 |
|
BASICS OF INTERNET WEBSITE MARKETINGBy John Ellis, owner Twenty Twenty Web Designs
2. THE TRUTH ABOUT WHERE WEBSITE MARKETING IS HEADED 3. WHAT IS THE SOLUTION TO MORE EFFECTIVE WEBSITE MARKETING. 4. ANOTHER SET OF PROBLEMS RELATED TO WEBSITE MARKETING 5. NOW CONSIDER THIS ABOUT KEY WORDS AND BIG CITIES. My current Website Solicitation Email
1. WHO IS JOHN ELLIS I have been building websites since 1997. Before that I sold insurance, accounting, tax and legal services as a sole proprietor. I focused on small businesses. So I know the problems of running a small business and I understand marketing not just internet marketing. Right now the mom and pop small businesses are hurting. They are being choked off by those who buy the large ads at the top of a Google Search. Many of those ads for the service industry have nothing but an 800 number because all they do is take the calls and sub contract out the work. This was going on with the old Yellow Pages but not like it does now with the search engines. 2. THE TRUTH ABOUT WHERE WEBSITE MARKETING IS HEADED. 15 years ago I began to tell business owners that in time there were going to be a few business owners in every category of business that were going to own every market. Why did I say that? Because in a Google Search (And there is really only one search engine and that is Google) there are 3 very expensive paid ads at the top, then 3 to 5 free local ads for businesses who have a presence in the local area and below that there are the ten organic results. Now with the cell phones, smart phones becoming the primary search device, the searcher is forced into a thin channel of listings in the above order. And on a cell phone you cannot see but a couple of listings at a time. A searcher generally is very impatient so they really don't often go All the way to the bottom of the 10 organic listings. In the old days of a yellow page book people, would see a whole page of ads and they would easily turn the pages and see a hundred or more graphic ads and one line listing. Those days are gone with the cell phone. Today you have an all or none presence on the first page of a search. Now the big guys in every business buy the top ads, the pay per click ads. Those ads draw calls but the cost of those ads are high. Those who buy those ads are very concerned that they are making a profit off those ads. And the truth is that the profit margins for those who make significant buys of those ads is pretty thin. And if they over buy, then a profitable marketing campaign really becomes a drain and red ink begins to appear as a loss on the income statement. The other problem is that Google has really skewed its search engines to favor the huge ad money they take in from Yelp, Angie's List, Yellow Pages, Thumbtack and a lot of others. These are like mini phone books inside a huge Google Phone book. And when you take out these ads you are almost never the only one on their page. You are sharing your ad with 5 or 10 other businesses and again if you are not at the top of the list, you probably are not going to get calls. These ads are sold with big promises but once you pay your money and sign the contract your calls are going to decrease because the Yelp and others are going to focus their ad dollars on the potential new business as opposed to continue to support the old business. It is a highly rigged and predatory game. The avenues for manipulation are wide and many. The small business owner is at at disadvantage with regards to these predators. So the bottom line is that right now it is hard to get an individual company's web site on page one among these mini Googles advertisers. It can be done but the cost of doing so is rising. And right now the websites that get on page one usually have an old domain name which gets a lot of priority for their seniority from Google algorhythm that determines ranking. What is the trend for many service business, plumbers, electricians, locksmith, lawn maintenance, painters, roofers and so on? They are either going to have to get big and buy the ads, which is almost impossible for a small business, or become contractors for those who can buy those ads. Or just find another business to be in. 3. WHAT IS THE SOLUTION TO MORE EFFECTIVE WEBSITE MARKETING. FIRST you have to understand and acknowledge that the internet search engine marketing is new and it has been in a constant state of change since day one. And that change continues. There is a huge amount of misinformation and out right lies told to business owners about how the internet works. As per usual, it is always about money. It is significantly predatory and preys upon the ignorance of small business owners. The solution is that you have to be informed. In an old ad agency, the money you paid out for advertising had to make a net profit or the ad agency was going to be replaced. Just that simple. Accounting was primary in an advertising budget and the Ad Agency had to prove that their ads brought you business But the small business owner does not require Yelp or Angie's List or Yellow Pages to prove the money spent with them brought back twice or more than that amount in gross sales. No web designer I know produces that kind of accounting that the old ad agencies did and do. A problem is that there is really no way to know how much business came from your web page. When you query a caller too much they get irritated. And a lot of times they do not know how they arrived on your website. More importantly you have to ask every one who calls how they got your number. But if you are running a lot of internet ads, most people are not going to be able to tell you which ad they responded to. All they know is that they got your number from the internet. So the only true way to know how many calls come off a particular ad is to have a different phone number for each ad. You can rent a phone number for $3 a month. That is a very cheap way to track how many calls came from a particular ad. In truth, it is the only way to know. So if any web designer wants to talk about statistics and how much traffic your site is getting, it is just nonsense. All that matters is the number of calls your received or the number of submit forms that came back to you. The rest is just web designer puffing and manipulation. 