I thought it would be a good time to provide a case study of one particular client which has performed extremely well over the last couple of years. My aim is to help you to understand what the “secret ingredients” are and what ultimately determines your success when undertaking any online marketing campaign.

The Budwig Center

When the Budwig Center approached me for help in the middle of 2009 I was asked to build a site for their clinic which provided courses in alternative medicine, specifically the Budwig Diet which is used to prevent and cure cancer and other serious illnesses.

Once the site was completed, we were pretty much starting from scratch in terms of traffic to the site. So, there were no indexed pages, no sitemaps, no inbound links, nada.

Today the site realises around 24,000 visitors every month and numbers have been progressing each and every month since we first begun. The site offers a free Budwig diet guide and this on average is downloaded around 1,000 times each month by prospective clients and no doubt provides some very good leads and new business for the clinic.

The site also enjoys good sharing activity and since September 2009 has been shared no less than 2,572 times via sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google and MySpace. This kind of sharing is crucial if you are to take your marketing efforts to new heights in this new social media age.

There is definitely a direct correlation between good sharing, mentions via social media sites and positive organic rankings. The main search engines are now using these “signals” as a part of their organic ranking algorithm.

Each month the Budwig Center site goes from strength to strength and below I can give you an insight into reasons why.

UVP – Unique Value Proposition

This is the most important step. If you get this wrong, don’t even bother to spend your time and money on promoting your business.

If you are unable to offer something of value that solves a problem that people are having problems finding anywhere else, you will have an uphill journey all the way. Trying to flog something to people that doesn’t have a real benefit or doesn’t differentiate your business from hundreds of others is a no win situation.

BUDWIG CENTER UVP: Providing visitors with free guides, information and advice to help them overcome and prevent cancer and other serious illnesses.

Site Design and Usability

I’ve lost count of the number of websites I have been shown by potential clients that just were not cut out to be put live on the web.

Great web design is of paramount importance and can be a major stumbling block when promoting your business online. You do not have to spend $10,000 on a site for it to be effective.

Any website needs to be functional and easy to navigate. Anything superfluous added just distracts users and prevents them taking the desired action, i.e. downloading a guide, filling in a form or subscribing to your newsletter.

User’s are generally after information that solves a problem, they don’t want to be entertained, if they wanted that, they would turn on the TV or watch a movie. Give them what they need to know and solve their problem. Job done!

BUDWIG CENTER SITE DESIGN: Clear, easy to navigate, social sharing features, fast loading.

Search Engine Optimisation

If you have a website and create regular content then you need to make sure that the search engines can find it so that it can be presented in the search results for relevant search queries.

SEO helps you site to be seen on the web. By optimising page titles, meta descriptions, H tags, bolding of text, creation of XML sitemaps and performing good internal linking, you send the search engines positive signals as to what you content is about and how it should be categorised.

But this is only half the story. You will also need to perform a certain amount of keyword research, competitor analysis and manual link building in order to help boost your organic rankings, especially in the early stages of your marketing campaign.

BUDWIG CENTER SEO: Consistent on-site and off-site optimisation has been performed in order to strengthen organic search engine positions for the Budwig Center’s most important and relevant keywords.

FREE Content That Provides Solutions

You have to add fresh and interesting content on a regular basis. Ideally you need a blog which is connected to Twitter and Facebook to allow your followers to be notified of any new blog posts. You also need an RSS feed which is good for those that want to read your updates via their RSS reader and not have to visit your blog directly.

At the end of the day, the more interesting content that provides users with solutions or answers to their problems, the more shares you will get and the more natural links you will gain.

But there’s something else to remember here. YOUR CONTENT MUST BE FREE!

I know what you are thinking, “FREE! Are you mad!. I can’t afford to give my time away!”.

You can and you must if you want to win the social media game. Free content attracts more customers, links, likes and customer loyalty in the long term.

BUDWIG CENTER CONTENT: Free downloadable guides, rich information, free expert advice, testimonials, case studies and blog posts.

Call To Action

If you want a visitor to take action you have to point them in the right direction and lead them gently into your sales funnel.  It is a fact that most of us subtly WANT to be lead and advised on the actions we need to take.

It’s actually surprising just how many sites neglect call to action. Things like nice bold buttons, links, strong titles, strike through’s, good copy-writing and images can all help to get users to convert.

It’s worth noting that call to action doesn’t have to be big and bold. It can also be the subtle language that you use in your copywriting and “speaking the language” of your customers.

BUDWIG CENTER CALL TO ACTION:  Simple call to action in form of images and textual links. Social media call to action to help build social community.

