Jonathan's Web Marketing Blog

Usually, when you check into a hotel, and they give you your key card, they put it into a little sleeve. Well, at the Inn of Chicago, they really screwed up...



Now, they might have just run out due to poor planning, but this just goes to show the glaring mistake it is to leave such a bland, brand-less first impression with a client. PLEASE make sure that when someone calls your office, you answer the phone with the name of your practice. The same goes for email.

After the exhibit hall at the AAJ meeting closed, we took the Chicago Red Line over to Wrigley Field to watch the Chicago Cubs play the San Francisco Giants. It was a great game, but unfortunately, the Cubs couldn't come back from a bad string of pitches that led to a couple of runs being walked-in. Still, Bill and I enjoyed it.

Go check out the pictures at my Page 1 Photo Station.

We've met with a couple of our clients already, and it's been great to get some face-to-face time with these guys that we generally only get to communicate with over the phone and email. We are reviewing their statistics with them and discussing possible changes in their website designs.

Here's our president, Dan Goldstein with our New York personal injury lawyer client, Joseph Awad.

Well, I'm at the Denver airport, and thanks to the miracles of the modern, wireless computing age, I'm able to blog in the concourse from my laptop. I'm on my way to Chicago for the AAJ and IACA meetings. Back to back conventions! That's a first for me. I'm looking forward to meeting some new clients, and to helping some people on the exhibit floor.

Web marketing requires investment. Sounds pretty obvious, but many doctors and lawyers fail to watch over and nurture their websites like they would do for any other type of investment.

Whether you have a website already or you've just purchased one and are doing some Internet marketing to promote it, you have to take care of your site and track its success and failures. Just jumping into the car and hitting the gas doesn't work. You have to watch how fast you're going, look where you're going, and steer. If you didn't do those things, you'd of course wreck your car, possibly kill someone, and possibly be killed in the crash.

Okay, you won't die if you do a bad job at marketing on the Internet, but you will quite probably end up with a loss if you don't watch where it is going and steer it back on course if it's heading off of the predetermined path.

You nurture a website marketing plan by tracking results and taking action.

Tracking Web Marketing Results

There are three main types of results that you must track in order to monitor the success of any website marketing campaign:

1. Search Engine Positioning


2. Traffic


3. Conversions

There are many nuances depending upon which web marketing techniques that you implement, but in general, these are the big three. Think of them like the three branches of our government (I know that I'm potentially treading on dangerous ground here...). They all carry different levels of importance, have different roles, and keep each other in check.

Search Engine Positioning

Search engine positioning is of paramount importance because without good search engine positioning the traffic simply can't happen (as a result of your WEB marketing). Track all of your important keywords, and look for 1st-page search engine listings. All other pages are somewhat irrelevant. True, 2nd-page listings get traffic, but 1st-page listings, of course, yield the greatest return on investment.

Web Traffic

Tracking your website's visitor traffic will give you a different perspective on the success of your site. It will help you determine which keywords are the most valuable, and which pages of your website are working best. Your traffic can act as a barometer for your web marketing campaign.

A common mistake that professionals make is fixating on the number of 'hits' that their websites get. Don't track hits - track user sessions. This isn't just a matter of semantics. A single user session can be responsible for hundreds of hits. A hit is any file request that the web server receives. An image on a page will register as a hit. Your traffic program should be able to track visitors by their IP addresses and then record all sorts of background information such as how many pages they view, how many hits they registered, and how many minutes they spent on the site, etc..

In the first month of your web marketing campaign, you'll likely see decided improvement in your search engine listings, but probably not on Google unless you're doing a PPC campaign. Even so, by checking your traffic, you will see that even during your first month, you're making progress. More people are coming to your site, and you can track which search engines are sending you traffic.

The average length of user session is one of the most important criteria to use as a cross-reference in evaluating the quality of your visitors. This tells you how long the average person is spending on your website. This number should ideally be at least three minutes long. Any less than that, and you'll find that your conversions will suffer because the users aren't spending enough time on the site to make the decision to contact you. An increase in your number of visitors shouldn't be celebrated as a victory unless your session length stayed relatively stable.

