seo

extraspace-inetIt’s happening in every industry as we speak. Decision makers are looking at information that tells them how the Internet is impacting their business and their industry.
It may be happening in your office.
A decision is going to be made:
a) To continue with business as usual
b) To commit to the Internet as a crucial part of the future of the business
Those businesses that choose a) may not be here in 24 months. Those that choose b) may not either, but if they are they will be the leader in their space.
In my Search Engine Land column 5 Ways to Jump Ahead in Your Industry, I outline the characteristics of a testing company, like Zappos or Amazon. These are the characteristics that can result in astonishing growth and amazing profitability. They include:

        

  1. Accept The Internet As A Lever

  2.     

  3. Develop A Testing Culture

  4.     

  5. Invest Where It Counts

  6.     

  7. Know Your Numbers

  8.     

  9. Take A Non-Commodity Approach

It is no small feat to accomplish these, but those that do will enjoy a lead in their industry that will be hard to usurp by competitors.

Thanks to Extra Space Management for sharing their results with us at the Phone Smart Unconference Hawaii.

Every site has one visitor in common: Googlebot. Googlebot is an unusual visitor that few of us understand. Understand the persona profile of Googlebot and use it to your advantage.

If you follow The Conversion Scientist, you know that a failure to understand your visitor is conversion suicide.

So how do we get copywriters, designers, developers and marketers to configure their site for this powerful king-maker visitor? The same way we do this for our human visitors: We personify them.

Building Empathy For Googlebot

Personas are a challenging topic. Personas are, well, personal to every business. You can’t cheat off of anyone else’s paper when putting them together. Whether you’re going to spend 30 minutes dashing off what you know about your online visitors or invest in a full workup to hack your company’s intelligence, you have to do the work. You can’t borrow from someone else’s case study.

There is one exception, and this visitor may be on your site as you read this.

I’m going to use a persona to help you relate to Googlebot. All of the components are here.

Building empathy for Googlebot.

Building empathy for Googlebot.

Note: I’m sure those of you experienced in SEO could add to this persona. Please do so in the comments.

My Search Engine Land column “Building Empathy for Googlebot” this month is a persona profile of Googlebot, and any site should be able to use this to their advantage.

Put it somewhere everyone on the Web team can see it; print posters, put it up on Basecamp, add it to your war room.

It should go right next to your other personas. Don’t have any? Contact us and we’ll help you understand if personas will move your online business forward.

Here’s an excerpt:

Demographics

Name: Googlebot

Education: Ph.D. in Kindergarten

Gender: Male. Definitely male.

Description

While Googlebot is one of the most pervasive presences on the Internet, little is known about him. It is widely believed that he has an undiagnosed combination of savant syndrome and autistic disorder.

This condition is marked by super-human analytical powers combined with an inability to connect basic concepts or understand simple social norms. Googlebot does not have a sense of humor.

Another reason for this diagnosis is Googlebot’s amazing but selective memory. Googlebot has an unwavering fascination with words and an uncanny ability to remember the links that connect the Internet’s far flung pages.

It is widely believed that Googlebot is also good at counting large sums of money.

Googlebot can identify and recall a seemingly unlimited number of images and videos, but has no understanding of their meaning.

Mode Of Persuasion: Methodical

Googlebot analyzes information slowly and logically. Methodical visitors need lots of detailed information.

Visitor Commentary

These are Googlebot’s needs in his own words:

I’m an excellent surfer. I come to your site on Tuesday… definitely Tuesday afternoon. I read your pages. I see your words. That tells me everything about you. You use some words over and over and I can tell what you talk about. Of course there are the meta tags. Descriptions, descriptions are good; and the page title. Headings have words and I like to count the words in headings and see if they are in other places on your site too.

Links. I like links, definitely. Link text has words and I like to compare them, compare them to the other words in the other places. The link text words tell me about the place they link to. Must … resist … urge … to … follow … until … done … here.

Of course, you have links back to your site, 497 links — definitely 497 – and the words on those links – they call it anchor text, but anchors are on ships and ships float on water and I don’t see many sites about ships and water — and I can compare those link words to the words in the other places on your site.

I’m an excellent surfer, you know.

Uh-oh. Your site doesn’t change much. 99.93% of text is the same as last time I visited, 99.93%, definitely 99.93.

Uh-oh. Images. Video. Strange blobs of pixels. Of course, I can’t see them, but sometimes they have words, alt text words and then I know everything about them and I can compare those words to the other words on the site.

Sometimes people try to trick me with invisible text or wrong keywords meta tags or funny links from sites with very different words, and then I stop visiting and stop counting words and stop tracking links and then the site disappears since I don’t like lying liars.

Of course, I’m an excellent surfer.

Questions To Be Answered

What questions Googlebot is trying to answer on your site.

  • Which pages to index (sitemap.xml)
  • Which pages to skip (robots.txt)
  • Primary domain (canonical info)
  • Words that define each page site (title tag, description meta tag, keyword meta tag)
  • Words that readers can see: Heading tags, body copy
  • Words that readers cannot see: Image alt text and title text
  • Links to other sites
  • Links from other sites telling Googlebot what the site is about

Calls To Action

This is how we ask Googlebot to take action. For Googlebot, a “conversion” can be defined as getting a page on our site indexed in the Google database.

