The MailChimp Experience

Email marketing continues to provide one of the best ROIs around, increasing traffic and conversions for websites and supporting other marketing efforts very well. If you need a basic overview of how to create an email newsletter, check out my post on Using Email Marketing

We do lots of email newsletters for clients, and routinely see web traffics and conversions triple following a newsletter. I have no excuse for the fact that we haven’t previously done one of our own.

However, the experience has been enlightening for me. Usually, I go and write up a newsletter for the client, using the custom template they’ve bought, and then I check their website analytics and their newsletter stats when it’s over. I send them a happy report telling how well everything went, and I’m through till the next newsletter.

Doing a newsletter for Haden Interactive gave me an opportunity to experience some of the aspects of email marketing that I haven’t had to consider before.

Cost, for one thing. The ROI for email marketing is excellent, even when it involves hiring a designer to make a template and a writer to make some content. The price of the email service you choose — whichever one you choose — is really negligible. Top Ten Reviews did a handy chart comparing email services with price and feature information. To encapsulate the chart, most email services offer just about the same features, most start at $10.00 a month or less, and $150.00 a month is the most you can spend, even with 25,000 on your mailing list. You can’t send out a monthly postcard to your best customers for that price.

Even with this certain knowledge that email marketing is unquestionably cost effective, I still found the idea of a free service appealing. If you have a small list, MailChimp has a free service. Many of the other companies used to have a free service, and now charge everyone, and our experience of the internet should lead us to believe that any free service might be temporary, but at the moment, you can use MailChimp for free.

Integration is essential for email marketing. If you have to add every new contact by hand to your email newsletter list in addition to your customer relationship management system or email contacts list, and add every new subscriber to your CRM, you’re going to hate that newsletter service before long. We use Solve360, which integrates with Constant Contact and with MailChimp. Check your CRM before you get your heart set on an email marketing company.

MailChimp, like Constant Contact, iContact, Vertical Response, and a whole bunch of other services, has a WordPress plugin that creates a subscription form for your site. We’ve used several email marketing plugins, and they all seem to work just fine.

The other important integration issue from our point of view is Google Analytics. I don’t mind checking clients’ newsletter results and analytics separately and creating a report that shows the harmony between them, but I sure as heck don’t want to take that time for my own company. Of the Big Three email services (iContact, Constant Contact, and MailChimp), only MailChimp integrates with Google Analytics.

Appearance is typically not my job for client email marketing. The designer creates the template and I may curse that designer if it’s hard for me to work in it, but it’s the designer’s fault and not that of the newsletter service. It’s also the designer’s job to make the template look good in the first place, and also in multiple browsers. I just have to make the words look good in it and not break it.

If you do your own newsletter, you are responsible for making it look good. If you use the newsletter service’s templates, the quality of those templates is part of what you’re paying them for.

Since I have a small list at this point, I’m not paying MailChimp for their template, and it’s a good thing. As you can see at the top of the post, our newsletter looked pretty good in most email clients, but you can see at right that it looks terrible in Outlook. It is in fact broken.

We believe in hiring designers for newsletter templates, so we’ll have that problem solved, but it might be a dealbreaker if we were determined to do it ourselves. Lots of people use Outlook — we don’t know how many of our subscribers do, but I’m betting that the number for our business and for yours is at least “a lot.”

Apart from the utter failure in Outlook, I liked MailChimp’s design wizard. I tried out the one in Constant Contact as well, and found that — while both were easy to use — MailChimp’s seemed more intuitive. They have more stylish templates straight out of the box, too, and they’ll automatically import the color scheme from your website, which can be a super big help if you don’t know how to get that information yourself.

All in all, MailChimp is a satisfying service. In comparison with other services, there were a few things we didn’t love:

• The video embedder doesn’t work as well as, for example, the one from Constant Contact. We had to fake our video embed, actually, and use a screenshot and link.
• You can’t quickly send your most recent newsletter to new subscribers with MailChimp.
• The aforementioned failure with Outlook.

