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Archive for September, 2008
September 26th, 2008 by ChrisD
Google decided to be helpful on Monday and share a post called Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs. We’ve since received a number of questions from clients about this issue asking “should I change my site?” or “did I just waste thousands of dollars making my engineers implement a rewrite?” The answer is no.
We’ll continue to use properly implemented redirect strategies, where appropriate, as a part of a total search marketing campaign. In competitive verticals a website that correctly rewrites dynamic URLs to short, keyword rich static URLs will outperform those who don’t (ceteris paribus).
The Webmaster Central Blog isn’t written just for those of us who dabble in search engine optimization. That’s why they have Matt Cutts. The Webmaster blog is for….webmasters. That means every webmaster from Fortune 500 companies with a million pages and full ecommerce, all the way down to your local flower shop with 5 pages and just a phone number. You can imagine that the Fortune 500 webmaster likely has a team of engineers and designers to help them out, while the flower shop is lucky to have a website at all. So when Juliane and Kaspar wrote their wee post, they’re trying to be helpful.
The line most people are concerned about says: “avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it look static”. (Bold and italics are original) Why is this? They give four key points about dynamic URLs that I’ll paraphrase:
- Rewrites are hard
- It’s ‘safer’ to let Google handle it
- If you rewrite, remove the junk
- If you rewrite for a static URL make a static copy of the content.
I could go on and on about the issues with this post (as has been done on Sphinn and Webmaster World) but the same fundamentals we’ve always shared with our clients still apply. They touch on them in the post:
Keep your URLs short: Short URLs with relevant keywords perform better in the search results. They rank better, and the get better click-through.
Rewrites are hard: Rewriting can be very tricky, depending on your CMS. If it’s a complicated CMS and we’re looking at lots of pages, you’ll get to know your engineers very well.
Help us analyze your URL structure: Keeping your folder structure shallow, but presenting it, as well as the entire architecture of your site, in a logical format will help you perform well in the search results.
Google’s John Mueller replied to a comment which helps separate the wheat from the chaff.
We see too many examples of webmasters shooting themselves in the foot by installing some so-called "SEF/SEO-Module" on their site, which makes algorithmically understanding a website close to impossible. If we are to give a general recommendation, we would have to say that it is better to stick with dynamic URLs.
What he’s saying is if you’re not sure of what you’re doing, let Google handle it. They’ve got to make their recommendations relevant to the flower shops of the world, and those sites which are very technically savvy (or are working with Enquiro).
I agree that the authors are being a little Google-centric in their post, and I’d like to hear what they think about dynamic URLs will work in some of the other engines. Yahoo has actually offered to help rewrite your URLs.
For the rest of us, it’s business as usual.
September 25th, 2008 by Gord Hotchkiss
What makes up buzz? And what determines how fast it travels? Last week, I talked about how important the opinions of others are in shaping our brand beliefs. Today, I want to look at one category of word of mouth, the juicy tidbit, recently christened “buzz”, and see what makes it leap from person to person.
Buzz is Nothing New
For some reason, we think buzz is a new thing that lives online. In fact, it’s as old as human behavior and has its roots in our very social fabric. We need to pass on information. We’re driven to do so. We gossip because it’s inherently satisfying, both to ourselves and to the recipient. But the spread of gossip through a social network is neither uniform nor consistent. In the 70’s Mark Granovetter discovered that, like many things, social networks are patchy, made up of tightly linked clusters of people who spend a lot of time together (families, friends, coworkers) which are loosely connected to each other through “weak ties”, more distant social relationships. The survival potential of a viral piece of information (Richard Dawkins first coined the term “meme” as a cultural equivalent of a gene in his book, “The Selfish Gene”) lies in its ability to jump Granovetter’s weak ties. If the meme doesn’t jump out of a cluster, it ceases to propagate itself and can die an isolated death.
It’s Not Just the Network
In 1993 Jonathon Frenzen and Kent Nakamoto launched an interesting study that showed that the ability of a “meme” to spread through a social network depended not only on the structure of the network (the main point of Granovetter’s work) but also on the impact of the meme’s message on the carrier (akin to the idea of a phenotype in genetics) and the value of the meme itself.
Frenzen and Nakamoto worked with three different variables:
· First of all, they altered the value of the message. In the first variation, it was news of a 20% off sale, in the other variation; it was the more valuable news of 50 to 70% off.
· Secondly, they varied the amount of product available at the sale price. In one case, there was unlimited inventory. In another, the supply was very limited
· Finally, they varied the structure of the network itself, in one case having a network of strong ties, and in another, strong tie clusters linked by Granovetter’s weak ties.
What they found was that the value of the message (20% off vs 50 to 70% off) has a significant impact on the rate in which the word spread, as did the availability of items at the sale price. The second factor introduced a moral hazard aspect. It made spreading the news a zero sum game; if I tell you, I might lose out.
