Small Business Web Project Management

Translation Please!

Looks like  we should SEO for “bass fishing lures”, it has a high conversion through PPC.  Also, it has a good KEI and we have a couple inbound links with good Page Rank where that is the Anchor Text.  Interestingly, “fishing lures” looks  like a lot of browsers, not much in the way of goals. Maybe we should consider a negative exact match on it.

There is an unofficial language that I like to call “Techese”, others call it “Geek Speak”. If you’re anything like most small business owners, you don’t quite understand all the lingo and terminology of tech type people, and probably don’t fully understand that first paragraph. That’s OK, in fact I would say you shouldn’t understand it.  I’ll bet you’re good at what you do. There are parts of your business that nobody could do better than you. And I would argue, that is where you should spend the majority of your time.  However, if you are going to move toward the Internet somebody needs to be able to speak “Techese” and you need somebody who can explain it to you, in your language.  And most important, how it impacts your business and how to profit from it.  This is where my varied background working with business owners across the country is your benefit.

 So just what was friends fishing for?  Let me translate.

There are two things we are talking about here in relation to search engine marketing. Pay Per Click, (or PPC) and Search Engine Optimization, (or SEO).  Pay Per Click has to do with paying a pre-determined amount of money every time somebody clicks through to our site.  SEO aims to increase where our site “Ranks”, or is shown when somebody searches for a specific phrase or phrases through a search engine, like Google, Yahoo or Bing.

Since we track the visitors to our site we know quite a bit about them, including what they searched for that brought them to our site and what they did when they got there.  We have designated a couple pages as “Goals”. These are pages where the visitor did what we wanted, maybe bought something or contacted us.  From this we  identify our best and worse performing terms.  What we are seeing is that people are hitting goals more often when they look for something specific, in this case “bass fishing lures” versus people looking in general “fishing lures”.

The Anchor Text and Page Rank are things that are important search engines and we already have an advantage there.  KEI talks to the volume of people searching on a term compared competition for that term.  A “good” KEI says that there is likely room to take advantage of the phrase “bass fishing lures”. And finally, since we are not seeing many conversions coming from the broad phrase “fishing lures” we are going to stop showing our ads when people search only on those two words, opting instead to take advantage of lesser competitive and less expensive terms.

All of this helps to increase meaningful  traffic to the site, while reducing direct marketing costs. And based on our past experience, lead to more sales.

(Need a more detailed translation???)