That’s not much to complain about. We like the friendliness and sassiness of MailChimp’s site and interface, including their nice resources for designers. A thumbs up. Subscribe to our newsletter, by the way, if you’d like to hear from us occasionally, and also feel free to contact us if you need any assistance with your email newsletters. We may be late to the party when it comes to our own newsletter, but we’ve been writing successful newsletters for other people since the 20th century.

Can You Take Rejection?

Rosie gets several hundred emails a day at our “info” email address. Mostly from robots, she thinks, so she skims through them quickly and deletes most of them.

I don’t have that many emails, and most of them aren’t from robots, but the ones that are from strangers? I skim through them quickly and delete most of them.

Today I had a link request — lots, actually, and not just today, but the request I’m thinking of looked real enough that I opened it and skimmed through the message before deleting it. The writer was painting an optimistic picture of how she and I would benefit, mutually, from my linking to her site about clocks, what with my having lots of content about clocks here at my website. At the bottom was a note telling me how to opt out of future messages by responding with “remove” in the subject line.

That’s not the way to get links.

That kind of message, while the sender might think it makes the request less spam-like, actually says some significant things to the recipient:

• I don’t know you, and I realize that I have no right to contact you.
• I realize that you will perceive this as spam.
• I plan to contact you again in the future.
• You have to do something to fend up my unwelcome contacts.
• If you don’t tell me to quit, it’s your own fault.

She’s doing it wrong.

Ideally, the people to whom you send linkbuilding requests respond with, “Ooh, cool, what a great resource! My web site’s readers will be so glad I found this source. Thanks for hooking me up!”

Actually, they might just skim quickly and delete you.

If you can tell that this happened, you should consider how good a fit you are. If you’re asking for a link to your clock site because, frankly, you just want a link, then you should cross that site off your list and forget about it. There are plenty of fish in the sea, and strangers don’t have an obligation to respond to your emails.

If you really want that link and have reason to think it might actually be a mutually beneficial relationship, you can ask again, because you might have been hastily and accidentally deleted. You can send a postcard making your case. I got a phone call not too long ago — I’m not sure I’d recommend that, but it did get my attention.

If you get a “no,” thank the person for reading and responding. Then move on.

Your link requests should be handcrafted and personal enough that your recipient should never consider the message spam. They should also be well chosen enough that you get a fairly good rate of positive responses. That might mean that you’re invested enough in the relationship to feel rejected. If so, you’ve probably done a good job with your request.

On the other hand, if you get positive responses to every request, then you’re probably not pushing the envelope far enough. You should be daring enough in your efforts that you occasionally get a rejection. Accepting rejection is an important skill for linkbuilders.

On PageRank

Google recalculated PageRank this week, so your site’s PageRank may have gone up or down. Should you care?

Here’s Google’s official word on it:

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. Today we use more than 200 signals, including PageRank, to order websites, and we update these algorithms on a weekly basis. For example, we offer personalized search results based on your web history and location.

In other words, PageRank is one factor, and only one, in your rankings with Google. All things being equal, a site with higher PageRank ought to be offered to searchers before one with lower PageRank, but how often are all things equal?

Since PageRank is a measure of importance, you have to figure that the most important site won’t always be the best one for your query. for example, NASA’s website (PR9) is certainly way more important than our little lab site, FreshPlans (PR3). If, intrigued by President Obama’s announcement of the new National Robotics Initiative, you decide to do a general search for information on robots, NASA would be a better choice for you. If for some reason you want to make robot cupcakes in celebration, though, FreshPlans is your place.  It wouldn’t be reasonable for Google to offer you NASA’s robotics page if you wanted a robot bulletin board idea.

Is PageRank unimportant? It probably depends on the circumstances. The first thing to consider is that PageRank is public. We changed domains in January and lost all our PageRank (in spite of following the rules precisely). I think it was probably bad for business, since we are an SEO firm, and I’m very happy that we’re back at PR5 where we belong. Even if you’re not an SEO firm, people visiting your website can see how important Google thinks you are, and they may use this information in deciding between you and another company. Does a more important pizza parlor serve up better pizza? Probably not, but you can’t be sure that everyone knows that.

