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Posted by rebecca

In an earlier post I had mentioned that I started reading Web Design for ROI by Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus (check out their website for more information on the book). Today I thought I'd share some tidbits from chapter 3, Managing for ROI.

1.  Know What You Want

• What do you want your website to accomplish?
• To you, how satisfying is your website's design/usability?

Ask yourself the following questions:

• "How can we use our site to achieve organizational objectives?"
• "What opportunities are we missing because we have a poor/mediocre website compared to our competitors?"

These tips are concise, yet powerful. So many companies think "We need a website" without truly considering why they need a website. What's the benefit? What are your goals? What do you need your website to do? Also, competitive intelligence is an invaluable resource. Who is beating you in your sphere or industry, and what are they doing that you're not? Are they providing free tools? Offering discounts? Better customer support? Attractive images? It's imperative to analyze your competitors' websites to see what content they provide, which keywords they focus on, who's linking to them, etc.

2.  Know Your Audience

You're not designing the site for yourself, you're designing it for your audience. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Why are people coming to your site?
• What do they expect to find?
• How can you make your site easier for visitors to use?

It's important to think of your site from your user's perspective. Consider doing some user testing on your website--a fresh set of eyes are always good to have. Think about how you ask someone to proofread your work, or how people hire you to do site reviews for their website. The same goes for your website--you look at it and work with it every day, so someone new may very well catch something that you've been overlooking.

3.  Treat Your Website Like a Business

Think about how your site contributes to your business's goals as a whole. Your site should complement your business plan.

4.  Create a Website Strategy

Have a site strategy--establish clear goals, communicate with your team, and work to implement those goals. The following is a suggested strategy:

• List your site's objectives. Don't confuse objectives with strategies--objectives are goals, whereas strategies are how you achieve your objectives. Objectives are the "what," while strategies are the "how."
• List your primary and secondary audiences. Your primary audience should be who you hope will receive the greatest ROI, while your secondary audience is everyone else. Consider crafting personas or audience profiles to better understand your audience's point of view.
• Draft a list of questions your audience may have when they're browsing your site, such as "How does your service/product work?", "How much does it cost?", "How does using this product benefit me?", "Is there any printed material I can obtain?", Do you have any partnership opportunities?", etc. Some questions will be specific to your site's niche.
• Analyze your competitors. I already mentioned this earlier, but be sure to study your competitors' site, their calls to action, their landing pages, etc.
• Break down your site's traffic sources. What percentage of your traffic derives from organic search, paid search, email marketing, banner ads, direct navigation, partner sites, etc? Think about tweaking your design and offering separate landing pages based on where your traffic is coming from (chapter 4 goes more in-depth with landing pages).
• Strategize. Revisit your objectives and flesh out specific strategies you'll execute in order to complete them.
• Understand which metrics you'll need to track in order to measure your strategy's success. Which leads us to the next section...

5.  Measure the Right Metrics

This section cautions against relying too heavily on some metrics while ignoring others. Loveday and Niehaus list some problems with web reporting (analytics) tools:

• There's too much data. Too many site owners obsess about the figures without really thinking about what they mean or why they're like that.
• They aren't perfect. Lots of you know that different analytics programs report different stats. Don't worry or freak out that different programs are providing conflicting figures. Think about the data in a relative sense, much like keyword research tools. What you don't want to do is not trust analytics simply because you think the numbers aren't 100% accurate.
• They lack context. Don't just look at your analytics and say "We had 5,000 visitors today." Is that good? Bad? Look at the bigger picture and consider your stats as a whole. Know how to take the analytics information and read into it.

Key principles of measuring the success of your website include:

• Focus on what people do vs. what they say. Don't ask someone how they would find a specific product on your site--watch them try to do it.
• Think of success metrics in dollar figures. Which is easier to wrap your head around, "Our conversion rate improved to 2.7%" or "By increasing our conversion rate, sales improved $200,000"?
• Focus on trends. See if your metrics increase long-term vs. just a one day fluke spike. Don't obsess about something that could be nothing more than a short-term, fleeting gain.
• Emphasize consistency over accuracy. As mentioned earlier, analytics aren't 100% accurate, so instead focus on how consistent the metrics are.
• Integrate your site with various metrics. Hopefully, you should be able to track your customer's behavior from start to finish.

Metrics that matter include business metrics (what your organization uses to measure success at a high level), site metrics (analytics, etc), and user metrics (user feedback). Metrics that don't matter include traffic (if you have a bunch of visitors but no conversions, the traffic doesn't mean much), the time on site and average page views (good directional indicators, but they can easily be misinterpreted), hits (it's not 1997 any more!), and survey (the questions can be subjective, they're often poorly worded, skew responses to people more willing to take the survey).

6.  Prioritize Design Efforts Intelligently

Most people design their website in the following order:

From an ROI perspective, however, design attention should focus on:

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Search Engine Strategies New York had something for everyone, including tips for small business marketers. In today's Small Business Search Marketing column, "Small Business SEM Takeaways from SES NY," Carrie Hill shares some of the pointers she found for SMBs.

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Wall Street is acting with caution when it comes to Google based on months of reporting that the search engine giant's paid search clicks are declining. But Google insists that the click reductions are due to improvement in the quality of the ads, not because Google is somehow losing its luster.

The timing for this move may be poor, however. A Business Week article points out that some advertisers may be cutting their ad spend due to a slower economy.

Still, Google is smart to perform quality assurance. As any good search engine marketer knows, the answer lies in revenues, not clicks. Everyone wants their conversion ratio to be as low as possible, and Google is smart to keep their eye on providing quality for the user (both buyers and clickers). A temporary slowdown in growth is far better than ignoring a quality issue and seeing sustained declines down the road.

