Dominate Your Local Market!

What keywords do your visitors use to find you?

Knowing what keywords your visitors used to find you offers a glimpse of which keywords you should optimize for and which keywords and phrases you should try in Pay-Per-Click (PPC).

Prime “long tail” keywords¹ will often turn up in the list of keywords in your statistics. These keywords will often produce high placement for far less cost than broad-based keywords.

They also produce higher quality clicks through to your web page. Searchers tend to use longer, more specific keywords when they have done the research and are ready to take action (buy).

How do you find out which keywords your visitors used to find your web page?

If you have a stats package on your web server, it should supply you with that info. We use the Urchin stats program on all OrangeCat servers. If your hosting company doesn’t include a stats package, you can just use Google Analytics which will give you a ton of great information including keywords.

As Lord Kelvin said, “If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.”

Let me paraphrase Lord Kelvin to apply his wisdom to marketing:
“If you don’t measure it, you won’t be able to improve it.”

Jargonator

¹ “Long tail keywords” are actually multi-word phrases that you visitors might use to find you.

If you’ve been hearing the rumblings across the ‘Net about Google once again changing the way they rank your web pages, you’ve probably been wondering how it will effect you.

Google’s profitability stems in large part from being able to serve their search engine users with high quality results. Over the years Google has been in business, the parameters they use to judge the quality of a website for a given set of keywords has evolved.

Google is about to take another giant step in how they match a website’s relevance to a set of keywords… and it could have a profound effect on how your web pages rank.

The main criteria in use over the past few years has been Page Rank. The higher the Page Rank, the higher your web page would show on the Search Results Page (SERP).

Page Rank has served Google well, but inevitably, websites owners and developers have learned to exploit how Google sets Page Rank. Quite a few “black hat” techniques have been developed and used and Google feels, as always, that it is in their best interest to squash those using “black hat” methods.

At the same time, Google is trying to improve the experience of it’s users. These two goals are fully compatible from Google’s perspective. Those who resort to using “black hat” methods often do so because the quality of their content is not top notch.

So what is Googles latest strategy to improve user experience and the quality of their product?

If you are a user of, or are at least familiar with Google analytics, you know that Google is quite capable of logging an incredible amount of information about your website. This is accomplished through the cookies that are set in your web browser and follow every move you make on the Internet.

NOTE - Google Analytics is a free service that you can use to track all sorts of information and statistics about who visits your website, where they come from, what they do on your site, etc. It is a free service and all you have to do is sign up and place a snippet of code in the pages you’d like them to track.

Google can then use this information to try and determine the relative value of the information on your website by tracking how many visitors you have, but more importantly what those visitors do on your website, how many pages they visit, how long they stay on a page or the site, etc.

It’s a good bet that if your visitors view more pages on your website and stay longer on each one than those of a competing site, Google might consider that a sign that your content is more valuable to users and will probably rank you higher in the future.

So, what does this mean to you?

It means that content just graduated from “king” to “emperor.” It means you need more absorbing content, like audio and especially video, that holds visitors attention. It means that more than ever, having a large amount of high-quality content will serve you well.

The effects of this will kick in gradually through 2009 as Google tweaks the system to achieve their desired effects. It also means a rough time for those who have opted to use “black hat” SEO and other gimmicks to game the system. This has been called a “Google slap” and it is a pretty accurate description.

But if you provide your visitors with lots of high quality content, you’ll be just fine through this change and ones Google chooses to make in the future.

Now that WordPress 2.7 has been released, work on the 2.8 version has begun. The folks at WordPress.org have asked for input on what users would most like to see in the upcoming upgrade (you can participate in the survey here).

What do your customers really want? You can use polls and surveys to find out.

The folks at Automattic have created PollDaddy.com to help users create polls and surveys that you can then place on your blog, website or link to from an email. A simple interface walks you through the process of creating your poll or survey. There are 19 themes that you can use or you can use the built-in tool that helps you create a custom theme.

