Dangerous Thinking

ComScore reports top UK sites for June:

Google Continues to Lead Ranking of Top Sites

Mozilla Organization is Fastest Growing Site Due to Uptake of and Updates to Firefox Browser

The table is worth a scan, if only to confirm the pre-eminence of the usual suspects.

I’ve just listed ITcopywriting.co.uk on eBay.

It’s a great one for a specialist marketing consultancy, ad agency, freelance copywriter or journalist. And, of course, it has a couple of great keywords if you’re interested in optimizing the site.

Edit: I didn’t get the asking price, but will be readvertising the domain. In the meantime, I’m open to serious offers.

I tried out William Arruda and Kirsten Dixson’s Online Identity Calculator.

The result?

Online Identity Calculator (beta)

Your online identity score is 10 out of a possible score of 10.

Congratulations. You are digitally distinct. This is the nirvana of online identity. Keep up the good work, and remember that your Google results can change as fast as the weather in New England. So, regularly monitor your online identity. Read Chapter 11 of Career Distinction for more ideas on how to continue to build your brand online.

It’s good to know my online branding is so strong. Not least, because the score is partly calculated on relevant listings on the first three pages of Google.

How is your online branding?

Edit (21 August): Just out of idle curiosity (yes, I had something better to do…) I found that the first 132 results on Google.co.uk include me – either written by me, or mention me. There are yet more further down.

With the welcome news last week that FeedBurner PRO stats are free, I was asked what else I use stats-wise on Dangerous Thinking.

Inevitably, this blog gets used as a testbed for all sorts of stuff, but here’s the current state of play. Google Analytics gets added to just about any site I’m involved with, so that’s a given. The third, which I’m enjoying using on a day-to-day basis is Clicky [Disclosure: this is an affiliate link], which unlike Google Analytics, gives up-to-the-minute stats.

Clicky’s presentation is clean, almost spare, so it’s easy to get an immediate feel for what’s happening. Yet you can get really anal, tracing the minutiae of individual visits, should the urge take you – and you have a free half-hour.

I also like the way it integrates FeedBurner stats into one tab, meaning I can see everything I need in one place. I now interact with Analytics just once a week when it sends me a PDF of all the reports I like to see.

I’m not going to write an in-depth review of Clicky, save to say that I like it, and will recommend it – there’s a free trial, so hop over to Clicky and try it out.

There’s plenty of evidence that many marketplaces are moving from conventional channels and media on to the Net – I’m not even going to start pointing out the plethora of comment and reports, because you can Google just as well as I can.

Typically, many retailers are finding their high-overhead high street outlets are not looking as viable as they did a few years back, as consumers like to shop online from home, when it suits them. Other businesses are finding that traditional print-based advertising no longer works or is cost-effective.

Perhaps that’s the kind of challenge your business is facing, and you’re feeling unsure about what the future holds or what’s involved in getting business from the Web.

I’d argue that the change can be positive. While effective SEO isn’t the 50 quid a month many dodgy dealers may lead you to believe, try comparing a realistic proposal from a good consultant or agency with the cost of a quarter page ad in a print publication that gives you access to the same kind of audience.

An Organic SEO campaign will also have real longevity, not the day, week or month you’ll get from the print ad. While moving to more economical non-retail premises may save your business a packet.

It’s a sobering thought. One that will probably have your business wholeheartedly embracing the possibilities online.

In a word, no. Consider the nature of the battlefield. Google is king of the Web – more than 70% of searches worldwide are on Google. And, in the B2B sphere, probably more.

Google actually prefers older, established sites – it even largely ignores new sites by ’sandboxing’ them for 9 to 12 months. The big hitters have been there for 10 years or more, and they have thousands of mature links, many of them inevitably of good quality. They’re the kind of sites that will be entrenched in the top positions on popular searches.

Now do you want to take them on? Do you have the budget, stamina and time? Or will you find a better way?

Read the full article Only pick a fight you can win – the first rule of successful Web marketing at Web Positioning Centre.

The other day I wrote about ‘What’s in it for me?’ and hot prospects. It led to an interesting conversation, which in turn, led me to realising I should have spun the benefits out a little further.

