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.

Seemingly out of nowhere, the title tag in the search snippet for one of our clients completely changed. Well, that doesn’t sound too horrible or harmful you say. Normally that’s right. Sometimes titles in snippets can be altered by the search engines and in rare cases can improve click-thru rates (I still recommend controlling all information in snippets with custom META data for every single page on your site).

The issue in this case was that the title tag now included information referring back to a really old (and outdated) sponsor…like years old. Even though the META data and the code said one thing (and keep in mind hadn’t been touched for at least a year), the title tag said something completely different.

Check it out. Here’s a screenshot of the source code:

And here’s a screenshot of what a users would see on Bing (and Yahoo) when searching for “holiday bowl”:

Notice anything strange? Hint: the title tag in the search results does not match what’s in the source code. In fact, nowhere on the Holiday Bowl home page does it even mention the word “Culligan”.

So what gives? And more importantly, how can it be fixed?

I had heard that sometimes the search engines pull META data from DMOZ and use that in snippets – overriding what a website has in its source code. So I checked DMOZ to see if that was true in this case.

Here’s what I found when I did a search for “holiday bowl” on DMOZ:

There it is! There’s the source of our pain. Bing and Yahoo are pulling “Culligan” from DMOZ and using it in the snippet.

After a quick search, I was able to find and install the following script into the home page code telling the search engines to ignore the META description in DMOZ and use what’s in the source code:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp”>

After about 4 days the title tag was back to normal:

Hooray! It’s fixed. Bing and Yahoo are pulling from the right source and “Culligan” has disappeared from the snippet.

Whenever you see this problem with one of your sites, just use this simple-to-implement fix and you’ll see results very quickly.

Have you ever had this problem? Did you use this method to fix it? Let’s discuss in the comment section below.

We’re fortunate to get a lot of repeat and referral business. It’s because we take pride in the way we treat our clients. Since our company was founded in 2004, we have set out to treat everyone we work with as partners, not just people that pay us to do work for them (unlike a lot of our competitors out there).

Over the years I have learned a lot about how to work with our partners. And I have heard some horror stories from new business about the way they were treated by a previous vendor. I talk more about some of the most common and powerful ways to make sure clients will be…errr unhappy…in my latest blog post for the Outright community.

Enjoy.

In my most recent post for the Outright Community, I wrote about how it’s critical for web developers to make sure they put everything in writing before they start any project.

I want to expand on that thought just a bit. The exact same thing is true for all of you on the client side of the equation. The next time you hire a website development firm, make sure everything related to the project – the price, the timeline, the requirements – are all in writing before any money changes hands.

It sounds obvious but a lot of firms are small. And they won’t spend a lot of time on details like contracts and agreements. They just want to crank out projects and get paid. Most of them do a great job and the amount of money involved isn’t huge, but it’s still a smart idea to protect yourself in case something goes wrong with the project.

Don’t fear the contract. Most firms will have very basic agreements that won’t require you to hire a lawyer to interpret it for you. Just be sure to read it over and ask any question if there are parts that don’t make sense. Don’t be afraid to push back on anything that doesn’t seem fair. A good firm will be willing to budge on terms in order to make you happy and to keep the job.

Have you hired a web development firm recently? Did they ask you to sign a service agreement? Let’s discuss in the comment section below.

Qualified traffic.

Small business owners and startups who rely heavily on their website for sales all stress over how to get more of it. Oh, and they want it cheap. Quite the conundrum!

There are lots of ways to get more traffic. All involve some level of investment (either time or money). None involve some level of magic (unfortunately, because that would be kind of cool).

Success acquiring qualified traffic starts with getting the basics right first. And the basics don’t always involve hiring a super-expensive SEO firm that claims they are going to make you millions in 3 months (by the way if anyone tells you that, just hang up).

If your website can do all of the following, you’ll see more qualified traffic. And it won’t burn a huge hole in your wallet.

1. SEO fundamentals - if you are going to do just one thing, this is the one. This all starts with making sure your keyword list is accurate (pertains to your specific products and services) and realistic. For example, stop trying to compete for the broad keywords that the big brands shell out tens of thousands of dollars per month to dominate. Start out with local terms and build your way up. If you can afford it, hire a professional to build that keyword list for you. If you don’t get that list right, it will make everything else on this list a lot harder.

Use those keywords to build your URLs and meta data (page titles and meta descriptions). Get those keywords in H1 tags, alt tags, and in the content (without blatantly stuffing them in there). Do all of these things are your website will have the basic foundation you need to start chasing organic traffic.

