There are a couple of things you need to know first, before you embark on a paid search campaign.

1. If your sales cycle is longer than 2 weeks from click to sale, your results might suck.

This is an important one, and many people miss the mark here.  If whatever you are selling takes multiple visits, multiple people in the decision process, or is a large, emotional transaction, chances are your paid campaign will suck.  Let’s look at a few examples:

Plumbing Service – you’ve got a overflow situation getting worse by the minute. Do you search 15 plumbers and call for quotes? No. You go to your computer (or mobile phone) and within 60 seconds search for a local plumber and choose the one that looks most   You might even pick the one who mentions “emergency service” or “available 24 hours” or “30 minute emergency response.” You probably don’t care much about the price either – you just want it fixed.

Real Estate – buying property is usually not an impulse buy. We look at lots of options, talk to lots of people, make personal visits and collect a lot of information before making the final purchase. This is definitely not an impulse purchase. Paid search can work in this case if the margins are high enough to where even if the conversions are dismal, one sale could pay for the whole campaign.

Air Conditioning Repair –Like the plumber, you need the next available company to service your system, because it is 100 degrees outside and your AC isn’t working. The first or second listing will get the deal.

Home Health Care – getting a parent or loved one into a home health care situation is an emotional experience. Not only is the sales cycle longer than 2 weeks, but the decision is usually not with one person, which makes it a harder deal to close. If clicks are going for $5-10 a piece, you could spend hundreds before getting a new client.

2. Send your clicks to a very targeted landing page.  Quality score matters and can greatly affect your cost per click.

We see a lot of businesses sending their paid ads to the home page of their website.  Sending someone to a page that has little to do with what the ad said will result in a poor Quality Score.  Secondly, your home page has lots of other links and things to distract a visitor (who you just paid for) to do just about anything other than what you want them to do – convert.

3. Find out what long tail terms in SEO convert well, and bid on those.

This is also an overlooked area in paid search.  If you take a gander at your analytics, you already know which organic search terms convert well.  Many of them are branded (include your company name), but some are not.  Many of them will be long tail, or terms which are extremely targeted and result in fewer visitors, but less bounce rate and higher conversions.  Bid on these long tail terms – they will be cheaper and will likely convert better.

Here’s a video recap by NovusTV of the F5 Expo held April 7th, 2010 in Vancouver, Canada.

(Left to Right) Michael Tippet of NowPublic, Justin Young of Radar DDB, and myself discuss cost effective video marketing at the F5 Expo on April 7th in Vancouver, Canada.

Photos courtesy of www.jeremylim.ca

The F5 Expo held Wednesday, April 7th was a tremendous event. Rich content, well-attended and a powerful keynote from best-selling author of Blink, Tipping Point, and Outliers Malcolm Gladwell. His challenge to people using and developing on the Internet is to use it to create strong ties rather than just weak ties, of which the Internet is already very good at. Revolutionary change can only happen through strong ties Malcolm argued, as he cited several examples throughout history to prove his point. His feeling, and I agree, is that the world needs more social revolution, and if revolution can only occur through strong ties, then we must find ways to use the Internet to foster it. The question is, are we up for it?

Malcolm Gladwell argues that the Internet has only been good at generating weak ties quickly amongst crowds of people. Social revolution can only happen through strong ties.

I had signed up to moderate two panels, the first being Cloud Computing and the other Search Engine Marketing. Thank you to my panelists for a job well done. I got some very positive feedback on these topics from attendees. I was also a last second replacement on the Cost Effective Video Marketing panel and had the privilege of sharing the stage with Justin Young of Radar DDB Vancouver and Michael Tippet of NowPublic. All-in-all, I thought it was a great event… minus the registration snafu! Well done Linz!

Malcolm Gladwell takes live questions through Mingleverse at F5 Expo Launch Party.

I was in attendance at the F5 Expo Launch Party yesterday, January 26th. What a great turnout! The place was packed with over 200 people – and all eyeballs were fixated on the many screens around the V Lounge as Malcolm Gladwell appeared within the Mingleverse online universe (think Second Life) to take questions from the live audience. If this party was any indication of what we can expect of the main event on April 7th, the Vancouver business and tech scene is in for a special treat. F5 Expo is all about online business, marketing, and technology. Hot topics like Search Engine Optimization, social media, video blogging, and cloud computing will be tackled in interactive sessions and panel discussions. I’ve just been added as a moderator on the SEO panel. Should be fun!

If you haven’t registered yet, take advantage of my personal promo code that gives you 30% off the ticket price until Jan 31st.

REGISTER NOW

ENTER PROMO CODE: P1F510

Don’t be afraid to invest in your website just as you would a training and education budget for a salesperson. You may be tempted to throw a lot of money into paid search, but investing in organic search will last much longer, making it the most effective way to drive leads for your business. That means once the ad budget runs out, the leads and the traffic stops, but the work you put into organic rankings will last for months, if not years to come.

But what happens when you can’t find your website in the organic listings?

Chances are, you need help optimizing your website to tell the search engines what your site is about. I run a company called Pear Analytics where my team developed a tool that gives you a free SEO analysis in about 30 seconds with actionable details and instructions on how to fix the issues in “Fisher-Price” language. You’ll get a score from 0 to 100, as well as a detailed report, which will look something like this:

Each category is labeled with an indicator to help identify your problem areas, where you can expand each section to learn what it is, how you scored, and how to fix that particular item.

Increasing your score helps ensure that your site has been properly set up to be search engine friendly; however, you will still need to work on three main things in an ongoing manner.

