The Search Buying Cycle

Before you can make decisions such as keyword targeting and page optimisation, it is first important to understand the search buying cycle and how this can impact on your keyword queries and landing pages.

Going back to my days in offline marketing, the sales and marketing funnel looks rather like the image on the left.

During the sales process there are several possible points of contact for the seller to influence the buyer. Everything from casual interest at the top of the funnel, though evaluation/research/comparison, and hopefully all the way to sale/commitment and possible referral.

The ability to understand this process is vital to an online marketing campaign, not just during the SEO process, but it should also impact on the website structure and build.

The Buying Cycle

Firstly think about how you yourself might behave online when you’re researching buying a product.

Taking a typical online purchase for something like a television. You might start with a search query for a very general phrase like TV or television. You’ll see that there are several irrelevant results for our purpose such as the BBC and ITV results, but using the informational properties such as Wikipedia, or the Google shopping results you may then make a decision that you’re looking for a plasma TV rather than an LCD TV.

Of course you may also decide to visit one of the commercial websites listed for these queries, or buy from the PPC listings, but it’s more likely you’ll want to research a bit more first.

Next you’ll probably search for Plasma TV, this is looking a bit more promising, there are several relevant shopping results some reviews websites and a few more relevant commercial sites appearing. After reading a few of the sites you decide that the Panasonic 50PZ800B looks fairly impressive and you want to find out a bit more about it.

Of course you search for it, possibly adding terms like review, test or comparison to bring up the more informational resources.

It’s about now that you feel you’re happy with your choice, you’ve compared it against other makes and models, you’re happy that it’s what you’re looking for and you want to go ahead and purchase.

To find online shops selling that specific model you may use buying trigger search terms such as buy or cheap, or possibly even adding geographic search terms such as London or UK.

Points to note…..

• A typical online sale is unlikely to result from one specific query, but is made up of several queries
• Some studies have shown up to 12 separate searches may be made before a purchase
• This process may take several days or even weeks
• At any point in this cycle the customer may decide to buy
• The process may crossover several mediums, the eventual sale may come from a phone call or a shop purchase
• The further into the cycle the higher the chance of a purchase
• The further into the cycle the lower the number of searchers

So how does this affect your actions when it comes to building and marketing your website?

Firstly you need to ensure that you’re targeting a range of search phrases that cover the entire sales process. If you’re only targeting the more general phrases such as TV and television then you’re probably missing some low hanging fruit in terms of the sales trigger phrases such as buy and cheap. Similarly if you’re only targeting the specific phrases then you’re also missing a lot of traffic that can be converted into sales.

Bearing the sales process in mind when building and organising your site can have a dramatic effect on sales and conversions.

Treat your site hierarchy as a representation of the sales process. Undecided visitors making generic searches need to be sent to the homepage where then you can influence their decision and funnel them further into your site using tools like buyers guides and FAQs or offers and other calls to action.

Visitors making more specific searches should be sent to relevant category or sub-category pages.

Product specific searches should of course be sent to the product page. Minimising the number of clicks that the visitor needs to make before buying will have a dramatic impact on search engine visitor conversion rates.

Although all of this sounds obvious, I constantly lose count of sites that try to optimise their homepage for as many phrases as possible when there are far more suitable landing locations on internal pages.

Blogging Goes Mainstream

One of the main obstacles to overcome when trying to convince a client of the merits of corporate blogging is the view that it’s a niche medium and it’s really read by visitors.

Recent figures released by ComScore indicate otherwise. A huge 41% of the total internet audience visited at least one blog in August 2008.

“Blogs have become part of the essential fabric of the Internet today,” said Herve Le Jouan, Managing Director, comScore Europe. “They live and breathe in real-time, helping quench media consumers’ thirst for the most up-to-date breaking news, information, and analysis. It should not, therefore, be particularly surprising that they’re increasingly displacing traditional media usage and carving out an ever-increasing slice of the online advertising pie.”

