Accession Media

With everyone setting corporate and personal goals for the coming new year, we figured we would perhaps help out with three key things we would recommend you get on top of (if you aren’t already) in 2007 to help move your business forward:

1. Start tracking something. Anything. Analytics is free now; everyone should be using it to some degree or another. Think about what the measure of success for your website is or should be. Is it the number of page views? Unique visitors? Online sales? Do you know how you did in any of those areas last month? In the last three months? This month last year? If not you should make use of the free, and/or not-so-free but excellent tools that are out there in the coming year. You have no idea where you are going, or how long it’s going to take to get there, if you have no idea where you are starting from.
2. Discover and keep track of how well you rank (or don’t rank) in the major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) for the keywords that your customers are using to find your product/service/information, etc. Do you come up at all? Do you want to come up higher? Aside from doing spot check searches, the analytics mentioned above can help tremendously with this. A majority of web users start their surfing sessions on search engines. Whether you use search engine optimization to rank well in the natural search results, or use pay-per-click marketing to buy your way to the top, or some combination of the two (which is what we usually recommend) - there is no better marketing mechanism than putting you offering in front of the people who are seeking it when they are seeking it! Sounds so simple - but it’s really quite revolutionary - refer to Google’s stock price for proof.
3. Implement and/or optimize “pull” content and technologies instead of only focusing on “pushing” visitors to your site and hoping they do what you want them to. Start blogging on a regular basis, and make sure it includes an RSS feed and a Google Sitemap. Start a regular email newsletter. Include genuine helpful content in these publications with no strings attached. These tools can help create or put a fresh spin on your brand and create an audience and readership where there was none previously. Imagine an ecommerce site that sold only three products that the customers didn’t need but once a year - at best. If that site included a blog or newsletter that kept the customer in touch and interested in the brand and the company between those long purchase cycles - what are the chances that they would buy again in 1 year’s time? Much better we have found! Like Godin says: “Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers“

Those are some of our basic thoughts - admittedly high level. We’d love to hear some of the goals and plans that some of you out there have for 2007. Use the comments field below. And as always, contact us if you want to discuss your needs or if we can help you out in any way.

Happy New Year!

I had an interesting conversation with a potential client the other day. They were looking for some help with search engine optimization or SEO as we like to call it.

SEO is the component of search engine marketing that aims to get your website pages highly ranked (on the first page of results preferably, at the top of the list even more preferably) in the natural search results…not the sponsored results where you buy your spot. A company purporting to help you rise in the natural search results of the major search engines is often referred to as an SEO firm, or just an SEO. Sponsored search is called pay-per-click marketing, and a very different discipline, which I can address in a later posting.

Anyway, this potential client I was chatting with was interested in knowing about us and what we can do for them, but midway through the conversation he stopped me and sort of broke the ice by asking me (and I’m paraphrasing here) “how do I know if some of the SEO companies I’m interviewing are for real? They all guarantee different things. They all say they can deliver the world for a large monthly retainer. How can I tell who is legitimate and who is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge?”

This excellent question changed the tone of the conversation a great deal because I went from being a guy trying to sell my services, to someone trying to counsel a fellow business person through a scary territory in which I have a good bit of exposure, which is generally how I would rather approach things. Then today I happened across this excellent posting by SEO guru Jill Whalen on ISEdb.com that basically answers this same question in the same way I answered it for my potential client. I highly recommend reading Jill’s posting before starting out on an evaluation of SEO firms.

If after reading my rambling you don’t have time to read Jill’s posting, they just know this one thing: the absolute favorite scammy SEO sales pitch, one that a cold-calling SEO sales person actually tried to tell me once, is that their firm can guarantee you top placement (or any placement) in Google’s (or any other large search engine’s) natural rankings. This is an absolute lie. If you read Google’s advice for choosing an SEO firm you will see this spelled out plainly!

Bottom line - be careful and do your homework. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!

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UPDATE: here’s another article with great advice on this same topic