Integrating Event Marketing with Social Media

I’m working right now on a website for an event marketing company, so it’s probably natural that when I attended an annual women’s holiday marketplace last night I thought about event marketing.

It’s not a new concept for me — I used to manage a bookstore, and one of my primary jobs was to organize events. I gave teacher workshops, dressed up for preschool storytime, organized food drives with slates of local musicians, and wore those stupid costumes with giant heads (yes, they are as uncomfortable as they look). It was worth it because it made our customers love us, got us press coverage, and kept the cash register ringing.

But the latest marketing reports are announcing that event marketing is on a lot of companies’ list of approaches to reconsider or cut back on. Along with newspaper and TV ads, it’s being thought of as an expensive method whose ROI you can’t measure. As we squeezed through the laughing crowds last night, it seemed to me that event marketing has a real place in an overall marketing plan — but only when it’s connected with online marketing.

Here’s how the holiday market used social media to get the word out:

• They created a Facebook Event page and invited all their friends.
• They blogged about the event, posting their flyer.
• They emailed their mailing lists with personal notes.
• They announced their event in local online publications and calendars.
• They used pingg.com to send email invitations.
• They tweeted and posted at Facebook to remind people, linking back to the pages they’d made.

Here’s what they could have done, and didn’t:

• Asked all the vendors and the venue to announce and link the marketplace at their websites.
• Created a hashtag at Twitter to encourage more tweeting and discussion.
• Used other social media sites, such as Google+ or Pinterest.
• Asked local bloggers to write about the market (since there was a charity element, they could have asked freely in a good cause).
• Blogged about it extensively at their own blog.
• Posted photos of the event at Facebook or FlickR — in real time to bring people out, or afterwards to keep the buzz going.

Obviously, social media is more cost effective than the same amount of coverage in traditional media or direct mail. It’s more directly targeted, and consumers trust it more than advertising. It also has more staying power: the newspaper ad your business places will be gone forever — probably before the event itself. The blog posts and photo albums you create for your event will continue to show what a fun/ community oriented/ active place your company is for years.

Events do something key for your social media, too: they give you something to talk about. The event marketing company we’re working with offers child safety seminars, rodeo trivia events, sports stuff — a company presenting one of these events can chat about child safety, the rodeo, and sports as well as the event itself. This gives you a chance to say things that benefit your company without actually talking about your company all the time.

Event marketing and social media make a great partnership.

The Power of a Metaphor

This terrific PSA-style ad series from Team Detroit for the College of Creative Studies in Detroit is a great example of the use of metaphor. In this series, the language, the photos, and the style of the ads all mimic ads about drugs, giving us an “art=drugs” metaphor that catches eyes and gets repinned and Liked (I first saw it at Eric Huber’s Facebook page, and he saw it at the Philbrook’s page).

It’s clever, but metaphor is widely used in ads for more reasons than that. If your metaphor is successful, it brings a huge amount of content into a small space. “1 in 5 teenagers will experiment with art” along with the fine print “Talk to your kids about art school” gives us the compelling nature of art, the admitted fact that parents sometimes worry about kids who want to make the arts their career, the reality that art school is a good way to direct the passion for art toward a living wage, and possibly also a bit of a suggestion that art is a wholesome alternative to drugs.

That’s a lot to pack into two brief sentences.

Does this work in web content? Not necessarily. The problem is, search engines don’t get metaphor. I worked on a website once which wanted to use the headline from their print ad campaign for their website, too. “One of the nation’s best kept secrets.” Can you tell what the company does? Neither can a search engine. Anything requiring context and previous experience is lost on robots. Anything requiring images to clarify the point is also lost on robots. Robots don’t get jokes.

That doesn’t mean you can’t use metaphor in your web content. Just consider these suggestions:

• Don’t use metaphor for your main headings. Main headings are supposed to be the most important stuff at your website, and search engines pay extra attention to them. They have to communicate clearly.
• Don’t use the metaphor to the exclusion of clearer messages. When you have a good metaphor, you don’t want to give it up. If your company is a rocket ship, then you may want to zoom past the competition, send your customers into orbit, and explore the very edges of the universe — but search engines will not offer you up to people who searched for “accounting software” if that’s all you’re saying. Get the basics on the screen in the right places, and decorate with extra flourishes and tendrils of metaphor.
• Don’t use the wrong metaphor. The College of Creative Studies is betting that parents prepared to pay for their kids’ art school education will find the art=drugs metaphor funny. Most companies couldn’t get away with equating their products to drugs. Online, equating your product to something that turns up mostly in shady online neighborhoods can send your product right to the shady neighborhoods. It’s hard for the most respectable nutritional supplements to stay out of shady neighborhoods online, so calling your dry cleaning service “Vitamins for your professional image” is an online error. Might be just the thing for your print ads, but don’t chance it on your website.