Frenzen and Nakamoto also found that in strong tie clusters, word seemed to spread relatively quickly regardless of the nature of the news. There were variations, but in all cases, the majority of the strongly linked network came to know of the news fairly quickly.
Social Speed Traps
If the discount was fairly low, the news tended to get stuck within clusters and had difficulty jumping the weak ties. If the news was valuable (50 to 70% off) and supply was virtually unlimited, the news was much quicker to jump the weak ties, spreading through the network very quickly. But, if the discount was large and the supplies were limited, suddenly the news tended to get trapped within the strongly tied clusters. People were reluctant to spread the news because the more people that knew, the more it was likely that they and their close family and friends (the people within their strong tie clusters) would lose out on a great deal.
Weak Ties on the Web
In both the online and offline worlds, the speed with which buzz will spread depends on the value of the message (is the gossip juicy? Is the price unbelievable?) and how much we stand to gain or lose (does sharing reduce the chances of me and my close circle getting ahead?). Gossip’s primary purpose is to create social bonds and the sharing of intensely interesting information is something we’re programmed to do. Similarly, we’re programmed to share opportunity with those closest to us, either through kin selection (we want those with whom we share the most genes to get ahead first – W.D. Hamilton did the foundational work on this) or reciprocal altruism (doing a favor for a friend knowing that at some point, we’ll benefit from the payback – Robert Trivers is the name to search for if you’re interested). In most cases of online buzz, there is no moral hazard. In fact, unless a meme has what it takes to jump the weak ties in a real world social network, it will never make it onto an online forum. Posting on the internet is, by its very nature, a weak tie, a reaching out from ourselves to everyone. We don’t publically post memes if it costs our strong ties the opportunity to capitalize on them. Similarly, we’re less likely to post unremarkable news, although I’m still trying to reconcile Twitter and Facebook status updates with this theory.
So, in the world of social networks, some people have more influence than others, right? Some are mavens, or super connected hubs, or natural sales people (borrowing from Gladwell’s The Tipping Point). Not so fast, says Columbia University’s Duncan Watts. But more on that next week.
September 24th, 2008 by Jody Nimetz
Ah SEO and PPC living together in perfect harmony. Yeah right. How many of you out there put as much effort into your SEO efforts as you do with your sponsored efforts? We hear of all of this money being poured into sponsored spend yet when asked how much you spend monthly on SEO many will respond by scratching their heads and look back at you with a shrug of the shoulders implying "I don’t know exactly…". Or even worse, others will state that they do not track what they are spending on SEO.
As you track the return of your sponosred campaigns, remember this little stat. Based on some of our original research inside the mind of the searcher, we found that Organic results received the majority of clicks on a SERP. We found that the split between organic vs. paid clicks was as high as a 70%-30% split. Over the past couple of years this ratio has changed slightly, but the fact of the matter is, more people click on organic results. Now of course further research suggests that there are other factors that affect what people click on when they perform a query in a search engine. Factors such as:
- Blended Search Results appearing
- The phase of the buying cycle that the searcher is involved in
- Brand Awareness or lackthereof
- Type of keyword/phrase queried
Ah yes the all mighty key phrase. Depending on what the users types into a search engine may dictate whether they click on a sponsored listing or an organic result. So as online marketers, where should you spend your time? Organic or Sponsored? The answer quite simply is both. SEO and PPC work together quite nicely when establishing your keyword strategy for your online campaigns. However, how many of you have a balanced SEO/PPC online marketing campaign? When it comes to keyword strategy, something to think about when planning your keyword strategy is understanding where you are today. That is how competitive is the online space that you are trying to occupy? Are your "money" phrases hyper-competitive and expensive to bid on? Ask yourself if you can really rank for <insert your desired key phrase here>. Note: Prior to establishing your final keyword list it is assumed that you have performed research into your target audience and have identified the language that they will be using to search for your solution or product.
Keyword Strategy: SEO or PPC?
Ok so you have an understanding of your target audience and of what they may be searching for online. You’ve looked at some of your competitor’s web properties and you’re aware of what they are trying to position their sites for now what?
Step One: Determine the Genetic DNA Make Up for your Keyword Strategy - When you think about it, there are three types of key phrases. Head Phrases, torso phrase and long-tail keywords. You will need to establish which combination will work best for you in terms of being able to intercept your audience. How does SEO and PPC fit in? Well head phrases tend to be hyper-competitive but can drive a ton of traffic to your site. In this case, a simple SEO strategy may not get you the rankings that you hope for, instead you’ll want to utilize a sponsored strategy where you bid on some of these hyper-compettive phrases to drive this traffic to your website. Depending on your budget, the level of success depends on which phrases wil provide the best bang for your advertising buck.
SEO on the otherhand can be effective when optimizing your site for long-tail keyphrases that are more specific to your industry. These tend to be phrases that the user will type in a search engine when they are closer to making a purchase decision. A lot of times long-tail phrases tend to be less competitive, but they drive more qualified traffic. More qualified traffic to your site means more qualified leads.
