Leveling the Internet Playing Field

Messaging, Partnerships, SEO, Site navigation, Web Development

Industrial S for SEO

Duped by all the media hype saying that the internet levels your playing field?

Do you recall when it was widely published that the internet levels the playing field for small businesses? Media raved about how small business could not only one up their direct competition but also compete against big companies, which sparked a lot of small businesses to get on the website bandwagon. If you were one of these businesses but have yet to see the promised positive results, you might be feeling duped by all the media hype.

Well, the good news is that it wasn’t just media hype – they were right. However, the bad news is they forgot to tell you that there’s a process that must be followed to gain internet success. Just like developing new products or implementing new processes, if steps are missing, the results are poor performance or outright failure.

So what was the process I should have followed?

Outpacing your competition on the internet is a complicated process, but when broken down into manageable steps, the result is a website that meets company goals and expectations. The three critical steps: goal setting, navigation, messaging, and content, and monthly data monitoring are detailed below. But don’t despair if you didn’t implement these steps when first launching the site; it’s never too late to start.

Step 1: Goal Setting

Asking the simple question, “what do we want our website to do for us (the goal)?” The answer to this question helps drive navigation, content and call-to-action decisions.

Here are some goals that might apply to your business:

  • Grow my business by $900k within 6 months.
  • Establish creditability as one of the best sources for the unique value we offer.
  • Offer our market a one-stop source for equipment and repairs.
  • Acquire viable leads and avoid requests for products/services that don’t fit our business model.
  • Discover new markets for current products.
  • Provide easy to find technical data for my current customers.

Once goals are defined, you can move on to step two.

Step Two: Navigation, Content, and Messaging

Once you have your goals clearly defined, take a critical look at your site and ask, “how well does the site’s navigation, content and messaging help us meet our goals?” If you answered that it doesn’t meet 100% of your goals, then it’s time to get to work and decide what is lacking or missing and then assemble a web team to fix the problem. Depending on your needs, typical web team roles can include:

  • Someone who understands marketing; specifically messaging, brand building, and website optimization.
  • A content expert; someone with a strong understanding of your products and services to help develop a strong story and on-point messaging.
  • A graphics designer to elevate the look and feel of your site.
  • A programmer to implement necessary code that supports website parameters for appearance, functionality and marketing tactics.
  • Sales and service personnel that have direct customer interaction and know what customers expect.

In a small company, this team is often comprised of one or two internal people. Almost always, outside resources are required to fill any lacking skill sets. Your internal team should interview outside resources to confirm qualifications and fit with the team.

With your team in place, it’s time to create a clear project plan outlines activities needed to ensure the site meets its goals, and timelines and assigned resources to execute the activities. A project plan helps the team stay focused, so the project is completed on time and within budget.

Once the project is complete, now it’s time to protect your investment.

Step Three: Data Monitoring

With the goals set in step one, and the activities complete in step two, metrics can now be established that help you know if the site is meeting its goals, and defining the tools needed to track the metrics.

Monthly data monitoring is a must to stay focused on the results. Monitoring also helps to track trends and tackle any site issues proactively.

Examples of essential measurements are:

  • Customer search behavior – how do they find the site.
  • What do visitors do on site and how much time do they spend.
  • Your site’s keyword rankings.
  • Competitor rankings for your relevant and prioritized keywords and phrases.
  • Traffic trends and volume from your market’s region
  • Mentions in published articles.

The internet offers a level playing field, but the devil is in the details. Now you have a better grasp of to achieve website success.

As always, if you need help navigating search optimization best practices or redesigning your website so it meets its goal, give us a call, 1-360-834-2780.

AODD Pump Selection

Keywords, Search Engine Marketing, SEO, Site navigation, Web Development

Industrial S for SEO

What can AODD pump manufacturers do to help end users find the best pump for a challenging application?

The answer is simple; optimize product pages with the features, benefits, and specifications that end users need – let’s explore this further.

Direct Industry lists over 55 manufacturers. Each of these manufacturers’ claim unique benefits in their directory listings, but does this help end users find the best pump for their application? The truth is, not really. Directories are middlemen in the search process. Wouldn’t it be more efficient and cost effective to eliminate the middlemen and drive end users to a page on your site that is the perfect product for their application? By doing so, you will help save the end user time by quickly giving them what they need. You are probably asking, sounds great, but how do I make this happen? Read on.

Optimize for the search savvy

Search engine technologies have reached the point of providing excellent matches for user search terms. For search engines to rank your products well, they must clearly understand what your products have to offer. Web pages must concisely communicate product specifications, features, and benefits, and they must be easily navigable – no crazy, illogical URL structures.

