Is Your Website "Over-Optimized"?

If your website is “over-optimized” then your Google rankings will suffer.  Use today’s article as a 4-point checklist to ensure you’re not sabotaging your rankings using overly aggressive SEO tactics.

4 Spammy SEO Mistakes to Avoid

 

Many businesses are so eager to get ranked in Google that they over-do it. They use aggressive SEO techniques that ultimately backfire, pushing their website further and further down the rankings…
 
It reminds me of the guy who is trying so hard to impress a girl that he ends up doing the complete opposite – she runs away.  When you over-do it with Google, she’ll push you away as well!
 
So, in today’s article, I’m going to walk you through 4 “over-optimization” mistakes to avoid to ensure you don’t get pushed away by Google.
 

1. Stuffing Keywords into Page Titles

Google looks at the title of every page, and it helps to tell Google what your page is about. Your titles have a major impact on how your pages will rank in Google.
 
In case you’re not familiar, your title is part of the code of each page. It’s actually not visible on the webpage itself, but if you open up a browser, in the upper left-hand corner of that browser, you’ll see the title of the page.
 
Because of the weight Google puts on titles, a lot of people try to force their keywords repetitively in the title. I see this mistake very often when I’m reviewing websites.
 
Back in the day, this type of keyword stuffing could improve your search engine rankings. But these days, that tactic does not work as well. Instead, it can be counter-productive.
 
It’s important to include your keyword in the title, but if you repeat your keywords a lot or include lots of different variations unnaturally, that can actually hurt your search engine rankings because Google will see that as manipulative.
 
And here’s another way that stuffing your titles with keywords can backfire…
 
The title is actually what shows up in the search results – it’s the blue under-lined link in Google’s search results. And if you’ve just put a lot of keywords as the title, then when somebody does search, and your website shows up, then that’s going to look pretty spammy.
 
I know, personally, I’m not going to click on that link if it doesn’t look like a legitimate website.
 

2. Forcing Keywords into Your Webpage Copy

The second over-optimization tactic I see all the time is stuffing keywords into the actual webpage copy.
 
Before, I was talking about stuffing keywords into the title. From a website visitor’s standpoint, you could sort of fly under the radar stuffing keywords into your title tag, because most people actually don’t notice that when they’re on your website.
 
But putting keywords directly into the body of the webpage is obviously much more noticeable to your website visitors.
 
If you force keywords into your copy, your website visitors will read unnatural sentences and random keywords stuffed into the content. That looks really spammy, and it can be counter-productive for your ultimate marketing goals.
 
After all, what’s the goal of SEO anyways?
 
It’s not just rankings. And it’s not just traffic either. The ultimate goal of SEO should be to generate leads and sales. And if your website content is spammy, that could really hurt your website conversions.
 
Plus, if you force keywords into your website copy, Google will see that as unnatural and spammy as well. And that can hurt your search engine rankings. So it’s just not a good idea.
 

3. Creating Near-Duplicate Pages Purely For SEO

Imagine you’re a dentist, and you wanted to rank for the keyword phrase “New York City dentist.” You might create a page on your website focused around that keyword phrase, right? Maybe you’d optimize your homepage for that phrase.
 
But then, you might decide you’d also like to rank for a similar phrase like “Manhattan dentist.” And so, maybe you’d create a page for that keyword phrase too.
 
And so on, and so on.
 
Creating those near-duplicate pages used to work OK years ago…
 
But not today.
 
Google has gotten smarter at figuring out that a lot of different keywords are synonyms with the same search intent. And the Hummingbird update improved Google’s abilities even more.
 
You don’t need to have two different pages for New York City dentist and Manhattan dentist because Google understands that’s the same search, so they’ll display the same results for that.
 
Instead of creating near-duplicate pages for different synonyms, you should group your keywords into topics, and then create the best page you can for each topic.
 

4. Over-Optimized Anchor Text

When it comes to SEO, you need to build up your website’s authority.
 
And a major factor in your website’s authority is the quantity and quality of links from other websites that are linking to your website. You can basically think of a link from another website as a vote in your favor.
 
