2008 May

Wondering what the average return on investment (ROI) is for SEO? Wonder no more  - you can put a stop to your ponderings and thank DIYSEO.com for this infographic, looking at what makes SEO the king of ROI.

Whether you’re looking at promoting a services or products driven site, SEO (that’s the honest-to-good professional white SEO stuff, not that black hat or amateur-”I did SEO once” type of stuff), can provide up to 250% greater return on investment than online media buying, PPC, PR, or direct mail. Now you know.

Do you get a sense that nobody is listening when you hit send on the latest issue of your email newsletter? Or worse still, a nagging feeling that nobody cares? OK, you can put your hand down now – instead of pulling the curtain on your monthly newsletter, take a look over on Copyblogger, where they have put together 5 key reasons why your email newsletter isn’t being read.

Indeed, there could be a whole host of reasons why nobody reads (or cares) about your newsletter, but making sure you’ve got the basics in place to deliver a compelling newsletter to potential or existing customers is a must. Take a look at their post and make sure you’re not guilty of any of these mistakes:

1. Your newsletter isn’t helpful
2. Your newsletter has no voice (or personality)
3. Your newsletter doesn’t tell stories
4. Your newsletter has a weak call to action
5. Your newsletter has no frequency

If you’re expecting someone to read your email newsletter each month, make sure you’re not committing more than 1 of the mistakes above. If you are, it could well explain that nagging feeling every time you hit send…

The decision makers within small businesses are becoming more familiar with the term ‘SEO’. This is partly because more businesses are coming to realise the potential benefits the web can bring them and what needs to be done to make their website deliver those benefits. Unfortunately, ‘SEO’ has also entered their vocabulary as a result of a thousand pieces of email spam and a hundred cold calls from companies promising miracles with rankings and traffic.

These scammy spammy scummy companies that bloat inboxes and suck the time out of your busy day also damage the reputation of our business as a whole and mean we good guys need to begin any SEO conversation almost with an apology for our wayward brethren who follow the dark side. There now follows a case in point.

A case in point

About a month ago, Adam and I had a stand at a business exhibition. During set up, I wandered across to speak to another exhibitor. Because I’m nice that way.

We swapped a smile and a handshake. Then I told him what bpodr did. Talk about a change in the weather. It suddenly went very cold, followed by a storm front moving up from the east. I was then subjected to a series of epithets and accusations. The tamest of these was ‘pest’. I retreated with no opportunity to protest my innocence.

From the body of his rant I was able to deduce that the root cause of all this bitterness and bile was a prolonged exposure to the constant hassle of unscrupulous SEO leeches. In such a situation, retreat is really the only option: to stand and debate from a position of weakness looks like begging and can only serve to undermine your whole case.

Thanks, scummy spammy, SEO scammers.

There’s bad SEO companies and there’s BAD SEO

There’s another sense of in which an SEO company can be the good guys, however. Good in the sense of actually knowing what they’re doing.

The spammy life-suckers that pass for SEO companies fall into one of three categories:

1. Pure Scam – they take the money and do nothing
2. Black Hat – they take your money, do some shady things that improve your rankings and traffic for a while, then disappear as your site is penalised by Google
3. Useless – they take your money and they do some stuff that actually causes your site to lose traffic and rankings

The common thread, of course, is that you’ve spent money and your site is worse off than before – just like your bank account. The Useless may be ethical – but with no idea of SEO and no idea how to attract clients, hence the spammy emails and calls – but in the end they’re not doing SEO.

Rae Hoffman has a great post about a useless SEO company that were probably less ethical than they should/could have been. The point, though, is that they were marketing themselves as SEO experts when what they knew was a fraction of the stuff they needed to know. Go read the post – go on – whether you work in SEO or are a business employing an SEO company. It has some real cringe moments and Rae’s conclusion is pretty sensible: do some research and due diligence before parting with cash for SEO work.

For another take on the issue, try this brief comic strip from Ranked Hard.

Is it time to say ‘bye bye’ to the name SEO?

Perhaps it’s time to come up with a new name for what we do. Something that better describes what the good guys do. How about LMB? Land More Business. Seems a shame, though, just as more and more people are familiar with the term.

The important thing to remember is that SEO is a convenient hook on which to hang a whole raft of services that can bring benefit to a business. The ethical but useless SEO companies seem to be focused on only one thing – the way your site is coded. That’s like planning to win the World Cup by putting all the training into making sure the team can tie their boot laces in a double knot.

Anyway, when you get that email or call offering you miracle LMB services, remember you saw the term here first.

A great overview of the components that comprise developing and improving your landing pages from unbounce.com: The 12-steps landing page rehab program.

You can read the full article about this infographic, with some great insights and ideas about how to optimise your landing pags over on the SEOMoz Blog:  the-12step-landing-page-rehab-program-infographic.

Some key points from the “12-step program”

• Use a separate landing page for each traffic source (email, PPC, Facebook, etc)
• Test your landing pages with A/B testing
• Make sure the page headers match what the user has clicked
• Videos on landing pages can increase conversion rates by about 80% (80? Wow!)
• Long forms = less interactions
• Refine the page copy, cut ruthlessly, rinse, repeat
• One page, one purpose (bpodr TOP TIP!)

Those of you who are paying attention will remember our quick and easy guide to link baiting – it was quick, and fairly easy, but didn’t really roll it’s sleeves up and tell you the types of content you might consider creating for link-baiting. Fret not, Econsultancy have published 15 types of content for link-baiting, which is well worth a read if you’re responsible for creating content for a web site.

The types of content they suggest are:

1. Lists
2. Create a great infographic
3. Have an argument
4. Say something controversial
5. Be a contrarian
6. Build tools
7. Launch a competition
8. Get an exclusive
9. Release a whitepaper
10. Be helpful
11. Amuse an dentertain
12. Involve the crowd
13. Say something bad about Apple
14. Write killer headlines
15. Do something new

While the list delivers some great food for thought, it is just that – food. Sorry, I mean thought. These are ideas on how your content could become great link-bait material, not the final content itself. Some of these ideas should be used almost all the time (choose one of: Be helpful, Amuse and entertain, Write killer headlines), whilst others may not fit into your own site’s content strategy. That’s fine, you don’t need them all, you just need to make sure whatever content your site is producing is relevant to your products or services, and it’s interesting. If you can’t do that, say something controversial.

If you’re struggling for content ideas, hopefully you’ll find something useful to dislodge that writers block…