BIC is a non-profit organization that does some very cool things but, like most non-profits, hasn’t updated their website for many years.

Needless to say, they have almost no Internet marketing or SEO strategy which led them to ask for help by submitting their site for this series.

In this post, I’m going to break down:

1. Who the business is and what they do
2. First Impressions: Overall analysis of website look, feel, targeting and usability
3. Second Impressions: Overall analysis of social media and Web 2.0 presence
4. Top Level SEO: Keywords, navigation, rankings, competition, backlink profile, content, etc.
5. Page Level SEO: Structure, tags, usability, etc.
6. 3-step action plan for biggest/fastest improvement

So let’s get started.

[Editors Note: Remember, opinions and recommendations made are that of the contributor - Search Engine Land does not actively provide site audits as a service; nor is this intended to be a complete and thorough review by the author. Advice given is merely intended to be constructive criticism and a jumping off point for sites looking to improve their website marketing efforts.]

1.  What Does The Organization Do?

As explained to me in layman’s terms, the Bank Information Center is a watchdog group for the World Bank.

The World Bank isn’t a bank in the traditional sense in that a single person cannot open an account or ask for a loan.

Rather, the World Bank provides loans, grants and technical assistance to countries and the private sector to reduce poverty in developing and transition countries.

Sometimes though, the Bank’s huge projects —like roads, power plants, and dams— displace people from their homes or hurt the environment.

BIC’s mission is to raise awareness of when this happens and try to work with the World Bank to fix the problem or create new rules that will keep the World Bank from doing more harm than good. You can read more about BIC here.

2.  First Impressions Count: Website Usability

When I loaded up the BIC website, I was taken back to a nostalgic time – 1997 – when hand coded websites ruled the world and just having a website was a big deal for most institutions.

Needless to say, BIC has some work to do to bring their overall website and online presence up to speed.

Now, while there are several factors to consider – the purpose of the website, budget, organizational focus and probably most importantly for BIC, resources – I believe that BIC should start with a refresh of their entire Internet presence.

The primary reason for doing so should focus on relaying the organization’s purpose, mission and bringing attention to those efforts.

It took me about 20 minutes to figure out what they did and I was purposefully looking for that information for this site audit.

Since I still didn’t fully understand it, I had to ask them to explain to me in plain English what they did, which I passed along in the previous description.

What Is The Purpose Of The BIC Website?

It seems to be trying to do many different things, which is a part of the problem – there is no clear unique selling proposition (USP), call to action or general purpose.

And what does their tagline mean?

In addition, there’s a donation button/link buried at the bottom of the homepage, but shouldn’t that be highlighted more significantly?

If individual donations are not a large part of BIC’s revenue, they may consider removing this area entirely, or put it in another part of the website to clean up the clutter on the homepage.

The same applies to the often cold, obtuse and corporate-speak language used in the latest news updates, ad copy and navigation.

If the site is designed for corporations, trusts, or larger institutions that understand and respond to that language, then keep using it; otherwise, it needs to be made much more conversational and easier to understand.

I certainly shouldn’t have to email the company to get a better understanding as to what they do and how they do it.

These and other issues, beyond the scope of an SEO/Internet marketing audit, need to be addressed before an SEO action plan is put into place.

Key Takeaways

• Website looks tired and old – lacks trust, social proof and “gut” feeling of a reputable organization.

• BIC needs to decide who and what the website is designed for: individuals, or organizations/trusts that already know the nomenclature, and design it accordingly.

• Website has to quickly and easily allow the user to find what they are looking for, whether it’s information on how to contribute, or the latest work the foundation is doing.

Overall Score: 3 out of 10

3.  Second Impressions: Social Media Presence

This section is supposed to be devoted to a quick look at a company’s social media presence.

Well, BIC made that super easy!

They don’t have one – not even a blog – just an “updates” section on the site.

Other non-profits like Kiva.org use social media in a very compelling and advantageous way and I think BIC needs to address this shortfall immediately.

Key Takeaways

• No social media presence – must be addressed immediately especially with such a targeted and passionate audience.

• The “updates” section is a good place to start. BIC needs to flesh this out and offer user participation and make it a part of a larger content marketing strategy.

• Add comments and social sharing icons for all blog posts.

• Make their email sign up form more prominent.

Overall Score: 2 out of 10

4.  Top Level SEO Review

This analysis will vary from website to website based on a company’s goals, target audience and other factors.

In addition, because of space and time constraints, I simply cannot cover every single aspect of a company’s SEO profile, but will choose those I feel have the potential for the largest impact.

For BIC, because I know it would be really easy to pick on them for poor keyword choices (or none at all) or site navigation and other related issues – instead I wanted to focus on low hanging fruit – things they could easily/quickly/cheaply fix that would give them the biggest bang for their buck.

Important note: It should go without saying, however, that BIC needs to perform and implement a complete top-down keyword research strategy in order to understand their market and what keywords they need to rank for in order to reconstruct their site navigation around those goals and keywords.

Total Domain/Website Authority

First, let’s look at BIC’s overall authority using some broad level metrics.

• Toolbar PageRank: 6 (out of 10)
• Domain Authority: 62 (out of 100)
• Domain MozRank: 5.17 (out of 10)
• Domain MozTrust: 5.91 (out of 10)

From these preliminary metrics (because they are logarithmic in scale), it looks like BIC’s website and domain are highly authoritative, trusted and influential – which is a great start.

Backlink Profile

Next, let’s do a quick check of BIC’s backlink profile to take a peek at the possibilities for ranking higher for different keywords over time and get a sense of their SEO efforts – even if they are entirely accidental.

Here’s a look at BIC’s backlink profile courtesy of Majestic SEO.

Needless to say, I was very impressed:

You can see that BIC has been gaining backlinks very steadily over the last 5 years.

In addition, their backlink discovery profile has been very steady with a couple of blips.

First, there was a large spike in backlinks and referring domains in late 2010, early 2011.

