I have been meeting a bunch of great local people thanks to my association with our local Net Squared group Net2NO . (update: in town? come out tomorrow night: http://netsquared.meetup.com/27/)
And one of them, David Robinson , who heads the local Adobe Multimedia Users Group asked me to speak to his group all about website promotion . It was a lot of fun, and I met even more great local folks and got to work on a much longer talk than I’m accustomed to.
The talk was an SEO 101 of sorts and was a lot of fun. We ended with a site clinic in which I reviewed and made some recommendations for some of the attendees.
I always say that I’d love to teach. I think there is too little real-world tactical online marketing eduction for the masses.
Holy cow it’s taken me a long time to write this! But that’s good news because I’ve been adding to my own understanding in the meantime.
I have been intending to post on this since before my friend Chris Schultz wrote his “10 Tips for Launching Your Startup” in which he brushed on the core concept, the Customer Engagement Cycle: A C I P R (Awareness, Consideration, Inquiry, Purchase and Retention (Referral)).
Take for instance the “Referral” above, I’ve come to realize that this is as valuable as “Retention” in the model. And sometimes is more effectively leveraged toward referral than repurchase.
Chris Schultz and I were both reminded of this at a recent Net2NO meeting (New Orleans Net Squared Group) by Chris Skinner, a New Orleans local and a big-brand search pioneer.
Being an entrepreneur trying to lead our business, with a little tunnel vision, I tried to apply it to my own recent experience, and below I’ll share that with you.
At the time, “awareness” seemed a heady concept but I’ve since come to recognize how it applies to what we do. Often as not, our customers’ “Customer” is already Aware. They know the product exists. There are clearly times, however, when it behooves us to drive awareness as well, and I’ll close with that story. As you think about these, their meaning is pretty obvious but I’ll editorialize in case it’s not all the way there for you.
Customer Engagement Cycle Defined
Awareness
“Hey, check that out. I didn’t know that was an option. Wow, that’s kinda cool. Glad I saw that”
Consideration
“You know, that thing I saw might fill this need / desire. Hmmm”
Inquiry
“Hi, I heard about that thing, and I have a need. Do you guys have that thing? Do you think that thing fits my need? Could I come down and talk about that?”
Purchase
If anybody is unclear on “Purchase” raise your hand please.
Retention
“Hi Bob, this is Suzie down at widget-town. I wanted to check in and see how you’re enjoying that thing. Oh really, that’s great! Glad to hear it. Keep an eye on your inbox because we’ve signed you up for our newsletter with some great tips on maintaining that thing. Thanks again Bob, we appreciate you.”
So, Skinner gives his talk and I say “yeah, yeah, Awareness — big brand heady stuff”.
Consideration, I get that. That’s what keyword research is for, right? You’re thinking about it, you’re typing it into Google and I’m taking you where my client wants you to go.
Inquiry – that’s when conversion matters. You’re asking questions, I’ve got answers and I need you to know how to get those questions answered. Once you arrive, I need to get you in our funnel so we can make sure you make it to the next step.
Purchase…
… cha-ching!
Retention: or as my step-father always said it’s much easier to sell to someone who’s already bought from you.
But what about referral? Your customers can be your fans if you let them. My friend Mack Collier talked about social media as “Making Yourself a Rock Star” and I think it was taken in the wrong connotation. His intent was not that you should put yourself on a pedestal, engage in substance abuse and fly around in private jets, it was that if you made a point to make fans from your customers you would have all the free promotion that fanaticism brings.
I often reference my BNI membership and it proves the value of a good referral.
For instance, one of my BNI fellows recommended us to a friend who is having a reputation management issue. I met the guy for lunch on Friday, we talked for an hour and he signed for a nice sized one-time fee. I was pre-sold by the referral and it got us past the point of proving the value to discussing the issues.
Finally, back to Awareness and a couple recent stories which led me to my to rethink my perspective.
One of our clients is among a very few plastic surgeons in the US who have had special training in a combination procedure called Lipoabdominoplasty. This is, essentially a tummy tuck with upper abdominal liposuction. There are a number of benefits, which I’m not near qualified to talk about, but suffice it to say it’s a less invasive tummy tuck with shorter recovery time and, many would say, better looking outcomes.Week before last, they had an appointment scheduled by a patient from California. They’re in New Jersey! Do you think there aren’t any qualified surgeons in California, clearly there are, but by virtue of promoting this specialized procedure our guy was able to garner interest from the plastic surgery capital of the world.
This lady was ready to fly cross-country for a revolutionary procedure — that’s Awareness!
