Improving your site’s PageRank

[This is the 2nd of a 2-parter on Google PageRank; 1st part is here]

Google says it so simply:

“In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”

It sounds so easy, but trust me, it’s not.

And the folks behind PageRank (“PR”) have no shortage of guidelines for webmasters so they can best find, index and rank your site.  With Google commanding 80% +/- of search, PR is inarguably a pillar of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

So how do you get started?  Begin by tracking your PR on a monthly basis with a free tool like this one.  Heck, there are even smartphone apps for PR checking, like MultiPR which currently resides on my iPhone.

Net net, the more sites you have linking to your site, the higher your PR will be.  And, the higher the PR of a site linking to your site, the better– e.g., if you get a site with a PR of 8 linking to your site, it is FAR better than a site with a PR of 2 linking in.

The trick to getting high quality links, of course, is to be link-worthy.  What benefit does another site derive from giving up some of its precious real estate, and creating an on-ramp for its users over to hop over to your website?

Consider the following “give/gets” as part of a campaign to get sites to link to your site:

1. Make a dynamic tile that gives always-fresh information.  Here’s one of the most famous examples in web history from weather.com.
2. Make it part of an Affiliate program, where you share a slice of the revenue from referrer traffic.  Amazon does this remarkably well.
3. Design a Landing Page on your side that reflects the referrer’s brand, so a user departing their site finds the move less jarring.  For example, if you sell Flexible Packaging Film and you get a Machinery Vendor to link to your relevant film page because the film moves through his equipment, create a page that BOTH explains your film and has a photo and verbiage about the partner’s machine.
4. Have an incredibly useful, current and compelling site– I see that www.freepatentsonline.com gets linked-to from all over cyberspace, probably because it is an easy-to-navigate collection of all the patents in US history that puts the unwieldy, difficult-to-use government site to shame.
5. Reciprocate– create a Partners page or the equivalent where you cross-link to the very players who link to you.

Do you have a strategy for driving your PR, or are you happy with what you’ve got?  Let us know by commenting below….

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What Is Google’s PageRank And Why Does It Matter?

[First of a Two-Parter]

First, a definition of PageRank (“PR”) from Google’s own Technology Overview page:

“When Google was founded, one key innovation was PageRank, a technology that determined the “importance” of a webpage by looking at what other pages link to it, as well as other data.”

Basically PageRank (which was also named after Google co-founder Larry Page…cute huh?) assigns a score to every webpage in its index, based on the number of websites linking to it and the relative quality of these links.  PageRank scores are reported on a 0-10 scale, with PR-0 being the lowest indexed rank and PR-10 being the highest.

If you have a new website your PR will typically be N/A until a PR update happens.

For you computational types, PR is likely a version of the following formula:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))

The key point is that links coming from a PR-3 site with 5 outbound links would be more valuable than links coming from a PR-5 site with 1,000 outbound links.

The other thing to note about PR is that it operates on a logarithmic scale. This means that the difference between a PR-0 ranking and a PR-1 isn’t the same as the difference between a PR-7 site and a PR-8 site. This image below by Elliance will help:

When PR was first launched, it was one of a couple dozen factors that were considered by Google’s ranking algorithm. Today, however, the algorithm assesses 200+ different variables!

Still, the fact is that on any given search word or phrase, your content appears higher in organic results as a function of context (content fit to the word or phrase) AND your PageRank.  So if you and your competitor both describe a Filling & Sealing Machine in more or less the same prose, the site with the greater PR sees the higher results… and is more likely to garner searchers’ clicks.

Next week we’ll talk about how to discover and track your PR, and improve it.

What’s your experience with your site and PageRank? Comment and let us know.

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Email Marketing Done Right

Sending emails to prospects, or even suspects, typically has but one over-arching goal:  Create a Lead.

Here are the 5 keys to success–

Start Warm:  You must be acquiring names/emails somehow, e.g,. a newsletter.  Make sure to send welcome emails to new subscribers, so you can start earning trust and filling the reservoir of goodwill from the first moment.

Stay above the fold, too; shorter emails are better especially early on.

Qualify, Qualify, Qualify: Make sure you can see WHO who reads the emails and then visits your site; analytics are essential.  Find out precisely how your potential new customers are interacting with your email missives.

Marathon Not Sprint: Some prospects– perhaps the majority– will need to get comfortable with your company and products well before buying.  Cultivate these folks with a steady drumbeat of product info, webinar invites, case studies and links to short-form video.