Like search engines, end users have become more search savvy; they now typically use long tail searches (keyword phrases) to help narrow down their search instead of a single keyword search. Long tail searches that contain application challenges or required product features help produce the ideal pump in a search result. It’s much like dating sites where couples seek the perfect partner. The best match is out there, but if your website doesn’t illustrate user solutions in the way people search, results fall short.

It sounds so simple, and you are probably thinking, “I do a good job with that so why are my company and products not ranking high on a search results page?” But if your product navigation is complicated and your product pages don’t clearly communicate specifications, features, and benefits, search engines will not understand your site structure and products, and you won’t be able to outrank the competition.

Let’s see what we are talking about

Let’s demonstrate how it works. Try entering the following into a search bar or click on the following link, AODD, ½” ports, 20 psi, 5 GPM, Polypropylene, PTFE, stall proof, efficient, food grade. Notice that the search engine struggles to find the perfect match, but offers some good results. What got these pages top ranking? What can you do to outrank the competition and make the end user happy by providing them with an ideal match? Easy, make product pages relevant to the phrases people search for and simplify site structure, especially if you have many product categories. Do a thorough job of describing the value your products offer so search engines can make accurate matches and present the searcher with ideal results.

How does your site stack up?

Search engines are doing their part, now if you do your part as an AODD manufacturer, everyone wins (you, customer and search engine). Who is going to be the first manufacturer to take the lead by communicating properly with search engines, win new business and give customers a delightful search experience?

As always, if you need help navigating search optimization best practices, give us a call, 360.834.2780.

SEO or PPC

PPC, Search Engine Marketing, SEO

SEO vs PPC

SEO vs. PPC

What’s the difference and where should industrial firms spend marketing dollars?

We see a lot of our industrial clients struggling with the question, “where do I spend my marketing dollars, on search engine optimization (SEO) or search engine advertising (like Google AdWords)?” The answer to that question, like so many other things, is not an easy either-or decision — SEO is essential for a site to be found by prospects, it improves the customer’s experience, and it helps improve search engine advertising results.

Before we discuss how to determine what is best for the company, let’s look at both options in greater depth and explore some of the pros and cons of each — this knowledge will save money and avoid disappointment.

What is search engine optimization (SEO)?

SEO, also known as organic search is, according to Google, “the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.” Search results are ranked based on algorithms that closely match the searcher’s intent. First page rankings increase your probability that searchers will click through to your site, and are even higher when your site ranks 1, 2 or 3 on the first page.

To rank well on a search engine result page (SERP), a website must be properly search engine optimized. It is imperative that a company optimizes individual web pages for their most important keywords with highly relevant content and a host of other factors (see our detailed blog posts on On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO for additional information).

Let’s look at the pros and cons of SEO.

Pros

  • Trust and credibility. High search rankings carry the perception of credibility; they imply authority, which generates trust.
  • Click-through Rate (CTR) studies show that CTRs are always better for organic search results for informational searches.
  • Organic search is less costly than paid search to achieve results.
  • SEO practices yield a superior human experience leading to superior results.
  • Works for your company 24/7 – everlasting.
  • SEO creates the foundation for long-term success.

Cons

  • Organic search can take months to rank highly; it is a long-term strategy that requires resources to apply SEO tactics and develop and maintain content.
  • Maintaining organic search results relies heavily on fresh content and building authoritative backlinks.

What is search engine advertising? 

Search advertising, also known as Paid Search or PPC, are advertisements that companies place with search engines to have their ads displayed when a searcher enters specific keywords. Companies bid for keywords and only pay for the ad when a searcher clicks through to their site from the ad.

Keyword bidding and the ad’s quality score are used by search engines to determine ad placement. Keywords are used in the bidding process to match your ads with what prospects are searching for. You choose how much you are willing to pay for a keyword — you pay for each click on your ad. Quality scores are variables based on the ads expected Click through rate (CTR), ad to keyword relevance, and the ad’s landing page relevance to the ad. High-quality scores can lead to lower ad prices and better ad positions.

Now, let’s look at the pros and cons of PPC.

Pros

  • If ads are properly bid and have high-quality scores, paid advertising can propel search rankings to the top of the search results page.
  • PPC can be tailored to target specific audiences, for example, industry, locations, product users.

Cons

  • Ads won’t rank well unless ads and their respective landing pages are highly relevant to each other and the searcher’s query.
  • Competitive keyword PPC ads can be expensive.
  • PPC ads require close monitoring to avoid excessive clicks by unqualified traffic.
  • For informational sites, there is some level of distrust by searchers for paid ads.
  • Informational sites, PPC ad CTRs are lower than organic search CTRs.