Permission Marketing/Visitor Retention

Once users hit your site, you want to keep them coming back. Your need to build a tribe of fans who look forward to hearing what you have to say. You can only do that if you keep them connected to you. How do you do this? By using RSS feeds, newsletters, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

These sites and services act as “outposts” for your business and means that visitors do not have to visit your site directly in order to read the content that you publish.

When users signup to your newsletter, like you on Facebook, follow you on Twitter and alike, this is referred to as “permission marketing”. This is your ultimate aim as a marketer. It means that a user trusts you enough and will allow you to sell to them.

So make sure you are building your outposts and allowing users to connect with you in multiple ways.

BUDWIG CENTER PERMISSION MARKETING: Makes good use of Facebook, Twitter, RSS and email to help keep customers connected.

Social Media Presence

As mentioned above, you need to build outposts. Outposts include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr and many other social sites.

But it does not stop there. You need to be consistent with using these sites and need to update your status and interact with your social circle consistently. It also means that you have to build your social circle over time.

But remember that it is not just about numbers! It’s about building a tribe of loyal friends and fans who not only want to interact with you on a social level but who will ultimately spread the word to their own social circles and help to promote your business.

What is really important to mention is this.

DO NOT SELL TO YOUR SOCIAL CIRCLE!

Your aim is not to SELL. Your aim is to build trust and nurture your social community. Once you provide useful, free content which shows you are an expert or authority within your field, your circle will look to you for a solution when required. They will also tell their friends about your product and services as well. Double whammy!!

BUDWIG CENTER SOCIAL MEDIA: The Budwig Center have a number of social media accounts including Facebook and Twitter which act as outposts and pull new visitors into the site. Also make use of relevant forums, answer sites, document sharing sites and blog commenting where appropriate.

Shareability

The web has evolved. Links are no longer the be all and end all of internet marketing. Shares have now become just as, if not more important.

Each time your blog content or Facebook page is shared it pops up in the stream of that users social media account. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ or another social media feed, by sharing your content, a user is advocating not only your content but your business. This is what we refer to “social proofing”. Hey, my friend likes this, so there is a good chance that I will too.

With the average user on Facebook having around 130 friends, you can see that it is extremely valuable for your business if only a handful of users share your content. This kind of sharing creates a “viral buzz”. Your content can reach many many people in a short space of time.

The Budwig Center provides rich, useful, free content that helps to answer questions that visitors have about alternative medicine and cancer. This kind of solution based content is easy for others to share.

By simply placing social media sharing widgets on your blog posts or important content ( I recommend addthis ) you allow users to share your content with their social circles.

BUDWIG CENTER SHARING: The Budwig Center makes good use of AddThis social sharing buttons on the main site and blog which allows users to share their content effortlessly.

Conversion Optimisation

Most companies are not familiar with or if they are, do not spend the time or money on focusing on Conversion Optimisation.

It’s great getting visitors to your site but is a total waste of your time and money if they do not complete a goal, whether signing up to your newsletter, buying a product or completing your form.

This is where Conversion Optimisation comes in. By analysing your main landing pages you can improve them with good call to action which can gently help bring your visitors into your sales funnel.

In order to improve your pages conversion rate, you will need to have a complete understanding of your sites visitors, why they are there, what they care about most, what problems they need solving and what will ultimately make them take action.

With conversion optimisation, it is also important to run A/B split testing and multi-variate split testing. This enables you to make changes to your landing pages and monitor whether conversions have improved or not.

Another important tool to help improve conversion is usability testing.

Usability testing means setting unknown users tasks to complete on your site. They perform the tasks which are recorded with sound and video which enables you to find out what the user is experiencing and if they are having issues with your site.

It’s important to understand why users are not buying. It is normally because they either CAN’T buy or WON’T buy.

They CAN’T buy normally means that the site design is lacking in something such as poor navigation or it could be that the content is “answering their questions”.

If a user WON’T buy, this usually means that there is something wrong with your value proposition. Are your products too expensive? Are they of a poor quality? Or do you not provide the items or services that your visitors really need?

By performing conversion optimisation including split testing and usability testing, you will find out why.

BUDWIG CENTER: We have undertaken numerous usability tests and split testing to improve conversion rates and usability on the site.

CONCLUSION

If you want to help create greater brand recognition and build a community around your site, then you need to be using as many of the above as possible.

Inbound Marketing presents a world of opportunity to ALL businesses, large or small, local or global. Given time and a little creativity, there is no reason why you can’t leverage the opportunities that the web offers, even on a small shoestring budget.

You don’t need big bucks to compete online and this is why the web has helped to level the playing field for smaller businesses and one man bands.

Users are ignoring conventional media (interruption marketing) more than ever. Television, radio and press marketing is no longer as effective as it used to be. Users have “switched off” to these conventional forms of mass marketing.

Inbound Marketing using SEO and Social Media is YOUR opportunity. So start creating something of value today and begin to build your social community.

