Every month I run reports from Google Analytics and several other sources to see how my websites are doing. Knowing how many hits your website has gotten is important but how do you know how many hits your website could have potentially had?

Keyword Analysis: Pittsburgh photographer

The first step to finding the answer to that question is knowing what keyword(s) you’re trying to use to bring people to your site. For me the keywords Pittsburgh photographer and event photography are very important. Google sent me 116 visitors last month for the keyword Pittsburgh photographer. I know that from looking at my Google Analytics but how do I know how many I could have gotten? For that I need to check Google’s search-based keyword tool. On average there are 200 local searches per month for the keyword Pittsburgh photographer. So that means that last month I received 116 visits out of (an average) of 200 possible visits. That’s 58% of the possible visits. What does this mean though?

It means that not only is my website web positioned for this keyword (in that it shows up in search results) but also that when it comes to searches for Pittsburgh photographers my website receives visits from over 1/2 of the people searching for photographers in Pittsburgh.

The lesson is as follows – knowing how many hits you’re getting is great but knowing those numbers compared to the potential number of hits gives you a better picture. Why spend money on expensive SEO services if you don’t know how many possible hits they can generate? Budgets are tight, don’t spend hundreds of dollars a month chasing after low numbers. Use Google’s search based keyword tool to find keywords that both relate to your business and that generate a fair amount of searches each month. Use these keywords on your website, in your content and in meta tags. Write blog posts about those keywords – like I’m doing here with the keywords Pittsburgh photographer. If you do these things you can manage your own SEO and keep the money you may otherwise be wasting paying an SEO company.

It’s no secret that I’m a bit of a geek but what you might not know about me is that I have a serious efficiency fetish. That doesn’t sound right exactly but what I mean is I really need things to work efficiently. I can’t stand extra steps and time wasting. When a client or a friend asks me to email them something that I’ve already sent I find it very annoying. It’s especially bothersome when they want something I sent them within the last few days – stop that.

Did you even try to find it?

Now I understand that a lot of people are very busy and that they get a ton of email and I can even look past the fact that some folks maintain somewhat disorganized inboxes. That being said sometime I want to scream, “did you even seriously try to look for it?!?!”

What I’m really asking is did they bother to use the search function in their mail client? Did you even know that Microsoft Outlook has a search function? It does as does every free web-based email service.

Why don’t people search?

It may be because on the rare occasion that one does run a search most of the time they don’t find what they are looking for. Why is this?

I assume that it is because most people don’t create email messages that are meant to be searched for. That is that they are not formatted to be easily retrieved by a search engine. Clearly Google’s search technology is not the reason that one can’t find a message sent to their gmail account. The reason they can’t find it probably has more to do with the fact that the sender wrote a poor subject and the content is likely to be equally poor in it’s ability to be searched.

How can we fix this?

The Wrong Way:

I think the wrong way is to outsource the problem. There is an entire industry that has grown up around the idea of creating easier to search email archives.  That is an industry that is trying to devise a more accurate search but the problem is so rarely the search algorithms or even the search parameters.

My opposition to this  goes back to my hatred of inefficiency. Here we have people capitalizing on a problem rather than solving it. I’m in no way opposed to people making money – I’m opposed to people doing so without providing a truly valuable service.

My Observations

The problem, as I see it, is that we send email willy-nilly without so much as a thought about it being found later. Email, like their younger cousin the tweet, are put out and forgot about, in abundance. In fact more and more of them are being put out without any thought.

For several years now there has been a small dedicated, (some would say crazy), group of people that have pushed for some sort of formal guide to email writing. They want people to think about what they are writing and to only send emails that are necessary. Some go as far as to say – unless you’d send it in a postal letter don’t send it in an email. I’m not behind that idea, in fact I prefer email to phone calls, (for business), because you have a written record of the conversation. It also saves me time because if I’m on the phone I’ve got to write down what they are saying anyhow.

Teach Our Children

Here is a thought – when I was in school we were taught how to properly format and write business letters and the difference between them and less formal letters. Why not teach kids how to write a proper email? I’m sure that in some more progressive school districts this has already begun but I’m just as sure that they are not teaching searchability. If we learned how to write searchable emails we’ll end up with more thoughtful, better structured, and more worthwhile communications. The best part is we’ll also be able to search through our inbox or archive and find what we are looking for.

What about the old people?

