Going the Distance: Four Ways to Build a Better Customer Loyalty Program for Your Brand

It’s easy enough for a customer to join your loyalty program, especially when you’re offering an incentive such as discounts. All your customer has to do is give out some basic information, and voila! They’re in the fold, a brand new loyalty member with your company. From there, it’s happily ever after. You offer the perks; they stand solidly by you, bringing you their continued business. Simple. Or is it? In reality, just how many of those customers are act ively participating in your loyalty program? Do you know? Sure, loyalty program memberships are on the rise according to market research company eMarketer, having jumped 25 percent in the space of just two years. However, that figure may be a bit misleading. The truth is that, while loyalty program sign-ups may be more numerous, active participation in such programs is actually in decline. At the time of the study, the average US household had memberships in 29 loyalty programs; yet consumers were only active in 12 of those. That’s just 41 percent. And even that meager figure represents a drop of 2 percentage points per year over each of the preceding four years, according to a study by loyalty-marketing research company COLLOQUY.

When discounts just aren’t enough

So what’s a brand to do? How can you make your loyalty program worth your customer’s while—as well as your own? After all, gaining a new loyalty member doesn’t mean much if your customer isn’t actively participating in your program. Consider this: Does your customer loyalty program offer members anything different from what your competitors are offering? Chances are your program includes discounts. That’s a given. And what customer doesn’t appreciate a good discount? But when every other company out there is providing this staple benefit in comparable amounts, it becomes less and less likely that customers will remain loyal to any one particular brand. Frankly, it’s all too easy for customers to get lost in a sea of loyalty member discounts. They’re everywhere. In fact, just under half of internet users perceive that all rewards programs are alike, according to a 2015 eMarketer survey. The key to success, then, is to differentiate your business from the crowd. If you can offer your customers something unique and valuable beyond the usual discount, chances are they’ll be more likely to stick with your brand. Here’s some inspiration from companies who get it.

Virgin: Reward more purchases with more benefits.

That’s not to say you need to get rid of discounts entirely. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Customers still love a good discount. The goal is to be creative in terms of the loyalty perks you offer. Take the Virgin Atlantic Flying Club, for example. As part of its loyalty program, the airline allows members to earn miles and tier points. Members are inducted at the Club Red tier, from which they can move up to Club Silver and then Club Gold. Here, it’s not just a discount. It’s status. And people respond to feeling important, elite. Still, even where the rewards themselves are concerned, Virgin is motivating loyalty customers with some pretty attractive offers. At the Club Red tier, members earn flight miles and receive discounts on rental cars, airport parking, hotels and holiday flights. But as members rise in tiers, they get even more. At the Club Silver tier, members earn 50 percent more points on flights, access to expedited check-in, and priority standby seating. And once they reach the top, Club Gold members receive double miles, priority boarding and access to exclusive clubhouses where they can get a drink or a massage before their flight. Now that’s some serious incentive to keep coming back for more. Discounts are still part of the equation – but they are designed with innovation and personal value in mind, elevating them to more than just savings.

Amazon Prime: Pay upfront and become a VIP.

What if your customers only had to pay a one-time upfront fee to get a year’s worth of substantial benefits? It may not sound like the smartest business idea at first glance. But take a closer look. Amazon Prime users pay a nominal $99 a year to gain free, two-day shipping on millions of products with no minimum purchase. And that’s just one benefit of going Prime. It’s true that Amazon loses $1-2 billion a year on Prime. This comes as no surprise given the incredible value the program offers. But get this: Amazon makes up for its losses in markedly higher transaction frequency. Specifically, Prime members spend an average of $1,500 a year on Amazon.com, compared with $625 spent by non-Prime users, a ccording to a 2015 report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

Patagonia: Cater to customer values.

