mwon, Author at Nett Solutions Blog

Link Building or Content Building?

04/21/201404/21/2014 mwon

link building or content building 8 Good Reasons to Concentrate on Content, not on Links

So you have your business website set up to draw visitors from all over Orange County. It’s ready to entice them and convert them or at the very least to get an email address off of them. Now you have some place to continue adding content, like a blog or a customer service portal with easy navigation so that all of your visitors can find what they need and remain thankful to you for providing it.

Now the question is, do you concentrate more on building more content? Or do you work on linking more, other, highly ranked sites back to your existing content? That debate continues.

For lots of us big mouth experts, the answer is easy.

For the Orange County small business owner, it’s still, often, not so clear. Let’s look at it this way.

1) Content is the Far More Affordable Option

Most of the link builders you’ll meet are going to give you valueless or even damaging links. That’s the nature of the game. Links that are easy to get are useless and the people who can really build valuable links will really make you pay for them. The results still won’t be as good as what you can do with quality organic content and organic back linking.

Hiring and working with a decent copywriter is not expensive and has all kinds of benefits beyond simply building links and an interesting website. Find and work with a writer

– or even two or three. You may need to work closely with them at first, but a good copywriter will learn your business and your customer base.

2) Value

It’s far easier to measure the value of pages on your site than the value of links to your overall ranking. Unless a particular link is feeding you visible traffic, you won’t know the value of a link to your overall ranking. But pages of written copy are easy to evaluate in terms of “likes”, “shares” and traffic. Exact search terms might be a little more difficult to determine, but there is almost no limit to the number of search terms you can benefit from. Anyone who offers to “optimize” your site with fewer than a hundred search phrases is selling you short. Adding content means you’re always adding search terms.

3) Writing is Thinking.

That’s why a lot of people hate it, right? Working closely with a copywriter, or better, handing them a draft allows you to not just re-focus your service, your site and your business. You also get it far better spelled out so that you can see the cracks, the gaps – and the opportunities. Good copywriters know this. Writing is about ten times more intensive than reading. If your business is not writing, you’re very likely operating on just a vague understanding of your business model. Re-writing your business plan every couple of years is just good business, and the more you have written, the better prepared you’ll be for the next draft.

4) Links don’t do P.R.

Content does. Content generates links, and you can, perhaps, estimate the extent of your public outreach just by counting up those links, but that’s not PR. Public relations is inserting your business into the public conversation. It can be a little more complex than that, but why shouldn’t you be there when the cameras are clicking and the pages are getting scanned? Submission based links are all but wiped out as a valuable ranking factor. Guest blogging goes on, but it’s not valuable for the links, unless there is actual buzz.

5) Writers are everywhere.

You don’t have to get the very best writer, and especially not on the first try. On the contrary, you can always evaluate what they’ve done – and get another one if it didn’t work out. Doing that with an SEO team will cost about ten times more and take three times longer. Link builders? They were virtually wiped out by algorithm changes (Panda and especially Penguin ) and their links were too. But let’s look closer at those landscape altering algorithm changes.

6) Working against Google is just not viable.

Lots of business people would never do Black-Hat trades with their customers, suppliers or partners – yet they only think of Google in terms of gaming the system. Google has spelled out how it wants you to work with them. That work involves quality content that engages and educates your visitor – be they a customer or not. The plan calls for quality content, transparent business relations (and reviews) and natural, organic linking schemes. Not back linking plans.

7) Branding without a Plan is like Talking without a Voice.

Branding just baffles lots of business people, and were it not for Google and the Internet, business people would probably spend (lose) as much to Branding experts as they do to SEO consultants. The shame is, Branding will get you better returns and the more you do it the better you get at it. But you can’t do it without a plan. As mentioned above (#3), planning means writing, and thinking and reading and clarifying. Essentially, you’re writing up a “person” not a just logo and that person needs to be as complete as the people you know. Think about that.

Better yet, think about this. Fyodor Dostoevsky could write up a character in two pages. At the end of those two pages, you’ll feel that you know that person better than the actual people in your life. That’s the task of branding. There’s no better way to develop the elusive brand than to write it up, continually, over a period of time, and let it interact with your customers. It’s not only totally do-able, it’s what’s expected of you.

