Posted by Aaron R Stewart on November 8th, 2007
The other day we were leaving a soccer game for my 6 year old boy. My 2 year old wasn’t quite happy with her perceived lack of playground time, and she expressed her upset quite loudly, while she thrashed around. I calmly (kind of) chased her down, picked her up and lovingly wrestled her into her car seat. She reacted to her entrapment with unrelenting, ear-pearcing screams. Over this outburst, I couldn’t hear myself think, let alone my car’s reverse alarm, and we subsequently backed straight into a light pole. The bone-jarring thud caused instant silence, which was quite nice, but I dreaded getting out to view the damage. I slowly walked to the back of the car, and to my complete surprise and extreme delight I had hid that poorly positioned pole dead center. The only damage was to my trailer hitch cover, it was completely shattered, but it costs less than $100 so I was happy. I went from total dejection to total elation in just a few seconds. What a relief.
Now I really love that trailer hitch cover, and in honor of its fine protection, I wanted to replace it with a new one. Unfortunately I couldn’t remember where I purchased it, I knew it was online somewhere, but it was over a year ago and I can’t even remember my kids names from day to day. So I went to Google and searched “Jeep Trailer Hitch Cover,” which seemed to be a pretty good description. But, while I love search, and I love the amazing supply of products online, I do get a bit frustrated with all the information we get back in the SERPs, it can be way too much. With so many of the sites just being unhelpful noise, much of which is caused by all this Adsense craziness. It makes efficient searching more difficult, and the SERP I was looking at was too much. Fortunately, because I knew what I was looking for, I just clicked on the Images link at the top of the page, and was happy to find an image of the hitch cover I was looking for at uhaul.com
I went to the page, determined the formal name for the product, and searched again, to find other suppliers of the hitch cover. I quickly figured out the best deal, which happened to be at uhaul.com anyway. But going through all this, I became curious as to why U-Haul’s image of the product showed upon the first image SERP, but the image from the other online stores did not. I assumed it was due to U-Haul wisely naming their image well, and using the description tag to inform the search engines about the image, but I was wrong. It turns out U-Haul needs to thank Google for this particular sale. U-Haul’s images are actually served up from a image database, and no image names or descriptions are passed through to the product page, leaving the image without direct description. However, Google knew there was an image on the page, and wisely assumed it was related to the first 3 words on the U-Haul product page, namely “Jeep Hitch Cover,” so Google decided to return this page with my query. People can bang on Google all they want, but in this situation, they performed well.
So what could the other online stores done better to insure they are being found more readily through image search? First let’s look at stores which use the same product image as U-Haul, and see what how they named their images:
1. Jep_hitchstep.jpg
2. 10903_step_jeep.jpg
First, neither store used the image description tag, so it would be very difficult for any search engine to match my particular query by virtue of the image name alone. Both pages were also full of content, obviously trying to show their authority on the topic Jeep accessories, but Google couldn’t seem to figure out what they were selling in their text. Now if both stores were to name their images a bit more descriptively and add “Jeep Trailer Hitch Cover that is also a step” or something similar in the description tag, they will do better in the future for queries similar to mine. It is very important for us to think about what our customers will type in the search engine, which combination of keywords they will use to find us, and make sure our product images are labeled accordingly. The search engines are smart, but they are looking for some sort of relevance, and if we provide them this information, we will be rewarded with qualified traffic.
One final note, due to the shear volume of web pages being added each day, Image search will continue become more important. Image search allows us to narrow some searches more quickly, to find what we need more efficiently. I use the Image search function quite a bit, if I know what I am looking for, or I am not familiar with an online store for a particular product type. How important is image search to you? How often do you search via images?
Oh, and as a note, my daughter did stop crying… eventually.