After speaking to BIC, it appears that this was likely due to the fact that there were protests going on for several major projects in Spanish-speaking countries. Because BIC had information on these events in Spanish, they received a ton of backlinks as one of the only sources for information.

Then, over the last year or so, backlink discovery has dried up or disappeared entirely, depending on what month it was.

According to BIC, this was likely due to the fact that they had budget/staff cuts, so their information wasn’t being updated as frequently if at all, leading to a loss of backlinks to new content.

Overall though, BIC has a fantastic track record of being able to acquire links from all over the Web from high ranking and trusted authoritative websites – which in turn has elevated their website into an authoritative and trusted website.

Even if these links were purely accidental in nature – BIC was not doing anything specific, aside from day to day operations to get these links – the fact that they were able to grow their backlinks and authority without “trying” makes the potential of the website incredible.

Referring Domains

As an addendum to the above two points, BIC has an incredible dossier of referring root domains.

Here are the top 25 referring domains taken from Open Site Explorer:

In addition, you can see from the screenshot below, also taken from Open Site Explorer, that most of the referring domains are from .org domains, and 6% are from .edu’s (out of the top 300 referrers).

It’s no wonder BIC’s own website has gained huge amounts of authority and trust.

Anchor Text Analysis

I probably already knew the answer to this question, but I wanted to confirm what anchor text was being used to reference the BIC website from other websites.

Was BIC getting link juice for other corollary keywords or to other pages on their website? Or were they merely getting generic links to their homepage?

Here’s a list of the top 10 anchor text phrases being used to link to BIC’s website, courtesy of Majestic SEO:

Sadly, I was right in my assumption. BIC is getting anchor text pointing mainly to their homepage while using generic anchor text or the “Bank Information Center” company name.

This obviously won’t help BIC rank for other keywords without some effort.

First Page Rankings for Company Name

After taking all of the previous information into account, I now wanted to make sure BIC at least dominated the first page of Google for their company name: Bank Information Center.

Here are the results:

As you can see, while the company does occupy the top spot (with some nice sitelinks to boot) and one other spot below (with an old Vimeo profile that is no longer in use), you can now see how their lack of social media presence is really hurting them.

They should be dominating the first page of Google and could easily occupy more spots by simply claiming their social media profiles on Facebook (screenshot below), LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube and Twitter, and linking to those pages from their website.

Because their largest source of traffic is for branded terms, at the very least, BIC needs to make sure they are dominating that entire first page.

Other Housekeeping Items

The above are broad-spectrum site-level SEO recommendations designed to identify low hanging fruit and areas where BIC can make some powerful and highly impactful changes for their overall SEO profile.

I now wanted to briefly touch on some other “housekeeping” items that should be taken care of as well:

• Title Tag (Homepage + Other Pages): The title tag on the homepage and other pages is too long – this is a big no-no. As well, it contains the word “Welcome” – an unnecessary use of 7 characters.

• Title Tag Part 2: There are literally hundreds of pages on the site with identical or nearly identical title tags. Each page should have a distinctive page title. Remember that the title is the most important on page SEO factor. Here’s a video I created to teach you how to effectively write great title tags.

• Ugly URL’s: BIC is losing some SEO juice because their URL’s are generic, not keyword rich, and end with the wasted extension of .aspx. This might be a by-product of their Content Management System (CMS) but they should look to clean all of this up. 

For example:

The Africa Region link looks like this:

http://bicusa.org/en/Region.1.aspx

It should instead be something cleaner like this:

http://www.bicusa.org/en/bic-in-africa

Or:

http://bicusa.org/en/bank-information-center-in-africa

BIC should then do the same for all of their updates/blog posts:

Instead of:

http://www.bicusa.org/en/Article.12606.aspx

It should instead say something like:

http://www.bicusa.org/en/lphu-launches-global-campaign-for-disability-rights

In addition, the BIC website is not returning a 301 redirect from www to non-www or vice versa. This means that Google may cache both versions of your site, causing site wide duplicate content penalties. Courtesy of Virante.com.

Description Tags Missing

Where are the META Description tags? The description tag is vital to getting folks to click through to your website. The entire BIC site is devoid of them…oops! This was courtesy of Screaming Frog.

Duplicate Content

Some other things to consider and check, especially as BIC institutes some of these changes, include duplicate content and canonicalization issues.

I could go on forever, but these were some glaring mistakes that should and can be corrected immediately.

Key Takeaways

• BIC needs to institute a complete top-down keyword strategy before anything else gets done.

• They then need to execute that analysis by upgrading their navigation, titles, descriptions and URL’s across their entire domain and online presence.

• Finally, knowing what they want to rank for, they can begin a link outreach campaign for specific keywords.

Overall Score: 3.5 out of 10 – because of domain authority only!

5.  Page Level SEO Review

This audit has already gotten longer than I intended…I guess that’s what happens when there are a lot of things to fix, right?

(I suppose in that respect, BIC was an excellent choice to kick off this site audit series! Huzzah!)

At any rate, I’ll try and cut to the chase and analyze one page of BIC’s website for its on-page SEO and then apply that same advice to ALL of BIC’s pages.

We’ll use this page for our example:

http://www.bicusa.org/en/Region.1.aspx

Some quick hits that should be taken care of to make sure the page is SEO friendly:

• The page layout is cramped and makes it hard to find information. This should be a part of the overall website redesign strategy.

•  I would like to see more information on all of BIC’s pages – make them more in depth with better and more comprehensive information.

• The page header should say something more than just Africa. Page headers are a part of search engine algorithms, so your page header should be descriptive – something like: “Bank Information Center in Africa” or whatever keyword phrase you are trying to rank for.

• Page META title needs to be shortened and more descriptive (see Top level SEO advice).

• The page URL should be fixed as previously mentioned.

• Code is not using Image Alt text or Title text. For instance, the image in the middle of the page, has the alt text as: img alt=”Mararaba 1″:

This word isn’t used anywhere else on the page. Instead the alt text should be more descriptive about something on the page so search engines can better understand what your page is actually about.

