Write for your customers

A few months back we were consulting with a small business owner on getting his blog up and running and the topic of who to blog for came up. Normally we give our standard recommendation to blog to his perfect customer and after one or two follow ups we move on. This client had more questions than normal and had some good reasons for writing to his peers as well.

I won’t break down the conversation for you but I will lay out the five main reasons why you should be writing for your customers on your small business blog.  While every business is different, I would wager that these 5 reasons will be true for 99% of the small businesses out there.

5 Reasons to Write for Your Customers

1. Your Peers Will Never Buy From You
   No matter how well you are viewed in your industry your customers are still the ones that pay your bills.  When they come to your website it’s for one of two reasons; to make a purchase or to answer a question they have.  If you write for your peers you’re cutting out that second reason and all the sales that it would lead to.
2. Your customers are searching for answers
   When working out an SEO strategy one of the important metrics we track is search volume.  This is an estimation of how many people are using search and from an SEO perspective you have a great many more customers searching than peers.  This means more easy organic traffic to your site, plus each of these visitors is a potential paying customer.
3. It’s not about you, it’s about them
   In blogging and social media it’s important to remember that your content isn’t really for you, it’s for them.  Focus on providing value to your customers by answering their needs and being a friendly and helpful resource. This kind of relationship pays off huge in the long term as they keep coming back and refer their friends to you.
4. Your customers don’t know who the industry leaders are
   Let’s face it, your customers have no idea who is who in your industry and they don’t care. Customers are more interested in relationship and perceived value than industry status.
5. There are better places to promote yourself as an expert
   Nearly every industry has “official” blogs, news sites, forums, and even printed magazines where you can show off your experience and get noticed.  Look into guest blogging, getting involved in the forums, starting a personal blog, and submitting articles as a way to get noticed.  Not only will you get more exposure this way but there is more prestige writing for a well known site than your own blog.  As a bonus, you get to focus your site on your customers which will make them happier too.

A lot of SEO companies will stress paid search engine placement for your keywords, while we don’t discount that as a part of some SEO campaigns it won’t mean a lot if all of the traffic driven to your site doesn’t find the content they were looking for. That’s where knowing how to develop and implement your content comes in.

Of course, content strategies will vary based on the kind of site that you have. One thing that all content strategies should contain; however, is in -depth search engine optimization research. Every piece of content on your site should be crafted with your key words, competition, and potential customers in mind. While it takes a lot of work up front, it pays off with big SEO returns after launch.

A big no-no is simply regurgitating what you have found elsewhere. Not only do search engines frown upon this, but if your “borrowing” isn’t done following copyright laws with proper citation, you may find yourself in legal trouble. Keep in mind that if you create content (whether it’s blog posts, articles, sales text, or even just meta tag descriptions) that is unique to your site, uses your identified keywords (in moderation) and is relevant to your site and your customer’s needs, you will reap great SEO rewards.

Best practice is to take those old URL’s, and all their traffic and inbound links, and redirect them to a new working URL. This results in a win/win for your users and your search engine rankings.

That is where the 301 server redirection comes in. Without getting technical a 301 redirect is a HTTP response from the server that means that the page has permanently moved to a new URL. Setting up 301 redirection is pretty straight forward and easy to manage.

301 Redirects and SEO

The permenant redirection indicated by a 301 error is honored by search engines. What this means is that when a search engine encounters a 301 redirect while crawling the web they will delist the old broken URL and update all the incomming links to the new URL.

Here is a short video by Mike Cutts from Google explaining how Google treats 301 redirects and anchor text.

301 Redirects Best Practices

Currently what we suggest to all our clients is that any page that gets search engine traffic or that has a significant number of inbound links get a 301 redirect to a working page with similar or the same content. This provides the best experience for surfers and maximizes the SEO value of their existing inbound links.

Any old pages that don’t get traffic or that have little to no inbound links should then be sent to a well designed and helpful 404 error page. Since there is little value in these pages to be lost the purpose of this method is to maximize the user experience for those who stumble upon one of these pages.

