Marketing Trenches

We talk a lot about social media on Marketing Trenches.  And for good reason – Social media seems to be at least one item on the agenda for about 90% of the meetings we have these days.  Everyone wants to run 100 miles an hour to do something on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.  I wrote about this previously in Want to Succeed In Social Media? It Sure Helps to Have a Strategy.

A big part of any strategic plan is revisiting that plan –  Making sure you are doing all the things you should, adjusting the pieces that aren’t working and continuing to optimize the pieces that are.  Sometimes though, we get so excited for the newest, shiniest, brightest, sparkliest things that we neglect the basics.  Herndon Hasty’s recent article in Search Engine Watch, That’s so 2004: Everything Old Is New Again, reinforces this – both from  a Social Media and Search Engine Optimization perspective.  I encourage you to read the whole article, but here’s one quick excerpt:

Blogging: The Oldest Social Media

In the midst of the discussions about Twitter strategies and how to build a Facebook fan page, the huge value that a company-driven blog offers has gotten lost in the shuffle. Maybe it’s because it’s easier to think about reaching out to potential customers in 140-character snippets, maybe it’s because these sites have already built the platform for us rather than having to create one ourselves, but keeping a blog for your company still brings value to your site and your brand that these newer social outlets can’t.

Combine a drive by the engines for fresh content with SEO value that newer social media can’t touch. It’s an invaluable channel that’s frequently overlooked and neglected — in many cases because it’s not the word on everyone’s lips at the moment. Remember, if you have enough news and content to Twitter about, you have enough to blog about.

I couldn’t agree more.  We like to view a blog as the hub for your social media efforts.  It serves as the platform that feeds the rest of those efforts, and it has undeniable SEO value.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s incredibly important to have a social media strategy that encompasses all the places you should be — just don’t neglect our old friend the blog.

Agree? Disagree? Feel free to share your thoughts in our comments section.

About the Author: Will Davis is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing.  Don’t hesitate to drop Will a comment on this post.  If you liked this post, follow @willdavis on Twitter for more commentary like this.

Whenever a conversation starts around the topic of social media, inevitably I find a number of people that immediately question the value and want to see some ROI numbers before getting involved.  We’ve talked about both sides of this discussion before in many posts, most notably Businesses: Stay Away From Social Media If You Meet The Following Criteria and Social Media: Justify Your Love With the Right ROI Approach.

Just today I came across this research in B to B magazine, which seems to once again prove some value to social media activity, particular as it relates to search

Social media searchers seek out ‘lower funnel’ terms

Internet users exposed to brands via social networks subsequently search for “lower funnel” terms associated with those brands, indicating a higher propensity to convert, according to new study.

The study, “The Influenced: Social Media, Search and the Interplay of Consideration and Consumption”-conducted by digital marketing company comScore and social media agency M80-found Internet users exposed to a brand in a social media setting were 1.7 times more likely to later search for that brand using keywords associated with a high level of loyalty and propensity to buy, compared with searchers not engaged with social media.

The study also showed a 50% increase in paid search click-through rates when Internet users were exposed first to social media mentioning a brand. The online survey, which drew 2,000 respondents, was conducted from May through July.

One of the basic tenets of branding is to build recognition and loyalty.  And, whether online or off, we’ve known for a long time now that building a strong brand can feed search engine success.  Social media is just one more place where that can happen, and as the study above proves, the payoff can be big.

So, what should you do about it?  I think there are 2 key takeaways:

1). If you have waited to develop a social media strategy until you have had the justification, this might just be it.

Note: Throwing it to the intern to figure out is not a strategy.  While that person may help you to execute on a strategy, the strategy itself shouldn’t come from someone rental companies don’t trust enough to rent a car to for four more years.  Social media should have a  role consistent with your overall marketing plan.

2). If your social media activities are generating more highly qualified searches, make sure you are maximizing your ability to be found there.

Do everything you can from a Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing perspective to ensure those highly qualified searchers will find you.  We know they will be out there looking and you need to maximize your opportunities to capture these high value searchers.

About the Author: Will Davis is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing.  Don’t hesitate to drop Will a comment on this post.  If you liked this post, follow Will on Twitter for more commentary like this.

We’ve written on this blog previously about the importance of content and how writing is often undervalued, whether for a press release, website, social media, email or really anything else.  Just as important as having the right content and writing well is having the right tone.