8) Thinking “They Already Get It” is a Recipe for Disaster

It’s a bit macho too. And that’s probably where most of the resistance to content comes from. Business people are no-nonsense, and telling stories and customer-service is too often presented as a ladies’ game. The truth is, people buy from people, not from companies. If people bought from companies, companies would all be vending machines. On the contrary, telling your complete story, in bite sized pieces, is smarter, and allows you to re-convince even existing customers to come back for more. Existing customers are your most cost effective source for new customers.

There’s not much more reason for resisting now is there, macho man? Work with your content. Work with a bright, energetic writer and you’ll wonder why you ever wasted so much money on SEO. A year from now, you’ll be re-inventing your business. Good luck!

Tweaking the Irvine California Restaurant Website for Sales

03/31/201403/28/2014 mwon

Seven Easy Tweaks You Can Make Today.

Destination Irvine, the Convention and Visitors Bureau website of the Irvine Chamber of Commerce, lists no fewer than 389 Irvine restaurants, cafes, eateries, supper clubs and dining rooms all over Irvine. Probably every one of them gets a handful of visitors every month from their listing on the site. The number of qualified sales they’re getting from that traffic is probably right down there next to zero, in the .0001 monthly sales range.

Standing out is important, but standing out in a list of 389 is next to impossible. These are just seven easy things you can do today to ramp up your sales and get your own website to finally pay for itself.

1) Make Your Contact Info, Location and Hours Obvious.

Make it really obvious. Put it on every page, and in the header and footer if possible. That’s all that half of your Internet visitors want, so give it to them. Let them make the call and you’re half way there.

2) Spell Out Your Menu.

This is the second most important thing on your menu. No matter how big it is, or how often it changes, your menu needs to be in HTML coded pages and not in a downloadable PDF. A PDF is just a devastating mistake that costs you customers, keywords and money. You’re webmaster needs to be as creative as your kitchen staff, but get the information up there in as many pages as are necessary. Don’t hold back.

3) Collect Email Addresses.

This one is simple. If you tweak your website until you are blue in the face, you might get 5-6% sales from visitors. Sending out regular well-crafted emails, that promote your brand and what you offer, should get you better returns. Better than 10% is possible and the bigger your list, the better the returns. Anyone of the major email-marketing service providers can get you started, and most of them will let you start out for free.

4) No More Seduction! Branding!

Remember, guests (or potential guests) don’t visit your site to get provoked into hunger. A nice “idea” of the cuisine is ok, but it’s not your job to seduce them (like old-school television was always trying to do). Rather, give some thought to the kind of “Person” they would like, or expect, in this situation, and be that person. That’s what good branding, done well, is all about. If the experience of your restaurant is lavish, then pour some more on. But if you’re a no-nonsense, good deal for 30 or 40 bucks, then match your website to your no-nonsense customers. Either way, set up a communicative, honest space for sharing what you’re about, and share away. The higher your prices, the more information people expect to justify the cost. Chef Bios really only start to be important at the upper-ranges of the market.

5) No Slideshows and No Flash!

It’s taken years for marketers to figure this out, but slideshows don’t work. Flash, even less so. Visitors realize what a slideshow is in about 1.5 seconds and they look away almost immediately. I bet you do it, too. So, why should your visitors be any different? Just eliminate all the sliders and the bells and whistles and go with solid, attractive design, that emphasizes your brand first and your location/contact info second. Then your menu. Background music? You really need to step back from that one and probably have your head examined.

6) Mobile and Responsive Design

Most visitors are not going to come from the Chamber of Commerce website. People look for restaurant websites when they are 1) hungry 2) planning a dinner, lunch, meeting, date or something similar. Either of those can be taken care of from a smart phone, and are increasingly For the same reason as we discussed above, that visitors often have a distinct purpose for visiting, you must ensure you have a mobile website. Visitors to your restaurant website will often be on the move, making a decision on the spur of the moment. Visiting a website on a mobile device only to be presented with a broken website or one that is too large to load fast via mobile will drive traffic away. All Restaurant Engine customers get a mobile version of their website included to ensure visitors can find what they’re looking for regardless of the device they use to browse.

