Ideas for Business

The Panda and Penguin Google updates have certainly spooked a lot of people. The slightest move in website traffic volume is now being blamed on either one (or both) of these updates, and whilst significant drops in traffic are a worrying sign, a closer inspection sometimes shows the opposite to be true. I recently looked a website that had seen a 50% drop in traffic, and that drop coincided with the Google Penguin update.

Google Analytics is a great tool when used effectively. Using this tool, I could drill down into the various statistics for the both the day before the Penguin update, and for the day after when there was a significant drop in traffic. What I found to be interesting was that Google’s Webmaster Tools showed there was not a significant change in the average search rankings for the targeted keywords. So why the huge drop in traffic? Surely people didn’t suddenly stop using those search terms?

In this case, the drop in traffic came from two sectors, mobile, and Europe. For some reason this website had been ranking highly in search results in Europe. It was also ranking highly in mobile search. Neither of these two sectors were important to this business. They were not geared to provide a service to European customers, and being net based business, mobile traffic had tiny 0.01% conversion rate, so the loss of that traffic wasn’t harming the business.

Whilst there was a distinct drop in traffic numbers to this site, the number of sales were the same both pre and post Penguin. In fact, the post Penguin conversion rate as a number almost doubled – and so it should, half the traffic for the same volume of sales. When looking at traffic numbers from search results, it’s important to dig to find out exactly where you have lost traffic. Is it one page, is it site wide, is specific to a region or connection method?

If this business had kept a closer eye on their search analytics, the fact that almost a third of traffic was coming from Europe may have opened doors for new business. That window has closed now, however, they can look at much improved conversion rates.

You need killer content to survive! I bet you have read that a hundred times. What exactly is killer content? If you can create content that catches the attention of the masses to the point that it is shared, then you’ve produced killer content. That content could text based, videos, images, or the latest fad, an infographic. So why publish killer content? Here are five reasons to consider:

1. Social - killer content will be shared and in so doing, will help to build the number of people following you.
2. Branding – the more often your content is viewed, the more it exposes your brand.
3. Sales – the more visitors you receive to your website, the greater the opportunity to build sales.
4. SEO - killer content gets shared, and the more often it is shared, the more inbound links you are likely to receive.
5. Trust – when your content is shared, it’s similar to a recommendation. This can help to build your reputation and that all important trust factor.

You don’t need to publish killer content everyday. Timing is important – as one piece of killer content starts to wane in popularity, that’s when you publish the next piece. This keeps your business and your brand in front of people’s eyes. It also has people talking about you for an extended period of time.

Creating killer content isn’t always easy and it should be created as part of your overall online marketing plan. If you have the marketing dollars, you can always outsource your contents creation. Most businesses outsource video productions, and it makes sense to do the same if you have an idea for an infographic. There’s no reason why you can’t have text based content outsourced as well if you don’t feel confident in your own writing skills. Produce that killer content and you business will reap huge rewards.

There are tens of thousands of perfectly legitimate honest businesses on the Internet now. When it comes to attracting sales, many of these businesses fail the most basics of customer tests – the customer can’t legitimize your business. Most people won’t hand over personal information and credit card details to just anyone. For larger businesses, reputation is all the proof required, for smaller businesses, you need to do more to prove who you are. Fortunately, the Internet makes this fairly easy; you just need to spend a little time legitimizing your business.

For most businesses, the answer is right there on their website. Having a well-written About page doesn’t take long to prepare, yet it can tell potential customers a lot about your business. Who you are, where you came from, and what skills and experience you and your employees have will help customers feel safer dealing with. Of more importance is your Contact page. This page on it’s own can help to legitimize a business. Where possible, don’t just use a generic email address such as admin@yourwebsite or sales@yourwebsite. A phone number that potential customers can use to talk to you in person helps as does a physical address.

Customers don’t trust businesses that only have an email contact – there’s something about a brick and mortar connection that help’s customers build that ‘feel good’ feeling about a business. If you do have a brick and mortar existence, be sure to claim your business through Google Places. This places you on a map (that you can include on your website if you wish) and helps to reinforce that brick and mortar connection.

Finally, make use of positive reviews. When potential customers see that others have had a good experience with your business, they will finally feel that you can be trusted. Do you have a good About page? Are your contact details up-to-date? Can I verify that you are who you say you are? If I can answer those questions, then I may well do business with you. If I can’t, I’ll be looking elsewhere, and so too will hundreds of potential customers. Don’t lose a sale because of lack of legitimacy – your reputation management starts with your About and Contact pages.

There are tens of thousands of successful small businesses trading in thousands of communities. In fact, world wide, you could make those numbers millions. Why is then that a highly successful local business fails on a wider platform like the Internet? A business management professional could point to a score or more of reasons for this failure, however, I am only going to stick to one today, and it’s one that affects every business that attempts to trade online.

In a local community, marketing is relatively easy. You may only have one or two competitors, or, in larger towns, maybe a handful of competitors. Online, you have hundreds, if not thousands of competitors, so your marketing approach has to be different. Locally, you may be able to win on price, service, and perhaps even quality. Those factors, whilst still important, wont differentiate you from every other online business. Someone somewhere will beat you on price, perhaps quality, and as for service, there’s only so far that you can go.

To succeed online, you need to be able to stand tall over the top of any opposition. This means being different, even if you are selling the same products for the same price as your competitors. How you find that one factor that helps you to stand out can be difficult.  Specialization can help. By narrowing your target market, you may find niches that are not as competitive, yet deliver the same volume of sales. Many businesses fail because they decide to diversify to broadly when they should have looked at a more specialized market.

Every business is different, so it’s impossible to come up with a single solution. You will need to analyze your business structure, analyze your niche and your competitors, then discover a point of differentiation that will help you stand out from the crowd. Small business Internet marketing professionals can help you analyze your business to discover that point of differentiation.

Google has been reworking search algorithms for years, however, they have been coming thick and fast recently, and Google I’m sure has taken great pleasure in applying names to them. Earlier in the year we had the Panda update that hit poor quality sites and recently we had the Penguin update that is said to hit spammy websites. The problem with the Penguin update is that it came hot on the heels of a fresh Panda update, so webmaster who suffered a drop in traffic are unsure if it is due to poor quality (Panda) or spam (Penguin).

There is a relatively easy way to tell, if you have Google Analytics (or any good analytics software). The Panda update was released on April 19 and the Penguin update on April 24. If your traffic started to drop off after April 19, then you have quality issues. If your traffic dropped off after April 24, then Google has issues with your website related to spam.

You don’t use spam? Me neither, can’t stand the stuff! What about your website? Have you ever, particularly in your sites early days, built a few unethical links? Pay for links? Does your website have any duplicate content issues? This may be duplicate content on your own site, or content you have copied from other websites.

Whether it’s Panda or Penguin, you will need to work on areas that don’t meet Google’s quality guidelines. A complaint to Google will not necessarily reverse Penguin related loss of traffic. Clean up your site and, with luck, you’ll float back to your original position in search results. Google is not against search engine optimization, in fact, it has written guidelines on how to get it right. Just don’t over optimize, or use grey (or black) hat techniques.