Squidoo for SEO (Is it worth it?)

Who knows whether this will turn out to be a useful platform or not ? And if it does, who knows how long it remain useful for? Squidoo is, according to good old Wikipediaiknowbloodyeverything:

“Squidoo is a community website based in Irvington, N.Y. that allows users to create pages (called lenses) for subjects of interest. Lenses are interactive, and can contain Flickr photos, Google maps, blogs, eBay auctions, YouTube videos, and other links. Squidoo is in the top 500 most visited sites in the world, and in the top 250 most viewed in the United States. It has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to charity.”

So they’re popular, useful and they don’t  ‘do’ evil if their charity donating credentials are anything to go by. But can you use Squidoo for SEO?

I have had Squidoo on my ‘to do’ list for as long as they’ve been around. Vowing to give it a good going over at some point to see if it might be of benefit to me or my clients as either a branding, PR, SEO or similar tool. But never seemed to get around to it.

Squidoo is Seth Godin’s baby and I have a lot of respect for Seth. I’ve read quite a lot of his blog entries and books over the years and his ideas are generally sound (if a little broad) and with a little imagination and common sense his notions can be applied with favourable results.

Thus the idea of Squidoo being a ‘nowblog’ named after a squid (with it’s large eye lenses) and the ‘oo’ coming from the names of companies such as Google & Yahoo having ‘oo’ in them and them being successful companies is fun, compelling and easy to engage with. So I thought I’d have a look.

From an SEO point of view I wanted to see whether there was any benefit to creating a popular, ontopic lense that could be used to channel both traffic and link juice to pages I’m targeting for SEO. Case in point is my client John C Wilkins in Bolton. They are a soundproofing (yeah, I know) products supplier and to cut a long story short we have started working on various pages within the domain that we want to rank for specific terms. So my first lense on Squidoo is all about a topic that is relevent to what they do and genuinly useful and informative: How to Soundproof a School

The idea is that this will be one of several lenses all based around the central theme of soundproofing with some good content and some strategic anchor text links with the objective being to raise the rank of my client’s pages in G.

The first part of that is pretty straight forward and we have full control over the content, it’s usefulness and it’s popularity. That’s our job. The second part though, the linking issue is a little foggier. Unlike the Flickrs before it, the Squidders haven’t decided to combat the obvious potential for spam with the use of ‘nofollow’ tags on outbound links that you control. Sweet. Potentially.

But does that mean that Google have already devalued links coming from Squidoo lenses thus eliminating the need for nofollow to do that job for them and thus allow Squiddo the perceived quality of link freedom? Maybe.

It would make sense that links from sites such as Squidoo or buzzle or ezinarticles would be devalued. G knows what these sites are all about. They dofollow links and can clearly be spammed. Or can they? If writing content purely to gain a ranking benefit in Google is against G’s “Webmaster rules you must obey you SEOing scum” then some there’s some very very good content out there, genuinely appreciated by people and having absolute value that should be penalised, because that’s what we do isn’t it? We try to write stuff that will rank well or provide some strong,  on topic links and try to make it genuinely useful content so it’s read, linked to and ‘on topic’.

I’m digressing though. The point is, will Squidoo help me to rank or not. Some say yes and some say no. Google may or may not devalue links from here to a more or lesser degree (probably a bit) but surely the on topic nature of the page can counter that? And surely if the lense itself is strong and it’s own inbound links confirm the quality and theme of the content then it’s a useful vehicle for link (and traffic) building.
I’ll tell you what, I’ll try and find out shall I? Feel free to share any Squidoo thoughts or experiences…

The High Search Engine Ranking Myth

It’s an easy and obvious assumption that higher search engine rankings will inevitably lead to more sales or sales leads from your website. It stands to reason that if your website was a shop on the high street and on Monday you had 20 people in your shop and on Tuesday you had 100 people in your shop that Tuesday would be be a better day for everyone. More people in my shop and more visitors to my website equals more sales – Right? Sorry – dead wrong.

Forget high search engine rankings and forget getting more people into your shop because more people does not equal more sales. Okay, maybe on a superficial level you could expect a marginal increase in sales but in terms of profit and return on investment (ROI) it’s a loss. What you need to be thinking about is your conversion rate.

