I wanted to share a case study about a new home page design that helped a client in the estimated tax business improve conversions. The results have been great so far – up 83%.

First, let’s get the background info on the client (Easy Estimated Taxes) out of the way. Easy Estimated taxes is a site that allows taxpayers to manage their quarterly estimated tax payments. Taxpayers can pay their estimated tax payments out of their bank account, keep record of their payments, and they get reminders of when their next payment is due.

Probably the most important thing to know about the business is that it’s seasonal. There are four payment periods per year and their traffic peaks during those four periods. That means those four periods are super important to them – it’s how the business sustains itself for the entire year. By now you’re putting 2 and 2 together and realizing that their site needs to perform during its peak period. If not, then they have to wait 3 months for another peak to come around.

The client had the following goal: get more of the existing traffic into their sales funnel. Put another way, get more of the people that visit the site clicking on the right call-to-action.

Accomplishing this goal goes beyond making the call-to-action button larger. There are some subtle details we had to address to make people comfortable with clicking that call-to-action. In other words, not only should people click it, but they have to want to click it because they were confident that Easy Estimated taxes would provide the services it claims to provide.

Here’s the design before we got our hands on it:

Here’s what we noticed needed to be adjusted to help accomplish the client’s goals:

1. Above the fold was actually decent. There is a clear call-to-action with fairly easy -to-understand text. There is always room for improvement, however.
2. Everything below the fold looked inconsistent with the rest of the page. In the tax-related industry, it’s incredibly important to convey a strong, professional, and trustworthy appearance. Users in this industry are highly skeptical of sites that don’t appear to be run by the government.
3. It wasn’t clear to the user how much the service cost.

After some iterating, here’s the design that we launched for the client in time for the last peak period (September 15, 2011):

We focused on conveying more trust, tweaking the text to better educate potential customers, and increasing the perception that the site is a legitimate, trusted way to pay estimated taxes online.

The results were all very positive:
When compared to the previous quarter, 83% more customers completed the signup for the site. Most importantly, the client was psyched!

Thoughts, comments, or questions? Let’s discuss i the comment section below.

The new IRS.com layout - optimized for revenue generation

Last month we completed a project for IRS.com. I just finished writing an SEO case study (it may be better classified as a white paper) highlighting the process we went though with our client and ensuing results.

The entire case study is fairly lengthy, so I’m including just the summary in this post.

Just five months of working with Tax Center produced extremely positive results. The website is now better positioned in the search engines than it was before and it is receiving more traffic because of that positioning.

This project was different from most for a couple of reasons. First, it was shorter. Most content strategies are at least 12 months in length. Second, we began working with Tax Center at the beginning of their most important months of the year (as opposed to implementing our plan in the offseason for taxes).

This means that we needed to implement a strategy that did all of the following:
A) Got results without adversely affecting current search engine positioning,
B) Resulted in accelerated returns (meaning immediately), and
C) Laid the groundwork for long term performance beyond the scope of the project (future tax seasons).

We began the project by performing an in-depth audit of the site. The audit pointed to several key areas of improvement – basic SEO fundamentals, a more trusted user experience, and more high-value content. We based our strategy on those key areas.

The results were quick, and significant. First, the site was better positioned in the search engines:

• The number of pages on the site that come up in search results went UP 686%
• The number of pages on the site that are on the first page of Google search results went UP 175%

Second, more people visited the site in the 2011 tax season than in 2010:

• 49% more people visited the site
• Traffic coming from the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) was more than 4 times higher

The content created yielded an immediate return. The ROI for the more than 250 pieces of content we created and posted was better than 127%. That means the client more than made their money back for the cost of the content in less than 5 months.

The positive results don’t necessarily end with the passing of the 2011 tax season. The groundwork laid for the client will continue to bear fruit in the offseason and in future tax seasons. All of these numbers may increase in the future as the new content gets more inbound links.

Here’s the full case study.

What are your thoughts? Any feedback? I encourage you to participate in the comment section below.

