We’ve worked with many nonprofit organizations over the years. Without fail, we find that nonprofits tend to make the same common mistakes when it comes to search engines:

Mistake #1: Autopilot Pay Per Click Campaigns
You take the Google tutorial, set up a campaign and log in to the Google interface a few weeks (or maybe a month) later to take a look at how much traffic was generated for each keyword you purchased (who knows which keywords actually converted, you don’t have time to figure that out). Would you approach your email campaigns this way? High ROI Pay Per Click campaigns that raise money, build email lists, etc. require tight management and an understanding of multiple nuances in Pay Per Click, such as keyword selection, bid management, the Google grants system and most importantly, tracking and analysis.

What’s the upside of doing it right? RedBoots recently helped SOS Children’s Villages -USA clean up their Pay Per Click campaigns. In the first month, we were able to reduce their total spend by 65%, increase donations by 187% and increase donation value by 65%. Like many of our other nonprofit clients, Pay Per Click Search Marketing is now consistently the highest ROI tactic used by SOS-USA for online fundraising.

(Note: Doing it in-house? The RedBoots Digital team can help you set up, and/or clean up, your Pay Per Click campaigns and learn how to manage everything in-house with higher ROI results.)

Mistake #2: Lack of a Multi-Channel Search Strategy
There is more (much more) to the search engine results page (SERP) than sponsored listings (Pay per Click). In Google for example, you have at a bare minimum two opportunities to appear on every SERP (and more if you do it right).

Why is it important to appear more than once on the same SERP? First, the cost of Pay Per Click is rising dramatically (for .coms and .orgs). A multi channel search strategy that leverages positioning in the organic search space (the “free” or natural listings that appear in the middle of the Google SERP) will help improve the overall ROI of your search engine initiatives. Second, the more frequently your site appears on the SERP, the more opportunity you have for a click-through (much like the “frequency” concept in conventional media buying). Moreover, research shows that multiple exposures in search engines boosts brand related search queries and overall conversions.

Mistake #3: No Social Media Strategy
Your visibility in social media impacts your visibility in search engines, now more than ever in Google, which still claims over half the total searches that take place each day on the Web. Google’s new practice of “Universal Search” means that results from vertical channels such as Google video and Google images, (heavy social search content) now displays in the regular organic results. In fact, do a search on almost any topic and you’ll find a combination of organic listings that may include a You Tube video, images from Flickr – a whole range of content from social media destinations.

Leveraging social media also enables you to dominate the SERP for a keyword search on the name of your organization, and/or or key leadership, which helps with Reputation Management (and in case you think Reputation Management applies only to corporations, go and search the name of your organization on any search engine – you may be surprised, or horrified.)

(Note: Beth Kanter provides some resources on the basics of social media for nonprofits; also see my Social Media Workshop presentation from the Search Engine Strategies conference.)

Mistake #4: Testing
How well would your email program do without testing? You probably test a wide range of elements for email. You must do the same with search. A visitor who comes in from a paid listing on a general charity or donation related keyword will be looking for something different than a visitor who comes in from an organic result on a long tail keyword that describes your issues, campaigns, etc. Each of those visitors will require different content and a unique conversion funnel on your Web site. If you test what works for site visitors based on how they found you in the search engines, you will improve the ROI of your search initiatives dramatically.

Mistake #5: Tracking
Tracking at the keyword level is imperative. You can’t run cost-effective search programs without it. Unfortunately, effective tracking is complicated and fraught with problems. At RedBoots, we find that over 90% of our new, nonprofit clients have either insufficient analytics systems or have not set those systems up properly.

So, what do you do? Invest. Spend the money on revamping your Analytics. In fact, take it out of the marketing budget if you have to. If you aren’t tracking properly, you are flying blind and you will lose more money by continuing to spend marketing dollars without the ability to assess your investment than you will if you simply bite the bullet and get the software (and the consulting hours you will need to make it work properly for your organization).

