Tracking Your Search Engine Ranking Success

by John Eberhard

So you’ve done keyword research and found the best keywords to target. Then you’ve done search engine optimization on your web site. Then you’ve started link building, with blogs, article directories and press releases. So how do you know when it’s all working? How do you track your success?

Well fortunately, as with many things on the Internet, in this case it is possible to track your success very closely.

Basically what you want to do to track your success with search engine marketing and link building, is to track two things:

1. The traffic you’re getting monthly from the big three search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN
2. Your site’s ranking on the big three for each of your list of target keywords

The first thing is probably pretty obvious. Because the more successful you are at SEO and link building, theoretically the more traffic you should be getting from the search engines. That’s the goal of the whole process. You can check this by having Google Analytics or any other quality web statistics program on your web site.

But why do you care about your ranking on search engines for all the keywords? Because the whole process of selecting keywords, doing SEO on your site, and then doing link building with blogs, articles and press releases, has as its goal: raising your rankings on the search engines for your targeted keywords.

The higher you rank for each of your keywords on the big three search engines, the more traffic you will get. The thing is, it will really start happening when you break the top 20 for a keyword, and especially when you break the top 10, i.e. on page one. That’s when you’ll start seeing real traffic from search engines.

The way you check your ranking for a list of keywords is not to do it manually by going to each search engine and entering your keywords. You can do it that way, but it takes forever. It’s better to do it with software that checks your rankings for a list of keywords. There are two excellent software packages that I have used for this purpose: Internet Business Promoter, and Market Samurai.

In the last six months or so I have started using Market Samurai, since I did Ed Dale’s Thirty Day Challenge training program in August 09. It’s great for keyword research and will also do search engine rank checking for you. I like Market Samurai because it will check your rankings down to the 500th place.

So let’s say you have a list of 100 keywords that you have selected and that you are targeting with your various actions. By using one of these software packages you can get your ranking for each one of the keywords.

I do the reports for each of Google, Yahoo and MSN, then put the results into a table, once a month, like this:

Keyword – Monthly Searches	Google Dec 09	Yahoo Dec 09	MSN Dec 09
Keyword 1	Not top 500	326	153
Keyword 2	Not top 500	52	Not top 500
Keyword 3	Not top 500	Not top 500	Not top 500
Keyword 4	372	19	109
Keyword 5	18	Not top 500	Not top 500
Keyword 6	5	35	185
Keyword 7	227	117	Not top 500
Keyword 8	6	1	5
Keyword 9	41	14	73
Keyword 10	37	27	140

The above is an excerpt from one of my clients’ monthly report, with the actual keywords taken out of course.

Then I add up all the #1 keyword positions, top ten positions (including the #1s), the top 20 (including the #1s and top tens), top 100, and top 500. Then I track it monthly like this:

Number 1 and top 10 positions	Aug 09	Sept 09	Oct 09	Nov 09	Dec 09
Keywords with #1 position	1	3	4	4	6
Top ten keywords including #1s	3	4	9	11	23
Top 20 keywords including #1s and top tens	n/a	8	26	29	41
Top 100 keywords including #1s and top tens, top 20s	19	33	57	67	81
Top 500 keywords including #1s, top 10s, top 20s, top 100s	36	65	69	88	102

The above is actual data from one of my clients where we are doing aggressive link building. Note that over a 5 month period we are seeing good progress. Note also that it doesn’t happen overnight.

So if you mainly get traffic from search engines when your keywords reach the top 20 or top 10 positions, why do I track or care about the top 100 or top 500? Because, as I do more link building a blog posts and so on, more and more keywords will be added to the list of ones that are ranking. But they won’t start out in the top 20, they’ll start out way down the list. So I believe this is an effective way to track what we’re doing with link building. The monthly totals really tell the story, and tell us whether the strategy is working.

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Conversions with a Web Site

by John Eberhard

You work hard to get traffic to your web site. That’s great.

But now the job is to get conversions. In other words, you want a good percentage of your visitors to either:

1. fill out a form to give you their name and email address, or
2. become a lead, or
3. buy something

If they give you their name and email address, you can email to them in the future repeatedly and market your products or services to them. If they become a lead you can call them and sell them. If they buy something from you online, great.