Roughly speaking, here’s what we usually take it to mean:

• 0 — new or not considered useful
• 1 — usually gets skipped, but would mean uncertain for a fairly new site, or if it’s been around a while, then it’s not considered a worthwhile site
• 2 — new site at first recalculation; a good sign for a new site but bad for an old one
• 3 — typical ranking for a good site with limited range
• 4 — a mature site with limited reach
• 5 — a good site
• 6 — an influential site
• 7 — an important site
• 8 — a significant site, probably for an important organization
• 9-10 internet royalty

Generally, small business sites should be in the 3-5 range, and be happy if they’re above. If they’re below, they should make changes.

Under Construction Page

I’ve been working with Suzanne Hurtig Design and TitusD on a new website for Coco McAtee, a public speaker in the Kansas City area.

Coco’s brochures and business cards are ready and she’s actively looking for work, but the website isn’t quite ready to go live. Rather than having to say, “My web address is on the brochure, but it’s not quite ready yet,” Coco has an Under Construction page that functions as a mini website while she gets the permanent site finished up.

I’ve written before on Coming Soon pages, and the advice there is still sound, but I wanted to share some of the special elements of Coco’s page.

The most important thing is that the page includes the essential content. Coco’s name, email address, and phone number are right there, so visitors can easily reach her.

The “who we are and what we do” is also there, in a very scannable and friendly form. The planned homepage content is more search friendly — a good thing, since we don’t want the Under Construction page to turn up in search once the completed site is up — but the Under Construction page is very friendly to human visitors.

The design matches the brochures and business cards Suzanne made for Coco, so Coco’s brand is supported. This increases the professionalism and trustworthiness of Coco’s site. While your web host’s default Under Construction page is better than a park page with ads or a Not Found page, the best choice is a page with a visual message consistent with your brand.

Coco’s page gets the “under construction” message across with style. When we’ve had Coming Soon pages for our sites, we’ve had the company logo and contact info and left it at that, but a clever announcement can be more memorable and encourage visitors to come back to the page in the future.

Writing Case Studies for Your Website

Case studies are great for search and for conversion. For search, they’re an opportunity to create keyword-rich content. It’s not only your primary keywords that search engines notice, after all. Search engines use related words to disambiguate keywords, so that someone searching for “lead generation” will get things about generating sales leads rather than things about the current generation’s exposure to lead.

Our case study for a valve manufacturer’s representative lets us use not only terms like “valve” and “actuator,” but also lots of words and phrases relating to the specific industries our client works with. As people use longer, more specific search queries and personal search becomes more important, having a rich net of related terms also becomes more important.

Case studies also let you strut your stuff, professionally speaking. Showing how you solved a problem for someone helps your visitors see how you could solve a problem for them, too.

Finally, case studies let you add fresh content to a site with no blog. The site we’re building for VAC will be on a WordPress platform, since the company needs to be able to update product specs and similar information regularly, but they have no plans to blog. With case studies, we can easily add pages for them when new concerns arise in their field, without complicating their navigation.

Here are some suggestions for writing effective online case studies:

• Use your essential keywords as soon as possible in the case study. Read a case study explaining that if you want more detail on this point.
• Make sure you speak to your primary selling points. The company whose case study shows at the top of this post wants to make it clear that they know the business well and keep up on innovations, so they can really be useful to their customers. Some visitors may need the specific innovative valve being described, but many more may need a company that will make their purchasing process more efficient with innovative solutions.
• Also consider the worries and problems your customers may face. Many people search for the problem, rather than the solution. If someone searches for “control valve problems” or “sticky control valve,” we’ve got a case study for that.
• As with any writing you do, especially for the web, keep it direct and active and make every word count.

Plugin Review: Broken Link Checker

We tried out the Broken Link Checker WordPress Plugin at our lab site, FreshPlans. This site has a lot of posts that are compendia of links — the best math sites, a bunch of good resources on sharks, stuff like that.