Instead, how about using:

img alt=”BIC Helping The World Bank In Africa”

Then, the title attribute (which is entirely missing from all your pages) when you hover over the image should say something like:

title=”BIC helps villages in Africa have a voice”

Key Takeaways

• BIC should make their pages more “juicy” with deeper content and easier navigation.

• They then need to fix the titles, descriptions, section headers and image alt and title text, at the very least for their main pages and from now on for their “updates”/blog pages.

Overall Score: 2 out of 10

6.  Three Step Internet Marketing & SEO Action Plan

When I selected BIC as my first “victim” I never realized until I rolled up my sleeves and started digging deeper, how much work and guidance they really needed.

The sad part is that I just don’t have the space to go over every last detail, but hopefully with what I covered here, BIC – and just as importantly your organization – can take immediate action on the highest level priorities.

To that end, here is a specific action plan for how BIC can systematically fix what is wrong with their website, SEO and Internet marketing strategy for the biggest return on their investment.

Step 1:  Overall Site Redesign and SEO Upgrade

I highly recommend that BIC undertake a complete makeover of their website, SEO and online marketing presence taking into consideration the GOAL of their online presence and their target audience.

I understand due to cost considerations, resources and time constraints that this might be difficult, if not impossible.

Therefore, the next best thing would be to immediately implement the Top Level SEO changes that I specified above.

These should include:

• Figuring out the goals of BIC’s website, their target market and then their overall objectives before implementing anything
• Creating a master keyword list and overall SEO strategy
• Fixing/upgrading the link architecture and navigation throughout the website using this information
• Fixing/upgrading the content on as many pages as possible
• Fixing the title tags for at least the top 50 – 100 pages
• Adding Description tags for at least the top 50 – 100 pages
• Adding Alt and Title tags for all images on the top 50 – 100 pages
• Fixing the URL extensions for the top 50 – 100 pages and making sure to REDIRECT the old pages using a 301 redirect to the new pages
• Checking for duplicate content on the entire website and either removing it, or at least canonicalizing it

Step 2:  Social Media Implementation

BIC should immediately claim and develop all available social media accounts.

My top recommendations are: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+.

BIC should then make sure to add social sharing icons on their blog and perhaps throughout the site, as well as adding the ability for folks to comment on their “blog”.

Once that is done, BIC should curate and build up these channels immediately by creating a social media marketing strategy that involves their main website, blog and social media properties to provide unique content and value to each of them, while also leveraging their powerful brand and Internet presence.

Step 3:  Link Outreach, Traffic Generation and Inbound Marketing

With everything cleaned up and in place, BIC should now look to expand their traffic and diversify the company’s inbound traffic strategy through other sources.

This means asking other websites to link to BIC using various anchor text — to appropriate internal pages – that will in turn help BIC rank for keywords people are using to find their website that they aren’t ranking for now, but can easily rank for with a little outreach.

It also means mining their social media, blog and other channels to create a veritable self-fulfilling loop of goodwill, brand affinity and traffic through their continued updates, content and user interaction.

This will then culminate into BIC’s most desired outcome for their website: whether that’s to get donations, inform, generate awareness or some other goal that BIC ultimately decides upon.

Bottom Line

The Bank Information Center is an incredible non-profit with a seriously powerful and underutilized website property that is losing vast amounts of traffic (and potentially donations)  because they haven’t taken the time to map out a sound Internet marketing – SEO and social media strategy – and implement that strategy on an ongoing basis.

If they systematically utilize the information I’ve broken down for them in this audit, they’ll see a huge increase in their rankings, traffic and ultimately, what all businesses care most about – even non-profits – an increase to their bottom line that will grow and sustain their entire organization.

[Submission Instructions: If you would like to submit your company for consideration for this series, please visit the LinkedIn discussion group that we created for this series by clicking here. You’ll find instructions on that page on how to add yourself and what information I’ll need from you to consider your website. Note there is no guarantee your site will be selected, nor is there a set schedule for audit times.]

Want the infographic for yourself? You’ll find it here: Infographic: Why Content for SEO?

In this article, we’ll explore several areas of content creation and distribution which can assist in creating effective B2B content marketing strategies and support search engine optimization initiatives.

The Core Foundation: Value Extraction

Many of the B2B organizations we have worked with have had a content plan that usually includes two to four major content pieces (per year). This typically includes development of marketing assets such as white papers, industry research, etc.

The foundation for content creation is simple: extract maximum value from all of your organizations key content assets. The graphic below is meant to help illustrate this concept.

These type of assets are loaded with valuable resources, spanning multiple points. You can re-purpose one solid white paper into a combination of several supporting content assets.

At a basic level, this information can be the basis for initiatives such as a series of blog posts, or articles and bylines that can then be leveraged for link building requests.

Take that concept one step further. With a little more creativity, a solid content asset can be spun into a webinar, podcast, or video. If your team (or your search engine marketer) is graphically inclined, perhaps a visualization or graphical outline of a concept is also possible.

With scarce resources and time, it is imperative to unlock as many supporting content opportunities as possible from these key content assets planned in the annual marketing calendar.

Keyword Optimization

Keyword research goes hand-in-hand with the development of all content assets, primary and supporting. In the ideal setting, the search marketer has input from the start. In most cases, we tend to get asked about keyword strategy after the initial concept has been defined.

For the latter, it still can be a fixable problem. If the organization has invested in an SEO strategy, core content assets most likely have a keyword focus already in mind; even without specific input. A search marketers job is to uncover the real gems and potential longer tail keyword opportunities based off of a core keyword theme.

Here is a high level example:

For one of our clients, keyword research for supporting content assets, derived from one content-rich white paper, led to over a dozen actionable longer-tail keyword strategies, with measurable search engine volume based off of keyword tools and historical PPC data.

Most likely, there are additional keyword opportunities that can be derived from one or two competitive keyword themes. Make sure to use historical PPC data, competitive analysis, and keyword tools to uncover keywords that can be applied to these newly developed content assets.