And really finally on Awareness, I had an epiphany about Twitter. How many of you have heard of Twitter ? Twitter is a micro-blogging platform used for quick messaging encompassing both broadcast and dialog. For those of you not using it, it’s like instant-messaging to hundreds at a time, with the occasional conversation breaking out. It’s definitely a bit of work to find out with whom you’d like to connect, but once you get going you’ll find it easy to grow those connections.
In thinking of Twitter and some of the things we’ve got going on with a couple clients I came to the realization that Awareness isn’t necessarily a big-brand issue. Awareness often applies to making a prospective customer Aware you exist.
So, we’ve got a couple customers who are building Twitter followings. In one case, the Twit (he he) is a young lady who is already enmeshed in social media and for whom it’s a natural form of communication. She is engaged in the community and sharing information and her follower base is growing quite nicely.Oh, and they’re also running the occasional giveaway — on Twitter.
The impact in links and mentions in blogs and real media is nothing short of amazing! People who never heard of these guys are getting exposed, becoming Aware and spreading the word.
Will it work for everyone? No, probably not as well. These guys have a consumer product which is ripe for giveaways and, given the demographics of Twitter, inherently viral.
These two instances the plastic surgeon and the retailer have completely changed my thinking about the Awareness component of the customer Engagement Cycle.
There is a place for us there, but it is more a function of PR then traditional website promotion in the search engines. Sure, these two cases have a search ranking perspective, but the bulk of the traffic, Awareness and interest is outside of the search engine results pages.
I find that as I look at the work we do for our customers it is helpful to think in terms of the Customer Engagement Cycle. Are we messaging appropriately? Do we have the tools we need to measure? And are we on a path to Purchase?
That last is the hardest question to answer when you’re thinking about Awareness, but our experience thus far indicates that the right kind of Awareness will definitely lead to Purchase.
How can/do you apply ACIPR to your actions with your customers (or prospects) today?
I’m proud to announce that I have been asked to take part in a new Local Search News site http://www.localsearchnews.net/ (note: Local Search News is dead and we’ve moved the Barnacle SEO post to the Search Influence blog.
And, my first post is live!
In this post I argue that with a judicious application of Barnacle SEO, even the smallest budgets can have an impact on small business website promotion.
Small business owners are generally a frugal lot.
Of course there are some who’ve got the budget to invest heavily as long as they see a return, but what about those who don’t?
A long time ago someone coined the phrase “Parasite SEO” talking about the abuse of Blogger and WordPress.com to get better search term positioning. I love the term, but “parasite” is just so ugly sounding. I prefer “Barnacle SEO.”
Barnacle SEO: attaching oneself to a large fixed object and waiting for the customers to float by in the current.
People also ask
Is SEO still alive?
Who is king of SEO?
How important is SEO?
I’ve been so busy with the turn of the year that I forgot to mention that I had a rare opportunity to contribute to Mike Blumenthal’s Loci 2008.
For those of you who don’t know, Mike is THE authority on Google Maps and Local.
I’m very proud to have been asked to take part and would gladly do it again!
My contribution is here, excerpt follows:
Search Influence has been in business since 2006 but 2008 is the year I realized there is a community of like-minded folks and engaged with that community.
I made an offhanded comment on Tim’s blog for which Mike called me out and the rest is history.
So, David asks, I contribute — surely not as knowledgeably as some and it leads to one of the most valuable events I’ve attended: The SLOMO Local Search Sit Down as chronicled in David’s conference recap. Talk about some heavy hitters — the biggest names in Local Search around one table for the evening.
The Yellow Pages Association has launched a blog .
I added it to my feed reader under Local Search. I put it there because I don’t have a category for Dinosaur or Dead Trees or Dying industry 🙂
I kid — I think the Yellow Pages has 5-10 years of life left in it.
There may be some consolidation and there will certainly be heroic efforts to save it, but ultimately it will completely lose relevance in a world of ubiquitous connection.
Trust: to have confidence or faith in Authority: the power or right to give orders or make decisions Yellow Pages: a telephone directory listing businesses by category
Often as Search Marketers we use words which have been redefined by our industry without thinking about how they’ll be understood by customers.
“Trust” however has the same meaning to marketers and customers. We just need to understand the differences in how trust is measured by our customers and the search engines.
When talking with clients I often slip into SEO-speak and use the term “authority” differently than above.
My use comes from the idea of “Authority Sites”, and “Hubs and Authorities” in the search algorithms.
But customers need an example, like: “The same phrase on YouTube has much higher likelihood to rank than on drkim.com because YouTube is an authority site“.
Really though it’s about Trust. How much do the search engines trust your site? What are the signifiers of trust? Are they the same for search engines and humans?
