The biggest SEO mistake made by NZ small business

Search engine optimisation is critical for driving traffic to websites.  We all know that.  Some organisations spend an lot of money constantly reviewing, optimising and tweaking their site to get to the at all important #1 result.

Small business in NZ don’t often have access to the same kind of resources or budgets, so must focus on the fundamentals that are going to get maximum return for the level of investment they can afford.

So what is the biggest mistake we see?

“I type my company name into Google and I come out on top!”

Well – yeah.   If it worked that way, we wouldn’t need the yellow pages – the white pages lists company’s alphabetically and is easy to use.

Of course your business is going to be the first result if your company name is even somewhat unique.  But it relies on people having already made the decision to deal with you.

The sale is half way made already!.

Your businesses may be missing out on all the potential customers that don’t know you .

NZ small business rely a lot on networks and referrals.  This is fine but why wouldn’t you want business from those people who you haven‘t met yet?

To be fair, with their limited resources, SEO can be daunting for the one or two-man band.

Other common mistakes include:

• Leaving it to their web developer – who doesn’t really care
• Relying on a short term PPC campaign run by a take-your-money-and-run outfit who don’t care about anything but their fee.
• The usual collection of meaningless or missing title tags, non sensical description tags and missing headings
• Minimal amounts of content
• No understanding of the keywords and phrases being targetted
• No linking strategy
• No measurement or tracking of search behaviours

A good SEO consultant should be able to provide a level of assistance to suit any budget.   And you’ll see the return.

NZ browser use statistics

According to global web traffic statistics counter StatCounter, New Zealanders are quicker to move from the ageing Internet Explorer version 6.0 than the rest of the world.  Our use sits at 11.92% compared to a global 21.75%.

A greater percentage of us are using Firefox (29.37% compared to 25.83% globally).

It looks like more of us have upgraded to IE7 (44.19% compared to 39.1%) but the stats suggest some people who are making the move from IE6 have jumped to Firefox instead of IE7.

Our statistics are similar to ‘Oceania’.  So if your customer base is in NZ and Australia, 30% of your users are using Firefox, with about 5% using Chrome or Safari.

We don’t know about you, but we couldn’t afford to ignore 35% of our user base, so make sure you test your website functionality for IE7 and Firefox 3.0 at the least, and ensure the design gracefully degrades for IE6, Chrome and Safari.

Twitalyzer – a measure of your twitter success

Updated:  After following a link on Twitalyzer to the Web Analytics Demystified website, our anti-virus software blocked a potential threat.  Don’t know whether the site was trying to do something legitimate or not but couldn’t take the risk!   We’ve learnt not to argue with Kaspersky.   This would normally result in the post about the particular tool or service to be withdrawn.  But the advice still looks worthwhile so I’m leaving it there, but follow Twitalyzer links at your own risk.

Original Post:

If social media is part of your marketing mix, Twitalyzer might prove to be a useful tool.  Not because it necessarily assists specifically with your marketing efforts, but because it provides some guidance about how to get more out of Twitter.  Based on ratings across a number of elements: Influence, Signal, Generosity, Velocity and Clout you can test how successful you are.

Your success rating is based on (this is summarised):
1. Influence:

• Number of followers
• How often other people retweet you
• How often you retweet others
• How much you engage others in conversation
• Whether you write frequently

2. Signal – the frequency of the following elements:

• References to other people (use of “@”)
• Links to URL’s
• Hashtags (use of “#”)
• Retweets (use of “rt”)

3. Generosity – the ratio of retweet’s to all updates

4. Velocity – how many tweets you do how often

5. Clout – the number of references to you (use of “@you”) as percentage of total possible references.

So to be more successful on Twitter, at least by Twitalyzer’s measures you need to:

• Follow people and have them follow you
• Retweet
• Be retweeted – so it means tweet something useful in the first place.  Tweets with links to articles or webpages seem to be the most popular for retweeting
• Tweet often
• Reply to people’s tweets
• Use hashtags.

