Spa Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

AOL's mistaken release of data on 20 million searches was not only a huge privacy concern, but also a rare peek behind the scenes of a major search engine. So much of SEO is based on rumor and superstition that actual data is like tripping across a treasure trove. No wonder the SEO community was so quick to dive in and unearth insights from all those AOL searches.

To be successful, you have to get on the first page of search results, which generates 91% of the clicks. The second page drops down to under 5%.

And, on the first page, there's a bit of a winner-take-all mentality: the first ranking gets 42% of the clicks, dropping to 12% for the second ranking.

We always knew that getting on the first page of search results was crucial — but the AOL data provides real-life confirmation of exactly how important.

So, what can we learn from this? You're better off focusing on less competitive keywords for SEO where you can get on the first page of search results and potentially attain the #1 ranking. Even though there might be less searches for that keyword, you'll actually get more traffic to your website. Instead of "your city spa", it's wiser to focus on search keywords in your speciality, like "your city sports massage".

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Not search engine optimization (SEO) itself — that you need to do. But there is many an SEO company, consultant or service for which the only answer is no. So many of them, in fact, that I have a simple rule: if someone contacts you out of the blue, just say no.

SEO is a area ripe for scams. It's hard to understand. It's hard to measure. And that has a attracted a lot of less-than-ethical folks into the mix. There are several large "SEO" companies that are hardly more than back rooms full of telemarketers who do next to nothing to help your website, or worse, use techniques so old that they actually hurt your search engine rankings. The Wall Street Journal had a great article on this last year, 'Optimize' Rankings At Your Own Risk.

Warning signs for an SEO company:

• "We'll submit you to hundreds (or thousands) of search engines." It's just a ridiculous statement; first of all, there are only a handful of search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask). And, there's no point in submitting to them. They want to find you via links to your website.
• If they say "we have secret techniques" or "inside information". SEO is just plain hard work, and any real secrets are fleeting and not meaningful to your success over time.
• Be wary of guarantees, particularly for "#1 rankings". It's just not something that an SEO company can guarantee, unless they do it for long, useless keywords.
• If they ask you to make a bunch of links to websites that aren't directly related to your business, run. They're engaging in "link farms" or "free-for-all" links. This actually worked a few years ago, but these days will hurt your rankings.
• If they use "doorway" pages. This approach isn't building value in your website. The SEO company can just decide to switch where they're sending traffic from the doorway pages to someone else.

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Fortune Small Business has a good read about the power Google now wields: "How Google can make - or break - your company". They mean it as a cautionary tale, making it sound like Google might just arbitrarily wipe your business out.

A lot of small online businesses have appeared with a simple model: rank well for natural searches (meaning ones that aren't paid for) on Google, and then make referrals to people who actually sell something. Their business was made possible by Google, and sometimes is right in the path of Google's number one goal: to provide the most relevant search results possible.

As the backlash against Google grows, I suspect this kind of press will become more common. Although it's interesting, for your spa, it doesn't matter. Google isn't out to get you.

But there are some things you need to do:

• Because Google is always looking to improve their search results (and usually leads the other search engines by months or years), you need a website that evolves as search engine optimization (SEO) evolves.
• Don't use an overly aggressive SEO consultant that employs "black hat" techniques. In this case, I lied, and Google is out to get you.
• Create great content on your website that's useful for your clients. That's what Google is looking for. In an upcoming series, we're going to talk about how you optimize this for search engines, but it all comes back to having a useful website.

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Here's a quick and easy way to tell if your webmaster has a clue about search engine optimization (SEO): just ask them about the importance of "meta tag keywords".

If their answer is that they are crucial to your ranking on search engines, it's time for a new webmaster (or at least to send them back to training).

SEO is a constantly changing field, because search engines are always updating their algorithms to return what they consider to be the best search results. But this particular misconception has lingered on forever — meta tag keywords lost their power years ago.

Death Of A Meta Tag sums it up nicely from one of the real SEO experts, Danny Sullivan. This was written almost four years ago.

Bottom line? Meta tag keywords have almost no effect on your search page rankings. If you don' t have them on your website, don't worry about. If you are designing a new website, don't spend more than five minutes putting in meta tag keywords.

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Website stats are full of somewhat arcane terms, and here's another one: landing page, which is the starting point when a visitor comes to your website, and is often used to describe pages on your website used for a specific purpose. Thanks to your suggestions, we've created a Landing Pages report for easy analysis of the starting page for your website visitors.

Most of the time, of course, the landing page is your home page. But what's interesting is when it's somewhere else.

• Search engine optimization (SEO): Getting serious about SEO means writing articles for your website that will be found by search engines and linked to by other websites. Looking at landing pages will tell you when this strategy is working.
• Track advertising: You can create new pages on your website for specific promotions. Create a "tv" page when you run ads on the local cable station for the holidays, and point viewers to "www.yourspa.com/tv" for a special offer.
• Online ads: Make your online ads more effective by creating landing pages tied specifically to the ad. AdWords for "Dallas facial" will be more effective if, instead of just going to your home page, links to a page on your site specifically about your great facials.

