You don’t have to search hard to find someone who’s obsessed with whether their company’s search engine rankings has moved from position #3, down to #10, and back up to #6. People with this obsession come from big and small companies alike. Even the wisest of business leaders can fall victim.

Sadly, businesses people often worry about their natural search rankings when, the truth is, in most practical cases, they have little if any control over the day-to-day results. (Worrying or even concerning yourself about rankings would be like watching the stock market several times a day when you are a layman, long-term investor, trying to build overall financial health.)

I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t get concerned (or even panic-stricken) if you were on the first page for some phrase and suddenly were nowhere to be found. I am saying you should focus your time and energy on things you have some control over, such as the conversion rate of your website and monetizing your search traffic as a whole, be it leads, subscriptions, or transactions.

Breaking Free From Ranking Obsession Syndrome

Here is a list of some items to put your efforts toward in place of obsessing over your search engine ranking:

• Make sure you’ve optimized your website as best you can. This means clean, search-friendly code, and well-written content that is tightly themed around the phrases you wish to rank highly for. There are likely past recommendations that were given to you, or that you came across that haven’t yet been implemented. Start there.
• Make sure you are pursuing phrases that people actually search for. What good is a #1 ranking if people don’t ever search for it? Equally as important, don’t just pick those phrases that have the highest search volume on some keyword report. Rather, add modifiers that really match your prospects’ needs for your services.
• Consistently look for creative and efficient ways to get other websites that are relevant to yours linking to your website. Write articles for other websites. Regularly send out optimized press releases. Get out there on other blogs and post comments. Put something so compelling on your website that other people will want to link to it as a service to their visitors.
• Is the search traffic you are getting currently converting into leads, subscribers, or revenue? At what rate? It can always be better. Doubling your conversion rate will produce a dramatically better return on investment than time and money spent trying to improve your rankings (but you should continually work at both). As an added bonus, that gain in conversion is yours to keep, enjoy, and build upon.

A Healthier Outlook on Your Search Engine Marketing

I don’t want you to think search engine rankings aren’t important and valuable—of course they are! But rankings are just one indicator of the overall health of your search engine marketing.

If you don’t like what you are seeing one morning when googling yourself for a certain phrase, change your perspective. Look at the overall month-to-month contribution of all of your search traffic in terms of leads, opportunities, and return on investment. And keep in your heart one of the world’s most famous prayers:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
the courage to change the things I can;
and the wisdom to know the difference.

While I know of no such mileage-doubling opportunity, I am aware of a sales-doubling opportunity that many executives seem comfortable to ignore.
If your website generates sales leads today, it’s entirely possible that, with a few modifications, you could enjoy a 2X (or even 5X) increase in leads.

The common term for this is “Conversion Rate”. We know mileage rate means that for every gallon of gas we burn we can expect to travel a fixed number of miles. Conversion Rate means that for each thousand visitors that come to our website we can expect to generate a fixed number of sales leads.

Attacking your conversion rate can have huge upside for you. In this case, huge might only be 1%, and there are few times in business where you can get truly excited about 1% of anything. Here’s where the excitement comes from…
If your website generates 10 leads for every thousand visitors, you would have a 1% Conversion Rate. By moving from a 1% to a 2% Conversion Rate, you double your sales leads. The net change is only 1 percentage point, but doubling your sales leads is pretty exciting!

Another nice thing about Conversion Rate is you can treat it like a project instead of a long-term campaign. Yes, you will have to dedicate some resources to this project, resources you hadn’t budget before you started reading this article. Yet you only have to pay for the improvement one time. After you’ve modified your website to improve your Conversion Rate, the leads keep rolling in at the higher rate with no more energy or investment on your part. And your investment is far less than what you would spend on long-term lead generation campaigns.

Most of my clients get hooked on the Conversion Rate Game. After they see how easy it is to boost Conversion Rate, we continue to test changes and make tweaks to drive the Conversion Rate even higher.

It’s best if you tackle Conversion Rate before your competitors choose not to ignore it any longer. Let’s imagine you are in the delivery business, and your competitors UPS and FedEx figured out how to double the mileage rates for their trucks. Your business would get really scary, and your future might be uncertain.

Instead, you have a chance to put fear into the hearts of your competition. By choosing to devote some time and attention to your Conversion Rate now, you’ll be among the few who actually do something positive about it. It doesn’t matter whether your competitors get it or not; the reality is you’ll be spending less time and money at the lead generation “pump”, and that will give you a competitive advantage. You’ll get business that might otherwise power your competition.

Attack your conversion rate now, and you’ll see more plentiful leads from your website, lower cost of sales, and a better return on all of lead generation investments. Even when times are tough, you can make your business go farther and faster when you spend some time under the hood and upgrade your Conversion Rate.

Q. What is the relationship between these two people?
Q. What’s this guy thinking right now?

Your opinion is most appreciated!

Please retweet this research question if you’d be so kind.

Got any ‘must adds’ to my collection?

The Last Lecture

Team Hoyt

Jason McElwain

While no doubt there are many examples of truly great mission statements, for the most part I think they get trivialized or forgotten altogether by employees and largely ignored by their customers and prospects.  My hunch is this is due, in large part, to the fact that most mission statements are too long,  too cliche and too ‘formal’.