Step Two: Monitor Your Exisiting Visibility - from an organic (SEO) point of view, monitoring your visibility in the search engines will determine where you draw the line between sponsored budgets and organic SEO for your site. If by chance you are lucky enough to rank in the natural search results for a relevant head-type key phrase, you may not need to put sponsored spend towards this phrase. Instead you can either A). Save this spend (which affects your bottom line as less money going out) or B). Put this spend into other keyword groups or baskets that may require a boost. By monitoring your visibility, you will determine the right balance needed between SEO and PPC when positioning keyword visibility for your site.
Step Three: Consider Timing - Considering the timing of when to use PPC to boost SEO is critical to the success of any online marketing campaign. We all know that SEO can be very rewarding and that the results are longer lasting, but the fact is that SEO takes time. Do not expect to improve your website’s visibility overnight with SEO. So as part of an effective keyword strategy is understanding when to use PPC and SEO and when to use PPC with SEO. For example if you are planning a website redesign, you will want to use PPC to mitigate any risks from organic ranking decreases as a result of transitioning your website durning the redesign. For a period of a couple of months, you may need to use PPC to boost site traffic until the SEO and organic results are "revived". Also if your business is somewhat seasonal, you may want to boost sponsored spend during this time while optimizing your site for organic visibility. If all goes well, once you enter your "slow-season", you can reduce sponsored spend and time it so that your organic rankings drive traffic to your site.
Step Four: Revisit Your Keyword Baskets - for both SEO and PPC, you’ll want to visit your keyword groups and baskets on a regular basis. Your target audience will not remain status quo with their searching habits. Identifying the latest buzzwords that your audience is using is critical for obtaining qualified traffic to your site.
SEO and PPC work nicely together when establishing an effective keyword strategy. The key is to know when to empasize one over the other, or when to use when to support the other. SEO is effective when focusing on long term keyword strategy. PPC is effective when you need immediate traffic, together the two of them work to ensure that your site remains visible in the competitive online space that is the World Wide Web.
September 19th, 2008 by Gord Hotchkiss
In the past few weeks, I’ve looked at where our feelings towards brands come from and how they get stored in our brains for future recall. I’ve looked at how powerful brand beliefs can be, even to the point of altering our physical sensations (the Coke blind taste test), how advertising can mix with our own personal experiences to create false memories, how emotions can build a powerful subconscious reaction to a brand and how we label complex concepts, including brands, with a summary label that reduces all we know about a brand to an easily accessible impression. Today, I’ll round out the building of brand belief with perhaps the most powerful influence of all: the opinion of others.
Social by Nature
We are social creatures. One of the reasons humans have flourished on earth is because we take advantage of the power of groups. We have built extremely sophisticated heuristic rules to help us know when to trust and when to be wary. In our past, human survival depending on the passing of information from those we trusted and ignoring information from less trustworthy sources. While the survival value of word of mouth might not be as critical to us now (unless knowing a good Chinese restaurant or mechanic is a matter of life and death) those evolutionary mechanisms are still in place and every piece of information we receive has to be filtered through them.
Remember, heuristic rules, which we know as our gut instincts, tend to form when the same circumstances product the same results in the majority of cases. Given this stable pattern, we create a subconscious mechanism that allows us to act without thinking. A huge percentage of human behavior falls into this category (I explored one example, habits, previously in this column). The same is true for how we treat word of mouth information. Let me give you two examples.
Who Can You Trust?
First, the closer someone is to us, the more we tend to trust their opinion. The word of family or close friends tends to carry a lot more weight than that of a stranger. That’s because friends and family have proven their worth in the past and gained our trust. They haven’t steered us wrong before so why should they now?
Secondly, the more enthusiastic the endorsement, the more value we give it. If we get a wishy-washy recommendation, we probably won’t run right out and take action. But if someone close to us is ecstatically recommending a Thai restaurant, the odds are we’ll try it ourselves in the near future. Enthusiastic endorsement shows that the initial impression was strong and memorable because it was emotionally tagged, making it more believable to us. Incidentally, it probably isn’t coincidence that many personal recommendations tend to revolve around eating. Sharing information about promising food patches would have been a key survival strategy for our ancestors.
Gut Level Judgments
When we get presented with information from others, it’s not as though we pass the information through a number of rational filters. Calculations like the two examples are done below the surface. At a gut level, we instantaneously affix credibility to word of mouth and decide whether to pay attention or not. But if we do pay attention, this becomes a tremendously powerful consumer motivator. It’s no coincidence that word of mouth typically tops the list as the key influencer in every marketing study ever done. Word of mouth fits our inherent survival strategies. We are programmed to prioritize information from trusted others as being important.
Your Word over Mine
In fact, in many cases the opinion of others may trump even our own experience with brands. Studies have shown that we alter our own memories of a consumer experience depending on the opinion of others. If we’re recalling a less than positive experience but at the time of recall we’re surrounded by others who have more positive opinions, we’ll alter our own opinions to better match the collective one. The same is true in reverse. A great brand experience suddenly loses some of its shine if others are vocal about their bad experiences.
