Comparing Website Optimization to Search Engine Optimization

It is important to note that website optimization is different than search engine optimization. I sometimes hear people interchange them - thinking they are the same thing. If you search on the net for website optimization, you will also get results that equate it to SEO. Guess what? I think they are wrong! Many larger online retailers know the difference between the two, and it was clearly dissected for me at last year’s Internet Retailer Conference in San Jose. I really think all website owners have a lot to learn from multi-channel merchants online as they already have this down to a science.

Search engine optimization is a strategy to get more site traffic by having more exposure on the search results; website optimization is a strategy to enhance your website experience to avoid that traffic from abandoning your site. For website optimization, it is all about raising your conversion rate (your desired reaction, like a sale or interaction) once visitors are on your site.

My definition of search engine optimization (aka SEO):
In most simplistic terms, search engine optimization (SEO) is a combination of tactics to make your website show up in the search engine results pages (and for the most part the first page or top 10 organic results) This process is to raise your website traffic with relevant visitors who may convert into customers or give you the desired interaction with your website or with your business. For a snapshot of some strategies for SEO, read more on my blog “What is Search Engine Optimization?”

My definition of website optimization (aka WSO):
It is making your site better once you have the site visitor. It is the little changes and tweaks to landing and inside pages, usability considerations and overall site architecture that make the site visitor to most likely convert better.

Website owners spend so much time and investment on website visitor acquisitions (SEO and SEM) and barely any efforts on optimizing conversions and retention. If you had a website with 10,000 visitors per month and 1.5 percent of the traffic actually converted into a sale or a lead form, would you spend more time to double your traffic? You’d probably answer yes. But what if you had some way to double your conversion with the same traffic? Which way would be more effective in the long term and give you a higher return on investment?

I learned some tips and best practices about website usability at the Internet Retailer Conference on website optimization. I wanted to test this theory and did some minor enhancements to an online store I managed. Before the changes, the site had a consistent 1.8 percent conversion rate that became orders online (compared to overall site visitors). I implemented some usability tweaks to optimize the website like incorporating bread crumbs (navigation hints), location hints for the checkout, toll-free and guarantee blurb on every page. Believe it or not, we watched the conversion rate increase to 3 percent the very next month! We could have doubled our pay-per-click budget to make more money, and we didn’t. But these minor website optimization changes allowed us to get more money from the existing traffic. We have now doubled our sales without putting any more budgets into online advertising or SEO. These combined enhancements lowered our shopping cart abandonment because it enhanced the user experience during the shopping experience.

Website optimization can include a mix of the following:

• Enhancing website performance: Sometimes websites are slow and the site visitors will bounce off the site if they experience it. You can use online tools to measure how fast your website reacts to requests (I use http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/index.html ). Switching hosting providers can solve this issue. Making sure you are not on a shared server with other sites that can slow your website down. A decent hosting company will have burstable solution where you are not capped or affected. Or there are software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies that have a great scalable solution, like Sitemasher has. (Disclaimer: I work at Sitemasher as the Online Marketing Manager). Also, make sure that your website is built on a good platform (online store, or Content Management System that is scalable and does not have issues with bloated databases that will hog the server memory) or find out how to clean up your databases to make your site run faster, if that is the case.


• Advertising to and linking to relevant landing pages: Making sure whatever pages you are linking to from external campaigns on directories or banner ads are relevant and have the same messaging. Don’t direct all campaigns to your home page. If you have a banner ad for widgets, then link it to the widget page and not your home page. The more you leave your site visitors to hunt for the info, the more likely the drop-off will happen. Tim Ash, author of “Landing Page Optimization” is a huge advocate of optimizing your website landing pages. He delves really deep into this one strategy and articulates this practice so well that you will be sold that this alone is one of the best strategies and something that you should work on every day.


• Tweaking usability and design: Look at the tiny details and try to get into your customers’ minds to determine what they want on your site. Learn what others have learned. Incorporate best practices for usability, for example: the checkout button is on top right and search bar on every page. Don’t try to be “different” or “cool” and let the site visitor guess at how to interact with your website. Keep the common-sense stuff consistent.
  
