As reported in the Fall 2008 issue of Search Marketing Standard magazine, 70% said they went ahead, registered and made the purchase. Not bad, maybe… but if you think about it, that also means nearly a third of the potential customers either left the website outright (23%) or registered, but changed their mind and didn’t buy anything (7%).

Let’s be clear — these were people who were “sold” on the product or service to the point they started the purchase process. And these websites that required registration prior to purchase basically changed their minds, and convinced 30% of them to not by.

Which, given how hard we all try to persuade people to buy from us, seems kinda crazy. Pretty much the opposite of what we normally try to do. And not just a little bit wasteful.

I mean, can you afford to turn away one-third of your customers?

If you currently require registration or you’re considering it… first, it would probably be a good idea to stop and think for at least a minute or two about why you want people to register before purchasing. What is it that they’ll get out of it? What do you get out of it — and, more specifically, what will you get out of it (that you can’t just as easily get through other means)?

While you’re pondering those questions, here are a few other things to consider:

• Find another way to get the info you want. For instance, customers expect to furnish their contact information as part of making a purchase anyway, so you don’t need them to register to get that. If you want a newsletter opt-in, why not simply ask for it as part of the purchase process? If you think about it , you may find you can get the information you want without any registration necessary.

• Offer customers something extra. In the same Forrester Research survey, 51% of site visitors said they’d be willing to share personal information with a website in order to receive an extra discount on their purchase. Some other reasons they said they’d give up their information: to receive fewer ads (41%), to save time (on future purchases, maybe? — 40%), to receive free content (39%) or to have a more personalized experience (27%). You can try to figure out what your customers most want and offer that as a “carrot” to reward them for registering.

• Consider making registration optional. When it comes down to it, you need to decide which will work better for your business — to require registration and possibly lose 23% of your prospects (those who will bail without registering) and up to 30% of potential sales (the 23% plus the 7% who register but don’t buy)… or to make registation optional, and maybe save those sales (admittedly, while probably losing sign-ups from some unknown percentage of people who will buy without registering).

Bottom line, don’t assume registration has no effect on your conversions and sales. Be sure you’ve considered the consequences before you make registration mandatory.

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The experts

• Seth Besmertnik, CEO, Conductor
• Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOMoz
• Todd D. Malicoat, founder, Stuntdubl.com
• Eric Ward, president, EricWard.com
• Debra Mastaler, president of Alliance-Link

These folks represent some significant firepower in the world of link building. Things to note from what they said:

• Internal navigation is a significant portion of most any successful SEO campaign. Pay attention to your site’s menus and other internal links.
• Linking out, far from being a problem, can potentially help (maybe) if you link out to good resources to demonstrate your site is a “good web citizen.”
• Don’t get so worked up about whether or not your outbound links are passing link popularity to somebody else.
• Link anchor text is very important in determining how a page ranks in the search results.
• Don’t pay so much attention to the little green bar on the Google Toolbar displaying PageRank (PR). That number isn’t related to Actual PR, which is used in the ranking algorithm, and may in some cases actually be misleading.

There’s plenty of additional information in the post. Strongly advise you to check it out if you have any questions about effective link building for search.

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Yikes! Seems like it wasn’t that long ago that everybody and his dog was singing the praises of blogging as indispensable for business marketing. So what in the world is going on here?

Over at bloghound, Lois Kelly speculates that maybe businesses who got into blogging early on had unrealistic expectations, or set the wrong measurements and goals. As she points out, blogging is a conversation, not a “campaign tactic.”

And, of course, as mentioned in a post at Direct, one reason corporate blogs may not have lived up to those expectations is that too many of them “read like tired, warmed-over press releases,” according to the Forrester analysis.

Which is probably true. We’ve been through this kind of issue at my company, and it’s something I harp on all the time. There are some in the company who find it incredibly tempting to stick to stiff and stilted corporate-speak or that fake-enthusiastic “rah, rah, we’re the best so buy our product“ sales-pitch mode… neither of which work particularly well, especially over the long run. I think a little bit of that stuff goes a long way.