Once you have your poll set up, PollDaddy offers several ways for you to publish it. A simple JavaScript snippet can be placed on your web page by you or your web designer, and there’s a direct link method to include in emails. There’s a WordPress plugin for your blog and a MySpace app let’s you easily insert your survey into your MySpace profile.

In addition to the free version of PollDaddy, there are two premium versions for those who require more power and features.

We created the poll below using the free PollDaddy app. It’s a live poll so pick and click for an example of how PollDaddy works. You can then sign up for your free PollDaddy account.

Some reflections on the New Year

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.
- Bill Vaughan

Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man.
- Benjamin Franklin

New Year’s Day is every man’s birthday.
- Charles Lamb

Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.
- Hal Borland

New Year’s eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights.
- Hamilton Wright Mabie

Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.
- Oprah Winfrey

Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page. Take up one hole more in the buckle if necessary, or let down one, according to circumstances; but on the first of January let every man gird himself once more, with his face to the front, and take no interest in the things that were and are past.
- Henry Ward Beecher

New Year’s Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving [the road to] hell with them as usual.
- Mark Twain

We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.
- Edith Lovejoy Pierce

Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever.
- Mark Twain

People are so worried about what they eat between Christmas and the New Year, but they really should be worried about what they eat between the New Year and Christmas.
- Author Unknown

Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.
- Oscar Wilde

New Year’s Eve, where auld acquaintance be forgot. Unless, of course, those tests come back positive.
- Jay Leno

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.
- G.K. Chesterton

Every man regards his own life as the New Year’s Eve of time.
- Jean Paul Richter

And my personal favorite…

May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions.
- Joey Adams

If you’ve searched on Google for a local business, you probably noticed that when a locality, such as city and state are part of the search terms, the #1 position in the organic (unpaid) search results is a Google map showing local businesses related to the search term.

An example:

This would certainly benefit you to be a part of that listing because of it’s position. It is a much shorter route to the top of the search results than any other.

The Google Map listing is not directly related to Google Search, but works in parallel to it. So listing in Google Maps is NOT a replacement for good search engine optimization, but a compliment to it.

Listing your business in Google Maps is easy and free. It should take you less than a half-hour to complete the process. If you are unsure about getting it done right the first time, call your web design or marketing professional.

Listing also opens the door to tying in your Google Maps listing with your Google AdWords campaign, and is an essential part of any online marketing strategy for local businesses.

Click here to add your business to Google Maps
or call or OrangeCat at 859.544.9005 for a free consultation

If your answer was “Internet Explorer” only, you may be antagonizing huge and growing parts of your market. I never understood the “one browser” web development philosophy, even back in IE’s hey-day.

Back then I used to hear some non-forward-thinking developers say they only tested in IE because it had some 75% or the market, the rest of the contenders divided up the other quarter of the pie, there was only so much time in the day, blah, blah, blah.

But thumbing one’s nose at 25% of web browser never made any sense - at least to me.

But the nose-thumber’s lot has grown worse with time. Over the past year, IE’s segment of the market (combined IE6 and IE7) has shrunk from 53.2% to 46.6%. IE 5 has all but disappeared.

In the same 12 months, Firefox’s share of the market has gone from 36.4% to 44.2%, Safari’s from 1.9% to 2.7% and Opera’s from 1.4% to 2.3%. So anyone now developing for IE and ignoring the others is building for less than half of the market.

But I still see websites and applications that misfire or completely fail in Firefox, Safari or Opera. For a personal website, it’s just dumb. For a commercial website, it’s suicidal.

If the current trends continue, it won’t be long before Firefox assumes the #1 position, a mean feat considering you need to go get it, download it and install it. But Firefox is gaining popularity for a lot of reasons - not least of which is that it’s extensible.

There are Firefox extensions that add all sorts of useful features to the basic browser. One of my favorites is the Foxmarks bookmark extension that allows me to keep all of my bookmarks automatically synchronized across four different Firefox installations on two OS X Macs, a PC running XP and a Linux laptop on Ubuntu.

