This is a talk I gave at The Sunday Business Post National Digital Media & Marketing Summit www.digitalsummit.ie on the 29th of March, 2012 in Croke Park Stadium, Dublin.
It was a conceptual overview detailing some of the key elements in a website that delivers sales / enquiries.
21. Ideas Where To Get Links
- Suppliers & Partners
- Industry bodies
- News sites from Press Release
- Social Bookmarking sites
- Forums
- Reference / Q&A
- Guest Blogging
- Local directories
30. How to Keep Sales Coming
• Conversation
• Ask for people to spread the word, RT
it, like it etc. – it does work
• Build community
• Reward loyalty (exclusivity)
• Retargeting
31. Final Thoughts
• Respect your website’s value & potential
• It’s not an overnight success
• Build on your success & go International
32. Thank you
@ecelticseo
• brian@eceltic.ie for any questions or if you need
help with improving online sales / leads
• Slides will be live at:
www.ecelticseo.com/digital-media-summit-2012
Notes de l'éditeur
Please visit www.ecelticseo.com for more details about our company and how we can help your online marketing campaign.
There are tips, tricks and best practice techniques that a lot of people don’t know that you can use to gain a disproportionate advantage of other Internet marketers. But at the end of the day, it takes a combination of expertise + experience + time + money.How many people here have heard or said “That’s it I’ve got the website built now – that’s taken care of, checked off.
How youget them in the door of your website
When making targets, think backwards if you have an average of 2% conversion rate. To get 1,600 sales you’re going to need to fill the equivalent of Croke Park - 80,000 visitors.Does 80,000 sounds a lot?Are you valuing your site as the hardest working salesperson in your company? Probably not. At a minimum if your website was on minimum wage it would be paid 75,000 EURO per year as it never takes a day off, never asks for holidays.
What is SEO? Search engine optimisation is the practice of optimising your website to get more organic traffic, more traditional sense it’s earned media.In a standard search you’ll see the paid ads on the top and right known as Google Adwords in pink area.Adwords can give you instant traffic and are very useful in driving immediate short term hits.One thing that Adwords can give you is certainty - we had one client in the insurance sector who said they didn’t want any SEO because with adwords they had the ability to turn on and off enquiries like a tap. They didn’t want to get overwhelmed with organic enquiries and not be able to respond to customers. They were happier to be paying 5,000 a month and have their guaranteed traffic. The green section below the ads is the organic results produced as the most relevant result by Google’s algorithm.
Adwords can be very effective but be careful about relying too heavily on adwords in a medium – long term strategy.Do some tests but make sure you’re benchmarking performance against organic traffic in completing goals or making purchases otherwise your budget can disappear.
Organic traffic is earned media is broader than just organic search resultsThere’s three steps to getting inbound visitors. There is a huge amount of jargon in SEO and probably in this talk too. I’m going to talk mostly on content and touch on the other two aspects as I’ve only a limited time.
Producing quality content is what can differentiate you to people and search engines tooDon’t forget to write for people first and search engines second.
No industry is too boring!No site or sector is too competitive – you just need to focus on a niche first and build out from there.There are plenty of creative ways you can gain traffic.- Do a list of the top 20 people in your industry- Run an awards program and invite people to apply- Do a blog interview with customers, suppliers, staff or industry leaders- Use your knowledge to give tips or information in blog posts- Top 10 lists – people love these- Do some original research + publish it in a press release - plenty of SMEs can do this! - Write a genuine positive review of something relevant and tweet them your review
OkCupid is a dating site.What they did was take the profile data of their customers and aggregate it to be anonymous.They then did some comparison against national statistics from their user’s profile.Surprise surprise - people lied about their height, age, salary, sexual preference and all sorts of other things. This got a lot of press and blog coverage.
Closer to home - daft.ie the property site releases quarterly reports - using their data tomaximise PR coverage in online publications, blogs + as well as offline.Don’t forget just because your site is based online don’t forget to market offline too.
Zappos a successful ecommerce site now have 100,000 functional product reviewvideos!!!30% of Internet Traffic is currently video, according to Cisco this is set to jump to 90% by 2013Good video isn’t cheap or easy to do, it’s something Google uses to separate brands
Viral videos often use humour to sell products This is Dollar Shave Club.com 4 million views in less than a month - 4k USD video to shoot Apart from the video– it also has a referral scheme where if you refer a friend it gives you one month’s product free For maximum SEO benefit I recommend using Vimeo Pro and embed the videos in your own site because if you upload to YouTube the click through to your website will be minimal.
User generated content – if you’re building a loyal regular audience and community on your site – invite their opinion and reviewsResearch show that people would rather purchase after seeing an average review or above rather than no review.
One thing Amazon also do really well is use the really long sales page approach to keep you scrolling constantly selling to you – that rule about not making anyone scroll isn’t always true!Another site you should learn from is the DailyMail – it has an excellent SEO team. Their journalists pass their stories to a team of SEO professionals before uploading them. They have longer titles and are image rich to keep you on the site for a longer period of time.
Use these to establish thought leadershipWebinars + Whitepapers + PodcastsThey are not relevant for every industry and most suited for the B2B sectorMake sure to capture at least an email address before giving these awayA client we’re working with at the moment in the financial services sector
100 items in our checklist
Links are the measurement of authority on the InternetThe more links you have that are high quality and relevant, the more you establish your authority
There are plenty of examples of where you can reach out for back links to your siteFocus on the quality, size and relevance of the linking site
Good linkbait is good PR.Linkbait is easy when you have Michael O’ Leary as your CEO. But there’s other ways to leverage online PR, doing surveys and collating those results can produce headlines.
Put that data into infographics such as IDA where they’ve compiled information on FDI in Ireland and designed it in a nice graphic and received links and news features based on this.
Can you spot where Ireland is?
Don’t forget that the Internet has no borders and is built for you to export your products and reach new markets.
http://www.kontain.com/signup
Help push them over the lineWhen they can’t find what they need an autocomplete search like Google helps them find alternatives or a live chat assistant. Also giving too much choice may overwhelm your usersHenry Ford – any colour you want as long as it’s black
Keep a conversation going through social mediaStop only focusing on the 2% what about the other 98%?