Website Effectiveness poll

RainMaker

I would like to get a feel for how many people have found the magic in their website, and for those who are having good results, what role their website plays in their overall marketing strategy.

Jeff Blackwell

We have a real estate website that is an excellent source of leads. For that particular business the website is the primary marketing tool.

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Gary Boye

Honestly not satisfied. I'm between a rock and a hard place as far as my web site goes. I don't want to represent myself as something I'm not--and--I don't want to represent myself as something I don't want to be.

So what am I--professionally? What am I really? I'm a sales strategist, a teacher of selling, and a sales mercenary. Who searches for help on the internet using those key words? Sales trainer, sales coach, sales training, etc--the web is crawling with sites like those--and those are the key words I feel compelled to plug in. I don't do seminars, I don't do slideshow presentations and I don't walk on the balls of my feet when I've made a point with an audience. I don't want to do that stuff. But put me into a really tough selling project, or have me overhaul a company's or individual's selling strategy--that's what I do. That's my gift. How do you present that on a web site and get hits?

So--no, I'm not satisfied.

RainMaker

Gary, I have a suggestion for you that I think is worth giving a try. It has not been long enough for me to determine whether it worked for me or not, but it seems like it's based on a sound principle.

Try using www.Wordtracker.com to find some new keywords. You can subscribe for one day which is all you need to have access to tremendous loads of useful keyword information. I have no idea if the information is accurate, but it's pretty well used in the industry from what I can tell.

I happened upon on a post one time on some other forum where someone was commenting on how they discovered a much better converstion ratio when they stumbled on a less frequented keyword that was highly targeted to their product.

What makes Wordtracker.com different from the basic overture keyword suggestion tool is that it does not just tell you how many times a keyword has been searched in the past 30 days, it takes the number of searches against the total number of websites who have placed that exact keyword (or keyword phrase) in their meta tags to give you something called a KEI ratio (I forget what that stands for). You are not only looking for the most frequently searched keywords, but the ones for which the competition is particularly low thereby giving you a higher probability of ranking for it. They call this cherry picking.

Also once you start clicking the suggestion tool, it will give you MANY related terms that you would not have thought of yourself. I found myself on massive brainstorming sessions once I got the hang of it.

Gary Boye

Thanks, RM. I saved your post in my files and am going to explore that. It made something click with me. If individuals were searching with less used key words, they would probably be delighted with a site that was in synch with their quest. Sort of set me apart from the masses--and get me a better qualified prospect.

RainMaker

ONLY 4 responses?? Come on out there in SP land...I need more to get any meaningful insight from this pole. Thanks.

RainMaker

Well, I didn't get an overwhelming response on this poll, but I was wondering if the person whose site fell under the first category would offer any insights into what they feel is/are the critical element(s) that make their site so successful.

There is SO much information on the net about how to accomplish this, that it is difficult to sift through. Some advice CONFLICTS with other advice. I would love to hear some tips from someone who is doing it with success.