7) Page Load Times.

This one isn’t necessarily a “tweak” and improving your page load times can get downright complicated. Most of today’s “responsive design” websites are much faster and so you really can kill those two birds with one stone. Page load times are just like waiting for the waiter, and you probably know that some people get impatient almost immediately. Make sure your images are not too big and talk with your webmaster about the other steps you need to take to speed things up for mobile or traditional internet visitors.

Finally, let’s look again at number 4. Branding is one of the toughest things for people new to online marketing to figure out. It’s easy to say “the personification” of everything that your business represents. But obviously in writing an article like the above, we have to consider not just all the different 389 restaurants in Irvine, but all the others who aren’t on that list. All of them – probably more than 500 Irvine restaurants – are struggling to distinguish themselves and to stand out.

Most of them are going to imitate what other restaurants are doing. That’s exactly the opposite of what they should do. If you want to really tweak for sales, start doing what the people you respect do. Offer honesty, integrity, and support to your neighbors and friends. Do it on Social Media, too. Give away advice for free. Put up your other local Irvine businesses – or non-profits – for free and let people know why you are doing it. Share some of their information too.

Do all of that, and you’ll see your sales take off.

Local SEO Tips for Orange County Restaurants

02/24/201402/28/2014 mwon

Restaurant SEO is all about Local SEO. For all but the very biggest and most famous restaurants, and especially in Orange County, there’s always going to be a big slice of the population searching for the right food – importantly – in the right location.

Local SEO is totally “location, location, location” and the great thing is – even obscure or hard-to-guess locations can not only benefit, but really shine. Look at it this way, 34 cities are incorporated in Orange County, and outside of those there are another 15 cities that are unincorporated – but just as good. Every one of these places is subdivided into more neighborhoods, hamlets, corners, zones and areas than any one person can name. Even the nicknames, or totally informal mini-neighborhood names will work and so will your plazas and malls and shopping center names.

You can break them down. So can your customers. If they’re not local, then they’re asking “Where are we?” and they’re getting accurate answers. You don’t have to memorize every place name in the county, just the ones relative to you, your customers, your delivery or service area and hopefully a good sample of the places surrounding.

TripAdvisor lists, at this writing, 7,094 restaurants in Orange County. Getting your restaurant to stand out from the rest is the point of this article.

15 Things You Should Know about Content Marketing

01/28/201402/24/2014 mwon

Content Marketing Cycle

Content marketing was a big, big buzzword for 2013, not least in Orange County. By the end of the year, as luck would have it, some very good pins were stuck into the bubble of people thinking that content marketing is the answer to everything. “Content marketing will never work” is the must-read for 2014, and the comments at the bottom are a must too. But before we get too contradictory right up front, keep in mind that Content Marketing was never the be-all-end-all for quick, impulse purchases and throw-away relationships.

If you’re thinking of content marketing for your Orange County business, you should also think of the multiple ways that content marketing is construed. Content marketing really is, simultaneously:

10 Great Content Ideas for your Orange County Beachfront Business

12/18/201302/24/2014 mwon

No one, anywhere, makes quite enough of the beaches in Orange County. It’s a great tourism economy and running a business in the Orange County coast can be satisfying and lucrative.

That should be a good thing because there is actually a big opening if you’re running a business anywhere in coastal Orange County – or writing a blog about one. Whether you’re doing content trying to nail traffic, or you’re doing it more for straight marketing and communications, try any, all or just the most appropriate of the following. Take this list, build it out, rough it up and then polish it and you’ll have ten great articles for the next 3 months of active marketing.

QUICK TIP #3 – SEO

10/09/201310/09/2013 mwon

If you own a website, SEO should be a part of your growth strategy. SEO is a combination of strategies, techniques, and procedures which are used to increase site visitors and achieve a higher ranking on the search engine results page. SEO is basically just another way to make your website more eye-catching to the search engines so you get more customers. The search engines are always changing their requirements. Most people don’t know how to work with all these changes, let alone keep up with them. Those that do find that it takes a lot of time, energy, and effort to keep up with the SEO process.

QUICK TIPS:

SEO Your Website

Audit your keywords to make sure they align with your goals. Use a combination of long and short keywords. Make sure you use your keywords in your title tags and anchor text. Frequently check out your competition to compare your rankings versus theirs.