Visited 1321 times
November 8th, 2007
Aaron R Stewart
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Posted by Aaron R Stewart on August 7th, 2007
To small business owners, SEO cannot be seen as the “end all - be all” to their potential success, but it rightfully should be considered a “must do” in order to maximize their full business potential. Based on our own situation, and finally deciding ourselves we needed to spend time on SEO, we now understand that getting started in SEO can be a bit intimidating, and very confusing without the right information. The SEO world tends to speak in their own tongue, and their language wasn’t developed, or taught in any business classes I attended. These new terms, whether it was meant to be this way or not, seem to have created a bit of a “barrier to entry,” to use a term we are more familiar with. Essentially the SEO industry created an illusion of “if we don’t know the terminology, it will be difficult to understand or perform SEO, and even tougher to do it well.” I felt the same way at first, but that perception is simply not true. SEO done the right way, without all the tricks and tinkering (which isn’t all that effective anymore anyway), is actually pretty straight forward. Just as simple as learning about credits and debits in Accounting or how supply and demand affect pricing in Economics. Not too tough to understand with a little reading and some hands-on exercises.
So if SEO is important, and we can learn it, how much time should we spend on SEO as a small business owner? It is an excellent question, and ultimately depends on how much business a firm hopes to bring in through their online efforts. For example, if a firm has in mind that in 12 months they would like to have 50% of their sales coming from online sources, and they currently only enjoy 5% of total sales from the site, then they should probably spend a considerable amount of time working on the site, making sure all the pieces are in place, so not only will the site’s visibility improve, but potential clients will be happy with what they find. Conversely, if this firm wants only 50% of their sales from online sources, but they now enjoy 60% of total being online generated, then they should focus more attention on more traditional forms of marketing and advertising until this ratio changes.
To get started in SEO, I would recommend just setting aside an hour a day to dive in. At first start just by learning about SEO, either from some pretty good books on the topic here and here, or through a number of blogs we recommend to our readership, namely: Michael Gray (GrayWolf), Todd Malicoat (StuntDubl), Lee Odden (Online Marketing Blog), Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz), and Brian Clark (CopyBlogger). These books and blogs will provide good insight and instruction on the ins and outs of all aspects of SEO.
Once one has a basic grasp of SEO, they really should get themselves an account with SoloSEO, in order to put this knowledge to use, using the most comprehensive set of SEO tool on the web. Much like exercises in Accounting and Economics, actually using the tools, and seeing the results of your work, drives home the SEO concepts, and puts the finishing touches on the learning process. Through working with SoloSEO’s tools, a solid understanding of the pillars of SEO, namely keywords, links and content will form, and SEO will then seem not only doable, but pretty simple.
So once we understand what SEO “is,” then it is time to really understand our industry online, and review what our competitor’s are up to. This online Competitive Analysis can also be done using some of SoloSEO’s tools and reports. We must remember we are competing within a different marketplace, with new competitors, and how they have positioned their sites online, could and should influence how we position and optimize our sites today and in the future. There is not a pre-determined set of guidelines at this point for SEO, no matter what some might say, much of what we need to do to compete most effectively online will be determined by what our competitors have done and will do in the future. While the process of SEO is standardized, the focus of our specific SEO strategy will need to be flexible to face the challenges put forth by our online competitors. If we watch what they do, and manage our online SEO accordingly, then we can keep pace or outpace what they are attempting to do, and better our online exposure.
In my mind there isn’t a business out there today which cannot benefit from an online presence, especially a site that is well prepared, and skillfully promoted. Small business owners need to take every advantage, use every possible tool and strategy available, to insure their eventual, or continued success. I can think of nothing more vital, more accessible and more easily implemented (not to mention more affordable) than SEO. A site which runs well, and effectively targets the right potential clients, promotes a firm’s image in a positive way, while making sales, even while we sleep, or while we play golf (not that anyone would do this during business hours). 
Take the time to get to know SEO and you will quickly understand just how big your little company can become, and that realization can be quite jolt.
Visited 1606 times
August 7th, 2007
Aaron R Stewart
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Posted by Michael D Jensen on June 18th, 2007
Over at WMW there is a fun thread started by Habtom covering the Top 100 Ecommerce Tips. It’s kind of hard to read in a forum list, so I’ve put it together here for you (and fixed some spelling and capitalization). This has relevance to all sorts of aspects of Internet Marketing.
Before I give the whole list, here are some of my top picks:
99. Let the customer see the shipping charge without registering! Preferably on the basket or a easy-to-find ’shipping charges’ page.
