Do you do cold calling?

The quality (or lack of it) of cold calls I seem to be receiving lately is upsetting.

Nobody really likes to receive cold calls I'm sure, so is it not vitally important to excel in that call to make sure you get the result you are looking to achieve?

I had yet another Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) company call me this afternoon.

Without introduction to who they were, they proudly told me that my website wasn't ranking a particular keyword phrase and presumably would have gone on to tell me that they could get it to number one in the Google list within a week.

They obviously hadn't done their homework as the phrase is one of the most competitive on the internet and I have only one sub-page deep in my website targeting it. So the chances of that being sustainably achievable in a short time scale without resorting illegal methods that could potentially get me removed from the index completely - are zero.

Not only that, but they had based their statement simply on the fact that I have, as a short term test at the moment, a Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign running that targets the phrase.

They didn't ask me what my business goals and plans were and how that keyphrase fitted in with them, nor had they looked at my website to understand what I was really about.

You might get a good idea of how that call ended today. I should have offered to mentor their sales staff perhaps, but I didn't get their company name and when I called 1471 the number had been withheld, surprise, surprise!

I'm occasionally asked to run call campaigns on behalf of my clients, often targeting very high powered individuals within global industries who have an even shorter fuse than me! But I get through and get the job done because I take the time to research and find out what they are up to and what they really need.

Every business needs to do some cold calling at some point and if it's going to be successful it needs care and thought to get good results.

http://www.roygough.co.uk/

Is the 'Home' page of your website of any value?

Is the 'Home' page of your website of any value?

The way in which all the main search engines, such as Google, work is that they find your home page, follow it's navigation links and discover all the other pages that make up the site.

If you've been doing your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) correctly, each of those pages will be targeting a tightly focused small number of keywords or phrases. The purpose is to help Google understand EXACTLY what that page is about so that it can effectively determine when to show that page in the organic , or natural, listing as a good potential page for the searcher to view.

This shows that Google indexes pages rather than sites as a whole. Your Home page probably isn't sufficiently keyword focused to be shown in most listings as a response to a search query. This leads to some SEO experts to say that the Home page is of little value.

I beg to differ.

1. Unless you are a totally internet based business relying upon the search engine rankings to gain site visitors you will be using your domain name - www.mycompanyname.co.uk, which is effectively your Home page - on your business card, flyers, brochures, newspaper adverts, on your van and anywhere else you can legally find to display it.

2. If someone hears about your business they might just type in your company name. That could well produce your home page at the top of the search engine listings because it probably isn't product or service targeted.


So your Home page is absolutely vital. It's your office reception. Most bricks and mortar businesses spend a great deal on making their reception area feel warm, inviting and confidence building so that you might feel happier doing business with them.


Make sure your Home page creates a great impression and easily directs visitors to the part of the site they are looking for.

But in reality, every page on your site is a 'reception'. If that's the first page they go to on your site then it's really got to do the same job as the Home page, but do it's sales job as well. That's going to be tough to get right.

Is it any wonder that making profit from your website can be so tough?

If you need help with your site to make it profitable my Wesite Profit Program might be your answer.

Local Business Website Profit Success

Norwich based, up-market gents hairdressers Truman's wanted a web site that would do justice to their quality men's grooming services and desirable Elm Hill location. Within days the website, created by Alloy CRM, was ranking at the top of the search engine listing for their keywords and phrases.

Just as icing on the cake, after just a few days, Truman's received a call from a lady in Felixtowe who had found them in the search listings. She went on to book a top of the range grooming day for the special man in her life - business, and valuable revenue, that could not have come about just a few weeks earlier.

You can see Truman's site here: http://www.trumansofnorwich.co.uk

Alloy CRM can create websites with excellent Search Engine Optimisation ( SEO )and generate profit for Small businesses at sensible prices.

A simple guide to website ranking with links

One of the key factors influencing how your site is indexed, and ranked, in the search engines is that of inbound links.

These are hyperlinks to pages on your site from other sites on the web. The basic theory is that the more links you have, the higher the value of your own site. Why? Because the search engines will assume that, if all those other people think your site is interesting enough to link to, then it must be important.

That was the premise a few years back, but sadly that assumption was abused by the darker side of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). They set up thousands of sites that were just 'Link Farms'. Pages and pages of listings with links to other sites. The more links you had on these sites, the better value you appeared to have, thus skewing the listing results.

Google got smart to this idea and, in an attempt to reduce the effect, they introduced a system of ranking each page it indexed. It's ranking process included a host of factors but was mainly designed to weed out the Link Farms. In fact sites that were/are still found to be listed on these sites are often penalised heavily and their own indexing can be severely impaired making it difficult to appear in any of the results listings.