When one is trained to work at an office they are asked if they know MS Office and how to use a multi-line phone why not ask if they know how to write a searchable email? If they don’t train them. If you’ve got to train someone to use your system why not make searchable email part of your system?

SEO and SEOM

Subject Matters

Searchable mail is just as simple as the searchable web – create an informative subject that matches the content. If your content is time specific, say it’s about an event, place the date of the event in the subject. A good example of this is when I book a photo job I send an email with the date of the job in the subject.

The Content

What you put in the body should always be informative too. As a gmail user I have conversation threads, that is emails that are back and forth replies about the same subject. Google groups these for me and that’s one of the functions I love the most about gmail. Even when email clients don’t do this they usually append previous messages to the body of an email (gmail does both) which means you have a continual record with the latest additions on the top. The benefit of this is that by adding content you’re creating more stuff that can be searched which is great because you end up with a more searchable file most of the time. The downside is that if someone changes the subject but not the thread you end up with conflicting data and less searchability.

So when writing an email we should all be aware that if we’re changing the subject we should create a new email to address that subject.

Ambiguity is ugly

Just because you anticipate a long thread with lots of back and forth, there is still no excuse for ambiguity in emails. If you just physically talked to a coworker about a subject that doesn’t mean that you should ever send an email that doesn’t address what you were talking about or that refers to discussion without putting into the body of the email what was said. Is that a pain in the ass? Sure but what happens in 3 months or 4 years when you don’t remember what was said and are trying to piece together what an email means? All of a sudden your minor pain in the ass is a huge problem either because of a he-said-she-said situation of because your memory has failed and you don’t remember if it your coworker told you it was the red wire that needs cut or the black one.

Give Searchability a Try

So now that you are aware of the issue will you try to make your emails more searchable? I’m sure that if you do you’ll find you get fewer requests for you to resend the same email you sent the day before. Give it a try, spread the word, and let’s make the world a better, (more searchable), place.

I received both a phone call and an email today from such a company. When I googled them I found this page which is a complaint board for questionable businesses. In the event that you don’t want to click on it I’ve posted my comments that I left on the page at the bottom of this post.

They were not the worst that I’ve dealt with – by far. This summer I received a call from a dude that told me his company would fill the first results page of Google with my website and only my listings whenever anyone searched for photography and Pittsburgh. He had me search for a tanning salon in California that he said they did so for. So basically I pay them an arm and a leg and they eliminate any competition in the photography field from the first few pages of Google.

I explained to him that the photo community is fraternal. We may compete for customers and there may be a plethora of shooters in Pittsburgh but I could call up about 200 of my fellow photographers here in Pittsburgh and ask them to borrow a lens or a flash and they’d gladly let me borrow it even if I had beat that person out for the job.

After realizing that I was not going to go for his pitch he began to threaten me. If I wasn’t going to pay for it he’d find someone else who will and that means that I’ll never find another job to shoot ever again (never mind the fact that less than 10% of my leads, and maybe 2% of my clients come from people finding me via a search engine). Could I do better SEO? Probably. Should I? Maybe. Am I going to pay someone else to do it? NO. I know enough that I can do so myself. The fact that I’ve written Pittsburgh and photography so many times in this post alone may lead to me jumping up a few pegs in the search results. In the end though – I find most of my work via word-of-mouth and that’s something that few people can do FOR you, if you’re not going to do it yourself as well.

As far as generating leads for me – these companies also don’t seem to do much “active lead generating” they set up a website and use what? That’s right SEO to get to the top of results and list a ton of companies. They then charge you when someone clicks on you.

The last time I checked Google Adwords start at $0.01 per click. These other companies want to charge you $10 for a service that is not anywhere near as good because they only list you on their own site(s) – and not on all the pages that Google can list you on.

This isn’t even my biggest complaint about them. I’m about to tell you what my biggest complaint is about them.

My biggest complaint is that they are offering a service that YOU DON’T NEED! If you can’t find leads yourself you’re not going to stay in business. This is fundamental to your business – if you can’t find people to pay for what you’re selling your not going to last long so don’t trust finding leads to just anyone.

The other thing that really bothers me – besides the fact that these are worthless companies is that they offer very low wage jobs to people who just need a paycheck. These people don’t care about your business – they care about making enough to buy another pack of smokes, put gas in their car, and pay their cell phone bill. If you go out of business they won’t care one bit. Are those the people you want working to generate sales for you?

That’s enough bitching – I’ve got to go out and find people that want what I’m selling which I happen to be fairly good at.

Here was my comment: