The Cutting Edge of Online Marketing

It’s been just days since the conclusion of the MHI Summer Meetings in Washington DC and already the Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are being lit up with reports from MHMSM.com taking top positions.

As a result of Teresa Payne‘s “Manufactured Housing Rocks!” exhortation at the MHI event being reported in the Masthead Blog, by MHMSM Editor L.A. ‘Tony’ Kovach, a Google search for “Teresa Payne Manufactured Housing”, the MH Program Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary at HUD holds the #1 and #1b positions. Can’t get much better than that for a first appearance in MHMSM.com.

But the ball has just begun rolling. A search for Elizabeth Cocke using the term “Elizabeth Cocke Manufactured Housing” also yields a #2 result. This article is also Liz’s first mention in the pages of MHMSM.com

George F. Allen is one of the best known and most respected names in Manufactured Housing. George has been mentioned in this ezine before and wrote a two-part article for the July issue of MHMSM.com. George’s appearance in the post Amazingly Allen, The IMHA and the Chairman’s Reception ranks #1 for the search term “George F. Allen Manufactured Housing” and the report on a previous SERP appearance associated with MHMSM.com ranks #1b.

In addition, Greg O’Berry, the COO and President of HometownAmerica, mentioned in the same blog post as Teresa Payne and Liz Cocke, drew a #2 SERP position for that appearance. Greg also wrote a guest post for MHMSM.com’s INdustry Voices blog – GSE’s Duty To Serve – and that post earned Greg the #2 spot in a Google search for “Greg O’Berry Manufactured Housing.”

It’s becoming readily apparent that having your name appear on MHMSM.com, whether as a writer, a guest blogger at INdustry Voices or giving an interview will increase your online visibility in the world of factory built housing.

Have a Press Release, Job Listing or Ad that you want to get noticed? MHMSM.com would be the place. Can you write article or a guest post for INdustry Voices? Have vacant homes or lots? Homes sitting on your sales lot? MHMSM.com is proving to be the absolute BEST place for your company to get the results it wants and needs.

First I want to wish everyone a Happy 4th of July and Happy Birthday to this wonderful country we call home. Too often, we take the blessings we have been born into or chose by immigration for granted. Take a few moments today to express some gratitude (silent or otherwise) for the gift of freedom.

And to everyone in every corner of the manufactured housing industry, I wish you the very best starting right now. Join the Manufactured Housing Revolution (more on this to come).

Independence is great on a national or global scale, but what about the practice and realization of independence in your own life and the lives of those around you?

An often overused (some might say clichéd) expression is “work smarter, not harder.” I recently read a thread in a forum where a member was complaining that the phrase is often used with no explanation of what the user means, making matters worse instead of better.

Taking that complaint to heart, I am going to explain what I mean when using the cliché “work smarter, not harder.”

Even before the Great Recession, many of us were working harder. Many of us were approaching the limits of endurance. This helps to increase production and generate wealth, but leaves us with precious little time to enjoy it.

And when you are working as hard as you possibly can (the ‘work harder’ part), how do you produce more leads and more sales, especially those working in the retailing and community sectors of the industry?

One answer is take advantage of available technologies (the ‘work smarter’ part).

What is the lifetime value of a customer to your business?

Most businesses don’t think of this when it comes to acquiring and retaining new business, but it is very important when budgeting the cost of acquiring leads.

In a retail business, it is likely that the business will only make one sale per lead. If that one sale earns you, say $5,000 – THAT is the lifetime value of that customer. Keeping that lead happy through the process of converting them to a sale and after can result in referrals, but we are not counting that for our purposes.

What is your conversion rate over time? If you convert 20% of your leads to sales, that would make the value of a lead $1,000 in this scenario.

So the absolute maximum you could spend per lead in this case would be $1,000. Ideally, you want to pay much less than that.

Arrowhead Ranch MHC, Campbellsville, KY – StarHomeUSA.com

In the case of community owners a lot rent of $250 per month, 10% net and 5 year average stay per tenant would equal $1,500 as the lifetime value of that one sale.

How much of a difference in your annual bottom line would one or two extra sales per month make? For most retailers, a huge difference! For community owners, it would mean a plummeting vacancy rate and a return month after month, no?

Now what can you do to make that happen, where you are now and starting with the tools you have right now?

We’ve all heard (probably repeatedly) the fact that 82% of all consumer searches for a new place to live originates on the Internet. That fact alone should convince any retailer or community owner who doesn’t have a website to get one – IMMEDIATELY! (we can help)

If you already have a website, congratulations. You have the first part of the puzzle in place.

But do you have any idea how important it is to have your website appear on page 1 of search engine results pages (SERPs) for your keywords?