Content Distribution

Now that you have the content developed, it’s time to get the message out. The graphic below is meant to illustrate the various potential social sites and communities where this material (as well as the primary content developed) can be distributed.

Make every attempt to post and promote your material as best as possible, using methods as appropriate for each community.

Beyond content developed solely to be placed on the company website or blog, consider how articles and blog posts may be used for link building assets as well. We have had success drafting articles from deeper research and white papers, which ultimately were accepted as bylines, in industry publications. Guest posts on industry blogs are also be possible if the right relationships have been made.

There are niche social media networks for sharing almost every type of creative asset, from the most popular like YouTube and Flickr, to more niche networks like Docstoc or Slideshare. Do not forget to create links to related website information in applicable description fields as well when uploading. Even if links are “nofollow” they can still attract the right click-throughs if your target market is also using these communities.

The B2B Lead Funnel

The final piece of the puzzle is in tying conversion initiatives into the content generation process. At a basic level, core content assets can be incorporated into a landing page for lead generation. Instead of simply directing visitors to only the form, develop introductory content, around that form, with keyword strategy in mind.

A basic outline that we have found to be successful is as follows: a few leading sentences, around three bullet points highlighting important concepts or key takeaways, and a clear call-to-action to the form submission.

For your supporting content assets, make sure to track referral data in through web analytics. Establish reporting metrics for both unique referral traffic and returning prospects that follow and click-through to visit or view your content as well.

Wrapping Up: Get More Mileage For Your Efforts

Generating new content for your B2B search engine marketing efforts does not always rely on completely new ideas, week after week, or month after month.

Focus on deriving the most value by extracting smaller, more concise pieces out of deeper material like white papers, research studies, and other key content initiatives.

Content goes beyond the traditional, written article as well.

Assets such as video, graphics, and presentations can be used to populate supporting sections of the website or utilized for link building and social media initiatives as well.

Finally, do not forget to tie your content initiatives around conversion metrics, including form submissions and click-throughs from targeted prospects and customers.

The test was simple. I placed a unique word in the meta keywords tag on the home page of Search Engine Land. This word — xcvteuflsowkldlslkslklsk — generated no results on Yahoo when I looked earlier this week. Today, when I searched, it brought back the Search Engine Land home page. Thus, Yahoo indeed indexes the content of that tag. (And to be clear, I looked before writing this article. In short order, this article itself, along with others, will appear because they’ll make use of that word).

During the session last week at SMX East, when Yahoo said it no longer supported this tag, several in the audience said they didn’t believe it. I was kind of struck. You’ve got a search representative flat-out saying they don’t do something, but no one wants to believe them? How things have changed. Sure, I can see distrust on some controversial issues (such as whether Google really does not count nofollowed links out of Wikipedia). But why would Yahoo lie about something like meta keywords support?

To be clear, I don’t think Yahoo was deliberately lying. The representative was probably confused in some way. Similarly over at Bing, despite them NOT supporting the tag (it’s not mentioned here) and never having done so since they launched their own search technology, they recently blogged much advice about using the tag.

As I commented about this:

That reads like someone got a copy of really old SEO advice and decided to put it out there regardless of what Bing actually does. I mean, my head hurts, but not everyone cared about commas or not. And no one had this 874 character limit. I mean, if you went over, it was no big deal. And the don’t repeat more than 4 times? According to what. Microsoft never, ever had its own guidelines like this.”

It’s a good reminder to the search reps. In many ways, you occupy god-like status on issues relating to SEO. Everything you write, everything you say will be fully believed by some. And if you’re not correct, you’ll confuse people and cause others to lose faith in you. If you don’t know, don’t say — or qualify: “I’m not sure” or “I’ll check on that.”

Postscript: Yahoo’s sent me this:

What changed with Yahoo’s ranking algorithms is that while we still index the meta keyword tag, the ranking importance given to meta keyword tags receives the lowest ranking signal in our system.

Words that appear in any other part of documents, including the body, title, description, anchor text etc., will take priority in ranking the document – the re-occurrence of these words in the meta keyword tag will not help in boosting the signal for these words.  Therefore, keyword stuffing in the keyword tag will not help a page’s recall or ranking, it will actually have less effect than introducing those same words in the body of the document, or any other section.

However, when no other ranking signal is present, unique words that only appear in the meta keyword tag section of documents can still be used to recall these documents.

The news came during the Ask The Search Engines session at SMX East in New York today. The search engines were all asked about their support of the tag. Moderator Danny Sullivan noted that only Yahoo provided support of the tag — prompting Cris Pierry, senior director of search at Yahoo, to announce that support actually had been ended unannounced “several” months ago.

Bing doesn’t support the tag. Google has never supported it and in fact clarified this again in a special post last month. See Google: Stop Suing Over The Meta Keywords Tag, We Don’t Use It for more about that.

NOTE: See our follow-up post, Sorry, Yahoo, You DO Index The Meta Keywords Tag.

Measuring SEO success using rankings is out-of-date: rankings fluctuate significantly and do not show any improvement on the website success. Traffic does not fluctuate so much, but it still does not show you the money. The way to measure SEO is by measuring its ROI.

Many people still think of organic traffic as free traffic. Although it is possible to get free organic traffic, to go to the next level and attract the masses to any website, it is highly important to invest resources, either with an agency or in-house people. Besides, many changes to the website are needed. Therefore, it is very important to consider all the expenditure with SEO, be it with consultancy, in-house development, or other. This way, it is possible to get to the understanding of the SEO ROI: how much profit you are getting from your organic traffic?

Content is king, but usability is queen

As we all heard time and again: when it comes to SEO, content is king. We don’t disagree. Relevant content is really essential in any website, both for SEO and for conversions. However, there is a clear tradeoff between content and usability (the design). Sometimes people are so worried about one of these elements that they completely forget about the other one.