Let’s go backwards a bit to go forwards: Getting more people to your shop costs money. Advertising on the radio, the TV or local press does not come cheap (And isn’t even remotely as targeted as you might think these days but that’s another story) but it does work to a degree, as does web advertising (Banner ads, Sponsored links, PR coups) but it’s costing you money. Usually quite a bit. Now if you’re like me you don’t like spending your hard earned dough on marketing efforts unless they can show a significant (or at least profitable) return on investment, and if  you’re not watching your conversion rates then I’m sorry but you’re wasting your money, both on and off-line.

Fact: It is cheaper and easier to get more sales out of your existing visitors than it is to get more visitors.

In other words, if those 20 people who came into your shop on Monday didn’t buy anything – Why spend more money to get more people into your shop on Tuesday? This is the importance of your conversion rate.

Your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website who take a desired action. For example, if 4 out of every 100 visitors bought a product from your website then your conversion rate is 4%. Of course, it is entirely up to you how you define the ‘action’ to be performed. It might be to make a purchase on your site or it might be to complete and submit an enquiry form (lead generation).

So here are the first 2 things you need to do to make more money out of your website:

1: Define the clear goals of your website (Sales, lead generation etc) and define the actions you want visitors to take.

2: Measure you conversion rate.

How do you measure you conversion rate? You obviously know how many sales you’re making and how many leads you are generating via you website, regardless of how web savvy you are – All you need for this sum is the amount of visitors you are getting to your site. If you don’t have access to this directly then your web developer or web host will certainly be able to help with this.

The metrics associated with measuring visits can also reveal all sorts of fascinating information about your website. Or more specifically, about the behaviour of people who visit your website. It is this information that really lies at the heart of improving your conversion rates.

You can uncover, not only where visitors come from (Search engines, keywords used etc) but also what pages they looked at whilst on your site, how long they spent viewing products, which product was most popular and even which pages most often encouraged people to leave your site altogether!

You can build up a picture of what is working and what is not. You will see patterns emerging that will help you iron out all the wrinkles in content and usability that might be putting off potential customers whilst building a streamlined and effective sales and marketing tool – Just like you hoped it would be when you paid a fortune to have it built!

With this sort of information, correctly interpreted you can start to make a real difference to your conversion rates in a very short space of time. Search engine rankings take a long time – conversion rates can be improved overnight.

3: Analyse website statistics to find out how your website is performing for your visitors

Now it’s time to act on the data you have gathered. If a high percentage of people are leaving your website on a specific page you might have a look at the content on that page an try to figure out what’s putting them off. Or why are they abandoning your shopping cart? Or what is wrong with the homepage that means most people don’t navigate any deeper into the site?

9 times out of 10 it will be for the most common reason people leave websites – Their problem is not being solved here, so they go and look somewhere else. Either that or they simply have no idea how to proceed.

Here are 5 tips for improving the conversion rate of your website that you can do right now:

1: Ensure that your homepage tells people immediately ‘What you do’ and ‘What they need to do next’. A homepage should convey a simple message to visitors that confirms to them that they are in the right place to solve their problem and make it easy for them to go ahead and solve it.

2: Keep the copy skimmable. When people visit a web page they usually scan it for clues that confirm it’s what they are really after. Use bullet points and bold type to highlight important parts but always keep it as brief a possible – eliminate unnecessary words.

3: When writing about products and services try to keep it ‘benefit’ based rather than focusing on features alone. People always buy based on an emotional decision so talk about how your product can benefit them in a specific environment or situation that they can relate to.

4: Keep contact forms brief. Don’t ask for more information than is reasonable for the purpose of their enquiry. A good way to get visitors to commit to submitting a form is to put a tick box at the top. For example, the first element of the form is “Tick here to receive a brochure about this product”. The visitor ticks this box to request his brochure and has ‘committed’ himself to completing and submitting the rest of the form.

5: Your ‘call to action’ (Buy now, Click here to.. etc) should be bold, obvious and easy to find – Preferably a button. Remember – convention works so use conventional methods to make it easier for your visitor to understand how to proceed.

The most effective thing you can do to improve your conversion rate is to measure the behaviour of visitors on your website and test the effect of changes you make against your conversion rate. There is no more cost effective way of getting the most out of your website in terms of sales and sales lead generation.