For my own business, Orange Cat Productions, we have captured the #1, #1b, #2 and #3 positions
on page 1 for this keyword. What is not showing is that we also have #7.

Even in a small market, it can be the difference between getting those two extra sales per month and not getting them.

How do you get your website onto page 1 of the SERPs?

Either through hard work or working smarter. And the working smarter part involved in attaining a page 1 listing will generate secondary sources of leads and can even compound your success rate. Sensing a theme here?

Moving your website from wherever it is now in your local search rankings to page 1 is a time-consuming and laborious process – but carries with it great rewards. And this is one of those tasks that brings to mind the quote from Red Adair that appears in my signature every time I send an email, “If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur!”

Within three (3) days of launching this completely new website and domain,
Premier Limousine had the #3 position on page 1 for their keyword.

The more competitive the local market, the costlier in time and money gaining a page 1 position will be. But the greater the reward of success.

Making the wrong choice here will cost you money – a LOT of money. But far more important, it will cost you a lot of that irreplaceable resource – time. Time where you could be earning, but are still struggling.

The Twisted Sifter’s blog holds the #1 and #2 positions on page 1, and the website is #4. Rounding that out is a directory service entry holding #3 for a clean sweep of the top four positions on page 1 for this keyword.

For those of you who are inclined to take on this type of project yourself, I will be creating a product to help you ‘work harder’. I’ll be announcing it here in this blog – watch for it.

For those of you who choose the ‘work smarter’ option, help is just a phone call or email away.

Independence of this sort is a choice. Make your choice today.

A few posts ago, I wrote about shaping your keyword selection for your website around your customers perceptions. In The best keyword is not always the most desired term, we discussed that even though the term “mobile home” has not been the official term for a manufactured home, it was still ingrained (by better than 2:1) in customers consciousness and needed to be addressed when optimizing web pages in order to not miss out on those customers.

This time we’re going to enlarge on that a bit and explore just what keywords you’ll want to optimize for.

We’re going to go back to the Google Keyword tool and check a few more keywords related to our industry.

In the comments of my last post, John Thalacker posted the stat that the term “Clayton Homes” pulled 165,000 searches, far and away the most searched brand.

Here are a few more manufacturers (definitely not an inclusive list) and the keyword search stats for them this past month.

If you’re in the process of optimizing, and you are a dealer for a manufacturer, be sure to optimize for the best keywords and for the manufacturer you represent. Make it easy for customers to find you.

Let’s try one more set of keywords – what they call “long-tail” keywords. Long-tail keywords are multi-word phrases that further qualify and narrow the search. They often contain a location. They are commonly used by people looking for a local business that has what they want. They tend to be more qualified than short-keyword searchers because they are looking for a specific product in a specific location.

Optimize for “long-tail keywords” that are pertinent to you and you’ll will get less – but much more highly qualified – leads.

Lets have a look at a few:

Using a blog in your marketing efforts has an added advantage of using “tags.” Tags are very much like the old “keywords” Meta tag that has been deprecated by the search because of abuse.

You can optimize a blog post for a set of keywords much the same as any other web page. But then, using more variations of your keywords as “tags” will cause your blog post to show in results for those keywords.

Last week, I launched a website for a local limousine service here in Danville, KY. We used keyword specific pages and optimized for long-tail (localized keywords).

Within 4 days, we had grabbed the #4 spot in Google results for the keyword “Limousine, Danville KY” an ideal placement for the company. The #3 search result is my blog post announcing the launch of the website, so he is in effect holding the #3 and #4 positions.

Here is the Google SERP for that keyword set:

We’ve had some astounding results in ranking well for multiple keywords using WordPress software installed on the clients webs server. Much better result than we’ve had with WordPress.com or Blogger.

I believe that is because of the plugins that are available to self-hosted blogs. We’ll get into that more in the future.

How do you optimize for more keywords?

The best way I know of is to create more pages for your website, using each of them to optimize for a specific keyword set. As an example, visit my landing page for Danville, KY Online Marketing. You’ll notice in the navigation for this site that there are links to landing pages for each keyword for each city in my area. This page – in addition to serving as a landing page – ranks #1 on Google for its keyword set.

This is even easier to do and more effective using a similar technique in a WordPress self-hosted blog.

Start thinking about how you can better your Search Engine Ranking for specific keywords or get with us for a consultation.

“Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgment, the manner in which information is collected and used.”
- Dr. Carl Sagan

Do you rely on website statistics as a basis for your online marketing decisions? If you do, having accurate information would seem very important to you.

Yet, over the past few years I’ve seen repeated evidence that the statistics many of us rely on may be suspect at best. There has been a lot of chatter on the Internet regarding underreporting of website statistics by Google Analytics.