Any other suggestions?

Microsoft get the jump on Google?

Several articles this morning are reporting the impending announcement of deals between Microsoft, Twitter and Facebook to integrate real time status updates into the Bing search engine results.

Bing has been increasing it’s share in the search market – at Yahoo’s expense -  according to Compete.  Sitting at  8.8%, it may not currently compete with Google’s 72.8%, but the industry commentators, particularly at BNET, are suggesting this will be of serious concern to Google.  It could be big enough to change the search market dynamics if Microsoft get the jump on Google who then have to play catchup.

What could be of concern to a lot of people is the potential for privacy intrusions.  What goes online could end up being seen by everyone (especially the particularly embarrassing ones).  When people spend half their life online blogging, tweeting and messaging it becomes a natural part of how we communicate and people relax any self-moderation they may be doing.  Even so, there are already privacy concerns by many Facebook users and we don’t think they’ll react very well to the potential for their status updates to be showing up in search results.

What we’ll all have to wait to see is whether including status updates have any value to the searcher or whether it will fill results up with more junk than can already be the case.

Facebook and Twitter could also become overrun (or should I say more over-run) by marketers desperate to leverage whatever mechanism they can to get their product in front of as many eyeballs as possible, which could bite both Facebook and Twitter in the rear end.

BNET article by Gopal Raju

Techcrunch article by Michael Arrington

Matt Cutts blog is a must read

If you care about how Google search works, that is.

There are a lot of blogs I read.  Some regularly.  Some not so much.  One I do read often is  Google’s Matt Cutts.

Matt is the head of Google’s webspam team (whatever that means), but what is important is that he knows more about how Google’s search works than 99.99% of the planet.

He also writes funny yet informative, to the point blog posts and particularly useful video blogs.  And he just seems like a decent bloke.

Read the disclaimer – the comments are quite funny – it would be nice to work for someone who a) pays you a lot and/or b) pays for travel to conferences etc (read: think you are worth the $$).   I’ll see how I feel when people are banging down my door offering gifts tho.

Give users what they want!

We follow Gerry McGovern and pretty much subscribe to his recommendations and views.

In a recent post, he starts with a statement that we wholeheartedly endorse:

Success on the web is not about making customers do what you want.  It is about helping customers do what they want.

It sounds simple and logical, but over the years clients have suggested some things that have nothing to do with customers or making it easy for them to do what they want.    Some are so crazy that it’s easy to talk them out of it but others are more difficult.  Here are some common ones:

• Can you add a link to my friend/collegue/son/wife etc’s website.  This seems innocent enough, but if the site to be linked to has no relevance to the client site, then it becomes difficult to find a place to put the link that looks natural.  It is in no way motivated by making the user’s life easier or to help them complete the task at hand.   It often motivated by innocent (or not so) attempts by the requestor to help their SEO efforts.  It is not helped by SEO experts recommending that people try and get as many backlinks as they can which leads to these sorts of requests being made to anyone a site owner knows.   We’ll ususally try and find a non-intrusive way of doing this for clients because the debate can be lengthy and seem pedantic, although we’ll try to decline at least once.
• Content full of fluff, spin or other messages designed to persuade, entice or otherwise sell your product.   The users are generally there because they believe you have something they want or need.  Tell them what you can do for them truthfully and make it easy for them to get it done.  Users no longer blindly believe what an organisation tells them  on a website.  You have to demonstrate that you’re there to help them and a website that makes it easy to do business with you is good way to do that.   Unfortunately marketing people who advise clients that they need to do have ‘powerful persuasive content’ are often very good at selling their view point to which is why this can be a tough one to resolve.
• Images that look nice but add no value whatsover.  There is a place for imagery to enhance the visual appeal and response to a site.  But they should support the brand and whatever message you want to send.  Even worse if the image is a stock image acquired as a freebie from somewhere.
• Images that don’t look nice.  Grainy.  Poor focus and poor composition.  Nothing degrades a site faster than poor imagery.  Particularly if it’s an ego shot – ie one that the site owner wants there because they think it’s important or a nice shot or it’s one of them.
• Background music.  Don’t ever do this.  It’s annoying and irrelevant.  Unless your business is about music or jingles or something similar it does not enhance the mood.