So let's go back to the beginning. Inbound links are important, but they have to be carefully chosen and prepared links.

Here are the three key factors you should consider:

1: What is the Page Rank (PR) of the page and site that will show the link? The higher the PR the better as it seen as an important site and it's outbound links are valued higher too. Not only that but it will 'feed' some of it's high ranking across to your page as a bonus.

2: Is the site relevant to yours? As an example let's say your site was about pet products. If you had a link on a site with heaps of information all about dogs - that would make sense to Google and be valued. A link on a dating site would be seen as totally irrelevant and virtually ignored.

3. Use good 'Anchor Text'. Having a hyperlink to your pet product site showing as www.petproducts.co.uk on that dog information site is not so effective, and meaningful, as having the hyperlinked text saying 'Buy dog baskets, leads and dog food'. Google sees and understands the relationship between the wording on the information site, the anchor text and that of your site - so it will value the link higher.

So to summarise, links to your site are good, but not all links. Be careful about accepting offers of links, especially if they are asking you to pay. Take time to consider those key factors before you commit.

Finally there is the issue of reciprocal links - the 'You show me yours and I'll show you mine' of the internet world.

You may be offered a link to your site in return for a link to theirs. If you accept this and the link to them is shown on, for example, page 2 of your site and the link to you on their site also points to your page 2, it will easily seen as reciprocal and not a 'vote' of confidence in your or your website, therefore valued less.

Turn that around based on the 3 key factors earlier in this blog. If the link from them is on a page of information about dogs, the anchor text reflects that and the page on your site which it points to is about dogs that's good.

So in return, work something on the same principal but using different pages, perhaps about cats. That way the links are less likely to be seen as reciprocal.

I hope that all makes sense, but you can always talk to me about how to maximise your website profits at Alloy CRM, Sales & Marketing Strategists

Who will be the next economic sacrifice?

The high street has taken a real battering over the last month. Some have gone down deservedly you might say. Woolworths has never really seemed to understand how modern retail works and I'm surprised that they have survived so long really.

MFI had suffered from it's appalling quality and customer service record in the past. Perhaps if they had renamed and re-branded a few years ago they might have been able to survive.

Although I don't grieve the loss of these retailers, who I didn't use anyway, my heart goes out to their staff and the many companies in their supply chain who will all lose out.

During my days in ecommerce I visited many reasonable sized businesses that were in the high street supply chain feeding goods to all of the famous high street names. I remember coming across a significant number of businesses that had one retail chain representing over 80% of it's customer base and, in some cases, 100%.

Most chains work on the 'just in time' stock principal. Which means that the retailer estimates his total supply requirements in advance. After an initial stock up, replenishment is by replacement only and it is up to the supplier to have the stock on hand to provide immediate turn around - with no commitment from the retailer to take the whole consignment if sales are bad, but penalties for you if you can't supply.

I don't know how they slept at night and I said just that to the MDs in question.

When we have a sharp economic downturn that level of reliance puts you on dangerous ground and your business can be wiped out even though your own business management and cash flow are sound.

As small business owners it is always attractive to accept business opportunities that give us 'security' by filling our order book for substantial periods. But it doesn't come without risk. I suspect there are hundreds of small businesses that spent more than 80% of their efforts pandering to MFI and Woolworths who will be left with virtually no business to speak of.

Perhaps our New Years resolution should be to spread our business across more customers and therefore spread the risk?


If you need help with a New Year sales and marketing strategy, particularly using the internet, I'll see if I can help.

Will you profit from the Google changes?

What is the point of having a website if it doesn't bring you a sale or at least high quality enquiries?

So we live and die by Googles' ability to index and rank our sites correctly to attract the right visitors. At any one time we can search ourselves on the keywords and phrases that we would like to be seen for and see exactly how we fair in the listings.

But according to search engine specialist Bruce Clay that's all about to change.

Google has, and probably always will, had to fight a battle with the 'black hat' SEO specialists who work hard to unfairly skew the rankings in their, or their clients, favour.

Google wants to maintain its standing as the leading search engine (over 80% market share in Europe) by offering the best, most useful and most appropriate web pages to us as web searchers. That's what keeps us coming back time after time.

Google has been experimenting for some time with ways to overcome the black hats by making each search unique. They are getting 'up close and personal' to help personalise each and every search that we make.

By using information gained from your previous search history, your location and a broad understanding of your 'intent' (are you looking to buy something or are you looking for information) they can create a different listing of web pages for you to view.