Every link to your website has what’s called anchor text, which is the clickable text.  This anchor text helps Google understand what a particular page is about.
 
Again, imagine you’re a dentist based in Manhattan, and you want to get your website ranking at the top of Google for “New York City dentist.”
 
Wouldn’t it be great if lots of websites linked to your website with the anchor text New York City dentist? That would help you reach the top of Google for that phrase.
 
And so, that’s how a lot of companies have approach SEO for years. They would go out and build tons of links with identical or very similar anchor text.
 
When we’re conducting an SEO audit, we’ll take a look at a website’s link profile, and see how many links they have and where they’re coming from, and the anchor text of those links.
 
Often, we find that websites have very highly-concentrated anchor text, with almost all the incoming links containing the same keyword phrases.  Well, this is extremely unlikely to happen naturally!
 
Google knows that, and increasingly, this type of linking has become a big red flag to Google. When Google sees this, they know you are trying to manipulate the search results. As a result, taking this approach with your SEO can do more harm than good over the long-term.
 
Google’s Penguin updates and “unnatural link” penalties are focused on devaluing (or penalizing) these unnatural linking schemes. So you should avoid building links to your website with overly-concentrated anchor text.
 
If you’re in business for the long-term (which I hope you are!), then it makes sense to take a long-term approach to SEO. By avoiding these 4 mistakes, you’ll stay on Google’s good side and protect your rankings for the long-term.
   

Optimizing for SEO vs Google AdWords

Today I want to clear up a common misconception about your website.  Scroll down to learn why it’s a mistake to try to optimize the same webpage for both SEO and online advertising.

Why You Can Not Optimize One Webpage

For Both SEO and Advertising 

I realized as I was meeting with a client last week that there’s a common misconception about how to optimize your website for search engine optimization (SEO) and search advertising (i.e. Google AdWords).
 
For both SEO and search advertising, your website plays a critical, yet very different, role.  The misconception is that a single webpage can be optimized for both online marketing tactics.  This is simply not possible and in this article I’ll explain why you need separate pages for SEO versus search advertising.
 

The Many Roles of Your Website

 

The primary role of your website is to convert visitors into leads and customers.  It’s no different than a sales position in your company, and you should judge your website performance accordingly.  Sure, you may love your new, slick design, but does your “upgraded” website drive any more sales than the previous one?  That’s the all important question.
 
Next, assuming your prospects search for your products and services in Google, then your website must also have the appropriate pages for Google to display in the search results.  If your prospect searches for “huarache running sandals” and your website does not have a page about huarache running sandals, then guess what, Google is not going to show your website in the results.  The first step with SEO is to make sure you have a webpage for each of your target keywords.  That’s SEO 101.
 
Finally, if you’re going to advertise, then you need pages on your site that perfectly match the different offers you’re going to make in your ads.  For example, if you advertise a special buy one pair of sandals and get a free running shirt offer, then you better prominently display that on the ad landing page.  If prospects don’t find what they’re looking for within seconds of clicking an ad, then they’ll click back and go to a competitor’s website.
 
So let’s recap:

1. Your website should be designed to convert visitors to sales.
2. To optimize your website for search engines like Google, you must have pages that match the keywords you want to target.  These pages need to be set up properly so Google knows they are 100% relevant to the target keywords.  The goal of your SEO efforts is to first get ranked in Google so you drive traffic to your site.  If you can’t drive traffic, then there’s no one to convert into customer :)
3. To optimize your website for search advertising, you must have pages that match the offer in your ads (which also must match the keywords you’re targeting).  The sole purpose of these pages is to sell.  You’re buying traffic so all you need to worry about with your ad landing pages is converting the traffic into sales.

See how your pages optimized for SEO have different goals than your ad landing pages?  With SEO, your webpage must be set up to get ranked in Google.  Of course, you also need to convert the SEO traffic, but getting ranked is the primary goal.  With advertising, your webpage should be structured with only one goal in mind: get the highest conversion rate possible.
 