Let’s talk about each of these items above separately.

Filling Out the Form

Years ago web designers used to put up “guest books” to try to get the name and email of web visitors. But in today’s world, people get way too much email. So they are very selective in giving out their email address. That means you have to come up with items of real value that they want, and then require that they give you their email address in order to get that item.

So what do I mean when I say “items of real value” that will entice the visitor to give you his email? I’m talking about information products. Things like an email newsletter. Or white papers, i.e. reports on some topic related to your business. If you’re a software developer you can offer software demo downloads.

I have used email newsletter subscription offers, and free report or white paper offers, with great success on the web sites for a variety of companies.

The trick with a free report or white paper is to come up with topics and titles that will appeal to your target public. You can apply quite a bit of ingenuity to the creation of a white paper or coming up with a great title, and this can make quite a bit of difference in the response.

The trick with an email newsletter is to decide on a schedule (weekly, monthly, etc.), stick to that schedule, and come up with articles of interest each time.

Partly what you are doing with either a newsletter or white paper is establishing yourself as a source of helpful and accurate information. As a trusted source, the reader then feels confident in buying products or services from you, because he can see that you know what you’re talking about.

I use autoresponders when someone responds. When he signs up for the newsletter, he gets an email back right away saying “thanks for signing up.” When he requests a white paper, he gets an email right away that says “click here to download the white paper,” and “by the way, we’re also signing you up for our newsletter,” and “you can unsubscribe at any time.”

Leads

If you are using the web site to do lead generation, then the lead is your highest quality conversion from the web site. This allows your sales team to contact him. But don’t forget to automatically add him to your email newsletter list. This is for two reasons. One is that, in case he doesn’t buy right away, he can still be receiving information from you regularly and will this not forget about you. And the other reason is that if he does buy right away, the newsletter keeps your name in front of him for when he is ready to buy again.

Sales

If you are selling products directly on the web site, make sure you make it easy for the prospect to find them. You should have a “buy” button, or “shop” button or something of this nature on every page of the site. Your prospect could decide to buy at any time. Make it easy on him when he makes that decision.

Web Statistics

I recommend Google Analytics as a great, free tool offered by Google that allows you to know how many web visitors you’re getting weekly, where they are coming from, what keywords they typed in on a search engine to find you, what pages they visited and so on.

You should look at these statistics once a week (I graph them). Then look at how many conversions you’re getting weekly, i.e. how many people are filling out a form to request one of your free offers, or asking for more info and becoming a lead, or buying something online. Divide the conversions number by the total number of visitors, which will give you your conversion percentage.

So the million dollar question is – what’s a good conversion percentage? That depends. If you are just selling products on the site and aren’t offering any free offers, then the percentage will definitely be lower. Online marketing guru Ed Dale says that 0.5% is an acceptable conversion percentage for selling products. I would say that for sites with free offers, I have had as high as 50% conversion, but that’s unusual and with a really great offer. If you are not getting at least 3% conversion, you should work on your site and come up with ways to increase it, with new offers, bright buttons, etc.

Good luck.

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Landing Pages vs. Landing on Your Home Page

By John Eberhard

I started doing email marketing about 10 years ago, and started doing pay per click advertising about 5-6 years ago. One important element of each type of marketing is: where are you going to have people land on your site?

I noticed 10 years ago and still notice now that many people just automatically have visitors land on their home page. But is this the best way to go? And when I say what is the best way, let’s clarify that the goal is to get the most leads or sales from the campaign.

I developed a technique of making a special, customized landing page, for use in both email marketing and pay per click. This landing page:

1. Has sales text and pictures, of varying lengths
2. Has a form at the bottom of that page for people to become a lead or buy something. Also has a phone number in case they want to call in.
3. Has no navigational buttons
4. Often has a video or audio clip on it
5. Has some kind of compelling offer

Over the years I have tried this type of customized landing page on probably over 100 campaigns.

