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So, how can you get more value out of your email newsletter?
One of the easiest, smartest, and cheapest ways a small business can squeeze more
value out of an email newsletter marketing campaign is by archiving email newsletters
online and using the content in them to generate more search engine traffic to your web
site. This is called search engine optimization. Repurposing the content of your email
newsletter by positing it on your web site can generate qualified traffic to your web site,
leads for your products and services, and sales revenue. It can also help you collect
more email addresses for your email newsletter.
Of course, search engine optimization assumes that you have a web site. While many
small businesses still don’t have a web site, a majority do.
If your small business already has a web site, then there are a series of five inter-related
steps that you can take to leverage the effort that you’ve already put into creating an
email newsletter to launch a search engine optimization campaign.
Each of these five steps is important and it is risky to skip one. You may want to hire a
firm to do this work for you, or you may be willing to invest the time to learn how to do
it yourself. Either way, you will want to understand how to successfully take each step
to ensure that the complete process produces results.
Develop a Segmentation Strategy
Any small business should target at least two key market segments. The first group is
shoppers, prospects, or visitors to your web site. The second segment is existing buyers,
customers, or subscribers who have opted-in to receive your email newsletter.
In a growing business, the first group is bigger than the second. In a healthy business, a
significant percentage of the first segment will turn into members of the second.
When you create an email newsletter, it is generally targeted at the second audience.
These are people you already know and who already know you. Your reason for
sending it is to increase customer loyalty, prompt repeat purchases, or sell upgrades.
Their reason for receiving it is to get practical and reliable information as well as early
news.
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If you repurpose your email newsletter by posting the content on your web site, it can
also address the first segment. Visitors to your site will be able to read what you are
sending to your newsletter subscribers, which may prompt them to make a purchase or
opt-in to receive your newsletter themselves.
This sounds fairly straightforward, but you would be surprised by the number of
companies that don’t archive their email newsletters on their web sites. They can’t
imagine hitting two birds with one stone.
Once the content of your newsletter is posted on your web site, it can help an even
larger group of shoppers and prospects find your site when they use search engines.
This group is huge.
According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project (www.pewinternet.org
), 63%
of American adults go online. That’s 128 million people.
Of these 128 million Internet users in the U.S., 84% use a search engine to find
information. That’s almost 108 million people.
How can you get even a fraction of this group to “beat a path to your door”?
Conduct Keyword Research
Think about the terms users would type to find pages on your web site, and then
conduct your own keyword research to determine if you are right. To discover the most
popular search terms your prospects might use, try Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool.
It can be found at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
and
it’s free!
Start your keyword research by typing your company name into the box. Now, for
comparison and contrast, type in: Google. In November 2004, there were 24,070,822
searches for this brand name. Not bad for a company that was incorporated on
September 7, 1998.
If your company or brand name isn’t as well known, look for a generic description that
people actually search for. As a general rule, the best search terms for small businesses
to use are at least two or three words long. Usually, too many web sites will be relevant
for a single word, such as "restaurant", or even for a popular two-word term like
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“Chicago restaurant.” This increased competition means your odds of success at being
found by search engine users are much lower. However, picking more specific phrases
can increase your chance of success. According to the Overture Keyword Selector
Tool, there were 13,679 searches done in November 2004 for “Chicago Italian
restaurant”.
Here’s another suggestion: Use a different target term in each article of your email
newsletter. Over the course of a year, this will enable your web site to be one of the
most relevant matches for dozens of search terms.
At SEO-PR, we license and use more sophisticated tools and services to conduct
keyword research for our clients. But, we have found that the tool or service you use is
not as critical as how well you use them. To paraphrase David Ogilvy, what
distinguishes great surgeons is not the scalpel they use — it’s their knowledge, dexterity
and experience.
Target Major Search Engines
To be successful, any small business needs to target the major search engines. How
many are there and which ones should you target?