Why SEO Pages Do Not Make Great Ad Landing Pages

The temptation is to try to optimize your webpages for both SEO and advertising.  Sure, they are both online advertising tactics.  Plus, your website is an integral component in both.  But they really are different beasts.  A webpage optimized for SEO will typically not be the best landing page for your advertising campaign.
 
For one of my clients, the best ad landing page is simply a video that gives information and presents a compelling sales pitch to buy the product.  There’s no way we could optimize a video page like this for SEO.  On the flip side, the best pages for SEO typically do not convert high enough to be profitable on paid search advertising.
 
This is a very important concept to remember as you get started with online marketing.  Do not fall into the trap of trying to optimize your webpages for both SEO and advertising.  You must create different pages and optimize each tactic separately.

Online Marketing: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

 

I love old Clint Eastwood western movies.  They were always on TV when I was growing up and I would instantly get sucked into a ~3 hour movie, along with all those commercials.  Hey, I figure there were worse ways to spend a Sunday afternoon.

I've probably watched The Good, The Bad and The Ugly about 10 times by now.  To be honest I can't always tell which one of Clint's movies I'm watching until they reintroduce it after a commercial.  They all include gunfights, signature one liners from Clint, and some timely, precision tobacco spitting.  My kind of movie. :)

Even if you haven't watched the movie, you can probably guess there's a good guy, a bad guy, and an ugly guy.  I'll spare you the details and jump right into how this relates to online marketing.  In my experience, online marketing plays all 3 of those roles: Good, Bad, and Ugly.

 

 

The Good

 

The good is usually what draws businesses to online marketing in the first place: It's affordable.  In some cases, it's downright free.  For example, any business looking for local customers can set up and optimize a Google+ Local page and within about a month get free exposure in Google's local business results.  No upfront fees.  No ongoing fees.  No fancy software to learn.  Just free exposure when local customers are searching for you.  Hard to beat free when it comes to driving new business!

Even advertising is usually more affordable online versus offline.  With Google AdWords you only pay per click so there is no big upfront investment like there is with TV, print or radio ads.

Of course, affordability isn't the only reason online marketing is good, but I think that gets the point across just fine.  Now let's look at the bad...

The Bad

The bad news is that online marketing is always changing!  Just when you think you've mastered search engine optimization (SEO), Google will go and change their algorithm.  Or just when you've built up a hefty Facebook audience, Zuckerberg decides to tweak their EdgeRank algorithm so you have to pay to get your posts in front of your prospects and customers.

Scroll through this list of Google algorithm changes to see just how frequently the search engine landscape changes.  Trust me, it's nearly impossible to keep up, and I do this for a living.  There's just no way a business owner can stay on top of all the trends and best practices without help.

And Google is just the tip of the iceberg... Have you looked at all the options available with online marketing?  Talk about overwhelming.  There's SEO, local SEO, search advertising, display advertising, Facebook advertising, email marketing, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, press release services, website conversion optimization, tracking and website analytics.  I could go on and on but you get the point.

Now, let's turn to the ugly side of online marketing...

The Ugly

First, there's the glut of information available.  There are books, blogs, articles, videos, and podcasts published online daily.  Some of it is sound advice.  Some of it is applicable for certain types of businesses.  And some of it outdated, or simply inaccurate.  Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible for a business owner to know who or what to pay attention to, which leads to poor marketing decisions.

Second, there are many low quality (and even unethical in my opinion) online marketing providers.  For example, I've talked to many business owners who paid and lost thousands to an SEO company that guaranteed #1 rankings.   My spam folder is full of these prospecting emails so I know how tempting it can be for businesses.  However, the reality is that no one can guarantee #1 rankings. As soon as you see or hear that phrase, run away, hang up, or click delete. That's a red flag that you're not dealing with a reputable company.

Digital Marketing "Summer Tune-Up" (3 Simple Questions)

 

Before summer speeds by and we’re officially into the fall season, I recommend taking some time now to tune up your marketing so you have a strong finish to 2015. Before we know it, the holiday season will be here… and then with the blink of an eye, the ball will drop in Times Square.