Sometimes things on a site contribute to intangibles like portraying a professional image to builds trust, but  a good test for any content is to ask ‘what does this do to help the user acheive their task?.  If the answer is nothing then there’s a good chance you shouldn’t do it.

The Twitter debate goes on

Latest darling of the social network landscape – Twitter – featured on the local breakfast show recently.  An ‘expert’ (don’t know if he is or isn’t one) suggested that Twitter wasn’t for everyone.

Many small business owners must have breathed a sigh of relief.

Unless it’s appropriate for your target audience, Mr Expert went on to say (quite sensibly).

But this advice may not be that useful in our view, as some SME’s won’t know the answer to this question.

Part of the challenge of utilising the web for business is keeping ahead of (or at least up with) tools and mechanisms that your customers are using to do business, communicate with you and each other.   A business needs to look at each trend in the context of their own business and make a decision to leverage it or not.

Our advice to many businesses is to get someone who understands your business to provide an informed, fully explained recomendation as to if, how and when to utilise new communication mechanisms.

Some SME’s can do this by using a designated in-house employee who’s job it is is to keep up.  But that person will have to be given permission to use it (in this case, Twitter), research it and test it’s effectiveness to begin to understand it’s potential purpose.

Alternatively, involve experts to help you do it.  Some SME’s simply don’t have the resources or the motivation to establish and maintain levels of expertise in all areas of their business.  Leveraging the web (as a key sales channel) is one of them.

Consider establishing a relationship with an experienced, knowledgeable web expert who can help keep your business on track with your goals for the web.  In some cases this might involve establishing what those goals are first.  This would provide context for decisions such as how to ride trends like the social media wave.

WordPress as CMS

Just completed new site for a client I Style NZ using WordPress as a CMS.  WordPress is effective and well supported.  Stable and the search engines love it because it is fundamentally (ie designed to be) optimised for search.    There is ample community support should you run into problems, although like always you have to be able to weed out the opinions of the real experts from the self-styled ones (no pun intended).

We used WordPress rather than our other preferred CMS, Joomla!, as this is a small site (11 pages) and Joomla! was deemed overkill.

Everyone should love web traffic stats

A couple of news items this morning had a theme of web traffic statistics, hence the theme of today’s post.

A lot of people we speak to can’t answer the question “How many visits do you get to your website?” – much less know what keywords they used to get there or which is the most popular content on their site.  If you have a site, it’s pretty much critical that you know what people are doing on it.

One of the first challenges is choosing a measurement tool.   Different measurement tools can report wildly different results.   This is a big problem for large companies who sell advertising based on audience numbers or any organisation that relies on high traffic metrics as proof of ROI.  And as the saying goes  “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”   But for many businesses it’s not necessarily about the raw numbers – but how they translate into tangible business results.  Statistical data should play a key part in any measurement and improvement activity, so pick a tool that gives you the information you need.  Test a few out.

We’ve not used all the tools out there but I’ve used a few, big and small.  Until we come across something bettter, we recommend Google Analytics because a) it’s free and b) it gives as much information as most small to medium businesses will be able to do anything with.

In the meantime, we’d recommend an alternative to Google for bigger organisations if:

• You want to track technical performance factors that Google doesn’t cover like server loads and bandwidth usage.
• You have a problem with Google owning your data – tends to be a bigger issues with bigger organisations for whom this data is considered commercially sensitive
• You get more than 5 million page views per month per account.