Sometimes, the draw for consumers isn’t saving money or getting a great deal. The eco-friendly outdoor clothing company Patagonia figured this out back in 2011, when it partnered with eBay to launch its Common Threads Initiative: a program that allows customers to resell their used Patagonia clothing via the company’s website. Why is this program important to customers? And how does it benefit Patagonia? The company’s brand embraces environmental and social responsibility, so it was only fitting that they create a platform for essentially recycling old clothing rather than merely throwing it away. The Common Threads Initiative helps Patagonia build a memorable brand and fierce loyalty by offering its customers a cause that aligns with deep personal values. OK, so their customers get to make a little money, too. Everybody wins.

American Airlines: Gamify your loyalty program.

If you’re going to offer your customers a loyalty program, why not make it f un? After all, engagement is key to building a strong relationship with your customer. And what better way to achieve that goal than making a game of it. American Airlines had this very thing in mind when it created its AAdvantage Passport Challenge following its merger with USAirways. The goal: find a new way to engage customers as big changes were underway. Using a custom Facebook application, American Airlines created a virtual passport to increase brand awareness while offering members a chance to earn bonus points. Customers earned these rewards through a variety of game-like activities, from answering trivia questions to tracking travel through a personalized dashboard. In the end, participants earned more than 70 percent more stamps than expected – and the airline saw a ROI of more than 500 percent. The takeaway: people like games.

Stand out from the crowd.

Your approach to your customer loyalty program should align with your overall marketing approach. Effective branding is about standing out, not blending it. Being memorable is key. To this end, keep in mind that loyalty programs are no longer a novelty. That means that yesterday’s strategies won’t work moving forward, so look for ways to rise above the noise, setting yourself apart from the cloying drone of countless other cookie-cutter programs.

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Small Changes, Big Impact: 5 Things You Can (and Should!) Do Today to Boost Your Website’s Performance

Every spring it happens like clockwork: the temperatures get warmer, the days get longer and everything in nature becomes more vibrant and colorful. Along with these changes in the great outdoors comes the irresistible urge to clean house and embrace a fresh start. Why not keep that motivational momentum going and apply it to your business – and, more specifically, to your website – as well? After all, there’s no time like the present to sweep away the old and outdated and bring in fresh new ideas and technologies. But you don’t necessarily need to dive head-first into a full redesign and all of the time and expense that entails to reap measurable results. Instead, here are five small steps you can – and should! – take today to ensure that your site is up-to-date, relevant and doing all it can to bring you new customers and grow the community around your brand:

1. Reposition your contact form.

For most website owners – especially those in service-based businesses such as law, accounting, consulting, real estate, etc. – the key “win” for their site is when it motivates a visitor to request more information or schedule a meeting. Contact forms are a ubiquitous website staple intended to provide a convenient – and highly measurable – avenue to initiate communication between an interested prospect and a company. However, perhaps because they are so commonplace, all too often these forms are given little strategic thought, resulting in a cookie-cutter name/email address/phone number format that yields more bogus spam submissions than legitimate new business opportunities. However, there is one simple change you can make that has been shown to get better results: reposition your standard “Contact us” form as an “Ask our experts” feature. By doing so, you shift the focus of the form to providing your visitors with an opportunity to submit a question that is specific to their needs and concerns. Rather than feeling like they are opening themselves up to an endless barrage of solicitation calls and emails, your visitors will sense that they are initiating a dialogue with an expert who will help them solve their particular problem. Make sure to respond to all inquiries within 24 hours, provide helpful advice that is free of charge and tailored to your prospect’s situation, and leave the door open to continue the conversation in a future meeting or phone call. By doing so, you will establish an important foundation of trust and confidence with your potential new client that will make them more inclined to engage your professional services. I have personally seen the submission rates on these types of forms increase dramatically. On one site where this small change was implemented, form submissions jumped from one or two per week to one or two per day – all legitimate business opportunities that were sparked simply by repositioning the focus of the form.

