I’ll be presenting a free World Synergy webinar, “Online Marketing Success Strategies for 2012,” at 1 p.m. April 19th.

Register today.

I’ll help marketers discover how they can improve their ROI by making the most of online marketing tactics.

You will get plenty of tips, learn about the latest trends and get fresh perspectives on everything from SEO challenges to social media options.

Business executives need to go out of their way to be wise and not foolish with the choices they make regarding online marketing.

Our new feature, “39 Mind-Boggling Online Marketing Mistakes that Companies Make,” captures a full range of mistakes and horrible assumptions that get companies into trouble.

Miscalculations can hurt when wisdom is overlooked.

They can easily be avoided if businesses get some sound advice about paid search, e-mail marketing, SEO, link building, social media and more.

What kind of decisions have you encountered? Are they bizarre? Do they defy logic?

I’d love to hear what you’ve come across.

Businesses of all types do a lot of strange things when it comes to online marketing. Sometimes logic seems to take a back seat.

Online marketers and other corporate executives are often bright folks who actually lead successful businesses. But some of their Internet-related decisions are just mind-boggling.

Here are just some of the ones I’ve encountered over the years – some shared by friends and others I experienced first-hand. Unfortunately, it’s apparent that many of these happen all of the time.

Businesses would avoid a lot of aggravation if executives just turned to some seasoned experts before going down costly paths. You can learn a little by getting a free copy of my new study, “Small Businesses Just Don’t Get SEO.”

What goofy, real-life scenarios do you come across?

1. I’m going to pay $2,500 for one person to attend a 4-day Internet conference in Vegas and I don’t have an implementation plan to use whatever Bob or Mary learn along the way.

2. Bob or Mary took in as many of the 60 sessions as possible and they’re overwhelmed. They don’t know where to begin. I haven’t held them accountable to ask good questions or connect with speakers for some free, post-conference advice.

3. I don’t give my employee the time to dive deeper once he or she returns from a conference.

4. I thought it would be neat to buy a domain about cheap airline tickets, build 15 pages,  and mistakenly expect it to rank No. 1 for airline tickets on major search engines. With my head in the clouds, I completely missed the fact that my domain has the word “cheap” in it and I could leverage that for long tail keyword phrases over time. I should have picked up something like the Ultimate SEO Keyword Selection Guide. It’s FREE.

5. I insisted on putting my phone number at the very bottom of the home page right next to the copyright symbol thinking everyone would look there instead of up high near my logo. I didn’t consider an attractive font that someone could actually see.

6. I wrote 20 short paragraphs and then invited the reader to call my business after the last paragraph. I was thinking someone would read every word. I  should have focused on a catchy keyword-rich page header, subheads, bulleted text, hyperlinked keywords and boldfacing to guide the visitor while using the web site design, navigation and key pages to help them reach my business.

7. I found a sensational $100 Google AdWords coupon and opened an account to get all of that free web site traffic, but now I don’t know what to do or how to set up the campaigns.

8. I decided with all of my expertise to run an Google AdWords program, not realizing  that Google fakes you out and makes it look really simple. I did it anyway, picked out words that I thought people would use. I was wrong.

9. I don’t know the difference between broad, phrase and exact match with pay-per-click, but I paid Google anyway hoping for the best.

10.  I wrote ads and stayed within the character limits, but I didn’t even look at successful examples in my own industry or anywhere else – skipping the numerous case studies offered throughout the Internet.

11. I took all of the paid search visitors to my home page that hasn’t been updated in 14 years  (the web site  my nephew made when he was 14 with that tiny phone number you might miss). And no one called. I’m not sure why.

12. I didn’t look at the account setting defaults, so auto-tagging wasn’t on and I won’t be able to tell what keywords are organic and which are paid in my Google Analytics.

13. I spent $300 with nothing to show for it, feeling ripped off. It never dawned on me that $300 may not be enough and that I should have taken visitors to interior pages that my nephew actually structured better (for some reason he put the phone number higher and on pages that better matched the ad text).

14. I didn’t make custom landing pages because I didn’t know that was possible because I never hired anyone to tell me what’s best to do. I thought custom had to do with custom suits and custom sports cars and people you meet after an international flight.

15. I’m a Fortune 500 executive and I’ll show my bosses how smart I am by giving millions of dollars to Google and Microsoft for paid ads and ignore even the most fundamental SEO practices that could drive thousands of visitors to my web site without needing to pay search engines for them.

16. I won’t write or pay someone to create  industry articles for national publications to share my experience and convey my expertise (and get a quality inbound link along
the way).

