One of the frustrations of helping other people market their product or service on the web is, often times, a lack of control over the way that product or service is presented on the website, the website design — or even the product/service itself.

There are some things that search marketing can accomplish, like helping your site achieve better rankings for relevant keywords and a growing channel of valuable traffic, but long term success depends on turning those new visitors into actual customers (hopefully over and over again). If the site and/or product lacks the ability to turn those new visitors into long term customers, even the best SEO isn’t going to help much.

A lot of internet marketing consultants, myself included, have begun to make site usability and conversion optimization part of our list of services. However, many companies are resistant to those suggestions when they’re coming from the “SEO guy.” I guess for a variety of reasons (which I’ll probably save for another post).

So, here are a five site issues that SEO/SEM can not fix — that will affect the long term success of your online business:

1. High Bounce Rates. Bounce rates above 35% or so should be of concern. While it IS true that targeting the wrong keywords can cause high bounce rates, if your bounce rates are high across the board you have a problem. Think of it this way: If your bounce rate is 50%, every visitor is actually costing you twice as much as you think it is. Chances are users aren’t immidiately seeing what they expected when they clicked on a link to your site. Look at what keywords are being clicked and make those the emphasis of your landing pages… and USE LANDING pages. Don’t send all your traffic to the home page!
2. Low Rate of Return Visitors. A site with a very low return visitor rate usually makes search marketing largely unscalable. Growing traffic and sales over time depends on turning one-time visitors into repeat users. Otherwise, you end up paying (in some fashion) for nearly every visitor every time they visit your site. Your site’s growth potential is only as big as your budget. This will not bring long term success. You have to figure out why qualified users aren’t returning.
3. Higher Than Average Cart Abandonment. Looking through analytics data many times reveals that users make it all the way to the purchase page, or even 1-2 steps into the purchase process and then abandon/exit the site. Some of this is expected, but with an overall internet-wide abandonment rate of around 60%, there is always room for improvement. If your rates are above this average, you have particular reasons to be concerned. Think about how difficult the process is, how it can be simplified, credibility, security and even return policies and guarantees.
4. Bad/Wrong Pricing. The science of pricing is not something that I pretend to be an expert in. However, I do know that the wrong price can kill a great product. Comparing prices online has never been easier. A user has to see value in your offering that matches or exceeds the price point. Maybe the pricing really is okay but you’re not presenting the benefits of the product in a way that excites the user. Sell the sizzle.
5. Lack of Focus. A site without a clear focus… better yet, a PAGE without a clear focus is doomed to fail. You should imagine that each path through your site is a guided journey from entry to checkout. Every action that the user has the opportunity to take should lead them one step further toward that goal. That means that if you’re not really using social media to turn visitors into customer, then skip the Facebook and Twitter icons. Dig through path analysis data. And if you’re not sure that your pages are focused, try a service like crazyegg.com that can help, cheaply and easily, visualize what users are paying attention to when they reach your site. This is sometimes a huge wakeup call for subpar layout and design.

Too often site owners point fingers when trying to figure out why things aren’t working. While sometimes that blame may be well-founded, it’s important to remember that the best search marketing can’t fix a broken website.

What did I leave out?

From: Aaron Dalrymple & Associates, LLC

I’m not sure how earth shattering this is, but this post from HotelMarketing.com refers to a study showing that most people searching for a hotel are using a search engine to find hotels rather than going directly to a hotel’s corporate site. No big surprise that the internet is helping to commoditize hotel rooms just as it assisted in pushing airline tickets that same direction.

For most people, I believe, hotel rooms are booked primarily — in this order — for their location (city & state), price, proximity to desired landmarks, amenities, and then brand loyalty. No real scientific data there, just my gut instinct on how the average person goes about finding a hotel room for a family vacation, weekend getaway, business trip, etc.

I don’t doubt that brand does come into play if there are two hotels that match closely on the other factors. But average people don’t much care if it’s a Hilton or a Radisson in most cases. So, searching by destination, as this study suggests, seems perfectly matched to my theory. And, if you look at the search data you’ll find that a city name with a qualifier such as “discount” or “cheap” are the next most popular.