2. Productize your offering.

Another challenge that professional services organizations face in creating a website that works as an effective customer conversion engine is that they do not sell a specific product but rather a suite of services that can be customized to each client’s specific needs. This makes it terribly hard to market to visitors who come to their site and simply want to know “What exactly does this company sell, and how much does it cost?”. Because there are so many variables to the company’s offerings, there is not a quick and easy answer to these questions. If this challenge sounds familiar to you, one approach you can try is to “productize” what you have to offer. Create a bundle of services with a fixed price, and market that package on your site in a simple, straightforward manner that makes your offering easy to understand and helps visitors feel like doing business with your company is as simple as buying a product off the shelf at a store. This is exactly what my company did with some of the technology consulting services that we offer. Instead of only listing the array of services we provide, we also created a product that representing a very specific offering. This made it so much easier to answer the “What do you sell?” question, and it gave us something tangible to promote in our marketing campaigns. In reality, this approach in no way limited the range of services we are able to offer our clients; rather, it merely served as a vehicle to open doors to new opportunities and made it easier to start conversations with new customers for whom we could ultimately provide a custom-tailored solution. Examine the services that you offer, and work with your marketing team to create an appealing package that you can market – understanding all the while that this “product” is really just a means for you to connect with customers and begin the sales process with something tangible that they can easily understand.

3. Lose your home page carousel.

One simple change that I have seen many websites make in the past year or so is to remove animated image carousels from their home pages. These carousels have long been a popular fixture of website design, but the reality is that they can sometimes do more harm than good. Home page carousels typically feature giant, screen-spanning images which carry with them heavy download requirements both for the images and for the scripts that power the animation sequences, thereby creating a potential stumbling block in performance for users on mobile devices or with slower connections. Additionally, studies have shown that click-through rates on animated carousels are extremely low, and they drop significantly from the first slide to the subsequent ones. This is why many companies are replacing rotating carousels with a singular static message instead. This one change can greatly reduce a page’s download size (when my company did this on our home page, its file size decreased by 75 percent) while having little to no effect on actual user engagement or click-through. In fact, because the page now loads more quickly, many sites actually see an uptick in user engagement because fewer people are abandoning a site due to poor performance. Do you have a carousel on your website? If so, do you know whether or not it is working well for you? Your marketing team may be able to do some A/B testing between a version of your site with this animation feature and one without it to see which performs better. Since carousels do work well for some sites (like news organizations or sites with lots of frequently updated content), having this data can help you determine whether or not it’s time to ditch the carousel.

4. Update your image(s).

Stock photography is something of a necessary evil of website design, as more often than not, companies don’t have the budget to execute a full-fledged custom professional photo shoot. However, not all stock images are created equal. Stock photos that are overused or that look so obviously staged that they scream of their “stockiness” can cheapen a site’s design and leave visitors with a negative overall impression of the site. Replacing those images can make a big difference in a site’s visual appeal. If your site’s imagery is stale, you can make some simple image swaps to freshen it up. If you are going to change out old stock images for new stock images, make sure to seek out photos that feel fresh and that are not terribly overused (most stock photo sites will tell you how many times an image has been downloaded). An even better option is to try to add some unique imagery to your site. This could be photographs that you hire a professional to take or – in keeping with one of this year’s hottest trends – custom illustrations that you commission from an artist. If your budget is tight, incorporating even just one or two such one-of-a-kind images in key spots on your site can really boost its visual impact. For instance, if you lose that aforementioned carousel on the home page and replace it with one truly compelling static image and message, it can make a really powerful first impression on your visitors.

5. Publish less.

Most experts agree that publishing original, value-add content on your site on a regular basis is key to optimizing its success – both from a sales and marketing standpoint and as an advantage in the never-ending battle of SEO. While I agree with this approach in principal, for many companies, the drive to publish regularly has resulted in putting out mediocre content simply to meet an inflexible standard of frequency. This is often an entirely counterproductive effort, as content that lacks in quality, original thought or value for the reader reflects poorly on the organization and its perceived level of expertise. Publishing original content to your site on a regular basis is still a best practice, but that content must offer value for it to succeed. Let’s say a visitor comes to your site and is impressed to find that you publish new articles weekly or monthly; however, once they click through the headline to see what they can glean from your writing, if what they find is mediocre at best, what motivation do they have to return to your site again in the future, let alone entrust you with their hard-earned dollars? If, on the other hand, you publish new content less frequently, but everything you produce is of the highest quality, then that same visitor will know that the time they spend on your site will always be worth their while, and they will look forward to the next time you post something new. Re-examine your current content marketing strategy, and ask yourself whether you are focused on quality or frequency. If it’s the latter, commit instead to writing less but to improving the quality of what you offer on your site. While this change may not have an immediate impact, it will absolutely yield long-term results that your visitors will appreciate and respond positively to.