Please feel free to join me on Facebook, Twitter or subscribe to future posts via RSS.

Recommended Sites

Social Media - Likeable Social Media, Social Media Examiner

SEO – SEOMoz

Web Design: Redline Company, Innov8graphics

Social Sharing Buttons: AddThis

Usability Testing: User Testing, Open Hallway

Conversion Optimisation:  Conversion Rate Experts

Inbound Marketing – Hubspot 

The second most important aspect is your website. Your website needs to be able to reflect your brand and the image you are looking to portray. It takes users just a few seconds to like or dislike your site, so why leave it to chance?

At SEO Services Spain we offer usability and conversion optimisation in order to help clients to convert more visitors into paying customers. After listening to many recordings from testers, one thing is for sure, the usability and design of your website is of paramount importance.

This is why we at SEO Services Spain work closely with a number of web design companies. Redline Company have been partners with SEO Services Spain for a number of years and offer professional CMS websites at highly affordable prices. You can view their current portfolio of websites via their web design portfolio page.

Redline are currently offering fully manageable websites designed using the latest version of Joomla CMS from only 499.00 Euros + IVA. Price includes slideshow on homepage, contact form and gallery.

If you are looking to get your business online and want to save money on regular web design updates, then a professional Joomla site from Redline Company is the perfect choice.

If so, you may be in need of some new year tweaks to improve things.

Google announced back in April that page load times were a part of the ranking algorithm and hence can affect your rankings negatively.

Google are almost obsessive about speed, and for good reason. Slow websites are a pain, not only to users but also to search engines. Google and the other engines do not want to rank your site high in the rankings, only for users to experience slow load times and a poor overall user experience. This looks bad for the engines as they are in effect voting for your site.

If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account you will find some really important information in regards to site speed. Under “Labs” we have “Site Performance”. Here, Google reports on your overall site speed. This info is taken from a number of sources including the Google toolbar. I can’t confirm if the info is 100% accurate, but it does serve as a good overall guide.

Another important section of WMT is the section just underneath the load time chart above and is labelled as “Page Speed Suggestions”.

Here you can find info and advice on files on your site which Google believes can be reduced in size to provide better performance. This could be via one of the methods in the section further below.

So what to do?

Well, there are quite a few things that can be done to improve your sites load times and keep everyone happy. But in the interests of brevity, I will just cover three of the main suggestions here.

HTTP Compression

In its simplest form, HTTP Compression is where the data sent between a browser client and server host is compressed or reduced in size in order to speed up the transmission of the website files and data.

In order for this to be achieved, the server and the client have to agree when they first handshake and agree the protocol.

Live HTTP headers http://livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/ is a great piece of software that you can run in order to view the http header information when establishing a connection to a website. This can provide us with a lot of useful information. (Note: Live HTTP Headers is an extension for the Firefox browser)

In the image below you will see that on initially requesting the webpage my browser requested the page and also said that it can accept gzip or deflate encoding. These modules are typically installed as a part of the Apache web server software. So basically my browser is saying “throw me the page across, and if you can make it smaller using gzip or deflate and save us both time and trouble, please do so”.

The image below is the next part of the conversation between server and host. The server is replying OK, I have this page and includes other info such as last modified date and the server software. What we are looking for is the area highlighted in red which says “Content-Encoding: gzip”. Happy days! The server is saying OK, you said you can handle compressed content, so I will send it to you in gzip format. Job done!

If the server did not support HTTP compression of some sort then no problems, the data would still be sent, just not compressed.

For further information on setting up your Apache web server software have a read of this post on how to optimize your site with gzip compression.

To check if your website data is compressed already, use this http compression checking tool.

Combine JavaScript and CSS Code

Most websites today use JavaScript and CSS. JavaScript is a scripting language and can be used with many programs, widgets, graphics apps etc. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and is mainly used to render and format HTML.

Unfortunately when developers and designers work on websites they sometimes use code and place the code in multiple .css and .js files. This means that these files need to be “called” a number of times in order for the browser to run the required code.

Now. A better way is to copy and paste the code from any .css files and .js files and combine them into one file for each of the CSS and JavaScript.

For example I recently combined the JavaScript code from a few different applications into one file on one of my client’s site and call the main file combined.js

The reference at the top of the HTML code would look something like

<script src=”combined.js”></script>

Then something similar for all the CSS code.

<link href=”layout.css” rel=”stylesheet” />

So now, whenever any Javascript or CSS code needs to be run, it is all searched for and run from one file.

