LizWelsh.com

Madison, WI, SEO Success Story

“More people are finding me now through my web site than the ads on the Isthmus. That was not happening last year. You Are a Genius*, Thank you.” - Tim Quigley

*Disclaimer: Liz Welsh is not actually a genius. She just plays one on the internet. Serious side effects may occur when she is paid such inflated compliments. The most common are swelling of the head, bloating of the ego, narcissism, and inflation of hourly rate. Consult with your doctor before emailing Liz. Women who are pregnant or nursing should not go have a drink with Liz (all others should feel free). If you feel Liz is right for you, set up a meeting by emailing elizwelsh at gmail.com.

SEO Case Study: LogicTrax

LizWelsh.com wins first-page results for LogicTraX

In mid-March we optimized the LogicTraX half of LogicHaul.com, a railcar fleet management company. We took 10 important words that they wished to be found under on Google and other search engines, and tweaked their site so that when searchers looking for their service typed those words into Google, they would be able to find them. Prior to our work, you couldn’t find them at all on search engines when typing in those terms.
Just two weeks later, analytics data from Google, Yahoo, and MSN show that 9 out of 10 of those keywords now bring up the company on the first page of search engine results! (The 10th keyword brings up the company in the middle of the second page.) Here are the results:

Google:

• Railcar Tracing: page 1, listing 8
• Railcar Tracking: page 2, listing 5
• CLM Movements: page 1, listing 8

Yahoo:

• Railcar Tracing: page 1, listing 1
• Railcar Tracking: page 1, listing 5
• Steelraods Tracing: page 1, listing 5
• Steelroads Tracking: page 1, listing 5
• Car Tracing: page 1, listing 2
• Car Tracking: page 1, listing 2
• Car Location Report: page 1, listing 1
• Railcar Location Report: page 1, listing 1
• Rail Shipment Tracing: page 1, listing 1
• Rail Shipment Tracking: page 1, listing 1

MSN:

• Railcar Tracking: page 1, listing 4
• Railcar Tracing: page 1, listing 4

SEO Case Study — Madison, WI

LizWelsh.com takes Quigley Decks & Fence from no presence in Google to the very first page, very first result (in under one month).

In late December I was contacted by an Irish home improvement contractor based in Madison, Wisconsin, and serving greater southern Wisconsin. He had a website, but it was MIA in the search engines. His website was virtually invisible to potential customers searching for home improvement contractors in southern Wisconsin, a fence builder, or a deck builder, etc., on Google. In my research, I scrolled through to page 11 on Google searching for his site, to no avail.

The day after Christmas we met downtown at Espresso Royale. Over coffee I explained how I would research pertinent keywords for his industry and optimize every page of his website so that it would have a much better chance of showing up prominently in search engines.

One handshake later, I got to work on his site. I completed my work — which included an overhaul of his website copy as well as writing new title tags, meta description, and meta keywords (as well as some minor graphics work and analytics implementation) — on January 14.

Just shy of one month later, you couldn’t ask for better results. What’s more, the vast majority of competing sites that Quigley Decks & Fence shares the first page of Google with are directories of businesses. This is a huge edge over his competition.

A few example searches:

decks and fences southern wisconsin
December 2007: not found
February 2008: page 1, listing 1

home improvement contractor southern wisconsin
December 2007: not found
February 2008: page 1, listing 2

home improvement contractor cottage grove wi:
December 2007: not found
February 2008: page 1, listing 3

home improvement contractor lake mills wi:
December 2007: not found
February 2008: page 1, listing 5

home improvement contractor madison wi:
December 2007: not found
February 2008: page 1, listing 8

home improvement contractor fitchburg wi:
December 2007: not found
February 2008: page 1, listing 9

home improvement contractor middleton:
December 2007: not found
February 2008: page 1, listing 9

Febreze Tactics

Other kids had lemonade stands. My “twin cousin” and I — at 8 years old both budding ambitious (not to mention shady) businesspeople — opened a laundry stand on the sidewalk in his upscale Los Alimitos neighborhood one summer. We thought we were very shrewd because we collected trusting neighbors’ laundry, and rather than wash it, we simply spritzed it with Febreze (or whatever the the ’80’s version of Febreze was). In no time at all, laundry was finished, folded, and returned to glowing customers who raved about how fresh their laundry smelled. We laughed all the way to our piggy banks.

The next morning none of our customers returned. Looking back, I believe that they probably realized the impossibility of laundry being washed and dried in 20 minutes and were simply indulging us for a day. But nevertheless we realized that our business model (cheating) had short-lived success. What would we do next? It wasn’t likely we’d be able to be as beguiling with a lemonade stand. Perhaps we could secretly make Crystal Light and sell it as bona fide lemonade, but of course that would be just as much work, so what was the point?