• Enhancing experience and navigation: Help your site visitors find information and navigate back and forth. Use bread crumbs stating how deep the site visitors are in the site and give them ability to go back to first level with one click (non-linear), add hints to where they are on checkout (i.e. “you are on step 1 of 4”) and also have a sitemap link and search on every page.
  
• Encouraging interaction for help: Have multiple points of contact available for your users for support. Online chat is a good one (like HelpOnClick or LivePerson). People want answers and support instantly, and will most likely not want to wait for an e-mail response later or the next day. Have a phone number, help topics and e-mail contact as backup. Having multiple help and support mediums might save you from losing a customer. I have found that for some small online stores, may have first-timers calling in orders or asking live chat questions – they only want to check out if you respond and are actually legit. In those cases, they will probably not ask for support the second time, as they may trust you from the first experience. Also, inquiries and concerns from such customers can actually give you ideas how to optimize your website further, so welcome every one of them. Some will most likely be issues you never even thought of!

There are many more ways and best practices to optimize your website and above are some good starting points. The important thing is that you start to analyze your website metrics and review the small changes as you go to see if they have made an impact. I would not recommend doing many changes at once, and if something does not have beneficial impact, you can change it back. Your website can and should get better when you understand the impact – it is an evolving process!

Do you have a specific question about online marketing? Send an e-mail to shannon@sitemasher.com , and we'll try to post a blog on the topic in the future (and possibly do the research for you, if we don't know.)

If you want to share similar experiences on this topic, I encourage you to leave a comment!

What is Search Engine Optimization

In most simplistic terms, search engine optimization (SEO) is a combination of tactics to make your website show up in the search engine results pages (and for the most part the first page or top 10 organic results). This process is to increase your website traffic with relevant visitors who may convert into customers or give you the desired interaction.

Those visitors will use certain key word strings (two to three words and most likely not your company name, unless you’re Nike or Sephora). You will need to somehow figure out what those key word strings are and tweak your SEO strategies constantly to get the desired effect.

Sounds vague to you, right?

You are not the only one! The reason it is vague is that there are many search engine optimization strategies and tactics, and they are constantly evolving; because the heavyweights like Google and Yahoo change the rules and will not share the formula with you. The reason they keep it all a secret is because they want to bump out the spammers and black hats (online marketers who try to trick the system). Remember the days when you typed in “Britney Spears” and you got directed to a sex site? Google now serves relevant pages for search terms, and it is all because its algorithms are more complex. Algorithms are basically a mix of variables that is hard to count for one factor being the result.

I like how William Flaiz articulated SEO in his blog: Standards? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Standards!

"The goal of SEO is to increase the search rankings of a client for specific terms. No matter how you rationalize it, whether you think you're increasing a pages relevancy, optimizing a site to search engine standards, or ’building connections,’ we're manipulating search results. The point of a search engine is to provide the most algorithmically relevant pages to a user. "

“SEO is a discipline of balance, and careful mixture of human and algorithmic input is necessary to create truly helpful listings. "

SEO strategies that help your business grow online:
The following are just a few samples of different search engine optimization (SEO) strategies that make your website search engine friendly and that, in the end, increase relevant traffic to your site:

• Key word discovery and enhancements: Using tools and competitors’ websites to find out what key word strings to focus on. Also using your analytics or even your pay-per-click campaigns (if you are doing any) for some key word ideas. Looking at each page as an opportunity to focus on a theme of a few key words. This strategy can always be tweaked and enhanced as you learn more about your target audience and how they arrive at your site.


• Content-rich copy: Writing your web copy with key word strings that your potential customer or site visitor will search for you.


• Making sure site architecture is crawlable: Having html pages that can be read by the search engine robots (not a Flash site), having pages that are not dynamic (choosing the right CMS or e-commerce platform), having navigation links that are readable from home page, constantly tweaking and cross-linking pages throughout your site. Linking to sitemap from your pages, and having a robots follow in header (not a “no follow”).
  
