WDTalk

Like Google or not, they’re the giant of the Internet search engines, and if you want your online business to strive, you’ll court Google with open arms until someone invents a better mousetrap. There are tons of ways to use Google, but here are a few ways to amuse yourself and maybe learn something about your company in the process:

Search for your:

Name
Email address
Company name
Company phone number
Company’s products or services
Facebook page
MySpace page
Blog
Forum

What happens?

If your search query returns millions of results, that’s a good thing. But if your glass comes up empty, you’re in serious trouble. Then again, if those millions of results are on message boards talking about how bad your service is, doom looms ahead. Word of mouth spreads like wild fire on the Internet. I frequent a lot of forums and one of the more common discussions is about how to best market your business. The prevailing answer is Word of Mouth. Of course, everyone has their own opinion what word of mouth means. On search engines like Google, it means you need to list in at least the top two pages, and preferably, the top ten results. Anything less than that and your online business will suffer by comparison.

Emphasis on Local Results
If I were to enter a search query on Google from my workstation in Phoenix and someone in San Francisco entered the same search query, our individual results would be very  different. Why? Because Google returns results on local relevance, based on your IP address. If your business is located in Dallas, but your target audience is London, would your SEO strategy need to structured to address the differences geographically? Absolutely. One size does not fit all. SEO strategies need to be customized to your intended audience.

Relevance is KING
The key for every search engine is relevance, and Google has said many times that relevance is it’s primary indicator. They’ve recently added site speed to their algorithms, but unless your site’s content matches up to search queries and provides value to your visitors .. not good. Get in the dance with Google to maximize your ecommerce efforts.

Of course you don’t know what you don’t know, but how important is it to know what you don’t know? Personally, I don’t know a lot about astrophysics, but that’s not really important to me. LOL. My wife and I own a hair salon, so understanding beauty products is essential. Knowing the difference between hi-lites and lo-lites, or how to apply color is a must.

Making assumptions
In most industries, vendors take knowledge for granted – and by that I mean they assume most clients know more than they really do. Here’s an example. Most of us have dealt with printers, specifically replacing toner cartridges, but how many of us understand toner yields – how many pages you can reasonably expect to print from that new cartridge. Vendors use terms like yields 250 pages at 6% coverage. They don’t tell you that if you use any shading whatsoever on your prints, coverage jumps over 12%, cutting the yield of that cartridge in half – to just 125 pages!

Not knowing what you don’t know could put your online business at risk
In web hosting, an awful lot of prospects buy on price. Hey, the economy is tough – we’re all trying to stretch our dollars. When a few of the larger providers started offering unlimited disk space and bandwidth on their shared webhosting plans, it raised some eyebrows because everyone in the industry knew unlimited was unrealistic. Of course, there were limitations on their unlimited plans, buried in their Terms and Conditions, but how many of us really read Terms and Conditions? In this instance, not knowing what you don’t know could put your online business at risk. 

Don’t have a clue?
In the web hosting industry, there are shared hosting plans, virtual plans, semi-dedicated, reseller plans, VPS, clouds, dedicated servers and colocation. If I asked my wife to tell me the difference between them, she’d be like, “What?” Most small business owners realize on some level that they need a website, but probably more than a few are just like my wife. They know they need an online presence, would love to sell their product or service online, but have no idea how to go about doing that – so they do what most of us do now. We search the Internet for info, and try to decipher what makes one provider, developer or vendor more appealing than the next.

Would not knowing what you don’t know hinder your ability to select a new vendor?
A common theme I hear from business owners is, “I have a website, and I need or want to make some changes, but the firm or person who designed my site went out of business and now I’m stuck and need help.” Would not knowing what you don’t know hinder your ability to select a new vendor? How would you know what questions to ask? If I were to tell you that your landing page size was 1.03 megabytes, could you relate that to return traffic or conversion ratios? If you reduced that page size to under 60 kilobytes, would that increase your sales?

We can’t be expected to know everything
Of course none of us can be expected to know everything. That’s why we leave certain things to the experts, like brain surgery. In web hosting, stuff like bandwidth and disk space are important, but so is the stability and expertise of the provider you host with. I’ve always heard that the measure of a great company is not so much what they offer, but how they respond under pressure or stress. How do they treat their customers? Companies that survive the test of time are those that understand the lifetime value of their clients.

What separates web hosting providers?
Aside from the obvious like plans and pricing, why would you select one web hosting provider over another? If I’m a growing mom and pop shop or even a small business with thousands of dollars tied into IT infrastructure and online marketing strategies, there is a common thread – the need to know what you don’t know.  I always recommend asking lots of questions in your search, but equally important are the questions your prospective provider asks you. Do they genuinely show an interest in your business, and offer solutions based on your specific requirements and growth projections, or do they simply offer packages. As you grow, can you upgrade your plan – for example from shared to dedicated? And is knowing that important? It’s important for your provider to know what you don’t know, and that they help by partnering to grow your business and theirs.

Google uses a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites. Why? Because in Google’s words, “Faster sites create happy users.” So …….. after months of testing, Google has added site speed to their search ranking algorithms.

Relevance is still KING
First, let’s define site speed. Its how quickly a website responds to web requests. If you’ve somehow convinced a visitor to link through to your site, what factors come into play to help keep them on your site? Certainly, relevant content helps, but site speed is important. Studies have shown that speeding up your websites improves user experience, and as a side benefit, it also reduces operating costs. At the moment, while site speed is a new signal, Google says it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Higher SERPS means more looks at your site, and hopefully more sales.

Is Your Site At Risk?
Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected – and this is only for visitors searching in English on Google.com. So how would you know if Google’s new signal puts your site at risk? Well, there are a number of free tools that evaluate the performance of websites. Among those are:

• Zoompf – For a free mini-web performance overview, Zoompf offers a fairly thorough analysis.
• Page Speed - An open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug web development tool.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• In Googles Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world.

A lot of sites I visit regularly are either business, technical or detail oriented. If your goal is to drive traffic geared to specific marketing campaigns, going viral to a consumer audience may be a viable option.

What are consumers looking for?
As a consumer myself, it’s no secret that most of us are looking to cut costs. An increasing percentage of consumers are also searching for environmentally safe solutions (Going Green). In contrast to detail oriented sites, viral websites work best with a lighter, benefits-focused design.

Going Viral Tip
Going viral follows basic networking guidelines. Referrals of any kind work best when the person on the receiving end of that link knows, likes and trusts the sender. I just recently became aware of campaigns that allow uploads of sender’s faces with those links – graphically reinforcing your message.

Measuring for Success
You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Monitoring traffic driven to your site is paramount. Viral websites should drive those measurement s thru the roof.