Reduce DNS Calls

Without going into DNS too much, DNS is the Domain Name System and is used to resolve domain names to ip addresses. So when you type in a URL in your browser, your browser goes off and checks with the server which is authoritive for that domain and asks for the ip address for that particular site. The server then returns something like 195.56.87.99. Your browser then tries to connect to this server requesting the contents of the website and page. IP addresses are like postcodes in that they pinpoint the exact location of where the site is hosted. They are also unique.

So, anyway. The point is when someone connects to your site, if your code includes calls to things such as Google Analytics, Statcounter, Widgets, Chat, Banners etc these all have to be looked up and resolved before the page is fully loaded. The more calls that are made, the longer the page will potentially take to finish loading.

So, in this case, make sure that you are not making any unnecessary DNS calls. Keep it nice and clean.

For further tips and techniques for reducing page load times, take a look at http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

EDIT: Google have recently offered on online page speed testing tool which also gives you advice on where you can speed your website up. Take a look at the Google pagespeed online tool page.

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I get quite a few enquiries from clients looking for a new website, either they do not have one or their previous “designer” screwed up in some way and are now looking for a revamp or a new site all together.

One thing that is common though, is that clients have this vision of an all singing and all dancing website design with flash, rockets, animated graphics and all sorts of other “distractive” features!

People, get real! Your visitors do not want this, YOU DO! Are you trying to sell or entertain? Let me give you an example of a simple but effective website design. The google homepage. Do you think they will put lots of flashy images, movies and banners ads all over their homepage? Of course not.

Believe it or not, Google does keep the page to a very minimum(something like 28 elements/words) but makes very very subtle changes that most people do not even notice, but these changes are effective. Take a look at their post on search experiements back in August. Wow, no flashy content there eh?

It’s words and user experience that sell! Copywriting and call to action should be the main focus for your site, NOT fancy images and flash animations. For example, if you have a real estate site(of which there are many), what do you think your visitor wants? Some flash animation or the ability to search and locate a selection of properties painlessly? You got it, the painless information retrieval wins every time.

It’s about content and user experience and not so much image. Not that I am saying you should build a crappy website, just that the website should be focused on your goals and conversions, whether thats getting somebody’s email address, selling a product or service, or having someone signup to your newsletter. Its all about giving them what they want, which is:-

A Website That Is Easy To Navigate

Don’t make your visitor search too hard for what they are looking for. If you are selling property make sure your listings are easy to find and that if the search boxes are not on the homepage, make sure there is at least one link that is visible to that search page. You only have a few seconds to capture that user, make sure you use those three seconds well.

You also want to make sure you structure your site well, ie not too many deep directories. Keep the structure as flat as you can and your most important content(for users and bots) nearer to the top of the structure.

Good Internal Linking Structure

Make sure that you interlink your pages well by creating hyperlinks where neccessary back to other pages using keyword rich anchor text.

Nice, clean URL’s

If you are not using a content management system(CMS) try to make sure that your urls are keyword rich. for example mysite.com/cars/reviews/porsche-boxter.html

This makes the urls easier to remember, more descriptive for the visitor and will help with rankings as well.

If you ARE using a CMS system such as Joomla then get yourself the SEF plugin or something similar and get those urls rewritten using mod_rewrite.

Keep Your Images Small and not too much fancy flash

Once again, not too many oversized images and flash animations. They can be a bit of a turn off and in other instances become a real distraction. When you have someone in that sales funnel on your site, keep it simple and get them to that checkout asap. No distractions, no excuses.

Set Up A Blog

Blogs are a great way of telling your visitors about changes to your business and website. If its any good people may even subscribe to the blogs feed so that they can see your posts as soon as you create new ones. They are also good for internal linking and SEO so set one up. WordPress only takes a few minutes to set up so set one up today and start posting on a regular basis.

Good Use Of Page Headings

Its a fact that people “skim” text when visiting websites, looking for that indicator as to what they have been searching for. Its a bit like when people read a newspaper. They SCAN the paper for appealing titles and headings that catch their attentions. The same goes with websites.

Make sure you use good H1 and H2 header tages to format your pages correctly using your main keywords within these tags.

Clear Contact Information

Its amazing that sometimes you visit a site and it seems to take forever to find your contact info. Generally you want to have it on the home page somewhere that is visually accessible very quickly, for example top left or top right. Wherever you put it, make sure it can be found quickly. This is very frustrating for a visitor who needs to contact you quickly.

Well there are a few. There are in fact many changes that you can make to your site in order to make it more appealing and effective.

Don’t overlook the most obvious features of your new or old site. User experience NOT search engine friendliness is the most important aspect(and thats coming from someone who mainly deals with SEO). Its no good spending loads of money on SEO, PPC or any other marketing for your site if the users experience is not going to be up to scratch.

Weve been doing some small jobs on this site and its coming on a treat. So, if your feeling lonely need a friend or partner, take a look and signup for your free account.

Rob