I also installed extensions such as the Google toolbar, the Web Developer Toolbar, ColorZilla (tells me the value of any color on my screen) and a Del.icio.us bookmarking button.

Add to that the fact that Firefox is Open Source (free) and very crash-resistant. If you’d like to try out Firefox, here is the link to download it:

10. Using free web hosting

If you were starting up your business right now, would you locate it in an out-of-the-way location where customers had a difficult time finding you? What if the landlord limited the number of customers you could have? Would you open there just because the rent was free?

That wouldn’t be a very good choice, would it? Unfortunately, free webhosting has the same issues. The biggest problem is bandwidth limits. Web hosts pay for the bandwidth they use and understandably limit the amount they give away for free. That can often result in your customers getting an error message instead of your website.

That error message is the equivalant of having a big “For Lease” sign on the front of your business. It may refer to one of the apartments upstairs, but by-passers can easily make the assumption that you are out of business. Not good.

Free hosting services also limit your ability to add essential services to your website. They generally don’t allow some important scripts to be installed and when they do, the limited resources they make available to your site can hinder their performance.

There are a number of low-cost web hosting solutions available. Sometimes, as with the marketing plans offered by OrangeCat, professional-grade web hosting is included in the package price. In OrangeCat’s case, domain name registration is also included.

IMPORTANT - When domain name registration is included in any plan you are considering, make sure that the registration will be in YOUR name, not the webhosting company’s or web developer’s. That can save you from some really BIG problems in the future.

If you are creating your own website, or if your web developer wants you to set up your own hosting account, there are several low-cost, high-quality hosting services available. One that we have used and found to be first-rate is HostGator. Another is Hostorix.

Either HostGator or Hostorix will provide you with professional-grade entry- to medium-level web and email hosting. So will most of the other low-cost hosting services. I recommend HostGator and Hostorix because I’ve had highly positive experiences with them. I can’t say the same for some others.

If you need a more high-level solution to handle large bursts or traffic, numerous email accounts or to maintain greater control of your hosting, you’ll need to give OrangeCat a call at 859.544.9005 and inquire about a custom solution that can be matched to your needs and budget.

Remember that your web hosting is the foundation on which your online business is built. Make sure that the foundation is a solid one.

9. No or poor contact information

I‘m often amazed when I visit a website that sells products or services and nowhere on the site is the contact information for the company that stands behind it.

Put yourself in the buyers shoes for a moment. Would you give your credit card number to someone whose name, address, phone number and email information are concealed. Are they someone up the street or an identity thief in some untouchable location? How would you know?

If you expect someone to pony up the bucks for your product or service and to give you their credit card info, you’d better let them know who you are. And the more information you can give them, the more comfortable they will be with the process.

When customers visit your website, anything you can do to eliminate confusion is to your benefit. It’s very easy for customers to “just say no” to whatever you are offering, and introducing any confusion into the process will encourage them to do just that.

At the very minimum, you need a contact phone number on every page and a separate “Contact Us” page with your company’s name, mailing address and email. Repeat the phone number again on this page and offer a link to your online support system if you have one.

This was a short post, but don’t underestimate the value of getting your contact information right. If you have any contact information issues, make a plan today to set them straight and reap the benefits from here on.

8. No call to action

What do you want your website visitor to do? Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But very few web pages out there have a clear “call to action.” Without a clear call to action, the visitor is left wondering what to do next. Most often, they’ll just leave.

When they leave, they might not find their way back and you’ve lost a potential customer. You’ll find a “call to action” down lower on this page. If you take the action called for, you’ll know whether your website has a clear call to action. That action is there to illustrate exactly what I mean when I say a clear call.

Tempting though it may be, don’t ever have more than one “call to action” on a page. Visitors will find that confusing (which do I do first?) and probably leave without taking any action at all.