One of the advantages of both email marketing and pay per click advertising is the ability to track the results extremely well. For example, with Google AdWords, you can have what is called an “A-B” test, where half of the people who see your ad will go to landing page A, and half will go to landing page B. And you can see in great detail, after a week or two of testing, whether it is better to have people land on your home page or on a customized landing page.

Sometimes when I have described the customized landing page concept to clients, they have been skeptical. They have sometimes said:

1. “I wouldn’t like that if I came to a site like that.”
2. “That would piss me off if I came to a site like that, I would want to surf around the site.”
3. “People want to surf around the site.”
4. “Anyone with any web smarts would just back up to the main domain name and then be able to navigate around the site.”

While I can’t particularly argue with whether any of these statements is true, what I can do is say that over the last 10 years, the customized landing page, with no navigation, has worked better in 80-90% of all cases.

When I say that it has worked better, I mean that a customized landing has in 80-90% of all cases worked better in terms of getting more conversions. And by conversions, I mean leads or sales. The customized landing page got a higher percentage of people going to that page, converting to leads or sales than when landing on the home page or any other page of the site with navigation buttons.

What about that other 10-20%? I have seen it work better to give the visitor the option to tool around the site, in rare cases, such as when the product is very visual, such as certain home improvement companies (landscape, paving stones, ponds), where the most highly trafficked pages of the site are generally the photo gallery pages.

For the rest, I recommend leaving the navigation off.

My theory for why this works better, is that letting the person wander around your site is not as focused an experience. They wander around and they leave. But if the only option for the person is to fill out the form or call you, they do, at least in higher percentages.

If you don’t believe me, test it.

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Writing Content for Your Newsletters and Blogs

by John Eberhard

So you have an email newsletter. Or you have a blog. Now what? Does it matter how often you send out the newsletter, or how often you post something to the blog?

Yes it does matter. I have found that the optimum frequency for putting something on a blog is once a week or more often. If you also make sure to send out a ping to the blog search engines (using www.pingomatic.com) and post something once a week or more it will drive traffic to the blog and thus to your site. With a newsletter you have to find out the optimum frequency for you and your public. I send out my newsletter once a week and it definitely drives business for me.

So how do you come up with content? What topics do you write about? How do you come up with ideas? How can you possibly come up with a new article every week?

Well believe it or not, it can be done and it won’t kill you. I understand that if you’re not accustomed to writing, especially writing regularly, it can seem hard. That’s why I’m here to help.

1. For topics, assuming that your newsletter or blog is there to support your business, you should write about topics related to your business and your industry. This may be a “duh” but I’m just making sure.

1. I find that during the course of each week, something will often come up in dealing with a client or prospect that will make for a good topic for an article. Like a couple of weeks ago someone told me that a guy had walked into their office and promised them the #1 position on Google. Bang – article! Another time in talking to a prospect, I realized that it was not real to him that a blog could drive traffic to a site. Bang – another article! Each week in dealing with your business and your clients or customers, you deal with various issues that could be topics for interesting articles or blog posts.

1. If I’m stuck for a topic when I’m writing for my own newsletter or when I’m ghost writing for one of my clients, I go to Google and enter words relating to the general topic, maybe including the word “article.” Then I find articles written by others in the same field, and that gives me ideas. It’s important not to plagiarize, meaning to just steal someone else’s writing. So minimally if you are going to write something using the topic someone else used in another article, then rewrite it using your own words.

1. I think it can be helpful to get on some other newsletter mailing lists for other similar businesses in your industry. That way you can see what others are doing and it can give you ideas for content.

1. If possible use some humor occasionally, even if it is dry humor such as that favored by yours truly.

1. Especially for blog posts, they don’t have to be that long. You can make a blog post as short as 50-150 words. Most newsletter articles should be a bit longer, like at least 300 words. Most of mine are 500-700 words.

1. One thing you can do on blogs is comment on something that is happening in your industry, or link to something written on another site with a short comment about the link. I sometimes post a YouTube video on my blogs, especially my political blogs.

1. I recommend setting a schedule for yourself, whether it’s a newsletter or a blog, and always write something on that schedule. So if you decide to get out your newsletter every two weeks, then stick to that and get something out every two weeks.

Believe it or not, the more you write content, the easier it will get.

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