In closing

Eventually, your website will need a redesign, but in the meantime you can make small, strategic, surgical changes that will pay immediate dividends in your site’s success. This approach of implementing gradual but regular modifications will also benefit you when it does come time for that full redesign. By making intelligent improvements over time, you will ultimately be closer to your end goal, leaving less to accomplish with the redesign and thereby paving the way for a smoother and less costly project.

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Seven Ways to Shed Weight Fast!...For Your Website

With the holiday season and all of its excesses in the rearview mirror, for many of us, our thoughts turn next to resolution-making, specifically vowing to shed the extra pounds that are the collective result of any number of regrettable dietary choices made over the course of past months, from digging into the kids’ trick-or-treating bags to raiding the fridge for Thanksgiving leftovers to a daily egg nog latte habit. But while we’re in resolution-making mode, we’d do well to think not only about how to trim our waistlines but also how to slim down our websites. Why? Just like all those little culinary indulgences add up to extra pounds on our bodies, the small additions you might have made here and there on your website can weigh it down and leave its performance in the same type of sluggish slump as you might feel after one too many pieces of grandma’s pumpkin pie.

The problem

Today’s websites have become bloated, with the average web page tipping the scales at over 2 megabytes. That may not sound like much in an era when we’re well accustomed to talking in terms of gigabytes and even terabytes. However, when it comes to the Web, even 2 megabytes is too much, especially for visitors using low bandwidth or mobile devices, who are likely to leave your site rather than wait for a too-slow page to load, leaving you in the perilous position of losing their business altogether. Hefty page weight and poor performance can also have a negative impact on your site’s search ranking, as Google and other search engines now include these elements as key factors in their algorithms. As a result, streamlining the size of your web pages is certainly a best practice, but where do you begin? Just as shedding pounds requires you to make changes in multiple aspects of your lifestyle, there are a number of aspects of your website that you can examine to find ways to trim the unnecessary dead weight that’s detrimental your site’s performance.

Your seven-step plan for website weight-loss success

1. Optimize images.

As giant, screen-spanning images have become a popular trend in website design, pages have gotten heavier and heavier over the years. One way you can make a drastic reduction in the weight of your web pages is to ensure that the images on your site are properly optimized for the Web and that you’re not serving unnecessarily large images to mobile devices with small screen sizes.

2. Retool HTML files.

HTML files also impact the download size of a page, so look for ways to optimize the code to reduce the overall size of the file. Although these savings are likely to be small, remember that even small changes can add up to measurable improvements.

3. Streamline style sheets.

Because CSS files must be downloaded in order for a user to view your site, poorly formatted files or loading of unnecessary styles can increase the size of downloads. Requiring multiple style sheets can also have a negative impact on performance, since each one will require a separate HTTP request to fetch that file.

4. Ditch JavaScript where possible.

Using JavaScript files or libraries is a common practice in modern website design, but when it comes to optimizing page download size, there are a few drawbacks to this approach. First, requiring an entire library for just one effect (like an animated carousel of images) is not the best use of bandwidth. It can also lead to a critical user experience fail if your website does not work as intended because a visitor has elected to disable JavaScript in their browser. In some cases, JavaScript may be necessary, but be sure to make the distinction between when it is truly a must-have versus when it is simply a nice-to-have feature.