1. Understand the keywords you should target and your competition
I find quite often that websites are not systematically targeting any keywords, or they are targeting words or phrases that do not get searched often. Use our Website Analyzer tool and look at the Keyword Targets section of the report. It tells you the keywords you are trying to target, but also what Google thinks your site is about. Evaluate the words to target based on how many searches per month the word gets. In other words, you don’t want to target a keyword that gets searched 20 times per month. You want to target words that get over 1,000 searches per month, or 500 per month on a local search (if you add a location to your search term).

2. Generate interesting content that people want to read (and link to)
This is the one thing that worries small business owners because they do not have a lot of time to dedicate to keeping up a website or a blog. In reality, this is an exercise that will take a couple of hours a week – more is better if you have the time. Over 40% of the traffic that comes to my Pear Analytics company site is from blog posts that are found through Google searches. I have roughly 50 blogs and have been blogging about analytics, SEO, SEM and other topics for about a year now. Try to do a blog post per week, or generate a new page of content, or add new products to your site on a weekly basis. Google likes new and fresh information and will give preference to sites that update often.

3. Build your inbound links as organically as possible
Building links is the most time consuming and difficult task. Most people won’t link to you without good reason, and you want to avoid buying links whenever you can. Most sites that offer to sell you links for a few hundred dollars are not very good links. You would rather have a few great links than lots of poor links. This goes back to creating awesome content – like whitepapers, video, or other information that would be valuable to people, or something they would expect to pay for. You can also use public relations as a way to build inbound links. By writing press releases and posting them electronically with strategic links back to your website could be extremely valuable.

Try the free SEO tool and start thinking strategically about your website and getting found in the search engines. Let me know what you think about the tool and if you’re finding it helpful. Would love to hear your feedback!

• Malcolm Gladwell’s keynote presentation
• Access to all sessions and panel discussions
• Lunch and refreshments
• USB memory stick preloaded with exclusive offerings and savings for your business
• Admission to the post-event networking reception with Malcolm in attendance

BONUS: Your name will be entered into a draw to meet Malcolm in-person. Only 20 tickets will be made available for this private reception.

Order Early Bird Tickets Here

Host of Tech Talk Expert on Global TV News and show organizer, Lindsay Smith asked me to join her advisory board this year to help with the latest edition of the Massive Tech Show to be held in April 2010. The event has lost some steam over the past couple of years and is looking to refocus. We had our first group advisory meeting earlier this month and the overwhelming consensus was the event needed a heavy makeover to make it relevant again for people doing business today. Some of the core decisions included a re-branding, focusing on social media (Twitter and Facebook) and online marketing (SEO and SEM), and placing a greater emphasis on quality content and big personalities. To that end, Lindsay announced yesterday she has signed on Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author of Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers as the event’s keynote speaker! Wow. If you haven’t read any of his books, please do yourself a favor and visit Amazon or your local Chapters or Barnes & Nobles and pick up one. A tremendous author with incredible insight on the world as we know it, Malcolm will be quite the draw at F5 Expo (ah yes, the new brand, cleverly named after the “F5″ function button on your keyboard, typically used to refresh your screen).

As the event starts taking shape, I’ll post some more details on it, but expect it to be an entirely different show than past iterations – in a very good way. Congrats Lindz on getting Malcolm!

Jennifer Tanzi

Here is a helpful article for novice small business operators looking to understand the impact of SEO on their sales as written by my guest, Jennifer Tanzi of Buydomains.com:

Using SEO to Court Search Engines

Ever since Google became a verb, small business owners have wondered about guaranteeing prime placement when prospective clients go a-typing in their search engines. Times have changed since you simply added “AAA” to your business name and scored first place in the yellow page listings. Marketing yourself is more complicated in the digital age, but with a little bit of insight and a few simple steps, you can catch the eyes of those search engines, and propel your businesses name up those prospective clients’ lists of results.

You know how people use name repetition (sometimes relentlessly) to remember yours? (“Hi, Sandra, so good to meet you, Sandra. Can I get you a beverage, Sandra? Sandra, let me take your coat.”) Search Engine Optimization — SEO — works kind of the same way. Repeating key phrases in your domain name and throughout your website pages makes your business more appealing to the search engines. Once they find you, so will all those new clients. You just need to put some thought into choosing the right keywords, and some craft into your copy so your message sounds fresh, and not repetitive.

First, figure out your key keywords. Let’s say you sell organic lavender, tended and harvested on your own pristine acres of New England farmland. You’ve done your homework on choosing domain names that attract type-in traffic and landed one that screams “organic lavender” right there in the URL. Now, how can you ensure that every person looking for your product sees your business name in lights when they go Metacrawling?

Perhaps your website boasts glorious photos of lavender plants so vivid you can smell them through the screen, and describes memorably the many attributes of your farm — the perfectly tended soil, the soothing scents of the lavender as you coax the shoots from the earth. But when Elinor the Florist needs a supplier for her tremendously successful hand-tied organic bouquets, what words will she type into her search engine? Organic lavender. And, since she wants to go local, maybe also, “New England.”

So there you have ‘em. New England. Organic. Lavender.

Your new SEO keywords, New England organic lavender, should appear five or six times on each page of 500 – 600 words of copy. So your site needs to describe the perfectly tended soil of your New England organic lavender farm, the soothing scents of your New England organic lavender plants as you coax the shoots from the soil. Placement of the keywords is critical, too. You should include them in <H1> header tags, in your first paragraph and in links throughout the site.

As you master SEO, there are a few pitfalls you’ll want to avoid. Vary the titles and meta data of your pages, so that if several different pages of your site pop up in the search results, customers see difference slices of information about your business from your site.
When you’ve mastered the SEO strategies, test your efforts. Cruise the web yourself to see which sites your keywords bring up, and what your competitors are doing differently to place high in the results. And be sure to use web analytics on your site so you know exactly how your visitors are finding you.

To small business owners, those search engines might at first seem a fickle bunch. But once they get to know you — through SEO — they are really going to love you.