If you’ve had a website for any length of time you’ve likely been spammed by someone who claims to be an expert, specialist, guru, Jedi, or whatever other self-aggrandizing expression they use to describe their online marketing prowess.  The email probably told you they’ve noticed your rankings have dropped, you can’t be found on the major search engines, blah, blah, blah..

Unfortunately a lot of people still fall for these urgent-sounding emails.  They don’t realize thousands of people received the exact same email, and these people never saw your website before.  Furthermore, unless they have access to your Analytics software, there is no real way for them to know your “traffic dropped”.

These spam emails are just as bogus as these greatest hits:

• This email is from UPS: we can’t deliver your package so open this attached ZIP file (don’t worry there’s no virus in there)
• This is a Chinese domain registration company and someone has sent an application to register your domain name in our country
• I’m your friend and stuck in a foreign country because my wallet was stolen–please wire me money quickly
• You’ve just won the Nigerian lottery
• I just got an inheritance but need your help to get it–don’t worry I’ll share some of it with you

Even though the Webtivity website ranks very well in multiple cities for many, many key phrases (we are an internet marketing company after all) we get these emails too. Every. Single. Frickin’. Day.  And guess what?  Even Google gets these emails too!

From Google Webmaster Tools:
(source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35291?hl=en)

Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue. Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:

“Dear google.com,
I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories…”

Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for “burn fat at night” diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.

Here are some tips for not getting scammed by someone supposedly selling “SEO services” (or Viagra, weight loss pills, etc.):

1. If they’re emailing you out of the blue trying to sell you something and you’ve never heard of them before:  Hit the SPAM button really really hard.
2. If they spammed you through your website Contact Form:  Swear at them and delete it.
3. If they emailed you from a free email account like Gmail or Hotmail realize it’s because they are spamming the crap out of everyone until the email address gets shut down.  Plus you can’t track them down once they steal your money.
4. If the spam email says “Reply to this email with ‘Unsubscribe’ if you no longer want to receive emails from us” do NOT reply (unless you want to verify to a spammer that your email address is legit and receive MORE spam.)
5. If the email says “Click this link to…” do NOT click the link (unless you want to verify to a spammer that your email address is legit AND/OR go to a website that will install malware on your computer.)

One final question for you to consider:  If your website ranks so poorly.. HOW DID THEY FIND YOU IN THE FIRST PLACE???

Peace out.

The post Your Website Traffic Has Dropped!!! appeared first on .

It’s not your fault — you’ve been conditioned to ask for it.  It’s a buzzword you’ve heard over and over again.  You’ve gone to workshops, you’ve read blogs, you’ve seen ads for it, you get spam through your website every day for it.  “Rank #1!”  SEO SEO SEO. 

What if I told you SEO isn’t the be-all-end-all?  Does that sound strange coming from an internet marketing company? 

First let me be clear that SEO is important.  If people can’t find your website when they do a Google search you are leaving a TON of business to your competitors.  But just because your website ranks on Google’s coveted first page doesn’t guarantee success.  We have plenty of companies come to us because they ARE ranking on the 1st page for relevant search phrases and getting lots of traffic — but they aren’t getting any business!  How could that be?  Poor usability and poor messaging are two top reasons people come to your website and leave without contacting you. 

Usability
If your website is difficult to navigate or users can’t view your website properly on their device you are losing business.  For example using Flash on your website prevents people using Apple devices from accessing those areas of your website.  If you don’t have a mobile-friendly website people who arrive on a smartphone will have a significantly higher Bounce Rate. 

According to research done by Google, U.S. smartphone owners use their phones as follows:
- 96% use it at home
- 83% use it on the go
- 76% in a store
- 70% in a restaurant
- 69% at work

Often people do their initial research on their smartphones because it’s the most convenient place for them to do so.  Which website would you rather browse on your smartphone in the screenshots above?  The website on the right is missing out on a lot business.  Guaranteed if you look at their Google Analytics the Bounce Rate is extremely high for people who arrive on their smartphone.  (By the way I checked–they don’t even HAVE Google Analytics installed on their website!)