• Posting fresh content on a continual basis: If you have a website that has fresh content, the search engines will come back and index your site more in the results pages. Also more new content means you will also have more key word strings and potentially more traffic. Having a blog is a great way to add fresh content, and the search engines love how crawlable they are.
  
• Rolling out the red carpet for the search engines: Includes having a robots.txt and a sitemap.xml with all your pages listed and ranks. The search engines also need you to pay attention to and label every inside web page with unique title tag, meta description, key word tags, image alt tags that match or complement the content within that page. Read my blog on “Why Use Google Sitemaps.” (also, check out Danny Dover's SEO Cheat Sheet - I think it is quite handy!)
  
• Link building: Have complementary sites link to your site. The more relevant and complementary key words the linking site has to your business, the more it will so-call lift your rankings.
  
• Social media tagging: Get your site listed by tagging (which is kind of like getting yourself categorized by key words in directories). This can include digg, del.icio.us etc.
  
• Universal search: Optimizing and labeling/tagging images, video and news with key words. More and more you will see these popping up in the results page versus just text links.
  
• Local search listings: Getting your company listed in local search, also making sure you put your full address with zip/postal code in text in the footer of your pages or contact page, Google picks that up as well.
  
• Using website statistics: Analyzing, interpreting and looking for opportunities and ongoing tweaks for key words.
  
• Avoiding black-hat strategies: This is a bad-guy strategy. Avoid using duplicate doorway pages, cloaking multiple sites with same content, stuffing key words in same color as your background and in invisible Div’s. You can maybe trick Google for a short while, and it would be very hard to get relisted in the index, if they find out and penalize you for it. Follow rules stated in Google Webmasters area and you should be fine.

Each of the tactics above warrants further explanation in separate blogs and you can really invest more time dissecting individual areas and tactics. The more you work on SEO best practices, the more likely it will grow your website traffic. I also like to term SEO as a full-circle process and not linear – you can learn from one SEO tactic that can further help another. SEO is all about research, analyzing, interpreting and tweaking - definitely not a one-time project!

Complementary to search engine optimization (SEO) is search engine marketing (SEM) strategies and for the most part are online marketing campaigns that may have some hard costs (outside of someone’s time to implement). For example: pay-per-click advertising, cost-per-acquisition initiatives, paid directories, banner advertising, e-mail marketing. Read my blog on “Multidimensional Online Marketing Tips” – it will give you some ideas on having a mix of SEO and SEM strategies.

Do you have a specific question about online marketing? Send an e-mail to shannon@sitemasher.com , and we'll try to post a blog on the topic in the future (and possibly do the research for you, if we don't know.)

If you want to share similar experiences on this topic, I encourage you to leave a comment!

Multi Dimensional Online Marketing Tips

Recently, I went to Vancouver's Massive Trade Show and Conference. Two conference tracks I attended are the Online Marketing 101 track (with Chris Breikss from 6s Marketing, David Scott from Entellium, Fred Vallaeys from Google, and Joanne Acri from Yahoo) as well as the New Media track (with Monica Hamburg, Warren Baxley from InterCall, Rebecca Bollwitt from E-xact Transactions, Linda Bustos from Elastic Path). They all had great suggestions for website owners, as well as beginner and advanced online marketers!

What I learned personally overall, I would say that online marketing should be multidimensional and you need to test the waters on the proper mix for your business. Whatever tactics you use online; try, test, measure and tweak your mix constantly - you'll be on the way to online success. The presenters had summed up some points quite well (better than I could have explained). Below are just a few of the many pointers and tips the speakers shared with the attendees.