94. Make your site incredibly easy to buy from - no registration if possible, live chat, 800 # - make it friendly and easy to buy from.
59. Have a “best sellers” or “most popular” listing. The boost from this has been noticeable.
49. Drop the “Create account” language. People don’t come to our sites to create accounts, they come there to buy things. I try to make the account creation process appear like the normal checkout process. If they enter an email that is already in the system, THEN I ask them to request their password to login.
35. Have a list of “recommended products” and “other customers also bought” with each item. This can be simply done in your database where you just connect products together and base it on what customers have actually bought. (okay, I admit, this was my contribution)
3. Test. Everything. A lot.
I really like #1 too, but I’m going to make you scroll all the way down to read it! Remember these are just random tips added one after another, so the advice is not always good in all circumstances. I do think there are some gems here, so go on and read through them!
Top 100 E-Commerce Tips
100. Never leave unanswered emails for more than 48 hours, or your customer is gone.
99. Let the customer see the shipping charge without registering! Preferably on the basket or a easy-to-find ’shipping charges’ page.
98. Make sure your forms use common names for fields so that they’re recognized by toolbars that have an autofill function.
97. Sites (mainly US!) that have address or phone fields that assume only a US citizen is going to purchase e.g. State fields that only allow a few characters entry.
96. (following on from 97) If you’ve got a country drop-down box, please list it in alphabetical order, and don’t put United States at the top!
95. Don’t just accept payment through PayPal. Many people have had bad experiences with PayPal and prefer to use alternative, simpler payment methods.
94. Make your site incredibly easy to buy from - no registration if possible, live chat, 800 # - make it friendly and easy to buy from.
93. Take a picture of your office and add it to your contact us page with your company FAX number on it.
92. Don’t bury your products in several pages of clickthroughs, implement a working search mechanism so the user can get to what they seek in two clicks, three maximum. Insure there are redundant methods of getting around and no point on your site is more than two clicks away . . . from ANYWHERE.
91. Keep your initial products pages light and clean, with links to product details if they actually want to read.
90. Build your site for the end user, not the search engines. This means leave off all the serp-y text on the initial products pages.
89. Give the user a sense of who you are. The web is a cold, anonymous place. Anything you can do to bring a sense of personality and assurance to your website will help.
88. if you use a site search, make sure it works better than expected. It should search more than product names. Make sure it can find products by SKU, Model Number, and even misspellings if possible.
87. Be sure to include links to your privacy, shipping, returns & exchange policies right out where the customer can easily find them. Tell them the truth.
86. Keep the customer informed about the status of their order before they ask
85. Re: Navigation - Use the same visual theme for every action required of the customer
84. Re: Product options - Make them clear and comprehensive. Answer every possible question on the product detail page
83. Make sure your site search can also search by size and color. If I’m considering a green skirt or blue towels, make it easy to find other items that would match.
82. Don’t use those standard drop down country forms containing places like North Korea or Bouvet Island (an inhabited speck in the South Atlantic. For heavens sake, don’t list known scam destinations as a ship-to.
81. Don’t start huge lists like this that require people to read every previous post thoroughly 
80. If you only ship to USA (or wherever) say that right off and several times.
79. Drives me crazy when the “About Us” section says nothing specific about the seller and just has some obviously canned verbiage.
78. Mission Statements: Yuck! Luckily they seem to be dying out. No one gives a ****, anyway.
77. Goes without saying that spelling must be perfect. On slow days, have employees proof read old pages.
76. Bragging about yourself is ok if you have something to brag about. But better to not mention things like “Since 2005″ or “here’s a picture of our new puppy.”
75. If you’re new to ecommerce NEVER mention that. Invitation to scammers to hit you.
74. Get a real 800# (or 888), not a 866 or such.
73. Get the most web un-savvy person you know to test your site.
72. Customize product descriptions. Eschew text provided by suppliers which everyone else uses.
71. Listen to customers, invite their comments and criticism and act on what you learn
70. Answer emails in 8 hours max (certainly not 48)
69. Give street address but never “we’re in Puppyland Center, between Tony’s Pizza and the Shoe repair shop.”
68. Show good sharp graphics. Learn to use basic photo editing software.
67. Worth saying again, and again. Make everything fast and simple. Do you really need a wish list or tell-a-friend or even customer registration? Don’t just add to your site. Sometimes remove clutter.