17. I’ll pay my team to pay hundreds of dollars to a news release service for a seminar that no journalist will write about, but I won’t pay $90 to get the word out about an how-to industry guide that generates new leads every time someone requests a copy while sharing their name, phone and e-mail address. I won’t do it because it never occurred to my staff to do it and I never wanted to hire a consultant for his or her advice.

18. The online marketer on my staff is expected to be well-versed in SEO, paid search, e-mail marketing, link building, social media, online video production, HTML, web site analytics, and something about QR codes. On top of that, they handle a good portion of business development (read: sales), work closely with clients, write proposals, attend numerous business association events, coordinate all of our seminars, write our newsletter and 8 other essential tasks.

19. I want more visitors to come to my restaurant web site, but I don’t want to deal with them if they make it into the restaurant. I like to be behind the scenes. I want to hire a general manager to deal with the new customers. However, I can’t afford to hire the general manager because I don’t have the extra customers. They aren’t finding my place because I won’t spend money to get them here. I don’t know what to do.

20. I have a new service that no one knows about. In fact, I couldn’t begin to tell you what keywords someone might use to find it because they don’t know its value or that the service even exists. I didn’t take the time to pay someone to help me think through this dilemma and help me develop a strategy. For example, I didn’t think about using keywords people might use for a traditional service, using my well-designed web page to explain how my new service compares or why it’s better. I didn’t realize I could test out keywords with paid search and specific landing pages with compelling calls to action to see how people respond. I didn’t know it was possible to introduce a new keyword phrase and promote it through social media, groups within LinkedIn, through my blog (if I had one), my web site, news releases, online videos and more.

21. I don’t mind having  a blog, but I don’t want to write anything. I’d rather not react to industry trends, talk about new technology advances, offer personal insights about how businesses can manage more effectively, explain how to save money, provide tips on how to avoid regulatory penalties or explain what I’ve done through the years to solve major business problems. I’d rather not comment on other popular blogs to showcase my expertise and encourage people to visit my web site.

22. I’d like to pay $250 a month and be No. 1 for any keyword I choose through SEO. Someone told me  that’s my expectations are just a  “tad” high.

23.  I prefer to overwhelm my left-hand navigation with many choices that satisfy all of the things that interest me to the dismay of new visitors and prospects who leave quickly because they don’t know how to use my web site.

24. I’m going to sell products online, but I won’t include real testimonials or invest in third-party validation seals that could assure a visitor that they’re about to do business with a trusted web site.

25. I don’t want to offer free shipping because I don’t know how to establish products and pricing at levels that would allow for margins that could accommodate free shipping that my competitors manage to promote.

26. I’ll pay $40,000 and accept all of the lost productivity for an annual trade show (flight, booth, shipping, lodging, food, and more) to get 68 leads. But I won’t pay $20,000 for an online marketing program to generate hundreds of leads.

27. I require people to log-in first before they can begin to buy something through my online store. I’d rather not get their full attention and interest in a product before asking them for contact and shipping information.

28. I just got done making a beautiful site that has a sensational design with awesome colors that complement each other. And it doesn’t have a single word in regular text so search engines  won’t have anything to find and I won’t appear on search engines until I own up a poor choice in a designer who led me astray. No one told me that Flash animation could greatly inhibit a web site’s ability to get indexed. No one suggested that Flash be used sparingly to explain a product or service.

29. I made my own web site and my home title says “Home.” Since I’m not in the real estate market, that won’t even begin to help me in any way.

30. I just took three hours to write 225 keyword phrases for the keyword meta tag on each of my 5 main pages only to find out that it was a waste of time. An online marketing firm sales rep set me straight.

31. My designer  made page headers that really look sharp. But since they’re not in text, my rankings will suffer on search engines that read text, not images.

32. I offer online psychics for a fee, but I can’t predict when I’ll be No. 1 on Google.

33. I sell adult toys, novelties, massage oil and clothes, but I don’t want to be found for popular anatomical or profane-based keywords – just “romantic gifts” and that sort of thing. Apparently, I just have high standards.

34. I have a lead-generation site with very little original content and few inbound links, but I want to be on the first page of Google for “insurance.” It didn’t dawn on me that I should find a particular niche and exploit that rather than take on the most competitive aspect of a giant  industry.

35. Through a series of several dynamic menus, I decided to present deep levels of navigation off any page – forcing visitors to encounter all aspects of my web site at every turn. I later discovered that usability and natural rankings would improve significantly after I finally paid someone to fix my poorly conceived web site.

