All posts by Clay Ashley

What Do You Do When Website SEO Just Isn’t Enough?

There are thousands of webmasters across the country who have been in this position before: you know you’ve got a solid product, and you’ve been paying for professional website SEO services for months. You’re getting some pretty solid rankings going.

You’ve done everything right — you’ve got a diverse array of links coming from several different IP address, created at different times of day — and you’ve got the traffic to back it up. Google Analytics tells you that you get more than 100 hits from organic searches every single day, and the bounce rate is low, so you know they’re not just leaving because they didn’t expect to end up at a sales page.

What do you do? It’s obvious that your SEO efforts are working — and every client who actually purchased your product (or service) has had excellent things to say about it. You haven’t had a single refund request, and you’ve got testimonials up the wahzoo. The only problem is that your website just doesn’t turn visitors into customers the way it should.

Well, there are several options, but let’s take a look at the best:

1) Get Better Copy
Surfers who don’t like what they see will bounce, and Analytics will tell you that they’ve bounced. If you have visitors that stick around for 30 seconds to a few minutes and they still don’t buy from you, the problem is with your copy. You might want to consider finding a professional copyrighter and asking them to rework your page. You’ll want your SEO company to work together with him and make sure your keywords still place properly, as well.

2) Change Your Goal
Sometimes, a product just isn’t a “must buy” — and there’s not a lot you’re going to do to convince visitors to hand over their money. Some gurus will tell you that you have to start over and find a new product; only “must buy”s are viable online. Others will tell you that those gurus are dumb.

What you do need to do is switch away from trying to get them to buy right away, and move to a strategy of simply reminding them that you exist every once in a while and telling them why they should consider buying from you. Targeted email marketing is probably your best bet at that point. Talk to your SEO company today.

SEO in a Jersey: The Full Court Press Release Service

newsMuch like your fantasy football team winning their season, there is a strong element of luck involved in writing a dispatch to a press release service. Certainly, every press release will get listed on a few websites, and those press releases will provide simple backlinks for a short time until they get outdated and removed from the archives. But that’s not really the purpose of a press release — it’s just the door prize, as it were. The real goal is viral exposure. That’s why, when you write for a press release service, you have to write well.

Headliners Don’t Have to Be Haters
There was a fascinating article that came out of a journalists’ conference recently, talking about the value of a funny headline. It claims that website SEO is killing clever headlining, because puns don’t translate well into search engine terms. To be blunt, that’s a pile of hooey. SEO keywords don’t mean no creativity — you just have to retain the coherence of the keyword while you build the clever part around it. This article could be called “SHIFT KEY NEEDS PRESS-RELEASE SERVICE” or “Jailed Journalists Seek Press Release Service.” It would have to be written to tie it all together, of course, but that’s what they pay writers like me for, after all.

The Strength of A Strong Hook Shot
There’s nothing more disappointing than watching your favorite team bust into the court, pumped up and ready to go, and then watch then get crushed so badly in the first few minutes that their morale breaks. There’s also nothing quite as sad as following a brilliant headline into a press release and finding it…lacking. So every press release needs to have a powerful hook — something to drive a journalist that’s casually glancing over the press release to want to post it on his website or print it in his publication.

An Easy Lay-Up
Finally, a press release without a call to action is like a clean fast-break with no lay-up at the basket. No matter how killer your headline and how strong you hook, if you can’t sink the last ball at the buzzer, you won’t win the game, end of story. Write with the end in mind, toss it up, and make it stick.

Custom Blog Creation Does Nothing Without Regular Blog Posting

fresh blog postingNo matter how much you pay for it, getting a high-end SEO company to do some custom blog creation for you is a complete waste of time unless you have someone — on-staff or freelance — to engage in regular blog posting as well. A blog is not a one-time expense — no matter what some crazy gurus want to tell you about autoposters, content shufflers, or other blackhat garbage.

The truth about blogs is that search engines love them. New content is like catnip to a search engine: it drives them crazy. They’ll give any new content a fair shake at the front page for a short period of time. But that’s not really the key to blogging success unless you prefer your success one twenty-minute burst at a time. If you really want to take advantage of that kitty-dro, you need to keep posting fresh content on a regular basis.

Every time that you post fresh content to your blog, assuming that content is relevant to the rest of the posts you’ve made on your blog, the search engines add a little bit more authority to your site regarding the keywords that are in your posts. Of course, at the same time, you don’t want to post exclusively on the same couple of keywords, because eventually they’ll assume you’re keyword stuffing and ignore you. Also, don’t schedule your posts to be released at the same time every X days — the search engines hate repetitive timestamps.

Now, this is not to be said that posting regularly is the sum total of great bloggery, either. You do still need a qualified expert to set up your blog in accordance to a myriad of SEO rules that are hardly obvious to the casual businessperson. You’re still best off a URL that reflects one of your choicest keywords — and if you can buy one that’s been in existence for a few uninterrupted years, it’ll help a lot. Both custom blog creation and regular blog posting are necessary to make a good blog truly great.