B2B Website Conversion Strategies: Self Service Calls to Actions

In this podcast I interviewed Dale Underwood, CEO of EchoQuote to discuss B2B website conversion strategies. Dale is a 20 year veteran of the IT industry. About three years ago Dale began implementing internet marketing strategies providing tools to convert website visitors into sales opportunities. Here’s an excerpt of the interview. To hear the full 20 minute interview, click or download the podcast above.

When a visitor comes to your website due to your well planned SEO or SEM strategy he or she is not necessarily ready to convert into a buyer, or to fill out a form, or ready to talk to a salesperson. This is especially prominent in B2B websites.

Buyers have many options when they do their research on the web and therefore, they are harder to engage.  Many marketers struggle with how to engage a website visitor.

Marketers must look at their website from the customer’s point of view. Visit your website as a prospective customer. Ask yourself if your website content and calls to action are engaging for visitors at different stages of their buying cycle.

Most marketers have not done a good job of engaging visitors based on where the visitor is in their buying process. Some of the calls to actions marketers have offered such as white papers, are not very compelling or they are sometimes freely available. They often don’t address needs of the buyer at the current stage when they visit the website.

EchoQuote is a group of IT sales people. They came up with a method to provide a website conversion through self service budgetary pricing without displaying pricing on the website.  By offering the website visitor the promise of budgetary pricing without having to contact the company or talking to a salesperson, many visitors are willing to engage.

Often a website visitor wants to know the general price range of your products or services. By offering the ability to provide budgetary pricing the request rates can be very high. But, just because someone requests pricing information doesn’t make them a qualified sales prospect.

When someone asks for pricing info using a link from your website to EchoQuote, the first detail captured is an email address. Therefore, this email address can be nurtured for future sales potential. This method is a good way to build your email list.

Once someone requests pricing they are a “suspect” and it’s a good idea to have a sales person contact the visitor to explore their criteria in order to avoid a situation where they scope your products or services without your input.

EchoQuote is a patented system whose clients are B2B.  Most of them sell a complex product or service with a direct sales force or a knowledgeable channel partner.

EchoQuote client example: a 20 year old company who traditionally does a lot of email marketing. They had noticed a drop in leads from the contact form. When they implemented the EchoQuote self service pricing their lead form conversions picked up by 30%. The client attributed it to giving visitors the ability to receive budgetary pricing in a self service model.

Dale summarizes the podcast interview by pointing out that all situations are different but suggests that all marketers visit their website with your customer’s perspective and assess if you’re providing compelling calls to action relevant to different stages of the buying cycle.

Listen to the podcast for the full interview between me and Dale Underwood.

Bernie Borges
Twitter name: @berniebay

Do You Have a Blog Strategy?

This podcast elaborates on a blog post about blogging strategies. 

We start with a plug for the annual Tech Jam party hosted by TBTF – a party with a purpose to support the TBTF Foundation!

At Find and Convert, we frequently get asked by our clients about business blogging strategies.  “Should we have a blog?  How would a blog benefit our business and our SEO strategy?”

Sidenote: Podcasting has its roots in blogs.  The first podcasts were posted (and many still are) on blogs.

The real question is what is your social media strategy?  A blog is a component of a social media strategy.  Social media is not rocket science.  It is any web platform where communities of like minded people go, they subscribe, they contribute thoughts and user generated content.  They “socialize” online! The collective influence of communities in social media is very powerful.

When considering a blog within a social media strategy, a business should first consider what they want to accomplish.  Do they have subject matter experts, thought leaders AND the available resources who can be committed to a blog? 

Many companies start and stop a blog because they don’t get instant results.  One reason is they don’t commit the resources to the blog.  I sometimes visit a blog and see the last post was three months ago.  That blog instantly has NO credibility!

Where do you start?  Start by being a “listener” first.  Before a business starts a blog, they should visit other blogs where their community hangs out.  Read about what they’re talking about.  Get involved in those conversations with any frequency that suits your comfort.  You can gain really valuable insights from other blogs.  People can be talking about your company, your products, your competitors and even your employees.  They may be talking about issues your company addresses well but they don’t know that you do.  That’s an opportunity!

What should businesses blog about?  Most companies should blog about what they are capable of blogging about!  Begin by finding the person who has the interest in writing and the knowledge (authority) to write.  If a business has more than one person who likes to write, divide up the roles on the blog.  It’s ok to have more than one person “hosting” a blog.  They should be able to write in a blogging style.  Write conversational, not as corporate speak.  Always write relevant content!

Mistakes to avoid? One big mistake is not being transparent.  Don’t be someone you are not.  Be honest with your community.  If you use a screen name, be real behind the screen name.  No smoke and mirrors.  Your community will eventually find out and trash you.  Don’t underestimate the power of the online community.