It’s no surprise that the most visited properties were technology and entertainment based with Engadget and UnrealityTV being the most popular.

Why Do Print Designers Think They Can Design For The Web?

Please excuse the following rant but I’m increasingly frustrated, bored, let down, despairing, incredulous that there are still “graphic designers” out there who have no concept of how to design for the web, but who insist on designing websites for their clients

It’s fine if they stick to Quark and what they are good at, and all credit to them, but for some reason they think they have carte blanche to roam into areas which are not their concern.

For example, let’s say that you wanted to design a new boat.  Who would you go to first?  Would you go to a designer of aeroplanes?  No, you would seek out people who have experience in boat design, because what you want is a boat,  and you need someone who understands nautical things like waves, water, ballast, the pros and cons of different hull shapes, propellars, and the like.  Would you really want to go to sea in a craft designed by a designer of aeroplanes? I think not.

Do you work for a web design agency?  Does this happen to you that clients get their so called “brand” guardian to do the web design or the guy who did their brochure and aks you to implement it as a web site.

And is it just us or do you receive a complete load of tosh that disobeys practically every law of web accessibility, search engine friendliness, usability, extensibility and future proofing, font usage and image sizing hell?

What planet to these people live on?  Why don’t they put up their hands to their clients and say we can give guidance on the design but we are graphic designers for print and you need a professional web designer who can take into account the requirements of the web.  Because they work in the web every day they will know what is the right way and what is the wrong way to do things.  Do web designers try to do design brochures?

I won’t get started on programmers who think that they are web designers as I’m far too angry.  Just for the record, in case you are a print designer and you are still wondering where you went wrong here are few tips:

• Decide the width of your design and what happens to the site when viewed on different size monitors
• Think about usability and consider tried and tested conventions.  No need to think of your own “unique” style of navigation.  There’s a reason for some of the conventions.
• Think about search engine friendliness.  Not enough space here to explain but be aware that 60-80% of traffic and sales on most e-comms might come from search engines.
• A little flash can be nice, it can look good. A whole site built solely is flash is pointless – just drop it.  Nobody is interested in seeing your logo sliding in and out.
• Think what happens in the future.  What happens if more menu items, or product lines are added.
• Think about who will administer the site and how many image sizes you really need.  It’s a pain creating 4 different size images for each new product, (although yes there are ways round this programmatically).
• Splash pages – why? What are they there for? Why do you feel the need to make people click an extra time to get to where they are going?
• Consider the online audience – they do not know your company probably so help them help you by giving as much information about yourself and don’t try to be so cool that they have to be Sherlock Holmes to find out what you do.

Thanks for reading, I feel better now

We Are Recruiting! Looking For A .NET developer

Yes, yet again we are recruiting for a .net developer.  Do you know any super geeks or just normal people who would love to work in an expanding web development agency, who can think on their feet and work tirelessly from morning to nightfall and beyond.  More details about the role are on our main site

Your Content Development Strategy

Websites have come a long way, not just in terms of design and technology, but also in their intention. A few short years ago your website was just an extension of your offline promotional material. You had a bit of an introduction, a few pages about your services and contact page, and you were ready to go. That would do for a few years, after all, your services don’t change that often right?

These days you really can’t get away with that kind of static approach to web publishing. Websites aren’t brochures anymore. They are resources, communities and communications channels that are updated on a regular basis.

Why is content important?

Website content is important for several reasons.

It drives visitors – Search engines love text content, the more good, unique and relevant content that you have on your site, generally the more visitors you can expect search engines to be sending you.

It encourages links – Great content encourages people to link to it. Try to develop your site as a ‘resource’ offer free information, stats and tables, guides and tutorials. The more useful content that you have the more sites that you will find will be happy to link to you – it is these links that send traffic and will also increase search engine rankings.