2. Choose the right domain - whenever possible, build your website (or an affiliate website to feed your website traffic) around an exact match domain. For example, if your business is in car insurance, the most valuable domain in that industry will be carinsurance.com. Domains that are an exact match get bonus points from the search engines that can be tough for competitors to overcome.

3. Link-worthy content – search engines love quality, unique content. And they like to see lots of it being added frequently. Coming up with a 6-12 month content strategy for your website is crucial. And every bit of content you create should always be worthy of a link, meaning someone reads it and thinks it’s so good that they want to link to it from their website or blog. If it doesn’t pass the linkworthiness test, toss it and move on to the next idea. Remember, links are GOLD. The more links you can acquire from quality and relevant sources, the better it will perform in organic search (which should lead to more traffic).

3A. Linkbait - this is a lot easier said than done. It’s almost like trying to come up with an idea for a viral video. Everyone tries it, but very few execute it to the point they get a return. The thing I always tell people when they ask how to create something viral is to look within to see if your business produces unique data. Then think of a way to present it in a clever, visual way that doesn’t require any heavy lifting to understand. The best recent example I can think of was this post by Mint. This may or may not have come from internal data, but it sure garnered a lot of attention because it was topical and easy-to-grasp (especially the video). Look at all of the retweets and comments! Best of all, they picked up hundreds of links. That’s the real value.

4. Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising - this is the the fastest way to pick up lots of qualified leads. It can also be the most expensive. If you have money to burn, try it yourself but don’t get frustrated with the long learning curve. Chances are you’ll be competing with professionals that really know how to play the PPC game. So many companies try to manage this on their own and become so disenchanted with the whole thing that refuse to get involved again. All that does is block a very valuable source of traffic. So either be patient or hire a pro.

5. StumbleUpon - these days you have to be really lucky to have something get hot on Digg or Reddit. Don’t waste your time trying to compete. Stumble is an easy way to pick up some traffic. And it’s free to Stumble your own content! Just make sure when you Stumble something that you put it in the right category.

6. Word-of-mouth - take extra good care of your customers and you will be rewarded. The more you make them feel like you’re listening, the more likely they are to refer you to their friends. It doesn’t cost anything to treat someone right.

7. Two-way conversation - make your site social. The key here is you have to have great content. Try to write only about things that your target audience really cares about. Offer them a place to discuss it with you (like in a comment section). Not only will you get return traffic but you’ll learn a lot about what your customers think and want from a product like yours.

Here’s what didn’t make the list: Facebook and Twitter.

Look, you’re a startup or a small business. There are only so many hours in the day and resources are most likely not unlimited. I think having Facebook pages and Twitter accounts are time traps. Everyone says, follow me on Faceboook and and Twitter! But how many companies are really doing things on either that’s producing business? Very few. And it’s mostly big brands that can pay people to just monitor their presence on those properties. Until you can afford to do that, put all of your money towards getting traffic to your website.

Have you tried any of these tips? What was your experience? Let’s chat in the comment 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 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.

I’ve said it before – an overwhelming majority of the business owners I meet these days want to talk about search engine optimization and Internet marketing. That’s fine by me. I love talking about it.

Last night I was at a networking event and was reminded of a very common theme that I have experienced lately: business owners are generally aware of the importance of inbound links (links from other websites to their website), but a lot of them (anecdotally, I’d estimate as many as 8 out of 10) don’t know any of the following:

• How many links are pointing to their website
• What links are pointing to their website
• Exactly what pages on their website are the recipients of links

As a result, they also don’t know other really crucial things such as:

• How many broken links (links coming from other websites that are now dead because the page has been moved or deleted) are out floating around on other websites

There’s an easy and FREE way to check all of these things through Google Webmaster Tools (WMT). (I’ve said this before as well – a WMT account is mandatory for website owners, whether or not they actually manage their website.)

BRIEF TANGENT:  I don’t necessarily blame business owners that don’t know about basic tools like this. Many don’t actually manage their website. They have plenty of things to do like grow their company. To me, the really troubling thing is that their webmasters don’t know either. And if they do know, they are not sharing this valuable and easily-available data with their clients. Trust me on this: if your webmaster isn’t checking this regularly, then they aren’t doing their job.

So the first step is to get a WMT account.

The next step is to verify that you have the necessary access to that website. That’s done by either uploading an HTML file (that Google will provide) to your website’s root folder or some meta data (again, Google will provide it) to your website.

Once that’s done, let the good times roll! Within a few weeks, you’ll start seeing data trickle in. For the sake of this post, you’ll want to pay attention to the “Your Site on the Web” link on the left of your screen. Click that and you’ll have access to a link called “Links to Your Site”. That’s the one that will tell you all of the data we’ve listed above.

