At the Blended Search Revolution at SMX, Google’s David Bailey spoke on the topic of Google’s Universal Search.  When asked about SEO as it relates to Universal Search, Bailey responded “Well web results are still the primary results at Google and not backup, but Universal complements this listing.”

Bailey divulged a few tips that will help sites be more visible in search engines.  Although not the main gist of this post, it should be mentioned that for one of his tips he stated, “Create a high quality blog.”  Although he did not specify “company blog,” I’ll make that specification for the purpose of this particular weblog.  Due to the elaboration on the importance of a company blog in other posts, it only gets an “honorable mention” in this one, but it should be at least noted as it came straight from the horse’s mouth (pardon the cliché).

Here are the four other tips Bailey included in order to advise a website in being more visible when it pertains to search engine optimization:

•  Publish high quality and well captioned images
• Create a Google Video sitemap
• Update business listings in local business center
• Submit your feed to Google product search

Bailey’s words of advice are all vital factors that will help a business promote their blog to get the results they hope to achieve and get noticed from Google, along with all of the other major search engines.

If your blog promotions are boosting traffic to your e-commerce site and your podcast marketing is producing the subscribers you were anticipating, why aren’t all those customers who are - according to your analytics - engaged in and using your content, adding to your bottom line? It would be comparable to your brick and mortar store always having aisles full of browsing customers who, somehow, never make it to your cash register.

Online this is known as shopping cart abandonment and it’s going to take some work on your part to determine why it is happening.

“Shopping cart abandonment is a reality of today’s e-commerce. It is a concept that denominates the ratio between the number of people who go through all the steps of online purchasing and the number of the prospects who leave the e-tailers’ sites at some point, without checking out. Sadly, the abandonment rate, as shown by many specialists in the field, is somewhere close to 60%.”

It might seem a silly question, but have you shopped your own site? If not, do a little role playing and become your own customer. Whatever frustrates or irritates you will, more than likely, have irritated your customer.

One of the complaints you hear most frequently usually concerns the registration process. You can’t ask for too much, too soon. In fact, you need not ask for registration at all.

“Many e-tailers lose at this game because they make their customers register before allowing them to place an order. Try to use the information they enter during the ordering process to register them. They don’t even have to know it until the end, when they’ll be prompted to enter an e-mail address and a password.
You can even allow them to make purchases without registering, but do point out the benefits of spending some time to register: order tracking, personalized notifications for special discounts or preferred products, incentives, etc.”
(Source)

Other considerations are a consistent theme for your format, no distractions or attempts to sell “one more thing”, make it evident what step they are on in the purchase process, and have your contact info easy to find.

Blog marketing goes beyond RSS publishing, great content and Google analytics. It also encompasses becoming well acquainted with your online neighborhood. A builder is always looking at possible land to develop, keeping an eye on what land is being bought, and by whom, in the neighborhoods and towns that their brands compete in.

And so should you scout out the territory that your market occupies online.The landscape you build on in e-commerce will always be in a state of flux, and as it gets “built out”, brief windows of opportunities open.

Take the baby niche for the smaller retailer. It can be a tough market to penetrate, especially against the big children’s brands. But what if you could hitch a ride with a big brand? If you have made it your business to know what’s going on in “the neighborhood” that your online customers shop in, you might have noticed just such a window of opportunity open. If new mothers are your target market, Johnson & Johnson has an opportunity for you to leverage your brand of “family friendly” counsel,wisdom or products.

“Do you have a blog with an established audience and 50,000+ pageviews a month that BabyCenter readers would love? Or do you have a small business website featuring your own family-friendly products? Contact us! We want to feature you in our BabyCenter Network. BabyCenter can help you increase your audience, and you’ll benefit from ad revenue sharing, get promoted in our newsletters, and more. Contact us to find out all the details!”
(Source)

And here is incentive to examine your site and or blog and see if it has what it takes to take advantage of this window before it closes.