It ensures return – Better quality content encourages return visitors, the more people return to your site, the more likely they are to buy from you.

It strengthens branding – Great content will help to strengthen your brand and brand recognition. Not just through search engine rankings, but also through word of mouth and referrals. People are not only going to be talking about how great your products and services are, but also how useful your site is and how their friends and colleagues must go and take a look at it.

It creates trust – Writing on your area of expertise is a great way to demonstrate how much you know your topic. You’re more likely to buy from someone that is knowledgeable and generous with their expertise right?

How can I develop content on my own site?

Okay, now we’ve established that content is important and vital for commercial sites, but how do we go about creating a content development strategy of our own?

Below we have put together a list of tips on how to go about developing a content strategy for your own commercial website.

1. Leverage your people. The more people you have helping to create website content, the more ideas, variation and knowledge that you have. It’s also far less of a workload to have 8 members of staff generating one article each per month, rather than one person having to write a couple of pieces every few days. Set out a timetable that people are encouraged and rewarded for adhering to.
2. Consider your platform. It’s imperative that your have an easy publishing platform that your staff members can use and you don’t have to wait for developers or designers to get involved. Using a blog platform like Wordpress will mean even your less tech-savvy staff will be able to publish their own content in a matter of minutes.
3. Pitch it right. Make sure your content isn’t overtly promotional. Sales pitches don’t generally interest people, neither does it tend to encourage people to link to it. However nobody expects you not to link to or mention your commercial activities. Finding a happy medium that works for your site can sometimes take a little time.
4. Brainstorm – Involve others in coming up with article titles and ideas. A monthly meeting should be sufficient for coming up with a few weeks of article titles and content ideas. You’ll find that some of the more wacky and off the wall ideas work the best.
5. Get involved. Make sure you get involved with your industries online community. Don’t be scared to link out to other industry sites. Comment on their blogs, offer to write for industry journals, invite industry figures to write for you. All of these activities will help to develop your online brand and increase the number of websites that are linking to your own.
6. Keep abreast of industry news. I recommend subscribing to as many industry newsfeeds as possible using an RSS reader. Not only does this easily keep me up-to-date with what’s happening in my industry, but also it gives me lots of topical subject ideas for relevant industry comment.
7. Look at sites within your own industry. What kind of content do they provide. Do they do anything that you’re not doing? Can what they’re doing be improved upon?
8. Look at sites in other industries. Are other sites doing anything that may be reworked to crossover into your industry? Can you apply things like video, community, social media, images or widgets to stay one step ahead of your competitors?
9. Demonstrate your knowledge. Consider adding content that displays your knowledge of your topic. Ideas like FAQs, guides, how-tos, client Q&As and critiques are great ways of demonstrating the experts at your company.
10. Be keyword conscious. Know which keywords people use when searching for products and services in your industry. Bear these in mind when developing your content writing timetable and article text.
11. Content isn’t just writing. Although you’ll find the bulk of your website content will be text based, don’t ignore the benefits of image and video content. Some of the best corporate linkbait is image based.

Some examples of corporate content ideas in action

Best Western – The On The Go With Amy travel blog.

Dell – A good example of FAQ pages

HSBC – The HSBC business network connecting businessmen using blogs and forums.

Nike – The Loop’d community connects extreme sports fans.

Office Furniture Express – The 6 coolest offices.

OfficeMax – Elf Yourself

Phillips – Shave Everywhere

Shock Absorber – The Shock Absorber sports bra. A product aimed at women with linkbait aimed at men!

Its always nice to get some feedback

Its always nice when a client emails to tell you how things are going. I have removed the clients details to ensure their website visitor numbers remain confidential.