5. Use Web fonts sparingly.

The rise of Web fonts has given designers much more flexibility in their application of typography on the Web. Instead of being forced to select from only a handful of Web-safe fonts, Web fonts allow new typefaces to be included with a site’s files or linked from a third-party resource, such as Google Fonts or Adobe’s Typekit service. While these solutions have greatly increased the options available to designers, they can also significantly impact the performance of a web page. Font files must be downloaded with the page, so it is important to keep these to a minimum. Requiring three or four different weights of one font may be attractive from a visual standpoint, but it will be brutal from a file size perspective.

6. Eliminate external feeds whenever possible.

Content that is pumped in from other sites, including social media feeds and ads from by a third-party provider, will absolutely slow a website down, as external feeds are notorious bandwidth hogs. While these resources are sometimes necessary, their use should be limited as much as possible.

7. Check for CMS dependencies.

If your site uses a content management system, there are likely to be aspects of that CMS and how it is configured that play a role in performance. Since CMS platforms draw their content from a database, the calls to that database can slow the download speed of your page if there are too many of them or if they are not configured properly.

Know your numbers

Just as you need a scale to help you gauge your progress toward your target weight, you also need tools to help you measure the impact the steps you’ve taken above have made in improving the performance of your website. The Website Speed Test from Dotcom Monitor is a great tool that allows you to “instantly test your website speed in real browsers from 23 locations worldwide.” This application will not only tell you how large your page is but also measure its load time and reveal which elements contribute most to its size (similar tests are also available from Google). Armed with this data, you can charge forth with confidence, knowing that your website will soon be a leaner, meaner business growth machine – no fad diets or gym memberships required!

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The Ever-Changing Face of Facebook

With the advent of another quarter comes another sweeping round of changes from our good friends at Facebook. In what is becoming a weird mix of techie tradition and rage-inducing behavior for the average Joe, Facebook will be rolling out a barrage of new updates over the upcoming weeks.

Now that the inevitable initial backlash has subsided (You changed ma Facebooks!1! Facebook is going to start charging for their services!!), let’s dive in and look at what’s ahead.

Timeline

The most significant update is the introduction of the Timeline – Facebook’s version of an online scrapbook. Once it’s been fully rolled out, the Timeline will replace the user’s profile page and will more closely resemble a blog, complete with a header image, summary bio information and a quick overview of friends, photos, likes and notes.

Scrolling further down the Timeline, you’ll see highlights from the user’s Facebook footprint over the years, laid out in reverse chronological order. Scroll down far enough, and you’ll see a hilarious new section for the user’s birth.

Yes, Facebook is no longer content with shaping our present and future. Zuckerberg & Co. have now devised a way to retroactively insert themselves into our past, too.

All joking aside, the interface is fairly intuitive and fun. While some have raised privacy concerns, as with every other service that Facebook offers, Timeline only works with the information that its users provide. Preventing photos or life events from being made public is as simple as not posting them.

News Ticker

If the Timeline is the most visually appealing new update, the News Ticker is probably the least (and possibly most annoying).

The Ticker is like status updates on steroids, providing running commentary – er, updates – whenever one friend comments on another friend’s photo, comment, etc.

Whereas previously a user’s interaction with their friends’ updates was mostly limited to the ones they commented on or liked (triggering notifications whenever someone else subsequently commented on the same item), Ticker operates from the assumption that users don’t want to miss a single instance of activity between any of their friends.

While I’m not necessarily opposed to the concept of the Ticker, in its current iteration, it definitely feels like information overload. It would be preferable if this feature could simply be hidden or deactivated.

Subscribe

Taking a page from Twitter, Facebook now makes it possible to subscribe to a user’s profile, rather than adding them as a friend. So in case you want to follow (a la Twitter) someone you don’t know on Facebook without the creep factor of adding them as a friend, now you can just subscribe to their updates. Then again, maybe that is the creepier of the two options…

Smart Friends lists

Oh, Facebook, again with the blatant Twitter homages. Their new “smart” Friends lists are exactly what they sound like: Facebook creates and auto-populates certain default categories (work, school, family, city) of Friends to allow users to easily view updates only from contacts in that particular group.