Back to reality after a great week in Vegas attending PubCon.

Really quickly I wanted to share, in no particular order, my top 5 takeaways from the week.

1. “Likes are the new links” – this was a quote from Bruce Clay during the week’s best session. Bruce was part of a panel that discussed Google Caffeine and May Day. Bruce thinks that when you add up what Google did with Caffeine (increasing the size of the index) with the fact that they have to account for social in search results plus the fact that a greater percentage of links are spam - the currency for validating sites will change from links to personal recommendations.

Whether or not you buy it, it’s definitely thought-provoking. I’m going to be testing this one while following it closely.

2. Local is everything – More and more search results have the top organic listing below the fold (most of them local). This will eventually be the new normal as Google deploys this layout for more keywords. Making sure your business is optimized for local search will mean the difference between gaining or losing organic traffic. It’s that simple.

3. Blekko = Buzz - It may have been just my imagination, but there were a lot of people talking about, and trying, Blekko. Matt Cutts even mentioned it in his keynote. All I could think was, “How long until Google buys them?”.

4. Page speed is on the clock - I had read a bunch of posts about the importance of page speed. I’ll admit, I haven’t done a ton to adopt this strategy. After last week I am a believer. Page speed should be improved whenever possible. It’s good for the users. And it’s good for SERPs.

5. Three that made me think – No offense to anyone else, but the three best speakers I saw were Scott Stratten, Rae Hoffman, and Tim Ash. All three brought it. They made me think. They gave me some helpful tips. I was impressed by each of them. If PubCon could get more people like them the conference would be much better.

Did you attend PubCon? How did your takeaways compare? Did I miss anything? Let’s chat in the comments below.

Here’s a list of basic questions I use when performing a website evaluation or audit on a client website. It gets more technical and geeky than this, but my hope is that this fives you a good idea of some of the things I do to help turn websites around.

GENERAL: questions I ask directly of the owner, or team that runs the website
1. What are the goals of the website? I want to hear from the website’s brass what they are trying to accomplish. It’s not always obvious. And it’s not always what they should be trying to accomplish. Often time there aren’t even any goals.
2. What the history of the website? Tell me specific details about sales (or membership) trends?
3. What’s the history of the site’s SEO strategy? What effect has that had on the site’s performance?
4. Have there been any major traumatic events (like de-indexing or site outages)? How have those affected sales and performance?
5. What’s your keyword strategy? If they have a strategy, I’ll ask to see the latest data they’ve accumulated about what keywords they consider to be most valuable.
6. How well has the stated keyword strategy been implemented on the site?
7. What is your content strategy?

The rest of the questions are what I ask as I evaluate the website.

ON-PAGE SEO
8. Is there any meta data structure? If so, was it done properly?
9. Does the site use unique, intelligent, SEO-friendly page titling?
10. What does the site’s meta data and page titling say about the company’s grasp of keywords?
11. How SEO-savvy is the URL structure being used?
12. What’s the internal linking strategy?
13. How healthy is the code?
14. How much (if at all) is the code affecting the site’s ability to be indexed?
15. Are there any site maps?
16. Do any of the search engines know about their site maps?
17. Are there any RSS feeds?
18. Do the search engines know about their RSS feeds?
19. What does their Webmaster Tools Account reveal?

TRAFFIC
20. What are the traffic patterns (if any) in terms of volume?
21. How is traffic now compared to a historical average? Higher? Lower? Why?
22. Where’s the website’s traffic coming from?
23. Why is traffic coming from those sources? Is is because of link partnerships? Publicity? Blog mentions? Comments?
24. What percentage of the traffic is coming from organic search?
25. What percentage of traffic is coming from paid search?
26. What’s the relationship between the traffic source and the user’s behavior on the site (pageviews, time on site)?
27. What’s the relationship between the traffic source and the conversion rate?
28. In case of higher conversion, what can we learn that can be applied to other sources?
29. In cases of low conversion, why are people not converting into customers? What appears to be the roadblock?