September site report summary

Bumper Month with record number of Site visits and Page views

Total business
During September 08 we had 141,000 visits to our 4 sites which is the largest ever in one month. It is also a 91% increase on September 07!
During September 08 we also had 430,000 page views which, again, was a record and was a 62% increase year on year.

xxxxx.co.uk had 93,000 visits in September 08 – the biggest ever – beating the previous record of 77,000 which we got in July this year. Year on year we have doubled the number of people visiting the site.
Looking at page views we had 273,000, another record and 57% up on Sep 2007.
We also had 1,600 new registrations in the month which is the largest monthly figure, outside of a period where were spending money to generate new members.

xxxxxx.co.uk had 44,000 visits in September 08 – the biggest ever – beating the previous record of 35,000 which we got in March this year. Year on year we have increased the number of people visiting the site by 91%.
Looking at page views we had 129,000, another record and 59% up on Sep 2007
We also had 1,390 new registrations in the month which is the largest monthly figure, outside of a period where were spending money to generate new members.

With this particular client one of the largest problems was the size of the sites, running into the tens of thousands of pages. Initially we concentrated on the site structure, making sure that the page optimisation was good as possible – ensuring each page had unique page titles and meta data, improving the page structure, URL formats and internal navigation.

Once we were happy that the site would rank as high as possible we concentrated on ensuring all of the pages were indexed and raising the overall profile of the site through an ongoing like development program. The client was very easy to work with during this entire process, taking information on-board and acting on our recommendations – of course now they’re benefitting from the results!

Small Business SEO

Although Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a skill that takes time and effort to master, there is no reason why a small business can’t give themselves an edge over their competitors by putting in place some of the framework that a professional SEO consultant would expect to cover.

In this article I’m going to look at why you, a small business owner needs to consider SEO for their website and some steps that you, or your web developer can put into place that will help ensure your site is performing as well as possible in the search engines.

Why do small business need SEO?
If you have a website then you should at some point have considered how people are finding you online. Relying on ‘push’ marketing factors such as brochures, business cards and flyers is all very well, but you already have had some contact with these targets – it’s not really using your website to its full potential to draw in a previously untapped market.

Over 70% of online sales start with a user conducting a search. If you sell or gather leads online, that’s a huge slice of your potential market that you’re missing out on. Good search engine rankings for relevant and often used search terms will drive qualified leads to your site at a fraction of the price of other marketing methods.

When To Keep Things In-House
Given the skills and the time it’s perfectly possible to conduct a reasonable SEO campaign in-house. If you or your web developer are happy to edit your website, and you and your staff have some time to devote to the campaign, then there’s no reason why you can’t make a success out of things without getting some experts in.

When To Outsource
If your website is (or has the potential to be) one of your major revenue streams, and a budget is available, then you should consider getting some experts in to run the campaign for you. Take care when hiring, make sure you ask the correct questions and ask for references. Our free SEO Buyers Guide should help you out here.
Essentially when hiring an SEO consultant, you’re not just paying for their time and knowledge, but also their experience and industry contacts – it is this that will give you a real edge over your competitors.

Some SEO Tips For Small Business’

Know Your Market
Firstly, before you go any further, you need to ensure you’re targeting the correct people. Is your market geographically based in one country? If so try to ensure that you’re using the correct top level domain for that country, for example a .co.uk domain in the UK, or a .fr in France. Failing that, if you have a more generic .com or .net domain then make sure that your website is hosted in the correct country. This will help to ensure that the traffic that search engines send will be from the market that you’re targeting.

Understand Your Keywords
One of the most important stages for any SEO is understanding which keywords are being used by people to find your products. Start off by brainstorming a list of keywords that you think people may use to find your products and services. Then use a keyword research tool to expand and develop your list beyond those that you have already thought of.

Page Titles/Descriptions
Ensure that each page on your site has a unique page title and meta description. If you’re comfortable editing web pages yourself then it’s not terribly complicated. Otherwise you may want to ask your web developer to do it. The titles and description tags should always be unique and reflect the content of each individual page. Here it’s best use your keyword list in order to understand which terms are most frequently searched for.
Other areas of the page to use your keywords are places like headings, image ‘alt’ text, bold text and the page content. First and formost ensure the pages read well to visitors, avoid stuffing as many keywords onto the page as you can – that doesn’t work anymore!