If you are going to have a call to action on every page - and you should - it could take many forms.

You may want your visitors to:

• Sign up for your email list
• Request product or service information
• Visit your place of business
• Buy a product or service right now

Each of those requires a unique approach:

• Sign up for an email list - You may want to use a special squeeze page (a highly effective tactic), or you may use a drop-down box, or lightbox-type overlay. Some of these can be somewhat annoying, but they are also very effective.
• Request product or service information - Here you might want to provide them with a form they can fill in and have the info mailed to them. Exercise a little caution here as most folks don’t like giving too much information on a first visit. Better to get as little info as possible to start and ask for more as you build a relationship.
• Visit your place of business - Make sure they have the address, a phone number, your business hours and a map. Don’t leave anything to chance. Offer an incentive for visiting.
• Buy a product or service right now - If you want to sell off a web page right away, you need a compelling sales letter that lays out the benefits of your product. Don’t confuse features with benefits. A feature is a characteristic of the product that produces a benefit. Example: an air conditioner is a feature of a car. That feature provides the benefit that you can drive cool and comfortable in the hottest weather.

Mention your product’s features, but sell on your products benefits.

The “Call to Action”

Here’s what I’d like you to do. Try this with your home page first. Ask someone to go to your home page and look it over. Then ask them what the page wants them to do next.

If they don’t give you the correct answer immediately, call us and we’ll help you straighten the problem out. If there is no correct answer, call right this minute, even if it’s 3 in the morning and leave a message.

If your visitors don’t have a clear idea of their next step, you are wasting money. If you’re wasting money, let’s turn that around today. Call Bob at 859.544.9005 right now.

7. Poorly chosen domain name

Not long ago, I wrote an article for OrangeCat.net called “Own You Own Name.” Click here to read it. What I said in that article was for everyone to grab some version of your own name and hold it forever.

I own several versions of my name - BobStovall.com, BobStovall.us, BobStovall.info and BobStovall.org. I use a couple of them as primary domains and the others as secondary ones.

Domain names are getting harder to come by - grab your own name now if you can. If you can’t get the .com or .org TLD (top-level domain), grab the .net, .info, .biz, .us or any other you can.

And while your at it, reserve your own name as screen name or url on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.

Why?

Branding. Would you rather control the branding of your name - or let someone else do it? If you’re in business, you are a brand. Have you ever tried typing your own name into Google and see what comes up? I hope it’s good - that’s what branding is about.

You use your own name domain for things like a personal or business blog or resumé website. Don’t underestimate the power of having that type of site under your own name.

Plus you get the added benefit of having an email address in your own name at your own domain. Looks a whole lot more professional than a free email address (which if you remember is Online Marketing Mistake #3).

There are other mistakes that can be avoided when choosing a domain name, but let’s look at that from the other perspective - what domain name SHOULD you get?

If you were a plumber in Anytown, GA, you might want to get something like:
AnytownGeorgiaPlumber.com, or
WeClearDrainsAnytownGA.com, or
AnytownPlumbing.com.

If you were a lighting store in Overthere, WY, you might want:
OverthereLighting.com, or
LightAndLampsOverthere.com, or
OverthereWyomingLighting.com.

If your domain name describes what you do in just a few words, it will help you in the search engine rankings and it will be easier for potential customers to remember.

Always try to get the .com version of the domain name your are seeking. It is better to take a slightly lesser .com domain than the perfect .net or other domain. Why? People often assume you are using the .com version whether you are or not. Why send them to someone else?

And avoid dashes in the name if possible - especially if you were thinking about using the same domain as a local competitor, but with dashes. I used to own several of the orange-cat variations of my orangecat domains. Then I realized I’d rather have other people drive incidental traffic to my sites by using the hyphenated versions than pay for them myself.

If you need help finding and registering the perfect domain for your local market, have your web developer help you out. And remember that domain registration is always free to OrangeCat Marketing Plan clients. You own it - we pay for it.