I’ve run into something similar in my personal life, too. Maybe you have, as well. You know, when you’re trying to have a conversation with somebody, and it’s clear they’re so busy formulating what brilliant thing they’ve going to say next, they have no brainpower left to pay attention to what you’re saying right now. The conversation quickly becomes limited to them pontificating on their favorite topic du jour and you listening — which may be fine if you’re on the pontificating end of things, but for the listener it becomes pretty tedious pretty fast.

So it’s something I’m aware of, and something I try to be on constant alert for to make sure I’m not guilty of the same thing. Not always successful, but at least I’m trying.

But, you know, I understand. It’s pretty scary for a corporation, or even a small one- or two-person show, to open up and get honest with their customers (and, worse, let their customers get honest with them). I mean, who knows what The Great Unwashed out there are going to say if you give them a platform to speak? And there are some real potential legal liabilities to letting other people outside your company post content (like blog comments) to your website.

It’s certainly easier and less frightening to stick to what the legal and corporate communications departments have vetted and steer clear of all this crazy “open conversations with your customers” stuff. Yep, I really do understand. (Of course, “understanding” doesn’t mean I think they’re right, just that I comprehend where their wrongness comes from.)

Hmm. Well, I’m not sure where I’m going with this one, except to say that I really admire those companies that have found a way to get beyond those fears, step outside the legal-department-sanctioned corporate-speak and have authentic conversations with their customers. And I think, maybe, if other companies can learn to loosen up their ties and relax a bit, they might find blogging — and the real connections they can forge with their customers through blogging and other social media/Web 2.0 outlets — aren’t necessarily so “irrelevant” to their business marketing after all.

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See, what I hear a lot on the marketing forums are questions from small business owners trying to figure out how to get other people to do what they want: point links to their website, sign up for their newsletter, sign up as affiliates, buy their products. And what’s really weird (well, it seems weird to me) is how often, when I ask whether they’ve tried simply asking politely for what they want, the answer is basically, “no.”

If you want people to buy your product when they come to your website, your web pages need to include a call to action. Don’t just assume people will “naturally” do what you want. Ask them (politely).

One really neat idea I’ve come across recently is to make sure your thank-you or confirmation emails are doing double-duty. You don’t have to stop at simply confirming the customer’s order — you can also ask for links to your website, cross-sell or upsell products, encourage people to read your business blog or sign up for your newsletter, whatever. The possibilities are really limited only by what you want.

You may have to work hard to get a small fraction of the recipients to open and read a “regular” email message. The cool thing about confirmation emails is they’re almost guaranteed to get read — giving you potentially a much bigger audience for your message. And those thank-you emails go to people who have already purchased something from you (who, presumably, will be more receptive to your message than random strangers).

I’ve got an article here at Search Engine Guide to give you some more ideas.

So, have you tried asking your customers for what you want? How did it work out? I’d love to hear about your experiences!

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As Ann points out, keyword rankings shouldn’t be the goal of search engine optimization — they’re a means to an end, not the end itself. But rankings are easy to measure and easy to understand, so they often turn up as the reporting metric from a lot of SEO firms, and they get used as measurements by a lot of DIY webmasters.

The problems with rankings — and some possible alternatives

Of course, a big problem with using rankings as a metric is they change all the time, and not necessarily in response to anything you’ve done as part of your optimization — which makes them an unreliable measurement of how well you’ve been optimizing your site. And what with Google’s push toward “personalized” search results, the rankings you see may not be the rankings anybody else sees… again, not the most reliable measurement of your success.

Ann suggests two alternative metrics: traffic from search engines, and conversions.

Traffic could be a decent measurement, except — as she points out — just because traffic goes up, this doesn’t mean your site is making any more profits. It’s actually pretty easy to drive traffic to a site… as long as you don’t care about the quality of the traffic. High-quality traffic is a bit harder to come by for most of us.

The conversion ratio is possibly a better measurement, because it takes into account the quality of the traffic the site is getting. The issue with conversions, though, as pointed out by some of the commenters on Ann’s post, is that maximizing conversions may potentially require changes in copywriting, site architecture, page layout, marketing strategy and tactics… pretty much everything related to online marketing.

