You do have an email newsletter, right?

Sending out a periodic email newsletter can help draw customers and prospects in to important pages on your website or to relevant blog posts. But how many read them?

Very often statistics from your email newsletter host will show that a relatively small percentage of readers actually click on any links to your website or blog. In fact, you’re likely to find that lots of recipients don’t even open your newsletter. (Some may view it in preview mode and unless they click on something that doesn’t count as an open. But still, a low open rate indicates a problem.)

Mistina Picciano of MarketItWrite offers 8 tips to make sure people read your newsletter. If you have a low open rate, focus on her tip #2: Use subjects that say “read me”. A compelling subject line to your email will get people to open them. That’s a subject we at Rank Magic discovered late in the game. For years our monthly newsletters had a subject line something like Rank Magic SEO Newsletter for April. Does that make you want to stop and read it? I didn’t think so. Last month’s newsletter hinted at some of the content inside with this subject line: Disappearing Rankings | SEO Myths | Google on Article & Social Media Marketing. A bit better, but not as compelling as it could have been. A better subject line might have been Why Did My Rankings Disappear? or perhaps Don’t Believe These Dangerous SEO Myths!.

Better newsletter subjects is something we need to work on, and chances are it’s something you need to work on, too.

Not so much.

Matt Cutts says Google’s not a huge fan. He says that sites which publish articles from article repositories tend not to be the highest quality sites, and there’s always the risk of duplicate content issues. He says that he would tend to “lean away from it” in preference to developing great content that can attract legitimate links itself, and promoting it with social media.

See Matt discuss article marketing.

At Rank Magic, we sometimes help clients with article marketing if that’s what they want, but we usually recommend they place such articles on their own website first. Then we can apply social media exposure to the original article. Once that’s done, if the client still wants to see if article marketing can help, we can facilitate that.

The key, really, is having content with enough value that people will want to link to it. The social media promotion just helps make more people aware of that content on our client’s website.

We all have them, but too few of us use them. Web Analytics, site logs, web site statistics … whatever you call them, they’re usually provided free of charge by our web hosting company. And if not, you can easily add free Google Analytics to your web site.

Why bother? Some of this stuff might be hard to understand. Sometimes it results in information overload. Some of the reasons people don’t use their web analytics are:

• It’s too confusing
• Information overload
• What am I supposed to do with all this data?
• Won’t all this tracking be expensive?

To address the last concern first, many web analytics packages are free. And if you focus on the really important items, it’s not so tough after all. Adam Singer wrote a primer on six things to focus on in your web site analytics. Here’s a quick list, but check out Adam’s article for the real meat on this.

This article by Mistina Picciano deserves your consideration, and she’s allowed us to republish it here.  Mistina is founder and president of Market It Write, an integrated copywriting agency that specializes in content marketing.

While organic rankings achieved ethically often tend to be stable for months and years without further attention, they aren’t permanent. As your business changes, you’ll update your website and may inadvertently de-optimize parts of it. As competitors rise in their ability to compete for rankings, your visibility may drop. A former client of ours had achieved a visibility score of about 50% (which is actually much better than it sounds) when we last checked his rankings five years ago. At the time, he was so busy from the SEO we did that he was reluctant to do anything further lest he be unable to keep up with the business. Now it’s five years later, and he’s blaming his slow business on the recession. But a quick check showed that as a result of changes to his web site that partially de-optimized it, his visibility had slid to only 6% over the past 5 years.

It’ll be much harder to get his rankings back now than it would have been if we’d attacked the problem in a more timely manner. That’s why our SEO Monitoring  program checks your rankings in a detailed report every three months. If you don’t want our rank reporting program, you need to at least check your important rankings manually on a regular basis so you’ll know if you start to lose visibility and need to take corrective measures.

pay per click (PPC) ads and organic SEO

We’ve often told clients that showing up in both the organic listings and the sponsored (pay per click, or PPC) listings “super-validates” your site as one to be clicked. Now, a study from a couple of NYU Stern professors has confirmed that organic search engine results can play a direct role in whether or not a paid listing is clicked. In essence, they’re saying that if your business has both a paid result and an organic result appear at the same time, you have a better chance of your paid result getting clicked than if the organic result had not appeared. Presumably, the reverse is also true: that your PPC listing increases the odds of your organic listing being clicked.