Of our roughly 6,000 links, we had 177 broken, so it’s a good thing we checked.

The plugin made it easy.You install it in the usual way, and it gives you a dashboard like the one you see at left (find it in the “Settings” section of the admin site).

Each broken link is identified, along with the type of link, its anchor text, where it used to go, and which post it’s in.

You can automatically unlink it or you can say that it isn’t really broken, and you can do these actions in bulk, so that you could just unlink them all in one fell swoop.

For some kinds of posts, that might work. For ours, definitely not. This is why we don’t advocate automatic link fixers. If you’re using links right, you shouldn’t be able to just unlink them and have everything in the post be okay.

However, we can go to the post with the broken links, and preview it to see quickly just where those links are. As you can see in the image on the right, the broken links have strikethrough text.

It’s easy to find where the resource being linked has moved to and update the link, or to remove the link if the resource is actually gone.

You’ll even get email alerts when one of your links goes bad.

This plugin is easy to use and a definite time saver. If we had been using it before, we wouldn’t now find ourselves with 177 broken links to mend.

Updating Old Blog Posts

Updating your blog regularly is important; blogs that are updated regularly receive so much more traffic than those that are updated only occasionally that it simply doesn’t make sense to leave your blog unattended.

But what about old blog posts? How much do you have to do to keep them updated?

Watch out for broken links.

If you use WordPress, you could install the Broken Link Remover plugin, which automatically unlinks any broken links. We don’t see this as a solution, since it can leave sentences like “Read more about this solution or download it for Windows or Mac” sitting there looking weird, but people were discussing it with enthusiasm at WordCamp.

The Broken Link Checker lets you know when links are broken so you can replace them with a better resource or remove the sentence. We’re testing it at our lab site, FreshPlans, and will let you know how it works for us.

If you’re not on WordPress,  consider Linkchecker or Webmaster Toolkit’s online link checker, or a similar tool from SearchBliss. Both caught a broken link for me, but SearchBliss also caught a 301 redirect, so I could update it as well.

Set aside some time for updates.

Granted, it takes time you could be spending writing new posts, but it’s worth doing for posts that still bring traffic to your website. At our lab site, which caters to teachers, last year’s posts on Pirate Classroom Themes and Rock’n'Roll Classroom Themes are both seeing lots of traffic right now. I went in and added some new resources, replaced some items for which there were better options, and removed a photo of an item that’s no longer available.

Here at Haden Interactive’s blog, which is about a field that changes frequently, I try to make sure everything stays up to date — but I know it’s going to take me a while to get all new images for posts on Google Analytics, now that GA has changed its interface.

When you know about a change, it makes sense to track down posts affected by that change. Otherwise, you can simply go back to last year’s post every day, thus ensuring that nothing is more than a year out of date, or you can work your way through the most popular ones.

Think carefully about deleting old posts.

In general, old content that gets updated is good stuff, from the SEO point of view. More content is better, your old posts may have incoming links, and if it’s bringing you traffic, then it’s paying its virtual rent.

However, having some old poor quality posts hanging around your website can do you harm. If you used to generate lots of posts just to make your site larger, or you went through a spell of thinking that “transparency” required levels of self-disclosure which you now regret, then you might want to do some pruning.

Consider rehabilitating old posts rather than just deleting them, if you can. If you really have some bad stuff in the blog’s past, though — especially duplicate content or content-free keyword stuffing — you should get rid of it for the sake of your site’s rankings.

Upcycling your old blog posts

One blogger says you should delete posts in which you predicted something incorrectly, but it seems to me that posts which have become obsolete or even humorous because of the timeliness of the topic are great candidates for upcycling.

Your post in 2009 claiming that Twitter was a passing fad and would be gone by the end of the decade? Go back to it and write about how wrong you were. Self-deprecation is popular in blogs, and you get a chance to look again at the factors that made you say so at the time.