KEYWORDS
30. What keywords does the website rank for?
31. What, specifically, are those ranks per keyword across all search engines?
32. Is there historical data to show how those ranks have changed?
33. What kind of penetration does the website have in organic search?
34. How does the site rank for the search terms they said they were targeting?
35. Are the keywords the website is targeting the right ones? If not, how much potential traffic is being missed as a result?

COMPETITION
36. What’s the state of competition in the industry? Who does the client think they are competing with?
37. According to search (not according to sales), who are they competing with?
38. What are their competitors doing better/worse than they are in terms of content strategy?
39. What do their competitor’s link profiles have that’s missing from our client’s website?

CONTENT & LINKS
40. What’s the state of inbound links?
41. Are the current inbound links helping or hurting?
42. According to the competitor data, are there immediate link-building opportunity?

Darn…didn’t make it to a nice even number like 50!

The answers to these questions help me put together an evaluation designed to help clients  get more qualified traffic and convert at a higher rate.

Have any questions of your own? Are you an SEO with a similar checklist? Feel free to comment or compare your experiences with me in the comment section below.

Last week Majestic SEO posted a really cool table that you probably didn’t see unless you regularly read a lot of SEO blogs. The table is made up of the Top 200 domains ranked by referring domains. (Majestic, by the way, is one of my favorite SEO tools.)

For those of you unfamiliar with SEO fundamentals or the basics of  search engine optimization, this table lists the websites from around the world that have the most unique domains linking back to their site. So, for example, let’s say your website has a two websites linking to it. One of them is WebsiteA.com and the other is BWebsites.com. That would mean your site has 2 referring domains. Not to mention a lot of work to do to get on Majestic’s next list!

For me – an Internet Marketing consultant who helps companies get more links through content strategies – here are five interesting tidbits I noticed while perusing the list:

1. Volatility isn’t limited to the stock market.
Admittedly, we’re dealing with huge websites and tremendous link volume, but the table shows that things will happen to cause even the biggest websites to make significant moves up or down the list.

Take a look at the biggest movers up the list:

• dot.tk moved up 187 spots from #200 to #13
• verizon.net moved up 117 spots from #183 to #66
• t-online.de moved up 114 spots to #3 from #117
• gmgp.org moved up 83 spots from #128 to #45

Other than the endless rumors about the Verizon iPhone, it’s not obvious at first glance what caused these other movements. We could, however, find out more with a more in-depth competitive analysis. And while we’re on the topic, look what all of that chatter about a product that doesn’t even exist yet did for Verizon…it gave them tons and tons more links!

Flip around the numbers and look at the sites that have fallen down the list. Xanga.com, for example, fell 82 spots to #160. Keep in mind this doesn’t mean xanga.com all-of-a-sudden suffers from worse search rankings now than they did two years ago because they didn’t build links as fast. They could still be a dominant player. It does mean they didn’t build links from new domains as aggressively as the other sites on the list. So this is a good reminder that we can’t rest on our laurels and stop trying to build links. That’s the worst Internet Marketing strategy. We gotta keep building. And building. And building.

2. What happened to eBay?
Ebay’s move downward is worth noting on its own. The auction giant moved from #4 down to #31. You have to wonder what happened there, especially when you see that the other players at the top of the 2008 list (Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, YouTube) all stayed in the Top 10. Why is eBay building links at a far lesser rate now than they were 2008? Or did they do something to lose a ton of links over the last two years?

3. The BBC is tops for media.
I thought this was sort of a surprise. The BBC’s website, bbc.co.uk, is the top-rated media website at #24. (By media I mean a site run by a traditional media company.) Cnn.com is the next highest at #26 with nearly 125,000 less links than the BBC. The NY Times’ website, nytimes.com, is ranked #34. I’m surprised because New York is the #1 media market in the world, and the Times is supposedly the most revered newspaper in the world.