66. (Follow on from 67) remove all non essential navigation elements from the checkout process. Have a single page checkout if possible.
65. Calling your customer to thank them and confirm their order instills immediate trust.
64. Make entering credit card numbers easy.
63. Install a really good stats system to track where your visitors bailed out of the purchasing process.
62. Pay good money for a proper interactive graphic designer (not a coder, web ‘developer’, or print designer doing a bit of moonlighting). If your web site looks professional, people will trust it and buy stuff.
61. Accessibility and usability - those 5% of ‘non-standard’ user groups all add up.
60. Add your 800# to every step of the checkout process with something to the tune of “questions or problems completing your order, call 800#)
59. Have a “best sellers” or “most popular” listing. The boost from this has been noticeable.
58. If your site ranks best in your niche, and If you sell something that is sold on many other websites (something drop shipped for you, for example), very slightly change the name — Tarenta to Tarento, Classica to Classico, for example. This helps deter people price shopping for the ‘product name’ elsewhere and in the shopping engines.
57. List your prices for every item clearly and upfront. There’s no space for a ‘price on application’ model online, none at all.
56. When using thumbnails to link to larger images give your customers larger images.
55. Pick the right product to sell. Something people actually want to buy. Preferably something lots of people want to buy.
54. If your target audience is concentrated in one country, host your website on a server and ip located in that country.
53. Promotional Offers: I believe offers are v imp. Now they need to be planned for first timers, repeat buyers and special offers for top customers.
52. Referral Program: Refer 2 friends and get x% additional/ discount always helps.
51. Actually have contact info - many sites hide their identity and location. Try to put the contact number somewhere on every page, it instills confidence.
50. Keep the 3 P’s above the fold on a product page. Product name, Price and Purchase link should all be visible without having to scroll.
49. Drop the “Create account” language. People don’t come to our sites to create accounts, they come there to buy things. I try to make the account creation process appear like the normal checkout process. If they enter an email that is already in the system, THEN I ask them to request their password to login.
48. Know your visitors - if significantly more people are first-time-buyers, don’t hit them with a login screen with a small link to register to the site - reverse the process.
47. Keep your cart on your domain - if for nothing else, it keeps your reporting homogenous.
46. Don’t use the “simple” methods of gateway processing where the visitor is redirected to the gateway site. It seems that on almost every implementation of these setups the webmaster fails to bring the most current site layout over to the gateway site and the visitor gets a whole new layout for cc errors.
45. Never tell the visitor to “Hit your ‘back’ button to correct”. I haven’t found a valid reason to do this yet - any issue should be able to be handled within the system.
44. Have a “Help” link very prominently displayed so they have somewhere to go if there is an issue.
43. For telephone purposes use a short and easy to spell domain name like … dot tld depending on locations or products use more than one, which redirect to a product or location page.
42. Get the credit card number first, ask questions later!
41. If you show a picture of the product and next to it a link that says ‘enlarge’ actually ENLARGE the photo rather than have it open in a new window exactly the same size as on the main page!
40. Ship fast. Preferably the same day and you are sure to get mails for appreciation.
39. Have points of re-assurance near the buy/add to cart button (bbb, bizrate, other ratings)
38. Use a proper ssl certificate.
37. If using paid advertising, don’t send them to your home page; send them to the relevant product page (or custom landing page) that is tied to the keyword you advertised!
36. If you sell software, allow immediate access to the full version and allow unlimited upgrades
35. Have a list of “recommended products” and “other customers also bought” with each item. This can be simply done in your database where you just connect products together and base it on what customers have actually bought.
34. Have a newsletter sign up and send out newsletters.
33. Don’t make the customer fill in the CC billing & shipping address fields when they’re the same, drives me nuts!
32. Vat number & Company Registration Number should be visible on the site in the UK to comply with UK Companies Act (updated Jan 2007).
31. If the product ships via a carrier, send an email to the customer with the tracking number with a link to the carrier to check status.
