Is your homepage badly in need of an update? Fire up your browser and head on over to your website. Here's five crucial questions to ask yourself (and friends) about your homepage to see if it's really working for you as hard as it could be.

1. Does it grab visitors' attention in 8 seconds or less? Bored visitors probably won't stick around, and your competitors are just a Google search away!
2. Does it stimulate interest and reinforce reader's confidence that they're in the right place? What's worse than a boring website? An irrelevant one! If you sell widgets, make sure your homepage not only states clearly that you make widgets but why your widgets are better that your competitors. (Or why your services are better than your competitors')
3. Does it inspire the desire to take the action or clicking deeper towards a purchase? If you were your potential customer, would you be persuaded to do business with you based on your homepage content?
4. Is how they take action easy and obvious? Step 6 feet away from your monitor and look at the screen. Is it obvious where you want your visitors to click next? If not, you need a more obvious "call to action".
5. After they've clicked, does the next page give them satisfaction by providing exactly what they wanted how they wanted? Did you hammer home why your services or products are better than your competitors? Did you provide testimonials, assurances or guarantees to make doing business with you as risk free and comfortable as possible?

And there you have it! Critical website analysis in 30 seconds or less! I'd encourage you though to spend at least a few minutes on this task. Most of your website visitors probably enter your website through your homepage. Spending a little extra time to make sure it's doing its job of impressing your visitors can go a long way to getting more business from your website.

Is Your Website Content Up to Date?

Why wait till Spring before cleaning up your website? With a new year upon us, now is the perfect time to review your website and make sure all the information is up to date and that your content reflects any changes you may have made to your business in 2011.

Also, for Website On-Denand Clients, what better way to use up your 30 to 60 minutes of free website updating time for January that your Website On-Demand plan now comes with!

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Many Clients have expressed interest in improving their rankings in the local results listing that often appears at the top of search results. An earlier post I wrote covered adding your website to the local results listing, and so this post will hopefully shed some light on improving your rankings. The things you can do break down into a couple different categories:

• Completing your Google Local Business Centre profile
• Getting your website listed and mentioned on other websites and directories

 

Completing Your Google Local Business Centre Profile

If you haven't already done so, the first step is to claim your website in Google's local business centre and complete the verification process. You'll then want to fill in as much of your profile as possible including adding photos/videos, selecting the appropriate categories, using keyword-rich description text and more. Be sure to ask your Clients to review your business under your local business centre listing too!

1-800 numbers are great, but your local business centre listing is not the place for them. It's important to use a phone number with a local area code in your local business centre listing as this is one of the factors Google checks. Also, ensure that your phone number on your profile matches your phone number on your website. If you have a Yellowpages listing, it should match there too!

To summarize the steps to completing your profile:

• Claim, verify and update your profile
• Upload photos and videos to your profile
• Request that your Clients complete reviews of your business under your listing

 

Getting Your Website Listed and Mentioned on Other Websites and Directories

Google will also comb through the web and keep track of mentions of your business on other websites and directories. These mentions will be listed under your local business listing. The more mentions in respectable places (spam sites won't count for much!) your business receives, the better your ranking will likely be.

Where are these places you might ask? Carrie Hill at SearchEngineLand.com has a great article on them and so I direct you to her article at http://searchengineland.com/secret-sauce-leverage-outside-listings-to-help-local-rankings-41905 for more detail. A few of the places she mentioned include:

• Flickr Galleries
• Youtube Channel
• BOTW.org
• Review Sites
• Craigs List
• User Content

 

I hope this is helpful in your ascent up the rankings. If you have any questions about improving your website's ranking in search engines, please feel free to contact me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

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If there's one question I get more than any other from new Clients, it's this one: "Will my new website be search engine-optimized?"

Fifteen years ago, a ‘search engine-optimized' website may have been enough to get you ranking well on search engines. Now-a-days though, a ‘search engine-optimized' website is only your ticket to the game. It is the bare minimum you can and should do to rank well in search engines.

Informal studies have been done on search engines and it's believed that only 20% of your ranking is determined by how well your website is optimized. This means including keywords and using them in the right places, making sure your URLs are search-engine-friendly, etc only account for 20% of your ranking!

What makes up the other 80%? You guessed it! Backlinking!

Backlinking is the process of getting links from relevant, high-quality websites back to your website. Once you've finished some basic, search engine optimization of your website's content, backlinking is the best investment of your time and money if improving your website's ranking in Google is your goal.

Let's say you invest 10 hours of your time in excruciating detail making sure your homepage is perfectly optimized. Your competitor spends only 2 hours doing the most basic SEO but also spends a couple hours getting one or two backlinks. Who's site will rank higher? Your competitor's hands-down!

Without further ado, here's 7 easy, free places to get decent backlinks to your website.

