DIY copywriting, marketing and SEO

What’s the most important on-site SEO idea to take on board from 2011?  

It’s ‘putting the visitor first’.

Search engines have released thousands of algorithm updates over the past year. Google’s infamous Panda and Caffeine updates, the big boys, are still rolling across t’internet like huge binary tsunami. Both appear to encourage good quality, customer-led content and promote ‘freshness’ while discouraging duplicated and poor quality stuff.

What does it mean for ecommerce?

The devil is in the detail. But the big picture is simple: make sure everything you do to your site is the best it can be from a visitor’s perspective.

What do most of us like about a website?

We tend to enjoy sites that:

• look good, which in a marketing context mostly means clear and simple
• load fast, so we’re not left hanging
• make it easy to find the stuff we need via as few clicks as possible
• are full of useful, relevant, interesting, well written information
• are updated regularly so everything is fresh and current
• are trustworthy, which is a marketing context means things like full contact details, VAT registration number, limited company details, returns policy, guarantees and so on
• entertain us
• do exactly what they say on the tin
• change often enough so we enjoy coming back to see what’s new

How do you tell if you’re doing the right thing?

Park your business head for a moment and look at your site dispassionately. Crowd source honest opinions from colleagues, Twitter friends and real life business networks to see if / how your site can be improved. Or get someone savvy to carry out a regular user-focused site audit for you.

Happy visitors = happy search engines

When people like a site, they stick around longer and more of them buy. When you please people you also make search engine bots and spiders happy. When search engines like what you’re doing, they push your site higher up the rankings so you enjoy better visibility. Win, win, win. Job done.

(Thanks to http://www.sxc.hu/profile/socyo for the lovely royalty-free ‘happy dog’ image!)

When you’re faced with a marketing puzzle, think it through logically.

Here’s a question recently asked on Twitter: “How long should blog posts be for SEO purposes?”

And here’s the answer:

• search engines take into account how long we spend on websites. It’s just one of hundreds of pieces of information they use to build up a picture of where a site should sit in the search results
• people tend to spend time on a website because they’re enjoying it. If not, they leave
• if your post is boring, irrelevant or badly written, people won’t stick around to read it. No matter how long or short it is
• therefore blogging should be about quality, not length
• the better your post, the longer people are likely to stay on your blog and read more posts

How long should a blog post be for SEO? As long as it needs to be to get your point across elegantly and plainly, in an entertaining way. No longer. No shorter.

Google always likes it best when you put people’s needs first…

I’m liking Udemy, a place where you can take and build online courses on any subject.

Their site’s beautifully written, clear and friendly

I love their slightly rebellious ‘about’ statement, which reads: Udemy enables anyone to take and build courses online. Our goal is to disrupt and democratize education by enabling anyone to learn from the world’s experts.

I was impressed by their original email marketing campaign: compelling and professional, short and sweet.

They even provide a choice of logos to download when you right-click on their site header logo. Cool! I really enjoy working with open, free-thinking, generous, clever people and that’s how they’re coming across.

I’m creating a course over the Christmas break. I’ll let you know how it goes. See what you think. Here’s a link: Udemy

Are you into social media marketing? If so, have you read TNS’s Digital Life report yet?

Don’t be surprised if you haven’t. It came out a couple of weeks ago, only to be met by a stony silence from the SMM community. How come? Probably because it’s full of findings that social media marketers don’t want to hear!

In a nutshell it’s the biggest empirical study of consumer digital behaviour so far, involving 72,000 people over 60 countries. That’s what I call a relevant statistical sample.

Here’s just three of the research’s key findings:

• the majority of consumers don’t want to engage with brands via social media
• in the UK, 61% of us say we don’t see social media as a place we want to interact with brands
• only 1 in 4 consumers in developed markets see social networks as a good place to buy products

And here’s a quote from TNS Chief Development Officer Matthew Froggat: “Many brands have recognised the vast potential audiences available to them on social networks; however they are failing to understand that these spaces belong to the consumer and brand presence needs to be proportionate and justified”.

As Marketing Week’s columnist and Associate Marketing Professor Mark Ritson says, “Social media literally means the communication channels that exist between people. Not between brands.” He adds, “As more brands attempt to grab attention and start social media conversations with disinterested consumers, more of them will switch off.”

The overall message from the TNS Digital Life report is this. Social media is a genuine world-changing development. But marketers who spent all their money and energy on it, using it as their main communications channel, are in for a “disappointing denoument”.

How many marketers have actually donned their consumer hat and realised social media marketing is fatally flawed from a human perspective? Hardly any. If they had, they’d realise how few of us actually enjoy having our social spaces clogged up by brands trying to sell us stuff.

Sensible advice? Test SMM carefully to see if you can turn a profit. But don’t, whatever you do, chuck all your marketing budget eggs in the social media marketing basket. You’ll probably end up being burned. Media variety, as always, is the spice of successful marketing life.

Want to know more?

Here’s a link to the TNS Digital Life report for 2011.

I’ve mentioned before how complicated the GoDaddy hosting and domains website is.

I find it almost impossible to find my way around it. And I’m no novice. I’ve been working online for at least thirteen years.

But help is at hand. They’ve released a video to show people how to navigate the site. Sadly, having just gone back to Go-Daddy to have a look so I can write about it, I can’t find the darned thing. The irony!

I would have thought it’s much better to redesign your interface rather than resorting to video to help people find their way around.

I can’t fault their service per se. It’s rock solid. But I’m still pretty naffed off that I renewed one of my domains on Go-Daddy simply because I couldn’t work out how not to, and didn’t have the time, energy or inclination to figure it out.

Here’s how I’d improve the Go-Daddy site:

• remove all the up selling and cross selling stuff, putting it in one unobtrusive place instead of constantly muddying the water
• make the visitor experience cleaner by simplifying the navigation dramatically
• reduce the number of logins and passwords to just one per account

Fingers crossed next time I need to renew the domain or do stuff with my hosting, in a couple of years’ time, they’ll have sorted it out. As it is I hate going there, it’s such a confusing mess.

Sorry Go-Daddy, but you need a direct marketer on the case.