The danger for OTAs and Search Marketers or resellers depending on search marketing, though, is the risk of becoming nothing more than a price and amenities comparison engine that enable users to pick out a property, from a location search, and then go directly to the chain’s website to book the room. This study suggests that just that is happening:

“The BDRC said bookings are increasingly being carried out on hotel sites but third parties such as Expedia (40%), Lastminute.com (36%) and Ebookers (22%) continue to feature prominently during the research stage.”

If all you sell are hotel rooms, how do you differentiate from the rest of the pack? How do you use all of those great rankings to convert visitors to buyers?

Here may be a clue… The PhoCusWright Travel 2.0 Consumer Technology Survey, published in December of last year, says that,

“When it comes to making travel purchasing decisions, most American travelers would rather see the options for themselves than simply act on the recommendations of others. In fact, travelers want to view the options in detail via pictures, online maps and video.”

Frankly, I’m surprised at the fact that hotels aren’t trying harder to compete head-on in search engine marketing. Aren’t they leaning on their brand a little too much? Or are we just doing the hard work for them?

Search engines dominate how consumers look for hotels

From: Aaron Dalrymple & Associates, LLC

Here is Why:

Eyetools Eyetracking Research

This eye tracking research by Eyetools, Enquiro, and Did-it states that 100% of users look at the top three organic listings on Google’s search results page. Only 85% even LOOK at the number four listing and after that it’s all down hill to number 10, which only 20% of searchers even take a peak at.

In addition, the importance of managing SEO along with PPC campaigns is further strengthened by the fact that only 50% of users are even giving a glance to sponsored ad units on the search results pages.

“We see a marked difference in how people say they search and what they actually do. Previous research had indicated that people were considered searchers and spent some time before choosing a link. The past few studies we’ve done, this one included, shows that there’s a huge importance placed on where the eyeballs end up on the page. Clicks happen pretty quickly. It just shows that search marketing is a real estate game. It’s all about location, location, location.” – Enquiro’s Gord Hotchkiss

From: Aaron Dalrymple & Associates, LLC

I just got back from PubCon Las Vegas. As usual, this was a great conference if you make your living in e-Commerce, search engine optimization, and search engine marketing. I was very impressed by the presenters this year, and I want to take a moment to recognize several by name and to highlight why they made such a strong impression on me:

Robin Liss

Robin gave a highly informative presentation of content production for the web. She used a beautiful manufacturing analogy to illustrate her points. To summarize, she informed us that creating quality content is like manufacturing any product. As a manufacturing endeavor, both the quality of your end product and the efficiency of getting it to market depends heavily on the process you use to get there.

Robin is founder of Reviewed.com, a network of independent product review sites, including CamcorderInfo.com and DigitalCameraInfo.com. Her sites are known for their high journalistic quality, their stringent independence of thought and for meticulously sticking to a consumer advocacy mindset.

I was impressed with the discipline and attention to detail that Robin’s company brings to the content they put on the web. Not only does Robin understand the process to drive a piece of content from Assignment to Research, Research to First Draft, Draft to Edit and down the pipeline to a finished, ready for web document. She also has an expert grasp of the economics of this kind of endeavor. By meticulously tracking each step of the process, Robin insists you can arrive at a very accurate understanding of the resources necessary to keep your content pipeline full, whether you want to generate one or two quality articles and postings a week or ten million words of high-quality, valuable content per year.

Robin Liss is a bright light, and I was personally very impressed with and appreciative of her insights.

Michael Stebbins

Some people impress you by their breadth of knowledge and marketing acumen. Some people impress you with their generosity of mind and their willingness to share what they know in order to raise the overall level of our craft to new heights. In Michael Stebbins PubCon presentations, I was impressed with both. Clearly Michael and his colleagues at MarketMotive are doing excellent research, which benefits both their clients and the rest of the web marketing profession. His willingness to share key insights in a plain and easily executed manner is quite refreshing, and I really appreciated Michael Stebbins’s contribution to the conference.

I had a chance to visit with Michael at one of the cocktail receptions, and he is also a hell of a good guy.

Ted Ulle

Talk about a veteran of SEO and someone with a fantastic ability to convey in a clear manner the importance of adhering to sound Information Architecture and Design principles.