The image below represents all the content (above the fold) before/after a change made for SEO purposes. The only change was the addition of fresh content above the product info, which pushed all product info to below the fold. Including more content on the page should not hurt the conversions of the website. However, the product pages have a very high conversion rate, and we saw a significant decrease in the visits on product pages. Conclusion: we saw an increase in the organic traffic, but a decrease in the overall conversion rates of the website.

As Nathan Rodriguez puts it, “Content is King, but sometimes the Queen rules!”

SEO for landing pages

When we talk about paid search campaigns, it is very natural to talk about landing page optimization. However, this is not so obvious when talking about organic SEO campaigns. But the importance is the same; both should be highly efficient in converting incoming traffic. The first question we should ask is: “Should I create or use an existing page for a keyword I am targeting with SEO?” And the answer: It depends! Depends whether your site already has relevant content for this keyword or not.

If you have a juice website, and you want to rank first for “soft drinks” it is not very efficient to use your homepage or another juice page for the keyword “soft drinks.” Even if you do succeed to rank first for this keyword you will probably have 100% bounce rate. But if you create a special page in which you show a comparison of different types of juices and soft drinks, it might persuade people to read further. A useful tool to test the success of SEO landing pages before you target them is AdWords. You can create a campaign in which you send visitors coming from “soft drinks“ to different pages and decide on the best SEO landing page. If content is the king and usability is the queen, relevance is the prince!

aniBoom is an animations’ website where people can create and upload their animations to be seen by other people. The site owners target content creators and they have a web-application called ShapeShifter in which users can create animations for free. The ShapeShifter main page receives traffic for keywords such as “create your own animation” and “free animation software”. When analyzing the organic traffic to this page, we saw a very significant bounce rate and understood something was wrong. The problem was that the most prominent element of the page, and probably the first words people read, are “$59.99″ (this banner was from one of their partners). When people click on “free animation software” and see a big $ on the landing page, they are very likely to bounce! Here is how the main element of the page looks before and after the analysis:

Another important element to optimize is the snippet that appears on the search results page: this is the first interaction of the user with your website, and ultimately may determine the click through rate from visitors coming from search engines. The snippet is what you promise to your user; are you delivering it in the landing page? You should be.

Targeting customer intent using internal site search

It is very common nowadays to optimize SEO by measuring the success of keywords bringing traffic to the website. While this is great, by doing that we lose a precious source of keywords: the keywords your customers are typing in your website, i.e. your internal site search. This is what they are really looking for, and you should check if you are targeting those keywords. Here is an example of a way to analyze internal search and optimize your SEO efforts using it.

TED is a very interesting conference that makes some of their talks available on their website (we did not analyze TED website, but did the same analysis for several websites). In the table below you can see on the left-most column search terms used by the visitors in the website (which keywords were typed in the internal search box). Each additional column represents a KPI for this term: how long users stayed on the website after searching, how many users clicked on a result from this search, newsletter signup (conversion), and registration (conversion). For each KPI, you can see if the keyword ranked above or below the average.

So, for example, people that searched for “good talks” in the website stayed longer than the average searcher in the website, they clicked more often than the average on the results, but they converted less than the average for both conversion types. Sir Ken Robinson was above the average for all KPIs.

TED always has some kind of cloud tags in its homepage, either with text links or image links. The way they usually organize the homepage is by recency of the talks, meaning that the latest talks get the better spot. Although this might be a good way to organize the website, we think a different way could be to organize it by highest converting search terms. So for example, it might be that every single person that gets to Bill Gates talk (which was the latest talk when this article was written) leaves the website. So why should it be the first one, just because it is the most recent one? Based on internal site search we can find the most converting terms and include them in the homepage: this would improve the usability of the website, meaning that people would find what they are looking for on the homepage, and it would improve the ranking for this specific term on search engines. These high-converting keywords should certainly be part of your target SEO keywords.

In summary, it is essential to adopt a customer centricity approach to web analytics. Rankings and traffic are not good measures of success for SEO efforts; we should focus on conversions and be sure to calculate the ROI of our organic traffic as we do for all other medium. A few takeaways: keep in mind the tradeoff between including content in the website and keeping it focused on conversions; choose carefully and optimize SEO landing pages; use your internal search to expand your keyword targeting on search engines and to give customers what they are looking for.

Full slides for this presentation are here:

Jakob Nielsen’s formula for website success

“The main thing SEO professionals should remember about Web usability is the formula for website success,” said Jakob Nielsen, Principal at Nielsen Norman Group.

What’s the formula?

B = V x C x L

Where:

• B = amount of business done by the site

• V = unique visitors coming to the site
• C = conversion rate (the percentage of visitors who become customers); note that the concept of conversion applies not only to ecommerce sites, but to any site where there is something you want users to do
• L = loyalty rate (the degree to which customers return to conduct repeat business)

“Narrowly considered, SEO might be thought of as the goal to rank as highly in SERPs for important keywords,” Nielsen continued. “While important, these rankings are only half of the ‘V‘ element of site success. Besides ranking high, you also need users to click the listing, so clickthrough provides the other half of ‘V.’ Clickthrough is determined by usability considerations; more specifically content usability, in form of the guidelines for writing for the Web.”

“The page title is the most important: it must be written to provide strong information scent and to extrude usefulness,” he said. “The article summary and the URL are viewed less, but are still important to help users determine whether to click a top search hit or to proceed to the next one.”

“After V comes C: It does no good to drive traffic to the wrong page that doesn’t convert visitors into customers,” said Nielsen. “Conversion rate, of course, is determined by usability: do people understand the landing page, does it speak to their concerns, and can they find their way around the site to solve their problem and understand your product line?”

“Finally, I believe that L is the most important variable for long-term website strategy: It is imperative that websites liberate themselves from being overlydependent on search engines and regain the positioning as the place users turn for the type of problem they address,” he said. “Right now, the best loyalty mechanism is the email newsletter, so it’s important to balance the site design in such a way that it encourages newsletter sign-ups at the same time as it also drives conversions.”