30. Use an XML Sitemap generator to create a sitemap to get a “big picture” of your site. Submit it to Google et al. and they’ll help you find dead pages, etc.
29. On category pages don’t just list product names, but include some unique content about the category for indexing.
28. Use a product rating feed or create your own system (if you have a sizable user base). A place for user-generated comments can be great, but it can also be a hassle (monitoring, lots of fake entries, etc).
27. If you sell the same object in different colours, offer them pictures of each colour.
telling a customer that you “also do this in blue” isn’t all that helpful because there are about fifty billion shades of blue.
26. Use a larger font (14+) for titles and product names to make them stand out and possibly increase conversions.
25. Stay away from dynamic URLs when possible.
24. Sign up for Hackersafe, Verisign and your related trade associations and display their logos to improve credibility.
23. Have a person answer the phone, not a recording.
22. If you cannot exceed the expectations created by your site, rewrite your copy. Underpromise and over-deliver.
21. Hang in there with the difficult customers-they become the most loyal.
20. Know when a customer needs to be given to your competition.
19. Consistency. Everyone has a different flavor, color, even brand. Key is to be consistant — have 1 text size and color for descriptions, one for links, one for category headers, perhaps another for main category links. At least theres a tone or vibe that your site is a statement vs a hodgepodge of stuff made by someone in their basement Be serious about what you are doing, and people will be serious about considering buying from you
18. If you use sessions, store them in a database, don’t append them to the URL, as people like the look of clean URL’s and often snip them to mail to friends to refer them to a particular product to purchase.
17. On checkout gather a name and phone number as the first 2 fields, store them before proceeding and ring all the customers that drop out before completing the checkout. (This alone turned a $1M business into a $5M business)
16. Make the font on your product copy readable. 12pt at least. NO funky fonts.
15. Make sure your buy button pops off the page and is big enough to be seen and clicked on.
14. Make sure the title tag on each product page is unique and reflects what is on the page. (It never ceases to amaze me how many companies in this day and age still have just the company name in the title tag of product pages). Oh, and product name first in the title tag. Not your company name.
13. Superstition does not work well with Business. What you may feel [to be] unlucky may be lucky for customers ranging from keeping Price Tag, Products, Colors, Day / Time of Shipping etc. [this one was weird]
12. Offer a strong guarantee. Don’t jast say this widget is guaranteed x days. Try for something like this: Try this widget risk-free for 30 days — if you don’t see an improvement in widget results — if this is not the best widget you have ever owned — return it to us for a full refund.
11. Add “District of Columbia -DC” to the list of drop down states, you be suprised how many sites are missing it…
10. And don’t forget PR, GU, VI and all the other US commonwealth and protectorates, that the Postal Service can ship to, at cheap postal rates.
9. Don’t forget US Servicemen/women abroad. Include APO/FPO state codes.
8 1/2. Add a 360 degree product view before the rest of the pack.
8. Play with the wording of your add-to-cart buttons. “Add to cart” is a nice non-threatening way to encourage adding items as some feel “order” or “buy” is too much of a commitment.
7. Be careful making a coupon field too prominent in checkout, especially in markets that are based on commodity goods such as electronics. Seeing the field may convince a shopper that was ready to purchase to exit and spend more time hunting for coupons. Consider relabeling as promotion code or something less descriptive (unless you are linking to a promo page with coupon codes to encourage larger sales).
6. Mine referral data of orders for search engine keyword queries encoded in the urls and further optimize for these terms for organic search or consider adding to your PPC campaigns.
5. Encourage impulse buys says a tip I read somewhere on the net, people don’t mind being asked “Do you want fries with that?”
4. If you’re going to ask customers to sign up for your newsletter during checkout, do it AFTER the payment is processed. Before the payment is taken, the customer is far more interested in ordering your product - but once you’ve taken their payment and they’re looking at your “Thank you for your order” screen it’s the ideal moment to get them to sign up…
3. Test. Everything. A lot.
2. Don’t assume the main goal of every commerce site is to make a profit. Publicly owned sites are often more concerned with selling stock and hitting wall street’s quarterly sales goals. That was true in the ’90s and somewhat true even now.