As it turns out, they are. When trying to describe the concept of Authority I often use the analogy of personal referrals. “It’s one thing for me to tell you how cool I am, but if you hear it from 30 other people you’re more likely to believe it, right”?
It’s the same for the search engines. Ultimately they’re looking for indications of your trustworthiness. There’s a great point here relative to off-page SEO but for today let’s talk about the Yellow Pages and what we can learn about human behavior from 100 + years of experience.
New Haven directory, November, 1878.
For many years, the Yellow Pages ad design process has been directed by adherence to what are called the “RASCIL Factors”.
RASCIL is a way of distilling down the elements of an effective add to communicate many of the most pertinent decision making factors for a Yellow Pages shopper.
What might not be wholly intuitive, however, is that many of these factors speak directly to the idea of building trust.
I’m reminded of my friend Jerry Kennedy of KAMS Construction who’s tagline is
“At KAMS, the first thing we build is your trust”.
Yellow Pages – Fingers Walking
The RASCIL Factors
RELIABILITYTime in Business, Affiliations, Memberships and Certifications, Guarantees, Size of Firm
SPECIAL FEATURES AND/OR SECURITYCredit Cards and payment options, Hours of operation, Special Services
COMPLETENESS OF SERVICEProduct Types, Pickup and Delivery, Buy, Rent and Lease
ILLUSTRATIONHigh Impact Pictures and Headline
LOCATION Location or Locations, Areas Served
As you can see, a lot of this actually makes for good web design too. Or as Tim Coleman says, Local Seo Is Easy… Just Create A Good .
Hard at Work Thanks to The Yellow Pages
Authority and Trust in Website Promotion
It’s unfortunate that small businesses no longer have such ready access to that friendly and helpful Yellow Pages sales agent.The great news is that many who are marketing online have little experience with traditional media, including Yellow Pages advertising.
Additionally, most of your competition don’t know how to appear trustworthy to the search engines.
Just as your web site (or any ad) needs to instill trust in humans, your online behavior needs to instill trust in the search engines. And interestingly, there’s a pretty strong correlation to theRASCIL factors.
Below are just a few examples:
Reliability: Time in business (domain age), Affiliations (links from chambers of commerce, BBB, professional accrediting organizations), Mentions in regional / national press
Authorization : Authorized brands (links from manufacturer / distributor web sites)
Location: Do you deserve to show up on that map result?
Illustrations: Does your site look professional? Does it match the marketing message which brought the visitor
Unfortunately, there are some things which are harder to affect. You can’t reset your domain registration age. It may be possible to buy an old domain but the chances of buying one relevant to what you do are very slim.
Simply put: trust = links.
And authority matters. A link from the BBB is worth 100 from a free links directory. If you’re a real business though, most of those authoritative, trustworthy, links are easy to acquire…
… just ask.
A Happy Customer
And best of all, many of the steps you take to appear more trustworthy to the search engines are equally valuable offline — to the human beings with whom you want to do business.
My friend, and a very smart local entrepreneur, Chris Schultz wrote an interesting piece entitled 10 Tips for Launching Your Startup in which he makes a pretty bold statement relative to PR (that’s public relations, not PageRank, for you search geeks).
There are a ton of other great posts on startups and bootstrapping including a recent one from a guy I’ve been reading since he was in print Guy Kawasaki.
So, whether or not a young startup needs a PR firm will no doubt be hotly debated for some time to come but I think there’s an important message in there: make a positive contribution.
Mr. Roberts calls the office last night looking for one of our writers, Andrew Stratton. Turns out Andrew Stratton is an amalgam. I don’t want to call him fictitious, because he’s based on a young man who used to work with us but he represents the occasional work of 30 or so of our writers.
We use these aggregators, if you will, for expedience and issues of ownership. If we had to set up accounts on multiple content sites in the name of a new writer each time our pool expanded or contracted we’d never get anything done.
Well, needless to say, Mr. Roberts was a little surprised at the news. Turns out he found the position taken in the pieces interesting enough to reach out and it turns out there’s no one but me to whom he can talk.
I’m sure there are other companies like ours who understand that publishing content is a great way to obtain links. We publish a ton of content and Andrew Stratton gets the byline on a lot of it.
But here’s the point, and I think it’s well spoken to by Chris’ statements regarding PR . Ultimately we’re responsible for making a positive contribution to the online dialog and I think this is what Mr. Roberts was responding to. He found the position taken a little inconsistent with his view and the voice authoritative enough to give him pause.
Unmasked or not, Andrew Stratton contributed to the dialog in a positive way. We created content in support of a client which was accepted as authoritative and a valid basis for dialog — Mission accomplished.