Nate Linnell is our Analytics Guru at Redboots; he is crafting some interesting and informative posts on this subject, including this post on which Web Analytics metrics should be tracked for content sites. For more detailed information on this topic, see my Nonprofits and Search presentation from the last Search Engine Strategies conference in New York.

If you’re an advocacy group that is looking to get attention for your cause on the web, then Universal Search gives you a great opening that you can take advantage of, if you’re fast enough! Universal Search is still new enough (having been launched in early June of this year) that most people are unaware of it, and the fact that it’s still in roll-out mode increases the chance that you’re ahead of the game.

Let’s examine how PETA is taking advantage of Universal Search: Their cause is well known, they are an animal rights organization that targets companies that they believe don’t treat animals as they should. An example of a company that’s raised their ire over recent years would be KFC, with PETA disapproving their treatment of chickens. PETA has done a good job of targeting the organic results, with 2 of the top 10 results being sites that they own. With Universal Search, other media results will eventually start to display for KFC, which may push the PETA organic results off the first page. This is why PETA has already begun work on those other media that may display on the first page. If you go to the video search and search on KFC, you’ll see that 3 of the top 4 videos are anti-KFC, with the 2nd and 4th being PETA videos.

This is a serious reputation management issue for KFC, but it’s exactly what PETA wants. By being proactive, they’re ensuring that their message is going to remain visible for KFC searchers.

What about an issue, rather than a company? Well, it’s the same concept. If you look at the example of “Global Warming”, you can see two sets of advocacy groups, those who accept that global warming exists, and those that deny it. Looking at the SERP for Global Warming, you can see that Universal Search has already made it here. Obviously those who accept Gobal Warming are currently ‘winning’ the image search results.

If you perform a video search, you’ll notice that the second video that displays in the SERP is from a denial advocacy group. As those videos are more closely incorporate within the SERPs, you may see that video moving up the rankings until that advocacy group has as loud a voice as those in the image search.

Clearly, the introduction of Universal Search has opened up a great opportunity for advocacy groups to get their message out, and unless the targets of their ire respond in like, by pro-actively creating multiple levels of optimized content, they will find that they have to fight it reactively or their voice in the SERPs may be drowned out and lost.

Imagine that you’ve put a lot of effort into landing a new customer, only to have them decide at the last minute not to go with you. You can’t understand why. Your prices were competitive, you provided some great references, and your products / services match your competition, in fact they’re better than the competition. So what happened to change their mind? You call them up and ask, to see if there’s a way to salvage the deal. Your contact tells you “quite frankly that they did a Google search on your company, and didn’t like what they saw…”.

Nervously you go to Google and type in your company name, and there it is… a site dedicated to bringing down your company written by an irate former customer, or maybe a disgruntled former employee, or maybe by some person who, for one reason or another, just doesn’t like the way you run your business. You could see a listing from the state sexual offender list showing up for your company name (if you have an employee that’s on it) it could be a critical news item, or just a blog or forum posting where someone talks down about your organization, products / services, or someone that works for you.

Now that you see this, what can you do? If the content is patently false, you can take legal measures to have it removed, but if it’s subjective, then you’ve got fewer options. You can ask the site owner to remove the questionable content, which they may do if it’s something along the lines of an anonymous comment, or one that they don’t feel comfortable supporting. If you feel that the source and issue are credible, then you can engage the commenter/site owner in discussion, addressing the issues (of course, without being combative, as that will not help the issue). In fact, this is probably one of the best ways of heading off criticisms, if you can identify the real issues up front, and address them, then your customer service image can be heartily increased.