Q4 2007 revenues showed growth but came in just under Wall Street's expectations. This coincided with news of a slowdown in clicks. We won't see Q1 revenues until sometime next month, but that will give some insight into whether or not Google is on the right track.

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Full-service digital marketing agency Geary Interactive has acquired Fathom Online, a search engine marketing firm. Though Geary already offered search marketing services, the company says it will expand it demographic reach as a result of the merger.

Geary CEO Andreas Roell said, "The combination of Geary and Fathom Online provides a compelling platform for today's digital marketing landscape. Together, we offer powerful capabilities and deep relationships with publishers and engines, expanded end-to-end customized marketing solutions, a national presence and extensive industry category experience."

The acquisition also highlights the need for integrating SEM campaigns with a larger online marketing strategy.

"Search engine tactics are the most popular element of a digital marketing campaign. In order to effectively generate search demand and convert customers' search clicks, the campaign must also include a strong integration with web development, paid and organic digital media planning and data analytics," said Roell.

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The drop in AdWord clicks over the past two months has created a bump Google's ongoing success. But not to worry, CEO Eric Schmidt told Business Week, people will eventually pay more for the better quality clicks.

There has been a lot of press about this lately. I think "Google's Gamble" as Business Week called it may be expecting too much. If the cost of their clicks continues to increase through their minimum bid and Quality Score push people may start using Yahoo and Microsoft first.

While their popularity will continue to give them the high volume of traffic, if Yahoo and Microsoft offer lower CPA (cost per acquisition) then the strategy of starting with Google because of that could be changed to get the lower costing conversions first and then test the successful ones over at Google.

If this happens then the edge Google has could drop. It is one thing to be the popular search engine for users, but if they lose their position as the popular engine for advertisers then they are almost back to the days when they had no idea how to monetize their engine.

Obviously in some cases where there is a big enough margin in what is being marketed advertisers will buy the more expensive clicks. But in the case of companies selling small margin items such a move will make it difficult.

Apart from the Quality Score influence, this move suggests Google is using information they are getting from Google Analytics to determine if people will pay more. This is a dangerous step for a number of reasons - one, the privacy issues could be a problems and stop this and two, many people using GA may not be doing so effectively, measuring the wrong thing and thus giving Google information that they use but is not real.

We will all have to wait and see if their hopes are founded.

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Posted by randfish

I wanted to try an experiment tonight and leverage a bit of the terrific community vibe and willingness to share we've got here at SEOmoz.

In the comments below, share your top 3 most bizarre, unique, unconventional or simply unexpected link building tactics. They can be specific, broad or even a little coy. The rest of us will go through and reward with thumbs up depending on how valuable we consider the techniques to be. Then, on Friday morning (the 4th), we'll give the member who gets the most thumbs up in the comments a free one-week trial to SEOmoz PRO.

I'll start with 6 of my favorite offbeat link building techniques (to help set the bar high)

• Whenever you make use of several vendors in an industry or have a depth of experience with them, create a blog post, article or content page with a list of your "favorites" ranked in a particular order, then email each of the mentioned sites and tell them that they're welcome to use a "testimonial" quote you've written about them and also link to the "rankings" page. Companies love to link to anything ego-boosting.
• Have a quick trigger finger on popular news sites that allow comments and try to be one of, if not, the first comment and mention a URL on your site that better explains your point or offers more insight. This works particularly well with politcally focused stories. The only caveat is that you need a repository of relevant material to draw on. Also note - if your URL is long, you can use tinyurl.com for this purpose (which also creates a sense of mystery as to what you might be linking to). The comments themselves are nofollowed (or don't even allow hyperlinking), but even just the printed URL will get plenty of copy-and-paste traffic from big sites.
• Be on of the first users of a given social network, and make sure to mention or include your URL in either your username or your account profile. Frequently, new services will blog about who joined them just after launch.
• Embed popular media with your brand in hilariously irresistable ways - Rick Astley + your logo doing karaoke FTW! Check out Shoemoney's genius McLovin ID cards as an example.
• Every time you send out a new customer email, send a snippet of code they can paste into the "partners" section of their website that will display your logo and a link back to your site (this works particularly well for B2B companies who like to show off their "partnerships").
• Create a wallpaper and screensaver with your company's brand and submit it to all the free wallpaper/screensaver galleries. The vast majority allow you to link back to your original source (or a profile site).

Now let's see who's got the best 3 link building tactics out there...

p.s. Already have SEOmoz PRO membership? We'll mail you a deck of SEOmoz Werewolf Cards or a t-shirt (as if thumbs themselves weren't enough of an incentive).

p.p.s. Couple more rules - you can accumulate points for multiple posts, so if you post 3 comments, each with 3 link building tactics, we'll combine the thumbs score (but subtract 2 points to compensate for extra thumbs up you give yourself). Also - in order for your comment below to be considered an entry it needs to actually contain 3 link building tactics, so we won't count every comment.

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Graduation is on the horizon, and Facebook is making the most of its college-heavy demographic by teaming up with CareerBuilder. The partnership will primarily target college grads in an attempt to assist them during their job search. Recruiters have traditionally experience difficulty in reaching this particular market, despite the various channels for job listings available.

Users will be able to place a CareerBuilder app on their profile page. If successful, this could be a great first step in Facebook building trust with users again. Last year, the social network blew it when its Beacon platform accessed user preferences for advertising - without user permission. The CareerBuilder app will require user permission first.

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