Ideas for Business

This week I’ll try something a little different with our BIGLIST of online marketing blogs reviews and share a screen shot of the week’s best looking SEO blog to be added.

That honor goes to Mikkel deMib Svendsen who’s been blogging for a very long time, except it’s been mostly in Danish.

Recently, Mikkel decided to launch a SEM blog in English, which is great news if you know Mikkel.  At my first SES conference I recall seeing this guy in a bright red suit taking lots of photos and not sure who he was. Then after seeing him speak on a few panels quickly realized the deep his search marketing knowledge he was offering.  Now you can get that insight online. This blog is a mix of both text and video SEO content, plus Mikkel has a new book on SEO you should check out.

And now for our SEM/SEO Blog reviews.

• Link Building Best Practices – Eric Ward, aka Link Moses aka old school OLB (original link builder) has re-launched a link building Q/A and tips blog that offers new and updated posts covering one of the most important aspects of boosting web site traffic directly and indirectly: links!  Of course, the blog already ranks #2 on Google for “link building best practices”.

• seo zombie – Justin Briggs is the recent winner of Marketing Pilgrims SEM Scholarship with tons of fabulous SEO prizes including a press release announcing his accomplishment from TopRank. Justin makes sense out of SEO by providing tips and observations on SEO basics ranging from keywords to blogs to SEO Lessons.

• Everett Sizemore – Aka @balibones is the SEO at Gaiam and recently launched this blog dedicated to SEO. Gotta love the tag line because it’s keyword rich AND creative: “SEO Consultant – Organic Farmer of Keywords and Tomatoes”.

Be sure to visit these blogs and recommend them to your friends. Heck, add them to your Blogroll. We did!

Blogs included in the BIGLIST have every reason to express their SEO bloggedy awesomeness with an impressive badge.

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Ah, free Wordpress themes. I’m convinced they’re one of the biggest reasons Wordpress is the most popular blogging platform today. From one-column minimalism to grid-based magazine layouts, photoblogging styles to made-for-Adsense themes, there are free Wordpress themes for every taste- just download, install and activate!

But to set your blog apart, you’ll want to tweak that theme- and when I say tweak, I mean make small changes here and there. To make these tweaks to your theme of choice, a tool like the Firebug extension for Firefox can be very handy- but, really, any text editor will do.

1. Tweak your header
   Usually the first place new visitors will look, and a good place to start. Some themes include “theme options” pages that show up when you’ve activated the theme, and others include banner photos or graphics that can easily be replaced with your own. If you’re using the default Wordpress theme Kubrick, the aptly named Kubrickr will automatically find photos on Flickr for you to customize your header with. To get more in-depth, I recommend reading through Wordpress’ official codex page on Designing Headers.
2. Play with your widgets
   Most Wordpress theme designers “widgetize” their themes, and for good reason: widgets are probably the quickest way to personalize a Wordpress theme. Built-in widgets, available in every fresh installation of Wordpress, include widgets for displaying your Archives, Calendar, Recent Comments and so forth- and And if the theme you love isn’t widgetized, you can do it yourself.
3. Experiment with color
   Even slight changes to the colors on your site can have a big impact. Online tools such as the Color Scheme Designer can keep you busy for hours, or you can check out pre-made color schemes at sites like colr.org and GenoPal.
4. Change your fonts
   We used to have just two choices when it came to web fonts: serif or sans-serif. Today, we have methods like sIFR and FLIR, which replace your fonts using Flash, the newish Cufon, which doesn’t require Flash, and CSS3’s @font-face, which works by downloading the specified fonts.
5. Personalize your About page
   This one, which requires no CSS tweaking at all, just might be the most important way of all. Tweaking your About page, the only page that comes pre-built with Wordpress, is where you can truly let your personality shine through. A photo of yourself is always good, but you should feel free to add anything here that shows the world- or your readers, at least- who you are. You can read more about tweaking your About page in a previous post of mine.

Of course, we’ve only barely scratched the surface of the ways you can tweak your Wordpress theme. For more ways, the Wordpress Codex is an excellent place to start.

The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen is a number 1 ranking for a long tail keyword based on nothing more than on-page content. If you keep it simple and build great content, it can happen. But how?

Here’s the key:

• Write content that people love to read. They’ll stay on the page longer and tell their friends. High traffic + low bounce rate = big SEO plus.
• Use your primary keyword liberally. Not in a spammy way. In a natural language way. But don’t be afraid to use your keyword.
• Put some external links on that page. Nothing is more beautiful than great site navigation with relevant links. Be sure those links have relevant anchor text.

That’s about it. It’s a very simple formula. Very basic. Beautiful. And brilliant.

Sometimes, the best SEO is just to do what’s natural.