But, what if the listing on the results page is one that you have no ability to change, how can you remove it? Well, you can’t. However you can de-optimize it. This is done by optimizing other listings to appear above the rogue listing. If you can ‘sweep it under the rug’, by moving it down from 3rd to 23rd, then less people are going to see it. This can be a challenge if the offending listing comes from a popular blog, or has ‘gone viral’, but since it’s your only option, you’re going to have to buckle down and work at it. Of course, it’s much better to be proactive than reactive, so work on getting those listings, videos, images, podcasts, blogs, etc optimized now, and the naysayers will have a much harder time breaking into your search space in the first place.

Last week I read yet another excellent post by Avinash Kaushik over at Occam’s Razor on the metrics that should be tracked for content sites. It gave some excellent metrics to get started with, but there are a few more additional metrics that I believe can increase your insight into your content site.

The analysis work can be broken down into three main categories that all play into each other. They are the:

1. Analysis of the visitors
2. Analysis of the content
3. Analysis of the conversions (yes you can have conversions on content sites).

This post will address the first of these categories, and I’ll address the others in later posts.

Visitors:

This was the main area that Avinash focused on and so I’m not going to repeat his points, but I will add a couple of metrics that I believe are just as important. The four excellent metrics that he mentioned were:

• Visitor Loyalty: How many times do visitors visit the site during the reporting period?
• Recency: How long has it been since a visitor last visited the site
• Length of Visit: How long does a visitor session last?
• Depth of Visit: How many page views per visit?

In addition, you should also track the quality of your unique visitors by determining if they help expand the base of your returning visitors. As with any site, you always want to strive to attract a wider range of your target audience who will then hopefully turn into part of your loyal base of visitors. To do this you use basic metrics, but it’s how you use them that will shed light on the quality of your unique visitors. The metrics are:

• Total Visits
• Unique Visitors
• Returning Visitors
• New Visitors

Trending the ratio of new visitors vs. returning visitors will help you see over time the balance that your site has. The ratio will fluctuate, especially if you’re actively marketing your content one month and not so much the next. It is important, however, to look at this trend so that you’ll be able to dig into the data, if necessary, to find any unexplained fluctuations.

The next piece of the puzzle is to figure out the quality of your unique visitors. While it can be helpful to track the trends for each of the metrics above, it’s important to look deeper to figure out the effects that an increase or decrease in total visits and/or unique visitors has on your returning visitors. In order to do this, you should look at the trends for the percentage increase or decrease each has from the previous reporting period.

Two of the possible scenarios that you could potentially see are:

• If unique visitors are steadily increasing by 10% each period and total visits are up about the same percentage, it may appear that everything is going great. Looking at the returning visitors may, however, change that perception. If the returning visitors are flat then it means that the unique visitors who are coming to your site aren’t the audience you should be targeting.
• If your total visits are down 10% you’re probably not going to be running out to the bar for a celebration drink, but there could be a silver lining. If during that same period your returning visitors jumped 10% you at least know that some of the work you’ve done in previous months to attract unique visitors to your site has paid off.

Many people look at short term solutions to boost traffic, but to be successful in the long term you need to build a strong loyal base. Assuming you’ve got great content, the next step should be to constantly test various marketing initiatives and track each to see which methods succeed at delivering the highest number of new loyal visitors at the lowest cost. Getting traffic isn’t generally that hard part, but getting quality traffic can be if you don’t track and test properly.

The following post includes takeaways from the WOM: Learn It, Do It Series.

Everyone is a fan of something. There are fans of your products and services, and of the experience you are providing. With word of mouth marketing, we can give people a reason to talk, and make it easier for the conversation to take place. Consumers already have a natural desire to share their experience with both marketers and other consumers.

Word of mouth marketing is growing conversations organically and amplifying other conversations. The goal is not to manipulate or control, but to listen, understand, and engage both fans and detractors. You can take advantage of the polarity between your fans and your detractors because each has different desires and ideas on how you might improve. If you help consumers tell a story or create an experience for them, they are capable of spreading your idea virally to their friends, family, and colleagues.