 

Lab Report: Bounce Rate

Our lab site, FreshPlans, has always had a high bounce rate. We haven’t been concerned about that, for several reasons:

• A site with daily posts may get people arriving each day for the new post and leaving again.
• An informative site may have people coming directly to the info they want by search, getting that information, and leaving happy. With our particular population, we know, they are likely to print the page for future reference rather than reading it online.
• A site with affiliate links may have people clicking through to make a purchase.
• FreshPlans is our lab site, not a business, so who cares?

However, we do always have to say, “If this were a client of ours, we’d work on the bounce rate.” So we’ve decided to work on our bounce rate the way we work on a client’s site — that is, using data instead of guesses and assumptions.

We found out some interesting things.

First, we went to Google Analytics and sorted our pages by bounce rate. You can do this in the Content section, clicking on Pages and then on Bounce Rate in the results. This will sort your pages so that the pages with the highest (or lowest, as you prefer) bounce rate are at the top.

We saw right away that we have thousands of pages with 0% bounce rate — searches and translations, mostly. We also have thousands with 100% bounce rate, largely searches for things we don’t yet have on the site or translations which presumably showed the visitor that the page wasn’t what they expected. Filtering those results out, we found multiple pages with bounce rates ranging from 10% to 90%.

Our next step was to check the keywords that had brought people to the pages. After all, if the bounce rate is high, that should mean that people didn’t find what they wanted. Our Monkey Lesson Plans page has an overall bounce rate of 85% — but people stay there an average of 4:22 minutes. They arrive with keywords like “monkey lesson plans,” “monkey classroom theme,” “monkey bulletin board,” and “monkey themed classroom.” Four and a quarter minutes is long enough to get monkey classroom ideas, print them out, and be happy.

By comparison, our page of Christmas lesson plans has a bounce rate of 12%. People stay there an average of 35 seconds. This page  has a bunch of links to the various Christmas-related lesson plans at the site, so it looks as though visitors skim the page and click through to the lesson plan about Christmas Around the World or the Grinch or what have you. They’re also probably happy, but the bounce rate is much lower.

So far, this is about what we expected to see.. The interesting part came when we discovered that a lot of our high bounce rate pages were actually just images. We have a page, for example, that shows a Little Red Hen mask. It’s not really a post or page, just photo storage. People reach this rather useless page through image searches for “little red hen mask” and “little red hen printable,” and it does them no good at all.

Clearly, we should fix this problem and make sure our photos are stored differently, or at least that they clearly lead to the lesson plans they belong to. Should we also change our monkey lesson plans? Perhaps not. Over 5,000 people have visited this page, all reached it by searching for reasonable keywords, most stay there long enough to read it, and it seems to us that it contains useful ideas. Compare that with our engineering lesson plans, which enjoys a much lower bounce rate but has been visited by only a few hundred people. It also shows reasonable keywords and a reasonable length of visit, and we’re not convinced that it’s actually a better page.

However, if FreshPlans were a business site, we would want people to visit more pages, to explore, to shop. That’s what you want at your website. So here’s our advice:

• Use Google Analytics to identify the pages with higher and lower bounce rates.
• Check the keywords bringing people to the pages with higher bounce rates.
• Examine the patterns you see closely, and identify the problems with the pages that have higher bounce rates.
• Fix the problems you find.
• In the absence of identifiable problems, add links to other pages on your site, invitations to other parts of the site, and calls to action that will lure visitors to pages where they will shop, subscribe, or otherwise convert.

As for FreshPlans, we’ve lowered the overall bounce rate by three points so far by increasing the links to other pages on our site and reducing the links going out. We’re not convinced that this is an improvement in the quality of our site. Fixing the photo storage issue will, however, be an improvement, and we wouldn’t have thought to fix it if we hadn’t examined the bounce rate.