Segment Your Target Audience: Remember BANT (Budget / Authority / Need / Timeframe) with every email you send.  Make sure you match the message to the role.   What appeals to the CFO could be radically different than what appeals to the Director of Operations.

Make a Crisp/Clear Offer: When BANT is aligned, or coming into alignment, it’s essential to make a discrete offer that is crystal-clear.  Said another way, remember to Ask for the Order.

Don’t just write emails, craft them. Make sure messaging and targeting are harmonized.  And please comment below with what has been working for you and your company.

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How Effective is your B2B Marketing Funnel?

SOURCE:  MarketingSherpa.com

The MarketingSherpa B2B Summit this year had some fascinating information  about optimizing the marketing funnel (graphic above as a PDF is here).

1. First, the most effective leadgen tactic is… your own website, followed closely by Search Engine Optimization/Organic Search.  Next is Email Marketing and Content Marketing (think:  syndicating your product brochures, case studies et al to vertical search sites), and finally, at #5 is tradeshows.

 

2. The Top Tactic for creating engaging, effective content is:  Using a Multichannel Messaging Strategy.  This means hitting your targets across various mediums so the “touches per contact” reaches the magical 3 to 7 times.  In the old word this was Web and Email– now it’s also Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and even Mobile.

 

3. The percentage of B2B organizations that  VERIFY a business lead before it’s passed on to Sales is 56%.  Our guess is that the 44% are missing out, because not only is the verification step a chance to ensure Sales gets a REAL lead (so they know to move f-a-s-t), but it’s a chance to sweeten the lead with 3rd party information, e.g. How big a company is the prospect in terms of revenue?

 

Sure, there’s a Sales Funnel– but it’s fronted by a Marketing Funnel where the lead is created off of various and multiple touchpoints, and there’s an all-important chance for further qualifying it.  Smart marketers work their funnel, to ensure sales people can better work THEIR resulting funnels.

How are you managing your marketing funnel? Comment below and let us know.

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QR Codes: What/How/Why?

Lots of terrific B2C marketing tactics make their way to the B2B world and QR codes may be next.

QR stands for Quick Response; that is, they can be read quickly by a cell phone.  They are popping up everywhere, from traditional magazine pages to business cards to… packaging.

A QR code looks like this:

Once a QR code is scanned by your cell phone, it may give you details about that business or product line, play a video, or give you a coupon.

They’re far more useful than a standard barcode because they can store– and digitally present– much more data, including web links, geo coordinates, and text.  And you don’t need a big hand-held scanner to read them, just your typical smart phone with a free app.

You can easily generate a QR code of your own using a free site like Kaywa.com, or QRstuff.com.

Using  QR codes in B2B
Marketing to consumers or businesses starts with engagement; you can’t get a message across unless someone is listening.  QR codes entice the curious to pull out their omnipresent smartphone and point it at YOUR QR code.  This quick action could yield them:

1. An upsale message.
2. A coupon for a future order.
3. A request to fill out a quick online survey.
4. Pretty much anything else you can think of!

If you’re in Plastics or Packaging, what you sell tends to move down the food chain to end-users.  Perhaps what would serve you best, after you’re using QR codes yourself, is to help your customers use QR codes with THEIR customers.  After all, if engagement is good between you and YOUR customer, it’s also good to facilitate QR codes and engagement between your customer and your customer’s customer.

Are you using QR codes?  What’s been your experience?  Please add a comment below.

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Fish Where the Fish Are

 

Figure 1

Vertical Search is a crucial marketing tactic for both B2C and B2B, given that Google returns a vast sea of results that is time-consuming for people to filter and difficult to use to compare products or services.

From Wikipedia (itself a Vertical Search Engine)–

A vertical search engine, as distinct from a general web search engine, focuses on a specific segment of online content. The vertical content area may be based on topicality, media type, or genre of content. Common verticals include shopping, the automotive industry, legal information, medical information, and travel. In contrast to general Web search engines, which attempt to index large portions of the World Wide Web using a web crawler, vertical search engines typically use a focused crawler that attempts to index only Web pages that are relevant to a pre-defined topic or set of topics.

But here’s the rub– to make a Vertical Search Engine useful to promote your brand and drive incremental revenue for your firm, it needs to drive Direct Response.  It must enable visitors to commit a tangible action.