By making your marketing interesting, relevant, and authentic, you can invite people to sample your products, sample the experience, and create influencers out of regular people. Alternatively, influencers in your target demographic are already looking to be engaged and might already be your consumers. By finding people in your target demographic, you can discover what got them interested and how they feel about you and the experience you have provided.

When it comes to moving forward with your word of mouth campaign, it isn’t necessarily the case that measurement is difficult, simply that it may not be instantaneous and immediately add to bottom line sales. Through reach and reaction, insights, volume and sentiment of conversations, co-innovation with consumers, and yes, even sales, there is a wealth of both qualitative and quantitative data that is available and can be gathered.

For more on word of mouth marketing, I recommend Nan’s post on Authentic Engagement in a Web 2.0 World.

The CEO blog has been around for a while now, and has been used effectively by some, and poorly by others. So what makes it the right move for your company?

1. Does your CEO have the time to devote to writing the blog, or is the plan to farm the writing out to interns and pretend it’s written by the CEO? If the CEO doesn’t have the time to commit to writing regularly, then there’ s no real sense in having them author a blog, as they’ll have a very hard time building up an audience, let alone retaining it. As for having ghost writers, if that information ever were to come out (as information has a tendency to do), then the audience will quite rightly feel cheated, and the backlash will most likely not be pretty. Note: regurgitated press releases are not content.
2. Can the CEO write well enough to engage the target audience? If they’re writing for technical audiences, do they have a full grasp on the issues that they need to talk about? If they’re writing for a more relaxed crowd, can they write with a sense of humor, putting across a personality for the blog?
3. Does the CEO have enough content to appeal to the target audience? Is the CEO close enough to the workings of the company to be able to first recognize topics of interest, and secondly be able to write about said topics effectively?
4. If there’s an urgent issue that comes up related to the company that needs to be addressed, can they make the time to blog about it, and make themselves a source of information for the outside world? Or, are they going to clam up and let the ‘regular channels’ deal with the issue?
5. Can they be candid about issues / controversial topics that face the company / industry, or are they going to gloss over issues, and address only fluff topics? Again, if the CEO doesn’t address issues that people are concerned about, then the blog will not have the level of credibility that it could have. Also, used effectively, the CEO blog could serve as a very good reputation management tool.
6. Does your CEO have the ability to self-censor, responding appropriately to criticism, and also knowing when not to respond to unreasonable comments? The last thing a corporate blog needs is a CEO that either ignores comments, or gets into a public ‘flame war’ on a company sponsored site.

So when should your CEO blog? When they give the right answers to the above questions.

I’ve been beating the drum about reputation management and social media (mostly at Search Engine Strategies conferences) for a while now, so I’m glad to see the new Citizen Marketers book getting some attention and spawning another round of conversations about authentic engagement, especially in the nonprofit world.

Here’s the problem: Most organizations (.coms and .orgs) still aren’t fully getting what authentic engagement means in a Web 2.0 world. They may be stepping up efforts to avoid a “top-down”, “one to many” tone of voice in their emails (email is still a one to many tactic by the way); they might be sharing some of the bad stuff in an attempt to be more open (the now defunct Ford Bold Moves Blog); they may be using tools that enable some level of engagement (the McDonald’s CSR Blog, with, gasp, moderated comments). They might even be revamping their customer service departments to be more, well, customer-centric (although being “responsive” without truly fixing the problem is hardly a good relationship builder).

All of which is fine (assuming the attempts are sincere). Changing the way we communicate, being nice to customers, listening, etc. is necessary – it just isn’t sufficient. In a Web 2.0 world, authentic engagement requires ceding some control and accepting, even welcoming, true participation in the co-creation of your brand.

But (the little voice is now saying) I can’t let people define my brand…I’ll lose control, sales will plummet, etc.