People connect with – and buy from – people, or at least the brand’s personality.  Make sure your approach to your content represents your company’s personality.  If you are a creative services company and a bit irreverent, your tone should reflect that.  At the same time, you probably don’t want your medical institution to attempt to be hilarious.  And, if you don’t know what your company’s personality is, this exercise did a great job fleshing out a bigger issue.

Then, make sure you are consistent.  Mike talked about this a bit earlier this week in his post Fall Cleaning: Clean Up Your Online Brand.  Ensure your content and tone carry over from one vehicle to the next, from your website to your emails, to your interviews.  Too many times we see this sacrificed — the classic mistakes of needing to get an email campaign out now and not having  the time to make sure it’s written right, or the belief that you need as much content as we can throw up there to help our SEO, it doesn’t matter how it reads are just two common examples.  Make sure you take the right approach and stay consistent.

Earlier this week we had a great meeting with a firm.  One of the first things they mentioned was that they wanted to meet with us because our website read just like it was written by them, that the tone was right in line with theirs.

Too often I end up reading content that reminds me of the boring guy in the corner at a party.  Sure, that person may have a lot of facts and information, but with zero personality it’s tough to really make an impact.  Think of that next time you write content yourself or hire a writer, it demonstrates that the tone is often even more important than the content.

After all, didn’t everyone like Norm better than Cliff Claven?

About the Author: Will Davis is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing.  Don’t hesitate to drop Will a comment on this post.  If you liked this post, follow Will on Twitter for more commentary like this.

About two months ago, I put together a post on the five ways professional services firms should use Twitter.  From a readership standpoint, that post represents one of the all-time top five posts on Marketing Trenches.  More importantly, we received a number of emails from professional services types praising the content and asking for more. 

If it’s more you want, it’s more we’ll give.  This time, we’ll address search engine optimization, also known as SEO, and the common mistakes that professional services firms make in an attempt to address this area.

One quick note: While these mistakes are pretty typical in the professional services arena, most of these are universal mistakes that any type of organization can make.  You’ll just have to trust me on that, as I’ve seen some pretty poor SEO efforts.

That being said, here are some of the most common areas in which professional services firms falter with regards to SEO:

1. Setting unrealistic goals for SEO with regards to rankings, timing and business impact.

As we’ve said before in this blog, SEO is a necessary tactic for just about every professional services firm.  Your firm will not, however, be able to secure a top 10 ranking on a keyword like “tax attorney” without a focused, long-term SEO strategy.  Your firm will also not be able to secure any type of top 10 rankings, with the exception of true long tail keywords, for at least 3-6 months.  And SEO, generally speaking, will not turn around the fortunes of a professional services firm. 

SEO is necessary, but it should be a component of a larger marketing strategy, and not THE marketing strategy.

2. Assuming that SEO work can be done in-house entirely.

Let me clarify something quickly.  SEO work can be done in-house, but only if your professional services firm falls into one of these categories:

• You have a legitimate SEO expert on staff.  This is highly unlikely in most professional services firms that aren’t in the marketing category.
• You have someone on staff that can write well, code well, understands SEO basics and is willing to put in the significant time required to learn advanced SEO tactics and to put in the actual work required to execute those tactics.
• You have someone on staff that possesses some of the qualities above and is working in parallel with an external SEO expert to implement your firm’s SEO program.

If your firm doesn’t fall into one of those categories, consider hiring a company that knows what they’re doing.  Just be careful about your evaluation of these firms, as for every legit SEO firm you will run into a snake oil salesman or two.

3. Ignoring off-page SEO.

Not long ago, on-page SEO was considered the blocking and tackling component of SEO, and off-page SEO was considered “advanced”.  Not anymore.  If your SEO effort stops at putting up some meta tags and walking away, don’t count on any significant SEO success. 

4. Not taking advantage of existing content in the form of web pages, video, pdfs, press releases, etc.

Once again, let me remind you that content is king for marketing.  If you have it - and most professional services firms have it in abundance - and you’re not using it for SEO purposes, you’re missing the boat.  Why would you NOT use content you’ve already produced if it’s going to improve your chances of achieving your SEO goals?

5. Downplaying the SEO value of blogging.

The blog post you are reading right now will be read by more people, and eventually rank higher in the search engines, than 80% of the pages on our primary corporate website.  There are a variety of reasons for that, but it should serve as a clear illustration for why you should not ignore blogging as a major factor in search engine optimization and overall marketing success.