Other things interesting about the media-related sites:

• Foxnews.com (CNN’s chief rival) ranks at #121 with nearly 800,000 less domains referring links as CNN
• The Wall St. Journals’ site, wsj.com, ranks at #82
• Despite the flourishing state of the so-called celebrity media, none of tabloid sites for gossip made the cut. I would expect that to change in the next two years as more people start to get their news from sources like TMZ.

4. School websites rake in the links.
Out of the top 200 sites listed, 11% are domains for schools. And just about all of them are the big brand names in education.

Here are the top 5 schools on the list. Just for fun I’ve listed the school’s rank in endowment (PDF) in parenthesis to see if there’s any corollary between wealth and domain referral popularity:

1. mit.edu: #73 overall (6)
2. stanford.edu #79 overall (3)
3. berkeley.edu: #83 overall (78)
4. harvard.edu: #87 overall (1)
5. cornell.edu: #124 overall (18)

Way to go Berkeley! They are raking in the domain referrals despite not having huge endowments like the others in the top 5. By the way, MIT’s website ranks ahead of sites for entities you’ve probably heard of like NASA and weather.com.

Biggest surprises on the list? How about Yale at #167 despite having the second largest endowment? Or the school right in my backyard, UC San Diego. They make the list at #197 despite having the 175th largest endowment.

5. Link-building technique don’t have to be obvious.
Ever hear of  #64 on the list, homestead.com? On the outside it’s Intuit’s answer to a Blogspot (#7), Macromedia (#16), WordPress (#17), and Joomla (#52) – a product that builds websites for small businesses. Some might wonder why the heck Intuit offers a such a product. Well, this lists tells you all you need to know. It’s for the domains referrals and links! I’m assuming that every site built using their software links back to Intuit. This may not be a huge revenue generator for Intuit, but it’s a gigantic SEO score for them. It’s a good lesson in how creativity goes a long way to getting links.

Lastly, while a lot of companies would be happy with 50 quality referral domains, the lowest amount on the list has more than 229,000 different domains linking to it. Of course all of these sites are huge sites for big brands, but it’s a good reminder that enough is never truly enough. Never be satisfied with the amount of referring domains and links coming in to your site. Keep striving for more. Your site probably won’t ever make this list, but there’s a huge difference between 50 quality referral domains and 150. Go for it!

What else do you notice on the list? Let’s discuss in the comment section below.

One of the common questions I get asked about Internet Marketing strategy is about how long of a commitment it takes for a website to perform well in search. What I’ve found is that the person is really asking if they can put in a few months of work towards improving their search positioning and then reap the benefits.

When I hear that question, I often think about a quote from Hall-of-Fame basketball star Larry Bird.

Don’t laugh. Hear me out.

Someone asked #33 why he works so hard (in case you didn’t know, the guy was renowned for his work ethic). His response went something like this,

“I work so hard because I know that there’s always someone better than me out there working even harder than I am.”

Before you get mad at me for attributing the quote to Larry Legend because you think someone else said it, forget it. This child of the 80′s remembers it coming from one of my boyhood heroes. It certainly didn’t come from Magic Johnson.

Larry’s quote rings true with Internet Marketing, in general, and search engine optimization and  social media marketing, in particular, for two main reasons:

1. The hard work never stops - even when you’re on top, there’s still work to be done to stay on top. So even when your website ranks at or near the top of search, for example, the fun is just beginning. At that point it’s your job to protect that position from everyone that wants to take it from you.

2. Someone is always working hard(er) - every day that you take off from your content strategy, you can assume that someone else is doing something to beat you. Assume that there are websites – more than one of them – spending time, resources, and money to improve their positioning in search, social media, and online reputation. The greater the competition, the more than needs to be done to not only keep up, but to surpass them.

To bring it all back to the original question , “How long should our company be thinking about committing to Internet Marketing?”.

The real answer is: forever. It never stops. Your company needs to have a smart and sensible Internet marketing strategy from before the website launches and continue it for as long as it exists.

