasons such as a planned sell-off. If you are running several sites for no particular reason, other than it seemed like a good idea I would certainly look at consolodating them.

E-Mail Marketing Is Spam

Spam is bad mmmkay? Don’t do it. EMail Marketing to an opt-in list that you have built as part of your brand will deliver a massive return on investment. Every company should be building, collating, segmenting and marketing to your customer data, it is a tremendously valuable resource. Avoid emailing people too often, and for heavens sake keep it interesting, useful and punchy.

All Sites Are Equal

Certainly in an SEO sense this isn’t the case. You’ll find that bigger brands can get away with a lot more than tiny start-ups. Older, more trusted domains with a higher authority can get away with using far more spammy tactics that would get smaller sites penalised. Google hasn’t exactly levelled the playing field with the Google brand update, which is rumoured to give big brands a rankings boost for certain commercial keywords.

Social Media Is A Fad

The rocket-like growth of social media sites has taken many people by surprise, online marketers, brands and PR agencies included. People react to change in different ways, some labelling the growth as a fad, something to be ignored. Others learn and adapt and have made millions in the process.
Social media is a fundamental shift in the way people communicate, used correctly it is a cost effective way of reaching brand advocates, consumers and influencers. Just because you haven’t worked out the best way of using, tracking, measuring and monetising social media for your brand doesn’t mean it’s not worth the time.

Rankings And Traffic Are Your Most Important Metrics

Checking your sites rankings is fine, and it’s a good idea to keep a close eye on your traffic numbers, but are these your most important metrics? Probably not. SEOs and online marketers in my opinion spend far too long obsessing over rankings and traffic numbers, and less time learning about conversion rates, segmenting visitor sources, looking at link acquisition rates, keyword £ values and ultimately sales volumes. Not many clients will tell you they value visitor numbers over money in their pocket.

Search Engine Submission

No, just no. If anyone tells you that you need to submit your site to a search engine give them a sharp poke in the eye. Search engines have gone far beyond having to be told where sites are located and are quite capable of finding them themselves through links. It’s been this way since the 1990’s but the myth just won’t go away.

Magic Page Keyword Density

I keep hearing the same question asked time and time again about what the optimum page keyword density is. There certainly isn’t a magic mathematical formula for keyword % that will give you any kind of boost over your competitors.
It’s far more important to write for your visitors and intelligently use your keywords in certain places on the page - sure it’s logical that they should be present in the body text, but search engines will attribute a far higher weight to words mentioned in places like the page titles, image alt tags, headings, bold and italic text etc.

Flash Sites

There are a huge number of misconceptions about flash websites. Can search engines read them or not? On the whole, now yes they can, text and links can be read, with the exception of some JavaScript links. Until 2008 this wasn’t always the case, with most flash sites being all but invisible to search engines.
So is now the time to rush-off and convert your site to flash because it looks so lovely? Probably not. There are still many fundamental reasons why flash sites don’t perform as well in search engines as their HTML cousins. Problems with page mark-up, content not being on unique URLs, and doubts over crawlability all don’t lend flash sites to ranking well in search engines.

Inspiration: Typography

One of Douglas Wilson's beautiful prints

I’m about half way through The Elements of Typographic Style and thoroughly enjoying it.  I really wish there was a way you could read a book and ride a bicycle so I could get more reading time in while commuting, but I’ll just have to take my time reading it instead!

Some thoughts so far…

“With type as with philosophy, music and food, it is better to have a little of the best than to be swamped with the derivative, the careless, the routine.” (Page 117)

I think this is true of all design.  In a time where you can get free website templates anywhere or make a website yourself so easily, the designs that have a lot of thought, care and expertise behind them really stand out from the crowd.

Shaping the page

Example of a page layout based on the Golden Section

Although the book focuses on print, the principles found in the chapter Shaping the Page can be applied to web design also.  It is a great reminder to me of design school, especially the theories of the Golden Section and Fibonacci series.  Using ratios based around φ are useful for arriving at a design that is easy on the eye and feels comfortable to use.

