Marketing Tips

Below is an email I received regarding a website that we have been working on…could it be the staff at the search engines trying to learn which websites are selling links or is it more likely just automated link-trade spam? My vote is for the latter, but either choice is highly likely.  

Dear Hi,

This is mark. I am webmaster of a few business-based sites. While looking for more business related sites, I came across www.somewebsite.com (not the real URL). I found your site very pleasing and would love to purchase text-links to my sites on it.

Please do come back on this with your views.

Awaiting your response,

Mark

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until you get good at it. If you are terrible at sales calls, then you should be out there every day making them so that you have an opportunity to learn from a variety of situations. If you are persistent and learn from your mistakes, over time you will become better, and possibly outstanding at making sales calls. This applies to everything in your business. If you put things off because you’re not good at them, your situation will never change. On the other hand, if you spend a little bit of time every day working on the things you’re not good at, you will advance light years ahead of your competition.

If your business markets to specific ethnic markets and you don’t natively speak that language, chances are that like most small businesses in the same situation, you’ve found someone in your office to translate your marketing materials. While this can sometimes work out well, most often the results range from poor to dismal. While different countries may speak the same basic language, a phrase or word that means something in one area may mean something completely different in another area. One of our clients who provides professional Spanish translation services regularly post some of the funnier translation errors that they’ve found in marketing materials. You should check it out, and if your company is marketing to the Hispanic community, definitely give these guys a call. They can help make sure that your message retains the correct meaning.

Most companies spend a tremendous amount of time trying to compete at the bottom of their market, because at first glance, it seems to be the way business works. People often believe that you must start at the bottom, slowly overtaking one competitor at a time. This is a time-consuming and expensive approach and fortunately it is one that you do not have to follow.

If you follow the status quo, your marketing can not change the perception consumers have of your company, so your only choice is to be louder than your competitors. The price tag to do this adds up quickly and is almost always cost-prohibitive for all but the largest companies. However, if you set your company apart from your competitors by offering far more than they do, it will be viewed as an industry leader rather than just another commodity. Instead of spending all your time and energy trying to compete at the bottom, stand out and climb above the chaos. The air is a lot better up here and business tends to be more profitable and enjoyable.

Marketing is constantly evolving and no form of marketing has evolved more over the last ten years than search engine optimization. That fact isn’t going to change anytime soon. In fact, the entire search engine optimization industry is headed for a major paradigm shift over the next twelve months. Like many of the major algorithm updates in the past, some people will be prepared while some will sit teary-eyed amongst their devastation wondering what happened and scrambling to pick up the pieces. Unlike the major algorithm updates of the past, you won’t be able to simply fix the flaws in your search engine optimization and jump back to the top of the SERPs. 

Why is this change going to be so different? In the past, the search engines have incrementally updated certain aspects of their algorithms to improve the quality of their SERPs, for example, eliminating the positive effect of Meta tag keyword stuffing which was being abused by spammers. Anyone who has been in the SEO industry for more than a few years probably remembers the chaos and panic when the major search engines stopped ranking websites based on this approach. This time around though, we’re looking at something much more significant than simply updating an algorithm to favor particular factors or discount others. We are looking at not only a completely new way for search engines to assign value to web pages, but more importantly, a new way for search engines to function.

Local search

A number one ranking for a particular keyword phrase was once the end-all, be-all goal but now many searches are regionalized to show the most relevant web pages that are located in the area that you are searching from. While this will probably reduce your traffic, the traffic that you now receive will be more targeted in many cases. Additionally, it give smaller websites a more equal chance to compete.

Google suggest

This August, Google Suggest was moved from Google Labs to the homepage, offering real-time suggestions based on the letters you’ve typed into the search box so far. This can be an incredibly helpful feature for users. At the same time, it can be potentially devastating to websites that rely of long-tail traffic because once a user sees a keyword phrase that seems like at least a mediocre choice they will usually click on it rather than continuing to type a more specific keyword phrase.

Devaluation of paid links

Google’s recent attempt to eliminate paid links has scared a lot of people on both sides of the link buying equation into implementing the “nofollow” tag. In the midst of this hypocritical nonsense, Google has also been taking great measures to devalue links based on quantifiable criteria, such as the “C” class of the originating IP, similarities in anchor text and/or surrounding text, location of the link on the page and the authority of the domain the link is from to name a few. Regardless of the effectiveness of any search engines ability to evaluate and subsequently devalue paid links, the fear of getting caught and possibly penalized is more than enough to deter a lot of people from buying or selling links.

Visitor usage data

Again, Google is leading the charge on this one. Between their analytics, toolbar and web browser, they are collecting an enormous amount of data on visitor usage. When a visitor arrives at a website, Google knows how long they stayed there, how many pages they accessed, which links they followed and much more. With this data, a search engine can determine the quality of a website, which is beginning to carry more weight in regards to ranking than some of the more manipulatable factors such as keyword density or inbound links. This puts the focus on content quality instead of content quantity and over time, will begin to knock many of the “me too” websites further down the SERPs pages, or out of the picture all together. The websites that will prosper will be those that produce relevant, original content that their visitors find useful.

TrustRank

Simply pointing a vast number of links with a particular keyword phrase in the anchor text to a website was once a quick and easy way to assure top ranking. The effectiveness of this approach is diminishing and will continue in that direction as a result of TrustRank. In a nutshell, a particular set of websites are chosen (by Google) based on their editorial quality and prominence on the Internet. Then Google analyzes the outbound links from these sites, the outbound links from the sites linked to by these site, and so on down the chain. The sites that are further up the chain carry more trust and those further down the chain, less trust. Links from sites with more TrustRank, those further up the chain, have a greater impact on ranking than links from websites further down the chain. On one hand, this makes it difficult for new websites to improve their position in the SERPs compared to established website; one the other hand, it helps to eliminate many of the redundant websites out there that are just repeating what everyone else is saying.

Google Chrome

Utilizing a combination of visitor usage data and a not so gentle nudge in Google’s direction, Google Chrome is set to change the way search engines gather data and present it to users. For example, when a user begins typing in the address bar of the browser, they are presented with a dropdown list of suggestions containing choices consisting of the #1 result in Google’s SERPs, related search terms and other pages you’ve recently visited. This gives a serious advantage to the websites that hold top ranking in Google and at the same time, gives a serious advantage to Google by giving their Internet real estate even more exposure than ever before.

So the question remains, is search engine optimization facing evolution or extinction? Certainly not extinction, not by a long shot, but in a short period of time it is going to be drastically different than it is today. The focus will soon be on producing a valuable and enjoyable user experience rather than just achieving top ranking, which is what it should have been all along.

This is a question we get quite often because business owners usually get tired of their own advertising long before their prospects do. So should you keep running the same ad? Check out this article in the upcoming October issue of Fortune Small Business for the answer along with additional tips to get the most from your advertising.