Over the past year, I have been tracking stats on 15 sites that I maintain for myself and for several clients. All 15 sites have Urchin 5 installed to read the server logs as well as Google Analytics.

What I’ve noticed is a very consistent underreporting of the raw numbers on all 15 sites. The underreporting ranged from 15% to 20% once bots and other non-human visitors were removed from the mix.

In one particular case, a new web page showed 17 unique visitors in it’s first week according to our server logs, which were independently verified as having been 17 individual human visitors. But Google Analytics only showed 1 visit to the page. That was an extreme case, but was 100% verifiable.

That incident just noted occurred in January of this year. It is not an old case where the problem has been corrected since. This sheds doubt on all website counts based solely on Google Analytics.

I’ve read many reports from website owners who claim underreporting rates of Google Analytics of 50% or more. In the past I have always found that number to unacceptably high and also unrealistically deviant from the norm. Now, in the light of the facts noted above, I am not so sure.

What could cause this sort of underreporting? While I can’t say with certainty, I suspect it has something to do with Google Analytics reliance on remote JavaScript as it’s method of gathering data. If a visitor has JavaScript turned off, or a network error interrupts the transmission of data from the browser to Google, no visit is registered for that page when a visit has actually taken place.

That said, I still use Google Analytics for the statistical samplings and ratios, such as pageviews per visit and bounce rate. Why? If the sampling is broad enough, even taking the underreporting into account, that such statistics can be considered accurate within acceptable statistical margins of error.

Alexa stats are another issue. We recently had a website with a bounce rate of under 20% according to both our web server logs and Google Analytics, but reported by Alexa with a 79% bounce rate.

That’s a HUGE difference – what could cause that? Well, the reason is the biggest weakness in Alexa stats and a good reason to doubt their veracity at any level. Alexa relies on users with the Alexa toolbar installed to gather data.

Problem – who is the Alexa user base?

Webmasters, designers, marketers and other “web admin” types are heavy users. But the overwhelming majority of consumers and Internet users don’t even know what Alexa is, let alone have it’s toolbar installed. So Alexa stats are almost exclusively created by the people who use the data, not the people who should be included in the data.

Knowing this, it is clear that smaller, niche websites whose user base actually consists of Alexa toolbar users have a decided advantage in Alexa rankings.

If you are using Alexa data to make marketing decisions, be aware that you are basing those decisions on data mostly collected from sellers like yourself, not from the buyers you are trying to reach.

If there is a bottom line to this, it may be that the webserver’s logs are the most accurate form of website statistics. So internally, we use our Urchin 5 statistics for most purposes, because the method of collection is the most accurate.

So when you are looking at website statistics to make marketing or other decisions, please take the following into consideratione. Whose statistics are being used? How were those statistics gathered? Are those statistics from the website’s own server logs, or from a third-party service that does samplings but can’t possibly have completely accurate information apart from the websites own server logs? “Caveat Emptor” – let the buyer beware.

If you’d like another take on this subject from another source, please check out this link:
Another source for Google Analytics underreporting information.

I was putting this post together for readers of my Local Business Marketing blog at BobStovall.com when I realized how important these stats are for retailers, developers, community owners and anyone in the MH industry who do business on a local level. So here it is. It’s a quick read but carries a small wealth of information.

“Ten years ago, your marketing effectiveness was a function of your wallet. Today, its a function of the width of your brain” – B. Halligan

Recently Microsoft gathered some numbers on Internet usage and here is what they found:

• 86% of searchers start at a major search engine when shopping online.
• Even when consumers plan to purchase offline, they often go online first.
• 42% of retail sales in 2009 were online or “web-influenced”.
• $917 billion in US sales were “web-influenced”.
• 63% of consumers use the internet to find local businesses.
• 44% of local businesses have a web site.
• 50% use search engines first for local business information.
• 24% use the Yellow Pages first.

Which Search Engines are the most important?

• Google: 49.2%
• Yahoo: 23.8%
• MSN/Bing: 9.6%
• AOL: 6.3%
• Ask: 2.6%
• Others: 8.5%

By being properly optimized for and indexed by Google, Yahoo and Bing, you’ve covered 82.6% of all online searches.

How important is it for your local business to be found in a search on one of the top search engines?

The Internet has 1.2 billion users world-wide

Facebook has 350 million user accounts

Twitter has 17 million user accounts

LinkedIn has 35 65 million user accounts

FourSquare has 1 million user accounts

So even the incredibly popular Facebook only accounts for 29% of Internet users, an astonishing number in it’s own right, but it still leaves 71% of Internet users unaccounted for. Would you bar 71% of customers from your business?

Social networking is an important part of marketing online, but it is in addition to, not in place of search engine marketing, whether using Search Engine Optimization or Pay-per-Click advertising.