That was the beginning and the end of my unethical business practices. Unfortunately, in the SEO world, like anywhere else, there are still some 8-year-old laundry stand kids masquerading as professionals, practicing “Febreze” techniques and guaranteeing first-page results. Their tactics sometimes work–until Google catches on and blacklists the websites that have implemented their changes. These SEO’ers take shortcuts like placing unrelated keywords (like Paris Hilton) in their meta tags, alt text, or CSS layers. They stack keywords (like cheese cheese cheese cheese wisconsin cheese wisconsin cheese wisconsin cheese) to fake out search engines. They sardine-stuff sentences (sentences at their loosest definition) in alt text, or hide keywords in the content of the page–keywords so tiny and faint that you’d need your 5.75 power reading glasses to make them out. The list goes on and on: bait-and-switch spam, redirects, doorway pages, cloaking, cybersquatting, and more.

Fixing the devastating effects the above practices can have is time-consuming and expensive. Once a customer’s website disappears from the search engines for having been caught cheating, it’s unlikely these charlatan SEO’ers are going to get a lot of customer loyalty. So it’s on to the next block, to prey on some other unassuming website owner. But once word gets around, the game is up.

Of course, there’s always selling lemonade.

Cowboy boots and bubble tea? A Google AdWords game.

It began as most friendships do: all seafood, clogs, and ice parties. A few days later, naturally, we were drinking bubble tea under ice cube lights. Before long we were talking of cowboy boots and learning how to make gelato. Naturally, as friendships go, we spent endless hours talking of mini & toy labradoodles, liposuction photos, and guitar lesson scams.

It was like we had known each other all our lives, and could talk about anything, from lighthouses to ski resorts to Superman Tees (2 for $30).

Was it a bad sign when the subject of annoying ringtones came up? Wedding planning? Thinning brows? Ted Koppel? I’ll be awaiting my gmail inbox destiny.

It’s a fun exercise to notice what Google AdSense advertisers make of your conversations by way of their keyword-targeted advertising in gmail. From what I’ve seen, advertisers have a great deal to learn about more focused targeting when advertising via AdWords. The only ads that have applied throughout the course of my many email exchanges with this friend are ski resort ads and the tactful dearth of ads when our conversations turned to subjects dealing with, ahem, “making out” and “stalking.” For these conversations, the right-hand column of gmail was conspicuously, and thankfully, blank.

What I’m getting at is proof that while pay-per-click advertising is accessible, it can be deceptively straightforward. Companies would do well not to take matters into their own hands and waste their money with keywords or ad groups that display their ads to an audience that has no interest in their product. There is a huge difference in ad campaigns targeting searchers and targeting content areas, such as gmail or other websites containing content related to the terms in your ad. It’s not a one-ad-fits-all model. But the majority of companies still haven’t learned this. Professionals who have experience researching keywords and market trends, developing highly targeted keyword lists, and discerning between various display methods (content, search, email) and knowing how to go after each audience, are going to save companies time and money in the long run.

Content is Queen

Clients with websites dominated by Flash (whose only text is embedded in graphics and video) sometimes ask me how to rank higher in search engines for their industry. My answer is simple. Content is Queen.

Do what they do with their lyrics, but in html-visible text on your site, not audio or graphics.

Take, for example, this song: http://youtube.com/watch?v=NOHXPNvVEwo

Notice the the focus and repetition of the keywords. Emulate Queen’s lyric length and poetic placement of keywords.

Write a magnum opus on industrial equipment sales, stationary, or the decks you build. If it helps, rent a smoke machine and wear a shiny white body suit in the process.

accolade sillier than Yahoo Ambassador?

When I became certified as a — drumroll please — Yahoo Ambassador at a former company, my colleagues and I joked that they should start addressing me as Madam Ambassador. I have always wondered how many brainstorm sessions took place before the Yahoo folks settled on “Ambassador.” And was it supposed to be funny, like my coworker whose official title is CSS guru?

For those of you who don’t know, the Yahoo Search Marketing Ambassador Program was developed to provide training and professional recognition from Yahoo Search Marketing to search engine marketers who complete all web-based training and receive a passing score on the final test. Though not required, before becoming certified, as with pay-per-click platform Google AdWords, I honed my expertise with real experience creating and managing hundreds of online ad campaigns, driving tons of traffic to local business who might otherwise not have been on the first page of Yahoo or Google. There are a lot of Yahoo Ambassadors out there with the logo and title but no real experience or proven results. Those of us who have that deserve a title a bit more serious, don’t you think?