Ted encouraged and argued strongly that folks interested in creating websites should look at key resources from Information Architecture and print typography to gain an understanding of the appropriate methods of organizing and semantically categorizing information and for displaying the written word. As always, content is king, but Ted Ulle adds the important caveat that content is king, if and only if users can navigate and find your high-quality content and search engines can crawl and index your content appropriately.

Take a hard look at your design process was Ted’s big message that resonated with me. Consider the purpose of your website and of most websites. You are trying to provide valuable information to a user, or you want them to trust you enough to make a purchase from your company instead of a dozen other options. You are presenting your content to those users, one way or another. The way you organize and structure your website and its pages effects both the end-user’s ability to find what he or she wants and the ability of the search engines to appropriately identify, crawl, and index what is most important and meaningful about your site.

ALL aspects of your Information Architecture, Graphic Design, and coding should support the proper organization and display of your content. Page navigation, headers, sub-headers, internal page linking structure, and graphical page elements all need to support the user’s ability to quickly find what he needs and take the appropriate action to get from first step to final step in a logical and intuitive manner.

I was very impressed with Ted Ulle’s undeniable expertise in his profession, but I was more impressed with his ability to convey his wisdom in a largely unequivocal and authoritative way backed up by clear examples of why and how this matters.

And I have to say that I also appreciated Ted’s very humorous cautionary tales about things as simple as your site’s error messages. They’re important, and if your IT geeks wrote them, please review them today!

I wanted to call these three indivuals out in the marketing community. I learned a lot. I appreciate their contributions to our profession.

Patrick Soch
Marketing Manager
www.eBags.com

From: Aaron Dalrymple & Associates, LLC

Great post here from Marketing Pilgrim, and a good lively conversation in the comments. What I would add to the discussion is that many clients WANT exactly what Greg is cautioning against in his post. Most of his points are great, but, unfortunately, a lot of people who call me (I don’t cold call) are looking for a quick meta tag and link building type campaign because the IT folks don’t want to hear your suggestions, the marketing folks don’t want your ideas and the product people don’t want your advice. I agree that SEO programs should be fully integrated, but convincing customers of that is sometimes difficult. They view it as a condiment instead of an integral part of the website sandwich…

The tips here are valid, but I don’t think they should necessarily be presented as find out if your SEO guy is unscrupulous… They should be presented as suggestions to help businesses understand why they need an integrated SEO program with a respectable budget attached to it – and, perhaps, why it is better to do it in-house…
Read on:

8 Tips for Avoiding an SEO Fraudster

From: Aaron Dalrymple & Associates, LLC

I know what Google says, “this will help the quality of our results.” But, like most (who ARE NOT Matt Cutts’ disciples), I am cynical when it comes to Google – just like politicians, Fox News and Clear Channel radio.

It seems that Google is making some changes to the algorithm that determines your ranking in the PPC listings – or Adwords for the brand conscious. To review, Google bases your rankings on quality, CTR and CPC. Currently, Google uses your actual CPC to help determine rankings. In other words, it uses what you’re paying, not what you’re willing to pay – or your maximum CPC.

Well, it seems, that in the near future that formula will be tweaked to consider your maximum CPC in the ranking algo instead of your actual CPC. You won’t have to pay that max CPC (necessarily), but, according to Google, this will give advertisers more control over obtaining a top ad spot.

Maybe so, Google. But it will also encourage users to increase their max CPC in order to get better rankings under the impression that a higher max CPC will increase rankings – regardless of what your actual CPC will be. And, while users will still pay an “actual CPC,” when everyone suddenly raises their max CPC, the actual CPC will follow – because your actual CPC is dependent on what the other advertisers’ maximum CPC is.

Google makes more money, you have a harder time maintaining a positive ROI, and Google moves one step further toward world domination. Read more about the apocalypse here:

Want That Top Ad Position On Google? The Rules Are About To Change

From: Aaron Dalrymple & Associates, LLC

Making practical sense of web stats such as time-on-site and pages-per-visit is hard enough. Getting those mysterious numbers to paint a picture that helps quantify results for companies and clients is nearly impossible with most metrics. Spencer Lavery of FreshEgg.com has come up with an equation he calls the “Engagement Factor” to help make sense of user’s behavior that looks beyond visitors and conversions.

Internet travel is so focused on conversion factors that sometimes we forget that engaging users really is the first step to converting them to customers. Many travelers simply don’t buy on their first visit to a given site; if you’re ONLY chasing sales conversion rates you may be missing out on a much more basic conversion factor… converting visitors to return visitors so that you have a second or third chance to convert them to customers.