Not surprisingly, all the necessary testing and making all the required changes is labor intensive and time consuming. It may be a bigger chunk to bite off than some small businesses are prepared for, at least when they’re just starting out with site optimization.

And not all sites have easily measured “conversions,” even keeping in mind that a conversion doesn’t have to be a sale. They can be things like newsletter signups, or white paper downloads, or forum registrations.

At the most basic level, a conversion is whatever action you want the visitor to take when they land on a particular page on your site. So every page has a conversion goal, even if that goal is simply for the visitor to read the page and leave. Unfortunately, as you can probably see, not all conversions are created equal, and some are pretty darned hard to measure.

There are other metrics that could be used, particularly for sites that have hard to measure conversions. For instance, if your site is simply an informational site, you might measure success by an increase in page views, or in “time on site,” indicating people are reading more of your content.

And, of course, you aren’t limited to measuring one thing. Perhaps a combination of metrics would be appropriate for your site — maybe traffic plus average page views per visitor, or traffic combined with time on site and conversions.

How do you decide?

As a DIY webmaster, how do you decide what measurement to use to track the success of your optimization efforts?

Well, you know, there’s an old saying: what gets measured, gets managed.

So decide what your goal is for your optimization. Do you simply want more #1 rankings for bragging rights among your business colleagues? Do you want to increase traffic to your site? Do you want people to spend more time reading? Do you want them to buy more of your product, or do you want more people to contact you requesting more information about your services?

Decide what your goal is, and pick metrics that tie directly to that goal. For instance, if your goal is greater sales revenue, then maybe you’d want to measure the overall number of web sales you get as well as the conversion ratio, plus the gross revenue from online sales, the revenue per sale, and the revenue per visitor. Putting all these together would give you a pretty good picture of how well you’re doing, and comparing them over time would tell you whether your optimization efforts are working as planned.

Focus your optimization campaign on things that you think will help get you closer to your goal. What things you choose to measure will depend on what goal you’ve set. Track the changes you make, and the effect they have (if any) on these metrics.

Don’t let yourself get sidetracked measuring statistics that have no relationship to your goal. Statistics can be fun and addictive, and it’s easy to get buried in numbers that look lovely but don’t tell you anything you need to know. So make sure you’re not wasting time measuring and trying to improve metrics that won’t help you get closer to your goal.

Keep your eyes on the prize. You can get there if you maintain focus.

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Well, as it happens, there are three simple and memorable rules that will help you steer clear of most problems.

Rule number one? Keep in mind some folks will tell you almost anything to get you to buy what they’re selling. The worst offenders are the con artists and scammers. If everything they tell you is just what you wanted to hear, your spider-sense should be tingling.

Rule number two? If what they’re telling you sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Remember: there’s fast, there’s cheap and there’s good. You only get to pick two. If they’re promising overnight success for a bargain-basement price, anyone who signs up is facing near certain disappointment.

And rule number three? The ones who really know what they’re doing can explain their techniques and plans in simple terms — and will be glad to do so. They want you to understand what they’re going to do. Anybody who can’t, or won’t, explain clearly what they’re about and what they’re going to do — without technical jargon — is someone to steer clear of.

There are plenty of good SEOs out there. I know a lot of them in person and from the various forums and social networking sites I participate in. And I can tell you something they all find incredibly frustrating is when people willingly sign up for SEO “services” that are pretty obvious frauds.

I dunno why. People just seem to be extra-willing to suspend disbelief when it comes to the web. They start believing in leprechauns, fairies and “secret sauce.” You get slick con artists talking about guaranteed rankings, special proprietary methodologies, “latent semantic indexing” and other nonsense… and normally hard-headed businesspeople apparently toss all their common sense out the window.

Now, I understand you might feel a little like a fish out of water with this whole SEO thing. Trust me, it wasn’t that many years ago I was in the same boat. Just keep in mind the three rules I mentioned above and you should be OK.

And if you need further help in separating the good, the bad and the ugly, a whole bunch of skilled, ethical search marketers now share with you the biggest scams they’ve encountered, so you’ll know specifically some of the most egregious scams and spams to look out for.