I’m constantly amazed, and often bemused, by the way online merchants find new and daft ways to kill online sales long before the prospect even considers buying. While searching for car insurance I couldn’t help but cringe while visiting the AA Ireland car insurance site:

AA Ireland Car Insurance homepage – Nice, clear design with strong headline, hero shot, bulleted benefits and nice CTAs

Let’s get a quote. Nice strong CTA. Cant miss it. But:

Oops, I forgot to accept a T&Cs challenge, which rather oddly appears after rather than before the main CTA flow

Not a big deal, but I’d hazard quite a few people get that challenge as the checkbox appears after the flow from headline to bullets to main CTA. I should also mention that whenever I see a challenge like this the site I’m visiting always loses a little bit of my “visitor equity”. I’ve written before about a very similar type of negative assurance – negative point of action assurances – which coincidentally was also based on an Irish insurance website.

Anyhow, back on track to get my AA car insurance quote. Step 1:

This is just Step 1? And I don’t even get my quote until Step 4.

What strikes you when you look at the form? What strikes me very quickly is that the AA expects me to invest a lot of time, and a whole lot of commitment, without indicating my benefit from this transaction. The progress indicator tells me I wont see a quote until Step 4, and I’m getting very cold feet at step 1.

Here’s where the negative point of action assurance really kills the deal. My mind turns back to that challenge – Please accept the data protection & privacy policy before getting a quote – which invokes negative apprehensions about my privacy. I’m no longer even considering whether the quote will be good or not. My thoughts have moved from “what if I dont get a good quote?” to “will they spam me for all eternity?“. This increased apprehension is only further aggravated when I go back and actually make the effort to read those T&Cs:

The incredible T&Cs that you must accept before the AA asks you to commit God-knows how much time and energy to see a potentially crap quote.

Smothering Your Prospects Before They Become Leads

When confronted with the AA’s long (unnecessary?) form I managed just 2 fields before bailing. Yep it took just 2 fields to decide that the perceived benefits of this interaction fell massively short of the commitment required. The AA doesn’t need all this data to price the premium, and my “visitor’s mind” now wonders how trustworthy this transaction actually is. Do you trust a company that insists on capturing everything about you without explicitly offering something in return? Will you commit to a transaction before you know what benefit you’ll derive from the transaction? Probably not.

The final nail in the coffin is the onerous legal T&Cs that users must accept before they can even view Step 1. This is what I “hear” – this transaction is all about us, about our terms and conditions, about our lead system, and about us pushing a sale on you later.

That perception might be misplaced, but since there’s no way in hell I’m going to read those T&Cs my next interaction will likely be with a competitor who thinks about me the customer. After all he’s only a click away.

Or Maybe 2 Clicks…

Quinn Direct wont get me either, even though they have 2 steps less than AA:

Quinn Direct are also a little too hot on commitment, and are likely to be spurned

So How Do You Nurture Your Insurance Leads?

In my opinion FBD do a great job of showing the quote without a large upfront commitment from users. They only collect the data required to generate the premium quote, without a requirement that you tell your life story. This one really hit the sweet spot for me:

FBD hit the sweet spot with low commitment, high return

Will FBD get my custom? Maybe, but one thing is for sure – The AA smothered me long before I came close to becoming a lead.

Want to read more?

1. Negative Point Of Action Assurances
2. Can Third Party Cookies Kill Your Sales?
3. IXQuick.com Private Meta Search – a good thing for SEO?

Google recently announced that it is incorporating photos of businesses in StreetView with Google Maps listings. I think this is great, except that there is one potential problem. What if StreetView has the wrong photo of a business or the wrong photo is uploaded to Google Maps and that confuses searchers who are looking for a particular business on a particular street in your town.

I imagine the following scenario taking place:

Service Clerk: Hi, welcome to XYZ Local Business. May I help you?

Customer: Oh, I looked for your business on Google Maps and was so confused when the photo of the building didn’t look a thing like yours. I spent 30 minutes trying to figure out if I was in the right place or not.

Clerk: Sorry to hear that. I can see how that would be confusing. I’ll have to let the owner of the business know about that.

Owner: (Walking into the store from the back room) About what?

Customer: I found your business in Google Maps and the photo in StreetView looked nothing like this building. It confused me. I didn’t know if I had the right business or not.

Clerk: She said she spent 30 minutes in the area looking around to see if she was in the right place.

Customer: Yes. I wasn’t sure. I kept driving up and down the street looking for the right building because the one in Google Maps didn’t look like this one at all.

Owner: Gee, I didn’t even know they had a picture of the building up there. We’ve had that listing in Google Maps for three years. That must be a recent development.

Customer: Well, you might end up losing some business if you don’t get the right picture up there. Not everyone is going to be as stubborn and persistent as I am.

Owner: True. Thank you for telling me.

And this business owner’s photo could have been up for six months before he ever found out it was even there, and the photo may not even be of the right business. It could be of another business on another street.

That’s a possibility, not an accusation. I’m sure Google will go through ever length that it can to ensure accuracy of representation, but we all know that the search engine has erred before. Google Maps are not always accurate in the directions, are they?

The task for small business owners is to monitor Google Maps a little more closely to ensure the above scenario doesn’t take place. And if it does then you can act quickly.