Professors Anindya Ghose and Sha Yang have highlighted the following findings:

• On average, the impact of organic listings on paid advertising is 3.5 times stronger than vice-versa, possibly because of the tendency of consumers to trust organic listings more than paid ads.
• The positive association between paid and organic listings increases advertisers’ profits by at least 6.15% when compared to profits in the absence of either of them. The positive association is strongest when advertiser-specific keywords are used and weakest when brand-specific and generic keywords are used.
• Click-through rates, conversion rates and total revenues are higher when both paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when paid search ads are absent.
• The combined click-through rates are 5.1% higher when paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when only the organic listings are present.
• The combined conversion rate increases 11.7% when paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when organic listings alone are present.

The professors used “a unique panel dataset of consumer responses to keyword ads on Google” to conduct their research. The complete findings from the study are available in a paper entitled “Analyzing the Relationship between Organic and Sponsored Search Advertising: Positive, Negative or Zero Interdependence?” It’s 52 pages long and a bit academic.

When the economy slows to a crawl, the vast majority of your competitors instinctively hit the brakes on their their sales and marketing. They see money for promoting their businesses as expenses and not investments. As a result, your competition drastically reduces expenditures for sales, search engine optimization, direct mailing, advertising, trade shows, promotions, and so on. Now is the time to hit the gas instead of the brakes, and establish a lead on them they may be unable to make up later.

Read more by sales trainer Bill Todd here.

Online press releases are great ways to get one-way links to your web site. For one thing, we know that Google and Yahoo and others visit the press releases and index them. Beyond that, other web sites are likely to pick up on a press release and republish it on their own sites. If that press release has links back to your own web site, then those links get replicated each time another web site uses your press release.

We use a number of online press release services that offer free press releases, but sometimes the premium features they charge money for can get you more exposure. If you’re inclined to submit online press releases, check out these sites:

• Free Press Release
• The Open Press
• PR Web
• PRLog

Link building is essential to good rankings in the search engines. The number and quality of other web sites that link to yours builds your link popularity, and that affects your rankings. Especially in Google. While reciprocal links (you link to me and I link back to you) are excellent to have, one-way links are even more powerful. One excellent way to get such links is through article marketing.

Webmasters are always in need of good, relevant content for their web sites. If you have well-written articles about your area of expertise in one of the several article repositories on the web, your articles will be found, picked up, and reprinted on other web sites. The price those webmasters pay for using your article is that they have to include your own “About The Author” blurb at the end of the article. A blurb in which you just happen to include a link to your web site.

There’s no reason you can’t include such articles on your own web site, of course. But the links from other related web sites are what you’re really after here. We can submit your articles to a number of online article repositories, or you can do that yourself, of course.

Article Quality is Critical

It’s essential that your articles not be commercials for you; they need to be useful and informative, with information that readers will find valuable. There are two very selfish reasons for this. First, article that tout your products or services are least likely to be picked up for inclusion on anyone else’s web site. And second, a great article with lots of informative content is more likely to entice a reader to click on your link at the bottom and visit your web site.

Not all of us are capable of writing compelling articles that can both inform and entertain, but don’t let that stop you. We work with some excellent copywriters who can “ghost write” articles for you. The ideas, of course, have to be yours, but the words can be crafted by someone who specializes in that. Some of the copywriters we’re familiar with and can recommend include Anne Lazo of Eagle Soars Marketing, Scott Stadler of Words By Design, Toni Sydor of The Write Direction, and Naoma Welk of Welk Ink.

After spending time and money on an SEO campaign, you need to know how it’s working for you. If you’re a client of ours, we can easily tell you how your rankings are doing in the search engines. But that’s only a small part of it. The real measure of SEO success is in whether you’re getting more customers and increased revenue.

You really need to track conversions: phone calls, information requests, and sales. Your SEO consultant typically can’t do that for you — you need to track that stuff yourself.

John O’Connor, owner of Shade Tree Garage in Morristown, NJ, a client of ours, maintains a yellow legal pad at his appointment desk. Every new caller gets added to a list on that pad, and they’re asked “How did you learn about us?”. That gives him a very clear idea of how his Yellow Pages ad is doing, how successful his newspaper advertising is, and how well his SEO campaign is doing.

By the way, John reports that he’s getting one new paying customer a day from his web site.