In this altering of our own opinion, one has to remember an interesting principle about memory formation. Memories are not unalterable snapshots. They get reformed every time they get retrieved and then laid down again. So, if we retrieve a personal experience with a brand from our memory, then alter it to fit the opinions of others, it’s the altered memory that gets recoded. We don’t suddenly revert to our previous opinion when others aren’t around anymore. Our perception of the brand has been altered by others from this point forward. This helps explain why others have such a powerful influence on our brand loyalties.
Next week, I’ll look at an interesting study that explored how word of mouth spreads in a network, whether it’s online or in the real world.
September 11th, 2008 by Gord Hotchkiss
I’ve talked about how powerful our mental brand beliefs can be, even to the point of altering the physical taste of Coke. But where do these brand beliefs come from? How do they get embedded in the first place?
A Place for every Memory, and every Memory in its Place
Some of the most interesting studies that have been done recently have been done in the area of false memories. It appears that we have different memory “modules”, optimized for certain kinds of memory. We have declarative memory, where we store facts. We can call these memories back under conscious will and discuss them. Then we have implicit memory, or procedural memory, that helps us with our day to day tasks without conscious intervention. Remembering how to tie your shoes or which keys to hit on a keyboard are procedural memories
Declarative memory is further divided into semantic and episodic memory. In theory, semantic memory is where we store meaning, understandings and concept based knowledge. It’s our database of tags and relationships that help us make sense of the real world. Episodic memory is our storehouse of personal experiences. But the division between the two is not always so clear or water tight.
The Making of a Brand Memory
Let’s look at our building of a brand belief. We have personal experiences with a brand, either good or bad, that should be stored in episodic memory. Then we have our understandings of the brand, based on information provided, that should build a representation of that brand in semantic memory. This is where advertising’s influence should be stored. But the divisions are not perfect. Some things slip from one bucket to the other. Many of our inherent evolutionary mechanisms were not built to handle some of the complexities of modern life. For instance, the emotional onslaught of modern advertising might slip over from semantic to episodic memory. There will also be impacts that reside at the implicit rather than the explicit level. Memory is not a neatly divided storage container. Rather, it’s like grabbing a bunch of ingredients out of various cupboards and throwing them together into a soup pot. It can be difficult knowing what came from where when it’s all mixed together.
This is what happens with false memories. Often, they’re external stories or information that we internalize, creating an imaginary happening that we mistakenly believe is an episode from our lives. Advertising has the power to plant images in our mind that get mixed up with our personal experiences, becoming part of our brand belief. These memories are all the more powerful because we swear they actually happened to us.
That Wascally Wabbit!
University of Washington researcher Elizabeth Loftus and her research partner Jacquie Pickrell have done hundreds of studies on the creation of false memories. In one, under the guise of evaluating a bogus advertising campaign, they showed participants a picture of Bugs Bunny in front of Disneyland, and then had them do other tasks. Later in the study, the participants were asked to remember a trip to Disneyland. Thirty percent of them remembered shaking Bugs Bunny’s hand when they visited the Magic Kingdom, which would be a neat trick, considering that Bugs is a Warner’s character and would not be welcome on Disney turf.
We all tend to elaborate on our personal experiences to make them more interesting. We “sharpen” our stories, downplaying the trivial and embellishing (and sometimes completely fabricating) the key points to impress others. When we do this, we will draw from any sources handy, including things we’ve seen or heard in the past that we’ve never personally experienced. To go back to last week’s Coke example, our fond memories of Coke might just as likely come from a Madison Avenue copywriter as from our own childhood. We idealize and color in the details so our conversations can be more interesting. It goes back to the human need to curry social favor by gossiping. When you have this natural human tendency fueled by billions of dollars of advertising, it’s often difficult to know where our lives end and our fantasies take over.
This mix of personal experience and implanted images explains part of where our brand beliefs come from. Next week, I’ll look at the power of word of mouth and the opinions of others.
September 10th, 2008 by Kyle Grant
Over the past several months, in part due to increased economic pressures, we have seen an increase of importance placed on improving return on investment (ROI) from search-based activity, particularly from PPC campaigns. ROI attribution and measurement becomes especially important when justifying the cost of the online sponsored advertising and improving the return on advertising spend (ROAS). Here are some tips on improving your search performance and getting the best ROI possible.
1. Know Your Analytics
This statement may seem fairly redundant, but all too often search marketers find themselves flying blind without proper analytics. Much of this article will focus on using analytics to optimize for ROI and knowing the limitations of your own analytics program is extremely important. Additionally, ensure that your ROI metrics are tied back to search-related key performance indicators (KPIs).