4. ANOTHER SET OF PROBLEMS RELATED TO WEBSITE MARKETING In the old days you wanted a business name that people could remember. You wanted to have a brand name that people recognized. Well that does not exactly apply to website marketing. In website marketing, you have to do two things with your website. 1) your website has to be seen my the search engines and, 2) it has to be professional and motivate the visitor to call you. What the visitor wants to see and what the search engine wants to see are two very different things. The SEARCH ENGINE engine wants to see the keywords in the domain name. Best Electronics is good for human identification but the search engines are looking for Electronics in Houston. And even better Cheap Electronics in Houston. Not a fancy name but the search engines are looking for relevance and the number one place to look is in the domain name. You will not get any points really from the search engine for Best Electronics, because no one is going to search that. But they will search Electronics Houston or Cheap Electronics Houston. So you see, what the Search engine is looking for has little to do with a catchy business name. Remember people search the internet to find a service provider they are not aware of. If they were already your customer they would not be looking for you on the internet. The internet is about getting new business; people who have a problem but do not know a service provider that can solve it. Now what you can do on a website is put a graphic on the website with the Catchy Business name but since it is a graphic the search engine does not know what it says. In other words, the coding that brings up the picture is what the search engine is looking for. So if you say in the coding that the picture is of an elephant, but it is of a waterfall, the search engine believes the coding whereas the visitor to the site believe his eyes. In addition, in the code of the site, there are the title tags and meta descriptions and meta keyword tags. What is the most important thing about a book? The Title. So the search engine is looking for the title. Same thing applies to the title and meta tags as the domain name. The search engine is looking for a match to the search not a catchy business brand. Most web designers don't really bother with the title tags. They just put the business name in there. For instance "ABC Plumbing" As Opposed to "ABC Plumbing, Plumbers in Houston, Plumbers Houston Texas, Houston's number one plumbers" The same goes for the description and keyword tags. Most web designs don't bother. You can verify this by going to your website, right click on text, and from the drop down menu select "source code". That will bring up the source code for the web page. The Source Code is the code that the browser looks at to construct what the visitor sees. The visitor does not look at the source code and the search engine does not look at the face of the website. So you see the problem. You have to talk to the search engine and the visitor in the same website. 5. NOW CONSIDER THIS ABOUT KEY WORDS AND BIG CITIES. The best key word would be Plumber Houston. Plumber is the generic word for a lot of different kinds of plumbing and Houston is the biggest city in the metro area. But there can only be a few domains with those two keywords in them. But few people consider that if a savvy internet user has a waterheater problem he is going to search waterheater Houston. And if he lives in Spring, which is a small city butting up to Houston, that searcher may go ahead and search Waterheater Spring. So the point is that if you had a bunch of micro websites (one city, one service) you may well get a lot more calls for 10 of these micro sites than calls from the one Plumber Houston website. And a micro site stands a good chance of going to page one where the Plumber Houston has a small chance because that is where all the big money focuses and the competition is fierce. We program professional custom websites from scratch. We do not use Lego Modules Services like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Wix, Godaddy, Weeby and others to build our websites. These module programs are INFLEXIBLE and CANNOT maximize internal SEO. The first thing you need to do to increase the ranking of your website is to put the internal SEO coding in the website. SEO Test: 1) Bring up your website on the internet. 3) Right click on your mouse. 4) In the pop up menu, click on "Page Source, Source" or similar words. The coding for that web page will come up on your screen. 5) Now count how many times you see your keywords in that coding. My bet is that you probably will see few if any keywords at all. The keywords should be there about 50 to 150 times. 6) Do this to to each page you have on your website. 