It’s a simple question but one that could increase your company’s profit when applied to your business.  I came up with this title as I sat in a company meeting the other day. Our EVP was telling a story about the cohesiveness that needs to occur between a website and a search engine marketing campaign. A past client in the cookie business wasn’t getting the kind of ROI on their cookie products that they were seeking. Their search engine marketing campaign was great but their cookie sales weren’t increasing. After some extensive research, my EVP pulled out her credit card and attempted to buy some cookies online. After attempting to buy cookies online for fifteen minutes and still not completing an order, she called the client and asked, “Have You Bought Your Own Cookies?”  The client was a little taken back, but went to their site and attempted to buy cookies. The client called back and said I understand.  The next step for them was optimizing their site’s usability.

 This is the same question that any company should ask themselves from time to time. Switch perspectives and become the consumer, the person checking out the internet. Would you sign up for a newsletter or buy products from yourself if you had never heard of your company? Some company’s aren’t realistic when it comes to this question. Their pages don’t load quickly, their site looks prehistoric, the content is too generic and not targeted to the audience, they have poor site navigation and the list can go on. If any of these issues sound familiar then you should look into optimizing the user friendliness of your site. Not only will it help your organic positions it will help your search engine marketing campaign. Optimization is a good for business.  Think about it, you can have the best ad copy in the world, have the best positions, and good keywords, but if people are appalled or confused by your site when they get there, they aren’t going to stay.  They are going hit the back button and find a competitors ad and get what they’re looking for in no time at all.

Optimization is a must for both good organic traffic and for a good search engine marketing campaign to perform at its’ best. The next time you’re looking to increase online productivity, go ahead and ask yourself the question. “Have I Bought My Own Cookies?” You may be surprised to find that your need to optimize your site’s usability.

So you may be thinking something along the lines of, “I have optimized my meta data, looked at the keyword density on the pages, made sure that my URLs are search engine friendly, but I still am not happy with my site’s rankings. What else can I do?”  Well the real answer, is what else can you not do?  The opportunities that fall under the umbrella of ways to improve your site’s rankings are seemingly endless. Today I wanted to focus on a few different ways that can help to improve your overall online presence, all of which come back to the same goal- bringing visitors to your site.

It’s a great start if you have optimized the current content and meta data on your site, but are you adding new content and with what frequency?  Blogs are a great way to share news, ideas, or facts about certain topics with visitors to your site. Yes, this goes back to the saying which still holds true, “content is king” and this is just another way to keep it fresh and updated.  As topics are discussed frequently, visitors will become engaged, will be more likely to view your site as a resource, and will come back often for more information or discussions.

Another way to interact with potential customers is to have a presence in social media. A presence in online communities can enable you to reach a whole new market of potential customers that you may not have been able to reach otherwise. Through profiles on social networking sites, you can communicate and build trust with these potential customers. This can often make them feel more comfortable about working with you. Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn are probably the first three social media sites that come to mind, but there are many others that you can benefit from.

Press releases, which we all know can help with branding efforts, also can contribute to your site’s visibility in natural rankings. When optimized and distributed, press releases have the potential to be picked up by the search engine spiders almost instantaneously.  A keyword rich and targeted press release can provide inbound links and can also be added to the site as another way to incorporate fresh content.

The value of linking should never be overlooked. Inbound links can be gained through all of the above- blogs, social media, and press releases.  These ‘votes’ to your site tells the search engines that another site considers yours to be a valuable resource.  Local directories, organizational directories, and chamber of commerce directories are also great places to start obtaining quality inbound links.

So if you are interested at looking into ways to enhance your site’s visibility outside of the fundamental SEO efforts, these are a few important tactics to consider.

Want your SEM program to perform better?  Your website’s landing pages should be built in the mindset of the searcher.

In working with many websites that have an SEM strategy, I consistently find that most have similar core limitations. Here,  I will focus on the landing page limitations I find most often.  However unique to the website itself, I find most sites have very few landing pages and they are much too generic to garner strong conversion rates.

Companies participate in SEM for several reasons, whether it is lead generation, e-commerce, B2B, or B2C. Regardless of the business you have, your website is your online store.  I find it interesting that companies spend countless amounts of dollars creating experiences for brick and mortar stores to be appealing to various demographics. They will spend countless more dollars designing the layout of the store to be intuitive to a shopper, so that the in-store shopping experience is inviting and begs the shopper to come back and tell everyone else they know about it.  So, why is it that so many companies don’t apply this same degree of scrutiny to their website?

An online shopper is looking for a product specific to their needs, so you should investigate and learn who those shoppers are. Then, just as you would build your actual store, you should build your website’s landing pages to be attractive and speak to their individual needs/applications.  These pages are your store displays; they should be intuitive for the searcher to understand how your products or services are relevant to them.

Great, so how does one go about doing this?  To help you understand how your landing pages should be built, I will give an example.  A company, I shall name Acme, sells a software product and targets specific industries: construction, accounting, and manufacturing.  A representative in each of these industries goes to Acme’s website to find out how this product is going to help them in their specific application.  Each one of these searchers is looking for information about the software and specifics for how the product can be utilized in their application.  Each searcher clicks on the ad it found for Acme and is directed to Acme’s request more information generic form page.  The form has some content that gives a little blurb about Acme and its software product, however the information is generic.  Oh, and then there is a form to fill out.  Hmmm…the searcher is wondering “how is this software going to work for me?  I don’t understand” So, now the searcher is a little worried that this may not be what they are looking for, because there wasn’t any information specific to their needs.  They are thinking about doing some further searches before giving out their contact information when it may be irrelevant. And, poof, the searcher leaves your website; opportunity lost.

Landing page limitations can critically affect your conversions. To remedy this problem involves a very simple strategy!  This searcher would have much rather been directed to a landing page that speaks to their needs and gives information about how this software product can help them in their own specific application.  After reading a more relevant summary of how the product works for them, the form has become more relevant, and thus, the searcher is much more likely to fill it out.

This same concept should be applied to the rest of your website!  You should find out who you customers are, and why they are interested in your product or service.   Then, apply this knowledge by creating multiple landing pages, each that speak to the different needs of your customers and the keywords that they are utilizing.  The more the searcher can understand how your product or service works for them, the more willing they will be to convert.  Now… get to work… you have a quite a few landing pages to create.