 

To help you assess your digital marketing and make fast improvements I put together the following 3-question “summer tune-up.”

 

Question 1: Where Can You Get More Website Traffic?

First, look at what’s already working and find ways to improve those campaigns.  What are you doing now that is driving traffic to your website? For example, if SEO is working (generating leads and sales), then determine how you can improve your current rankings and expand to even more relevant keywords.

This sounds overly simple, but do not skip this step!  It’s easy to overlook these easy opportunities to improve your marketing because they are typically not very exciting.  Personally, I find it hard to rally behind “doing more of what we’re already doing,” but the reality is that it’s by far the cheapest and most effective option.

Expanding into new territory is nearly always more expensive and more time consuming so focus on what’s already working first.  Then once you’ve maxed out a particular marketing tactic, then review your options to expand.

Second, assess what’s missing.  What are you not doing that could be driving traffic to your website? For example, if you’re using AdWords Search advertising, then consider expanding to Bing Ads to get even more exposure when your prospects are searching in Bing or Yahoo.  Or if you’re advertising in AdWords and Bing, then look into launching an ad campaign on Facebook.

 

Question 2: How Can You Increase Your Website Conversions?

Driving traffic to your website is only half the battle in digital marketing, yet it’s where most businesses invest most of their time and resources.

The second half, which is arguably the more important half, is converting that traffic into leads and sales.

Consider this example.  One business invests in marketing to drive 1,000 visitors to their website and converts 1% into customers.  A competitor invests half as much to get 500 visitors , but their website converts 2% into customers. Both businesses generate 10 customers, but the competitor invested only half as much to get the same number of customers!  If everything else is equal then the competitor is twice as profitable and can now afford to invest to drive even more traffic.

Can you see now how important it is to focus on improving your website conversions?

Now let’s review your website.  Do you have what’s called a “lead magnet” to capture contact information from website visitors?  A lead magnet is a free offer (report, white paper, video, coupon).

Note that a lead magnet is not an email newsletter subscription!  Email newsletters are not as compelling all by themselves and only a very very small percentage of your visitors will sign up.  Instead of an offering your email newsletter directly, offer a report that provides information or reveals a secret your ideal prospect needs to know. And when people opt-in for this report, they’ll also receive a subscription to your email newsletter.

If you already have a lead magnet, then take a closer look at it.  Could you make it more compelling? Can you offer more lead magnets that more closely match each of your different customer avatars?

 

Question 3: How Can You Improve Your Digital Marketing Tracking?

I’m not going to waste time in this article explaining the importance of tracking. Most people know it’s critical.  The problem is many businesses don’t take the time to set it up correctly, which means they can’t accurately measure the results of their marketing campaigns.

Here are the 3 key components you need to track your digital marketing:

1. Google Analytics to measure visitors and their activity on your website
   
   
2. Phone tracking to measure number of calls for each of your marketing channels
   
   
3. CRM (customer relationship management) tracking to measure leads and sales for each of your marketing channels

If you’re missing any of the components above, then set them up in the order they are listed.

The thing about tracking is it’s not retroactive.  That means if you’re investing in marketing now without tracking, then there is no way to determine which campaigns were profitable and which were losing money.  Only after you set up tracking can you start to calculate your return on investment (ROI).  That’s why I always recommend businesses get their tracking set up as soon as possible.

7 Ideas to Generate More Leads From Your Website

If you’re looking for ideas to generate more leads from your website, then you’ve come to the right place.  In this article, I’ll walk through 7 tactics that nearly every business can use that will convert your website from a passive brochure into a 24/7 lead generating machine.

Before we get into the tactics, it’s important to understand there are two very different types of website visitors:

    Buyers – Buyers are visiting your website to learn more about your product or service in order to make a buying decision in the near future.  They know what they’re looking for and are are ready to pull the trigger as long as your product or service fits their criteria.

