One of the best ways to generate leads on the Internet is through SEO (Search Engine Optimization), i.e., increasing the quantity or quality of visits from search engines – Google, Yahoo & bing – to your website. These visits are called organic search or natural search visits, to differentiate them from paid search, or Pay-Per-Click.

Quantity of organic search visits is straightforward to measure, whereas Quality is a little harder to measure. We’ll address quality in a separate post. A quick & easy benchmark answers the question: “What is a reasonable increase in organic search for my website?”

We think the increase in organic search visits to a website – either month to month or year over year – compared to the growth in overall queries made on all search engines is a good benchmark.

This graph shows the total number of search engine queries in the United States by month (Compete.com and comScore provide this information for free – see Resources at the bottom of this post).

If the growth in organic search visits to your website is better than the overall growth in queries, your organic search engine optimization efforts are paying off.

The graph shows that an absolute decrease in organic search visits indicates something is probably very wrong with your website or your business!

We calculated a benchmark using data from comScore and Compete.com:

Growth in U.S. Search Engine Queries

The following monthly growth numbers for both providers shows that there’s quite a bit of variation between their estimates, so use these numbers accordingly (don’t tie people’s bonuses to outperforming these benchmarks).

Caveats

• Your business may be fairly different from the larger search engine universe which would make this benchmark less useful for your website.
• If your business is highly seasonal, you will want to compare year over year.
• This data is for the U.S. only.

Global numbers were made available by comScore for July 2009.

According to comScore, North America accounted for 22.2%, or about 1 out of every 5 searches, in July 2009.

Global growth did outpace U.S. growth. If the U.S. makes up a very small percentage of your website’s visits, this benchmark will be less useful. You can still use the numbers here as a benchmark – just know that if your website does not handily beat them, it is performing very poorly!

Growth varies by region. Global growth was 41% from June to July compared to 0% for “expanded search” (the number above) and a 3% decline for core search (as shown on our graphs above) in the United States.

By the way, Google accounts for 2/3rds of searches in both the U.S. AND the whole world!

To conclude, your organic searches should be increasing by at least 2% every month or 10% year over year, otherwise something is wrong!

[This post will be updated periodically. - Ed.]

Sources
comScore press releases
Compete.com press releases
Global Search Market Draws More than 100 Billion Searches per Month, August 31, 2009, comScore, Inc.

Philippe Alexis and Juliette Donohue will be teaching a 2.5 hour “Workshop for Generating Leads Online” in San Jose next Thursday, February 19 from 9 to 11:30 am in San Jose ($200 before February 16).

It will give you a solid foundation into the principles of Internet marketing, and how to put them into practical use for your own website. We will also be giving out a workbook to take with you as a guide to implement the workshop recommendations.

Sign up and get more information here.

The landing page is the first web page a visitor sees on a website. This means it is a very important page. For this article, we are specifically referring to the first page she sees when she clicks on an AdWords ad (the little text-only ads you see on the right hand side of a search results page). The web address for this page is sometimes called the “destination URL” or the “clickthrough URL”.

Since the idea of placing AdWords ads is to generate an action from your website’s visitor, the landing page should help the visitor continue on the path to completing the action. She already has initiated the action by clicking on your ad. You don’t want to lose her after that – you want to “convert” her.

The best landing pages consider the visitor’s intent when she clicks on an ad. You should consider your keywords and ad’s text on that page. Ask yourself, “What information does the visitor need next in order to (fill in this blank)?” The whole point is to give the visitor what she wants and don’t make her hunt around your website for it. The best thing would be for the visitor to land on a page that gives her the most useful and accurate information about what she’s just clicked on.

The landing page may or may not be the same as your homepage. There are a few different ways to think about this:

• If you’ve advertised about a specific product or service, the landing page should prominently feature that product or service. Maybe that product or service is the only one on the page. For example, if you’re a shoe store advertising yellow boots, take the visitor to the yellow boots page, not the homepage.
• If you’re have a special offer, your landing page should make the special offer very obvious. The special offer might be the only topic on that page.
• If your ad references a section of your business, such as “cat boarding” in a veterinary hospital, you would want the user to land on the cat boarding services page of your website (not the homepage).
• If your ad advertises your whole business, for example “cat boarding”, your landing page would probably be your home page.

Another reason to provide quality landing pages is that it could end up costing you less. According to Google:

“As a component of your keywords’ overall Quality Scores, a high landing page quality score can affect your AdWords account in three ways: Decrease your keywords’ cost-per-clicks (CPCs), Increase your keyword-targeted ads’ position on the content network, Improve the chances that your placement-targeted ads will win a position on your targeted placements.”

