If there is one unfortunate truth that crops up in every area of my life, year after year, it’s that most of what creates success and excellence is showing up and doing the daily drill. That’s both good news and bad. Good because there’s no crazy prodigy requirement, no secret formula, no mountaintop guru that can give you the one true answer. The part that sucks is actually showing up and doing the grunt work to become excellent. We love the idea of an innate genius that lets us surpass everyone and rocket to first place.
Some people have that inclination or gift. For them to make anything of it, they have to show up and practice, just like the people who aren’t especially gifted. There’s no escaping work. For every human gazelle at a marathon, there are a dozen normal people who worked their way up from a morning run to a 5k to being able to go all 26.2 miles. The difference between them and me is that they were out pounding the streets while I slept in. There’s a fascinating paper by Daniel Chambliss, The Mundanity of Excellence, that deals with this phenomenon in Olympic swimmers.
Doing the mundane work to master something is hard. It’s not glamorous. It’s not exciting. It’s mostly tedious and woefully short on instant gratification. We always explain that search marketing is iterative improvement over time. You show up, you keep working at it a little bit at a time, and you’ll see extraordinary results. Just like your once great results will slip further and further if you don’t do the work to keep them. I wish that weren’t the case (mostly because of how much I hate to work out!), but it is.
Where are you failing to do the mundane work to become excellent? What’s suffering because of it? What would happen if you started putting in the time — even just a little bit — on a regular basis?
“Yahoo! Web, Image, and Video search experiences on both desktop and mobile devices are now powered by the Microsoft platform in the US and Canada (English), with more markets to come.”                                                     –Yahoo!
“Today I am happy to share that Bing is powering Yahoo!’s search results in the US and Canada…”                                                                                                       –Bing
Well, friends, that means there are now two players instead of three, and only one is really interested in providing the best search experience for users. Google is merit-based, and clients who want to be #1 for a particular search phrase have only to build the best page on the web for that term. Bing seems to be driven to sell consumers in a mass-media way, knowing that the megabucks of advertisers will follow a company that muscles its end users. We’ll have to see how that affects the 99% of websites which are small, specialized, and not heavily capitalized.
Speaking of which, we’re having some annoying and identical problems on PCs running XP…which has always been rock solid. Hmm, do you think they want us to upgrade and so are easing back on supporting the existing base?
There are some changes happening now and in the next few months that are going to affect your search marketing, web presence, and may even be undoing some of the hard work you’ve done. Want know what you should be keeping an eye on this summer? Read on.
1. Google Maps — We all know that the local map listings are getting more and more important for brick and mortar businesses. What you may not know is that Google has started requiring verification for bulk uploads. This applies to information that you’ve already uploaded. If you’ve spent the time to get your listings corrected, populated, and up to date, make sure that you go do some searching to check them and make sure the information is the way you left it.
2. Yahoo/Bing — Remember that merger and the kerfluffle around it? The merging is about to start affecting all of us search marketers. You might have gotten emails from the search engines telling you about upcoming changes, but we’re starting to see them already. The results being reported back from spidering are inconsistent, but manual searches to give a visual check will let you know if your rankings are rock steady. Some flux is always to be expected when big changes are made, so keep that in mind if you check your metrics and see some things that don’t make sense. Generally, things settle down in a month or two, so stay cool!
Great how-to from Marketing Sherpa in November. This is the reason I like Twitter, by the way…the industry’s leading lights sharing what’s interesting and/or valuable to them. Lots of year-end best-of lists right now.
This case study is a great resource, with excellent instructions on how to mobilize your company’s tribe of experts, what terms to use (not the same ones as you target on your site), and the results to expect. In this case, over half the search traffic is now to the blog…for the “other” terms that weren’t quite important enough for the main site.
This week, I’m thankful for my team, I’m thankful for our clients, thankful for our friends in the business like Mike Belasco, and thankful that our new service launch has gotten such a warm reception.
Doug Karr, of the MarketingTechBlog, got a preview of the new, low-cost service offerings supported by the Software as a Service tool that we’re using to help clients monitor the performance of their sites. In his review, he called it an “incredible SEO dashboard,” and went on to say:
There are three important elements of search engine tracking… the volume of searches per keyword, your current rank and volumes (and relative share), and your historical rank (whether you’re gaining or losing ground). As far as I know, there’s no other product on the market that looks at search as a ‘market’ and translates your rank to market share. RefreshWeb has done this with a simple but powerful reporting interface.
“Simple but powerful” was the whole idea, and our CTO, Tom Bartling, has spent every spare hour for the past year or so making it work. RefreshWeb wants to give a shout out to Tom, who’s not just a brilliant programmer, but a patient and helpful guy, smart, funny, creative, and always willing to explain and teach. These are an incredible combination, and we are SO glad he’s on our team. In fact, if you find yourself with an end-of-the-year budget you need to spend quickly, you should send it to Tom, care of RefreshWeb. It would make him happy, make you feel good, and make me a hero…one of those rare win/win/win opportunities!