“The key duty of an SEO should be to advise management on how to lower search-engine dependability. Don’t worry: this won’t put you out of your job, because there will always be a need for search-driven traffic,” he added.

“Returning to the narrow SEO job of high rankings, that’s of course highly dependent on knowing the vocabulary customers use when they think about the problem your site purports to solve,” Nielsen concluded. “You can get a lot of ideas for new keywords simply by listening to what people say during user testing, so that’s a last way in which SEO and usability intersect.”

SEO tunnel vision

“Being an SEO that switched over to 100% website usability, I feel that my work supports and fortifies the procedures and steps a search engine marketer takes for their client,” said Kim Krause Berg, owner and creator of Cre8pc.com and the popular Cre8asiteForums. “Most usability-oriented SEOs will say that SEO without usability is illogical. They’ll point out that the money value invested in SEO and online marketing is doubled when applied to a site that’s been designed properly for the user experience. This is correct.”

“However,” she continued, “a usable and accessible website will be remembered by site visitors whose needs were satisfied. Give them a pleasant online experience, from search result to whipping out their credit card, and they’ll refer the site to friends, return themselves, bookmark it, link to it, blog about it, submit user generated content to it, and more.”

“I find there’s a bit of tunnel vision toward usability by web designers and SEOs,” she said. “You’ll hear SEOs say, ‘Let’s make sure the navigation works,’ or ‘We need to be sure pages aren’t cluttered.’ How many SEO companies ask for user persona or demographic data to help with optimization and targeted marketing? Why are we not user testing during the design phase, especially for rebuilds? Where are specifications documents that include search engine optimization, accessibility and user experience requirements?

“SEOs have the skills to enable search engines, not manipulate search behavior. I think sometime they forget visitor expectations,” she explained. “For example, landing pages. How great and necessary to plant the seed in search engines, but is the page task based? Is there a value proposition? Call to action? Can someone using assistive software use the page? Or was the point just to be found, but not serve? An expert blend of SEO and usability elements can fine tune pages to rank and satisfy expectations. I wouldn’t invest in one without the other.

“I think if search engines didn’t exist, and we had to find websites based on word of mouth, print, newsletters, forums or blogs instead, the impact on user experience and usage would be more obvious,” she concluded. “We’d quickly learn that enabling search engines is not enough. We don’t remember sites because search engines rank them well. We remember and return to websites that work for us and give us what we want, when we want it.”

Conclusion

First, I want to thank Peter Morville, Dr. Susan Weinschenk, Dr. Jakob Nielsen, and Kim Krause Berg for sharing their knowledge. I always learn something new or how to improve client websites every time I talk to them or read their books, articles, and blogs.

Many SEO professionals might not agree with some of their observations and perspectives. Some of their viewpoints surprised me a bit, too, but I always listen, reflect upon, and then test their observations on actual client sites. Result? I almost always end up creating more effective web pages.

Shari Thurow is the Founder and SEO Director at Omni Marketing Interactive and the author of the book Search Engine Visibility. The 100% Organic column appears Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

The situation

For the most part, B2B organizations struggle with content development for one reason, and it’s not because they don’t have anything to say. Rather, the problem can be attributed to staffing, or a lack thereof, as content development typically is quite lean in most B2B organizations.

However, these same organizations tend to have solid PR teams in place—whether in house or on the agency side—that are ready, willing, and able to generate new material. In essence, what these organizations lack in the area of content development, they make up for in PR.

The solution

Given that, B2B marketers struggling with content development should try to capitalize on PR to generate new content. Doing so could provide the ideal solution. In fact, my experience has shown that once PR is brought up to speed on the goal and how they can assist, they are excited to contribute.

But before you run down the hall to ask for their help, let’s first take a look at how you can get the most out of the resource.

Getting clarity

To start, if you are going to partner with PR, then it’s critical to get some clarity. Specifically, what constitutes content? Good question. And timely too, especially given the development of blended search.

Over the last year, the major search engines have started to display blended results, which integrates different forms of digital content—images, news, videos,—into the general search results. Now web pages are not the only type of content that matters. Instead, the search results landscape has changed.

This is actually a good thing. The change represents considerable opportunity for marketers as it allows them to leverage their various forms of digital content, and as a result, increases their chance to stand out amongst the clutter in the search results.

But for some reason, when marketers think of content, they limit themselves to web pages. This is a mistake. For example, most marketers fail to realize that a white paper is content too—just in a slightly different format—and that if it is optimized properly, it can do quite well in the search results.

But now with blended search, there’s so much more opportunity. Images, videos, and yes, even press releases are considered content too. In fact, a recent study on blended search reveals that of all the types of specialized content now displayed in the general search results, users prefer news items the most.

Success factors

Clearly, the opportunities for content development are endless, and PR is a great resource to leverage. However, what are the chances that the PR team is idly sitting around waiting for your call? My guess? Not very likely. So if you are considering tapping into PR, you would be wise to keep the following factors in mind as you move forward. Doing so could make the difference between the success or failure of the initiative.

Strategy. If you want to leverage PR, you’ll need their buy-in first. To start, discuss your overall strategy with them. Take the time to explain the content challenges you are experiencing, and that you value their opinions in developing a solution. While this might seem like a very trivial part of the process, it’s not. I have seen numerous organizations fail right from the starting blocks because they did not get buy-in from their PR folks.

Education. To successfully tap into PR, you need to educate them first. Again, this might seem very basic, but it is another area where organizations regularly shoot themselves in the foot. Most of the PR folks I have worked with on this were initially intimidated by the task of developing content for searchers. For the most part, I think their trepidation can be attributed to the fact that this is a new area for them. To help them feel more comfortable with the task, provide a few training sessions on what SEO is, what your goals are, and specifically what you are looking for them to do. But keep in mind that your PR folks may be wary that you’ll want them to turn everything they create into marketing fluff instead of meaningful content. Given that, be sure to spend a good amount of time discussing the types of content you are looking for them to produce. Then allow them to brainstorm some ideas; it will get you more buy-in that way.