And if you’ve had a website for a while and haven’t had any strategy for using search to bring in leads, then you are behind! You need to put in the work necessary to get caught up with your competition.

What are some other examples of the worst Internet Marketing strategies? Let’s talk about them in the comment section below.

It happens to every business.

Usually with experienced entrepreneurs it happens before doors officially open.  For others it happens 3 months, or 6 months, or even 12 months after an official launch.

Eventually, a business will see the light. And it’s a strong light. A light where sunglasses are required, and maybe some SPF to be safe. Inevitably, once that light hits there’s smiling, some high-fiving, and that certain satisfaction that comes with making a discovery.

The light that every business eventually sees is the realization that their success is intimately tied to how their website performs in the search engines. All of a sudden it becomes clear that in order to thrive the business has to make itself known to the throngs of potential customers that are looking for their products or services through search. Pretty powerful light, right?

After the band stops playing music and the enthusiasm subsides, a BIG question looms like a black cloud: is it too late to do anything about it? Is our business too far down the road to reverse our failure to see the light until now?

The answer is a emphatic NO. It’s never too late.

Granted, it’s a heck of a lot easier if your company has a search engine optimization strategy from Day 1, but as long as a business has enough breath in it’s lungs to survive at least a few more months then there’s a chance to make something very good happen by leveraging the light.

Just how long it will take to jumpstart a businesses’ search profile depends on a few things:

1. Competition - how sophisticated are the strategies being deployed by the other companies in that industry? Are they investing tens of thousands of dollars per year into search? Or, are they still in the dark? The more sophisticated the competition, the longer it will take to make a dent in the problem, let alone compete directly. But that doesn’t mean a company can’t make up some ground pretty quickly.

2. History - Before the realization, was the business completely ignoring seo or was it inadvertently caught in a cycle of bad habits? And, how much content has been created? Are we dealing with a website that has hundreds or thousands of pages of content? The point is this: how much damage has been done and how much has to be fixed? A website with poor seo habits and thousands of pages of content is a larger rescue effort than a small website that has good content but didn’t employ any of the basic seo fundamentals.

3. Commitment - seeing the light is the first step. Committing to a long-term plan is something different. Results can take time. And the longer a business can commit to a plan, the better the chances it will see results. In other words, committing to a 4-week plan isn’t the right strategy for a business that’s gone 2 years without doing anything for seo.

To those companies who have just seen the light, welcome to the real world. Try not to focus on the time that’s been lost. Instead, figure out what you’re going to do to change the tide. Come up with a plan and commit to it.

Has your business recently seen the light? I’d love to hear about it in the comment section below.

News flash: running your own business is tough. There are a cagillion things to do and only so many minutes in a day. It’s inevitable that important success factors will get overlooked – especially when the business is just getting started.

One of the most often overlooked aspects of a companies first marketing plan is search engine optimization. For some reason, it slips between the cracks for so many small businesses. I think what happens, especially with a lot of first-time entrepreneurs or young companies, is there’s a natural desire to plow through the startup checklist so that the business can start and hopefully the money will begin rolling in.

You know the checklist, right? You’ve probably done it yourself.  Name for the business? Check. Bank account? Open. Domain? Grabbed it. Logo? Designed it. Website? Launched. Coffee maker? Brewing as we speak.

Eventually the checklist moves to marketing and,  ‘How exactly are we going to get people to pay us for our product or service?’. The key mistake that most startups make is assuming that just having a website is enough. They think, ‘Well, we have something out there for people to check out. It looks really cool and does a good job of selling our product. So, we’re covered there.’

What’s missing from that logic? The business didn’t bother to think through how exactly they are going to get traffic, and better yet qualified traffic, to visit their website. And so what usually happens is a company will look at their analytics after 90 days of being in business and realize traffic and leads from the website is nonexistent.

In a past post I wrote about the importance of launching your first website before you launch your company. This is different. What you need to have is a full SEO plan. I recommend that you generate at least a 6-month SEO strategy when starting a new business.

