Taking web marketing to the streets of Stroud

Here in Stroud we dig the blues, our farmer’s dig our award-winning market and now we’re digging the canal - it’s finally being restored and that’s got Stroud’s shopkeepers worried. The inevitable traffic disruption could send shoppers elsewhere.

To help promote Stroud’s shops, on 1 June we launched a new website for Stroud’s traders www.shopinstroud.com on our new Content Management System (CMS). Within 2 weeks the site was on page 1 of Google for ’stroud shops’ which says something about how ‘Google friendly’ the CMS is. Each shop has a Google map, a description, picture, opening times and contact details. We’ll be adding a shopkeeper area so shopkeepers can edit their details. There’s a newsletter subscription module and links to enable visitors to promote the site on Facebook and Twitter.

Stroud, sleepy? Get outta here!

I tendered for a contract via the Competefor site earlier and the question of risks and challenges of search engine optimisation and search engine marketing arose. The buyer also wants to pay by performance in terms of traffic generated - so here’s how we responded.

Dealing first with the challenges and risks of an SEO contract.

Typically there’s a substantial gap between where the client’s site ranks now in Google etc and where they want to be. Bridging that gap can involve challenges such as:

- restructuring the site’s navigation architecture
- cleaning up untidy code (a significant part of SEO is about enabling Google to index content quickly and accurately)
- taking on well established competition (analysing why their sites are ranked higher is relatively simple but overtaking them involves a well structured plan and rigorous execution
- working with IT people who may, understandably, be suspicious of external techs and protective of their own work
- avoiding triggering Google’s spam filters by doing too much too quickly to get instant results.

Working on the basis of pay by traffic performance has one serious flaw - the SEO company can’t control the total volume of searches in any given market. Traffic volumes vary according to factors such as season, topicality and the economy. The SEO company can build its client’s share of that market but it can’t dictate the size of the market.

Moving onto SEM or paid search (pay-per-click advertising or PPC), the main risks are associated with the cost of clicks and how to keep them low. This is a function of several things including bidding strategy, well written ads that attract clicks, landing page content (Google has an algorithm that assesses your “Quality Score” - a figure driven by click through rates, click backs from landing pages and so on) and testing and measuring different tactics such as time of day for ads to appear etc.

PPC is simple in principle but increasingly complex in practice. There are qualifications now for Google Adwords practitioners so unless the agency handling your account has accredited people, start asking some serious questions.

Email marketing can be highly effective. Provided you have a good quality mailing list, an interesting offer and a powerful call-to-action, you should be able to achieve profitable rates of conversion.

But what if Microsoft, Google et al decide that you’re a spammer and your mails don’t reach your subscribers?

Apparently there are over 4,000 words that the junk filters regard as indicators of spam. Naturally, the email service providers don’t publish these but Microsoft gives us some clues. You might be suprised at just how innocuous some of them are. For example:

How many legitimate emails might contain ‘removal instructions’ in their body text? Surely that’s a reasonable indicator of compliance with the requirement to offer an ‘unsubscribe’ option?

Put ‘advertisement’ in your subject and you could be junked too. Again, what if you’re an advertising agency seeking approval for some ‘advertisement copy’?

Send an email from your Sales department and put ’sales@xyzdomain.co.uk’and you’re flagging spam. Other ‘From’ names that Microsoft regards as suspicious include ‘mail’, ’success’ and ‘hello’.

Direct marketers often use terms such as ‘money back, cards accepted, free, guarantee, order now, order today and special promotion’ because they’re proven to lift response. Granted, some direct marketers are spammers but not all.

So how do you create effective emails without getting dumped in Junk?

1. Avoid the spam cliches.
2. Get your subscribers to ‘white-list’ you.
3. Create unique and original headlines and content.
4. Monitor your ‘open’ rates and watch out for any unusual drops. Check the emails that cause the drops and look for what be inferred as spam.

You can see some of Microsoft’s junk keywords here