Use Analytics
You’ll be able to make far better decisions regarding the marketing of your site if you have a solid understanding of how people are finding your site, which keywords and sites are driving visitors, and which visitors convert into sales. Signup for a free service like Google Analytics which will give you all of this information and more.

Consider Your Content
Great content can make it far easier to get a website ranking well. Look at the kind of information that your competitors are offering and improve on it. Try to ensure your site is a resource for everything that someone in your industry will need. Resource sites tend to rank a lot better as people are compelled to link to the information contained on them. Consider adding a blog your website that you can publish and archive regular posts on.

Think Links
Up until now everything that you have done has helped a search engine to understand what your pages are about. The page optimisation and content creation all help a search engine to decide which subjects your pages cover.
However it’s the links that point to your pages that let search engines know how important your pages are, and therefore how highly they should rank on the results pages.
Look for opportunities to get other webmasters to link to you. You may have suppliers or clients that you can ask. You may have industry bodies that link to members. You can consider writing articles on other industry websites or adding your site to relevant directories. The list of linking opportunities is endless.

Local SEO
Add your business to the local search services that the main search engines now offer. This will help return your business when people perform geographic queries such as “London accountant” Go to Google, Yahoo or Live to add your business.

Above all SEO takes time and patience. It’s not something that happens overnight. Over time you will find your efforts are rewarded with high quality relevant website visitors that convert into sales.

Optimising Your Company’s Wordpress Blog For Search Engine Optimisation

The benefits of a blog on your company’s website can be phenomenal. If you haven’t already got a blog on your company site, Matt’s post on corporate blogging is a vital read.  If you do have a Wordpress blog set up, great!
Not only is a Wordpress blog great for engaging with visitors and sharing information, it’s also a great traffic stream to your company website. However, there are a few tweaks that can be made to ensure you get the most out of your blog in terms of search engine optimisation.

Out of the box, Wordpress is pretty search engine friendly- it has an excellent internal linking structure through its use of categories, archives and tags, along with its ability for easy content creation, which are a couple of reasons why search engines like them so much. But to maximise the efficiency of your Wordpress blog from a search engine optimisation perspective, there are a few additional steps we recommend taking to ensure your blog is as efficiently optimised as possible.

Permalinks

By default, Wordpress uses URLs which aren’t so efficient in terms of SEO. Permalinks allow more efficient URLs to be used making links more efficient, improving the structure of posts and not to mention the ability to include keywords in the posts URL.
Permalinks can be activated under ‘Settings>Permalinks’. We recommend using the ‘Day and name’ option- the URL shows the age of the post through the date as well as the post name (and if you’re using post names correctly you’ll have important keywords in the post name, thereby including them in the post URL if using this method).

Post Titles

Post titles represent the title tag for the posts page- one of the most important aspects of on-page search engine optimisation- their importance has already been covered in the Top Five Tips For Optimising Your Business’ Meta Tags post. By default, Wordpress uses the format “Blog title » Blog Archive » Post Title” which ideally should be “Post Title » Blog Title”. Search engines pay more attention to keywords at the beginning of the title tag; therefore placing the post title (which should contain those important keywords) at the beginning of the title is more efficient. This also helps the readability of the pages result in the search engine results, therefore increasing the click through rate (CTR) in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
To change the post title structure, additional plugins are required. There are a few good Wordpress plugins available, we recommend using the All in One SEO Pack plugin and changing the post and page titles found under ‘Settings>All in One SEO’.