Take OpenTable, a noteworthy pillar in B2C Vertical Search.  Of course you can find your local bistro via geographic search and/or cuisine (e.g., Baltimore and Italian)– this is about RELEVANCE.  But most notably by using OpenTable, you can… make a reservation!

Per Figure 2, a user goes from Awareness through the funnel [Interest -> Desire) to Action (reserved restaurant seats on a given date).  Better, this Action results in a discrete LEAD for the restaurant– even if you don’t show up at the appointed day/time, the restaurant now knows who you are (name/email) and your interest, and they can market to you for future visits.

In B2B, the best Vertical Search Engines allows users to create leads, either specific to a vendor or general to an area of interest.  These leads are then matched and sent to vendors who can follow up on the prospect.

The smart digital marketers of today don’t just manage and maintain their own websites, but fish where the fish are - Vertical Search engines that aggregate interested prospects.  Action Item: Identify the Vertical Search Engines that your target prospects visit most to find RELEVANCE and commit Actions, making sure that your most compelling content is deployed on these sites.

What Vertical Search Engine is high on your list? Comment below and let us know.

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B2C Lead Generation Tactics Adopted By B2B

Web-based Business-to-Consumer (B2C) Lead Generation is a sophisticated, mature industry.

B2C companies employ hundreds of lead generation tactics, including co-registration, free or discounted offers, search engine marketing and optimization, content marketing and many, many others.

We’ve noticed that increasingly, Business-to-Business (B2B) LeadGen is emulating the best B2C tactics.  In fact, a popular tradeshow that occurs every August in NYC called LeadsCon now covers both B2B and B2C LeadGen.  Until very recently, this tradeshow was exclusively B2C.  It seems that with each passing year, it get’s harder and harder to tell the difference between the two.

WITNESS:  Virtually every B2C site has a quick and simple way to capture visitor information.  This LeadGen form is typically on the top right of the page and usually requests only the bare minimum in terms of information fields are required.  The hope is that the visitor enters the maw of the lead machine, usually compelled by some kind of offer.   Sophisticated B2B sites have finally realized that they too can play in the lead gen world with many implementing their own super-skinny forms dangling offers like “join our mailing list and we’ll send you a free white paper on ___”.

Part of what’s driving the increased interest in B2B LeadGen are firms such as BuyerZone that play in both B2C and B2B verticals.  Their “choose a product or service … share your needs … connect with sellers” model is at work in Home Security on the one hand for John and Jane Doe, and Marketing Services on the other hand for Acme and Beta Corp.  They straddle both worlds and have applied many of the best B2C tactics to their B2B visitors.

We at Informous are using the best mechanisms in B2C and honing them for B2B.  We recently announced LeadIQ, which is in essence Pandora for leads.  Every lead we send in our Packaging & Plastics verticals now bears a thumbs up/thumbs down icon.  Our subscribing vendors vote, and our algorithms learn-on-the-fly determining which leads they want more of and which they don’t want at all.

What B2C tactics descending upon the B2B?  What’s working and what needs work?  Comment below and let us know.

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Does Your Brand Have Clout?

Social Media has become  pervasive.  It’s a rare business that can’t gain more share of mind with prospects using what are increasingly tried-and-true Web 2.0 techniques.

But whether you’ve stepped out with a Social Media plan or not, you can start evaluating your branding success today.  Indeed, it’s essential to relentlessly measure the RoI of all marketing efforts, and you can have your Social Media baseline in minutes.

There are “Freemium” (free with paid features layered on top) tools galore, and two stand out–

Social Mention – This free do-it-yourself service scans blogs/microblogs, social bookmarks, 100+ social networking sites, comments, news, images, video, events, etc.

In a summary side bar the tool rates your brand in 4 categories:

1. Strength
2. Sentiment
3. Passion
4. Reach

Social Mention also breaks your brand’s social mentions into top keywords, positivity/negativity of sentiment, sources, hash tags and top users.

Better, you can get the Social Mention dashboard to come to you as a daily news alert about your brand.  And you can show buzz about your brand on your site with their “Realtime Widget” (also free).

Klout – What’s your Klout score?  Takes seconds to find out for free; a Klout score says how influential your brand is across the Social Web.

Klout looks at three factors:

1. True Reach:  How many people you actually engage with (not just how many followers or friends you have).
2. Amplification:  Reflects the probability of your content being shared by your network.
3. Network Influence:  Measures precisely how influential your followers are.