You can even completely rewrite your post if you want to. Don’t change your title or your URL so you won’t confuse search engines or get visitors clicking through to an error message, but you can certainly change your Photoshop CS3 tips to make them work for CS5.

Upcycling your obsolete blog posts can be a relatively quick way to produce valuable newish content.

SEO Tip #8

How Much Do Your Titles Matter for SEO?

Who uses page or post titles, and when?

• People use them on the search engine results page to decide where they should click. If you don’t specify a title, or if the search engine doesn’t believe that your title provides the best information, the search engine may provide a title for you. However, a quick search for “no title” will show you a whole bunch of pages with the auto-generated title “no title,” including a page for a Wagnerian society, the code for which you can see on the right. If you search for the first sentence on this page, Google will offer it to you with a reasonable title, but there’s no reason to leave it up to a robot to choose what to call your page.
• People also use titles when they have a lot of tabs open on their computer screens, to find the page they want and to get back to it. This means that the first few words should make it quite clear what your page is about. The words should also be different on each page. People might have several pages from your website open on their screen. Choose “Contact Elemental Fireworks Factory” and “About Elemental Fireworks Factory” rather than “Elemental Fireworks Factory| Contact” and “Elemental Fireworks Factory| About Us.”
• Search engines use them, we think, to determine the point of your page. This means that your keywords should be included in your page title if they can be included naturally. Some believe that, since you can usually expect to rank for your company name, your page title shouldn’t be the name of your company. So, instead of having “Parker Moore Feinstein” for a page title, they suggest that you should have “Boston Accountants.” I think this looks odd to the humans, and I don’t think that page titles carry so much weight that it’s worth making humans wonder about your trustworthiness. If you feel you must do this, go with “Parker Moore Feinstein| Boston Accountants.” This way, people can find the right tab on their screen without difficulty, and will click through to your page from the SERPs instead of thinking, “Those guys have a weird generic page title. I’ll go to some other, less weird company.”

If you believe that page titles are the most important part of the page for search, I invite you to perform a couple of experiments:

1. Check your main keywords: the terms that bring people to your site most often. Apart from your company name, how many are in the title of the visitors’ landing page?
2. Do a few searches at your favorite search engine. How often are the keywords you used in the page titles of the top ten results?

I ran this experiment quite a few times for a number of different sites, and the results don’t confirm that page titles are the be all and end all for SEO. Often, sites whose titles don’t contain the search term rank higher than those with titles containing the search term.

Take an example from our lab site, FreshPlans. We know that from May through September, “classroom themes” is our primary keyword, while “lesson plans” is the main one for the rest of the year. This year,  jungle classrooms are the rage, so our “jungle classroom theme” is the most popular page at our site for June. However, the second most popular page is titled “monkey lesson plans.” Look at the top ten keywords people used to reach this page:

1. “classroom themes”
2. “monkey classroom theme”
3. “classroom theme ideas”
4. “monkey themed classroom”
5. “classroom theme”
6. “monkey bulletin board”
7. “monkey classroom”
8. “monkey theme”
9. “monkey theme classroom”
10. “monkey bulletin board ideas”

People used lots of other searches, 182 in all, including “jungle classroom theme” and “learning lesson for kids hear no evil see no evil with the monkeys.” Of 853 visits from search, only one visitor actually typed in “monkey lesson plans.” Last fall, far more visitors to this page used the phrase “lesson plans.” That’s what our population happens to search for in the fall.

So give your pages, post, and press releases good titles that will work for humans and visitors, in the SERPs and on your page. Use your keywords a lot in your titles, but not so much as to be unnatural. Occasionally use something cute or funny, if that fits your website (go ahead, check out “Suddenly You Realize: Your Husband’s Underwear is Ridiculous.” I dare you.). And be sure to keep in mind that a great page title can’t rescue a poor page.

Web Copywriting: Doing it Wrong

Good web copy is rare. This week, I’m getting insight into why it’s so difficult.

Designer Tom Hapgood’s web design class builds a free website for a local nonprofit every term. This year, my writing class is putting together three paragraphs of text for the home page.