To optimise the titles, click the ‘Rewrite Titles’ checkbox and change the title formats for each option. We recommend:

‘%post_title% | %blog_title%’ for post titles
‘%page_title% | %blog_title%’ for page titles
‘%category_title% | %blog_title%’ for category titles
‘%date% | %blog_title%’ for archive titles
‘%tag% | %blog_title%’ for tage titles
‘%description%’ for description format
‘Nothing found for %request_words%’ for the 404 title
‘- Part %page%’ for page format.
It is also wise to check the ‘Use noindex for Categories’ and ‘Use noindex for Archives’ checkboxes to disable indexing of these pages.

Optimising Posts and Pages

Now that the basic general optimisation for the blog has been set up, you can optimise your posts, starting with the post title.

Post Titles

Remember to keep the title relevant to the post topic and to include your important keywords in the post title. Also remember the post title will show up in search results, so make the title interesting and have a call to action in  the title where needed.

Tags

Tags are incredibly useful for internal linking- if a visitor is on your site and likes the content for a specific topic, they may click on one of the tags. You should therefore add tags to all posts and pages, making sure the tags are relevant to the post. Tags are comma separated, just click the ‘Add’ button after you’ve entered the tags and the post will be recognised under these tags once the post is saved or published.

Categories

As with tags, categories are also efficient in terms of internal linking. Categories can also improve the time a visitor is on your site- if they can see you have more relevant information on a topic under a category, they will probably want to see what other posts are in that category if they enjoyed the content  of your post.

Make sure categories are well structured and specific. Check the boxes which your post is most relevant to.

All in One SEO Pack Tag Optimisation

If you’re using the All in One SEO Pack recommended earlier, you will also have an All in One SEO Pack tab when writing/modifying a post or page. Here you can override the defaults already configured. To do this, enter a title tag, description tag and keywords tag to override the default settings already entered.

There is also a ‘Disable on this page/post’ checkbox- this will disable all SEO modifications and revert back to the Wordpress defaults (which is unlikely you would want to do so) so do not check this box unless there is a specific reason.

Once each post/page has been optimised, save the changes. This covers the basics for Wordpress Search Engine Optimisation- there are more advanced changes which can be made but by implementing these recommended changes you will notice an improvement in your search rankings, your listing in the search engine results and an improvement in the indexing of your blog.

New recruit to Online marketing team

I am pleased to announce the arrival of Adam Miller.  Adam will join our growing online marketing team.  Adam was head and shoulders above other interviewees for this position. He showed passion for the subject area, an ability to communicate in clear english,  and he has a string of projects already under his belt that demonstrate his ability in promoting sites online. I am confident that our clients will be well looked after by him.

4 new site launches demonstrate our design and programming skills

We are pleased to announce the launch of 4 new sites this month.  Each one demonstrates a different skillset that we can provide here at Datadial.

New – e-commerce launch: www.basicallyblack.com

One for the ladies. As usual this site is fully updateable by the client and includes stock control, dispatch notes, customer management, full reporting and is integrated with Datadial’s email marketing system. Perfect site to find that oh so hard to find little black dress. Buy now!

AJAX engineered quote generator – www.flowduplication.com

A site for generating quotes for DVD and CD duplication. The quote generator has been developed in AJAX and provides an easy to use interface for ordering CD’s and uploading artwork.What is AJAX – AJAX speeds up a website by only refreshing the part of a page that needs refreshing. Well that’s the simple explanation. The increased speed hugely improves usability and eases frustration Datadial developed the site from a logo provided and designed all artwork on the site

The client commented “my boss was grinning like a cheshire cat all afternoon when he saw the site, thanks to you and the team

Content management system www.lloydgeorge.com with Fin International

Relaunch of this Fund Management site, following a re-branding exercise by www.FinInternational.com.  The site is fully updateable by Lloyd George staff using Datadial’s content management system.

Originally designed brochure site and blog www.carnabystreetthemusical.com

You haven’t heard of it yet this will be the next BIG West End musical in the New Year. The site is being populated bit by bit as people send in their memories of the sixties. If you were famous in the Sixties and loved Carnaby Street let us know!!