Then, when you’ve mastered all that – You can go back to worrying about search engine rankings…

A 22% Conversion Rate Case Study

Conversion rate is a pretty subjective metric. 80% might be considered underachieving if the goal you are measuring is how many website visitors have signed up for free chocolate but 5% could be very well received by a retailer of a very highly marked up product in a seriously competitive market.

But subjective or not, it is probably the most important measure of whether you are achieving relative success in the 2 most important elements of your website:

• Are you driving qualified, targeted traffic to your website?
• Is your website doing everything it can to convince visitors to take a prescribed action?

Answering ‘yes’ to those 2 questions is invariably qualified by a steadily increasing conversion rate. With that in mind I wanted to examine the successful ingredients of a recent project that have combined to achieve a healthy 22% conversion rate for one of my clients.

Geneva to Morzine airport transfers (Shameless – I know…) are what Geneva2Morzine.co.uk sell. They wanted a simple, cheap website that would help them to book their service out via the web.

Now, this isn’t an SEO client and we haven’t even really looked at that yet so this is not about ranking in Google for a relatively low competitive phrase set but about best practice in productivity.

Here are the basics from the last month:

• The top search terms used to drive traffic to the site via Adwords
  • geneva transfers
  • transfers geneva to morzine
  • geneva to morzine transfers
• The landing page headline: Door to door transfers to and from Geneva Airport to Morzine, Avoriaz and Les Gets
• Some simple and honest service information
• A great big, impossible to miss call to action: Click here to talk to us about Airport Transfers or get a Transfer Quote

That’s pretty much it. Nothing sexy or glam or funky going on at all – just a few relevant, targeted elements designed expressly to meet the expectations of the visitor based on their search. It helps that it’s a niche market but I think it’s a great example of productivity over style; of not forgetting the goal of the site. Or as Lynsday Camp would say “Remember the reader and the result”.

It’s always good to get back to basics because it’s so easy when working on larger, more complex projects, to seek out larger, more complex solutions when simple relevancy is so often the more elegant and productive way to go.

It’s all about the visitor. They have expressed their need with a search query.  Are we going to help them out or what??

When my son wrote “Nintendo Wii” on his letter to Santa he knew exactly what he wanted. If Santa delivers the wrong thing then he’s going to be disillusioned and disappointed in the whole process. You know what I’m getting at.

A new video podcasting toy…

Just got the Kodak Zi6 pocket video camcorder. It’s proper HD! Should be very useful for video blogging and the like… This is just a quick example of some output types…

.mov out of the cam converted to .avi, edited in Prem Pro and encoded back to .avi (1.6mb):

.mov in HD 30 frames per second (the Zi6 can also do 60fps) uploaded straight to Vimeo (13mb):

SEO Bombs!

Great new SEO tool from Google themselves? Or just too much time on my hands this Friday morning? I think you know…

Soundproofing Products [A Case Study]

JC Wilkins are the UK’s largest supplier of acoustic soundproofing products. They’ve been selling acoustic sound deadening products and materials and recording studio soundproofing services from their offices in London & Bolton for many years and traphic marketing are very happy to be assisting in their search marketing and SEO efforts.

Their website acoustic-supplies.com has recently been redesigned by Worcester based eCommerce website designers – Blue Box Software – and the focus has been on usability as much as it is search engine marketing. The site covers the majority of the services they offer such as:

• Acoustic wall and floor soundproofing solutions
• Part E of the Building Regulations
• Business and domestic soundproofing solutions
• Affordable housing sound insulation solutions
• School acoustic solutions
• Acoustic sound insulation training and advice
• Recording studio acoustic solutions

Our brief was to make sure they got a better return on investment out of their AdWords campaign, converted more of their visitors to sales leads for their sales team and helped them to generate more traffic from their target keyword terms.

This project has involved a great deal of ongoing keyword research, often facilitated by the AdWords

campaign management we undertake for them alongside On-site search engine optimisation to make sure their website is highly relevant for the terms we’ve identified as worth optimising for and a targeted link building campaign to ensure they outrank their competitors for target terms.

Key terms such as ‘soundproofing products‘ and ‘acoustic soundproofing materials’ and ’soundproof doors’ are already ranking well and driving plenty of converting traffic.

We’ve had a lot of early success and the client is very happy with results.