“DoubleClick Performics recently released data resulting from a usage study targeting “moms,”…which showed that of the nearly 1,000 moms surveyed, 89 percent use the Internet at least twice/day, and 90 percent have been using it for more than seven years. 86 percent of respondents said search engines are the most efficient way to find information.

The data illustrates heavy search engine usage in support of online purchases, offline purchases, coordinating travel and many other planning activities among moms.”

70% use search engines to gather information before making any online purchase
57 percent use search engines to gather information before making any offline purchase
64% use search engines to find out where to purchase products offline.
With regard to purchases made in the eight product categories under study, 92% of respondents say search engines were helpful in providing valuable information prior to purchasing, and 79% say the same for the offline purchases they made.
“… we gained a much better understanding of just how much moms rely on search engines to accomplish a wide range of tasks, literally on a daily basis.”
(Source)

Now, what is going on in your neighborhood?

A blog promotion coordinated with an offline ad campaign can produce an extremely effective, traffic producing advertising campaign. As a consumer who has often made purchases via an offline ad that pointed me to a website, I hate to see that I am predictable, but,  I am one of the 2/3 of internet users who seeks out a website based on an offline ad and one of the 39% who follow through with a purchase.

“More than two-thirds of the online search population is driven to search by offline channels, according to a study released today from Jupiter Research and iProspect, a search-marketing firm that is part of Isobar. This shouldn’t, perhaps, be that surprising given that people don’t spend their lives in a single-channel isolation, but it does illustrate the need for agencies and marketers to continue aligning their on- and offline efforts.

What’s more surprising about the study is that those who’ve initially been influenced by an offline channel tend to have a higher propensity to buy: 39% of them ultimately make a purchase. The offline search drivers most likely to result in a sale are magazines and word of mouth.”

It only makes sense to “herd” your buyers to your site via the mediums that they use daily. But be prepared to be successful. This has proven to be an effective content promotion strategy that will produce a stampede, something which you absolutely do not want to happen without thorough preparation, including a clean, optimized landing page, plenty of relevant content and an unambiguous route to get to the material that your offline ad promised.

“… it’s important for marketers to maintain a consistency in keywords, messaging, and look and feel of the online and offline parts of a campaign.

“If you roll out a new car, you want a site that’s well-optimized organically and has a paid search supporting campaign with same color scheme, same taglines, same spokespeople,” he said.”
(Source)

Browsing through websites of local retailers and small businesses you tend to find sites that evidence a great deal of sincere effort invested into content that can only serve them a limited amount of time. Static websites, no matter how attractive or informative, are immediately stale upon the second visit and as soon as a competitor jumps in the game with podcast marketing and blog promotions, the pretty website that is frozen in time will loose their traffic.

Savvy Consumers Expect More From Your Site

Tan Kian Ann at Blogpreneur makes a valid observation.

“Let’s say you bump on a normal website with a very interesting article. Would you come back the next day, expecting more articles? Probably not.”

Your Web 2.0 savvy consumer has been spoiled by the options to feast on continuously fresh content, entertained by videos and educated by podcasts. Having the right product in the right size is just not good enough anymore when the guy down the street has what your customer wants, and a banquet too.

Make a Commitment to Your Content

Another common mistake that is made by the small business that has gone ahead and made the investment into integrating a blog site platform is that he hasn’t fully made a commitment to his content. He’ll gear up the frequency of his posting for one particular blog marketing event and then revert to the occasional post. Again the savvy browser has only to glance at the archives to see  how consistently the blog is updated and if there is a healthy supply of posts.

It makes no sense for businesses to invest in a static website or upgrade to blogging and not fully exploit a continuously productive means of gaining brand exposure at a pittance of the price.

Just want to touch on two recently posted topics; web analytics and social media marketing.

Microsoft to Introduce New Web Analytics Tool

We posted on the importance of using your Google analytics, or a comparable tool, to determine the effectiveness of your various blog marketing campaigns and to determine the strength of your search engine visibility. We also talked of the importance of confirming that the numbers translate as a successful execution of a specific campaign goal. High traffic counts are desirable but, the ultimate objective is reaching the goal the campaign was designed to achieve, be it newsletter sign-ups, podcast downloads or a dollar amount in successful conversions.