What’s really cool is that you can click any of the pages on your site that have inbound links and find out exactly where those links come from. And if your curious, you can click any of those inbound links and see the actual page that’s linking to your website.

Note: this tool is not real-time. So if you publish a great new blog post today that you know a lot of people are going to link to, allow WMT some time (up to a few weeks) to find those links.

To sum it all up, links to your website are gold when it comes to SEO. As the very least, you should know what your link portfolio looks like. Google’s Webmaster Tools is a great way for you to get a handle on who is linking to your website and where exactly they are linking.

Good luck and let me know if you have any questions or comments.

If you run a retail website with lots (at least a few hundred) items in your catalog, Google just launched a new product that’s worth investigating. It’s called Google Commerce Search (GCS). I am not endorsing this product or being compensated for this blog post. I’m simply trying to inform you about this option.

According to Google, the concept behind GCS is simple – visitors take about 8 seconds to decide whether or not to stay on your website. And in that 8 seconds, a lot of people (over 40% according to this PDF from MarketingSherpa) perform a search to find the brand or product that they want. So if that many people rely on search to make their decision on whether to stay or go, then why not have that search powered by Google?

Besides having Google-quality search, GSC is scalable, customizable, supposedly easy to implement, and fully trackable via analytics.

How does it work? First you need to submit all of your products to Google Merchant Center via data feeds, direct uploads, or their API. Then you login to your admin panel and customize the way you want your on-site search engine to work. According to Google, that’s pretty much it.

Now you’re thinking this sounds cool, so how much does it cost? Well, it depends on how many products you have. This is a cloud-based application, so Google can be a little more flexible with the pricing. But, pricing starts at $50,000 – so this is no small investment for a lot of retail website owners out there.

As usual, Google has included a handy-dandy video to explain their new product:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gj7qrotOmVY

I’m interested to see this in action. Google obviously has the search skills and experience to make this work. The benefit to them is that, yet again, they’ll be gaining some really valuable data about pricing, user behavior, buying patterns, etc. In fact that’s the value to them in doing this. I don’t see this as a huge money maker for them.

If you see this live on a website, leave a comment with a link.

I’m always amazed at business owners who doubt leveraging the awesome the power of video for their website. Although I experience it less these days, I still talk to enough doubting business owners to make me believe the world is not yet as convinced as it should be. Video is the future, if not the present, people!

In fact, I’m sort of embarrassed this blog is in text, not video, but bear with me. I’ll get there eventually.

When someone gets to your website, you have only a few precious seconds to convince them that A) your service is worth buying and B) more importantly, they should buy from you. If your website is loaded with novels of text that someone has to read in order to understand what your business is all about, forget it. No one will read it. You need to shorten your pitch by doing things like showing people via video the value of your product or service.

Today I came across  another great example of  a business leveraging the power of video. Surprisingly, it was done by a bank! Banks aren’t usually known for using social media effectively.

Here’s why this video is so great:

1.  Within 2-3 minutes, you know exactly how the product works AND that it’s ridiculously simple.

2.  USAA took something that might make some people apprehensive (mobile deposits) and used actual customers to ease any potential fears or hesitations about complexity or security. This is brilliant. What’s more powerful than seeing real people make those deposits in only a few seconds?

3. Existing USAA customers will undoubtedly see this app as a value-add while people that aren’t customers might reconsider.

You can’t watch that video and not think that the service is very cool and a complete no-brainer.  Want proof? According to USAA’s Twitter account, $1.5 million has already been deposited using this new app in just three days.

If your website is not using video to help sell your products or services, start thinking about it right away. And if you need help coming up with a video content plan, let us know.

If you have other good examples of videos being used on websites you use, include a link in the comment section.

We got a really nice letter from Rudy Castruita, President of the San Diego Bowl Game Association, thanking us for our work developing new websites for the Holiday Bowl and Poinsettia Bowl.

Here’s a small excerpt from the letter:
“Your creativity and professional approach to our new websites is greatly appreciated,” said Castruita. “You helped bring our organization to the next level with premiere Bowl websites. Your hard work is greatly appreciated.”

Both Bowl games (held in December) were a huge success. Check out some of these numbers provided by the San Diego Bowl Game Association:

• The Holiday Bowl played in front of their third largest crowd in history (64,020 fans).
• The Holiday Bowl was the second most watched game on the ESPN schedule, reaching over 4.2 million households.
• The Poinsettia Bowl had their best attendance ever with 39,129 fans.
• TV ratings for the Poinsettia Bowl increased by more than 38% compared to 2006.

It’s always a great feeling to be appreciated by our clients. We loved working on the two Bowl websites. The fact that the committee is so pleased is a testament to our team’s proven strategy: this business is all about being dedicated to hard work and service.