When is PPC beneficial?

The perfect time for industrial companies to run an AdWords campaign is when the company needs to:

  • Jump start organic search results for a new or redesigned site or a new web page — organic SEO methods can take months to show results.
  • Launch new products, promote a new service or inform your audience about an upcoming event.
  • Quickly gain brand recognition.

The question, “should we spend marketing dollars on search engine optimization or PPC advertising?” is more of a question of how can I get the best bang for my buck to achieve my marketing goals.

PPC advertising can be used to help quickly gain search engine traffic for a new site, new web page, or new product. If it is imperative to rank well for highly competitive keywords, AdWords might be the answer, but remember, if the keywords are highly competitive, a substantial budget is needed to bid enough to rank well for those keywords.

SEO optimization, on the other hand, should be part of the company’s long-term strategy. The goal of SEO is to rank on page one of a search results page for the page’s most important keywords. You can think of SEO as an investment in the future — if website ranks well organically for relevant keywords, then a PPC campaign might not be necessary allowing you to spend marketing dollars elsewhere.

We can’t stress enough the importance of a developing a clear marketing strategy and marketing plan that deploys tactics that make sense for your business. Search engine optimization should always be part of that plan to ensure high-ranking, long-term, sustainable organic search results. However, activities like creating a company blog to position the company as industry experts or using email marketing to target your audience with a particular message might be money better spent than launching an AdWords campaign — let your strategy and data drive tactical decisions.

Still need help deciding the best course of action for your company, give us a call to discuss your unique situation — 360.834.2780.

Distributor Guide to Website Success

Keywords, Search Engine Marketing, SEO, Site navigation, Strategy, User Testing

Distributor Website Success

What is website success?

Website success means your site achieved its goals. For the purpose of this article, we’d like to focus on success that is measured by qualified lead generation – a goal 99% of our clients use – sounds simple right? Well it can be, but 3 things need to happen first:

  1. You have implemented Search Engine Optimization (SEO) best practices. Meaning:
    • Your site is found and indexed by search engines.
    • Search engines rank your web pages on page 1 of a search results page.
    • Your search snippets (page description) entice searchers to click through to your site.
    • Your site provides searchers with product and service information relevant to their search inquiry.
  2. You’ve user tested your website. Usability testing means your site meets the navigation and information needs of your prospects and customers.
  3. You analyze website and competitor data on a consistent basis allowing you to make data-driven decisions about the site to ensure it meets set goals.

Website success: What it does for your business.

  1. It generates a generous ROI.
  2. It helps you better understand your target audience. Search engines provide gobs of very focused usage data, but it also gives your insight into:
    • Human behavior as it applies to your business – this is important. What search patterns do site visitors use? What keywords do they use when looking for your products and services? How do they navigate your site? How long do they spend on the site? What are your most visited pages? Where did the visitors come from? And so much more.
    • Competitor data that reveals their success in ranking for specific keywords, which ad campaigns they run and how successful they are and other internet tactics they deploy.
  3. It pulls in leads that can be highly filtered to minimize and simplify response priorities.
  4. It establishes company creditability and authority.
  5. It warms up the customer experience by humanizing your website.
  6. It provides you with market trends applicable to your products/services.
  7. It builds and maintains brand recognition. And when accompanied by various marketing tactics and practices, will propel revenue.

What’s the process for developing a successful website?

  • Develop clear marketing goals – goals that are aligned with overall business goals. Ensure your website developer, graphics specialist, and internet marketing firm understand the goals and carry out their respective jobs with the intention of meeting those goals.
  • Understand customer expectations and develop your site based on their feedback. Searches have two sides; input and output. Search engines are becoming better at monitoring and understanding user behavior, and they are becoming very sophisticated at matching website content to searcher intent.
  • Understanding the keywords and phrases that drive qualified searchers to your site and ensuring all elements of your site (backend and frontend) are optimized and in synch. A search engine’s ability to match a searcher’s inquiry with relevant results depends on how well they understand a website’s content – this is where a lot of websites fail. If search engines can’t determine how to navigate your site and understand the information well enough to index and rank your site, prospects won’t find your site. How sad, since getting it right is a win for all players and the cost is low.

Get started.

So you may be saying, ‘this is all good for the big guys, but small distributors don’t have that kind of money,” which is a big fallacy. Optimizing your website, creating the ultimate user experience and analyzing the data does not require deep pockets.

Internet promotion, when focused on Company goals, provides you with the biggest bang for your buck. If you are still spending on exhibitions, print ads and paid directories, maybe rethink those activities by analyzing just how much business you acquire from each. You might have to reallocate marketing dollars, but you won’t be disappointed – the internet allows you to speak directly to your prospects and customers without excessive spending – the internet truly does level the playing field.