Over the past few years, Google has made changes to its algorithms for landing page quality in AdWords and Google’s guidelines have changed as well. We recommend reviewing Google’s current guidelines on Quality Score. What’s useful to know here is that Google is looking at your website the same way a potential visitor would.

Real Examples

I googled “acupuncture for headaches”. Here are the Google search results:

"Acupuncture for Headaches" on the Google Search Results Page

Here’s what happened when I clicked each of the four Sponsored Search links on the right side of the screen:

Moss Acupuncture took me to this San Francisco clinic’s homepage. The list of commonly treated conditions on the homepage includes “headaches” and contact information. The website also includes a web page with a longer list of commonly treated conditions.

Acupressure took me to the home page of the National Holistic Institute with 5 locations in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Migraine Relief lets me sign up for a clinical study in California about migraine headache relief run by PRI Research.

Acupuncture Walnut Creek is an acupuncturist in Walnut Creek. Notice that the clinic’s actual address is listed (and the advertiser lists its phone number right in the ad text). The landing page is the “Services” page, which gives the acupuncturist’s biography, a list of commonly treated conditions and contact information.

If you were an SF Bay Area acupuncturist specializing in headaches and used local AdWords search, you’d be one of three advertisers for this keyword that accurately matched the keyword used, and you could do a much better job with your landing page just by reading this article.

Landing Page Content
Figuring out and answering the questions your visitors will have is the key to an effective landing page which results in conversions.

Taking the above example, some of the things I might want to know if I were to land on an Acupuncture clinic page include:

• Is the acupuncturist licensed or accredited? Is this the industry standard?
• Is the acupuncturist experienced? How many years has he been practicing? Did he go to a good school?
• Does he specialize in particular conditions?
• How long does treatment last? How will I know that this treatment is going to be effective?
• Can I use my medical insurance?
• I want to feel comfortable about the acupuncturist, the facility and the acupuncture process.
• Does he have referrals from Western doctors or other clients?
• Does he give well-thought out and useful information on his website?
• Does he know a little about a lot of alternative therapies or a lot about acupuncture?
• Can I get sense of what sort of person the acupuncturist is? Are there photos?
• How do I make an appointment or ask questions?
• If I had a specific condition that I had typed into Google, I would want to know if he treated it and about his experience and knowledge of treatment of that condition.

When setting up or refining your AdWords, ask yourself what the intent of a visitor typing those keywords into Google might be and how well does your landing page serve her needs. This will increase your Quality Score, and more importantly, increase the likelihood of your visitor “converting” when she reaches your website.

References
Wikipedia entry on landing pages
Seth Godin on Landing Pages
Google AdWords Landing Page & Site Quality Guidelines
Inside AdWords, the Google AdWords blog
Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing for Dummies, Peter Kent, 2006.

[Thank you to Tracy Rabold for this article - Ed.]

Every quarter I teach an Online Marketing Course for the Small Business Development Center Technology Advisory Program (SBDC TAP). It is not an online marketing course, but rather a real life course about online marketing – about how to promote your site on the Internet.
I try to make it as practical as possible, with a lot of “live” examples where we analyse websites and techniques (there is an Internet connection so we can go to actual sites in real time). We cover Search Engine Optmization, content creation, the importance of keywords, setting up an AdWord campaign (Search Engine Marketing) and more. It's a bargain at $25!

Here are the upcoming dates and locations for my course for the Third Quarter of 2006:

Sep 14 5:00-8:00 PM
San Jose – San Jose Entrepreneur Center, 84 W. Santa Clara Street, San Jose, CA 95113

Sep 26 5:30-8:30 PM
Oakland – Cal State East Bay SBDC Training Center – 1000 Broadway, Suite 109, Oakland, CA 94607

You can register online too.

UPDATE – THESE COURSES HAVE BEEN CANCELLED AND WILL BE MOVED TO THE FALL

Hope to see some of you there!

The questions you're probably asking yourself are “what is a keyword analysis?” and “why should I do one?”. A keyword analysis will determine what the most effective words or phrases are for your web content and keyword advertising. By effective, I mean “most likely to lead to conversion”, be that a sale, a phone call or a newsletter subscription. The value in using effective keywords is it can increase the probability of your website being found in Search Engine search results, and it can increase recognition and credibility in your visitors' eyes.