Develop a pilot. To effectively leverage PR, start small. From my experience, the most successful initiatives start as pilots. The benefits of doing so are twofold: Not only will it help you get it right—by getting everyone on the same page first—it will also make it much easier to create momentum and show the results. This will get people excited about what you are collectively accomplishing, and as a result, they’ll be more willing to make it a regular effort.

Other formats. Leveraging PR for content development also means capitalizing on other media formats. You can involve your PR team in the optimization of additional types of digital content such as videos and podcasts. Many PR teams already create these digital assets for a variety of reasons, so take the time to train them to make subtle but effective changes, such as incorporating keywords in questions and using keywords to describe the video.

Measurement. Last, but not least, to fully capitalize on PR, you need to set goals and measure performance. A good way to start is to work with your PR team and the results of your pilot to set goals for your efforts. Be sure to set goals in terms of pages of content and frequency of update. More importantly, you must also set performance goals. But be mindful that the best goal setting is done as a collaborative effort. Make these performance goals aim for better placements in the search engines, more traffic, and more registrations or leads (some form of business results). And make sure to track these metrics monthly and report back to all involved so that everyone feels as though they are part of the effort.

Overall, if you are a B2B marketer struggling with content creation, your PR team could be the solution to your problem. But to make it work, you need to get their buy-in, run a pilot, and set and measure the goals for these efforts. If done properly, you have the chance to really make a difference.

Brian Kaminski is managing director of search engine marketing firm iProspect in San Francisco, and can be reached at b.kaminski@iprospect.com. The Strictly Business column appears Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

What is a landing page?

A landing page is a web page that a visitor reaches after clicking an online ad or a link, and contains detailed information about the specific product or service that is mentioned. The landing page should be considered part of the marketing campaign and shouldn’t just be another page on your website.

When you start developing a landing page you should really consider its purpose. What are you hoping visitors will do when they get there? Is your goal to sell a product, help visitors learn more about a service, or do you want them to provide you feedback? All of these goals would need different landing pages.

An effective landing page makes your visitors’ lives easier by providing them all the information that they need without having to scour your site or the web for answers. Using landing pages can significantly impact your conversion rate. A survey by Atlas OnePoint found that the average conversion rate when companies used their homepage as the destination for an advertisement or link was only 6 percent. However, companies that used targeted landing pages had almost double the conversion rate, with 12 percent of their visitors converting.

Landing pages can also improve your search engine optimization because they are filled with keywords about your business or product. Search engines want to provide the most relevant results, so these keyword-rich pages can improve your rank.

How to make a superior landing page

Content is an important part of a landing page, but knowing what to include and what to omit is very important. Your landing page should do one of three things—give your prospect reason to convert, enable them to do so, or resolve any concerns the prospect may have about converting. If any of the information on your page does not accomplish this, then it shouldn’t be there.

The site should provide relevant, focused, and detailed information about a specific product or service. It is most beneficial if this can be included on a single page. According to website optimization firm, Interactive Marketing Inc., this can increase conversion by 55 percent. This information should also be visible “above the fold,” or without the need to scroll down.

It is important to keep in mind who your audience is and make sure that the information you provide is relevant to them. This may mean you need to develop multiple landing pages for a single product. This will allow you to target your message to each specific audience.

Landing pages, as mentioned earlier, have a purpose, either to ask people to buy or to provide them more information—to meet that goal, your page needs to have a call to action. This can be a simple button asking people to purchase a product or click to read a free report. The button should be clearly labeled and should explain what you want customers to do.

Having a well designed page can heavily impact your conversion rate. Eye-tracking studies and other research have given online marketers new information about how users interact with websites.

People tend to look at the upper left hand side first, then at the headline and then at the left side of the page. To maximize your success, the most important information should be in these positions.

Additionally, the look and feel of your page should be consistent with your other marketing materials, and it should appear trustworthy. Users want to see a design that is consistent with the advertisement or link that brought them to your page so they know they’re in the right place. If you change your advertising campaign, you should change your landing page as well.

The impression your site gives visitors is crucial. A Stanford study found that 46 percent of web sales are lost on sites lacking the critical elements to build trust. The number one reason people indicated they don’t buy from a site is because it had an unprofessional look and feel that lacked credibility. Building this trust is crucial if you’re trying to gather personal information about your website’s users. The most common answer submitted on personal information forms online is Mickey Mouse. If you want fewer “Mickey Mouses” on your prospect list, this key is building trust.

The headline and page title on your landing page are very important. The page title is in the bar at the top of your web browser, and the headline is the biggest piece of text on the page. These two items have the greatest potential to impact your conversion rate. Include the keywords or phrases you used in the advertisement to get visitors to the site. Position these items where your eye travels first—the top left of the screen.

You now know the key to developing an effective design and helpful content, but what if you don’t have an in-house web designer or the resources to hire someone to design a landing page for every online marketing campaign? Luckily, there are online sites that help you create your own landing pages relatively easily and inexpensively. These sites don’t require that you know HTML, and designing a landing page can be as easy as creating a PowerPoint slide. For example, Marketo.com offers landing page creation tools and hosting.

Landing page optimization

To improve your landing page—test and test again. There are a few elements that are very important, including load time and headline.

Try to keep load time under 5 seconds. Cater your page to the slowest dial-up connection so as not to lose these visitors. Web analytics software can tell you how many of your visitors are using a slow connection, and a variety of sites, such as iWebTool, offer free tools to test your page load time.

Headlines can alter conversion times, so test a variety of them to see which is most effective. Headlines should tell the benefit to the customer, not necessarily the product features.

A landing page is also a good place to test different prices for your product if you display them online. An Allbusiness.com article about the psychology of pricing noted that prices that end with odd numbers, especially 7s or 9s, tend to be associated with lower prices than even numbers.