Off-Page SEO

SEO

Industrial S for SEO

SEO: The importance of off-page optimization.

In our last post, we talked about the importance of on-page search engine optimization (SEO), or the elements applied to your website’s front end content and back end code to improve its findability. In this article, we discuss off-page SEO — the marketing factors that play into findability improvements. Let’s get started.

What is off-page SEO?

Off-page SEO are the promotional tasks and campaigns executed to improve a site’s organic search results. Off-page SEO helps you market your website and build brand awareness.

An often forgotten but important element to building a successful off-page SEO program is the creation of an editorial and scheduling calendar. Editorial calendars help ensure you consistently post relevant, quality content (think blogs & social media) and meet your promotional marketing schedules.

Off-page SEO elements

Listed below are the promotional techniques that you should consider when developing your off-page SEO plan.

Blogging

Creating a blog on your site is an excellent way to strut your stuff and build authority. Blogging is a fantastic way to get your employees to participate in promoting your business by sharing their knowledge and expertise. Blogging can also provide the content you need for a successful social media program. Two essential elements to blogging are one, consistency — if one blog post per month is all you can handle, then schedule that. One post each month is more meaningful and keeps your target audience engaged and interested in what you have to say than posting sporadically. And two, sharing your posts. Sharing is especially important when you first start blogging — if no one knows about your posts, they won’t be read and shared. A simple email message to your customer and prospect database is the perfect way to spread the word. Also, mentioning a new blog post on your social media channels will help to broaden your reach.

Social media

It’s time to get social, but only on the channels your customers and prospects participate (and contrary to some popular belief within industrial markets, your customer base does use social media). Social media is about forming relationships with your target audience by engaging them in two-way conversations — it is also an excellent way to share your content. Channels could include Google+ (which is also very helpful in improving your Google page rank), LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Photo sites like Instagram or Pinterest are excellent sites to showcase your products and services, company functions, and employees.

Link building

One of the best ways to improve your ranking is through high-quality link building. Link building should be a deliberate practice — it is always better to have a few links to reputable, authoritative sites than many links to sites that have nothing to do with your business. For industrial companies, reputable and authoritative sites would include suppliers’, distributors’, manufacturers’, and industry relevant online publications and associations.

Participating in industry forums and groups

Commenting and contributing to the conversation in industry groups and forums showcases your expertise, helps build your authority and establishes your company as industry experts. For example, if you are in the pump industry, you can join a pump group on LinkedIn.

Sitemap Submission

You always want to submit a sitemap to all search engines, and any time that you add web pages, your sitemap must be updated. Sitemaps tell search engines how to navigate your site to improve indexing, which in turn, can improve search engine page rankings. Most content management systems, like WordPress, have plugins that can automatically do this for you.

Local SEO

If your business depends on local customers, this should be on top of your list. Local SEO provides search results that are relevant to a searcher’s current location. You should claim your Google Places for Business page, complete all necessary information, and then link your Google Places page to your Google+ Local Page. One important factor to remember when submitting company information to Google is consistency. Choose an NAP (name, address, phone number) format and stick with it — search engines get confused when your listings are not consistent.

Directory submissions

Directory submissions can be free or paid, but you should focus only on submitting information to directories that are relevant to your business. Like local SEO, NAP consistency is important.

Press release promotion

Press releases are an excellent way to share broadly company information and product and service news. There are many press release submission sites, but don’t forget about industry association and publication sites. These sites typically better target the audiences that are important to your business.

Need help with any of the above off-page SEO elements? Give us a call, 360.834.2780, or send us an email, info@pumpmarketingsolutions.com — we’d love to help.

On-Page SEO

Search Engine Marketing, SEO

Industrial S for SEO

SEO: The importance of on-page optimization.

In our last blog post we talked about the importance of search engine optimization (SEO), specifically, the importance of planning for it during your next website redesign project. In the article, we just touched on the elements of SEO, but want to take a deeper dive into those elements to help you improve the findability and usability of your website.

SEO elements can be broken down into two areas: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. This article will focus on on-page SEO – and next month’s article on off-page — let’s get started.

What is on-page SEO?

On-page SEO is all the elements you apply to your website to improve its organic search engine result rankings. Elements include front-end content and backend metadata (the codes and tags that comprise front-end content). On-page SEO is the first step to getting your site found and creating the ultimate user experience.

Every SEO project should begin with thorough keyword research. If your site is dependent on ranking for certain keywords – this step should not be skipped — page keywords and phrases should drive front-end content and metadata, but remember, it is important to always write with the customer in mind.