At a high level, here’s what you need to include:
Keyword research: find out what your industry’s most valued keywords are and start competing for them. Be sure to constantly monitor progress and don’t be afraid to re-evaluate keyword priorities every few months. This is the most important step in an SEO strategy. If you’re not going after the right traffic, or traffic that’s too competitive for a young company, you won’t get the traffic needed to survive.

Content strategy: it doesn’t matter how much you have, the content on your website the day it launches is not enough. Every website needs a vehicle for adding quality content rich in the most valuable keywords on a consistent basis. The easiest, and highest ROI SEO vehicle to add is a blog. Other examples are resource or educational sections. Ideally, there’s new content being added every day. That can be a drain on resources, however. So try to at least add something a couple of times per week.

I can’t emphasize enough how important a content strategy is for your website. Without some kind of plan to add new content, it will fall by the wayside. I see it all the time with my clients. Spend a day or two planning out 50, 100, 200 blog posts and then figure out a plan for getting them done.

Pay-per-click plan: at some point you need to test the pay-per-click waters. Every business should. Set aside the cash you need to at least test buying keywords. One of two things will happen: either it works and you’ve found an additional way to get qualified leads, or it doesn’t work and there are lessons that can be learned. For example, did you get a lot of click-thru’s but low conversions? That’s usually a sign the website needs to be optimized for conversion. Either way, make sure that the person managing the campaign is an SEO professional. Don’t try to do it yourself unless you’re willing to spend through the learning curve…and there is a learning curve.

Do those three things and you’ll be ahead of the game when it comes to having a smart marketing plan for a young company.

What’s been you experience with defining an SEO strategy? Let’s talk about it in the comments section below.

Here’s a quick client success story in-the-making that I think is worth sharing with you: the Pacific Life Holiday Bowl is a client of ours. For you non-sports fans out there, the Holiday Bowl is one of the post-season bowl games held annually in college football (aside: it’s one of the best bowls year in and year out). We’ve had the pleasure of working with them for the last few years.

After last year’s game, the Holiday Bowl said they wanted more organic traffic for the 2009 game (being held at the end of December).  Although the site gets decent traffic all year long, it gets an overwhelming majority of its annual visitors in December (when the game is played).  So December is very important. It’s their entire year. The vent is once-a-year, so the better the webiste performs in that month, the higher they can charge for ad deals, partnerships, etc.

We did a few basic things to help improve their overall search profile. And so far, those things have paid huge dividends. Traffic for December of this year is way up when compared to last year (stats listed below) and the year before (which is as far back as we have traffic stats for the site).

Here’s what we did:
1. We looked at the last 18 months of data about how the site was performing organically. As you might guess, the site dominated searches for “holiday bowl”. But we noticed for searches like “holiday bowl tickets” (a really popular search), the site was getting beat by ticket dealers and brokers. We saw a huge opportunity to gain substantial traffic just by improving on 10 searches similar to “holiday bowl tickets” – ones that had high volume and low/”beatable” competition.

2. Here’s where we addressed the fundamentals: for all of the pages we wanted to rank in those 10 terms, we rewrote the URLs and meta data using the most valuable keywords.

3. We checked out any pages that were listed as “not found” in Webmaster Tools and redirected to existing pages. This saved them a bunch of wasted link juice.

That’s it. That’s all we did. I’m not saying that took us 5 minutes to do, but it wasn’t like we had to come up with come kind of extravagant plan. We just stuck to the fundamentals.

Here are the traffic numbers so far for December 1-9 (as compared to December 1-9, 2008):
* Traffic is up just over 82%
* Pageviews are up 70%
* Average time spent on the site is up 10%

That’s all great, but what about organic traffic? (what they asked for):
* Traffic coming from Google organic search is up 120%
* Traffic coming from Yahoo organic search is up 24%

The best, and most telling, number might be this one:
* Last year people visited the site as a result of clicking on the search result for just over 2,400 keywords. This year that number is 5,200 keywords! So the net that was cast out in the search engines was twice as big this year than last year. That’s a huge difference.