Another popular alternative is to redirect these lesser used pages to the home page. Doing this allows you to direct the inbound links and search engine rankings to a valuable page on the website.

The downside of this method is that potential customers may follow a link expecting to find something and instead find themselves on your home page. This isn’t the best user experience and may result in a lost customer.

Redirects on Apache Servers

The simplist and most common ways to set up 301 redirects is through the .htaccess file in the home directory of your web server. Unlike javascript redirects .htaccess redirects are invisible to the surfer because they are executed by the server when the page is delivered.

.htaccess Single Page Redirects

Single page redirects are best used when the content on the old page is still available at a new location. This way not only do you maintain all the inbound links and pagerank but visitors who arrive through external links find the information they were expecting.

When writing the redirect rule for a single page redirect you leave off the http://www and instead just include the path that would appear afterwords. For exampe to redirect from the old page of http://www.site.com/old/page.html to http://www.site.com/new/page.html you would use …

Redirect 301 old/page.html http://www.site.com/new/page.html

Other 301 Redirects

There are many other ways to set up 301 redirects besides using an .htaccess file. Steven Hargrove has a great resource that covers all of them here. If possible I highly recommend using .htaccess though because of how easy it is to set up and maintain.

I’m not going to bother writing yet another of those articles. Personally I HATE this tag.  Not because of the tag itself, its really nice and non-offensive.  No I hate it because of all the inane questions, bad information, and scammy tactics that are the results of this tag.  If your wanting some information on the current state of the tag here are 3 wonderful examples if your wondering.

Here is Matt Cutts from Google saying that “Google doesn’t use the keyword meta tag in web search”

What’s The Best Keyword Meta Tags Formula? by Shaun Anderson (hobo)
Even Yahoo, who supported the tag much longer than anyone else are dropping support (or are they?).

So with no search engines of note using the keyword meta tag to influence rankings anymore what should we do with it?  The easy answer is to forget all about it.  In large part that is what I have done on a lot of our sites and the sites we manage.  So far we haven’t noticed any negative effects at all.

But, there is one use that I will highly recommend for the keyword meta tag.  Misspellings.

Currently Yahoo and most likely the others as well are indexing the keyword meta tag as normal text with a really low ranking factor.  Because of this I would recommend using the keywords tag for common misspellings of your business name, product name, or anything else that you would rank for normally.  Since you wouldn’t want to use the misspellings on your page hiding them in the keyword tag allows the search engines to relate the misseplling to your page.

Either that or just forget about them.  Thats what I do.

Research and Planning

Many SEO campaigns have failed before even beginning because of insufficient research and planning. A good SEO campaign will begin research well before the first change is made to the website or the first link acquired. A great SEO campaign will continue research on a regular basis to keep up with changes in the industry and competition.

When doing research there are three main areas that we focus our attention on. Traffic stats and analytics for the existing website (if any), industry trends and best practices, and the top competitors for our targeted search spaces. We want to have a solid understanding of what is working, what needs improvement, and what works for our competitors as early in the process as possible.

On Site SEO

Search engines determine how to rank your website largely by reading the code on the page and following links. Ensuring that search engines can find your content and that the page loads correctly and quickly can greatly improve your rankings. More importantly it will improve your customers experience and result in better conversion rates and customer loyalty.

For this reason one of the main focuses of an SEO campaign is to optimize the website itself. This is done mostly by cleaning up the code, organizing the navigation and content structure, and writing original title and descriptions for each page. On site SEO also includes the creation or editing of original, high quality content. A website without original content that has been optimized first for your customers, and secondly for the search engines will have a hard time ranking.

Off Site SEO

Search engines use a lot of off site factors as indicators of trust and quality. In essence they view links from outside sources as “votes”. A large part of the SEO campaign will be spent trying to gather as many of these votes as possible. There are many different methods used to gather links but the most common include social media, article directories, gaining inclusion into high quality relevant directories, and press releases.

