Aaron Wall has done it again with a very detailed analysis of the value of a top ranking in both organic and paid Google search results. This is a long read but should be required for anyone working to drive traffic and conversions via search
Seth Godin, marketing guru and savant of small things, writes about how inbound calls are the most important and most ignored aspect of marketing. I couldn’t agree more.
We did an SEO/SEM campaign for a client that was completely focused on developing highly qualified inbound leads. The criteria was simple: Get potential customers to visit their site, then pick up the phone and call for more information. A secondary goal was an email request.
One of my first actions in planning this was to call the number on the website and experience what a prospect encounters… and it was not good. First, a person did not answer- I got a phone tree. My options did not clearly include ‘talk to a rep’ as the first option. When I did get to that option, I got voicemail.
A new customer for this business is worth 5-6 figures minimum revenue in the first year. Many become long term partners. An inbound call is a serious indicator of interest yet this otherwise savvy business was placing impediments every step of the way for that caller.
Our response was that before we even work on lead gen, they needed to dedicate a phone line and a live person to answer that line 24/7. This can be done with a call center whose script is to determine the caller’s physical location and connect them with the appropriate sales rep for that territory. The sales rep is trained that calls from this source are serious prospects that must be contacted within hours, at the latest (leads are time sensitive and rapidly get stale, often within hours).
Even before the lead gen work was done this change made a significant difference in sales volume. As much as I believe in the power of online marketing, the power of great service is far more important. Put the two together and things will explode.
If you’re doing search marketing, including SEO and SEM, for your site(s) then you need to understand multivariate testing, the science of choosing various page elements, ad copy, keywords and other variables and testing them against a control. Your control is basically a combination of these elements that so far is your steadiest performing combination.
Jonathan Mendez is far deeper into this testing than I am and has begun a series of posts that go into how multivariate testing works into detail. This is complex stuff, but if you take the time to start learning and applying it to your search campaign, the payoff can be huge and the knowledge you gain will be a major business asset.
The days of pretending that there is some kind of separation between ‘branding’ and measurable direct marketing are over- everything is measurable and the results don’t lie. Traditional agencies and marketers take note: The creative director who ignores this reality in favor of amorphous ‘creativity’ is going to lose you clients.
If you’re a business owner this eliminates the old “I know half of my advertising budget works, I just don’t know which half (sorry, can’t find the attribution- if you know it please comment)”. With sophisticated testing, analytics and conversion tracking you can know exactly what dollars/creative are working and which are not.
There is a big shift in web design going on and it is changing the way I think about web architecture. I was in a client meeting last week discussing the messaging of a site redesign that covers several product categories, a number of vertical markets and multiple languages. The challenge is that a searcher entering this site is likely to only be interested in one of the options. The client is a language services company. A searcher may be interested in technical document translation for biotech in Mandarin and French. If they come to the site’s Home page seeking this information they are going to have problems because you can’t offer all these options on one page without creating confusion and the resulting likelihood that you will lose them. Or can you?
What happened in the meeting was interesting. Rick, my client, is a good web designer who understands these issues. He put a graphic up on the screen that he had built to help him sort out the way to organize his Home page. It was a Site Map. No marketing message, just a treed outline of the site done in text. It was not his intent that this would be his Home page but as we discussed it, it made real sense to reconsider the whole concept of Home pages- why not use a Site Map as your Home page content?
For the visitor the benefit is obvious: A simple, easy to read guide to the entire site. Just skim and click to get your answer. For the company the benefits are huge: At one glance you see the range of services and experience and you capture the visitor’s attention by making it dead simple to navigate to the exact info they need. No confusion, super usable, great from a SEO point of view.
The next level is where it gets interesting. Each page linked to from this Site Map is now a Home page for that subject matter, the top level of a microsite devoted to Translation> Biotech> Technical Docs> Language Choices. This would be built on a database that pulled the information from each ‘bucket’ into a page customized for the visitor. If it wasn’t exactly what they want they can get back to the Site Map with a single click.
This model, if constructed properly, would be extremely search friendly both for organic and PPC. It changes the static corporate web site into a dynamic information source (with lots of call-to-action sales built in). But what about branding you say?
Who cares? The top level domain has the brand (if it doesn’t then that domain and the brand need to be resolved now). The visitor isn’t seeking a brand experience, they are seeking a specific solution as evidenced by their search terminology. I’d also argue that the breadth shown on the site map is a brand-reinforcing message in itself. As a user I like the direct approach that skips the marketing message on the Home page which is all too often a distraction rather than an enticement.
I’m going to be having a serious discussion with my designer this week about our impending redesign of our corporate site. I think killing the home page in favor of the user might be a very good idea.