• WordPress
• Tumblr
• Live Journal
• Blogger
• TypePad
• Squidoo
• HubPages

The above are all very popular FREE blogging websites. Why list there? The answer is bit technical, but when you create a new blog on those websites, it has a "Page Rank" of 0 (the lowest) but it's also under the wordpress.com/tumblr.com domains which have Page Ranks of 8 or 9 (the highest.)

Now here's the backlinking process and what you need to do:

• Write an article relevant to your field, containing your keywords. At the top and bottom of your article, be sure to include a link back to your website. Also, make sure that link contains your keywords in the text. For example, in your link, don't say something bland and general like, "Click here to visit our site". Instead, say something inclusive of your keywords like, "Toronto website design services offered here."
• Create 7 different versions of the article above making sure to change titles, link text, most of the body text, etc. You can use a tool like http://thebestspinner.com/ or http://www.jetspinner.com/ (the latter has a free version) to create these new versions or you can do it manually. An even better approach of course is to use 7 completely different articles if you happen to have some unused articles lying around.
• Go to each of the seven websites listed above
• Sign up with each and create your free blog
• Paste a different version of the article in each of the 7 blogs.
• You're done!

Be sure to check your ranking in search engines before and then a month after trying this to so you can track your improvement in ranking.

Good luck!

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True, this article isn’t about websites. But I’ve read a few books on email campaigns recently, and I know that more than a few of you have ongoing email campaigns, so hopefully you’ll find the tips useful.

Let’s assume you have an email list of old prospects sitting around. Or perhaps you have a list of previous customers that haven’t done business with you in a while. Why not begin converting those prospects and inactive customers into new and active customers? A targeted email campaign is a great way to create business seemingly out of thin air (although really what you’re doing is monetizing your past efforts in marketing and sales.)

Below are the top tips from my research that you can use to make your next email campaign more effective. While mostly targeting towards service-based businesses, many of the tips below apply to product-based businesses as well.

1. Don’t overuse the words free, bonus, amazing, etc. These commonly appear in spam emails and may cause your email to wind up in your recipients spam folder.
2. In your email, get to the benefits part quickly.
3. Timing is everything with email campaign. Don’t send your email campaign on weekends, Mondays and Fridays. Also, try to avoid sending your emails first thing in the morning. People are in a rush first thing in the morning, and emails not immediately relevant to their work are likely to be deleted. Tuesdays through Thursdays in the late morning and early afternoon are better times to send your email campaigns. Most email campaign software allows you to schedule specific times for sending out your email campaign.
4. Write your emails to target your customers’ “hot buttons”. These are challenges that are of the utmost importance to your customers. Your email should make your customers aware of things that are preventing them from getting the results they’re looking for, and, of course, should pose your products and services as part of that solution.
5. Keep your paragraphs short (2 to 3 sentences) and include as few as possible.
6. Personalize the subject line – the more specific, personal and relevant, the better.
7. Ensure that the email appears to be sent from you rather than some generic address like This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Nobody really wants to read an email from This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. , particularly if they may not remember the name of your company.
8. Use font styling like bold and italics often to keep the text visually interesting. Do not mix font faces and font sizes.
9. Be clear about next steps. There should be no confusion (it should be blatantly obvious) what you want the prospect to do next.
10. Include a supplementary offer in your email in case your main “next step” is considered too daunting. Examples of a supplementary next step include signing up for email updates on your blog, downloading a report, visiting your Facebook group, etc.

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If you're like 99% of business owners out there, your Google Analytics traffic reports may be a little hard to understand. Fortunately, there's 4 simple questions you can use to begin understanding your Google Analytics website traffic reports and gathering insights from them.

Here are the questions to ask after you receive your traffic report:

 

1. How many visitors are coming to your website?

a. Do you have a problem attracting traffic to your website? (feel free to ask us for help!)

b. Also, look for long term trends (is traffic going up?) and seasonality (is there a time of year when traffic is highest? lowest? Why?)

 

 

2. Where are your visitors are coming from?

a. What referring websites are sending you traffic? (e.g., is all the time you're investing in Facebook paying off with traffic to your website?)

b. What keywords are (and are not) sending you traffic from search engines? (getting traffic to your website from industry-related keywords is ideal - not just your business name)

 

 

3. What do you want your visitors to do on your website?

a. What is the goal of your website? It's raison-de-existent. Do you want people to fill out your contact form, sign-up for your newsletter, make a purchase, etc? Deciding your website's goal is critical as you can't "improve" your website until you know what exactly it should be doing for you.

 

 

4. What are your visitors actually doing on your website?

a. Look at your top content and entry pages. If you want people to complete your contact form, are visitors even getting to your contact form page? If not, what can you do to change that? If they get to the contact form page, are they staying on the page or are they "bouncing"? Are they being encouraged enough to complete the contact form?

 

Have questions? Need some help looking at your analytics report or need more detailed information from your analytics report? Feel free to email me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

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