Despite the problems with collecting web stats, they do tell you something, so we recommend clients pay attention to:

• Overall visits as a trend – is it upward or flat.  If you do any kind of promotional work did it increase the numbers?.  Are they new or repeat visitors (which is better depends on your business model)
• Bounce rates if you’ve got it – if you have a high bounce rate, people are coming – then going again.  This is generally a problem
• Page views and visit durations – tells you how long people stay on your site and whether they’re having a good look around.  High page view numbers aren’t necessarily a good thing if those views are scattered all over the place – it could be an indication that they can’t find what they’re looking for.  Short time-on-page durations are a clue.
• Top keywords – this tells you what people are looking for when coming to your site.  Make sure they get it.
• Popular content – for larger sites, weeding out the content that no one looks at can reduce your content management overheads, although SEO experts would probably tell you to leave it there but you’ll need to balance out whether the SEO benefits from keeping content and the associated links are worth the effort and the impact on visitor experience.
• Traffic sources – Who is sending you traffic, and which has the highest bounce rate.  This will tell you what sites are giving you business – particularly important if you are paying to advertise on them.

One of the things that may become apparent very quickly, is that the site  may not be setup in such as way that makes it easy to analyse.  This can be caused by:

• Obscure URL’s.  URL’s that are search friendly should be easy to read anyway.  If they haven’t it will also make it a pain to interpret your most popular content if you have to figure out what content the url www.yourdomain.com/18upc_ab_content/holder/special/productidl456ddd_search -72698.html relates to.   (Note – this point doesn’t refer to dynamic vs static URL’s and SEO.  Google can handle dynamic URL’s, but they are a pain to read).
• Content lumped together on one page.  If a site has a ’services’ page with all the services on it, you can’t tell which one visitors are interested in
• Ads that don’t link to anything.  We’ve got clients that run ads (either graphical or text) that don’t link anywhere (a page, a site, a pop-up) which makes it impossible to get any stats to show whether a visitor had any interest in the product or service being promoted

At the end of the day your analytics tool – no matter how powerful – will not make decisions for you.

The power of analytics is in the decisions you make as a result of the statistical data.

Essentee supports the ‘IE6 No More’ campaign

A group of startups have started an initiative called IE6 No More.   They have set up a website explaining why the Microsoft browser must be abandoned to promote innovation on the web. It then provides code snippets that can be added to a website telling website visitors still using IE6 to switch to a modern browser.

It’s not a ‘I hate Microsoft’ move – just IE6 in particular.

Here are the main reasons:

• IE6 does not support CSS v2 (Cascading Style Sheets) let alone CSSv3.  CSS enables most designs on the web, and so designers have to do a lot more extra work to get a website to display correctly in IE6.
• PNG images don’t display correctly in IE6, so you can’t use them in design work.  This limits designs to the 2001 era  – no overlays, no graduated masks.  You can’t take advantage of the colour depth with small file sizes that PNG’s provide.
• Security -  Just like not updating your virus software can get you riddled with spyware, not updating your browser can be a gateway to attacks. There are even code snippets that will shut down IE6 (can be found on Wikipedia). It’s unstable.

W3Schools report in July that 14.4% of users are still on IE6.  For the sites we monitor, the stats range from 6% to 12%.  The lower stats are from sites with predominantly a NZ audience, so it might depend on where your visitors are based.

A lot of IE6 users will be those accessing the web from work, where conservative IT departments are reluctant to move to a more modern browser.  Microsoft will be supporting IE6 until 2014, apparently due to the number of organisations still using the eight year old browser.  But they comment that they would prefer people used IE8 – so why aren’t they assisting those organisations to move?  Probably a question for another post….<cough>Vista</cough>.

We’ll be supporting the campaign by:

• Leaving the decision to support IE6 users to our clients – but building in additional cost for the time if required
• Educating people about the benefits of moving to later browsers
• Where the choice is ours, we will not go significantly out of our way to develop workarounds for IE6, but the sites will degrade gracefully if at all possible.

This would be our approach regardless of what the browser is.   Eventually IE6 will be replace by IEx or Firefox x as the oldest most outdated browser out there, so the issue won’t go away.