Fatboy Bean Bags & Picure Frames

traphic marketing are very pleased to announce a new client. 4×90 are a large eCommerce company with a network of websites selling a variety of products direct to consumers.

traphic has the pleasure of working with the web developer, Blue Box Software, on this project and the objective comes in 2 parts.

Our first task is to improve the organic rank of the website 4×90.com for the search term ‘frames’. Now this is a very broad term and is certainly not going to be a quick fix. 4×90 sell a very wide variety of picture frames for photos framing, picture framing for paintings both in bulk to frame retailers, individually to consumers looking for frame related gifts and products and to professional picture framers looking for a reliable supplier of picture framing supplies on the web.

Our first task has been to ensure that on page optimisation, site structure and internal linking are all adequate for the purposes of this task and this will be allied to a comprehensive link building campaign. We are extremely confident that we can make a real difference to these guys and are already steaming ahead with our link building campaign.

4×90 also run another website selling Fatboy branded giant bean bags and they want to rank highly for the search term ‘bean bags’. Again, very competitive and the project will follow a similar pattern as the frames project in tems of on page work and link building. For those who don’t know, Fatboy bean bags are the luxury, high end bean bags that cost a little more than your average bean bag and thus cost a little bit more too. They are available in a variety of shapes and sizes and there’s even  fatboy bean bag for dogs!

How to get visitors to your website and then make them do what you want…

…Whatever that might be.

Welcome to my beginners guide to generating traffic to your website and then making them perform a desired action:

Making sales
Some of my clients are ecommerce clients – they sell stuff via their websites. For some of them them this is the only place they vend their wares and their website is the sole channel for their product. Some of my clients are service based and don’t sell tangible products on their website but rather the concept of their service.

Add to basket – again & again & again…
Ecommerce clients want visitors to their website to add a product, preferably several, to their shopping basket and pay for them via the online checkout. Ultimately they want the visitor (now a buyer) to enjoy this experience and come back regularly to do it again. Maybe to tell their friends about how good it was and get them to do it too. And they want this to happen over and over again every day including bank holidays.

Automatic sales people?
Service based clients don’t usually have an ecommerce solution attached to their website because they are more interested in leads than they are in online sales. Leads are the life-blood of a company who needs to talk to people in order to sell them something. They might sell holiday homes or legal advice and whilst it’s technically possible to allow people to purchase just about anything on a website, it’s not quite so easy to convince them that they want to. DVDs, CDs, books – easy. Houses? Our websites are not quite automatic sales people just yet. Although that ability is not as far away as you might think.

So regardless of the ultimate website goal of my client, they all have the one thing in common; they all want people to visit their website and then perform and action. Whether they want the visitor to buy something online, fill in a contact email form or pick up the telephone and call, the process is remarkably similar. So my job is two-fold; get people to your website and then make them do something.

This is not a sales pitch
Now before this starts to sound like an advert for me and my services, let’s get one thing straight – I’m not touting for business. With the work/family balance I’m currently booked to the hilt and the time it takes me to write this blog is about all the time I have left. So whilst I’m happy to engage in conversation and debate, I’m not available for any consultative work. If that changes, believe me, you’ll be the first to know…

Free, holistic search marketing & website conversion advice
This exercise is hopefully going to shape itself into a useful guide to the whole process of marketing your web presence effectively both in terms of visits to your website and the action you want visitors to perform when they get there. There is a wealth of information out there for folks looking for SEO (search engine optimisation) advice and there are many (often self appointed) conversion gurus and web design and development professionals. Not one of these areas, left to there own devices, will show you how to become an overnight success but a sound understanding of each will give you the best opportunity to succeed at whatever you online goals might be. Make money probably.

So over the coming weeks and months (And for as long as it takes to make sense) I will be sharing the stuff I know and the stuff I learn as we go. These are the 2 main areas I’ll be covering:

Search Marketing:
This is the stuff that makes you rank highly in search engines like Google, Yahoo & MSN. It’s not brain surgery but it is an important part of your online marketing strategy and it does involve time, effort and sometimes a bit of money. It is not a black art and it is well within your grasp to do this yourself. We’ll look at the do’s & don’t’s, examine current theories on best practice and explore the art of link building, content development and search engine friendly site design.

Website Conversion
Once we have generated a stream of targeted traffic to your website we will develop strategies to retain them at your site and furthermore to ensure they perform the action that defines the purpose for which your site was built.

So – without further ado – lets push on and look at where we start…