ROI attribution can become more cumbersome in the business-to-business (B2B) market place as sales cycles can be extremely long as well as potential of the sale occurring offline. In cases such as this, ensuring lead sources can be captured into CRM systems can provide vital statistics to the health of your campaign. (Yes, pun intended) Several CRM programs, such as SalesForce and Oracle, offer integration with some of the leading Analytics software providers. Simple Access or Excel spreadsheets can also be used to tieback the sales, lead value, or other KPIs to your search activities.
2. Optimize Landing Page Performance
So you’ve paid for the click; what now? Your landing page and ad copy must work together to assist in the sale of your product and convince the user into taking your desired action and converting into a lead/sale. On average, you only have 8 seconds to reassure the prospect that you are what they are looking for and convince them to stick around.
Landing page testing is incredibly important to the success of a paid search campaign and to improving ROI. With a landing page the simple combination of titles, copy, images, and call-to-action can make sweeping differences in the performance of the page. The difficult question is which combination? Unfortunately; other than best practices there is a limited supply of instructions and guidelines to assist search marketers in developing the perfect landing page, but there are testing tools that can help us along the way. Testing tools can range in abilities and cost, but one of the better landing page testing tools on the market is Google Website Optimizer. It is fairly intuitive, easy to implement, and provides clear results analysis, best part is that it’s FREE.
Your landing pages are perhaps one of the most important factors influencing the ROAS for Paid Campaigns. Simple landing page testing can be an easy quick win for any paid search campaign.
3. Optimize Conversion Paths
Conversion path optimization is the next important aspect of ROI optimization. We all know that attrition occurs at each stage of the conversion path, the key to optimizing ROI is mitigating the loss at these key stages.
Many of the analytics tools on the market do offer conversion funnel analysis which will allow you to dive deeper into the ‘fall out’ that occurs at each stage in the process. The key objective in this analysis is to determine at which stage in the funnel you are getting the largest amount of abandonment. Once you know where the users are leaving the funnel, you can then focus in on the potential problems with that page; what barrier exists, hindering final conversion?
Enquiro’s has used funnel analysis to optimize conversion funnels for its clients and has improved the conversion rates by up to 150%.
4. Leverage your SEO & SEM Together
Enquiro’s research has proven a significant branding advantage can be achieved by having a top paid ranking and top organic ranking above the fold. However, budgets can be saved by lowering paid ad exposure for those key phrases also occupying top organic position; allowing for more focus in other key opportunities.
With your SEM campaign, you are able to quickly test the traffic volumes and conversion rates for many keywords as well as determine what the best messaging is for communicating with your market. This knowledge can then be applied to your SEO efforts to help mitigate the costs of PPC. Although organic rankings take time to take achieve, there is significant benefit the can be attained by gaining organic rankings for your top search phrases.
Additionally, through landing page testing and ad testing, it’s possible to determine what messaging resonates with your target audience and which calls-to-actions are most effective.
5. Trim the Fat
We all have heard of the 80/20 rule, but in paid search campaigns it’s more like the 95/5 rule. Ninety-Five percent of your revenue will come from 5% of your keywords. Using your analytics and appropriately tagging your conversions to indicate, on the keyword-level, the source information can assist you in finding those 5% of the keywords and truly optimizing those ad groups. On the flipside this source can also indicate which keywords are simply driving up costs without producing results.
This should not be confused with eliminating long-tail keywords because they simply have not collected significant click volumes, but more so, finding those head and torso keywords that are costing a lot of money without driving conversions. Don’t be afraid to lose the dead weight in your campaigns.
6. Use Testing Budgets
When looking at paid search campaigns, once you feel you have developed a winning formula, there is a hesitancy to not want to mess with it. I know this feeling all to well, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it; but the truth of the matter is, if you don’t break it once in a while innovation cannot occur. To work around the hesitancy of making changes for fear of losing ground or ROI, assign a certain percentage of your budget that can be used for testing. Depending on how risk adverse you are, will determine how much you will assign.
Using a testing budget (in a separate campaign or even account) will allow you to perform keyword analysis, landing page testing, A/B ad copy testing, as well as experiment with different bidding strategies without affecting the performance of the main account. Once a winning strategy has been proven it can be migrated over to the main account to improve its performance overall.
One important caveat about testing to remember: one experiment = one independent variable. That is to say only make one change at a time; otherwise you will have difficulty in attributing positive or negative results to the correct changes.
7. Leverage Quality Score
Although I normally encourage focus be placed on optimizing based on conversions, optimizing on the basis of quality score has its advantages, there is nothing detrimental from using quality score to enhance your ROI. So what do I mean with that seeming contradiction in terms? Simple, look at the quality score suggestions and your campaign goals. Make the changes to your quality score that will not adversely affect your campaign. For example, using your ads to pre-qualify visitors may decrease your CTR; in turn negatively affecting the quality score. However, pre-qualifying visitors prior to their click will achieve a stronger Conversion rate, thereby increasing your ROI. Using keywords in the ad copy and landing page can boost the quality score without losing the pre-qualifying messaging.