Even though there are many different options to explore not all of them are available or effective in all cases. That’s why it is so important to have already completed the initial research before beginning off site SEO. It is actually possible to accidentally incur penalties in the search engines by making mistakes or being overly aggressive at off site SEO.  Remember that slow and steady wins the race.

How They Work Together

Research, on site, and off site SEO are all required elements and all work together in a good SEO campaign. Through research competitive search keywords are discovered. The on site SEO then optimizes existing content, or creates new content targeting those keywords. Finally social media and link building from off site SEO are used to promote that content. Rinse and repeat, building up the rankings of the website over time and across multiple keywords.

I hope this has given you some basic information on the three different elements of a search engine optimization campaign. I know it was a pretty general overview but I plan to publish more in depth articles in the near future. If you have any questions or comments please leave them below and I’ll be sure to answer them. Thanks for reading.

As an internet marketing professional it is your responsibility to manage those expectations and to help guide the client through the process.  These are the 5 keys to managing the client’s SEO expectations.

Don’t Promise Anything You Can’t Guarantee:

New clients have seen the other guys making promises for #1 rankings and most will expect the same from you.  Even though it may make it easier to sell your services; never promise anything you can’t personally guarantee. Instead focus on what you can guarantee; that you will bust your ass for your client and that you will use your expertise to market their service to the best of your ability.

Set a Realistic Timeline:

Internet marketing and SEO are long term investments that (should) start before any code is ever written and (should) continue indefinitely.  Lots of times clients want to cut a check once and see immediate eternal results.  Therefore, it is important to set forth a realistic timeline with the client and for the project.  Explaining this upfront, and reminding as necessary will keep the client thinking in the same timeframe as you and this will go a long way to managing expectations.

Set and Track Goals:

Goal setting in internet marketing establishes the parameters for success and failure.  Which means that it is essential to work with the client to set realistic, achievable goals very early on.  Once set, goals should be regularly tracked so that you can identify what is working and make adjustments.

Back Up Everything With Hard Data:

Any time you are providing information to the client do your best to back it up with data.  This is almost the easiest of the 5 keys to actually do.  With the high quality free analytics packages available and SEO tools at our disposal getting hard data is easy.  Preparing and presenting that data in a way that clearly answers the client’s questions will go a long way toward building their trust and making them feel at ease.

Keep the Client in the Loop:

This is probably the most important of the 5. Since your clients are probably not SEO and internet marketing experts, they may be wary of spending money on something that they don’t understand and may not see immediate payback from. By making certain that they know what you are doing and where their money is going you are fostering trust. Be specific with how their dollars are being spent, and how that will transfer into profit for them.

If you do follow these 5 keys then the client will be able to relax, trust your expertise, and focus on making more money to pay you with.  This means that they will have less questions and concerns for you to address.  Freeing up more of your time to focus on marketing for them.  Best of all by following these 5 steps, when it comes time to negotiate for a new contract you will have built the trust, relationship, and documented success that leads to a bigger paycheck.

1. Understand the basics of pagerank

Pagerank is the easiest search engine optimization metric to check so naturally it gets a lot of attention. My honest advice is to ignore pagerank and focus instead on doing the simple steps I’m outlining here. If you do this not only will you improve your pagerank, but you will save yourself a lot of stress.

You see a lot of people letting their pagerank become the focus of their search engine optimization campaign. What most of them fail to realize is that pagerank is a measurement of over 500 million different variables. Hyper-focusing on even a dozen of these variables will never result in long term success. What will create long term success is focusing on building a solid website foundation, providing compelling content, and promoting your website on social networks.

2. Start with solid on-page SEO

Much like building a house, building a website for long term search engine traffic requires a solid foundation.  This foundation is the code and organization that search engines read when indexing your website. We consider a site with solid on-page SEO to be one where visitors and search engines can easily find and understand every page and how it relates to the rest of the website. Here are some easy changes that you can do without having to hire us to redesign your site.