1. Amid all the costly free shipping gimmicks, 365 day guarantees, free return pickups, insanely low prices…don’t forget to actually turn a profit.
Visited 4692 times
June 18th, 2007
Michael D Jensen
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Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 16th, 2007
There is a big brouhaha over Matt Cutt’s recent postings (yes, 3 of them) about the disclosure of paid links (big one here, another here, and one more here). There’s been a lot of postings about it, with a great summary here by GrayWolf at SEOclass.com, some here by GrayWolf at Wolf-Howl.com, more here from Todd Malicoat of StuntDubl.com, more here from Matt McGee of SmallBusinessSEM.com, and another here from Andy Beal of MarketingPilgrim.com.
Essentially, Google wants you to disclose paid links to both users and to search engines. Google wants to know which links are “paid” instead of “natural” so they can discount their weight.
My feeling about it is this: Paid links are advertisements, and as such should be distinguished in some way from other links that are not advertisements. The disclosure should not be deceptive to users or to search engines. Disclosure can be subtle and is okay to be undetectable (not deceptively) to search engines/machines.
Google’s own webmaster guidelines specifically discusses that we should not do things specifically for search engines, but focus on the users:
Make pages for users, not for search engines … Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
If we look at other forms of marketing and advertising, there must be disclosure for advertisements. If you read a newspaper, it reads “This is a Paid Advertisement” somewhere on/near the ad. If you watch infomercials, it says “This is a Paid Advertisement”. If you listen to the radio and hear a political ad, it is disclosed as a political ad. If you look at Adwords and other text ads by search engines it has some form of disclosure, like “Ads by Google”. If you see a banner ad, well it either screams “I’m an ad” because it’s an image and it looks like an ad, or it says “Advertisement” somewhere. These advertising property owners do not make these statements because they are pretty or interesting, but to obey laws for advertising disclosure.
And now, for what you all have been waiting for…
The Perfect Solution to Paid Link Disclosure
So, I have the perfect solution for you to disclose your paid links to users and not search engines, that anyone can implement quickly and easily. This method makes it virtually impossible for a machine to implement an algorithm based on this code, but makes it fully disclosed to users.
To see the paid link disclosure in action, click on the following link (the next page has the link examples):
SEE EXAMPLE PAID LINK DISCLOSURE HERE
How to implement Paid Link Disclosure
Step 1
Copy the CSS code below and paste it in your existing CSS file for your site. (or create one, or put it in the template of your site so it shows up on each page).
a:hover.linkx {
background-image: url(/images/solop.gif);
background-repeat:no-repeat;
padding-left:10px;
}
a:hover.linky {}
Step 2
Change the name “linkx” to something else and don’t include words like paid or ad or affiliate. This keeps variability from site to site and gives it no semantic meaning. “linky” can be changed to something else also, but essentially all that is doing is giving your other links a class so that all links have a class assigned to it and cannot be “filtered” based on having a class attribute.
Step 3
Create an image that in some way reflects that the link is paid. Don’t just copy my $ image here, use a unique image and rename the filename to something else (keep it ambiguous). You may want to use a star, an asterisk, an exclamation point, or a turtle. It should be unique to you so again there is no regularity for the search engines, but at the same time it gives appropriate disclosure to your users. Place this image file behind the folder you created in step 4.
Step 4
Create a folder (give it any name, just be creative) and disallow search engines from access to this folder (learn how to do this in your Robots.txt file). No this is not deceptive, you just don’t want them to go there. This is for step 5.
Step 5
Create a file in the directory you just created and include a disclosure about paid links, describing that you disclose paid links by using an image icon next to links when a user mouses over them. I wouldn’t even include the icon on the page, just describe it with text, like “A dollar sign icon will appear when you mouse over a paid link”.
Step 6
Add the class attribute that you renamed in Step 2 above to the anchor tag of your paid links and any new paid links.
This solution would be incredibly difficult, and I would go as far as to say “impossible”, for Google and others to detect on a wide scale basis (which is what they face). Their problem is that this code is ambiguous, and could be doing any number of things besides attributing a paid link, and so they cannot fully determine that it is actually a paid link based on the CSS itself. But you’re still being ethical because users are aware before they click on the link that it is a paid link.