8. Use Micro Conversions as an ROI Indicator
Sometimes it’s not always easy to attribute ROI to your paid search campaigns, in fact in most cases its down right difficult. There is hope, however, in using micro conversions. Micro conversions are those actions that a user will take on the path to conversion. For example sites using a demo can calculate the conversion rates from demos to leads to sales. It simply takes a bit of reverse engineering to the sales cycle and determining values.
However, with appropriate analytics, you know the demo to lead ratio, the lead to sale ratio, and average sale amount; therefore using your average sale amount multiplied by your lead to sale ratio, gives you your value per lead, then simply multiply that once again by your demo to lead ratio and you’ve calculated your value per demo. The same can be applied for filling out a contact us form, engaging in an online chat with a sales person, adding to cart, product customization, etc. Micro Conversions can assist in determining the value of a paid visitor by the actions taken leading up to the offline sales process where tracking can be more difficult, impossible even.
September 5th, 2008 by Jody Nimetz
In many conversations that I have had with various B2B marketers, I often find myself wondering why they don’t take a step back to breathe and carefully plan out their online marketing strategies more effectively. Quite often they’ve heard of a new technology or SEO trend that they want to experiement with. Yet when you review their site, you notice that there are some serious issues that have been overlooked.
The whole B2B process tends to be more complex than its B2C cousin. Whether you are talking about the buying cycle for the intended consumer or the longer selling cycle for the organization itself, the B2B process in general is longer and more intricate. Hence the reason you see many marketers who have a need to simplify their solutions. Really this is the greatest secret. Being able to simplify your messaging, your marketing campaigns and even your tracking can be extremely rewarding. When it comes to your online marketing campaigns, quite often marketers start going after the latest and greatest or start thinking about these elaborate schemes that will hopefully improve the return on investment. The online campaign gets compilcated in a hurry and these marketers tend to fall into old habits. Inadvertently, the simplicity of the required strategy gets lost in the shuffle.
So what can you do to prevent this from happening as you plan out your online strategy? Well you begin with a process to get back to simplicity. Keep it simple.
10 Overlooked Website Optimization Tips for B2B Marketers
- Revisit and Refine Your Keyword List - understand the terminiology that users who are looking for your B2B solution are using when they perform a search is still paramount if you are to drive qualified traffic in hope of generating more leads from your web properties.
- Optimize Your Page Titles - Once you have updated your keywords, work to incoporate them into your page titles. You would be surprised how often this gets overlooked. Yet one of the best ways to get the search engines to index and rank your pages is to ensure that you have a keyword rich title on your important site pages.
- Optimize Your Meta Data - If you are going to optimize your titles, you might as well take the time to optimize your meta data specifically your meta description tags. These tags should be found within the <head> copy of your source code. Incorporating relevant keywords into your description will provide information to the search engines as to what your page is about. Meta data is simply data about data. Help the engines understand what you are trying to communicate. Remember the first step in a successful online campaign is getting the traffic to your web properties. Fundamental optimization of your site is the first step in getting there.
- Direct the Search Engines to Your Site with an Updated XML Sitemap - In order to ensure that the search engines can find all of your content, be sure to update and submit (or resubmit) your XML sitemap to the search engines. Remember that on an XML sitemap, you can have up to 50, 000 URLs listed, so this is a great way to provide a "roadmap" to the search engines for your content that is available to them.
- Optimize for Blended Search - Optimize your site for at least one type of blended search. Again this is an item that is always overlooked for some reason. It’s not difficult to optimize your images with alt text, keyword rich files names and supporting copy around the image. It has become extremely easy to optimize video or blogposts. If you want to be found on a search engine results page in the future, you’ll need to optimize for blended search.
- Content on the Homepage - I find that with a lot of B2B sites, there is a tendency to make the homepage flashy with a huge image taking up the entire "above the fold" portion of the page. Yet you have to remember, if this is the user’s first time to your site, they are looking for information and they are looking to find this informaiton quickly. Time is very valuable to them. If you don’t communicate what your product or solution is on your homepage, how do you expect the user to find what they are looking for? Don’t make them work for it. Present a brief description as to what you do and how you can solve their needs on your homepage. If you offer B2B price management software solutions, then state that on your homepage. While the first part of the solution is getting the searcher/user to your site, the second part is keeping them there. Strive for site stickiness.
- Place Your Full Address on your Contact Us Page - Want to help the engines with their local search index? Be sure to include your full address on your main contact us page. Yes there are still companies that do not do this.
- Respect Your Visitors with a Custome 404 Error Page - There are a ton of websites out there that do not leverage effective use of a custom 404 error page. If a site visitor is served up with an error page when visiting your site, be sure to guide them back to relevant parts of your site with a custom 404 error page. This could be the difference between them abandoning your site and visiting one of your competitor’s sites.
- Update Your HTML SiteMap - Don’t forget to update your HTML sitemap when you add new content to the site. From a user point of view this is a great way to direct site visitors to new content that is published on your site.