Check out his equation below. Does this make sense for travel sites? I think it might…

The Engagement Factor – Google, Internet Marketing, Web Design,

From: Aaron Dalrymple & Associates, LLC

Wordtracker, which has a great keyword generation tool that a lot of SEMs pay for, has recently released a new free keyword search tool that’s great for a quick keyword lookup or for those who don’t have the need for a full-blown keyword generation tool.  It’s very similar to the old Overture Keyword Suggestion tool that only seems to work about 1/3 of the time anymore.

Free Keyword Suggestion Tool

From: Aaron Dalrymple & Associates, LLC

According to Zagat, 75% of travelers say they now use the Internet as their primary means of booking, particularly air travel. While this means great opportunity for search marketers in the travel space, it also means that the space is more competitive than ever. The survey further states that the most commonly used website to book travel is Expedia.com while TripAdvisor.com takes the honors when it comes to finding travel information. Of course with all of the affiliate sites out there for these two companies, I wonder how many people even know that they’re using Expedia or TripAdvisor…

Another report, released by PhoCusWright, states that next year – for the first time – transactions on the Internet will account for over half (54 percent) of all U.S. travel bookings. Other findings from the report include:

• While the U.S. represented just one third of total online and offline travel bookings of the combined North America, Western Europe and Asia Pacific markets in 2005, the U.S. share of online bookings was over 60 percent of all online bookings.
• Growth of dynamic packaging — the ability of consumers to easily combine airline, hotel, rental car and other product purchases online — is projected to slow significantly from 51 percent in 2005 to 18 percent in 2008. This trend is partly attributable to the current tight supply of bulk airfares and merchant hotel rates available for packages, thanks to higher load factors and occupancy as suppliers enjoyed strong sales during the recent robust economy.
• Hotels will be the fastest growing segment online, surpassing air travel, which until 2006 had long been the fastest growing product segment.
• The advanced level of the U.S. online travel market creates an atmosphere in which many innovations such as dynamic packaging, metasearch and user-generated content incubate in the U.S. before expanding to other global markets. Many of these innovations include the new online capabilities that PhoCusWright has termed Travel 2.0 — the travel industry’s application of Web 2.0 practices empowering the online consumer.
• The tipping point of the travel market, with the online channel becoming the norm for travel purchases, is going to further shape consumer behavior that utilizes Travel 2.0 tools and applications.

I have to somewhat disagree with these statements on “Travel 2.0″ though. I think they may be a bit premature. I’m not sure that anyone has figured out how to bring value to the consumer, using 2.0 elements, that translates into revenue. Until that happens, what good is it to a bread and butter company that’s trying to sell travel – not trying to impress investors (we all know how well that’s worked out in the past)?

So, how do you go about standing out in a sea of affiliate sites, rising CPCs and product commodification? And, will 2.0 be the answer?

Zagat Survey Coverage

PhoCusWrigt Press Release

From: Aaron Dalrymple & Associates, LLC

More energy continues to go into PPC advertising. According to DoubleClick, while the cost of keywords held steady in Q2:

Year-over-year overall spending on search and impressions grew by almost 50 percent; active keywords grew by 58 percent while total clicks increased by 32 percent.

Obviously marketers are getting smarter about how many keywords they’re using in their campaigns. Without knowing, though, how these increased keywords and increased spending have affected the overall ROI – or effectiveness of PPC advertising – it’s hard to assess what these numbers really mean for marketers.

Clicks increasing by 32% and the fact that terms that previously cost between 21 and 99 cents now go for more than $1, does mean that the engines are making hay.

I’ll bet that when Q3 numbers come out we’ll see an even greater proportional increase in the take for the engines. With 60% of the market share, Google’s recent update is bound to boost its take considerably.

All this can’t help but make me wonder how much longer natural SEO (non-paid results) are going to be relevant. What’s to gain on the part of the search engines by putting any development, resources, etc. into natural results? Especially for Google, who doesn’t have CPM advertising all over their pages…

MediaPost Publications – Performics: Q2 Keyword Costs Flat – 10/02/2006

From: Aaron Dalrymple & Associates, LLC