What if your company was forced to declare a one word mission statement.  This word would have to be an action (verb).  Something that said “Billy, I want you to take this business, go out into the world and  ______.  Such a mission statement would certainly be easier to remember.  It could even be written (or symbolized) on every surface of your company to help remind people.  It could even make for a nice tattoo.

With this blog post I am kicking off a collaborative project to research and publish the most powerful and effective one word mission statements.  I’d like to challenge well established, successful, and well known businesses to go through the effort of selecting their one word mission.

So here’s the exercise:

Q1. What is your company’s mission in one word?

Q2. Why did you choose that word?

Q3. What do you do each day as a company to try and complete your mission?

Most companies’ mission statements are based on the answers to the last two questions.  I want to see what happens if the company is forced to start with the first question.

The most intriguing part of a one word mission statement is that it can become a powerful, galvanizing way to bring all of your people together (at least in understanding) of what you expect and where you’re headed as a company.  And being a one word statement, it better be one pretty amazing word.  Such a word can be emphasized several times each day, even meditated upon.  In times of uncertainty or indecision, it can be easily referenced.

I’m planting a mustard seed here, and seeing what grows.

My one word mission statement is……AGAPE

What’s yours?  If you know anyone really famous in the business/leadership community pass this along and ask them too.

SoulyBusiness 20 from Todd Miechiels on Vimeo.

As I’m helping them come up with ad copy and mock up some landing pages, I’m feeling pretty confident that we’ll have a good shot of catching a few good sales opportunities for the buck with some pretty decent bait they’ve come up with.

About the time we’re ready to launch, my client sent over the final landing page.  It’s pretty much what we’d discussed except, wait….no…..say it ain’t so joe…….. yes:

the dreaded Captcha form.

Why would any company pay $20 or more a click in hopes of catching Mr. Big, or Mrs. Procurement Consultant, or Ms. Analytst, only to say “Not only are all fields required, but we hate you so much and we don’t want to be burdened by any possible spam submissions, that we’re going to make you try and figure out what the heck these two words are so you can type them in. ”

Love Thy Prospective Customer As Thyself.

Lessons Learned:

1) In today’s marketplace assuming your case study, webinar, whitepaper, etc is so good that people should register for it is a dangerous leap to begin with.  There’s way too much readily available information for the consumer to access.  Let’s not push it with this self-serving technology (who it’s serving I’m not quite sure but it sure isn’t the customer and it’s sure not anyone looking to capture leads).

2) Don’t let IT or your web developers scope your landing pages (or your website for that matter)!  Marketing and sales should always be in the process asking “is this how I’d want to be treated if I were in the visitor’s shoes”.

I’m done ranting, anyone got any takes on this?

As an online lead generation specialist who works with B2B professional services firms, I see firsthand how pay-per-click search advertising is getting more and more expensive.  This fact, combined with the “salesy” perception that can go along with paid search ads in a prospect’s mind, means that I’m having all of my clients take a more serious look at social marketing.  And why not!  After all, if the big dogs are still in the doghouse, the crafty, intelligent client can establish online ties and really get to know their prospects well through corporate blogs, comments on other blogs, public reviews, and social networking sites (like Twitter and Delicious).  Many of my clients, who market to B2B decision makers, are very media and technologically-savvy, especially in their personal life, but they aren’t quite sure how to proceed with a smart, fluid social media presence.

I have two core pieces of advice that I’m in the process of executing myself for my own business development efforts- “Just do it” (thanks, Nike) and “Paralysis by analysis is baaaaad” (thanks, me).  Please let me know your thoughts below!

The idea for The Happy Face Report came to me in the form of a tirade that a prospect of mine was having one day.  “I’m so sick of reams of meaningless data that I have to sift through.” she said.  “I wish I could have a one page report that simply had a big smiley face or a frowning face on it.  And if it’s a frowning face, then have recommendations telling me what you are going to do to “turn that frown upside down”.

Brilliant, I thought!

Dashboards were created, and are still presumably used, to solve the problem of data overload.  But let’s be honest, all too often dashboards grown into beasts so large and confusing that we kind of end up back at square one.

When can you use The Happy Face Report?  When your client is entrusting you with the overall outcome of a clearly defined initiative.  They trust you with the details.  So who is it serving to proactively share anything beyond the happy or frowning face unless specifically requested?  No one, assuming both you and the client have better things to do with your time.

Why The Happy Face Report?

• The Happy Face Report requires, encourages, and breeds trust and accountability between all parties.
• The Happy Face Report forces us to focus on what really matters. (Hint: It’s not spinning a fancy narrative, or formatting a few pretty spreadsheets).  If it’s not clear what really matters, you should go must go back to square one and define it.
• The Happy Face Report promotes more effective leadership.
• The Happy Face Report saves massive amounts of time, paper, and lost productivity.
• The Happy Face Report eliminates long, drawn out, and often ineffective conference calls to “walk us through the report”.
• The Happy Face Report causes us to think carefully about whom we really want to do business with.  First, define Happy for yourself and then think to yourself, “Can I make this prospective client Happy?”.

In a perfect world there would be no reports, just self-evident results.   But if part of your business requires you to produce reports, or if you are a client and you insist on having them, let’s start a movement that takes us away from charts, tables, and verbose narratives and toward a world full of happy faces. : )