Website Visitor Conversions

Traffic is useless if it doesn't turn into emails and phone calls. There really is no reliable equation to say that X number of visitors should yield Y number of phone calls or emails. Well, I'm sure that the guy from Numb3rs could figure one out, but there are so many variables that come into play, that it's nearly impossible to nail down. The algorithm would have to change all the time. Suffice it to say that I'm not going to pay for a campaign that doesn't ultimately pay for itself and then some. I need a return on my investment.

If you don't track conversions, you'll never know what kind of return you're getting.

Prepare for Flux, Plan by Trends

All of these types of results with fluctuate, so it's important to look at the data from a more global view, over a span of several months, to look for a trend. If you have enough data, each quarter, I would recommend looking at the data in terms of years, and look for a trend at that level. Just don't torture yourself by looking at the data every day or even every week, unless you've changed something that you know should yield an immediate influx in traffic (radio campaign, PPC budget increase, etc). If you change things without the backing of trend data, you may make changes that actually hurt or inhibit your campaign results.

This is not to say that you should make changes. You have to act on your data - be it good or bad data. If it's good data, keep doing what you're doing and look for ways to step things up for even better results. If you see poor results, don't give up. Change things up and look for a better result.

You're guaranteed to NOT get a return on investment if you just let it sit there and let entropy do its thing.

Statistics show (according to W3School.com) that you most likely are reading this website using an internet browsing program called Microsoft Internet Explorer. But there are other Internet browser programs out there. Even Internet Explorer has different versions. Did you know that these browsing programs display webpages differently? Your website may look correct in Internet Explorer, but does it display properly in other browsers? Is that even important? The answer is, "It depends."

Over one-third of Internet users use a browser called Mozilla Firefox (you can download it for free here). It initially became popular because it offered several features that Internet Explorer did not feature. Microsoft has caught up to this somewhat, but while IE7 now shares some of the same features that Firefox offers, the two browsers behave differently.

Here is a website that displays properly in Internet Explorer 7 (NOTE: I have grayed-out items on the site that would identify the practice.):



But not in Firefox:



If you put your mouse over the second image, and then remove it, you'll notice that there's even a slight shift in where the elements are displayed between the two browsers. The biggest problem is that the banner wasn't coded using browser cross-compatible HTML code.

Browser compatibility is sometimes very difficult for designers to achieve and really isn't important in every case. Take Mac's browser, Safari. There is a segment of the population that exclusively uses Safari because that's what came with their Mac when they bought it and that's what they're used to. Safari displays pages differently too, and often elements that display properly in Safari display IMproperly on Internet Explorer. Statistics show that only 1.3% of web users used Safari last month. So, it would be unwise to design a website to display properly in Safari only to sacrifice the user experience of the much more expansive Internet Explorer and Firefox audiences.

Whenever possible, it's good to have your website displaying correctly across all of the browsers, but more often than not, you just have to pick your battles.

Here are some indicators that I look for when I speak with an attorney or doctor for the first time that tell me if the potential client really doesn't need our search engine optimization services. If a client doesn't need SEO, we just tell them. There's no sense trying to make something happen when it's a poor fit from the beginning. Here are some of the signs that SEO might NOT be right for you:

• Aesthetics are more important to you than the content of the website.
  


• You want instant results. (This would be a good candidate for pay-per-click advertising.)


• You don't have the resources and/or can't find the resources in your budget to invest in search engine marketing.


• You're looking for a "Do it yourself" solution.


• Your website isn't search engine optimization-friendly, and don't have the desire and/or the resources to build a new site.


• You don't see the opportunity that the Internet presents to get new patients/cases.


• There actually isn't enough demand for your services online to justify the investment in search engine optimization.

If you have a question about whether or not SEO is right for you, please call me for a free consultation at 800-916-3886. I will help you decide one way or the other. We're not for everyone, but I'm always glad to help.