Back to business: our goal is to provide exactly the services that clients need, at a price point that makes sense for any size business. And, if these new packages take off, there’s some job creation in store. This new dashboard makes it possible to provide SEO support starting at just $250/month. That’s a small fraction of the full service, SEO agency model we have always used in the past, but in this continuing recession, helping all kinds of business increase sales by moving up in the rankings is a worthwhile goal. So, we’ve developed a lot of flexible solutions for clients, from people doing SEO in-house to folks interesting in seeing if SEO works. Besides, we know there are a lot of companies that fallen for some fast talk and not seen results–but they have read enough to know that there IS a right way to do SEO.
If you’re come to the blog via the home page, you probably noticed all the design changes, namely boxes defining some prospects’ needs, pointing to new pages addressing how we can address this particular problem.
This was all possible because last Thursday, we launched our SEO dashboard at InnoTech in Austin, in combination with more flexible, less expensive service offerings. This is a big milestone, because it’s the first fruit of our strategy to evolve into a product company. As a bridge from here to there, we’re only selling the dashboard in combination with services we provide. From the business perspective, we now have a $250/mo. entry level price point instead of a typical monthly price of $2000, so our expectation is that this will stimulate a lot more demand. Plus, now we can help a lot more people weather the recession.
As a company, our intent is to become known for personalized education about search, tools for clients to better oversee and manage SEO (either internally or for an overview of the results from their consultants or SEO agencies), and as a trusted partner for developing site optimization strategy. The SEO dashboard is the first tool we’ve created, in response to where we believe the market is headed, which is wanting to develop search marketing as an internal capability. With the right kind of help, we think clients can develop this as a truly sustainable competitive advantage.
A friend of mine who is an economics professor sent me this from the Global TED in Oxford.
“The wonderful Rory Sutherland wows the audience at the TED conference in Oxford with a superb sixteen minute talk on advertising and aspects of behavioural economics.” As a repentant ad guy, it’s refreshing to see a “practising” ad guy leading the way for less is more. Enjoy!
October is usually the month that companies are working on budget for the next year, so I wanted to be prompt in reminding you that the continual improvement offered by site optimization is a great investment.
We talk to a lot of companies who a) didn’t know they were missing 90+ percent of their potential new prospects by having an unoptimized site, b) had no idea they would need to rework their website to reach these people, and c) didn’t budget for it. Well, what other marketing investment is going to increase your leads and web sales by 50-100%? That makes the ROI on the investment easy to figure out.
If you don’t know what it’s going to cost to fix your site, talk to a good SEO agency now, discuss your options, and make sure you include enough money to do the substantial work with content that will improve your rankings. Even if you only have $1000 a month to put toward working on the site, that’s still enough to effect positive change. We have clients who spend $250 a month, and clients who spend $5-10,000 a month on SEO. What you need for a search marketing budget really depends on what needs to be done…which is why we start with an audit or, for bigger companies, an audit with a thorough competitive analysis. That gives you a strategy and road map of how to get there…well worth the effort and the limited investment ($2500-4500). Our rule of thumb for B2B sites is to plan on spending $25-30K in the first year, and adjust based on your results.
Now that all of the excitement has died down from the launch of Bing and the announcement of the Yahoo-Bing partnership, I would like to reiterate the words spoken by Gord Hotchkiss to all of Google’s competitors before all of this took place. Last December at the Search Insider Summit in Park City, Utah, he took Yahoo and Microsoft to task for not mounting a more significant challenge to Google’s dominance. In short, he said, “Do something amazing!”
We now know that Microsoft is spending $80 to $100 million on a branding and marketing campaign to promote Bing. This is great news as it seems that Microsoft has finally put some financial muscle behind their intention to be a major player for search. Bing should also be taken seriously because Microsoft has even deeper pockets to invest more money as part of their overall online strategy. Sorry Yahoo, but now that Microsoft seems to have the financial and strategic will to mount an attack against Google, this message is specifically for Bing: do something amazing!
Bing needs to do the small stuff well and create an excellent user experience, but it also needs to make some high profile investments like Google Earth, Google Street View and the Google Books Library Project to show that it means business. This means that Bing should invest early and invest a lot now that the sound of the buzz of Bing is still ringing in our ears. There was MSN, then there was Live, and if Microsoft cannot succeed with Bing, then this is strike three and you’re out.
Here is a great post for B2B marketers on “What you don’t know about optimizing PDFs can hurt you.” While my pet peeve is the PDF that gets posted using the designer’s PDF, which was intended for the printer (say, using 17×11 paper), the real shame is the wasted potential of PDFs. One of the most effective contributions we make to optimizing a B2B site is to go in and specify the document properties, thereby creating a title tag and description. This is a comprehensive guide to best practices. Read it and reap!