Front-end on-page SEO elements

A good infographic for on-page SEO is “The Perfectly Optimized Page” by SEO Moz. We’ve broken down the elements below and explained them in greater detail.

Metadata Elements

Each page on your site should have unique and page relevant metadata elements — the elements are discussed below.

  • Title Tag ExampleTitle Tag: Title tags are what display in your site’s search snippet and browser tabs. Title tags directly affect a searcher’s decision to click-through to your site. One of the most important aspects of a title tag is that it is descriptive and relevant to the page content where the searcher will land. Keywords and keyword phrases should be front-loaded in your tag whenever possible. For example, if we are creating a title tag for our User Testing page, we’d create it as, Website User Testing – Pump Marketing Solutions. To avoid Title tag truncation by search engines, they should not exceed 60 characters.
  • DescriptionTagPage Description Tag: The page description is not a search engine ranking element per se, but it is important. The Description tag appears below the Title tag in your site’s search snippet – like the Title tag, it directly affects a searcher’s propensity to click-through to your site. In essence, it is the text that drives qualified traffic to your site. A well-written description makes searchers want to learn more about your product or service. Using keywords in a page description helps create relevancy between a searcher’s search terms, and will appear bolded in the snippet. An Important note to remember when crafting a page description is that it must be highly relevant to corresponding page content. If page content does not match snippet content, the searcher will immediately leave your site (in analytic terms, this is call a bounce). When sites have high bounce rates, search engines deduce that searchers did not find the content relevant to the snippet, which can affect how they rank your pages.  To avoid truncation, page descriptions should not exceed 160 characters, but note, the description in the example is only 156 characters and is truncated by nine characters. A good rule of thumb is to try and keep descriptions to 150 characters and keep the most critical information first.
  • URLURL and link structures: A well-structured URL and hyperlink is short and descriptive and should include keywords to show page relevancy. When well-structured page URLs and information hyperlinks are copied in to other sites and directories, they provide easy to recognize site and page identification. When structuring hyperlinks, on the back-end use the “href” tag as the text that displays on the page as opposed to the complete link.
  • AltTagImage Alt Tags: Image Alt tags identify images for search engines and visually impaired site visitors. If your image fails to load, Alt tags provide a text description of the image that should be displayed.

Page Content

Web pages should always be written with your customer in mind — they should be of value and contain content that is designed to inform, entice, and/or educate your audience. Research tells us the keywords customers use most, and it is these keywords that should appear strategically throughout your web page. Each page should also contain at least one image and one link to another page on your site or an authoritative third-party site. Page layout should flow in a way that leads the customer to take some action that is based on a page goal — meaning, the action you want site visitors to take.

Page Headings & Subheadings

Pages should be structured with headings and subheading that are wrapped in H tags — H tags are metadata that wrap the headings and subheadings to help search engines understand page content, flow, and relevancy.  On the front end, headings and subheading call attention to content sections and help site visitors quickly understand page content.

H tags (H1-H6):

  • The most important tag is the H1 tag — every page on your site should contain one and only one H1 tag. The H1 tag generally appears at the top of each page and provides a description of page content and whenever possible, should contain a page relevant keyword. The page’s main heading helps provide relevance to the searcher who has clicked on your search snippet.
  • H2 through H6 tags are typically used to title subsections under the H1 tag on each page. Each page can contain more than one H2-H6 tag. Think of your web page like a book, the book’s title would be an H1 tag, and each chapter would be an H2 tag. If chapters require subsections, they would be titled with H3, H4, H5, & H6 tags.

Other On-Page Elements

  • Social Sharing is becoming a more and more important factor in search engine rankings — if your content is good enough to share, then it must be significant and relevant.
  • Page load time does not directly impact search rankings. However, slow page load times (and image load time) provide a bad user experience, and you run the risk of site visitors quickly bouncing off the site.
  • Mobile Readiness is a key Google mobile search engine ranking factor. You can test your site’s pages mobile-readiness using Google’s  Mobile-Friendly Test. One way to ensure mobile-readiness is to build your site on a responsive platform. This ensures your site renders correctly on all devices.

Summary

On-page optimization is about creating a great user experience while ensuring search engine comprehension. For the user, your site should be easily navigatable, and web page layout should be structured so site visitors can quickly find the information they need. Page content should be meaningful and relevant and written with a purpose. For search engines, the necessary SEO elements should be applied for optimal search engine rankings.

When you combine the user experience with SEO best practices, optimization occurs — as with any process or product, when even one part is defective, performance suffers or fails entirely.

Need help with any of the above on-page SEO elements? Give us a call, 360.834.2780, or send us an email — we’d love to help.