Here is the sad fact: You aren’t in control NOW. Google is the home page of your Web site because search engines are the window into the online conversation that is defining and redefining your brand everyday (with or without your permission). Drowning out the conversation or making it invisible is an option, but not always the best one, especially if you have multiple detractors. Even the best Enterprise Generated Media strategy (which is a good and necessary thing, don’t get me wrong) will not be able to generate as much fresh content as an angry Blog Swarm (and even if you could keep up, consumers trust each other’s content far more than they trust marketers’.)

The best option is to proactively establish a real relationship (preferably long before a big problem arises) with your customers/supporters and facilitate their participation in the co-creation of your brand. If the relationship you’ve created is successful, you’ll get some positive content out of it – and even if it isn’t all positive (which it couldn’t be if the relationship is authentic), you’ll learn what is wrong and fix it sooner than you would have otherwise (which solidifies and strengthens the relationship and maybe gets you a brand evangelist or two in the process). Yes, there will always be some negative CGM floating around out there about your brand no matter what you do, but it will be easier to tip the balance toward the positive if you engage with your customers as partners.
More thoughts on what some authentic engagement initiatives look like later this week…

I have been building websites for over 10 years. In that time, I’ve created a slew of ugly designs. I’ve also used un-search engine friendly ways and means when I didn’t know better, like intro or splash pages, poorly generated/coded image maps, Flash, and content management systems that generate all sorts of ampersands and equal signs (whoops, still doing that), amongst other things. But if there’s one thing that happens to all of the sites I build, it’s that they receive traffic.

Now, I could tell you that my friends and family all visited my sites and be done with the story, right? Truth of the matter is, I never told my friends or family about many of these sites, and didn’t link them from any main personal site or profile. So what’s the secret I used to reach thousands and thousands of web surfers? Links to my site.

When I build websites off client hours, I build resources. People seek advice online in all forms, so writing content that helps solve a problem or fill a gap online has never failed in gaining links to my content. A combination of on-page SEO and off-page SEO is all it took, every single time, with an emphasis on off-page SEO.

If you had to boil down your website’s success to one thing, what would it be? Let me know in the comments.

Challenge

Take a rapidly growing online university that was looking to further leverage paid search, and optimize their PPC campaigns to deliver the maximum number of qualified leads at the lowest price all while staying within a fixed budget. 

At the start of the project the cost per lead was much higher then desired and their initial set of keywords did not capture the full spectrum of keyword opportunities.  Also, at that time, the online university space was becoming increasingly more competitive which was resulting in an increase in keyword costs.  Evaluating these different factors showed that a new bidding strategy would be necessary in order to build robust PPC accounts that delivered results in order to exceed the clients’ expectations     

Solution

Results

As dictated by the client’s budget, the average monthly cost remained steady over the next year.  During this time there were major shifts for all the success metrics used.

Total Leads: Increased 108%
Applications: Increased 134%
Requests for Information: Increased 88%

Total Cost per Lead: Decreased 50%
Cost per Application: Decreased 56%
Cost per Request for Information: Decreased 45%

At the start of the year, PPC had been their third leading source of new leads, after the work detailed above had been completed, it had become their number one source of new leads.

Google and Yahoo both offer tools for webmasters to ascertain the current status of their site in the engines. In Google, if you want to know the number of pages indexed you run a “site:” command, and if you want to know the number of incoming links you run a “link:” command. In Yahoo, running the “site:” command provides you with both numbers. Seems simple enough, right? So why is there a difference when you type “site:yoursite.com” and “site:www.yoursite.com”? It’s because the engines see them both as different domains. They’re both technically right, so what can you do about it?
The answer is canonicalization. Normalizing your domains. You can do this by using settings on your server to have your site return the www version when the non-www version is requested (or vice versa). Google also gives you the ability to specify the correct form through their Google Webmaster Tools interface, and whichever form they crawl will be converted to the form you specify.

Once you normalize your data into the canonical form, you’ll make your reporting tasks a heck of a lot easier, which will enable you to more easily track the performance of your site. For more information on canonicalization check out a post from Google’s Matt Cutts.