1. Fix your site navigation. This will help your customers find their way around your site and not get lost.
2. Link related content. Linking between related pages on your website helps to establish that relationship and will increase the authority of both pages.
3. Use titles for headings and sub-headings. Some search engines still give greater weight to headings but regardless using headings helps to establish the hierarchy for the page and is good usability practice.
4. Write accurate title tags and descriptions. Title tags and descriptions are used by most search engines when they display results. For this reason it is more important to write an accurate description than it is to fill it with keywords.

3. Create compelling content

Once you set out to increase traffic and improve pagerank it is very important to spend the time needed on creating compelling content. This is because no matter how many visitors you can wrangle up with a good search engine ranking and social media; once they arrive they will be looking for your content. If you content sucks those visitors will only stay as long as it takes to find their back button. If your content rocks you can turn those visitors into customers who come back time and again to read your stuff. Here are some basic tips that I use when creating content.

1. Write in a clear and easy to understand manner. Your visitors will appreciate not having to break out the dictionary.
2. Understand your audience and write content that they will find timely and useful. Try to write content that either answers a question they have or solves a problem.
3. Subscribe and/or bookmark Copyblogger.com it’s a resource that I can’t recommend enough. Read everything they have ever written and you will be miles closer to your goal.

4. Social networking and Social bookmarking

Alright! You have a well coded website full of helpful and timely resources targeted at your audience. Now it’s time to get eyeballs on your content and start developing relationships with the people who will be soon paying your bills. That is where social networking comes in. Social networking lets you connect with your customers, brings in thousands of visitors to your content, and provides your site with the inbound links we will be chasing in step 5.

There are hundreds of social networking websites with more popping up every day. No matter your industry there are bound to be sites where customers who are passionate about what you do hang out. You will want to find those places and start contributing to the discussion there. It is important that you contribute and become a valuable resource before you start pushing your service otherwise you will be shunned as a spammer.

Regardless of your industry I would highly recommend getting a Facebook page and a twitter account. Even if you don’t start using them right away this will reserve the name and prevent anyone from stealing it from under you. You will also want to join a couple traffic generating social networks to bring in the visitors.  Which ones to join depends on the type of content you produce. Here is a good resource for determining which sites are the best fits for your website. You will want to pick a couple that you think give you a chance to really connect with your audience.

5. Build inbound links

Inbound links are one of the main factors for both increasing search engine results and increasing pagerank.  Google especially uses inbound links as a major indicator of the quality of a web page. This includes links from other pages on a web site but links from other websites are given a greater rank. Not all inbound links are equal though so while every link has value links from websites with high PR are especially valuable. Here are a few simple tips to getting high quality inbound links that will really push your traffic and pagerank.

1. Do steps 3 and 4 over and over and over again. If you can create content that people want to read and promote that content on the social networks you can bring in thousands of high quality, highly relevant inbound links with little effort.
2. Syndicate your content at article and eZine websites such as EzineArticles. These articles find themselves spread over the internet quickly and each one contains a link to your website.
3. Submit your website to as many directories as possible but focus on getting into the big ones for your industry. Especially try to get your site listed on DMOZ as it still carries a lot of weight with search engines. The key is only submit to directories that are free and that don’t require you to link back.
4. Don’t forget local search and websites. If you run a brick and mortar business get a local listing in the search engines.

In Closing

Developing a website for long term search engine traffic may seem like a lot of work at first but it really isn’t. What stops most people from achieving success in the search engines is a lack of dedication. Instead of putting in the time to build up their site they either give up too soon or waste all their energy trying to game the system. I promise that if you stick with these 5 basic principles you will not only develop a site that gets search engine results, but you will build real long term relationships with your customers and keep them coming back time and again.

This was a big topic to try and tackle in one post so there was a lot left uncovered or glossed over so please feel free to post any questions in the comments and I’ll be happy to answer them.