- Update Content Regularly - Do not expect to rank well and drive a lot of traffic to your website with a 40 page website. To be an authority on a topic or solution, you need to continue to prodice content around this theme. Whether it is through blog posts, news articles, press releases or good old fashioned pages of HTML content, adding new content to your site will only improve your visibility in the online world. Having said that, do not just throw any old content up on the Web. This pollutes the Web and in the end had a direct impact on the results that are served (or not served) up by the search engines.
When planning your online campaigns and thinking about what to do next, do not overlook the small stuff. Remember the "Serenity Now" episode of Seinfeld, well in the online world you might want to treat this as Simplicity Now!
September 4th, 2008 by Gord Hotchkiss
Last week, I looked at the unprecedented backlash against the introduction of New Coke. The fervor of the protest took everyone by surprise, especially flabbergasted Coke executives (and truth be told, Pepsi brass as well). After all, New Coke was subjected to exhaustive consumer testing in the lab and the results were clear: most people preferred the taste. So why did something that did so well in the lab fail so miserably in the real world? Why were people so passionate about brown sugared water. Baylor University neuroscientist Read Montague set out to find out why in 2003.
More than a Blink
In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell advanced his theory of why Coke drinkers are so loyal to their brand yet failed to pick it in a blind taste test. The problem, Gladwell says, is in the nature of the test. Coke is meant to be drunk in big gulps, not metered little sips common in taste tests. It’s only when you down a whole can that you can truly appreciate the distinctive biting tang of Coke. But, as Montague would find out, the reason for the irrational devotion to Coke has little to do with taste at all and much more to do with beliefs, emotions and memories. It’s our brains that love Coke, not our taste buds.
Montague and his research partners started with a common blind taste test. After stating their preferences, study participants were given sips of Pepsi and Coke without knowing what they were drinking, then asked to pick the drink they preferred. The results were all over the map. Coke drinkers chose Pepsi. Pepsi drinkers chose Coke. Going into the study, the groups split evenly based on their stated cola preferences and in picking their favorite drink, Coke fared slightly better than Pepsi, but there was little correlation between what people said they preferred and what they actually chose. Their tastes buds were not that finely tuned.
Mind over Matter
It’s only in the last few years that we’ve discovered just how powerful our mind is in altering our physical perception of the world. The world is what we judge it to be, and judgment is largely passed by mechanisms beyond our conscious awareness. This explains the “placebo” effect, noticeable changes in our physical being due to the power of suggestion alone. If our minds believe, our bodies follow.
In Montague’s (along with co-authors McClure, Li, Tomlin, Cypert & Montague ) study, the truly interesting findings came when people were put inside the MRI scanners. Remember, fMRI scanners (functional magnetic resonance imaging) allows us to see which parts of the brain are activated during specific tasks, giving us some clue as to what’s happening inside our minds. After devising a rather elaborate method to feed participants sips of Coke or Pepsi, preceded by visual cues of what they were drinking (the methodology description took up a good portion of the published paper and is worth reading just to see the lengths one has to go to if you’re intent on conducting fMRI research) the researchers analyzed differences in brain activity.
The Brain on Coke
In one group, they provided two sips, one of Pepsi, the other also of Pepsi, but in an anonymous presentation with participants being told that the second sip could be either Coke or Pepsi. In the second group, the same thing was done, but this time it was Coke that was both the identified and anonymous drink. Then participants were asked to state their preference. In the Pepsi group, about half the group chose Pepsi and there was no strong preference over the anonymous drink (also Pepsi). But in the Coke group, the respondents overwhelmingly chose Coke over the mystery cola (also Coke).
When Montague examined the difference in brain activity, the difference between the two groups was fascinating. When the identity of the cola wasn’t known, the only brain activity registering was in the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex, an area associated with feelings of reward. When participants were told they were drinking Pepsi, the brain activity didn’t change significantly. But when the third group was informed they were drinking Coke, suddenly other areas of the brain started lighting up, including the hippocampus, parahippocampus, midbrain, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, thalamus and the left visual cortex. What was happening? Well, Coke was obviously eliciting a much stronger mental response than Pepsi. People were experiencing Coke at two levels: first, the sensory reward, and second, by tapping into people’s beliefs and feeling of self identify. The parts of the brain that lit up under the conscious awareness of Coke are suspected to control access to emotion and act as gatekeepers to working memory. The brand belief structure of Coke was being mentally loaded up and altering the perception of Coke’s taste. The effect was so strong yet so far below the level of consciousness, brand loyalists swore they could identify Coke’s taste and preferred it, even though blind taste tests consistently proved them wrong.
Coke’s Brain Branding
Somehow, Coke has created a brand that its fans believe in and identify with. The brand unlocks a treasure trove of brand reinforcements that have little to do with the taste or quality of the product. And it was this effect that Coke turned its back on in the introduction of New Coke in 1985. We have to keep this untapping of brand beliefs in mind when we talk about branding and search. With search interactions, the appearance of a brand can unlock belief structures just as strong as Coke’s. In the next column, I’ll explore some of the many elements that go into the building of these beliefs.