And finally, traffic from the term “holiday bowl tickets” is up 180% thanks to be ranked #1 in Google.

What’s the big deal? This reinforces what we tell potential clients when we talk about our strategy to help them. You have to get the fundamentals of search engine optimization right first.

We frequently talk to companies who are eager (rightfully so) to change their search profile. They are in a big rush to get aggressive with massive PPC campaigns and the like. That’s great.  We can do that for you, we tell them. But often times, as is the case here, we can deliver huge ROI just by making sure the basics are done right. Page titles and URLs are underrated when it comes to SEO, but they make a big difference.

Granted, the Holiday Bowl has the best domain name possible. That’s super valuable for them. That being said, the way the URLs were built didn’t leverage that domain fully. So now what we are seeing is improved performance in the long tail of keywords. And that’s where any website, regardless if they have the perfect domain, can see a serious improvement in traffic.

Thoughts? Comments? Any similar experiences? Share them in the comment section below.

I’m taking a chance that few who read this blog are as passionate as I am about college football and search engine optimization. I realize that. But there is a link. I promise. Just let me explain.

Bobby Bowden (below) is a legend in college football. He is a Hall-of-Fame coach that has won more games than almost anyone who has ever coached the sport (388 to be exact). He’s 80 years old and is in the news because he just decided (some say forced to decide) to retire after this season ends.

Bowden will be remembered for a lot of positive things – but the hard core college football junkie will remember him for recruiting speed. In its heyday, Bowden’s Florida State teams won with a whirlwind of pure athleticism and speed. His players were just plain faster than the other teams’. And as the saying goes, “There’s no defense for speed”.

So what’s this got to do with SEO? Google announced today an experimental feature called Site Performance making its debut in Webmaster Tools. And guess what? It’s all about speed!

Google has said that they want to make the web faster. Now they are giving every webmaster a way to check and see just how fast their site downloads in a browser. Google’s theory is a lot like Bowden’s – speed is essential to winning. And in the search giant’s clase they are talking about winning customers. The faster a page downloads, the more likely a person is to have a better experience on the site. In turn, the site will be more profitable due to higher retention rates.

Not only does Site Performance provide download times, it also tells you how speed on certain pages can be improved.

So what is Google getting at? Speed is becoming increasingly important for SEO. Although they haven’t come out and said this verbatim (correct me if I am wrong here), it sure feels like Google is trying to tell everyone that speed is going to be a consideration for search rank. So that means we all need to consider optimizing our download speeds folks.

To see Site Performance, click on the “Labs: link on the Webmaster Tools left-hand menu.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

I got an email today that I wanted to share with you loyal readers. The title was 1st Page Results Guaranteed. Now I never ever read emails that are obvious spam. Even though I knew the contents of this one would be garbage, I couldn’t resist.

Here’s what it said:
“Do you wish you could increase your online leads? Getting a GUARANTEED 1ST PAGE GOOGLE RANKING is easier and more cost-effective than you might think. We have helped a lot of businesses thrive in this market and we can help you! Simply hit reply and I’ll share with you the cost and the benefits. See you at the top!”

Have you seen an email like this one before? What about a claim on an SEO’s website similar to this? Or maybe you’ve been told something like this when you’ve met with a search engine optimization firm. If you have, hopefully you deleted it before picking up the phone. If you haven’t, you are lucky because guarantees like these seem to be everywhere.

If you have not seen or heard anything like this before, then I am going to give you a visual to keep in mind for when you do. I want you to associate the SEO guarantee with this picture:

Yes, the SEO guarantee is a pile of garbage. Here’s the super-simplified version of why:

1. Chances are the company that sent this to me did so via an automated script. It’s a mass emailing to a ton of people. That company has no idea what industry I am involved in. A huge part of SEO has to do with the competitive landscape in your industry. For example, there’s a tremendous difference in the amount of work required when it comes to getting on the first page for “baseball tickets” (254M results) versus “san diego software developer” (3.45M results). And that’s just one metric. A good SEO can’t just look at your website for a minute and tell you exactly what it will take to help you. They need to do their homework on your website’s SEO history and the competition that’s getting better results than you.