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A colleague of mine often says “Your website should be as good as your best salesperson” – which for many organizations is easier said than done.  Those of you who read this blog regularly know we always advocate looking at your overall marketing strategy, your web marketing strategy as a set of that, and your website itself as a piece of that.

In addition to looking at the big picture, sometimes it helps to slice off a few clear and actionable improvements you can take.  Some organizations have never done all 3 of the steps outlined below, while for others this is a chance to get back to basics and make sure you haven’t lost site of these 3 keys.  Here’s 3 key steps you can do to make your web presence work harder.

1). Take an Honest Look at Your Search Presence

We all know that search engines play a huge role in the web — In fact, 80% of online session start with a search  engine (via  PC Magazine).  So, even if you are doing everything you can to get the word out on your brand and website in other media, if you don’t have a significant presence in search you may be sunk.  Since search is where people go first when they go online, you need an effective search strategy — both paid and organic — to make sure that you will be found.  So take an honest look at your search presence, look with a keen eye and really re-evaluate everything.  Once you ahve done that and reformulated your strategy (or confirmed it was right all along), start working on keyword testing in paid search and SEO (learn more in a  previous post The Obvious Yet Underused Way to Build an SEO Program) and continue to monitor and adjust as you go, utilizing your analytics systems as a guide for what’s working and what isn’t.

2). Segment Your Audiences and Match Their Expectations

Too often we see campaigns where all visitors are sent to the same generic homepage, which may not speak to a segment’s particular needs.  One of the things we love about the web as marketers is it is trackable and customizable. So, for example, if you are a bank and know you have a prospect looking for CD rates, make sure you take them to a page about CDs.  If they are looking for mortgage refinancing make sure you take them to a page about refinancing, not new loans.  Utilize targeted landing pages and microsites in order to better match the prospect’s expectations and you’ll see much better results (see our previous post Microsite or Landing Page? to learn more on when to use landing pages and microsite ).  While these examples seem obvious, I’m constantly amazed by how many organizations aren’t doing them.  This feeds right back into #1, if you match your customers expectations when they come to your site, your campaigns — whether search, social media, print, or anything else — are just about guaranteed to perform better.

3). Optimize your Conversion Opportunities

So you’ve knocked down items 1 and 2 – what’s next?  Well, some people still think getting traffic to your website and getting a few leads is doing the whole job.  Getting visitors to your website is really just the first step, what we really want to do is convert those visitors by making them take your key actions.  That generally means converting them to leads by an activity such as filling out a form, converting them to customers by an activity such as an online purchase, or sometimes by an activity such as viewers of key information like using a retail locator to the nearest store.  By reviewing your analytics, you can develop a baseline for your conversion activity.  Then, begin to test different variables against this baseline, including copy approaches, offers, calls to action, imagery, landing pages, form fields and other variables.  By understanding and continually optimizing your conversion opportunities you’ll get much more value out of your marketing activities.

Whether you are new to online marketing or a seasoned veteran just circling back to make sure you are still doing the basics right, these 3 steps will make your web presence work harder.

About the Author: Will Davis is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing.  Don’t hesitate to drop Will a comment on this post.  If you liked this post, follow Will on Twitter for more commentary like this.

So you got yourself involved with a startup company.  It may have happened by circumstance or by choice.  You’re either a founder or one of the first employees.  You either envision your concept as a potential single to be flipped in 3-4 years, or a grand slam that will allow you to socialize with the likes of Brin, Bezos and Cuban.

Awesome.  We all love a good startup story. 

Unless you’ve got an inherently viral concept on your hands (and by the way, keep in mind that there have only been about 5 inherently viral products introduced over the past 5-7 years), you’re going to need to put a significant emphasis on marketing.  I wrote an earlier post about the necessity of bringing marketing expertise to your internal/external team, but this post isn’t designed to belabor that point.

You’re going to need to do certain things during your first 90 days to survive and show some traction from a marketing standpoint.  Why 90 days?  It’s simple.  Business plans are great for fundraising and for attracting senior-level employees, but executing on a 5-10 year grand vision usually happens in pieces.  I happen to believe that this execution is best broken down into 90-day pieces.

One caveat before we get into the list.  All of the items below are tactics.  Tactics that do not flow from a broader strategy usually fail at some point.  Build a sound marketing strategy - identify goals, build your messaging, pinpoint target audiences - before you start getting tactical.