September 4th, 2008 by Gord Hotchkiss
In 2003, Read Montague had a “why” question that was nagging at him. If Pepsi was chosen by the majority of people in a blind taste test, why did Coke have the lion’s share of the cola market? It didn’t make sense. If Pepsi tasted better, why wasn’t it the market leader?
Fortunately, Read wasn’t just any cola consumer idly pondering the mysteries of brown sugared water. He had at his disposal a rather innovative methodology to explore his “why” question. Dr. Read Montague was the director of Baylor University’s Neuroimaging Lab and he just happened to have a spare multi-million dollar MRI machine kicking around. MRI machines allow us to see which parts of the brain “light up” when we undertake certain activities. Although fMRI scanning’s roots are in medicine, lately the technology has been applied with much fanfare to the world of market research. Montague is one of the pioneer’s of this area, due in part to the 2003 Coke Pepsi study, which went but the deceptively uninteresting title, “ Neural Correlates of Behavioral Preference for Culturally Familiar Drinks” (Note: Montague has since picked up a knack for catchier titles. His recent book is “ Why Choose this Book? How We Make Decisions”).
Believing in Brands
In the last two columns, I talked about how our emotions and beliefs are inseparably wrapped up in many brand relationships. The strongest brands evoke a visceral response, beyond the reach of reason, coloring our entire engagement and relationship with them. It doesn’t matter if these brands are better than their competitors. The important thing is that we believe they are better and these beliefs are reinforced by emotional cues.
This certainly seemed to be the case with Coke and Pepsi. The market split was beyond reason. In fact, the irrationality of the market split caused Coca Cola to make the biggest marketing blunder in history in 1985. A brief recap of marketing history is in order here, because it highlights one of the challenges with market research, namely, that there’s a huge gulf of difference between what we say and what we do, thanks to the mysterious depths of our sub cortical mind. It also sheds light on the strength of our brand beliefs.
Coke’s Crisis
Through the 70’s and 80’s, Coke’s market share lead over Pepsi was eroding to the point where in the mid 80’s, Coke’s lead was only a few points over their rivals. This was due in no small part to the success of the Pepsi Challenge advertising campaign, where the majority of cola drinkers indicated they preferred the taste of Pepsi in blind taste tests. This wasn’t just a marketing ploy. Coke did their own blind taste tests and the results were the same. If people didn’t know what they were drinking, they preferred Pepsi. It was panic time in Atlanta.
Enter new Coke. It was a lighter, sweeter drink that was possibly the most thoroughly tested consumer product in history. Coke was preparing to kill the golden goose, and it wasn’t a decision they were taking lightly. If they were changing the secret recipe, they were making damned sure they were right before they rolled it out to market. So they tested, and tested, and tested again Coke meticulously did their home work, according to all the standard market research metrics. The results were consistent and overwhelming. In the tests, people loved New Coke. Not only did it blow the original Coke formulation away, it also trounced Pepsi. They asked people if they liked New Coke. Yes! Would you buy New Coke. Yes! Would this become your new favorite soft drink? Yes, Yes and Yes! Feeling exceptionally confident, Coke bit the bullet and rolled out New Coke. And the results, as they say, are now history.
Classic Coke’s Comeback
On April 23, 1985, Coke shocked the world by announcing the new formulation and ceasing production on the original formula. And, at first, it appeared the move was a success. In many markets, people bought new Coke at the same levels they had bought original Coke. They kept saying they preferred the taste. But there was one critical market that new Coke had to win over, and that wasn’t going to be easy. In the Southeast, the home of Coke, people weren’t so easy to convince. There, ardent Coke fans were mounting a counter offensive. By May, the “Old Coke” backlash had spread to other parts of the US and was picking up steam. Soon, a black “Coke” market emerged where deprived Coke drinkers started bring in the original Coke from overseas markets where the old formulation was still being bottled. By July, the Old Coke counter offensive was so strong, the company capitulated and reintroduced the original formulation as Coke Classic. Within months, Coke Classic was outselling both New Coke and Pepsi and began racking up the highest sales increases for Coke in decades, rebuilding Coke’s lead in the market.
Although it eventually worked out in their favor, Coke executives were puzzled by the whole episode. President Don Keough admitted in a press conference, “There is a twist to this story which will please every humanist and will probably keep Harvard professors puzzled for years, The simple fact is that all the time and money and skill poured into consumer research on the new Coca-Cola could not measure or reveal the deep and abiding emotional attachment to original Coca-Cola felt by so many people."
Keough was amazingly prescient in this statement, although he had the university wrong. Almost two decades later, it would be a professor at Baylor, not Harvard, that would dig further into the puzzle. Next column, we’ll see what one of the very first neuromarketing studies uncovered when Montague replicated the Pepsi Challenge in a fMRI machine.
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