This isn’t necessarily a bad update, but it’s probably only truly useful for those who are approaching their 5,000 friend limit and need an easy way to slice and dice their friend-base.

Recent Stories vs. Top Stories

Finally, Facebook has revamped the way updates are displayed in the home news feed. In the past, users had the option to choose between “All Updates” – activity from all friends displayed in reverse chronological order – or “Top News,” which was aggregated and ordered based on Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm.

Facebook has now eliminated these options by creating a hybrid of the two. The jury is still out on this new beast, but it appears that it might not be a bad compromise.

On login, Facebook displays a selection of “Top Stories” mixed with “Recent Stories.” As a user spends more time on their home news feed, Top Stories are filtered out and the feed returns to a straightforward view of Recent Stories (i.e., updates from friends/pages as they happen in real time).

Users also now have the power to select certain updates as Top Stories to further customize their news feed in the future. Conversely, they can deselect those updates that don’t make the cut for relevance and interest.

What do these changes mean for you?

While none of the most recently announced changes directly affect Pages, they are not without implications for those who use the platform to engage with customers and clients.

First, the evolution of the news feed and the introduction of the Ticker mean that it’s more important than ever for brands to publish exceptionally valuable, relevant content that encourages interaction from fans in order to ensure visibility in their feeds.

Secondly – and perhaps most importantly – despite the latest round of loud complaints from its most vocal users, Facebook’s growth shows no signs of slowing. Recent data from Nielsen indicates that users are spending an ever-increasing amount of time on Facebook – more time even than on Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft sites combined. And Facebook remains dedicated to driving innovation in their interface and the ways that users can engage with the platform. As new options and features continue to emerge, Facebook will become the default online home base of more and more users, making it an invaluable vehicle of communication between companies and their customers.

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SEO 101: A Plain-English Primer

In today’s marketplace, when people have a question, want information or need to find a product or service, they don’t flip open the Yellow Pages. They don’t scour online directories. In May 2010, Americans conducted 15.9 billion searches*Instinctively, they turn to search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. As a result, these sites hold the keys to targeted encounters between you and prospects who are looking for a solution that you can provide. In May 2010, Americans conducted 15.9 billion searches* using the five major search engines. Of those, 63.7 percent were executed on Google sites, while Yahoo and MSN sites claimed 18.3 and 12.1 percent, respectively. That’s a tremendous pie, and you undoubtedly want a piece. Unlike in the days when the Yellow Pages ruled the world, you can’t buy your way to prominence on an organic search results page. Fortunately, you can take a proactive approach to determining where you land in the ranking for applicable product- or service-related keyword phrases through the practice of search engine optimization, known as SEO. Much is to be gained by appearing in the first few results of a search. Users want immediate answers and are not likely to wade through pages and pages of listings. Furthermore, because the major search engines have built their reputation on returning quality results, the higher your ranking, the more apt the consumer is to assume that your site will deliver the solutions they are looking for. Therefore, in the simplest form of the equation, a higher ranking equals greater probability of a user coming to your site, more prospects seeing what you have to offer and increased opportunities to convert visitors into customers. As a result, garnering a favorable position in the results for select search terms is one of the foundational aspects of effective marketing today.

What SEO is and what it is not

SEO is not a turn-key solution.Let’s be clear: SEO is not a turn-key solution. There’s no SEO magic dust that you can sprinkle over your site and instantly advance from page five to page one. The value of Google from the user’s perspective is the efficiency of entering search terms and receiving relevant and trustworthy results without having to sift through a sea of unpopular and unhelpful spammy sites. In fact, the major search engines are constantly advancing and sharpening their algorithms in order to ensure that they protect their stature as the gatekeepers of good information. What does this mean for you the business owner? Achieving the top spot does not come easily, and it takes an ongoing, dedicated investment of time and resources to work your way up through the rankings of a search. After all, if just anyone could fake their way to number one, Google would be worth nothing. Unfortunately, because of the growing importance of SEO, it has become a lucrative field for marketing agencies looking to make a quick buck. There’s a proliferation of snake-oil salespeople who would have you believe that SEO is a simple, one-time fix that will launch you to the top of the list and send your traffic numbers through the roof. This is for their benefit, not yours. As a result of the misinformation and half-truths preached by these shysters, it can be difficult to separate truth from fiction, both in terms of what it takes to improve your standing and what to expect once you do. SEO is a complex process, but you certainly don’t need to become an authority in the minutiae to grow your business successfully. However, you should have a foundational understanding in order to sort out the legitimate practices from those that will only waste your time and money.