Here are the 10 marketing items every startup should consider executing within the first 90 days of operation:

1.  Build a clean, easy to navigate website.

I know.  Quite an “outside the box” statement.  All I can say is that people still miss on this first step, and miss in an embarrassing way.  Remember this - depending on which web genius you listen to, you have between 3-10 seconds just to convince a visitor to move further on your site. 

And if you’re a startup that doesn’t think you need a web site at all, I wish you luck.  No need to read further.

2.  Create a blog, post quality content, and learn how to market it.

You’re still reading this post because you find the content interesting and the site doesn’t look half bad.  You’re here because you found the content via a search engine, another website, or perhaps a social media property like Twitter or LinkedIn.  

If your website is your brochure (and hopefully it doesn’t look like one), then your blog is your platform to express your ideas and distribute some of your marketing content.

3.  Spend the time to do the basic SEO work, or have someone do it for you.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), generally speaking, rarely will impact your business in the short-term.  That being said, if anyone tells you that SEO is dead and you shouldn’t worry about it, toss them out the window like the guy in the Bud Light commercial.  Even the most basic SEO work, if done appropriately, will pay significant dividends eventually.

4.  Do some public relations, or at a bare minimum issue a press release surrounding your launch.

Not every startup can afford to spend thousands of dollars a month on retaining a public relations agency, but that’s not an excuse to ignore public relations.  You can get a high quality press release written, distributed and pitched for as little as $1,500 - $2,000, even less if you do some of it yourself. 

Is there a good reason NOT to announce your business?  Afraid of a poor first impression on the media and consumers of your product?  If so, you may be facing a product problem or a problem with other elements in your marketing mix.

5.  Get involved in social media.

Notice that I didn’t say to rush out, join all 10,000 social media properties and start posting.  As always, with social media, my advice is to join, listen, learn, then post.  Most startups join and post.  They don’t even acknowledge the listen and learn part.  Startups are typically in a rush to show some traction, and unfortunately some investors judge traction based on Twitter followers, Facebook friends, and LinkedIn connections.  That’s just silly, almost as silly as the valuations those investors placed on the revenue-less companies of dot-com boom times.

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In Tuesday’s 5 Marketing Misconceptions That Need to Change post, Will covered some of the misguided statements we hear from clients.  If I only had a nickel for every time we hear those types of statements….

In the spirit of fairness, I am determined to defend the marketers who make these types of statements.  Here’s what Will left out - often times these misguided comments originate from an agency, consultant or service provider that the company has put its trust in.  So let’s look for some warning signs. 

If you hear your agency, consultant or service provider make any of these five statements, consider running.

1.) Hi, I’m Mike from XXX National Directory/Search/Ad Network Company, and I am a Marketing Consultant with the company.  I am here to help you build your marketing plan.

RUN! FAST! Nothing against these folks (really), but selling Yellow Pages or even a “boxed” pay-per-click solution does not make you a marketing consultant.  It makes you someone that is trying to sell Yellow Pages or a “boxed” pay-per-click solution.  There’s nothing wrong with selling.  God knows we all do it in some form or fashion, but please don’t try to mislead people by calling yourself a marketing consultant.

Clarification: If you are in fact interesting in purchasing what essentially amounts to an advertising package, by all means engage with these folks.  Just don’t expect to get any marketing strategy advice out of them.

2.) If you choose us for your SEO project, we can guarantee multiple top 10 rankings on your targeted keywords.

I thought these people had gone away, but it appears they’re back in full force.  And I can’t blame clients for listening.  When someone tells you they can guarantee results, it’s hard to ignore.

That being said, let’s all say this together:  SEO is not a quick fix, set it and forget it solution for driving traffic .  The best SEO strategies I’ve seen involve a long-term commitment to the creation of relevant content, building that content in multiple formats, and finding multiple distribution channels for that content.

I am guessing there are companies that make an SEO guarantee and do follow through on it.  I am also guessing that those guarantees are made on keywords like “patent attorneys that also handle divorce cases in reston virginia”.

3.) You really can’t afford to wait on addressing social media.  We should build out your presence on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter right away.

Stop.  Please.  We all realize that social media is important, even though it’s getting a bit crowded.  Like anything else though, you shouldn’t build anything if it doesn’t fit into a more strategic plan. 