Sitemap.xml tells Googlebot which pages to index and how to prioritize them.

Internal links with keywords in the anchor text helps Googlebot find pages and associate words with those pages.

Recommended Strategies on Converting the Toughest Visitor of All

  • Do not attempt to sell Googlebot anything or invite him to join your email list.
  • Change content frequently. Googlebot loves blogs.
  • Don’t attempt to contact Googlebot or Google support.
  • Use video. Googlebot seems to like video, even though he can’t understand it.
  • Create content that makes other sites link to you.
  • Link to sites that have words similar to yours.
  • Put transcripts of videos on the page.

Is All Of This Necessary?

While it may seem unnecessary to experienced SEOs to have a persona for Googlebot, think of the copywriters who must write for the site, but don’t have SEO experience. Think of the designers that may not understand the search implications of their media choices. Think of the executives who don’t understand why they should invest in SEO.

All of these people will gain a better understanding of Googlebot and the challenges we face when designing a site for him (or her).

Now think about the human visitors to the site. How would a few personas help everyone communicate with real people?

As it turns out, personas help a lot.

For more on user personas.

Brian Massey

 

 

 

Originally published on Search Engine Land.

This is a guest post by Brian Combs of ionadas local.

A Local SEO Horror Story

About eighteen months ago, the SEO agency of which I was then a member was hired by a company in the travel industry. Their websites were seeing a 20% drop in traffic from Google. Even more worrisome was the nearly 25% drop in sales from Google.

Meanwhile, their keyword monitoring tools were saying everything was fine. Their tools watched several thousand keywords on a monthly basis, and the rankings had not substantively changed. If a keyword was third last month, it was third again this month.

We were tasked with determining the cause of the drop and prescribing a remedy.

The culprit was the new Google Maps business listing. These are the seven (at that point ten) listings that come up with the Google Map on queries with locational intent.

Austin plumber - Conversion and Google Maps optimization.

Austin plumber Sample Google Maps business listing.

Note: The example image is from a different industry than the client in order to protect the client’s identity.

These Google Maps had begun popping up for a large number of the client’s search terms. A keyword that was third in the organic listings was likely to be pushed below the fold. As a result, the traffic from Google was dropping precipitously.

And conversion was dropping at an even higher rate. Clearly, it was the best traffic that was being lost.

I would posit that this represents the biggest change to Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) since they began including paid listings above the natural listings.

Does Local SEO Matter for You?

If your business needs to generate website visitors, phone calls, or foot traffic from people in particular geographies, then local SEO is likely appropriate for you.

Do your keywords include a city (or neighborhood in them)? When you search on them, is the so-called 7-pack (or any Google Map) returned?

Google is constantly enlarging the universe of keywords that generate map results. So if the map is not returned today, it may begin doing so in the future.

Google is even assuming local intent when none is expressly stated.

For instance, if you search on [coffee shop], Google will determine your location from your IP address, and return you a list of coffee shops your area.

Impact on Conversion Rate

The impact of this change by Google can hardly by overstated. Even if you’ve worked your website to the top of the organic listings, the addition of the Google Map listings will have a substantial impact on Click Through Rate (CTR) and post-click conversion rate.

Which begs the question, what impact does placement within the 7-pack have on CTR?

While no studies have been published on this topic as yet, the assumption is that the curve of traffic decline within the seven maps listings is not as steep as it is for the ten organic listings.

Also, the company name within the Google Maps listing can have an effect. Known, branded companies certainly have an advantage. And those that are nothing but a list of keywords are likely at a conversion disadvantage.

Reviews and Their Impact on Conversion Rate

The Google Maps business listings very prominently list the reviews a company has received. These reviews may have been placed directly with Google, or may have been pulled into Google from third-party systems such as CitySearch.

Both the number and the quality of reviews within Google have an impact.

The number of reviews greatly impacts the ranking of the business listings. If all else is equal (which it never is, of course), the ranking with the greater number of reviews will be higher. A large number of reviews can overcome many other deficiencies in Google Maps optimization.

I have not seen any studies on the impact of the number of reviews on conversion, but I expect they are positively correlated. If there are two listings, one with twenty-five reviews and one with no reviews, people will tend to look at the business with reviews first.

And while the quality of reviews has little to no impact on rankings, it can certainly have a significant impact on conversions.

This is not to say that an occasional bad review is going to drive you out of business. We’ve all read reviews from clearly unreasonable people, and most people will give a company the benefit of the doubt.

But if the preponderance of reviews are negative, and the reviews seem reasonably written, you had better work to improve your product/service quality, and encourage happy customers to write reviews for you.

Brian Combs is the founder of ionadas local, a provider of Google Maps optimization in Austin, Texas.  ionadas local 13359 N Hwy 183, #406-245, Austin, TX 78750, (512) 501-1875

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