If you want to disclose paid links without having to hover, just modify the CSS code above and take out the “hover” part (see live page here of it in action):
a.linkx {
background-image: url(/images/solop.gif);
background-repeat:no-repeat;
padding-left:10px;
}
a.linky {}
If you have any improvements or other suggestions, add them to the comments below.
UPDATE: Matt McGee gives his idea for a solution, which is quite novel too.
Visited 2953 times
April 16th, 2007
Michael D Jensen
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Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 15th, 2007
Nowadays you don’t have to be big to get big clients. After 3 months of starting up (early 2006) our own web content firm (Applied Content), we landed a big deal with a Fortune 500 company (actually in top 30 though!). It’s not that we looked like a giant corporation, but we looked big enough to show that we cared about our business and about our image. Whether you are a business-to-business or business-to-consumer company, looking “bigger” or more professional will help you land bigger clients, and more of them.
Now for my top 10 list of ways to make your small SEO firm look big:
1) Show that you exist
You should exist more than having a website and a contact form. Preferably put up a phone number and an email address. Get a toll free number if you need to and have it forward to your cell phone. Show your office address, a physical location that someone could look up on a map and find. If you work from home, consider getting a PO Box, but get one that has an address instead of a box number (I think UPS is starting to do this).
2) Show that you actually work with clients
In the field of web content our clients don’t want us to tell the world we write their content, so we actually just “hint” at who our clients are (Fortune 500 company, a site listed in Time magazine’s 50 Coolest sites, other SEO firms, local companies, etc). If your clients don’t mind, I’d like to see the list, even a short (best of) list. If you’re doing SEO, what keywords is the client ranking for?
3) Clean Website
I can’t even count how many interested clients for our web content firm have called and said “I like how clean your website is”. It’s not perfect by any means, but yes it is clean and simple. Don’t have your 14-year old nephew design your site and don’t use clipart. You can find all sorts of free web templates, just make sure you customize them a bit so they don’t look “templatey”.
4) Nice Logo
You should have a logo if you don’t already, even if it’s just the name of your site in a nice typeset. We’ve used LogoWorks before, but I’d try a local design shop first if you can.
5) Link out
There’s a reason that Google et al. like it when you link out to authoritative sites, and for me that reason is because I want to know that you know your industry and resources.
6) Multiple author blog
Now not everyone can do this, but if you have someone else on your staff or even someone that remotely helps you out, even if its a Link Ninja, have them blog too. They don’t have to blog all the time (you should, at least once a week) but enough so we know you actually talk with other people.
7) Rank for your Business Name
If I am going to use you for SEO you’d better be ranked #1 when I search for your company name. Remember that Google et al. is not just a search engine, it is also a dictionary, phone book, map, and calculator.
Run a PPC ad for your Business Name
It won’t cost you hardly anything, especially if they use your organic listing (see #7). It tells me you are using pay-per-click like a smart business does, even if I don’t know what other terms you are advertising with.
9) About Us Page
Be personal about your company or yourself. How did you start, what makes your business strong, what are your strongest points, what makes you you? You can do this on a Contact Us page if you want. You don’t need to tell me about your family and your dog, but I do need to know you are real. I need to trust you.
10) Call me on the phone
Don’t email me, call me. When some contacts you, call them back before you try to send an email. Then send a follow-up email and do all your contact through email if you want. A phone call makes you real, that you are interested in providing your services to me, and you care about my needs. I think human nature now is email because it is easy, convenient, and you can actually think and re-think before the message is delivered. This also means, if you’re having potential customers fill out a form you want to ask for their phone number (maybe even require it).
I hope these tips will help you to be better, look more professional, and land more clients. Your potential clients do care what you look and act like, so you had better give it to them.
This is part 3 in our series about “Starting your SEO Business”. In case you missed them, here are the others:
Starting your SEO business: 5 Steps to Getting New SEO Clients
Starting Your SEO business: Tapping into Local Business with Local Search Tools
Visited 3778 times
March 15th, 2007
Michael D Jensen
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