Tip #1 - Any site owner should not depend on one tactic at a given time, or it will be one-dimensional and ineffective. Know your consumer and figure out your mix. Have an integrated marketing program. Your mix can include a combination of any of the following:

• E-mail marketing.
• Social Media - Can include blogging, participating in forums and other social media tactics, there are so many now, it is hard to keep up (Facebook, MySpace etc.).
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Trying to show up on the search engine results without paying for ads. This can include making sure your site is crawlable, having outbound/inbound links, good site architecture, and a key-word-rich website. Keep in mind that it is evolving to universal search with images, videos and external pages you have on the social networks as well. Make sure your pages have the proper key words and multi-media are tagged appropriately.
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) - Paid advertising via the search engines (Google, MSN and Yahoo). These usually show up in sponsored search results as well as on ad placements within the content network. Can also include text, image or video ads served through Universal Search.
• Banner Ads being served via third-party or portal-site sponsorships.
• Cost-per-Acquisitions (CPA) - This can include referral program (or even affiliate marketing), where you pay other sites that give you leads or conversions (signups or paying customers). This can include new CPA programs, which will be evolving.
• Traditional Advertising - Any traditional advertising like print, magazine and video should be complementary or enforce whatever you have online and tie in to either convert or track on landing pages.

I am a huge advocate of this Multi-dimensional Marketing, but in the past I have had a hard time trying to convince my clients on the different tactics (before I was with Sitemasher as the in-house marketer). It was hard to convince my clients and explain the "halo" effect and how all the chosen online strategies will sooner or later snowball and show results. Unfortunately most marketers (or business owners) either ignore MDM or simply aren't aware of the possibilities. I am happy that others (like the presenters at Massive) are advocates of MDM and are trying to educate business owners that there is potential.

Tip #2 – Multidimensional marketing should be looked at as longer-term online exposure versus a one-shot advertising effort. Also, a mix-and-match approach should be adopted at the same time to get the "halo" effect.

So what is the "halo" effect? David Scott explained it as a situation where you use multiple media and tactics to reach your customers and you have "lift" with branding. Chris from 6S marketing mentioned "brand equity." You should look at efforts as a full campaign and complementary. If you are not Nike or Apple, it may take potential customers to see your brand multiple times (also known as impressions) in different areas (i.e., e-mail marketing, in a forum or on the search results) before they include you into their "consideration set."

Tip #3 - Multidimensional marketing demands some patience and transparency when it comes to the social media tactics. Be persistent yet very careful when you venture social media.

• Take your time and learn how to interact within the social sphere and don't rush it. Learn how others use this medium properly. Observe and learn the right etiquette for posting, tagging and interaction with others.
• Don't expect results right away, this tactic does take time to earn brand equity.
• Be transparent and don't try to fool members of the community - they are smart consumers. Don't try to pretend you are a customer of your company and post spam comments on how great you are. They will find out sooner or later (most likely sooner), and you'll be banned or negatively advertised by the community. Try to add value to the community by participating in the topics and giving value with tips. You will gain trust and credibility from the community and they will sooner or later visit your website or e-mail you for more help or advice.
• If you are blogging for your company, try to focus on building thought leadership before trying to get customers. Customers will see that you have a good knowledge network and will contact you for your product or service after you’ve built trust and credibility.
• Be open to negative and positive feedback. Linda Bustos suggests, "If something falls apart, own up to it and turn it around." Respond to comments in a timely and honest way. If you screwed up, state how you are going to fix it and you'll probably win them back.
• Consider a reputation management tool to use and track good or bad comments that are being posted on external blogs (for example: Blogpulse).
• Lightly brand media and widgets, if you overdo it with brand and sales tactics, it probably won't be distributed by the community.

Tip #4 - Go after the Long Tail. Focus on consumer fragmentation for your multidimensional tactics online. Whatever you choose for your mix, try to focus on areas where you can find fragments of your customers that will have a higher conversion rate. Check your website analytics and know where people are coming from to your site. Find them on other places and look for other opportunities to have a better impact to the "halo" (read my blog on "Web Analytics - Simply Reviewing Referring Sites for Opportunities" for some ideas). They may hang out in communities that are complementary to your business or vertical or they may be a type of customer (persona) who uses certain key word strings to find you on the search engines.

Do you have a specific question about online marketing? Send an e-mail to shannon@sitemasher.com , and we'll try to post a blog on the topic in the future (and possibly do the research for you, if we don't know.)

If you want to share similar experiences on this topic, I encourage you to leave a comment!