We started with the text that’s on the current web site. My class has already spent a few weeks learning about the importance of having a point, so they could see immediately that the current home page just doesn’t have one.

Your visitors will give you five to 12 seconds, roughly, before they decide to leave or to stay. Your home page has to tell visitors immediately who you are and what you do. Your homepage should also be very clear on what you want your visitors to do.

Once we read through the whole site and figured out what exactly the organization does and the goal of their site, we decided on a single sentence that said exactly what we wanted to convey at the website. Can you do that for your website? You should. Possible sentences of this kind might be:

• With the help of donations from people like you, our organization starts homeless families on the path to stable, independent lives.
• You should buy tires from us because we provide expert, convenient service.
• Our cupcakes are so cute, they’re a fashion accessory.

If you can’t create a sentence that sums up the point and purpose of your site, then you probably aren’t clear enough in your mind to write that homepage. Ideally, you know this before you begin writing your site content, but we find that many of our clients have something in mind that’s more like “You should hire us because we can do practically anything” or even “You should buy our stuff because we want to make some money.” The nonprofit site’s homepage gave the impression that their main point was something like “Give us money because lots of companies already have.” That’s not what they meant to say; they just didn’t think it through.

Once you have a clear point to make, you must actually make that point on your homepage.

Having come up with a clear statement, we then identified the points of support it needed and made an outline specifying what each paragraph ought to say. The class split up into three teams and got to work on writing the paragraphs.

Each team identified a clear point and the necessary support. They were, at this point, way ahead of most of the “before” websites we start out with.

If your website’s main point is “Our products let you go green without sacrificing quality or value,” then you have to say something that proves your products are environmentally responsible. You have to make it clear that your prices are competitive. You have to address the question of quality.

If you want to say, “We are such fun, cool accountants that you will enjoy tax time if you work with us,” then your homepage content has to demonstrate your fun coolness, while also making it clear that you are in fact accountants.

The class, having figured out what they wanted to say,  jumped in to write the paragraphs. Unfortunately, they began with things like, “Multiple studies have shown that the most effective approach to…”

You don’t get to ease your way into your homepage content. You have to make the points you need to make, and every word you use should do that — and only that.

We’re still working on those three paragraphs. I expect to give the nonprofit a home page that will — with the web design class’s new design — get the effect they’ve been hoping to accomplish.

This is a great assignment for a writing class, even though they’ll soon be getting back to research papers, where it’s completely appropriate to start off by referencing multiple studies. They’re learning how to decide precisely what needs to be said, and to say it clearly and directly. This is a good thing for any kind of writing.

It’s essential for web copywriting.

What about your homepage? Does it make the point it needs to make? Or have u been doin it wrong?

Custom Post Types: Listings

Custom post types are an intriguing feature of WordPress 3.0 and later that, frankly, aren’t very accessible to those of us who are not developers.  “You’re not a developer,” a developer once told me, “so sometimes things have to be explained to you slowly.” That about covers my grasp of custom post types.

However, I’m currently working on a website using custom post types exclusively. This site is being built with the WooThemes Listings theme, which is designed to allow non-developers to use custom post types.

By default, WordPress sites have two kinds of content: pages, which are designed for static content such as your Contact or About Us page; and posts, which are designed for blog posts and news and things like that. Your attachments and custom menus are also custom post types, but they’re very limited in their uses.

The Listings theme has another kind: listings. With listings, you can list books, or wines, or pieces of real estate, or I suppose dogs in your animal shelter and people in your dating service. Till now, we’ve had to use blog posts when we wanted to make directories or lists for things, and they don’t work exactly right for that.

We used regular posts for all the albums of the band Trout Fishing in America when we built their website, for example, and putting them into chronological order while also preserving divisions into family music and grown-up music, sorting out those that had been nominated from Grammies, providing images of the album covers and links to downloads, and then connecting them all up with the listings in the store — well, it required some fancy footwork.