Avoiding Comment Spam

Quick quiz: what’s this?

That’s a boilerplate used by comment spammers to create comments on blogs.

The idea is that one of the expressions in each group will be put into a comment, so that on one occasion it might offers “Many thanks for the beneficial writeup” and on another “Thanks for the decent site.” Combinatorics tells us that something like this can create an enormous number of different blocks of  approximately English text.

The signature is probably something about cheap boots or pharmaceuticals, and it links to the site that hired the spammers or set off the automatic spambot.

Blog commenting software makes claims like this (screenshot from a software sales site):

The software identifies blogs using your keywords or meeting particular criteria (for example, allowing comments without captcha or already containing comments from their competitors). It generates comments from the junk you saw above, fills out the forms, and posts the comment.

Some of the software doesn’t bother with generating comments, but simply lifts real comments or bits of actual content from elsewhere on the web and drops them into the comment box. And of course you can hire people for as little as $1.80 an hour (I just checked — top rate at the site where I looked was $3.33 an hour) to troll the web and write poorly spelled drivel anywhere they find dofollow links.

Tools like these aren’t for businesspeople with business websites, so I’m not going to discuss their value. If you believe that your customers will be drawn to you by meaningless comments at random blogs, then you’re in the wrong place.

For us, the question is: what can you do about all those spam comments on your business website’s blog? I’ve written before about how to recognize spam comments and how to  filter spammers from your analytics results, but how can you keep that junk out of your blog?

• Have a spam filter. Akismet is what we use. Many blog platforms have the option of requiring commenters to do something to prove they’re human, such as doing simple math or reading messy looking words. These don’t prevent spam comments (spam software has ways around it) but they do reduce them.
• Limit comments. You can — again depending on which blog platform you use — require that new commenters be approved, refuse comments from anyone who isn’t registered, close comments on old posts, etc. This kind of thing will reduce the number of real comments you get. For me, it’s worth it. If you want the maximum number of real comments, you should recognize that actual people are turned off by this sort of thing (and by captchas) and often won’t play.
• Use nofollow links. Real commenters — human beings who have something to say to you — won’t check whether your links are nofollow or dofollow. Good linkbuilders who make the effort to add to the discussion may not be stopped by nofollow links. But it will definitely discourage spambots.
• Require approval of comments. If you don’t post anything until it’s approved, you won’t have spam comments showing up. This can be time consuming, but if you also use a spam filter, you won’t have so many to check. This is what we do, and I can tell you from experience that it’s much less trouble than having to delete all the spam after it has already shown up.
• Be strict. The presence of spam comments is one of the things that automatic software can easily use as a way of finding places to comment. If you allow a few of those “Your blog is the best!” comments because it’s flattering and seems harmless, you’ll soon find your blog comments clogged with spam. What’s more, if you approve one of those comments, the commenter may then be able to post anything they like automatically without being caught.

Social Media from the Start

If you’re new to social media, or you’re trying out a new platform, where do you start?

The real beginning, of course, is identifying your best strategy, including the places where you want to have a presence and the goals you have for those interactions.

We do that for people, or you can read about this step in some previous posts:

• Choose the Right Social Media Channel
• Social Media: Do You Need a Plan?
• How Measurable is Social Media… Really?

Once you’ve done the preliminaries and you’re ready to plunge in, you can’t just jump in and start posting ads, or even bounding up to people (virtually) and asking them to be your friends.

If someone follows us on Twitter, we go look at their page to see whether we want to follow them back.  There may be absolutely fascinating people who reached out to us when they were yet mere bald eggs at Twitter with no tweets, no link to a website, and no followers — and we didn’t follow them. We’re not the only ones who make that choice.

So you need to establish a presence, and for that, you need content. Let us show you a few examples.

At right is a conversation at Twitter on behalf of a company that isn’t quite ready to launch. Their website is live, but it’s still a work in progress. They want to test the waters, have some conversations, get some tweets out there, but not to bring people to their website. We’re not yet following people on their behalf or talking much, but we are reaching out to people in an honest, “We’re new around here” sort of way.

When they launch (next week), we’ll have something going on at our page and we can step out boldly.