36. I didn’t want to pay for search engine optimization because I wouldn’t be able to handle the extra sales that would put a strain on my operations and quality standards that needed attention. Over the next year, my sales fell off anyway and I laid off over 20% of my workforce because I couldn’t land enough new business.

37. I argued with my search engine optimization provider about the need for very broad keyword phrases like “interior doors,” “power tools,” and “employee management,” not realizing my conversions would be higher with long tail phrases that would have ranked higher  in the first place.

38. I picked a content management system for my large company only to find out later that the page title, page header and navigation were so closely aligned that they all had to have the same words with no flexibility in the page header words or page title.

39. I overstuffed my response forms with so many fields and questions – including 15 checkboxes for how someone found the web site – that I discouraged people from filling out the forms (over-zealous, pre-qualification sure has a price).

Questions? Contact me today at World Synergy at 440.349.4940 ext. 635. Let’s get you squared away.

Most small businesses don’t have a good handle on search engine optimization (SEO), missing opportunity after opportunity to connect with prospective customers who could help them be more profitable.

They aren’t fully grasping just how many factors must come together to ensure high rankings on major search engines – variables like page titles, keyword-rich page headers, inbound links from other web sites and more.

As a result, our free study of 200 diverse small businesses, “Small Businesses Just Don’t Get SEO,” found that 62% of their web sites don’t rank on the first page of Google for even one keyword phrase. More than half (51%) don’t use page titles with keywords (they merely list “welcome” or “home” or usually only a company name). We selected the ReferenceUSA database to randomly select small businesses for the study (we are not affiliated with any of the companies we identified).

The wide range of small businesses we studied offer such products and services as:

• Pizza
• Legal counsel
• Catering
• Local package deliveries
• Hair care
• Engineering consulting
• Toys for children
• Real estate agents
• Plumbers
• Gymnastics training
• Beer kegs
• Commercial signs
• Psychologists
• and many more

Over the years, we’ve met with thousands of the nation’s 27 million small businesses at our office, their locations, local events, and while speaking at national conferences. Some of them clearly value SEO. They simply don’t know how to pull it off. Many of them recognize that keywords are critical, but they’re often at a loss when asked to describe a suitable keyword phrase in light of their web site strengths and weaknesses. They aren’t sure how to correlate content with web site navigation and other critical steps.

Sometimes small business executives take an earnest interest – starting with competitors and then closely examining their own plans. They want to learn how SEO works and what it may entail for them initially and over the long haul. It’s no wonder that they want to tap into how people search. In the U.S. alone, there are about 18 billion searches conducted at home and work, according to the comScore qSearch analysis in January 2012. Google web sites represented 66.2% of the searches – dominating other industry players.

Past and current national studies show that small businesses believe SEO can help them with their bottom lines. They view it as a worthwhile investment that can help with leads and sales.

In 2011, MerchantCircle conducted a study among 2,500 small businesses and asked them, “If you had to put all your marketing time and budget into only one channel, what would it be?” Search engine optimization came on top at 32.9% compared to:

• Traditional Media – 19.7%
• None of the Above – 17.9%
• Social Media – 16.0%
• Paid Search Advertising – 9.8%
• Mobile Marketing & Advertising – 3.7%

MarketingSherpa provided more insights in its newly released “2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report SEO Edition.” Based on a survey of over 1,500 B2B and B2C marketers,  MarketingSherpa found that they care deeply about SEO. For example, 72% said increasing web site traffic through SEO is a key objective over the next 12 months (53% admitted it’s been a challenge over the past 12 months). Along the same lines, 62% said generating leads through SEO is a high priority for the next 12 months (48% indicated that’s been a big challenge the previous 12 months).

Unfortunately, their enthusiasm and high hopes for SEO don’t show up in the practical details of search engine optimization in most cases, according to our study.

Although many web sites use text headers above the core content, the headers typically are identical to the page titles – both dominated generic navigational references or an extremely broad keyword phrase that clearly isn’t tied to an overall web site strategy. Or, if the page title is distinct from the page header, the page title is often limited to the company name or a broad keyword with little opportunity to help the web site gain traction among search engine rankings.

Except for very few situations, small businesses don’t take the time to include relevant keywords in the main text or link those keywords to related pages on their web sites. They also focus only on their actual city where they’re based, which can hold them back with local optimization. In other words, small business executives could work harder to mention surrounding communities and even major cities (they could target long tail keywords and potentially establish decent rankings and attract some visitors).