Microsoft is said to be introducing a new analytics tool this summer that may go towards further refining your data.

“The reports indicate that a beta version of this tool, code-named “Gatineau,” is scheduled for this summer, and will enable users to filter web traffic by age and gender demographics. This specific data will be coming from users’ Windows Live profiles, and will remain unconnected with users’ personal information such as name or email address. Nevertheless, some privacy issues could come into play, regarding the manner in which demographic data is acquired and utilized for statistical purposes.”
(Source)
Image Source/Mashable.com

Gender Specific Social Media Marketing

We also touched on  getting your feet wet with social media marketing. There is a new contender in the field that might be of great interest to female entrepreneurs and blog marketers.

“A new social bookmarking site has entered the fray aiming to be a social booking marking site of choice for women. It’s called Sk*rt, and co-founder Gabrielle Blair calls it a “she-inspired version of Digg.”
[..]
“Here’s the gist: Sk*rt is an online media ranking site created for and by women, featuring topics women dig,” Blair writes. A check of Sk*rt’s front page as I write finds links to blogging, bras, autism, and a photo essay of pregnant women.”
(source)

Business blogging’s most arduous and time consuming task is getting that relevant content published on a daily basis.
You’ve optimized for search engine visibility, you’ve submitted your site to directories, you’ve been monitoring your analytics and tracking conversions.

Working Hard for the Content

You’ve been working pretty hard for the content, so why not let that content work harder for you. Social bookmarking is a method to get more from your blog promotion campaigns as well as increased brand exposure.

Probably every post that you have read has present at the bottom some kind of icon for you to click to bookmark that post, e.g., digg, Diigo, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Newsvine, etc. If your posts do not offer your readers the same option, it may be time to research social bookmarking sites and choose which of the many that are offered appear to have a community that aligns with your target market.

“What makes social bookmarking important to marketers is it’s another cost-effective way to augment search marketing efforts, distribute content, and aid branding.
[..]
Marketers can use social bookmarks to allow visitors to share their content. In this sense, bookmarks have forward-to-a-friend functionality. Additionally, marketers can post their content to social bookmarking sites to drive traffic and links to their sites. A mortgage company could post a calculator to determine monthly payments; for example, an e-tailer could add social bookmarking to allow shoppers to show products to friends.”

Give Customers Ways to Distribute Your Content

A salesman in the mid-west called one day amazed (he had been a reluctant blogger and did so only under threat from his manager - he has since changed his tune) to report that he had sold a 75′ yacht to a buyer who flew in from Seattle based on the blog post the salesman had written about the boat. The post had come to his attention via a friend who had sent it via the “email this to a friend” option.

The same principle applies to providing your readers the options to save your post to the bookmarking sites that you’ve provided icons for. Of course, if you sell boats, digg wouldn’t be your best market, but StumbleUpon, which has less tech emphasis, would be an excellent choice.

“Because social bookmarking is relatively new and growing fast, now’s the time to test and get up to speed. Do some limited testing to see how it performs as part of your marketing mix. Once you dip your toe into the social bookmarking waters, you just might find it’s worth diving in.”
(source)

Your pizza is a hometown legend. You have about a dozen restaurants locally and you want to solidify your leadership in the market, further extend your brand and leverage your operation with a view of possibly expanding throughout a tri-state region. What should your website involve to achieve this?

Building a Site That Achieves Results

XML/RSS
A website written in XML/RSS incorporating blog site platform and RSS Publishing is the foundation. From there, this type of marketing project can be launched across several channels, with an emphasis on local search and with an ultimate objective of going viral in the region.

Blog Promotion
Optimized content with many local references. If you sponsor any local little leagues or soccer leagues, a good many posts should reference the teams, always optimizing local team names and town names. The content will consist of what you have become famous for.

Video
If Whole Foods finds profitability in chefs “vlogging” so might our pizza man. Make your presence known on YouTube, but also embed the videos in your site for the search engines.