The second example is our own Google + business page  (come on over and make friends with us!) . We were early adopters at G+, personally, but we just put up our business page, so we’re working on getting some interesting and unique content there. Sure, we’re linking to posts from this blog, and we’ll probably link to other staff blogs as well, but right now the important thing is to make sure that visitors get an accurate and positive impression of our company.

We’re building G+ pages for our social media clients as well. Each one has a different strategy, of course, but the initial goal at this point is to provide a good representation of the company.

Google +, along with Facebook, is a visual space, so images matter. Even when you’re setting up shop at Twitter or LinkedIn, though, it’s worth paying attention to your visuals.

Visuals are more important at YouTube than at Spoke, of course, but you should always consider them if they are an option at the social media site you’re trying out. We have logos redone to fit the space, Photoshop images to maintain focus and accuracy, and seek out the right pictures to represent the company.

Our third example is from a specialized social media site. It’s easy to overlook these, and they’re usually not as jazzy as the big social media platforms, but a forum that tells you to “Invite all your roofer friends!” is likely to be a good place for professional networking.

We met yesterday with a group of scientists who want to appeal to investors and to researchers. Social media allows you to do this: you set up a good presence in the places where both groups hang out and choose (and express) your links accordingly when you prepare links to your website.

Your profile, page, or persona shouldn’t be identical to and interchangeable with anyone else’s. It should give as clear an impression of your company as possible, and keep your goals for social media clearly in mind.

It should be ready for visitors before you start bringing many visitors to it. The first stage is adding content — words, pictures, information, maps, graphics, videos — and the second stage is engaging with customers and colleagues. Don’t invite all your roofer friends till you’ve got some good stuff on the page.

Lab Report: Post Panda

We had the interesting experience of being smacked down by a Google algorithm update last month. We’ve never had this happen before on any of our sites, including any of our client sites. Algorithm changes are usually good for us, for the simple reason that we always focus on good content and visitor usability, eschewing all questionable SEO tricks.

So when our lab site, FreshPlans, lost half its traffic from Google (not bing or Yahoo) between October 13 and October 14, we saw it as a good opportunity to figure out what had gone wrong and what to do about it.

Nah. We tried hard to figure out what we had done wrong. I often find that our clients can’t see anything wrong with their websites when we can see the problem immediately (a good reason to hire people like us to do a site analysis for you), so we may just be overlooking it. But we did scour the site and listen closely to all the rumors about the algorithm change:

• We were out of the country when the change took place, so our daily postings had gone down to no new postings for a week. It seems excessively strict to chop someone down for going three days without new content, but we got right back into the daily schedule as soon as we returned.
• We have lots of outbound links at FreshPlans, since we direct people to good teacher resources elsewhere. We’re definitely curating, not link farming, but we went ahead and did more posts without outbound links.
• We have some affiliate ads on our lab site, and we do play around with them occasionally in an experimental way (lab site, remember?). We don’t feel that our ads are too aggressive, though. We saw no way to scale them down, short of removing them altogether. We had just installed Adwords, a Google product. but it’s hard to believe that Google would smack us down for using their product. We backed off on including affiliate links within our text — no lists of books, even though that’s something teachers appreciate.
• We heard a rumor that the change had penalized companies that didn’t have geographic information, which FreshPlans did not. We added a street address to the Contact page.
• We also heard that bounce rate was involved, and FreshPlans had a high average bounce rate. It’s still higher than we’d like, though it had gone down somewhat until the adventure of the vampire babies. I’m going to write more about bounce rate tomorrow; it’s too big a question to go into here. Suffice it to say that we worked on decreasing our bounce rate.
• Another rumor said that it was not so much websites as keywords that had been affected — that is, sites that focused on keywords with a high level of black hat activity had gotten smacked. That makes sense to me, since I know that terms like “free lesson plans” and “printables” are rife with bad SEO behavior. We don’t focus on those terms, but they do come up naturally in the stuff we write about, and “lesson plans” was our primary keyword. Again, we backed off. We usually send people elsewhere for basic information and give specific ideas on how best to use that information in the classroom, but instead we’ve been providing information (biographical data, for example) even if it’s readily available elsewhere online. Obviously, it’s thoroughly written and researched original content.