Listings are made just like posts, once the Listings theme site has been configured. Then they can be placed into the homepage featured content slider, read like a post or page, subjected to some fairly advanced search, and listed as a set of options. You can even allow users to upload their own listings to a template you create, so people can swap books or sell their used bicycles or something.

You can create taxonomies for your list with categories (hierarchical, which is to say they can branch off into divisions like a tree) and tags (not hierarchical). You can add custom fields as well — that’s where we could have put the album cover images and links to CDBaby and iTunes.

Custom post types power a lot of functionality in plugins and in custom themes. When you use custom fields for galleries and e-commerce, you’re essentially using custom post types.

We used Pods on our site for Rocky Grove Sun Company. Pods act a lot like custom post types. Read a comparison of Pods and custom post types to start thinking about which to choose.

Now I’m saying “which to choose” as though all of us can freely use both. In reality, if you’re a site owner rather than a developer, you can’t just choose either. I attended a presentation by Jonathon Wondrusch on how to create custom post types at WCKC last week, and found it enlightening. He showed us how to code them, and sure enough, it’s straightforward and logical. That doesn’t mean that you want to do it yourself.

I left thinking, “Perfect! Next time I need a custom post type, I know just what to ask the developer to do.” I also thought, “Sounds like Pods may be a better bet much of the time.” There’s now a third option as well. The Listings theme makes custom post types absolutely accessible for non-developers.  It costs more than your average WP theme, but it may be the ideal solution for those who want additional functionality without having access to a developer.

Changes in People’s Search Habits

We talk a lot about how search engines’ algorithms change, but have you noticed how people’s search habits have changed?

Probably not. I teach research skills, though, so I’ve had the opportunity to notice a big change since Google brought out Instant Search.

A year ago, the average user of search engines wasn’t very good at search. Studies estimated that about 37% of searchers were actually skillful in their use of Google or Bing, and that’s about what I saw in my classes, too.

Typical young adult searchers would type a word or two into the search box and then click on the first result. They’d often do a lot of clicking back and forth, trying out results in hopes of finding what they needed. We’d practice refining queries and using more words to get better results.

Now, most of the people I’m training begin with longer, more specific searches and change more quickly if the results aren’t what they need. They use the information on the search engine results page to make predictions about what they’ll find if they click through, and they also use the results they get to change their queries, getting more specific or clarifying their request.

It’s as though Instant Search has trained people to have conversations with the search engine.

What does this mean for online marketing?

Long tail keywords are even more important.

If you have an outdoor gear shop, your top keywords may be things like “camping gear” or “outdoor sports equipment” or “backpacking supplies.” If those terms bring you 100 visits apiece, though, you can expect to have more than 100 different searches like “sleeping bag for car camping” or “camping kitchen basics.” We call these “long tail” searches.

If you check Google Insights for Search for simple one and two word phrases, you’ll find that most basic terms show a drop over the past few years. This is not, I think, because people are no longer looking for camping gear, but because they’re beginning with long tail searches.

Does this mean that you should quit using basic keywords and start peppering your copy with long phrases you think someone might use in search? Nope. Just make a point of using synonyms, and also of writing plenty of good content. That way, when someone looks for “best shoes for camping in the High Sierras,” you won’t have to hope you happened to use that phrase — the search engines will have gotten, through semantic indexing, that your site is about outdoor gear.

As for keyword stuffing, it has never been a good idea and now it’s even less likely to benefit your site.

Your meta description is even more important.

Your meta description will usually be the thing that searchers see when they’re deciding whether or not to click through to your site. I’m saying “usually” because sometimes a search engine may choose to show something else, especially with long tail searches. In the first result below you can see that Google has chosen to excerpt a section later on the page that includes the state name. The second result shows that repeating keywords in your meta description robs you of the opportunity to give any useful information about your company.

Yours should contain things like your phone number, a clear description of what you do, and maybe even your address or other location information if you have a brick and mortar location.

Responsiveness to change is key in online marketing. This is a change worth responding to.

 

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