Some of these groups will bait you with the promise of thousands of Twitter followers, Facebook friends, or LinkedIn connections overnight.  Great.  Go ahead and recruit thousands of followers, all of whom could care less about your message.  They’re following you because they’re trolling for followers as well.  And the followers/friends/connections you do want?  You’ll turn them off quick with the hundreds of meaningless updates you’ll have to post to accumulate all the meaningless followers.

Build a social media strategy.  Make sure it ties back to your overall marketing strategy.  Then join, listen, learn, and eventually execute.  It’s that simple.

And one more thing, and I know this will be painful for some “social media gurus” to hear.  Social media is NOT a necessity, nor is it necessarily effective, for every business and business category.

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When I explain our business to people, I immediately get hit with questions.  And I love questions — it shows people are paying attention, interested and engaged (or at least somewhat good at pretending to be).  So questions are always good.  Sometimes what I hear, though, is somebody really looking for us to confirm a myth for them.  A few of those questions seem to come up time and time again and are easy to spot.  Here my Top 5 right now:

1). Why should we be on Twitter?  I don’t care what you had for breakfast.

Well sure, I don’t care what I had for breakfast either, or probably what anyone else had for breakfast.  Just like any other communications or content channel, there are folks using this channel well and some using it not so well.  We have already published a few posts on good ways you might use Twitter already (Read more on Measuring Social Media ROI, and on Five Ways Professional Services Firms Can Use Twitter) so I won’t go into detail here again.  But, just keep in mind most of the same people who think Twitter is about telling people what you had for breakfast thought bloggers were just a bunch of people living in their parents’ basement and would never have an impact.

2). I should just put my whole marketing budget in PPC search, that will be my most effective marketing right?

Maybe – but it really depends on your marketing objectives, industry, goals, products, services, and everything else.  PPC Search is great for many businesses, but it usually isn’t a magic bullet, but rather part of an overall plan.  Often we find PPC is a testing ground for a more informed Search Engine Optimization (Read more on The Obvious Yet Underused Way to Build an SEO Program)  and that we run the two together, or that PPC search doesn’t meet your goals.  My advice – Never put all your eggs in one basket.

3). Why should we have our marketing team do anything with Social Media?  We have an intern here that can get us up to speed.

I seem to be hearing this one more and more often now.  While your intern may be ahead of you on the social media front because he/she has more friends than you do on Facebook, that doesn’t mean they are the right person to handle strategic marketing.  Having extra help in managing your online presences is great – indeed it can be time intensive — but make sure you have the right strategy and a plan in place that you can then engage people (including maybe the intern) in helping to execute.  And, like with anything else – Make sure you bring in the right help to generate that plan if you aren’t equipped to do it yourself.

4). Why would I use landing pages for our campaigns?  That’s why my website has a home page.

We’ve talked about when you should use a landing page vs. a microsite in more detail before (read Microsite or Landing Page?), but it’s important to understand a landing page can speak to a specific audience and ask for specific actions, while your home page by nature has to be much more general in nature.  Utilize landing pages for campaigns when appropriate rather than pushing everything to the home page and your conversion rates will increase.

5). I just need to reach a bunch of people, can’t I just buy an email list?

(Preparing for backlash from list brokers…awaiting angry emails…OK, let’s go)

In all my experience I have never seen a client have great success with a “bought” or “rented” list.  There are opportunities to engage folks via email, but where I have seen success is in mailing to those that have truly, clearly opted in to hear from you, and from placements in relevant emails that follow this same principle.  Your results may vary, but if nothing else you are tempting fate on a huge spam backlash, blacklisting, etc.  I think you are most likely to be successful with many other strategies and tactics before this one.

What are the misconceptions you run into most frequently?  Feel free to submit your own in our comments section below

About the Author: Will Davis is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing.  Don’t hesitate to drop Will a comment on this post.  Follow Will on Twitter for more commentary like this.

At least a few times a week, we find ourselves talking to a company about search engine strategies.  Often, the conversation starts with something along the lines of:

“I really just need some SEO to get people to my website, do you do that?”

Usually, that then evolves into a discussion about the company’s overall business objectives and how we can fit this into a search strategy –- with an explanation of the difference between pay per click vs. organic listings as a key piece of that.

While we have talked about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in this space a number of times before, what I want to focus on this time is how to determine which keywords and phrases to target.

And, a way to get the right keywords that is so simple, and so obvious, and yet most companies don’t even consider.

But, first, let’s back up a bit for a quick high level snapshot of how search engines rank your site.