Obviously, these aren’t discrete, scientifically tested changes with all the variables controlled. With the high level of seasonal change we see at FreshPlans, and knowing that it usually takes a couple of weeks for changes to show fully, it wasn’t practical to test each possibility. You can test user response efficiently, but not robot response. So we made changes one at a time, and didn’t see any immediate striking effects, and that’s about all we can say.

So did all this make a difference for us? Here’s the traffic for the relevant time period, compared with the previous year:

 

Here are the raw numbers for weekly Google organic traffic during the relevant time period in 2011, compared with the same time frame in 2010:

2011	2550	1445	1405	1522	1443
2010	1066	1106	1084	1129	1232

As you can see, 2011 showed a severe drop following the algorithm change between weeks 1 and 2, where 2010 showed a rise. The following week, Halloween, both years saw a drop as teachers quit looking for seasonal lesson plans and began using what they’d chosen. The chart for 2010 then resumes its steady upward trend, while 2012 continues to bob up and down.

Naturally, we don’t like this. But what can we learn from it about responses to Google algorithms?

• While we did lose significant traffic, we’re still up significantly from last year, and Google continues to bring us about two thirds of our traffic. What’s more, we may not be seeing the steady week over week increases we’re accustomed to, but we’re also not seeing a complete loss of traffic or a complete lack of growth. We conclude that a site can recover from a smackdown.
• Google uses hundreds of different factors in their algorithm and makes hundreds of changes each year. We’ve always said that the math doesn’t favor the idea that you can focus on one little trick and expect any results. We see no indication that any of the narrowly focused changes we made had any effect. Even though we continue to believe that FreshPlans is a high quality website, we still have to take the same approach we always do when people come to us for help with a Google algorithm smackdown: add good content, improve usability, and watch for gradual improvement.
• Right before the algorithm change, Google search had jumped up to over 70% of our traffic. We make sure, in our business, not to let any one customer provide more than 30% of our income, since we know that nothing in this life is certain and we don’t want to have a crisis if we lose one customer. We didn’t draw the same conclusion about website traffic sources, but now we think we should. If you see nearly all your traffic coming from one source, get to work on those other sources.

Probably the most important outcome for me in this experience has been a greater degree of compassion for people whose sites have gotten hit. I’ve been sympathetic, of course, especially for people whose income has been affected, but there has definitely been an underlayer of “Come on — treat this as a wake up call and get that site cleaned up” in my mind when I see people getting agitated about algorithm changes. We’re proud of FreshPlans, and it felt like a game of chutes and ladders when we were affected by the update. If you think we’re being blind to the flaws of our website and have advice for us, I’d love to hear it.

In any case, I now know how it feels. We’re working right now with a company that got smacked by the original Panda update, and I can see why. We believe that we can help him. We believe that FreshPlans will bounce back, too. But we can see the process through the eyes of the unfortunate site owners now, and that’s probably a good thing.

SEO Tip #26: Credibility Pages

Why People Hate/Love Social Media Marketing

People want to see the companies they love at Facebook. I can’t tell you how many clients have admiringly shown me the Facebook page of Tom’s Shoes. They also want the companies they trade with to monitor Twitter and respond to the problems they tweet there. That is, for many of us, the fast way to get help with a product.

No Bull Social Media

No Bull**** Social Media: the All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing by Jason Falls and Erik Deckers is a good book for taking a big-picture view of the idea of social media for business. Falls and Deckers look at how social media serves businesses for branding, reputation management, and increasing sales. They compare social media with traditional media, suggest tools for tracking and measuring the value of social media to your company, and they give suggestions for developing a social media plan and policy for your organization.

This is a big picture book. It gives excellent, clearly referenced data on the power of social media in comparison to traditional marketing methods. It examines the usual social media advice (be sincere, really be part of the community, develop relationships with people) and rephrases it to make it more comfortable for people who want to be sure all this touchy-feely stuff benefits the bottom line.

It doesn’t give you directions on how to do anything with social media. Their suggestions are spot on; check out this list from Chapter 4:

• Set goals and objectives…
• Create a strategic plan…
• Measure the results…
• Commit to the process…

That is exactly right, from our perspective as professionals. If you can’t figure out how to change your background on Twitter or where to go to make a G+ page, you still won’t know after you read this book.