Messaging
When people arrive at your website it needs to look professional, and it also needs to “sell” your company with the right messaging.   Messaging is one of the most overlooked facets when companies have their websites redesigned.  Why?  Because they hire individual web designers instead of full service agencies that have the expertise to look at all aspects of your design and marketing.  Web designers are traditionally trained in visual design, but not in marketing.  If your website looks good but doesn’t succinctly explain your value and capabilities, you’re can’t differentiate yourself from your competitors when potential customers are comparison shopping.

Marketing your website online has become a multi-faceted affair, incorporating design, traditional marketing, search engine optimization, social media, paid advertising, content development, ecommerce and mobile.  Any of these facets you ignore allows your competitors to get in front of your potential customers.  That’s why rankings and SEO shouldn’t be the sole focus for your online marketing strategy.

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That is the title of an email I received the other day, and boy did it burn me up!  Not because it’s untrue.  Just the opposite:  inconsistent information on the web about your business can seriously hurt your SEO.  What burned me up is the email came from a service that claims to help you keep your business information consistent online.  On the surface it sounds great — pay an annual subscription fee and an automated service helps you keep your business listings up to date.  The problem is these automated services only work with a handful of directories and don’t work with some of the major ones where your business should be listed.  Even more problematic is these services are not perfect; and some are far from it.

This particular service’s name is met with much contempt in our office.  We’ve had clients who previously tried the service and then had to hire us to clean up the mess it made.  It’s an uphill battle dealing with the fallout and in some cases it took many months to clean up.  Sometimes the service erroneously created duplicate listings on directories because the existing listing did not have the exact business name, or perhaps had a different phone #.  A human could have found the old listing using a little elbow grease and deductive reasoning; something a mathematical algorithm is still not smart enough to do.  There are also times when wrong information was entered by the service and that information started getting ‘scraped’ by other websites and directories.

There are hundreds and thousands of places on the internet where you can post information about your business.  Most of those websites crawl the internet looking for information about companies and auto-populate themselves so the website seems full of information when people get there.  The problem is those websites don’t verify information they find, they just find stuff and post it there whether it’s accurate or not.  Then that information is found by another automated bot and gets populated somewhere else, and so on and so forth.  So if you aren’t constantly monitoring your online identity it’s easy to see how out of control your online identity can become. 

Automation technology has been amazing for manufacturing and other processes in our brief history on this planet.  So I suppose it’s become second nature for some to assume Automation = Good (unless your job was eliminated by it.)  The problem is that automation in our industry sometimes isn’t so good, and some things should still be done manually for accuracy.  Or you at least need to have humans in place to verify what the algorithms and robots are telling you.  These automated directory-building services don’t have humans double-checking the work.  And what’s worse, from our experience and from the multitude of complaints you can find online, they don’t seem to have the resources in place to correct errors that occur.  Unfortunately Google places a lot of weight on having consistent business listings across the internet (the same addresses, phone #’s, etc.) so when your identity starts to get screwed up it quickly pervades across the internet, Google takes notice, and your website gets dinged for it.  When a service can muck up something as simple as having multiple satellite offices in the same town you have to ask yourself how valuable the service really is.

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The internet is a big place.  Over 650 million websites large.  That’s a LOT of competition!  When clients come to me for advice on how to position their website online, that’s part of the conversation I need to have with them.  No matter what you’re selling, there are many websites out there that have been marketing for a long time.  Because of the way Google works and because of all the noise out there, it’s probably going to take a while to catch up.  That doesn’t mean you should throw your hands up in disgust and walk away, it means you need to be reasonable with your expectations. 

If you want to sell widgets, let’s do a Google search for widgets.  You’ll see Google returns 231,000,000 results.  That means if you want to rank on the 1st page of Google for the word “widgets” you are trying to be the top 10 out of 231,000,000 results.   Now let’s look at who’s already ranking there:  Wikipedia, Apple, Google Play Store, WordPress, Webopedia, Twitter. 

“Well”, you say, “I’m just a little company in Bradenton that offers plumbing services.”  Okay, well then let’s try the Google search Bradenton plumbing company.  Much less competitive, but still 463,000 results returned.  That doesn’t mean there are 463,000 plumbing companies in Bradenton, it means Google has identified 463,000 individual web pages that they think have to do with the topic of plumbing.  And if you’re a plumbing company, that means you’re trying to get your website placed in the top 10 out of those 463,000 other results.  Still pretty darned competitive, isn’t it?