7) When you do this test, and when you find there are no internal SEO keywords on your website pages, then call me and I will fix the problem and you can quit wasting money on monthly or annual SEO fraud. SEO fraud exists when a web designer says he is working on SEO but gives you no proof. This LANDSCAPING AND LAWN MAINTENANCE WEBSITE is an example of our most effective web design because it speaks to the SEO of an effective Google Search and it motivates the visitor to your site to call you. IF YOU ARE NOT SEEN BY Google and do not have a professional website to motivate people to call you, your internet marketing is ineffective. You must do both. http://creativegreenaz.com/ This is the desktop website that people see if they are searching with a desktop. This is what they would see if they are searching with a cell phone. http://creativegreenaz.com/cellphonesite/ The first step in increasing your calls from the internet is fixing the primary website which means significantly increasing the number of times the primary search words are included in the internal SEO coding of your primary websites. Module websites do not have internal SEO coding of any significance. You will notice that the cell phone site is packed with information and jam packed with keywords and has a navigation panel at the top. Most of the cell phone sites you see have a nice big picture, no logo on top, no phone number, no immediate list of services and no click to call Icon. Look at your cell phone site and see if this is not true. It is common sense that a cell phone site has to have this information at the top. The first step in increasing your calls from the internet is fixing the primary website which means significantly increasing the number of times the primary search words are included in the internal coding of your primary websites. The second step is to make sure the cell phone site has the name of your company, your phone number, your location, a list of your services and an icon to click to call you right at the top of the cell phone site. THESE THINGS ARE ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL TO A CELL PHONE SITE. The next step would be to create YouTube videos which would also be saturated with your key words in the description below the video under the SHOW MORE link. In most of the videos on YouTube these descriptions are empty. Some people search for services in YouTube before they go to Google. Also these videos bolster the ranking of the main websites. Further the videos are embedded in the website. 99% of web designers are totally ignorant of this. Do you have a video on your website? The next thing your site needs is more testimonials. These also increase the rankings of the primary website. Angie's list has made references critical on a website. And of course you know most of those references are fictional. Next, you need to create what I call micro websites that are focused on one city/ one service. The point of a website is not to create a Mona Lisa or have a bunch of movement like a Space Shuttle. The point of the web site is to SELL. The point is to look professional but show the visitor what he is looking for immediately. If someone is looking for a Nike shoe you better have one front and center on your website. With micro sites you would create sites for combinations of a city you service and the service you provide: For example cities: Beverly HIlls, San Diego, NYC, LA, DC, Anchorage, Jackson, etc and the services you provide: Surveillance, Familly Law, Due Diligence, Tracking, Locates, Corporate Theft, Hidden Assets, etc To create sites like: Surveillance Beverly Hills, Family Law San Diego, Locates LosAngeles, Corporate Theft Jackson etc Take the number of cities that you work and the number of services you offer and multiply them together to find a total of these micro sites you could consider. These micro sites generally come up on page one of a search. They point back to the primary site. These sites are built in a cell phone format. In other words, they are only 3.5 inches in width. If a person is searching for a city and service on a cell phone, the cell phone site will come up and if they are searching on a desktop the primary site will come up. The industry calls this Device Responsive. Here is an example of a micro site. http://polishedconcrete-michigan.com/Polishedconcreteannarbor/ These sites are not fancy because there is not enough space on a cell phone screen to do that. These sites are not fancy because they are heavily skewed to manipulate the search engines into coming up on page one of a Google Search We charge $300 to $1500 for a Primary website. This includes hosting for a year and free text and graphic updates. Micro sites are $40 a year each. We generally guarantee the micro sites to come up on page one. If we build you 20 sites to come up on page one, and 5 do not, we build 5 additional sites. You then have 25 sites with 20 on page one. We leave sites up and continually try to push them up to page one. Controlling your markets via the internet is NOT A SIMPLE MATTER any longer. If you want a significant presence, you need to do all the above and maybe some more. ONE WEBSITE IS NOT GOING TO ACCOMPLISH YOUR OBJECTIVE. As far as I know, no one does the above except me. Most of the web designers cannot work on this level. Most cannot program from scratch to achieve the above. The majority of webdesigners use Lego Module sites like the ones you probably have. And then they charge a lot of money per month to promote the sites with EXTERNAL SEO and ignore the primary internal SEO. Why, because you cannot pack SEO into an inflexible module website. There is more to website marketing, but this is the foundation of what you need to do if you are going to compete for business via the internet search engines which means Google. Lastly, every business category and every city is different so this entire program requires constant attention and tweaking until the right formula for each market is achieved. A simple example is that in some areas Private Detective gets more traffic than Private Investigator, same with Pest Control and Exterminator.
|