2. Things can change in an instant. For example, we have clients who are listed on the first page for results of valuable keywords but their slot on that first page changes literally every day. For example, some days Google will add news results. Some days they’ll add maps. Both of those drastically affect results. Trust me, search engines constantly tweak their algorithms. There’s no way anyone in their right mind should ever stake a guarantee on something as volatile as search.

3.  Lack of transparency. At the end of the day, no one outside of search engine company employees know the secret sauce. The beauty of SEO is that it’s open to interpretation. There are a number of different thories about what’s effective and what’s not. That being said, there are a ton of things that really good SEOs know how to do. And those things work for more often than not. But it’s not because they have been given secret access to the Google magic. They are successful because they are experienced. And any experienced SEO will never flaunt a gaurantee in front of your face becuase they know that’s crazy.

So, look out for the SEO gurantee. If you hear it or see it, move on to the next company. Hopefully they will know what they are talking about.

Have you ever been given the SEO guarantee? I’d love to hear your story in the comments section below.

I love working with startups. I’ve been a part of several (some successful, some not) and have been lucky to work with a bunch of startup or early-stage clients with Brand5. There’s always so much energy and optimism working with brand new companies. It’s a blast to help them out and watch them try to make it. In each situation, I learn incredibly valuable lessons that can be applied to future projects.

I want to touch on a common mistake that I see a lot of startups make when it comes to planning the launch of their website. Companies that have it in their marketing plan to rely on traffic from organic search (regardless of the expected percentage) fail to take into account search engine lead-time. As a result, there’s a gap between the launch of the site and the beginning signs of organic traffic.

Here’s usually what happens: Company X plans to launch their website on a certain date. For the sake of this example, let’s say July 1. As they work on getting their website built and ready for launch, there’s nothing (maybe at most a landing page saying “Coming Soon”) live on their domain.

July 1 rolls around and Company X launches their website. By the end of their first few days, Company X looks at their analytic and sees no one coming to their website via organic traffic. They wonder, “Where’s the love from Google?”.

Here’s the problem – Company X didn’t do anything to let Google know they existed before July 1. They never opened a Webmaster Tools account or submitted a sitemap. And the big problem is that Company X is now on Google’s clock. They have to wait around for Google to acknowledge the website exists and slowly start to creep into results. There’s no telling how long Company X will have to wait. It may take months for traffic to start seeping in, especially if Company X is in a highly-competitive industry for keywords.

Here’s how to avoid this common mistake:

As soon as you finalize your domain, launch something. At the very least, launch a landing page that has optimized title and description tags. A bonus would be to put some text on the page using your most valued keywords. In other words, give Google some indication of how they should index the website. While you’re at it, add analytics code to the site. There probably won’t be any traffic, but if there is, you want to know where it came from.

2-3 months from your hard launch, do a soft launch. I realize every company is different. Some want to be super-quiet and don’t want anyone to know about them. I understand that (sort of). But for the rest of you, upgrade that single landing page to at least a few pages – enough for a sitemap of more than one page. Consider adding more keyword-rich content and make sure every new page has optimized title and description tags. Most of all, submit a sitemap to Google through Webmaster Tools.

Make sure early traffic knows how to find you. If you are worried about getting potential leads too early, give people a reason to find out more about the company. Tell them your website will email them when it launches. Ask them to call or email you if they want more information now.Don;t just have something that says “Coming Soon”. No one will ever remember to come back again.

Bottom line: regardless of how little you think your new website is going to rely on organic search for traffic (trust me it will be way more than you plan for, it always is), don’t wait until launch to set the wheels in motion with search engines. Get your sitemaps submitted as far in advance as you can so pages can start getting indexed. Anything you can do to minimize the gap between launch and letting search engines your website exists will pay off.