Here's a real life example to illustrate this point. A client of mine had a product which he called an electronic scarecrow, which was searched for approximately zero times per day. We changed how the product was described to electronic bird control and now that is the keyword his site is most often found under. Also, a visitor to his site will take less time to understand what he is selling – product recognition will be improved.

There are three parts to a keyword analysis:

A. Discovering the keywords
B. Evaluating the keywords
C. Using the keywords

By the way, when I say keywords I really mean key phrases, as in what a searcher would type into a search box. Even though they are usually phrases of two or more words, they are usually referred to as keywords.

A. DISCOVERING KEYWORDS

1. Draw up an initial list
There will be quite a few “obvious” keywords you and your colleagues can simply come up with

2. Look at your referral logs
If you've already have had your site up for some time, looking at how people find you already is an invaluable resource. If you don't know how to see your traffic logs, ask your web hosting company. If they don't know either, switch web hosting companies! Also check out Google Analytics for a powerful and free way to access this information.

A real life keyword referral log snippet from a yoga blog

3. Look at competitors' metatags
Go to your competitors' sites look at the source code of some of their pages (select View-> Source from the browser's menu bar). The tag should be near the top of the page, and see if you can find useful keyword ideas (thanks Peter Kent for the tip).
Also don't stop at the metatags, look at the pages themselves, and observe which words and phrases are used in the titles, headings and text.

4. Use Overture.com's tool
Overture.com (bought by Yahoo!) has an invaluable free Keyword Selector Tool which gives you alternate suggestions for searches. For example, a search for homeopathy will list homeopathy medicine, homeopathy remedy, abc homeopathy and homeopathy training as the most popular searches.

UPDATE 2/19/07: Overture's tool has become increasingly unreliable. Google has introduced a Keyword Tool which used to be available only to AdWord accounts, but it is now free for all to use and has become an essential part of our own keyword analysis here at no diamonds:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

5. Refine list
There are several ways to add to your list, especially for your top ten keywords:
- spelling mistakes (calender)
- synonyms (home – house)
- singulars and plurals (shoe vs shoes)
- hyphenation (ecommerce vs e-commerce)
- geographic add-ons (palo alto doctor)

Now you should have a list of at least 10 keywords and maybe more than 100. Try to order them by importance to your site.

B. EVALUATING KEYWORDS

1. Search Popularity
WordTracker is the most popular fee-based online keyword research tool (about $8 per day or $250 per year). It will give you estimates of the number of searches performed for each keyword across all Search Engines, and will tell you how many sites appear in the search results giving you an idea of the competition. The site DigitalPoint.com allows you to use Wordtracker and Overture for free, but only for one keyword at a time.

Another good tool is SEObookwhich aggregates results from Overture, Wordtracker and more.

These will help you determine the relative popularity of search terms.

Here is a useful list of free online resources for keyword analysis from WebSiteTips.com.

2. Historical Trends
Google Trends shows you how up to five keywords rate against each other over time. This tool will give you an insight over the relative popularity of terms and highlight seasonality. Valentine's Day searches peak in February for example.

Google Trends can highlight seasonality in searches, as well as relative popularity

3. Focusing
Now that you know more about your keywords, eliminate the ones that are too general and the ones that are too specific. That is difficult to define exactly, but an example would be that solar is too general, solar power home installation is too specific, and solar power installation may be just right.

C. USING KEYWORDS

Now you should have a list of at least 10 keywords you have selected as most likely to provide targeted leads.

1. Place the keywords in your website (or if the terms below sound like foreign terms to you, get your webmaster to do it):
– Title Tag of every page
– MetaTags (not so important anymore)
– Headlines and Sub-headings
– Body Text
– Alt tags
– Title Attributes of hyperlinks
– File names and URLs

2. Start an AdWord Campaign
Having done this keyword analysis, you can use it as a basis for a Pay Per Click Google AdWord campaign. The finer details of that will be for another post!

I've been teaching an Online Marketing Course for the Small Business Development Center Technology Advisory Program (SBDC TAP) since 2005. The course is subsidized by the Small Business Administration and costs $25 for 3 hours.

Here are the upcoming dates and locations for my course for the Second Quarter of 2006:

May 2 5:00-8:00 PM
San Francisco – San Francisco Entrepreneur Center – 455 Market St. 6th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105

May 10 2:30-5:30 PM
Oakland – Cal State East Bay SBDC Training Center – 1000 Broadway, Suite 109, Oakland, CA 94607

June 5 5:00-8:00 PM
San Jose – San Jose Entrepreneur Center, 84 W. Santa Clara Street, San Jose, CA 95113

You can register online.