Years ago I worked as a mental health professional at a residential school for boys who were hard-of-hearing or deaf and who also struggled with issues like mental illness and developmental delays. There was one little boy diagnosed with sociopathy, who I’ll call Tommy. At the time, Tommy was 13 (but his physical appearance, as well as his emotional maturity, were stuck at about 7 years old). He had moments of pit-bull like rage and yet he could be as yielding as a small puppy. I remember him standing outside, as the other boys played football in the courtyard, kicking his foot against a brick wall, head down, lonely and dejected because they wouldn’t let him join in. But the sweetest memory I have of him was him watching those old Yahoo! commercials — the ones where a cowboy would yell, “Yahooooooooooo!” Tommy was so tickled by these commercials, and when the voice Yahoo’ed, Tommy (who was almost completely deaf) sang right along–with gusto–in his shrillest voice, “Yaheeeeeeeeeeee!”

I guess it’s one of those things you had to be there for. But it makes me laugh out loud to this day, as does the title of Yahoo Ambassador. But to answer my own question, is there a sillier title? Yaheeeeeee!

WYSIWYG (search engine marketing)

Liz Welsh emailed me yesterday. Although I have been known to talk to myself, I haven’t yet reached the point where I’m emailing myself. This was a different Liz Welsh, from Kentucky. She had wanted to buy this domain name and found that it was already in use–by me. So she challenged me to a Scrabulous game–winner takes the URL.

No, really, we hit it off. Interestingly, this Liz Welsh has her own marketing company, too. Lucky for me, she outsources quite a bit when she needs marketing materials created for her clients, so we chatted about collaborating.

Anyway, this parallel universe me (has anyone really ever been to Kentucky?) didn’t help me with my latest worry that I’m very average. Lately, everywhere I go I hear, “Oh yeah, we’ve met before” (no, we haven’t), or “You look familiar,” or “I swear I know you from somewhere. Do you play volleyball?” (not a chance). I figure if I look like so many other people, I must be extremely average looking. Now I come to find out that there are three other Elizabeth Welsh’s in Liz Welsh’s hometown of Louisville. How many are in Madison? I’m afraid to Google that.

This got me thinking about what separates me from other Liz Welsh’s. And then about what makes LizWelsh.com unique. And I came back to an email I had sent to a prospective collaborator describing my services, and I think I found it: “Basically, I do what fancy big-city companies do, but I do it myself without all the silly jargon and b.s.”

At a conference I spoke at last summer, I was stuck listening to a dry presentation at 8 in the morning. To make matters worse, they had run out of coffee. So to keep myself awake I struck my best “this is fascinating, I’m going to take notes” pose and tallied buzzwords on my notepad to see which geek-speak was used most often in that hour and a half. Would “price point” win? “Vertical”? What about “platform”? “Next-generation” anyone? 3 points for “algo,” and 10 for “B2B.” “Cononical,” “RLT,” “ROI,” “turn-key,” and “2.0.”

As fun as that exercise was, I do appreciate the need for industries to use jargon–I guess. But at the same time, much like I wouldn’t speak to a client in Spanch (inside joke), I won’t speak in Googlish either, or use search-enginisms, in person or on my website (if you catch me doing this, please call me on it).

In sum, what I’m trying to say is that when you work with me, WYSIWYG.

Oops, I did it again.

The Tao of SEM

One purpose of search engine optimization–to get a high ranking in Google–gets so much play that it’s sometimes easy to forget an equally if not more important purpose: Making your website more useful and usable so that you can convert website visitors into customers. Not cyber-people but flesh-and-blood people who will actually walk through your door with real-live Amex cards in their wallets.

In a former position of mine, we were very successful at getting clients on page one of search engines in the natural results as well as the paid results (the ads you see in the right column of a Google search results page). However, there were some whose websites we couldn’t “optimize” for conversions simply because their templates and content was pretty fixed. In these cases, they could see that they were on page one or two of Google or Yahoo, and that they were getting online traffic as a result of this, but they weren’t seeing that that they were making any more money. Naturally, they didn’t want to continue to pay for a service that wasn’t proving its value.

“Companies spend immeasurable billions on their Web sites,” says David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer. “In most cases, without those central meeting grounds for companies and consumers, all the measured billions spent on online advertising such as paid search—which looks to drive traffic to company sites—would be for naught.”

On the flip side, you may have a website that is successful at converting visitors into buyers and is on the first page of Google. Why then, you might ask, would you invest in search engine advertising (pay-per-click tools like AdWords)? In large part because it’s been shown that you can double your traffic by running a paid campaign alongside top rankings on the organic side, according to a prominent search engine marketer who also says, “Being at the top of Google organic search is the top priority for just about every online marketing company that knows what that top placement would mean to a company. The difference between being at position#1 and #11, in many cases, means the difference between a profitable company and a company scraping by.”