Visiting Switzerland

Coffee cup in Zürich

What you read opens your eyes to things around you; I have been noticing nicely designed type everywhere!  Recently we spent a weekend in Zürich - I love it how clean, thoughtful design surrounds you in that beautiful country.

Datadial Launch Their Reputation Monitoring Tool

Datadial are pleased to announce the launch of their online reputation monitoring tool. Designed for business and agencies that wish to monitor the online profiles of their brand, products, key staff and competitors.

We have designed the user interface to be as intuitive as possible, with an emphasis on speed of use and productivity, while at the same time a feature-rich interface gives in-depth data about the source of mentions and enables you to tag, comment or share mentions for further action.

• This service should be seen as part of any effective online marketing strategy.
• You will be able to track and measure what is being said.
• Armed with this information you will be able to see the effectiveness of your campaigns, gain customer insight, learn how your brand, products and services are being perceived and also join in the conversation and, if necessary, react to any adverse publicity.
• The results will help you with planning for future campaigns, enabling fine-tuning and therefore saving you money.

At this point the software is still at a beta stage, so we are inviting as much user feedback and suggestions as possible on design and functionality. Signup to track one phrase is free, so please go here to signup for an account.

Domain Legality & Appeal: Oasis Case Study

A few weeks ago I had an interesting discussion with a few attendees to one of our online marketing workshops. The workshops are designed to give small business owners guidance in what they can be doing to improve their own marketing campaigns with advice on link building, creating content and how they could be using social media to promote their sites.

One particular debate arose on the legality of competitors squatting on variations of their branded domain names, and offering up the domain name for extortionate prices. I did a little research and dugg our the Oasis case study from earlier in the year:

credit:perspicacious.co.uk

Since 1991, the highstreet brand Oasis has been trading as a UK women’s clothing chain, and in 2006 the domain name oasis.co.uk was acquired by Mr. James Dale who parked the domain name and displayed sponsored links to women’s clothing sites using the DoubleClick advertising network through Google AdWords.

Earlier this year Oasis challenged the registration of the domain oasis.co.uk, stating that the domain took unfair advantage of the company brand and trademark, taking their appeal to Nominet. Under Nominet’s Dispute Resolution Service, the initial case had been won by Oasis, and initially decided that the domain should be transferred to Oasis.

However this was no ordinary Nominet recovery case. Mr. Dale then came forward shortly thereafter to advise that the complaint had been mailed to his previous address, thus meaning he found out about the decision without having a chance to appear to do anything to fight it.

Mr. Dale had failed to update the Whois registration information after changing both physical and email addresses, and only found out about the decision after a friend contacting him to offer commiserations on loosing such a valuable domain. Mr. Dale was able to appeal against the decision, stating that Nominet had his correct details from other correspondence and asked that this violation was overlooked. He was allowed to file an appeal, although the DRS appeal to a three person panel would cost him £3000.

In Mr. Dale’s response to the complaint, the panel allowed the submission of new evidence, which was not their normal practice. However, due to the fact that his non-appearance at the initial hearing was due to circumstances of notification rather than just a basic failure to appear, they felt that the fee for filing the appeal was punishment enough. Thus they allowed the new evidence in the interest of true justice, rather than depriving him of the domain in an unjust fashion. By this time the appeal panel had in essence already found in favor of Mr. Dale based on the merits of the case.

Mr. Dale informed the panel that when he spent £4000 to purchase the Oasis domain name he had no idea that it had been a domain related to a women’s clothes shop. He had no interest in such a business and wanted to use the Oasis domain for a financial services or bingo website. Mr. Dale then produced proof of discussions that had taken place in which he could prove that the domain was intended for financial services. These kinds of claims are often viewed by dispute domain panels with much skepticism, but they could not dispute the proof provided by Dale. Combined with the fact that Oasis was a common English word, the panel accepted Mr. Dale’s argument that he did not wish to target Oasis with the registration of the domain and thus the acquisition of the domain could not be considered an abusive registration.