This is great for us as users as the results will probably be more akin to our requirements.

Google are also able now to interrogate video, flash and audio files on web sites and convert the spoken and printed word into text to help offer those in the listings too.

Overall, from a user point of view it's all good news.

How does this affect my website?

As a web site owner we still need to keep our eye on the SEO ball so that Google continues understand our site and knows when, and where, to rank it. Our problem is that we won't be able to check it's ranking for key words and phrases as that will vary from user to user.

This means that we'll need to study and understand the site analytics far more. How many people visit the site, from which keywords, how long did they stay, what pages did they view and did we gain something from them - some contact details or a sale for example?

With that information we are able to test and measure changes and influence the results without resorting to under handed tactics.

The other big change is the importance that Google is putting on what are described as 'Engagement Objects' - such as video and audio. These are seen as enhancements to the user experience and will give considerable weight to the ranking of a page. I have seen statistics that have indicated this for some time now so this element hasn't surprised me.

So the time has never been better to include video elements on your site as these changes will start to take effect during the first quarter of next year.

If you need help with video or how to make your site Search Engine Optimisation is up to scratch contact me at Alloy CRM - Sales and Marketing Strategists.

Using Themes in SEO

Using Themes in SEO

The Search Engines use a number of algorithms to determine the natural listing position for your site and pages. By helping the search engine understand the theme of your site it is better able to decide when to display a link to your pages in response to a users search query.

There are 5 key factors that influence the theme of a site:

The Domain Name
The Page Title
The Meta Tags
The Page Content
The Anchor Text of Inbound Links

If we look at a fictitious site about mobile phones and see how each of these can be used to our advantage.

The first step is to determine the best keywords and phrases to use. Let’s assume that the most appropriate for our site is ‘mobile phone’.

The Domain Name

It is always beneficial to have your main keywords included in the domain name, so mobilephone.co.uk would be a good choice.

The Page Title

The Title in the page code should be one of the first lines that the search engine robot sees when it ‘reads’ your site. This is the wording that appears in the uppermost line of the browser window. Something like ‘Mobile Phones at fantastic prices’ might be suitable and links to the domain name.

Another consideration with the Title tag is that of users adding the page to their favourites. This process takes the Title tag as the default description which makes it easier to understand when looked at in the list later.

The Meta Tags

These tags are of questionable use from a search engine ranking point of view now as it thought that these are no longer of interest to them. However the Description is used by the search engine to give a snippet in the listings to help the user decide if this page is worth viewing and, therefore, the wording is picked up by them. A 2 or 3 line paragraph that started and ended with ‘Mobile phone’ would be worth while from both a visual user point of view and to add to the ‘theme’

The Page Content

It is accepted that pages should be content rich and appropriate to the subject but including multiple references to our keyword ‘mobile phone’ would emphasise the theme once again. However it must be remembered that a human will read the text ultimately and it must therefore read fluently to ensure that a site conversion is achieved.



The Anchor Text of Inbound Links

It is widely accepted that links to your site from other sites is a key factor in determining its ranking. It has been common practise, in the past, to gain vast numbers of these from ‘link farms’ – sites set up simply to provide one way inbound links from otherwise worthless websites. The search engines have wised up to this practise and now value inbound links by the Page Ranking of the originating site. So for example a site such as bbc.co.uk, which has a Page Rank of 9/10 would provide an extremely valuable link to you. At the opposite end of the scale are sites with zero page rank which could in fact harm your own value in the eyes of the search engines.

So with that in mind there are some good ways to enhance the value of your good ranked links.

Typically links to your site would simply be the web address with a hyperlink. In our example of mobilephones.co.uk that’s not too bad at our key word is included in the domain name, but that’s not always the case.

A better alternative would be to have a short piece of text, describing your business and including your keywords, with the whole piece hyperlinked. This reinforces that the destination site is about mobile phones.



Conclusion

The processes described here are not ‘black art’, they are simply logical steps to ensure that the search engines understand exactly what you are trying to promote and give them guidance as to when they should be display your site as a suitable link.

The search engines ultimate aim is to provide its users with the best and most appropriate links to ensure that they keep coming back, using them as their search engine of choice.

All you are doing with themes is helping the search engines with that process.



If you would like help with making your website produce sales and marketing the results from SEO, SEM and PPC you are looking for call Roy Gough on 0777 556 1664 to discuss the cost effective options available.

Welcome to my new sales and marketing strategy blog.

My plan is to give my readers useful and informative tips on sales and marketing strategy to help them increase sales and profit.

More information is available on my sales, marketing and CRM site.