That’s okay. This book is not about how to follow people on YouTube or how to make your LinkedIn profile effective. It’s about the big picture. And it brings up some very interesting points. What kinds of goals are reasonable? What will it cost to reach those goals? Who is using social media, really, and how do you know? How can you control your company’s message (hint: you don’t control it now)? Who should be in charge of social media efforts?

If these are the kinds of questions you’re concerned with, or if you’re just trying to wrap your mind around the concept of social media for business, this will be a very useful book for you. Falls and Deckers aren’t shy about making claims, but they back them up with quantifiable evidence, as well as detailed case studies. It’s an enjoyable read, too, and should give you ideas or new directions even if you’re already engaging in social media for your business.

We encounter people who disapprove of the use of social media for business (usually on social media platforms, and we totally get what they’re saying) and people who don’t think it has value. We’d like those people to read this book. If you are one of those people and you’re beginning to feel like the world is passing you by, you might want to read this book and reevaluate your position. You may still hold the same views when you finish, but you’ll be approaching the question from an informed stance. And you might change your mind.

Is Your Website Too Wordy?

The big problem with the term “wordy” is that it means different things to different people… at different times.

Sometimes it means “having too many words.” Yet we’ve had clients say their page is “too wordy” when they have fewer than 200 words — far too few for good communication with search engines.

Making it shorter won’t fix that problem, and it will introduce new problems.

If you’re the one who thinks the site is too wordy, you can probably explain what you mean to your web professionals. If you’ve gotten that phrase as feedback and you’re passing it on, though, you may not be able to make it into useful information.

So let’s look further at what “too wordy” might mean.

Sometimes “too wordy” means “too dense.”

This site shows how very dense text can look as though there are too many words, even if the number of words is not itself a problem. A little space and organization would make a big difference.

Sometimes “too wordy” means the vocabulary is wrong. 

If your page has too much jargon, if the vocabulary is too formal, or if the words look too long for the paragraphs, the reader can feel overwhelmed by words. There may not be too many words, but the feel may be too heavy for the tone you want.

A less formal tone with more familiar words can fix this problem.

Sometimes “too wordy” means “too hard to read.”

In this “before” shot, light text on a dark background, poor typography choice, and narrow margins combine to make a page that looks like it’ll be hard work to slog through. Often, people don’t even have the vocabulary to think about this is a useful way. They’re not seeing typography, margins, color choices, or fonts, they’re seeing… words. And those words are so…wordy.

Sometimes “wordy” means “too little content.”

To us, “wordy” means using too many words to say something. Wordy is when you say, “In today’s modern world, the demands of your lifestyle as a business owner trying to wear lots of hats and do more with less money and less time can make it hard to choose the right insurance plan without the kind of expert advice a company like ours can provide” instead of “Our expert advice makes business insurance easy.”

I’m exaggerating here, just a little bit. But we were able to get a client’s 930 words down to 280 when they expressed concern that their draft was “too wordy.”

Sometimes there are words that don’t really have to be there. Saying “at this point in time” hardly ever makes sense. First off, it means “now,” which is much shorter. Second, it is now, isn’t it? Usually, you don’t have to specify that you’re saying something now. Look at your draft and see if there aren’t some words that aren’t adding to the conversation.

Sometimes you can use one word in place of three — if it’s the right word. “Stagnant,” for example, means “not moving, when it should be moving.”  If it’s taking you a long sentence to explain something, you may need to use more specific vocabulary.

For example, try not to say “wordy” when you mean “badly designed” or “badly written.” Save it (as our insurance company client did) for times when the content’s job could be done with fewer words.

Blogging for E-Commerce

If you have an online store, you need a blog. One of the things that people do most online is shop, even if they plan to do their buying in a physical store.

Some go directly to a favorite store and look for their desired item, or even just shop around in case they see something they like, as people do in physical stores. This means that ecommerce blogging should have the goal of being useful and attractive and friendly enough to make people like the store. One of our newest clients, Massi Decor, specializes in patio furniture and grills and such, so we’re sharing recipes for grilling vegetables and smoking turkeys, tips on caring for grills, and other stuff intended not only to turn Massi up in search, but also to identify Massi as a useful place for people interested in patio life. If I’m accustomed to coming to Massi for good advice and cool pictures, I’m likely to remember them when I want to buy a grill.