Read this article and promise me (and yourself) you won’t fall for any of the scams and cons highlighted. And promise to engage your brain every time you talk to anyone offering site optimization services.

Remember, there are out there dedicated, hard-working, ethical SEOs who will bring you real results. But every time you plunk down cash for a scammer or spammer because they’ve offered you a bargain basement price and filled your head with empty promises, you become part of the problem. Your actions encourage even more con artists and incompetents to jump on the bandwagon seeking what seem to be easy pickings. And you make real SEOs cry.

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To quote the author:

Traditionally, men are the early adopters of new technologies. But when it comes to social media, women are at the forefront. At Rapleaf we conducted a study of 13.2 million people and how they’re using social media. While the trends indicate both sexes are using social media in huge numbers, our findings show that women far outpace the men.

According to the survey details, it’s only on LinkedIn that men outnumber women (by about a two-to-one margin). On each of the other sites studied (MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Plaxo and Hi5), women outnumber men by about the same two-to-one margin. According to Hoffman, in part the dominance of women in social media stems from their observation that men tend to be more “transactional” while women tend to be more “relationship-driven.”

Indeed, LinkedIn, with its emphasis on job-seeking, making introductions and gathering business intelligence seems to be the most “transactional” of the sites studied. The other sites studied tend to focus more on “friending,” sharing photos and profiles, publishing personal updates, playing casual games with each other — in other words, relationship-building activities.

Some more interesting observations from the survey:

Among twentysomethings, women and men are just as likely to be members of social networks. Facebook, MySpace, and Flixster are extraordinarily popular. But we found that young women are much more active on these sites than young men. And men above 30—especially married men—aren’t even joining social networks. With the notable exceptions of LinkedIn users and venture capitalists in the Bay Area “friending” everyone on Facebook, married men are not hanging out on social networks. Married women, however, are joining social networks in droves. In fact, women between ages 35 and 50 are the fastest-growing segment, especially on MySpace.

So perhaps it wasn’t simply coincidence when Small Business Trends published a set of “point/counterpoint” articles on social media and the “pro” position was taken by a woman, while the “con” position was articulated by a man.

The guy who wrote the “social media is a waste of time” article clearly found social networking a complicated, scary place, and his first reaction was to retreat to old, safe, arms-length ways of doing business (soliciting sales through direct mail, sales calls and trade shows, for example). Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying these things are ineffective. Clearly, they are and will continue to be. What I am saying is: these things have their place, and social networking has its place and writing either one off as worthless is, quite frankly, foolish and short-sighted.

I guess it’s a chicken and egg question — do guys avoid social networking sites because they just don’t feel comfortable with the primarily female communications mode there… or are the social networking sites set up to appeal to women because the men weren’t signing up in the first place? Honestly, I don’t know.

My opinion: perhaps social networking is a waste of time for those who don’t know how to participate appropriately. But there’s plenty of evidence and testimony from others about valuable relationships, useful business intelligence and yes, even direct sales they’ve made through effective social networking.

Perhaps those who don’t “get” social networking simply need to get more in touch with their feminine side.

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Yelp is a user-generated content site that allows local customers to enter their own reviews of local businesses. Even in my small town, dozens of businesses including restaurants, banks and stores are listed and have user reviews. You might be in there and not even know it!

With all that content and business information, the site is important for local business visibility. And with a recent announcement of new features by Yelp, it can now be an important tool for opening the lines of communication with your customers.

Yelp has been known up until now as a consumer site. Now, it appears Yelp is offering some new features to make its service more attractive to small business owners. Simply by registering and claiming your business page, you can:

• Message people who leave a review of your business.
• Get stats on how many potential customers have viewed your business page.
• Instantly update your business information.
• Receive e-mail alerts when a new review of your business is posted.

Register for free at Yelp to take advantage of these new features. Of course, they’re hoping you’ll be so pleased with the results, you’ll spring for their paid upgrade options. Which, depending on your business and how active the local residents are on Yelp, might not be such a bad idea.