The anatomy of a search engine

At a basic level, all search engines operate the same way. The Web encompasses billions of documents that are bound together through links. Search engines use these links to find and access individual web pages and files, using automated “spiders” to crawl and index the content contained therein. All of this information is stored in trillions of records that are tied to specific keywords or phrases. Therefore, when a user initiates a search, the engine doesn’t have to scan all of the many billions of web pages in existence. Instead, it must only access the particular record that holds the index of information pertaining to the terms entered, making it possible to retrieve vast amounts of data in mere fractions of a second. However, search engines do much more than pull back data and generate randomly ordered lists of links that are related to the terms entered in the query. Rather, the results are sorted and ranked based on importance, which is gauged according to relative popularity, following the assumption that a site or page is popular due to the quality of the information it contains. Therefore, the objective of SEO is not only to ensure that the major search engines identify your website content as being relevant to the keywords that pertain to your products or services but also to increase the perceived importance of that content.

Turning the tables on search

You are undoubtedly very familiar with the mechanics of using a search engine. These days, online search is as deeply ingrained in our daily lives as eating or sleeping. However, as one who is charged with growing a business, it is a useful exercise to take a step back and seriously reconsider the search process, looking at it through the eyes of a prospective customer. Sure, it’s possible that a user might search for your business by name – “Sally’s Bakery,” for example. It’s easy to land at the top of those results. However, in that case, the searcher essentially knew what they’re looking for already, perhaps because they are a returning customer, they’ve seen your sign while driving down the road or they’ve been referred by another customer. The brass ring of SEO is capturing organic traffic – prospects that may never even have heard of you before.These types of visitors are good, but they aren’t necessarily the primary target of your SEO efforts. Instead, the brass ring of SEO is capturing organic traffic – prospects that may never even have heard of you before. These are users that are searching with more generic keyword phrases like “birthday cakes Charlotte” or “cupcakes Charlotte.” It’s not as easy to climb the rankings of these results, but it’s conquerable – not to mention profitable. It’s important to understand that each and every one of the billions of searches conducted each month begins with an identifiable need. Therefore, first and foremost, you should ask yourself two questions: “What types of problems do people have for which I can offer a solution?” and “What words or phrases would they use to express that need?”. The answers might not be quite as straightforward as you think. Let’s say you own a professional landscaping company. Certainly there are people who will search for “Charlotte landscaping” or “Charlotte lawn care,” and without question you want to make sure that your site is optimized to be ranked high among the results. But there are many, many other search terms like “landscaping ideas,” “garden,” “roses,” “weeds,” “fertilizer,” “insect control,” “How do I make my home more energy-efficient?” and even “How do I sell my house?” that are still relevant to your business. After all, chances are good that you would have something of value to offer anyone in your area that was experiencing a need related to one of those ideas or questions. Therefore, you should take all of these into account when developing your SEO strategy.

What’s next?

Now that you have a deeper understanding of the fundamentals of search, you’re well-armed to apply that knowledge to the practice of SEO. The great news for you as a business owner or marketer is that there are actually many things you can do yourself to improve your standing with the major search engines. Even better, many of these tactics also serve double-duty in supporting and reinforcing your other marketing efforts. Before you get started, be sure to read SEO 102: 13 Steps to Improve Your Ranking the Right Way. While there’s no instant formula that will launch your site to number one, by implementing these tried-and-true SEO techniques with patience and persistence over time, you can be confident that you will yield real results. * Source: comScore

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