Some unethical firms will send you unsolicited email promising to submit your web site
to “thousands of search engines.” Of course, other unethical firms will offer you diet
pills that “burn fat at night” or ask for your help transferring funds illegally from
deposed dictators. If this all seems too good to be true, it probably is.
According to the comScore Media Metrix qSearch service, there are only four search
engines with more than a 10% share of the searches conducted in the U.S. – Google
(36.8%), Yahoo Search (26.6%), MSN Search (14.5%), and AOL Search (12.8%). And,
since AOL’s main search results are powered by Google, there is just one search engine
that can literally make you – or break you.
Google has been called the 900-pound gorilla of search engines. It serves more than 59
million unique visitors each month and performs more than 200 million searches per
day
– referring more traffic than any other search engine. Google has also indexed the
largest number of web pages of any of the search engines – more than eight billion. So,
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if your web site can’t be found when your shoppers or prospects conduct a search for a
relevant term on Google, you are missing out on an extraordinary opportunity.
Google’s dominance clarifies which search engine you need to help find, index, and
rank your site. However, it doesn’t simplify what you need to do, because Google's
order of results is automatically determined by more than 100 factors, including its
PageRank algorithm.
So what is the best way to ensure that your small business will be included in Google's
results?
Follow Google’s Guidelines
Google has acquired a reputation as a company that keeps trade secrets very close to its
vest. Nevertheless, Google also posts resources that can be used for those who want to
do it themselves. For example, Google’s Webmaster Guidelines are posted online at:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
. Several of these are technical
guidelines for webmasters in big companies or professional search engine optimizers,
like SEO-PR. But other guidelines cover content, design and quality issues that you or
someone else in your small business should understand – and follow. Here are some of
the more important ones:
Content Guidelines:
Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site
actually includes those words within it.
Create a useful, information-rich site and write pages that clearly and accurately
describe your content.
Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
Position Your Keywords
In addition to these guidelines, you should make sure that your keywords appear in
important positions on your web site. Each page's HTML title tag is very important, as
is the headline of each article from your email newsletter, which should be posted as a
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separate page on your web site. Failure to include your keywords in these positions is
one reason why perfectly relevant web pages may be poorly ranked.
While your titles and headlines need to include keywords, they also should be relatively
clear and concise. Just as newspaper headlines help readers decide if they want to read a
story, the titles or your articles need to help search engine users decide if they want to
click through to your site.
Placing keywords in your titles and headlines is not necessarily going to help your page
do well for relevant searches if the content of the article from your email newsletter has
nothing to do with the topic. Your keywords need to be both relevant and reflected in
the page's content – "high" in the body copy of a page.
You might need to expand a few text references, where appropriate. For example, you
might substitute keyword phrases for one or two pronouns like "it" or "its" to increase
their overall frequency in the article. This reinforces your strategic keywords in a
legitimate and natural manner.
Design Guidelines
Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The
Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. When you post articles from
your email newsletter to your web site, make sure every page is reachable from at least
one static text link.
Every major search engine uses link analysis as part of its ranking algorithms. This is
done because it is very difficult for webmasters or search engine optimizers to "fake"
good links, in the way they might try to spam search engines by manipulating the words
on their web pages. As a result, link analysis gives search engines a useful means of
determining which pages are good for particular topics.
Build Links
By building links, you can improve how well your pages do in link analysis systems.
The key is understanding that link analysis is not about "popularity." In other words,
it's not an issue of getting lots of links from anywhere. Instead, you want links from
good web pages that are related to the topics you want to be found for.
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For example, you can create a site map with links that point to the important pages of
your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site
map into separate pages.
You can also go to Google, search for your target keywords, and look at the pages that
appear in the top results. Then visit those pages and ask the site owners if they will link
to you. Not everyone will, especially sites that are extremely competitive with you.
However, there will be non-competitive sites that will link to you – especially if you
offer a reciprocal link back to them.
Quality Guidelines
However, don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or
PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the
web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users, or present
different content to search engines than you display to users. Avoid tricks intended to
improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is…to ask, "Does this help my
users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
Specifically, don’t use unethical tactics that Google and other search engines consider
search engine spam. Search engine spam is as problematic as email spam. No one likes
email spam, and companies that use it often face a backlash from those on the receiving
end. Sites that spam search engines face the same backlash that email spam generates.
