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Editor's Notes

1. Instead of discussing hypotheticals or theories in how to get branding and revenue wins, I want to let you in on actual client struggles, some missteps & shortsightedness, I want to tell a few stories with examples. Instead of telling you a story about how great or how cool something was, I want to share a different story.
2. We worked hard at getting a NY company ranked really well for some high visibility keywords. They started ranking nowhere and ended up in the top four positions for their main converting words. Sweet. We have our one organic result. But it’s local, so we also needed to move that local listing. After forming a relationship with NYU and several other sites where Google is like “yes, you are super relevant and all these sites are vouching for you (and converting), we’ll let you be in the local result. And eventually they moved up to the second position.Sweet. We’re now in the PPC result, we’re in organic, we’re in the snack pack, first page saturation. You can’t help but see us.
3. Yes, the company was making more money, traffic was up substantially, conversions were up a good amount, it looked like all was good.
4. We tested out the customer experience. Called them, tested the website forms, the customer experience seemed solid. We checked our goals, tracked properly. Call tracking? Done. Tested their service with a call during the day, spoke with nice people who could help us. We should be good. But the client was now showing up in the local pack. For some really competitive keywords. We noticed the listing said “closed” around 8pm one night. Closed? You can still book their service, that shouldn’t say closed. Let me see what happens when I call them.
5. Wait 12 awkward seconds. Hands up, how many people would call a number, hear silence, and not hangup in the first 3 seconds? 6 seconds? 9 seconds? 12 seconds. I waited through the silence. What came next? “this call may be monitored”. What came next? Hold music. What came next? A person! I asked for more information about their service and I was told to call back during regular business hours. WHAT?
6. We found that for more than half the day, people who called were having a terrible experience.
7. You can’t just say it’s broken. It’s a business, there’s a lot of things that are broken. Why is this broken piece more important than the 30 other broken things we’re aware of? We pulled the number of calls by hour and found that out of the five more popular call hours, two of those were when the business was closed. Well, that’s frustrating, but it gives us data that we sometimes don’t have.
8. 1. Opportunity Cost 2. Phone Service Cost 3……. This cost isn’t easily measurable…. From 7pm to 8am they averaged 35 calls. At a 50% close rate, we’ll round that down to 17 Average service is worth $1000 in revenue There are 365 days in a year, closing 17 additional customers a day, multiplied by $1k. $6.2 million in revenue. That estimate is working with high close numbers that the client provided. Lets make our case more conservative. If my estimate is 70% wrong, that’s still a $1.9m problem to fix. Ah, now it’s suddenly the most important. Sweet. Not to mention 35 phone calls x 365 days = $12k if you’re paying a call service $1/minute. Burning money.
9. If money doesn’t matter to them, you’re likely not talking to the decision maker there. What other fallout? How about bad reviews from people who never even used your service. These are legit. They will stay. They will drop your Yelp rating and put-off potential customers.
10. Customer Journey razzle razzle.
11. Introduction to waterlogic. They sell water coolers & water filtration systems. Specifics – removes chlorine, has UV filters to kill parasites,
12. When we first started working with them, we were targeting keywords for people who already knew they wanted a water cooler. Searches people do who are ready to buy a water cooler. Office water cooler – bottom of funnel Buy water cooler – bottom of funnel But what if you don’t know that you need a water cooler? What if you’re not searching for the solution, but you’re searching for the problem
13. Why does my water taste sweet? These people don’t know what they need, all they know is they have a problem. They don’t know the solution, they don’t know if it’s their water, their pipes, their body, something else.
14. Lets research keywords, dump them into Google’s keyword planner, what do we have? 330 visits/month. At best, using the time tested Chitika click through rate chart, we get at the best case scenario 106 visits/month. That’s if we rank #1. Traditional SEO might say this is too small a fish to go after. When I see Yahoo Answers as a top search result, it tells me that top position is attainable. If you look at the top of the funnel, this is one question of many like it. What if we build helpful content that answers those questions.
15. Looks like there’s more search volume and queries than Google was indicating. The top one was 330 searches/month, yet when we created a page that addressed this one question, it drove well over 1000 sessions in a month.
16. How many people converted? Zero. What was the bounce rate? 95%. At a quick glance, it didn’t do well. But stop and think, a person may have just had a drink of tap water and then Googled Why does my water taste sweet, like metal, smell like rotten eggs. Here’s why, buy buy buy. No one is ready to buy at this stage.
17. 2-3 weeks after the content was live, assisted conversions began to trickle in. When you’re looking at a several hundred dollar water cooler, you do research. These people eventually came back. By being at the very top of the funnel, we were able to provide value to the customer and let them know off the bat that we can fix that. After three months, thousands of unique visitors have come to these pages, Waterlogic built up their brand, we became a trusted resource for potential customers, and this content played a role in their purchase decision.
18. Waterlogic was a success because the content created contributed to building a trustworthy brand. This is primarily because we had control of the message. But, what happens when you don’t have control over how your brand is represented?
19. An online only client’s corporate headquarters appeared as if it were a local listing on Yelp. Yelp is for physical locations customers can visit. People who didn’t like their online experience with this company were able to leave feedback on Yelp. How many left feedback? 3 individuals. Why is it a big deal? That created a 1 star Yelp review that appeared as the second organic result for branded searches for the company. We didn’t know to what degree this was hurting our brand, but a one star review almost at the top of organic results is unquestionably damaging. And highly visible to their board. So we needed to contact Yelp to get this removed. We drew an outline with talking points. Having a solid case to whomever picked up the phone at Yelp was key. They likely receive thousands of phone calls a day asking for reviews to be taken down. “That one’s fake” “It isn’t true” “They weren’t even a customer”. I’m sure they hear it all. Called. Introduced myself. Wrote down her name. Continued using her name. We navigated together to the client’s Yelp page and she said it looks like there are some low scoring reviews. I said there are but that wasn’t the reason I was calling. The reviews are helpful in understanding how we can improve our customer experience. This took the edge off my call. The problem? When someone shows up at our doorstep, they’re met with a security guard. It’s a corporate complex with several businesses inside. Customers aren’t able to do physical business here, it’s online only. It doesn’t happen very often, but when people show up, they can’t do business here. Therefore, we don’t belong on Yelp.