There are many other courses offered at very good rates:

• Small Office Computer Networking Made Simple
• Smart Tools to Manage Your Small Business Finances
• Successful Business Contacts Management with MS Outlook
• Technology Tools to Succeed in the Retail Business
• Web Fundamentals and eCommerce Principles

Maybe I'll get to meet some of you there!

This year local search is really taking off:

So, the question is, how do local searchers search?

For shoes they type “Kansas City Shocks” or “Omaha shoes”
For an accountant it's “Chicago west suburb accountant”
For computer programming it's “Idaho .Net programmer”

That's the reality of search on the local level and the search engines get it and are rushing in to be the big players in the local directory game and deliver search results all around town instead of just around the world..

This is from Duct Tape Marketing, who is offering a new service to submit to the many local Search Engines. Here's the handy list of the main local Search Engines' submittal pages:

Google Local – https://www.google.com/local/add/login?hl=en_US
Yahoo Local – http://listings.local.yahoo.com/
Super Pages – http://www.superpages.com/about/new_chg_listing.html
City Search – https://selfenroll.citysearch.com/
True Local – http://www.truelocal.com/getlisted.aspx
SwitchBoard –
http://www.switchboard.com/cobrands/sb/help_yp.asp#YP31
YellowPages.com –
http://www.yellowpages.com/sp/contact/update.jsp
Local.com – http://www.local.com/partner.htm
Insider Pages – http://www.insiderpages.com/
Judy’s Book – http://www.judysbook.com/merchant/

Some logos from thelogocompany.net: creative and cheap

There are many affordable ways to get a corporate identity. Wired Magazine recently conducted a test of some cheap logo providers. They invented a company and asked online shops to create a logo for them. Unfortunately the online version of the article Grading the logo shops does not show the logos they came up with.

The top 3 were these (all comments are from Wired):

- The Logo Company
Service: Three business days; $75. Fast and easy. Ordering was a breeze, and they gave us four decent, relevant designs.
[You can see examples of their work here on the left.]
Grade: B+

- The Logo Loft
Service: Four business days and four options; $99. Sue, the customer service rep, called – called! – to clarify our order.
Grade: B
UPDATE 4/07: A client has had a negative experience with this company recently

- Logo Design Creation
Service: Overnight; $69. Placed the order at the end of one day and got three logos to choose from the next morning. Hey, we are living in the future!
Grade: B-

Gotlogos which I mentioned in the post Making small business look big, cheaply, only got a C+ because

Can't call customer service. Charged an extra $50 for a hi-res digital file of our logo.

I bought The Search today (not online – in my local bookstore!) the new must-have book by search guru John Batelle.

A fact which stood out is the cost of acquiring new customers across different advertising channels:

Search $8.5
Yellow Pages $20
Email $60
Direct Mail $70

The numbers come from a Piper Jaffray study. It shows that AdWords are almost 3 times as effective as Yellow Page ads, and almost 10 times as effective as direct mail. They also require many fewer trees.

Peter Kent is the author of Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, a book I highly recommend because apart from being a goldmine of information on Search Engines, it is well written with a lot of humor, and the opposite of dry and powerpointy.

not just for dummies

The phrase Internet marketing often conjures just 2 forms of it: Search Engine Opitmization and AdWords. Hidden within Peter's consulting website is a Powerpoint presentation with a list of 33 ways to promote a website. Here it is; I have divided it by online and offline categories:

Online ways to promote your website:

- Search Engine Optimization
- Pay Per Click / AdWords
- Banner Advertising
- Trusted Feeds
- Build it and they will come

no wonder he has a great sense of humor, he is British

- Directory Registration (Including Specialty Directories)
- Link Placement
- Reciprocal Linking
- Local Directories
- Selling on eBay
- Shopping Directories
- Blogs – Your Own
- Blogs – Other People’s
- Affiliate Programs
- Coupon, Discount, & Freebie Sites
- E-mail Newsletters – Your Own
- E-mail Newsletters – Other People’s
- E-mail “Bulletins”
- “Giveaways” on Other People’s Sites
- Content Syndication
- Product Syndication (wallpaper, utilities)
- Browser Toolbars
- Viral Marketing
- Specialty Directories (e.g., Knowledgestorm)

Offline ways to promote your website:

- Advertise Through Existing Offline Ads
- Dedicated Offline Advertising Campaigns
- Push People to the Site from Your Brick-and-Mortar Store
- Offline PR
- Yellow Pages
- Direct Mail
- Community Marketing
- Offline Promotional Tie-Ins
- Customer Referrals
- In-Package Promotions