Finally, test the call to action to find one that delivers the highest conversion rates. This includes the buttons themselves. Large, red buttons tend to have the best conversion.

Tuning your landing page

Just building a landing page isn’t enough; to be effective, the page must be routinely updated. Updated content can boost your search engine optimization, it can help you track what content generates the best conversion, and it can improve traffic. The more you update, the more reason people have to visit your page. A Marketing Sherpa eye-tracking study showed that consistently updating and tweaking content can increase traffic by 40 percent.

One of the most important things to update is pricing changes. A landing page that misquotes a price will frustrate and most likely turn off a prospect. In a recent survey, Enquiro found that users of B2B websites preferred to see pricing information but it is often unavailable. Supplying a price range may help customers determine if you are within their budget, without requiring you to list specific prices.

Finally, make sure that none of the links are broken and remove any outdated links.

Landing pages are a great way to provide your customers the information they need in one convenient location, and they can help you convert web clicks into clients. While they may take some work to set up and maintain, they can drastically improve your online marketing efforts.

Julie Mason is general manager of Kellysearch.com. The Back To Basics column appears periodically at Search Engine Land.

And just how do you let your customers come to you? Search marketing is a good place to start. Some of the most successful search marketers know how to focus on the customer’s problem to allow customers to come to them.

Consider an example. You’ve just been named the product manager for a new line of organic lawn care products, to be branded “Green Can Be Green.” Beneficent Chemicals is branching out from its current brand image and its research scientists have given you an exciting new product as the first foray into the new line—Chinch Away. It’s totally organic, but it rids your lawn of those nasty chinch bugs that eat it to death. And your product does it in half the time as the old methods.

But it’s not that easy. Beneficent wants to start out selling totally online so that the new brand doesn’t get mixed in with its older brand image. You’ll get a Green Can Be Green Web site and you’ll ship all your products direct to consumers. Your job: Get them to find you and buy from you.

Immediately, you know that search marketing will be a critical part of your marketing mix. So, you start thinking about the keywords you’ll want to optimize for. “Chinch bugs,” of course. Maybe even “chinch” by itself. “Organic lawn care” and “organic insecticide”? Maybe. You start to look through all of your product materials and find some more words and phrases. Then you design a nice web site, filled with information about your product. About how fast Chinch Away works, how easy to apply, and, most of all, how green it is.

And it works. You’re attracting customers, you’re selling online, and you even start buying paid search ads for a few of the keywords. But you’ve missed a big chunk of potential buyers. You’ve missed the ones that don’t know they need you.

Think about the problem from your customer’s point of view. A homeowner’s lawn suddenly develops circular patches of yellow, wilted grass. That’s a problem. And the bigger problem is that the homeowner doesn’t know why. He turns to his favorite search engine, starting with “problem words,” such as “circles yellow grass.” If he knew what would solve his problem, he’d search for that, but he doesn’t. If that doesn’t work, he might try “yellow wilted grass” or just “yellow grass.” He’ll keep looking for information about the symptoms until he finds some ideas about what to do.

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that anyone would diagnose chinch bugs from what they find. They’re finding random questions on message boards about “yellow grass” and there are myriad causes of a yellowed lawn. Chinch bugs are rarely mentioned first. When confronted with this kind of information, people typically head to the store—a store that does not carry Chinch Away (because you sell only online).

What can you do about this? Well, you can provide the information that is needed. You can set out to provide the absolute best resources for diagnosing the cause of “yellow grass” that the Web has ever seen. You can walk the customer through each step they can take to determine what the causes could be. You can use photos, videos, whatever is required to make it as easy as possible.

Write it like a magazine article—as objective as possible. But (oh yeah), when you get to the part about diagnosing chinch bugs, it’s OK to link to your Chinch Away page to persuade them that yours is the best solution. But the rest of the article should focus totally on the customer’s problem. And each possible cause should get the same attention as chinch bugs do. It helps establish the credibility of the article, and you’ll be happy later as you expand your Green Can Be Green product line to handle other problems.

Why would you go to all that trouble? Because writing articles that are truly helpful to your customers (rather than sales pitches) benefit your search marketing in big ways:

You attract people searching for different keywords. If you can attract people searching for “yellow grass” when none of your competitors do, you have the first chance to sell them. These folks may never search for “chinch bugs” if you give them what they want. Many of them want to die ignorant of the array of chinch bug products out there—they just want the problem gone as quickly as possible. What’s more, this target segment might prove to be more loyal than the others—if their problem returns in a few years, they might head straight for your product because it worked.

You attract search engines looking for different content. Google’s Universal Search (as well as similar approaches with other search engines) puts more of a premium on non-text content than ever before. Your photos, your videos, and other forms now appear in the main search results pages and give you new ways of reaching your audience.

Your article is tasty link bait. Think about what kinds of information is linked to from other sites. It’s not your sales brochures or your product spec pages—it’s information that really helps readers. Information that solves their problems.

Searchers will pass your information to others. People pass on things they think will help other people, not sales pitches. Take advantage of the social media explosion to tap into “word of mouse.” Problem-solving content is more likely to be passed on than most of what sits on your web site.

Is anyone actually doing this? Absolutely—maybe the most famous example comes from longtime marketing innovator Procter & Gamble. “Problem marketing” is a key part of P&G’s approach. Check out their Home Made Simple site. Or try searching for “remove bbq sauce stain from cotton” and see if P&G’s Tide site still comes up #1. Maybe you didn’t expect a detergent manufacturer to be found for this search, but that is what problem marketing does for you. Tide’s site contains hundreds of combinations of stains and fabrics so they can be found for exactly what their customers are struggling with.

This kind of approach won’t work for all businesses—no one is thinking about solving a problem when they drink a Coke. But lots of businesses really are solving customer problems, and using “problem marketing” techniques gives you a new way to connect with customers that few of your competitors take advantage of.

Mike Moran is an IBM Distinguished Engineer for IBM’s OmniFind search and analytics products. He can be reached through his Web site mikemoran.com.