20. Done. Within 2 weeks the listing was removed. Granted – before we did this – measurement. We checked how much traffic and conversions came from Yelp over the last year: about 200 visits. Conversions? Zero. By requesting this removal, we were gladly giving up those visits that didn’t convert. No business lost, but how can we measure the impact of Yelp going away? What replaced it?
21. We see slots with Google. Yelp was fulfilling a review slot in the client’s branded organic results. 1 star. Suddenly, another review site, Credio.com, moves into that spot. It has an 87% satisfaction rating listed in the meta description, visible in search results. We switched out 1 star for 87% satisfaction. The very week it moves in, they get $800 in conversions from Credio. Zero from Credio before. Three months later, we had $3k in revenue from Credio.
22. Review sites aren’t the only ones that can speak out of turn for your brand.
23. What happens when you aren’t in full control of your brand? I’ll regularly search for 30 year mortgage rates. Knowledge graph started showing up. I clicked through on Wells, I’m a WF customer already, and noticed wait….
24. What happens when you aren’t in full control of your brand? I’ll regularly search for 30 year mortgage rates. Knowledge graph started showing up. I clicked through on Wells, I’m a WF customer already, and noticed wait….The 7/1 adjustable rate mortgage is not the same rate that Google is pulling. The top numbers are based on a 200k loan. What’s happening is Google is pulling from the middle of the table. Zero idea why right now, if you have insights I’ll be happy to hear and give you credit for them if I talk about this again.Well, they got it wrong. Oh well.
25. So I searched for more rate terms where Google could be pulling in the wrong information. I searched for 12 month CD rates.
26. Wait, why am I at a blog post?
27. Real examples for Test Plans & Strategies software developers use. http://www.testingexcellence.com/test-strategy-and-test-plan/
28. Why is it this way? Right column is minimum deposit, my query was 12 month cd rate, Google is picking the highest minimum as the best answer…..wrong column. We need best percentage, not highest dollar number.
29. You can’t just say it’s broken. What else is there?
30. We can’t guarantee what spots on that chart Google is going to pull. We also can’t control actual bank rates. What we can control – a different kind of visibility. Doubleclick is an option for a top banner and a side banner. Sweet. People who search for 12 month cd rates might see my organic listing as well as when people click through? Sweet.
31. Run the site through Display Planner tool and you’ve got GDN text options. A click on this page is about $1.50. A click in SERPs is over $4. If you have the best rate or a no-fee early redemption, great. If you’ve got 99% customer satisfaction, great, post that.
32. What if I told you….there’s a place you can go to spread awareness of your brand. There is a trade publication where experts and novice people alike discuss your industry. These members come back frequently. They rely on the publication to inform, advise, express themselves, & more. I don’t see our competition advertising in this publication. In fact, if we were to advertise, we could set it up so that we’re the exclusive advertiser. We don’t need to make a big commitment, this trade publication allows us to advertise a few days, a few weeks, or a few months, there’s no obligation to sign on for a long contract. In fact, there are no contracts. You game? Oh, the price, yes, the price is less than $200/month to be the sole advertiser in this publication, good to run a test for $200? Of course.
33. But what if the publication I’m talking about isn’t an actual publication, but is Reddit? You might think reddit is a niche market and can’t show relevance in search results. Lets compare it to a big brand. Macy’s. Macy’s appears in search results for clothing, kitchenware, jewelry, shoes, bathroom items, wedding everything, baby items, they sell a TON of stuff.
34. Well of course they rank for Reddit game deals, they’re Reddit. So what? Lets look at the search volume.
35. Just “game deals”, people search for that word …
36. We’ve seen people search for product appending Amazon or TripAdvisor, now people are using Reddit. If you’re not on Reddit, this audience will never find you.
37. People are skipping the traditional head terms and appending “reddit” to them, knowing they’ll find what they need there through community and honest feedback. It’s cheap to advertise on Reddit and the site is saturating search results. If you have a PPC ad, an organic result, and if Reddit is now appearing for queries that are relevant for your business, it’s one more place for you to saturate search results.
38. For the search term “bodybuilding” Bodybuilding.com owns the top organic spot, the top PPC spot, Reddit ranks 3rd after Wikipedia. When someone clicks on the organic result, bodybuilding could have their brand at the top of the bodybuilding subreddit, which has 122,000 subscribers. Thus thoroughly infiltrating the search market with their brand.
39. Don’t only look at the direct & obvious numbers. Tracking assisted conversions helps give the bigger view that it’s playing a role in the purchase decision. For the services company, if we only checked the phone conversions while they were open, we’d have never realized there was over $2 million opportunity being thrown away during the night every year.
40. Don’t just shrug things off thinking “oh well, it’s broken.” Why is Google pulling in the wrong results for our business. Is there an opportunity there? Why is Google pulling in the bottom results for Interest.com, Bankrate, Nerdwallet? How can we get more visibility and track when those change in search results?
41. Saturate it. Your job isn’t done when you get your first page ranking, your job is done when you’ve tested & explored all of the ways to saturate the first page with your brand. Look at who is ranking, where you can advertise, even if it’s not traditional.
42. Talking about branding & revenue. Instead of going into high level talks, I want to tell a few stories with examples. Instead of telling you a story about how great or how cool something was, I want to share a different story.