How often should we blog?  No one answer.  Just be consistent.  Not too infrequent.  I blog about once per week.  Each business blog is unique.  As long as the content is relevant and of interest to your audience.

What’s the benefit to my SEO strategy? Blog content is an effective way to add content to your website if your blog is connected to your website.  If your blog is standalone you can link back to your website with relevant anchored keywords.  Blog content is an effective way to add content because many businesses struggle with adding fresh content on their website.  The link value of your content is what counts the most in your SEO strategy in the long run.

What’s your blog strategy?  Is it in the context of a social media strategy? 

 

Do You Need a Blog Strategy?

One of the most common questions we get from B2B clients is “how can a blog help my SEO strategy?”  Follow up discussions include questions like, “What would we blog about?”  “How often do we need to blog?” 

This usually leads to a discussion around blogging strategy and social media strategy.  I point out that a blog may or may not be the right social media strategy for a B2B marketer.  I try to get the point across that a blog really should be part of a bigger strategy.  Some are reporting that B2B blogging is on the decline.

A big mistake to avoid is to start a blog just because it seems like a good idea.  A social media strategy should focus on the most effective ways to foster multi-levels of communication among the communities of people in your market place. 

There are many social media strategy avenues available and blogging is just one of them.

If a blog is a desired part of your social media strategy it’s important to have a well defined goal for the blog, along with a commitment of resources to the blog. 

Let’s look at each of these questions:
How can a blog help my SEO strategy?
Depending on your objective(s) it may provide several benefits.  One of them is if you don’t have a good blog and most of your competitors do, then you are possibly disadvantaged.  But, if you don’t have the resources to start a blog, even this reason isn’t a good one.  Find other ways to compete.  A good blog most often benefits a business by providing a friendly platform for your communities to gain insights into your company or industry that are not otherwise available.  A good blog will also provide link value for your SEO strategy.

What would we blog about?
You can blog about a lot of things.  What are the issues facing your industry?  What are the issues facing your customers?  What are some ideas you have (that aren’t confidential) that you want to express? Think in terms of product, environment and customer.  Write about things your community will have interest in and invite them into the conversation.

How often do we need to blog?
Often enough to show consistency. We blog about once per week. The frequency should be determined partly by your blogging resources and by the activity that takes place on your blog. But, if you start a blog with frequent posts, then it tails off to very infrequent blogging, you are likely to lose your audience.  Show consistency and listen to your audience.  You may need to blog more often if that’s the feedback you get from your blogging audience.

Don’t be surprised if your audience doesn’t join the conversation.  Depending on the size of your company and the size of your community, your blog may not generate a lot of conversation.  But, if it is well read, it can create another face to your business that can give you an edge, not easily duplicated eleswhere.

What are your thoughts on blogging?
Bernie

SEO Ranking for Competitive Keywords

How do you rank high organically for a competitive keyword?  Before we look at this, first consider if the competitive keyword you want to rank for is the right one.  Sure, there are obvious keywords in each business.  But, consider less competitive long tail keywords too for “winning strategies.”

If you want to make the investment of time and resources to rank well for a very competitive keyword, here are some factors to consider.

First, study the ranking results on the first page of organic search results for your desirable keyword.  If more than half of them are not relevant to your target audience, I take you back to the point above and consider other keywords. 

For purposes of this blog post, let’s assume all the search rankings on page one are relevant to your target audience and you’re not ranking on the first page.  Where are you ranking for this keyword?  If you are currently ranking on page 25 for this keyword, is this keyword really the best use of your time and resources.  If you are willing to make the investment and have the patience, read on.

So, you’ve decided you are willing to make the investment of time and resources to compete for this keyword.  And, you are willing to be patient.

First, study the websites ranking on the first page for your keyword.  Study their content, their meta data, their source code, their URL structure, their domain age and their link count. What is their PageRank and what is your PageRank?  As Sun Tsu wrote in the Art of War, the way to defeat your enemy is to know their strategy and defeat their strategy. 

When you study the content and links from the competitors on page one you will gain insight and ideas into how they got there and what you need to do to compete effectively for your desired keyword.

In many cases, you may face a real uphill battle (refer back to the long tail strategy).  But, if you are able to get even to position #10 on the first page, that can be a good accomplishment.  But, you may need to be realistic.  If some of the rankings on page one have a combination of content, links, domain age and website architecture that you simply can not compete, then either be content with a lower ranking, or defer back to the long tail keyword (winning SEO) strategy.

Studying your competitor’s (ranking on page one) content will give you insight and ideas for what you need to do.  Because, if you are expecting this blog post to reveal some secret formula, you will be disappointed.  You will need to develop a lot of really good content and attract links.  And, there are many effective ways to do this. 

