John Cashman's blog

One of the common misconceptions people have of Google is that when they use Google, they are searching the web. They aren’t searching the web at all. They are searching Google’s index of the web. One of the best ways to think about this is to think of how a library was once organized. Back in the day, OK ten years ago, when you went to find a book you went to the card catalog to find a book on a particular subject. If the card within the card catalog did not exist, you couldn’t find the book in the library.

Google works in a similar manner. Every hour of every day, Google is clicking on links to see where they go. They start on major websites like Wikipedia, the New York Times and their spiders go through the entire website and click on links that take them to other websites, where they repeat the process and go onto more and more until they reach presumably every website that has a link to other websites. As the spiders crawl over the web, they send information back to Google about what the website is about by looking at various keywords on the site. That information is then stored in Google’s index. When people search Google, the Google algorithm will rank the best results from its index in the order of 1 – infinity.

Therefore, in order to have websites rank within Google, the first step is to make sure your site is within the Google index. No matter the work you do to make sure the the site is on the right content management system or has the right keywords in place, if you don’t have those pages within the index, they will not show up in Google search results.

This can be accomplished in two ways.

1. You can get a number of links to your website, where eventually the Google spider will come to your website and crawl it and add it to their index. The problem with this methodology is if certain pages aren’t linked to the main page, Google may not crawl them or index them.
2. You can provide Google with a site map and ask them to crawl the site and submit it their index. This is accomplished in Google webmaster tools and is the preferred way to get websites into the index. Further as the website is updated, the sitemap is updated and tells Google there is a change that needs to be indexed again.

For example, we helped launch a site on 4/25. The site is based on the WordPress CMS, which is very search engine friendly and the yoast plugin which allows us to generate and send a site map to Google. On 4/26, we added the site map from the WordPress to Google via Webmaster tools and requested Google to recrawl and reindex the site as we had made a major site change. The previous version of the site only had 2 pages indexed, once we requested Google to crawl the site we increased the amount of indexed pages to 741.

This is really one of the first steps in SEO. While the index status has been greatly improved, the actual ranks of each individual page needs to be improved as well. This will happen as the keywords are processed by Google, and links are made to the site.

Some great stats on why social media and small business are growing so well together.

Source: How Small Businesses Are Using Social Media [INFOGRAPHIC]

We are proud to release our latest free ebook on reputation management. In this book, you will learn why an online reputation for brands and CEOs can make or break a company. You will also learn the ways we monitor reputations here at Digital Firefly and how we fix a reputation that may have some negative news. Feel free to download our latest ebook and share it with your colleagues.

Whether you are a small business owner or a high profile CEO, reputation management is becoming increasingly important as people use Google and review sites like Yelp and Angie’s List to research brands and products.

Consider the following statistics about Reputation management:

• 80% of adults are “very” or “somewhat” likely to consider buying products recommended by real world friends
and family. (source: Pollara)
• 78% of executive recruiters routinely use search engines to learn more about candidates, and 35% have eliminated candidates based on the information they found online (ExecuNet)
• 87% believe the CEO’s reputation is an important part of a company’s reputation. (Hill & Knowlton)
• 90% of consumers trust recommendations from others. (Forrester)
• Consumers traffic to the top 10 review sites grew on average 158% last year (Compete.com)
• 97% of people who made a purchase based on an online fair review found the review to be accurate (Comscore/The KelseyGroup, Oct. 2007)
• 92% of people have more confidence in information found online than from a salesclerk or other source
(Wall Street Journal, Jan 2009)
• 61% of people rely on user reviews for product information or research before a buying decision is made.
(Razorfish, 2008)
• 34% of people have turned to social media to air their feelings about a company. 26% to express dissatisfaction, 23% to share companies or products they like. (Harris Poll, April 2010)
• 75% of people don’t believe that companies tell the truth in advertisements (Yankelovich)
• 100% of those reading this post have either a personal or corporate reputation to protect (Marketing Pilgrim)

What the stats tell us is that consumers and business are increasingly using the Internet to research individuals and business before they even consider hiring people or purchasing products and services.

For businesses this may mean that someone wrote a negative review about you and it went unanswered. For a high profile person (e.g., politicians, celebrities), it may mean that something they did in the past is preventing them from succeeding in the future. Regardless, managing one’s reputation online and ensuring the reviews and news is accurate is being increasing important to both businesses and high profile individuals.

Earlier this week, we worked with a company to measure their Google AdWords and SEO return on investment (ROI) by calculating the amount of leads they are able to generate in relation to the amount of money they spent on AdWords and SEO. One of the easiest ways to do this is to use unique thank you pages that people see after filling out a web form.

The first thing you will need to do is set up a web form on your website. This information can be passed along to a CRM system or it can be housed within the website. Some folks will just list an email address or phone number on the Contact Us page, but by not having a form to fill out, it’s impossible to track whether or not a lead has converted and how they got there. Once you have a form set up, you will need to set the form setting to redirect to a page you can measure. This is typically a thank you page that says something like “Thanks for contacting us, we will get back to you in 24 hours.” This page will allow you to track the number of leads you generate and how they are coming in so you can measure your marketing effectiveness.

To measure Google AdWords conversions, you can create a conversion event by doing the following:

1. Log on to Google AdWords.
2. Go to Tools an Analysis and select Conversions.
3. Click on the + Conversion button and name your conversion.
4. The next page will ask you if you want to add Google Site Stats notification or not, which is a small widget that would appear at the bottom of your Thank You page. It’s up to you if you want to tell your prospects if they are being tracked.
5. The last step is to generate code. This will be code you embed within your thank you page.

Once you have the code embedded it will take about 24 hours to verify. Having the code on your site will allow you to not only track your ROI on Google AdWords, but also tell AdWords to serve the ads that convert at a higher percentage rate.

For SEO measurement of leads, the best thing to use is Google Analytics Goals. You can set a goal by telling Google what page you want people to end up on. This could be a receipt page for a product or a thank you page for submitting your email address. You can create a custom goal by doing the below:

1. Log on to Google Analytics
2. Click on the core domain where you will measure conversion
3. Click on Goals
4. Click on + Goal
5. Give the Goal a specific name like “Contact Us Form Filled Out”
6. Choose URL Destination
7. For Goal URL – choose the address right after your domain so if it’s http://dfm.com/thank-you, put /thank-you
8. Choose Head Match for Match Type

Once you get this goal situated, give it a quick test to see if Google Analytics is tracking the goal. Sometimes, Google needs to have the “Match Type” configuration changed to record the right URL.

Now that you have the conversions and goals set up, you can start to measure whether or not either AdWords or an SEO company is bringing in positive ROI. This can be done in two ways.

The preferred method is to measure how many dollars you are getting from the conversions either by knowing the total sales generated or by being able to track which leads converted into real sales. To calculate the return on investment you would simply divide Total Money Earned from AdWords Leads by Total Money Spent on AdWords. Any ROI less than one means you aren’t recouping your investment in AdWords. The same can be said for an SEO company. You would divide the total money earned from SEO by the total money spent on SEO. If your ROI is less than one, you may have an SEO company that isn’t pulling their weight or not enough search traffic to justify having an SEO company. Regardless, having the proper pages set up will let you measure what’s working and what’s not to maximize your marketing spend.