In simple terms, there are 2 main components to the way the search engines rank you.  The first is on page, meaning what is on your site and how the search engines read your content, structure, tags and titles.  This is a key piece in having the engines understand who you are and what you do.  You address this through ensuring your site is using the right titles, tags and other key content pieces.  The second piece is credibility, which is determined by the volume of credible links to your site from other websites.   Google and other search engines look at these as a “vote” for you, causing your site to be found more and have more credibility.  You address this through building quality links, utilizing techniques such as articles and widgets to gain links that drive both search engines and people to your site.

With that background in mind, where do you start?  Often we find we are working with a client in a very search competitive industry who just launched a new website or is lagging behind their competition form a search standpoint.

The key here if you want to make an impact is to go into it with the right approach.  First, acknowledge that to move the needle you will need a bit of time, particularly if  your site is relatively new, has only a couple of links to it or does not have a large density of content.  So, one of the things you will want to do to improve your natural search opportunities is work on these along with getting your website titled, tagged and optimized on page and then continuing to build credible relevant links on a monthly basis that increase your organic ranking.

To do this right way you will want to make sure you are choosing the right keywords for your optimization.  Since SEO is a long term undertaking with incremental improvement, you’ll want to make sure you target the right words when you start that effort — otherwise you could use a whole lot of energy optimizing around your worst prospects rather than your best.

So, while you want to target the natural search listings with the optimization, in order to make sure you get it right we often will recommend starting with a limited pay per click campaign as a research bed.  We’ll do this to determine which keywords convert to leads or sales rather than just which ones our gut intuitively tells us will perform.  We do this as a limited test to make sure we build the data to understand which keywords are converting to leads and then use those as the keywords we target from an SEO perspective.

For example, let’s say your company sells the ever popular widget (how did somebody miss out on patenting this item that was so popular in algebra class?).  Before you undertake a long term search engine optimization it’s critical to know which terms aren’t just getting people to your website, but converting to leads or sales for those widgets.  Maybe terms like “large widget” perform better than “small widget” or “imported widget” or “cogs” or “sprockets” — By running all of these in a test PPC campaign  we can get some actionable data on which are the right terms to optimize around and then undertake that optimization, rather than just jumping in blindly.  Sure, you may say, you have web analytics and they show you who comes to the website and how they got there.  But, keep in mind they are only showing you part of the story — the people that got there not the ones that didn’t.  By testing different keywords we can then benchmark success and roll those keywords into a more effective SEO plan.

Now, instead of spending all of your effort investing in optimizing against the keywords you think might work, you are building actionable data for a more informed optimization and only paying on a per visitor basis.  And, sell more widgets, or cogs, or sprockets — or whatever it is you do.

About the Author: Will Davis is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing.  Don’t hesitate to drop Will a comment on this post.  Follow Will on Twitter for more commentary like this.

Content is king from a marketing standpoint - now more than ever.  Can you really market anything without some form of content?  Think about it for a second.  Review every marketing vehicle you use, and try to identify one that doesn’t involve some form of content production.

If content is king, then what is the king’s most important weapon?  Another easy answer.  Writing.  And it’s not even close.

Writing is one of the most undervalued pieces of the marketing puzzle.

Let’s do a quick review of some marketing vehicles and how poor writing impacts each:

• Press Release: Don’t even write it if you’re not going to do it professionally.  Journalists and your consumer/business audience will stop reading when they hit the first piece of evidence of poor writing.

• Website: You know that rule, the one that says you have 10-15 seconds to capture a visitor’s attention and convince them to dive further into the site?  You know what can expedite that departure time?  Poor writing.

• SEO: Writing is far more important for SEO than most “experts” are willing to admit.  Here’s one simple reason.  Let’s say you rank #1 on an important keyword, but your meta description tag (the one that smart people read to determine whether your site is relevant to the topic) is too long, which is often the case.  Fewer clicks.  Fewer leads.  Decreased ROI from that SEO effort.

Let’s check out an example.  When I search on “copywriting” on Google, here are two description tags associated with top 10 results:

Tag #1: “Copywriting advice for bloggers and online marketers.”

In case you’re wondering, this is an effective description tag, which happens to belong to a very popular marketing blog.  No surprise.

Tag #2: “Blues icon BB King was once asked how he found his heart-warming, bone-chilling sound. It’s simple, he said. I only steal from the best. After.”

This may lead me to a very cool article or blog post, but doesn’t matter.  I’m not clicking because I don’t understand how this description is relevant to my search query.

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