On a related note, in their book, Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer’s Guide to SEO, authors Cristian Darie and Jaimie Sirovich touched on what they call the “fusion of technology and marketing”: “Search engine marketing is a field where technology and marketing are both critical and interdependent, because small changes in the implementation of a web site can make you or break you in search engine rankings. Furthermore, the fusion of technology and marketing know-how can create web site features that attract more visitors.”

This is what I call the synergy of search engine advertising and search engine optimization. They are the yin and the yang operating on different forces through different means. One is immediate, one is patient and slow. Together, they bring harmony to the world–Ok, I’m going overboard here. But you get the idea.

Postcards from the (blunt) edge

Usually postcards are sent to cheer up a friend feeling blue or let someone back home know that even while trekking through the Puerto Rican rainforest, they are what’s on your mind.

But I sent a handful the other day that I’m afraid don’t paint a sunny picture at all. Instead, the text that I chose for the cards, which I mailed to local businesses I’m interested in working with, is bleak and alarming: “Not on page one of Google? Why even have a website?”

But I didn’t mean to sound abrasive. I took my inspiration from the fact that “90 percent of searchers do not look past the third page of results, and 62 percent of searchers don’t go past one page,” according to research by iProspect and Jupiter Research.

It was my way of reminding the Small-Marts of southern Wisconsin that they can compete with its Wal-Marts via affordable, accessible search engine marketing.

If you’ve arrived at my website after receiving this postcard–or for any reason, really, thanks for visiting. Please poke around my site and contact me if you’d like to receive a complimentary website analysis and search engine marketing estimate.

What’s a Thought Leader?

The other day my mother, who was visiting from northern Wisconsin, kindly offered to drop me off at a local bookstore with my laptop while she shopped for shoes. Unfortunately there was no WiFi available, so I used the hour and a half to browse the marketing section. I grabbed a stack of books that piqued my interest and settled down into a cushy chair. I picked up the first on the stack and dug in before discovering that I knew the author, noted thought leader David Meerman Scott–or knew of him, more like. During my two-year stint as a copy editor for EContent magazine, where he is a contributing editor, I had read all his columns. I tore through this latest book of his, The New Rules of Marketing and PR How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing, and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly, in about 45 mins. I’m usually a slow, deliberate reader but I had limited time to decide which one of dozen books at my feet to purchase, so I really didn’t have time to waste.

In one of the chapters toward the end, his notion that today PR and search engine marketing are one and the same intrigued me, and I wanted to remember that and include it on my site. I had never heard that sentiment before, but I guess that’s why he’s a thought leader.

I didn’t have a notebook or pen (or, I later discovered, enough cash to buy the book, even though it is affordable), so when I got home I revved up my laptop and dowloaded his free ebook with the same title and grabbed a snippet on the importance of search: “Particularly when your buyers search, they use the words and phrases important to them. Once you’ve built an online relationship, you can sell into the needs and potential solutions that have been defined, but you need to help them find you first.”

And then I Wikipedia’ed “thought leadership.”

Small Businesses and Search Engine Marketing

Small businesses depend more on search engine traffic than larger firms, according to a study conducted by Hitwise in early 2007.

eMarketer senior analyst Lisa Phillips reports, “The Internet is now an integral part of doing business for US businesses, large and small. Virtually all, 98%, of the 220 manufacturers surveyed by SVM e-Business Solutions have a Web site, and 87% have had one for over three years. More than half, 52%, consider their site to be their most powerful marketing tool.”

According to emarketer.com, “The firm measured the percentage of average monthly traffic companies in the Internet Retailer “Top 500 Guide” received from search engines in 2005 and 2006. Half of the businesses ranked from the 400th to the 500th positions (e.g., smaller retailers) depended on search engines for 50% or more of their total site traffic.

Web-only merchants averaged 64% their of monthly site traffic from search engines.

Chain retailers and consumer brand manufacturers averaged 28% and 27% of their site traffic from search engines, respectively.”

On his Promotion World blog, internet marketing expert Michael Fleischner argues that search engine optimization is an important way for small businesses to compete with larger businesses: “That doesn’t mean they can’t compete against larger businesses or websites when focused on search engine optimization,” he says. “SEO is a basic marketing tool that everyone should use regardless of size…. I’m often asked by small business owners if they stand a chance against larger websites when it comes to organic search results. My response is that size doesn’t matter. When it comes to improving natural search results, it’s all about the keywords you choose and how competitive those keywords are. “