Were you to add together how many people you engage with regularly on your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts, how often your followers/friends re-share your shared missives and how influential they are overall then the result is…  your Klout score.

You can use Klout proactively to find influential people on the Social Web with whom to interact, to increase your brand mentions.

Whether Klout, Social Mention or another tool, only not measuring where your brand stands in the Web 2.0 world is a mistake.

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How Clean is Your Prospect Data?

Stop wasting $10,920 per Inside Sales Rep!

A recent study by LeadJen, an Indianapolis marketing services company, looked at 12 lead generation campaigns across different industries representing over 100,000 connections made by phone or email.  Their full report is here.

It seems that firms conducting a lead generation program without first investing in cleaning their data end up wasting 27.3% of each sales rep’s time, or 546 hours a year per full-time inside sales rep!

Say that an inside rep costs $40,000 per year on average, including salary, benefits and overhead.  If some 27% of the time is just wheel-spinning, the cost per year is $10,920 for each and every inside sales rep.

According to the study, unclean data means that 30% of first attempt calls are being wasted on contacts who no longer are with the targeted company, or on incorrect contact information.

Another 30% of calls reach a contact who is not a relevant target. This results in even more time leakage since it takes sales reps an average of four attempts to reach these irrelevant contacts.

How do you clean, or validate data before the reps smile & dial?

Image Source:  The Telemarketing Blog

1. Clean as you go:  Everybody is using CRMs these days, especially salesforce.com.  Have your reps get in the habit of keeping their contact lists current regarding “NAP”– Name/Address/Phone Number, and Address means email and snail mail as relevant.  Better, encourage them to develop multiple contacts per prospect, to hedge against the inevitable departures in this transient work society.
2. Try 3rd Party Services:  ReachForce, ZoomInfo, Jigsaw, Rainking Online…the list is long, and their prices get more compelling by the quarter.  Call ‘em and try ‘em with small sample sets to start.
3. Ask the Prospect:  Crowdsourcing increasingly is king in B2B, not just B2C– you’ll be surprised at the extent to which prospects will help you understand who to contact, once you’re engaged.  Ask for a map of influencers, financial types who have to sign off, etc.  If you can’t get the info on the complete spiderweb of decisionmakers, perhaps you’re not as far along as you hoped in the ol’ sales funnel.

How do you wash data, to avoid having to deal with inefficient selling when your reps hit the phones?  Comment below ….

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5 Reasons Google Places Should Be Your Place

On May 25th, 2011 at TechCrunch Disrupt in NYC, Google’s Marissa Mayer revealed that 20% of searches across Google properties are local. And that number bumps up to 40% when we’re talking about mobile searches.

What should you do about it?  Google Places, of course.

SOURCE:  Google Places

Google Places for Business can help searchers find your products.  Here’s a Top 5 List of advantages that come from making sure your business listing(s) are current with Google Places–

1. It’s free, and when your Google Places listing is optimized properly, your business listing appears on the first page of Google.

2. Your website, physical mailing address, and phone number are displayed in your listing, which allows prospects to find you more quickly and get the information they need.  Prospective buyers these days work at Internet speed, which is often f-a-s-t.

3.  Mobile phone users can find your business listing immediately, and they don’t need a computer to do it.

4. You don’t need a physical retail or warehouse location to get accepted into Google Places– you can be a B2B player that doesn’t actually sell to face-to-face customers at your actual physical location.  Better, Places can reflect all of your far-flung bricks-and-mortar locations, not just HQ.

5.  Google Places can lead to a broader “local” strategy on the web.  Google and other search engines pay close attention to “citations” or “references” from authoritative directories (such Informous) in determining rankings and in confirming the reliability of businesses’ Name/Address/Phone information.

In the classical Search Engine Optimization (SEO) world, rankings and PageRank are built primarily via Links.  In the Local SEO world, rankings are built in part from citations. While a citation can be a link, it’s also possible that it’s a mention of a business’s name along with the address and phone number– this is a small-but-critically-important point.

Google appears to give more weight to citations from well-established web yellow pages and other industry-specific (or “vertical”) online directories.  As such, you should run, not walk, to claim your listings in the top directories, and also optimize each listing as much as possible.  In many cases, the free option may be enough to get you the valuable citation, however, in other cases you’ll want to consider the various paid ad/lead generation programs.

Already using Google Places, or have comments about it?  Don’t be shy; click and type away below ….

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