    Browsers – Browsers are visiting your website to learn more about your product or service, but they aren’t ready to buy.  They are interested, but don’t know if they really need what you’re offering.

Of course we all want more buyers, but the reality at any given time is that the vast majority of your website visitors are browsers.  This is a key insight that leads us to one of the most important jobs of your website, which is to capture contact information from as many visitors as possible.  That way you can follow up with both buyers and browsers until they are finally ready to buy.

With this in mind, let’s dive into the tactics to capture more of your visitors’ contact information.  We’ll start with the basic tactics and move our way to the more advanced tactics at the end.

1. Add a General Contact Form

This may come as a surprise, but I still see websites that don’t have a general contact form.  I guarantee these websites are missing out on potential sales from visitors that would have submitted the contact form with basic buying questions.

For example, many people do research during non-business hours when calling is not an option.  In this case, it’s easier to complete a website contact form to get an answer to a question that could ultimately lead to a purchase.

If you do not have a general contact form, then this is one of the easiest ways to start generating more leads from your website.


2. Add Product or Service Specific Forms

The next step once you have your general contact form set up is to create product or service specific forms.  For example, on your product or service description page, add a “request a quote” or “request a demo” or “schedule an appointment” form to capture the contact information from buyers interested in that particular product or service.

The leads from these more specific forms will tend to be higher quality and further along the buying process compared to leads from your general contact form.


3. Add a Lead Magnet

Once you have the first two types of forms installed on your website, then it’s time to switch gears and focus on capturing contact information from all of those browsers.  Again, browsers aren’t ready to buy right now so they are not likely going to request a quote or ask a buying question on your general contact form.

Therefore, we need to take a different approach by using what’s called a “lead magnet.”  A lead magnet is something valuable (information, coupons, access to a tool) that you can offer on your website for free, in exchange for contact information.  For example, our homepage lead magnet is the Internet Marketing Survival Guide.  Plus, we offer other free tools like an SEO checklist and an AdWords checklist.

As you can see in these examples, the key is to offer something relevant and valuable to your target market in exchange for at least an email address so you can follow up.


4. Use a 2-Step Checkout Process

If you have an e-commerce website, then this is a great way to start generating more leads immediately.

As you probably know, every e-commerce website suffers from shopping cart abandonment, which is when buyers go through the process of adding products to their shopping cart, but don’t end up completing the order.  On many e-commerce websites, the order form is the last step and it’s also the only form that collects the customer’s contact information.  Therefore, when shoppers abandon their carts, you have no contact information to follow up. That is the case, unless you use a 2-step checkout process.

Simply add a step right before the final checkout page to collect a little information like name and email address.  Then after the 1st step is complete, the customer is redirected to the final checkout page to complete the order.  If the customer does not complete the final form, then you can use the contact information you collected on the 1st step to follow up and close the sale.


5. Add Online Chat

I’m sure everyone is familiar with online chat.  There are two types of chat that you can use: Live and Automated.  Live chat is obviously when a live person is chatting with the website visitor.  Automated chat is pre-programmed to answer frequently asked questions from visitors, which can save you time and money (but also can frustrate visitors that have more unique questions).

Generally, I recommend businesses test out live chat during regular business hours as yet another way to capture contact information from leads.


6. Add an Exit Popup

Have you ever tried to leave a website and you were quickly presented with a popup window explaining a special offer?  That’s an exit popup.

Exit popups are a last ditch effort to capture contact information from a visitor about to leave your website (possibly forever).  For example, you can use a lead magnet exit popup to present a free offer or a special coupon, you can offer live chat to get the visitor’s questions answered, or you can offer a free quote or demo.


7. Add a Lightbox

The final tactic is to use what’s called a “lightbox.”  A lightbox is the more user friendly version of the old pop-up window.  With a lightbox, the form is presented on top of the webpage the visitor was reading.  This is a more advanced tactic because you need to be careful about where you use the lightbox and how frequently the lightbox appears for visitors.  Obviously it’s important to balance the pros of capturing contact information versus the cons of annoying potential buyers.