In any case, it does seem like something worth checking out.

Hat tip to the Kelsey Group Blogs for bringing these new features to my attention!

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The first three will help you monitor what’s being said so you can respond appropriately when and if necessary. The next three help you establish a strong, positive online presence that could effectively offset negative information that might turn up. And the last one is just plain old common sense.

1. Keep track of what the blogosphere is saying about you and your competitors using free online tools such as BlogPatrol and Technorati. Don’t just track company names, but also product names and other search terms related to your industry or market.
2. Run a Google search on your company and product names every now and then, and see what comes up at / near the top of the results. Are there any unflattering or negative pages there?
3. Set up Google Alerts to be automatically notified whenever Google indexes a mention of your company, your company’s products or other important search terms.
4. Create entries that help establish your position as an authority in your industry. Create an industry-related “lens” in Squidoo. Write appropriate reviews of products in Amazon. Maintain a corporate or personal blog. Contribute to online forums. Write articles.
5. Make appropriate use of opportunities presented by social networking such as FaceBook, MySpace and YouTube. These can be valuable for posting positive content about your business.
6. Conduct a link building campaign for your positive company information, to build strong search engine rankings for this content. The article recommends buying paid links, but given recent developments at Google to devalue the impact of paid links, I’d approach this tactic with caution. Rather, I suggest building natural links if at all possible. It may take longer and require more work, but in the long run, those links will likely help more than paid links. If you need some hints or ideas for building strong natural links, Debra Matstaler’s blog The Link Spiel is a great place to start.
7. And finally, a bit of common sense. Be careful about what you yourself post online. You don’t want to undermine your own reputation management efforts by posting angry off-topic diatribes on professional forums, rude responses to customer complaints or pictures of drunken antics at your last office party. If you wouldn’t want your mom to see it, or if you wouldn’t want it plastered 30 feet high on a billboard on the busiest highway near your office, then it shouldn’t be posted online, either.

For more information about online reputation management, check out Andy Beal’s free Online Reputation Management Beginner’s Guide, with links to a plethora of additional resources and tools you can use.

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Now, I’d like to share another tip from the Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference, this time about evaluating your results.

Don’t Be So Hard On Yourself

This tip comes from Jennifer Laycock, a small business marketing expert and the editor at Search Engine Guide. If you want to learn more about effective online marketing for small business, buy and read her e-book The Small Business Guide to Online Marketing. Highly recommended!

So, Jenn’s tip was to make sure you have reasonable expectations for the results of your campaign.

I know too often at one or another of the forums I frequent, small business owners complain about being unable to crack the top five (or maybe even the top 10) for a (highly competitive) search phrase.

Jenn asked: in what other form of marketing would you consider a campaign to be a “failure” if it weren’t among the top 10 in the world? Not many, I’d bet.

• Do you expect your newspaper or radio ad to bring in one of the top 10 response rates ever in the world?
• Do you expect your direct mail to be in the top 10 in the world in terms of generating sales or leads?
• Do you expect your TV ad to be voted one of the 10 most memorable in the world?

Of course not! That would be silly.

So why do so many of us think we should be able to do that sort of thing online?

Because when you complain about not being able to make it to the first page of the search results, that’s what you’re doing.

Fortunately, it isn’t any more necessary to success to be one of the top 10 in the world online than it is in any other area of marketing. There are other, more reliable, more useful criteria for measuring the benefits of a marketing campaign.

Don’t beat yourself up or consider your campaign a “failure” if you don’t crack the top 10 or any other arbitrary threshhold.

No, rather look for improvement. Is your site getting more traffic or making more sales than it did before? Is the improvement at least enough to pay the cost of the changes you made?

If so, your campaign is a success! Celebrate it!

If not, you learned something from the experience and you’ll be able to apply that knowledge to improve your future campaigns. Celebrate that!

Either way, keep moving forward. Each small success builds on the one before. Eventually, you may find you have more business than you can handle, even if you never get that coveted top 10 listing for your most desirable key phrase.

We face enough issues as small businesses without adding the burden of unnecessarily high expectations. Enjoy, learn, apply and grow!

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