“Whole Foods is the latest in a line of mainstream food businesses - from Food & Wine magazine to Kraft - now posting video, says Michael Gartenberg, a vice president with the internet analysis firm Jupiter Research. “They’re not wanting to be left behind,” he says.”
(source)

That is one of the reasons that online marketing is a perfect fit for the small business owner. They can afford to avail themselves of the same tools that the big guys use.

Social Media Marketing
You can evaluate the potential for social media marketing via FaceBook or MySpace. An interesting campaign was recently deployed by Socialflowers.com who developed a widget that allows a FaceBook member to send flowers to another member from their profile page. One of the many new business applications being deployed in FaceBook. If your city has a large presence on a social networking site, why not deploy a widget that allows a customer to order a pizza from their FaceBook profile?

Local Search Directories
Google yourself and make sure your listings in all local directories and searches are in order. Make sure your profiles in local search directories direct customers to your site and keep an eye out for bad comments.

What is your landing page and what is it supposed to deliver? Your landing page is where your customer has come to get what you said you were going to give him. If you have an ad promising free podcasts on scuba diving in the Bahamas, now is not the time to try to sell them your chartering services.

If they clicked through on an ad for outdoor grills, your customer doesn’t want to land on your home page and search for the category. The landing page is not where you try to sell them something more or something other than what they came for. It’s where you keep your promise and start building trust.

Just as your content in a specific blog promotion educates your customer in a buying decision, your landing page is where he finalizes that decision, thus a landing page is designed with one specific intent.

Before you design the page you have to decide what it is you want your customer to do there. If you want him to sign up for membership - as per the Netflex example above - than the page needs to be designed with that specific conversion in mind. The landing page facilitates what you want your customer to do.

Other considerations would include the following:

• Employ your graphics and white space so that they visually lead your customer to the conversion exit with ease.
• Optimize your forms so that they present little cause for irritation. Make sure the cursor goes immediately to the next field when the customer is done with the prior field. Auto-populate where you can.
• Place all key content above the fold. Do not force your reader to scroll.
• Just as you would not interrupt a customer while they are in the middle of signing for a purchase to direct them to another part of your store - just so he can make sure he is getting what he wants - you do not disrupt the conversion process by offering promotions or links to the rest of your site. Give then what they came for and they will come back for more.
• Test, Test, Test. Re-test.

Content promotion strategies seek to engage your reader. The first and foremost consideration, after blog optimization succeeds in bringing traffic to your site, is how to keep their attention.

Content That Commands Attention

Your analytics provides data that tells you how long a reader stays on your site and which content  held their attention. Now Nielsen/NetRatings feels those statistics are more relevant than page views.

Heather Havenstein of ComputerWorld.com reports the following:

“Nielsen/NetRatings will announce Tuesday that it will immediately begin using total time spent by users of a site as its primary measurement metric.
[..]
“It is not that page views are irrelevant now, but they are a less accurate gauge of total site traffic and engagement,” Ross said. “Total minutes is the most accurate gauge to compare between two sites…’”

Dovetailing with evaluating ‘attention spent’ is Particls.com’s treatment of the importance of measuring attention, referring to it as AttentStream.

Analysis of ‘Attention Spent’

“This is where I think we can make an impact on the Pageviews and metrics problem.

An AttentStream (An Attent is defined as someone who receives Attention from another) is a channel/record of others paying Attention to you. This would be a stream of events (preferably attributed to people) that signify Attention given to you by another.
[..]
An example of an AttentStream might be if the YouTube player reported each time a video was played - how much of the video was played and by which user. This way authors can get Attention information about content they were involved in producing.

The information would not just include page impressions or views. It would include richer things like time spent, partial views etc.”
(Source)

This goes to the topic of the last few posts. Analysis of this type of data enables you to fine tune your content in order to keep your customers attention, resulting in a high conversion rate while simultaneously gaining high search engine rankings. The value of podcasting and videos implemented into your blog site platform is increasing as the technology to specifically measure their marketing impact advances.