Content is King

If you are trying to perform better in the search engine results, providing new, quality content is a must. Give your customers and audience content that is as informative as possible. One of Google’s biggest pet peeves is low-quality, duplicate, or outdated content.

QUICK TIP #2 – Retargeting

10/09/201310/09/2013 mwon

Retargeting is a powerful tool in the online advertising world. Even if you are not using it as part of your current marketing strategy, you’re competition probably is! This technology allows you to place ads in front of visitors who have already been to your website while they browse the internet. Retargeting is a powerful marketing tool, but it is easy to get wrong, and the consequences can be costly in terms of your budget and brand.

QUICK TIPS:

Make Your Ads Impactful

Create eye catching, dynamic ads that include a strong hook. A “hook” gives your prospects a compelling reason to take action right now. Examples of hooks are deals, sale pricing, discounts, or coupon codes. Make sure to include a phone number on all of your ads!

Create Multiple Campaigns For Each of Your Goals

Don’t make the common mistake of creating one campaign that contains numerous ad groups. Create multiple campaigns, one for each of your desired goals. Your campaigns will be a lot easier to manage and you will have a better understanding of what is working and what is not.

Orange County Restaurant SEO and Local Search Optimization

10/08/201310/08/2013 mwon

orange county seo There are 34 cities and another 19 unincorporated communities across Orange County. Every one of them is loaded with restaurants, eateries, bars, lounges and cafeterias. There are cafes, bistros and lunch counters and all of them miss out on at least some of the people looking on-line for where and when to eat.

Orange County is a savvy market, too. Some of your toughest competition is probably all over the local and mobile SEO scene, but then again, lots of other restaurants are not. There are restaurants well positioned enough that they can get away with basically letting their store-front do all the marketing. But guess what? They’re still leaving the entire Local Search and Mobile Markets to chance.

That’s literally leaving money on the table, so let’s start scooping some of it up!

This article is just to give you a start – with five fast and easy tricks – to optimize your Orange County restaurant for local and mobile search. It’s a big field, but there’s no reason not to get going now.

1. First, Claim Your Google+ Listing!

That might seem obvious. But just because Google has indexed your business and listed you, it doesn’t mean they’re going to optimize things. Do a search and find your listing in Google Plus. If it’s there but the main image is a giant map, then it’s still unclaimed. Google actually makes it pretty easy, to select the “Manage This Page” button and claim the listing. You need to have a Gmail account and you’ll need to verify that you’re the business owner or an authorized rep by telephone or a post card through the mail.

If no listing exists, you’ll need to set one up. Just go to google.com/places and click on “Get Started For Free”. You’ll need to fill out everything as accurately as possible and while you shouldn’t use the page to try to replace or stand in for a website, it’s almost as important. Make sure they get the restaurant name, physical address, and phone number, and the web address right. Categories, especially for food type are tremendously important, too, so select them carefully. You can continue working on it for several weeks or even months so don’t worry about getting it all correct during the first sitting. You’ll also want to add some photos.

2. Check Your Mobile Compatibility

One big reason that your Google Plus page is important is that it’s thoroughly mobile compatible. So even though it’s not recommendable to totally abandon your website in favor of a Google Plus page, you can get away with letting your Google Plus page stand in as a purely mobile page – at least while you’re optimizing for mobile search. It’s a big market, and restaurants are foolish to ignore the growth potential of mobile.

3. Optimize for Local Place Names

As we mentioned above, the city names, unincorporated communities and all kind of place names are an important part of optimizing for local. One good way to distinguish your business from others is with the place name used as a keyword. In many cases, that can mean optimizing pages for your food type and your place name. Santa Ana Pizza is almost ok, but Santa Ana is a pretty big place. If your reputation is good, people will drive across the city for it. Otherwise they’re going to want the Pizza that’s closest. Otherwise, you need to be optimizing for “Heninger Park Pizza” and all the communities you’re serving.

We’ve written a lot about keyword research, and for local search optimization, local, community level and neighborhood names can be among the most important keywords.