You can write content about how your (keyword centric) product is used, who uses it, why they use it and all the great things they accomplish by using your product.  I’m sure there are many people who also agree with all these great factoids, so they should contribute to your content.  For example, are there specific industries who benefit from your products?  Write about all of them, and write a lot.   

Writing all this content can take on several forms.  In addition to adding web pages with this content, you should consider press releases, articles which can be syndicated and blog posts.  If you don’t have a corporeate blog, start one.  If you do, add more content and look for relevant blogs where you can conttibute about these topics. 

You should promote some of this content in selected social media destination sites for visibility and natural link building.  After all you will need to build links for your content to compete for your super competitive, desirable keyword. 

If all of this sounds like time consuming, hard work, it is.  Did I forget to mention that?  Sorry….

 

 

Content is Still King

I talk every day with clients and write often in this blog about the importance of links in any SEO strategy. Anyone who has spent more than ten minutes reading about SEO knows that back links are critical ingredient for organic search engine rankings.

One point I make often is that a good link strategy will yield limited results or no material results without a strong foundation of content. In fact, we say that (in round numbers) 30% of a website’s SEO success is based on “on page” factors. On-page factors refer to well-optimized content with good use of keywords, meta tags, header tags, search engine friendly URLs and optimized source code.

The math is obvious. We like to say that about 70% of a website’s SEO is based on off-page factors. Primarily, this refers to the extent to which others think your content is good. At first, this sounds very strange. How can others determine how good my content is? And, how can Google (and other engines) determine what others think?

Consider a comment made by a Google engineer at the Online Marketing Summit conference I attended last October. He said this: “Google doesn’t care about your content. Google cares about who cares about your content.” What he means, is when other content (on other websites) link to your content, they are “casting a vote.” for your content.

The Google technology explanation describes how this works.  Essentially, other web pages link to your content and Google considers that a “vote” for your content.

To accentuate this point consider how Google’s origin as Backrub, is based on this concept of keeping score of the popularity of your content.

So, if creating links to content is so critical to SEO success then why don’t we just go out and buy a g-zillion links to our content?  Well, some do.  First, consider that if you pay a site to link to you, that is frowned upon by Google and the other major engines.  We don’t condone it.

Let’s go back to the comment by the Google engineer.  In fact, Google does care about your content.  He went on to say that the more relevant, keyword-rich content you have (along with a search engine friendly architecture), the more links your content will naturally attract.

Then, if you pay someone to build legitimate links to your website (not pay the website to link to you), those links will be well supported by your content and provide good SEO value.

Now, let’s go back to the 30/70 ratio although, this is admittedly hearsay, not a statistic backed up by Google.  The point to this ratio is this.  If you build a strong foundation in your SEO plan with great, relevant content, then the links you get will carry weight in SEO value. 

Of course, the Google PR value of the source of the links counts as well.  The point here is that links without content are not effective.

So, it comes back to this – content is king! 

Juiced Up Press Releases

I’ve written before about the importance of merit based link building.  I talk about it everyday with our clients.  So, here I go again writing about it.

Wait a minute – the title of this post says it’s about press releases.  Right….

Too many marketers have a one dimensional view of their press releases. They think a press release is an announcement designed to produce some public relations (that other “PR”) value.  Once upon a time, I hawked press releases in a previous life, working the editors and analysts hoping to get ink and win kudos from my boss and my sales counterparts.

Marketers should think of their press releases as content for their website.  Even more, they should think of press releases as content that can be syndicated across the web.  And, it is a great opportunity for merit based links back to your website, ie., SEO, ie., Google juice!

Those of us in the Internet Marketing business refer to “Google juice” as any content which helps us get indexed by Google.  The most powerful Google juice is content which has valuable links anchored from our desirable keyword phrases on a web page of relevant content.

Another term for this simply is an optimized press release.  If we optimize our web content for search engine optimization (SEO), then an optimized press release is just another form of optimized content.

The difference is that an optimized press release can get distributed over a search engine friendly wire service such as PRWeb and BusinessWire.  And, it can produce valuable and juiced up links, anchored from some of your favorite keywords.

Understanding this should inspire marketers not to limit press releases to the most newsworthy stories in their company.  A good marketer should be thinking of press releases as a key component to their SEO strategy.  That’s because a good marketer understands that in SEO content is king, and press releases can make for great content.  And, great content produces merit based links.  This is the SEO circle of life!

Take for example this press release.  In this release we announced a client engagement.  Regardless of your opinion of the news value, note the anchor text linking in this press release.  By optimizing it for keywords such as “SEO strategy” with links back to our website, we are producing valuable one-way links from news services such as PRWeb: http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2008/3/prweb774424.htm. 

So, juice up your press releases by optimizing them and creating great content and great links for SEO value.  It’s not too hard to do it and definitely worth the effort.