The content of most web pages ought to be enough for search engines to determine
relevancy without webmasters or unethical search engine optimizers having to resort to
repeating keywords for no reason other than to try and "beat" other web pages. The
stakes will simply keep rising, and users will also begin to hate sites that undertake
these measures.
If these ethical reasons aren't enough, how about some practical ones? Spam doesn't
always work with search engines. It can also backfire. Search engines may detect your
spam attempt and penalize or ban your page from their listings.
Google specifically recommends that you:
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ɸ
Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
ɸ
Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
ɸ
Don't send automated queries to Google.
ɸ
Don't load pages with irrelevant words.
ɸ
Don't create multiple pages, sub-domains, or domains with substantially
duplicate content.
ɸ
Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines or other "cookie
cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original
content.
In addition, search engine spam attempts usually center on being top ranked for
extremely popular keywords. You can try and fight that battle against other sites, but
then be prepared to spend a lot of time each week, if not each day, defending your
ranking. That effort usually would be better spent on other forms of free web site
promotion.
Submit Key Pages
When you add new content from your email newsletter to your web site, submit key
pages to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html
. Whatever you do, don't trust
the submission process to automated programs and services. Some of them are
excellent, but the major search engines are too important. So submit pages manually to
ensure there are no problems.
Also, don't bother submitting more than the top two or three pages. It doesn't speed up
the process. Submitting alternative pages is just a form of insurance. In case a search
engine has trouble reaching one of the new pages, you're covered by giving it another
page from which to begin its crawl of your site.
Google also suggests that you:
ɸ
Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware that
they are now online.
ɸ
Submit key pages to relevant directories such as the Open Directory
Project and Yahoo.
ɸ
Periodically review Google's Webmaster section for more information.
This approach requires a little patience. It can take up to a month to two months for
your "non-submitted" pages to appear in a search engine, and some search engines may
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not list every page from your site. However, it is a free web site promotion tactic that
works – if you follow the guidelines.
Trust, But Verify
Finally, in the words of former President Ronald Reagan, “Trust, but verify” your
search engine listing.
Check on your pages to be sure they get listed. Once your pages are listed in a search
engine, monitor your listing every week or two. Strange things happen. Pages disappear
from catalogs. Links go screwy. Watch for trouble, and resubmit if you spot it.
Google strongly cautions, “Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages,
check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our terms
of service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition
Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.”
Nevertheless, you should resubmit your site any time you make significant changes.
Search engines should normally revisit it on a regular schedule. However, some search
engines have grown smart enough to realize that some sites only change content once or
twice a year, so they may visit less often. Resubmitting your site after making major
changes or adding significant new content will help ensure that your site is indexed
more frequently.
It’s worth taking the time to make your site more search engine friendly, because some
simple changes may pay off with big results. Even if you don't come up in the top 10 for
your target keywords, you may find an improvement for target keywords you aren't
anticipating. The addition of just one extra word can suddenly make a site appear more
relevant, and it can be impossible to guess what that word will be.
And remember: While search engines are a primary way people look for web sites, they
are not the only way. People also find sites through word-of-mouth, traditional media,
and links from other sites. Use these alternative information sources to drive qualified
prospects to your web site.
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Finally, know when it's time to call it quits. A few changes may be enough to make you
tops in one or two search engines. But you shouldn’t invest more money than it is worth
to create special pages or change your site to try and do better.
If you can’t get top 10 results cost-effectively, SEO-PR will be the first to recommend
that your marketing dollars be put to better use pursuing other web site promotion
methods.
The Bottom Line
Search engine optimization can help you improve your ranking for key terms, increase
the amount of qualified traffic to your site, as well as generate more leads and sales for
your business. In addition, archiving your newsletter content on your web site can also
help you collect more addresses for your next email marketing campaign.
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