4. Do Your Research

Building on that thought, think about how people are likely searching for Pizza, or your food, in your area. Especially if your selling a niche food, or an alternative, such as vegetarian only, you’ve got to be aware of the most important combinations of keywords people are using to search. You should also check the Google Adwords Keyword Planner for a more thorough understanding of how people are searching in your area.

5. Understand Off-Site SEO

Local search SEO for Restaurants is very much an off-site process.

Dozens of directories will help with your rankings, particularly if they accept some reviews (and you get some reviews) but you need to claim the most important of your listings and optimize them. Make sure your contact information is consistent across each of them, and don’t feel overwhelmed. There can be literally hundreds of listing sites. You don’t need to claim and be on every single one, but the most important for your market should be sufficient.

Keep in mind also, that Orange County is home to some listings directories that are in and of themselves as important as the big national directories like Yelp and Foursquare.

BestRestaurantsinOrangeCounty.com is a good place to start. And while the OCStandard.com, for example, will accept your listing for a fee, it’s really the type of market you’re serving that will determine how much, if anything, you might budget toward online marketing or advertising.

How Google Collects Search Quality Data

09/09/201309/09/2013 mwon

As a full service SEM agency, we often field questions about how and/or why Google makes changes to its Search Engine Results Pages. The only honest answer to that question is “I don’t know.” It’s very difficult to predict Google’s next move. This is especially true for our SEO clients. They’re making changes all the time, both visible and invisible. The only promise we can make is that we will quickly pivot and create solutions for our clients to ensure they can navigate through this ever-changing landscape. Here’s an interesting piece from Search Engine Journal giving a behind-the-scenes glimpse into some of the tools Google use to improve the quality of its SERPs. While it doesn’t answer the how/why questions, it certianly gives good insight into the process. Link here.

How Google Collects Search Quality Data on Your Site

Posted on September 9, 2013 by Johann Beishline | Leave a comment

The views of contributors are their own, and not necessarily those of SEJ

It’s little known that Google was never meant to be a company. In fact, in 1998 Vinod Khosla (one of the first investors in Google) managed to convince Larry Page and Sergey Brin to sell their technology to Lycos, Excite, or Yahoo, the leading search engines of the time, for a paltry million dollars so that they could go back to focusing on their research at Stanford University.

While each company took the time to review Larry Page’s and Sergey Brin’s work, they passed on the opportunity of purchasing it. The companies were simply not that concerned with search quality; they figured their results were good enough and that they needed to differentiate themselves from the competition by other means.

When the two friends decided to pursue their search engine anyway, they made focusing on search quality their top priority. They even put it in their mission statement: “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Google has stayed true to this commitment more than a decade later. It still dedicates tremendous amounts of resources figuring out how to deliver the best possible results.

However, when a search engine is dealing with millions of searches each second –15 percent (or 500 million queries per day) of which it has never encountered before- how does it make sure that it is delivering the best possible experience? The answer is that it uses a combination of automatic and manual review processes.

Because automatic review processes (such as PageRank, Panda, and Penguin) have been discussed so often, this piece will focus on the more manual ways that Google gathers data to judge search result quality.

Millions of Everyday Users

In the interest of improving its algorithm, Google performed more than 20,000 experiments on its search results in 2010. Much of the data from these experiments comes from placing a percentage of users into specific buckets.

If you use Google, you are likely unwittingly helping the company improve their results as part of one of these experiments right now. Based on the outcome of these experiments, Google makes more than 500 changes to their algorithms each year with each one typically impacting a small percentage of search engine results.

Experiments might be as simple as split testing their website layout or as complicated as altering millions of search engine rankings in an attempt to improve their quality.

Website Statistics

The primary way that Google gains data about its search results is through basic usage statistics.

For instance, if you happen to look for a dentist using Google and you click on the first result, Google can indirectly measure your reaction to the website by seeing whether you return back to the search engine results page (SERP) and click on another link.

It is clear you didn’t find what you were looking for if you have to return to the search engine to click on another link. Google’s goal is to provide you with what you were looking for in the least amount of time possible.

Google knows what types of usage patterns to expect based on query intent (navigational, informational, or transactional) and aggregates data on each link’s performance.