This is a lot like ordinary brick and mortar retail.You develop relationships with your readers. They drop by to see what’s new, and you make a point of sharing your new stuff with lots of Pinworthy photos, detailed reviews, and enthusiasm. You write up gift guides and compare different items that you carry, so that your website can fulfill the duties of a good showroom salesperson.

However, many people start their shopping at the search engines. They type the name of their chosen product into the search box. Especially since Google now makes it possible to show prices in the SERPs, these shoppers are likely to go by price or shipping costs. They’re looking for a Primo Kamodo or a Jordan Rose Bistro set, and they don’t care whether you’re friends with them or not.

For these shoppers, the most immediate benefit of blogging is that it improves your rankings and makes it more likely that they’ll find you in the search results. Blogging gives you fresh results and greater authority, linkworthy content, and better chances of getting social media mentions (Massi’s blog posts, for example, have been tweeted by outdoor sports enthusiasts, who will introduce Massi to a new audience). With more pages of unique content, you’re likelier to have subheadings on the SERPs and more likely to come up repeatedly for people who search with several different phrases before deciding where to buy.

For both groups, your blog can increase conversions. Persuasive copy and alluring photos have obvious benefits, but comparison reviews can help move people from “Should I buy one?” to “Which one should I buy?” Posts detailing the use of your products makes it easier for people to imagine themselves using the products, and so move them a step further along toward commitment.

If you have an ecommerce site and you don’t have a blog, you should add one to your site immediately. If not sooner. Contact us if you need help doing that.

Vampire Babies and Irish Dance: When Search Engines Go Wrong

I love search engines. Organizing information is a noble calling, and search engines do it well. I teach classes in how to use them, and have done so since before Google existed. I wish real life had a search function.

That said, sometimes search engines screw up. Usually, when search engines are confused about your content, it’s because there’s something wrong with your content. Most people don’t write with search engines in mind, or try to do so and do it badly, and I spend most of my time correcting those errors — or helping people to avoid them.

In the case of our lab site, Freshplans, however, the search engines have recently just gotten things wrong. First, Google sent us hordes of people looking for Irish dance, and now Yahoo is sending us bunches of folks looking for vampire babies.

We’re simply not the best option for either of those searches.

Why should we care? Not ranking for important keywords may be distressing, but ranking for stuff we don’t deserve is just sending us extra visits at no extra cost, right?

Not quite. The 524 visitors we got over the weekend in search of vampire babies found instead lesson plans for vampire literature, and the bounce rate was over 93%. Since we believe that FreshPlans lost rankings because of a high bounce rate, and we’ve been working to improve that, getting an influx of lost searchers is bad for our website from the point of view of SEO.

Searchers for Irish dance have a bounce rate of about 55%, in case you were wondering. There just isn’t much online for the subject, apparently.

But vampire babies, since Bella, the insipid heroine of the madly popular Twilight saga, is having a baby in the most recent movie, are getting lots of searches. While there are lots of other options for vampire babies, we’ve gotten some overflow because we have the best page around for vampire lesson plans. If you didn’t already know that traditional Baltic folklore includes the damphir, offsprings of a vampire father and a human mother, lots of sources will now enlighten you on this, along with the unnerving information that damphirs are traditionally thought to have no bones. I doubt that detail makes it into the movie.

Our vampire lesson plans now contain this information, since we don’t want to disappoint people, but this is definitely a screw up. Our lesson plans page didn’t contain the word “babies” at all until this morning. I don’t get why people click through from the search engine results page, but some do, so there we are with an artificially raised bounce rate.

Should this happen to you, you have some options:

• Ignore it, secure in the knowledge that as long as your content is good quality and clear to search engines overall, it’ll settle down. That’s probably fair for the vampire babies searches. Once the fad passes, so will our problem.
• Come up with a way to leverage the random visits. Rosie, the bottom line girl for Team Haden, is even now trying to figure out a way to make vampire babies pay over at FreshPlans.
• Get rid of whatever is misleading the search engines. We had another case like this in the past. when searches for “motorcycle girl” were turning up lost searchers at a site that had nothing to do with motorcycles or girls. We tracked down the culprit: alt text for an image. These cases are nearly always caused by user error, so we can just find the problem and fix it.

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