That means to optimize your website you need to do all the things correctly that Google tells you to:

• Have a solid website foundation
• Have text on your website that contains the keywords you want to target
• Update the text on your website frequently (blogging)
• The longer your website has been out there, the better
• Get trusted websites to link to your website
• Get websites that are related to your industry to link to your website
• Use popular social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus

These are all the things that make up a healthy profile for your website that will help you build credibility on the search engines–and eventually rank well.  The truth of the matter is, doing all these things and doing them consistently takes a lot of time and energy.  The more competition you have, the harder you have to work on these factors.  And they have to be done consistently for as long as you have your website.   It doesn’t sound sexy, but it’s the hard truth.  It’s hard to sell the truth sometimes, especially when you have other companies in our industry promising the sun, moon and stars for pennies per month.  But if you think about the examples provided above, the competitiveness of the web, and all the effort involved in doing all the things Google says you need to do, you should come to the conclusion that the people selling “cheap SEO” are actually selling you a song.  And they’re singing off-key.

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Back in the infancy of SEO all you had to do was stuff a bunch of keywords in your Meta tags, hide some white text on a white background, set up 10 of the same website on different domains and you were off to the races!  There was no Facebook back then.  No iPad.  No smartphone. 

My how times have changed. 

Now if you want to rank well on Google you have to keep your website up to date, blog, use social media effectively, and get relevant websites to link to you.  So if you’ve been doing everything that Google loves and you’ve been monitoring your rankings, you’ve probably been Googling different phrases to see where you come up in the search results.  If you’ve been paying attention you may have noticed there are some differences in your rankings depending on how you searched.  Here are scenarios when Google will give you different results even though you are searching for the exact same phrase:

Your Location
Google will take your location into account.  If you’re on your home computer Google will determine your location based on your computer’s IP address.  So if you do a search for “Sarasota widget company” while you’re sitting in your condo in Sarasota you may get a different set of results than if you did that same search in Seattle.

Personalization
If you are logged into your Google account while doing searches, Google will take your past browsing history into account when serving your results.  If Google knows you have visited certain websites more often when doing a particular search they will show you those options more often thinking that is what you’re looking for. 

Your Device
Here’s where things can get really crazy.  If you do the same search from a desktop computer, a tablet and a smartphone, Google will likely serve you different results.  You can even get different results if you have GPS enabled versus disabled on a mobile device.

So at the end of the day how do you know if you’re REALLY number one?  The answer is you probably don’t.  And while Google says this is because they want to provide the most relevant results to their users, I have to think that at the end of the day they also enjoy the fact that it makes an already moving target even more difficult to hit. 

Happy 4th of July!!!

The post The Elusive Number 1 Ranking appeared first on from the Webtivity Blog.

It’s too early to tell exactly what Google has done, but early indications show a major shift in how Google ranks websites was launched this week.  Depending on which side of the fence you’re on you may be happy or very sad about this latest change.  The change seems to be related to one of the major complaints in our industry over the years: people with “exact match” and “partial match” domains (web addresses that contain the primary keywords a company is trying to target) have had an unfair advantage in Google results.

For example, let’s assume your company is named Triple Diamond and you’re a widget manufacturing company located in Sarasota Florida.  Since Sarasota is your primary market you want your website to be ranked for the phrase “Sarasota widgets”.  Instead of having your website located at TripleDiamond.com (the name of your company), you put your website at SarasotaWidgets.com (the exact phrase you want to target.)   In the good old days, even with a terrible, horrible, abhorrent website you would have a huge advantage over much higher quality websites for the exact match search of “Sarasota widgets”.  This phenomenon led to awesome domain names like Sarasota-widgets.com, Sarasota-widget-company.com, etc. 

The trouble with our Triple Diamond example above is that the company is ignoring the importance of building their brand by using TripleDiamond.com and instead focuses on parlor tricks to get their website to rank artificially high.  Google has been tackling this issue slowly but surely over the past year or so.  Now companies like Triple Diamond are falling like rocks in the rankings because they bought a domain years ago and never did a lick of SEO thinking they had beat the Google monster.  Well guess what, fake company I made up called Triple Diamond?  All those years you’ve rested on your laurels and didn’t spend any energy on SEO is now valuable time you wasted.  Get ready to open your wallet, because building trust on the search engines is much more difficult today than it was back when you bought that domain.  Hopefully you were at least smart enough to buy TripleDiamond.com back then!

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