The point I found myself making was as follows. You must let go of your prejudices about what your prospective customers are expecting. Your key phrase discoveries are acting as very valuable market research. They’re telling you what people are looking for in your market segment.

So if the findings are not wholly in line with your expectations, you should listen closely to what people are telling you about their needs through the searches they’re actually making.

Follow what your potential customers are telling you and you’ll get a better, more effective Web site.

If you found How to win against the big boys on the search engines interesting, you must read my latest article, on Reducing Risk for Start-up Sites on the Web Positioning Centre site:

‘Fail fast and fail cheap’ is a piece of advice that’s embedded in Internet culture. It’s also a piece of advice that many Internet entrepreneurs and established businesses fail to fully understand.

Let’s strip away that idea of failing, for a moment. Let’s modify it to ‘launch fast and cheap’. Many small businesses and start-ups soon get carried away with launching and lose sight of how they should be spending their budget.

The article shows how to stop failing fast and expensive.

Last week I wrote about Why I don’t like Google’s innate conservatism, where I painted a picture of a category of entrenched sites that newer sites will struggle to compete with under Google’s current algorithm.

Just in case some of you got the wrong end of the stick, I’m not advocating giving up or even waiting until Google changes the way it calculates how it’s going to list your site.

There are some things smaller businesses and start-up sites can do to take on the big boys. That means having a highly effective site, marketed with real nous.

Only pick a fight you can win

For a start, you’re going to have to operate smart, and pick a fight you stand a chance of winning. Now, you’re unlikely to want to take on Tesco (Wal-Mart, if you’re reading in the States) by setting up a small general store next door, so why would you want to take on the Tescos of the online world in a similar kind of contest?

I’ve used the example of a financial services company before now. It’s because from time to time we get an enquiry from someone who wants to rank on the first page of Google for ‘home insurance’, ‘car insurance’, ‘pensions’ and ‘mortgages’.

Time to let them down gently. There’s as near to no chance within their budget and patience boundaries of getting them there because every bank and financial institution has been pouring loads of budget into marketing their sites online. Many have been there for years, and just as many of them have thousands and thousands of links. And, for regulated financial products, the poor financial services business will have government sites to contend with as well – Google loves government sites because they’re the ultimate reference for so many matters.

Where’s your niche?

We need to look at what makes them different. Particular product niches or geographical focus, perhaps? It’s basic marketing, not Internet marketing or SEO.

So how can you find a niche where your competitor is weak? What kinds of things can you do that your competitors don’t or can’t? If your business is already running, then the chances are, you already have figured out your niche offline. That’s your starting point for you you’re going to market online.

Or look towards your business plan. A SWOT analysis should lead you in the right direction, but how do you apply those findings online? You could move on by doing a SWOT analysis of your site and products in the online environment.

Pinpointing your opponents’ undefended side

But commission (or do) some appropriate key phrase analysis researching both traffic levels and link competition, and your opportunities should be laid out in front of you. By this, I mean higher traffic key phrases that are relevant to your business, that you should be able secure a first-page listing for on Google because the big boys have ignored those pieces of prime turf.

All you need to do now is implement the SEO campaign.

At Web Positioning Centre, we use a wide toolkit of measures to promote of clients’ sites – Organic and PPC, Managed and Viral Linking, Technical and content-based approaches.

They certainly take care of increasing traffic through higher positions on natural searches or carefully conceived advertisement campaigns. But sometimes we find we have to look more closely at a client’s Web site, too.

We can find, for example:

Usability issues such as menuing systems that thwart the visitor’s attempts to navigate the site.

Badly conceived sales funnels which serve to confuse and/or demand too many clicks. Sometimes it’s just too complicated to make a sale and the shopping basket gets abandoned.

Insufficient sales copy. Some e-commerce sites rely on photographs, alone, to make the sale. Their owners haven’t learned from catalogue selling, where the copy is the clincher. While our optimized content often tackles a large part of this issue, often we need to look at the site as a whole and produce non-optimized selling copy, as well as some more general and corporate material to ensure that prospective purchasers feel happy about doing business with our client.

We see SEO as the most important part of the online marketing for a site. But sometimes shortcomings of the site itself need to be addressed before a client can reap the full benefits of our work.