Due to other factors, however, the case would not end here. Unlike the UDRP, under the DRS abusive use later on is sufficient, even in cases where the domain was actually acquired in a genuine fashion. The question that then came about was if it was abusive to use the domain for sponsored links directing to women’s clothing websites. Under Nominet’s policy, parking pages are not abusive in and of themselves. The nature of the domain, it’s links, and the ultimate responsibility for the domain by the registrant must all be considered by the panel.

Since some parking pages depend on specifications set by the owner while others have content that is generated automatically, the appeal panel found it would be dangerous to simply draw conclusions by looking at parking pages. Parties should explain in detail how their parking pages work, but in this case there was no explanation by either party.

It was then claimed by Mr. Dale that the parking page originally used contained only general links. To build his case against Oasis, Dale produced a statement from the parking company. The statement suggested an uncommon situation of how the women’s clothing links appeared on the domain’s parking page. It seemed that Oasis was using the domain name of “oasis.co.uk”, which was not owned by Oasis, as a keyword in their online marketing campaign. This in turn meant they would be targeting users specifically searching for the domain owned by Mr. Dale. Although Dale’s claim was short and did not provide much detail, the panel thought it was something that should be considered.

Oasis’ dismissal of the claim as “fanciful, unproven, and bizarre” did not satisfy the panel, as there was no statement provided by Oasis that it hadn’t used the keyword “oasis.co.uk” in their marketing efforts.

Since this claim was brought up by Mr. Dale and Oasis didn’t seem to have a valid defense, the panel then decided to check the Oasis website out for themselves. Upon inspection of the Oasis website, it was found that the keyword “oasis.co.uk” was indeed among the keywords being used to drive traffic to their own website.

What turns a genuinely acquired domain into an abusively used one can be assessed by Nominet panels by using the abusive acquisition or abusive use test provided under DRS. The normal approach to this situation has been that liability by the registrant is only present if they actively exploited their position by making reference to the trademark. The panel backed up Mr. Dale’s claim that it was the action’s of Oasis themselves which led to women’s fashion links appearing on the domain oasis.co.uk. Oasis lost it’s appeal as it was proven that not only did Dale not actively exploit his position, but the complaint that Oasis had filed was actually caused by their own behaviour.

While this may have looked like a good case for Oasis, it shows that assuming any DRS case is a “pushover” is a risky assumption. Detailed evidence must be provided explaining how the parking pages of any parties domain work. The content of a domain parking page cannot be assumed to be the responsibility of the registrant, and information from the parking company itself could be a necessity.

My point is this: if you can prove domainers are holding a variation of your domain to capitalise on your brand or trademarks then you probably have a strong case for appeal. If however the domainer can find any excuse (such as not updating their whois record after moving house!), they can drag the process out and duck out if they have some form of proof the domain was acquired for any other purpose.

Also trademark owners need to be aware that it may not be in their best interest to include domain names that they don’t own in their marketing strategy!

Further reading: Is It Me Or Is Everyone Else Stupid, Perspicacious, Ashurst

A New Arrival!

As a fresh face in the buzzing Datadial office, I think it’s time for some introductions - I’m Lindy Holman, I’ve just come from an in-house e-Marketing role, and have a range of experience in marketing and PR, both traditional and online.

A little about me: originally hailing from Australia, I can’t get enough of the great outdoors and playing sport (but no, not cricket!) I also enjoy exploring the UK countryside and have a notable fondness for chocolate, mulled wine and Christmas time.

I’ll be involved in SEO, search marketing, social media and development with Datadial and I’m looking forward to meeting and building a long (and very happy) relationship with my clients!

If you’re on Twitter, feel free to add me to keep in touch! My username is LindyHolman

The differences between Helvetica and Arial

Thank you to Steff for passing on this lovely graphic illustrating the differences between Helvetica and Arial.