But small businesses are sitting on several huge assets that they can leverage:

• Domain names
• Web site age
• Inbound links
• Content

Domain Names:
For example, 71% wisely incorporated keywords when selecting domain names (rankings are still affected by domain names with keywords).

Web Site Age:
They also have aging web sites (nearly 60% appear to be at least 5 years old based on the when the web site and domain were first used). Search engines clearly reward sites that have established a presence on the Internet.

Inbound Links:
Small businesses have managed to secure some inbound links from other web sites (links can influence rankings). In fact, 70% have more than 100 links from other web sites. The number may be dwarfed by web sites that boast thousands of inbound links, but it’s encouraging that small businesses have made some inroads with link building. They can always get more and take a closer look at the anchor text to see whether those links can include relevant keywords.

Content:
Although 43% of small businesses have 25 or fewer pages, 57% have more robust web sites with 26 pages or more. The small businesses have the ability to expand the text on some pages and add more pages to their web sites to support their keyword strategies. Very few of the web sites were locked into huge SEO barriers like frames or designs dominated by Flash.

The reality is that small businesses need to rank well for the right keywords if they’re going to promote their products and services through search engines.

And they have a long way to go.

The 62% that don’t rank for any keywords is actually bleaker than the statistics suggest. When we selected 5 keywords per web site, we included many with very few searches, according to Google’s keyword tool. For example, we often used keywords for products and services along with the names of small cities where the companies were based. And some of the small businesses still couldn’t rank. The 62% would have been much higher if we selected more competitive keywords that were still relevant.

Plenty of small businesses offer products and services for national and international markets. In that case, the competition for the keywords often intensifies.

Here is a cross-section of about 20 keyword phrases from the 1,000 we explored for the study:

The small set of keywords alone represents more than 1 million searches a year on Google.

You’ll see plenty of local keyword phrases like “Miami caterers” and “Phoenix car dealers,” but we also used non-local search terms like “Alaska salmon” and “DVD duplication.” Some marketers may suggest that the non-local phrases are too broad. We included them because they directly match what the businesses sell and how they promote their products and services (not limited to local markets). We also selected keywords based on keywords that businesses emphasized on their home page as well as page titles and meta data. For example, we sometimes included long tail variations of the broad keyword phrases.

Small businesses can still connect with prospects and new customers without even targeting keywords that appear to have minimal searches. If they can’t rank for a phrase like “Santa Clarita plumber,” they can focus on keyword phrases with no search data and still get visitors. We’re familiar with companies that frequently have web site visits for keyword phrases that appear as zero in Google’s keyword tool.

With our SEO study, we were somewhat surprised by the quality or lack of quality with website design. Too often, the architecture, images, fonts and text looked like they were developed in the hands of anyone other than a professional. As a result, the web sites were difficult to follow and many would make a horrible impression on any first time visitor.

Again, SEO shouldn’t just be about rankings on search engines. It should be an essential part of any Internet strategy. If you’re going to go to the trouble of investing in search engine optimization, you may as well take those new visitors to a web site that can meet the objectives – generate leads, sales and more.

Small businesses aren’t alone in how they deal with or neglect SEO – whether that’s their limited understanding, other corporate priorities or budget issues.

From small businesses in general to large Fortune 500 companies, studies and surveys consistently point out that businesses often ignore SEO.

• Conductor, which released “Natural Search Trends of the Fortune 500” in 2010, found that Fortune 500 companies spent $3.4 million a day on paid search with nearly 100,000 keyword phrases – but only 2% of their web sites and keywords appeared among top 30 organic (non-paid) results on Google. In fact, only 25% of their paid search terms made it into the top 50 organic search results.
• In 2010, “SMB Marketing Practices,” a survey of small and midsized businesses by GrowBiz Media and Zoomerang, found that 78% of SMBs don’t budget for SEO. E-mail marketing and social media were among the top budget priorities for 2011.
• About 23% of small businesses planned to invest in SEO in 2011, according to American Express OPEN Small Business Search Marketing Survey, which was released with the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO). Given the 23%, plenty of companies weren’t investing.

Those trends contrast sharply with the reality that people use the Internet to search for information – with search engines being the leading resource in many cases.

• In a 2011 Harris Interactive survey, 59% of U.S. adults identified search engines as the first place they go when looking for local businesses.
• Also in 2011, 44% of Internet searchers said they initially turn to search engines when researching products, according to a survey by the e-tailing group and PowerReviews.
• Before buying, 58% of consumers start with search engines, according to a 2011 study, “The Virtuous Circle: Understanding Search and Social Media’s Role in the Purchase Pathway,” by Group M Search and comScore, Inc.