Hopefully we can keep the conversation going with Deon and City Business and fulfill Chris’ assertions regarding PR .
Updated after another day of marathon editing by Aimee:
Wow!
Talk about some great feedback!
Thanks to everyone’s input we already have an updated theme incorporating all that feedback.
Please feel free to reference the original (and of course the comments). I’m feeling pretty good about the current design. I think it needs a little more polish, like amplification of the navigation but otherwise it’s approaching Ideal. Then of course there’s the sub-pages and blog-theme (whew, it’s a good thing Aimee ‘s a friend of mine).
So without further ado, here’s the version incorporating all the feedback of the last couple days + some which didn’t make the blog, like my mom :).
Revised to include all commentary – Click Image for Full Size View
UPDATE: We have incorporated all of the weekend’s input and put together a new version ).
Please go have a look! And of course, feel free to look at the below and comment in either place.
—
My good friend and colleague Aimee Ellingsen, a fabulous designer who’s portfolio is a little overweight in plastic surgeon web sites, is helping me out with a redesign of the Search Influence web site.
Like many sites, the Search Influence site has grown organically and is now a bit of a jumbled mess.
So, Aimee being a diligent designer and a little obsessive has put together 3 gorgeous site layouts. They are by no means press ready but they sketch some broad strokes of concepts, colors and sensibility.
I’m not going to say which is my favorite (mostly because I have more than one) but I have elements of each that I love. These represent a great variety from which to choose. The biggest challenge is one of self-definition: who are we? what do we do? with whom do we want most to work? — all that kinda stuff.
Good questions. I know the answers to some and hopefully in this design process we’ll find answers to the rest.
You may click the image below to see the full size mock-up image.
Layout #1
Layout #2
Layout #3
Thanks in advance for your feedback! I’m excited to get this finalized and implemented (hopefully by the new year).
Will
Update: It occurs to me, since I’m asking for your opinions, if you have sites which you think are good examples of what we’re after here please feel free to link to them in your comments.
BBB, BizzSpot partnership takes a shady tack to entice local businesses.
So, it’s taken me a few days to get back to this, but I was blown away by a recent cold-call from a company purporting to be the marketing arm of the Better Business Bureau.
I think everybody knows that the BBB is a commercial venture, but this was a little over the top.
Here’s why I liken it to Merchant Circle: The caller says “This is Valerie calling for William Scott. Calling on behalf of the better business bureau if you could please contact me at 888-xxx-xxxx. Thank you.”
Notice, nowhere does the caller indicate she’s calling to sell me something. So here I am presuming it’s something about a complaint or a renewal or something.
I feel compelled to get back to them.
Surely it’s not as bad as Merchant Circle telling me I’ve got bad reviews, but c’mon, why else would the BBB be calling.
So I call Valerie back and she instantly goes into how she’s so excited to hear from me because we are a search marketing company. She then asks me how I would self identify and I say “internet marketing” and she walks me into a search for “New Orleans Internet Marketing” (for which we’re second organically and #3 on the map behind neworleansinternetmarketing [dot] com which I feel pretty good about given our low level of effort).
” at which point she shows me a sponsored listing in the right hand margin at about half-mast. In the example it’s at least top of page.
Clearly I was impressed. Makes my organic and earned map ranking pale in comparison, no? 😉
So I asked “how much”? And I think she said $195.00 a month! Really though, it’s a bargain compared to $300.00 for Yelp! I’m not 100% sure that was the quoted amount and I may call back just because.
Like a dope I hustled to get off the phone. She offered to let me talk to a specialist and I said no rather than sticking around to get the real dope.
Handyman Columbus OH
Then I decided to do a little more digging. I backed out from “Local Handyman in Columbus OH” (a little long-tail to get much bang for that $195) and tried something more likely “Handyman Columbus OH” I saw our sponsored link and two 10 pack listings for different advertisers on BizzSpot: “Affordable Handyman” and “Handyman Professionals”. The website address on the “Handyman Professionals” listing goes to some guy in San Francisco (?!).
And, the on-page optimization is awful — no h1, bad title — a generally weak offering.
In short, I’m confused. BBB & BizzSpot have put together what looks like a mediocre listing product, with some attempt at distribution.
It seems as though the BBB is taking advantage of its members in a Merchant Circle style approach to position a weak eLocalListing knockoff at 4X the price. I know it’s not the eLocal co-brand because Steve would never let such drek out the door.
If anyone else has gotten this call and stuck around to listen to the full rap I’d love to hear about it.
Inquiry
Purchase…
In thinking of 
When talking with clients I often slip into SEO-speak and use the term “authority” differently than above.