Statistics they collect include bounce rate and time spent on site. Even though these statistics are indirect, they tend to be incredibly accurate at predicting if a user has liked the content they clicked on.

Another way that Google can gather search result quality data is by looking at page load speeds from people who have installed their Toolbar. You can see the data Google has collected from users about your site’s speed in Google Analytics & Webmaster Tools. While Google also tests website speeds when its bot is crawling the web, the Toolbar provides the company with more information about real world conditions.

Social Media Metrics

Google started gathering social media data quite a few years ago. Since Google does not have fire hose access to Twitter and Facebook, they have been hesitant to trust social signals, but these signals are becoming an ever-growing part of its algorithm.

In the past, Google relied almost exclusively on backlinks to determine how to rank sites. The problem with this approach is that it only lets webmasters decide whether your site is high quality.

Social media signals are the democratization of search engine quality measurements. Basically, social media has the potential to let everyone vote on whether a page should be ranking in Google. If you share a website on your social media profiles, it likely means that you viewed the site favorably.

Social media data will play a huge role in the future of search and will be heavily drawn upon by search engines to determine how people are reacting to content online.

Surveys & Questionnaires

While indirect data from its users is great, Google still has a difficult time understanding why users don’t like certain pages. It has plenty of data, but it needs to transform it into information through analysis and evaluation to make sense of it all. As a result, it has started to take more direct feedback from its users as well.

As a search engine optimizer, I conduct a fair amount of searches each day (so much so that I often have to type in a CAPTCHA just to use the service). The following images are from my real world experiences.

Google-Improve

After searching Google for “local search engine optimization”, they presented me with the box in the right hand corner. The box asked me to rate two different pages for relevance.

google-search-quality-result 1

One of the pages that Google was looking for information on was a Search Engine Watch article.

google-search-quality-result 2

The other page Google wanted input on was for a local search engine optimization company.

After visiting the two pages it’s fairly obvious what Google was looking for with its questionnaire. Since the query I typed into Google (“local search engine optimization”) is ambiguous, Google wasn’t sure what type of content to show.

They were checking to see if people were looking for articles on local search engine optimization (an informational query), or if they were looking for a company to hire (a transactional query).

I voted for the Search Engine Watch article, as the majority of people must have, because Google has recently begun integrating News results into the query. Now rather than showing local SEO companies near the top of the SERP, Google is showing more articles instead.

A few weeks later I performed a Google search for “great science fiction novels” to check on the types of queries for which it was using its new slider.

experimental-google

After performing the search, I noticed a feedback button that I hadn’t seen on any of the other sliders. When I clicked on it, the following buttons showed up:

crowd-sourced-experiment-google Google was looking for input on the types of books that should be in the slider. If enough people feel that a certain book should not be in the slider, Google likely removes it.

In fact, if you look at the results right now, you will notice that several of the books seen above no longer appear on the first slide.

Another survey tool that I have seen Google use is the one below:

The survey came in the form of a chat box in the right hand side of the screen and asked me to judge the page of results as a whole.

Google Search Quality Raters

Since around 2005, Google has used an army of hired search quality raters to ensure that its results are up to par.

Because Google still relies mostly on indirect measurements of quality, it uses search quality raters to look at poor performing pages and determine why users didn’t like them.

This feedback mostly makes its way back to Google’s engineering department so that it can develop more experiments. This feedback doesn’t usually have a direct impact on your site’s rankings. You can see the exact guidelines Google gives its search engine quality raters here.

Webmaster Tools Spam Reports

SERP-Spam-Report

Another manual method that Google relies upon to ensure quality search results is through itsWebmaster Tools spam reporting interface.

Spam reports come from a variety of sources including victims of scams, disgruntled SEOs, and copyright owners.

Google employees go through the reports and can manually penalize sites that they come across.

Conclusion

As you can see, Google is serious about the quality of its search results. Google is a living, breathing organism fed by enormous amounts of data.

The company is in constant flux, exploring ways to improve the quality of its search results. As long as search engine optimizers continue to outsmart Google’s algorithms (which will happen for the foreseeable future), Google will keep using manual data gathering techniques to enhance their algorithm and penalize manipulators.

What other tactics have you seen Google use to gather more manual forms of search quality data?