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Why do we spend so much time talking about Google? It's not like there aren't other search engines out there.

Actually, there's really only three search engines of significance these days: Google, Yahoo and MSN. By significance, I mean search engines that drive traffic to your website. And that's where the focus on Google comes from — Google is the source of five times more visitors than either Yahoo or MSN to our spa's websites.

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I don't know how much quality time you've spent looking at the web stats for your website. Probably not very much, and I don't blame you.

There is often a lot of amazing stuff in there, much of it arcane and useless. So, we've decided to boil down the stats for your website to what really matters — the stuff that shows you the effectiveness of your website. The stuff upon which you can make business decisions.

 
So, what is that? How many visitors to your website, where they came from and how many of them purchase an Instant Gift Certificate or request an appointment. With that in mind, we've created two reports:

• Referrers: shows where visitors to your website are coming from. Either "(none)", because they typed your website address in directly, or the website they came from, say Google.
• Keywords: For visitors from search engines, what keywords did they use to find you?

You won't find any mention of hits on your website reports. What is a hit anyway? Instead, you'll see the number of visitors, how many pages of your website they looked at on average, and how many GCs they bought. And then, the really important number: conversion percentage, which is the percentage of your visitors that purchased.

This gets right to the heart of measuring the two ways you can increase your online sales: increase your number of visitors, and increase your conversion percentage. This is exactly what we're here to help you with.

If you have a Dynamic Website, these reports show you the full picture of your website. For linked sites, the stats represent your SpaBoom linked pages. So, not your home page, but visitors that make it to your Instant GCs page.

Now the not-as-great-news: because we're using a new technique to collect this information, it's only available starting from when we implemented it, July 2nd.

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When you rename a page on your website (or redesign your website, potentially changing a lot of page filenames), there may be plenty of search engines and other websites still looking for you under the old filename.

For example, Albuquerque's Mark Pardo recently upgraded their spa website. Previously, their locations where at:

http://markpardo.com/locations.htm

But now on their SpaBoom Dynamic Website, it's at:

http://www.markpardo.com/contact

Google still has the old page indexed. But you'll notice, if you click on the old link, it actually takes you to the new link (instead of getting an ugly "Page not found"). And the same thing will happen for any other websites that link to that page — you'll go directly to the new page. And Mark Pardo still gets credit for the inbound link.

Doing page redirects like this is important for your search engine placement, and it needs to be done anytime you rename or delete a page. It's super easy for SpaBoom Dynamic Websites: go to Setup, Website and then click on Redirects. Add a new redirect, entering the old filename and then selecting the current page to which to redirect.

If you're managing your own website, learn how to do redirects or make sure that your webmaster does it. An important technical note: use what's called a 301 redirect, which means the page has moved permanently, and not a 302 redirect.

When Google crawls your website again, it will see the redirect and index the new page. And, in the meantime, everyone will still be able to find you!

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Trust in your website, that is.

As soon as you spend any time looking into search engine optimization (SEO) you run into PageRank. This is Google's original, big innovation: rank the relevancy of web pages by looking at who links to them.

It's pretty easy to game PageRank, though. Build reciprocal links, join link farms and pay for text links and you'll have a pretty good PageRank. That's why PageRank, as you see it on the Google Toolbar, isn't very important. It's just easy to talk about because it's such a visible element of SEO.

When in comes to links, what really matters in showing up in the search engine results pages (SERPs) is the quality and relevancy of those links. A lot of folks in SEO circles refer to this as TrustRank (the original paper was written by Yahoo!, but the term is trademarked by Google), and what it means is that Google wants to see links to your website that are relevant to your spa.

What this means:

• Develop links with businesses and organizations with which you have a real relationship. Do more than just a link: add a paragraph to your website including the link. For example, describe the bed and breakfast down the street on your site, and ask them to do the same in return.
• Just ignore the vast majority of reciprocal link requests. Random reciprocal links won't help your search engine placement, and may actually hurt it.
• Connect with local websites and blogs. Serenity Gardens has a Hero's Week every year, which was picked up by popular Albuquerque blog, Duke City Fix.
• Send out releases whenever you've got something new to announce, for example, your great new Instant Gift Certificate capability. Then, send them using the free online services of a company like PRWeb, and make sure to include your website in the press release.

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A couple of guys at Stanford created a list of their favorite websites in "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" in 1994. This turned into Yahoo in 1995, and gave us all a way to actually find stuff on the web. You had to get into the Yahoo directory if you wanted anyone to actually find your website. (This is back when search engine optimization was easy — get listed in Yahoo).

Next came the first wave of real search engines like WebCrawler, AltaVista, Infoseek and Hotbot — you could actually search the full-text of websites. It just didn't work that well for finding relevant information. If you wanted your website to turn up for a particular search, all you had to do was stuff your site with those keywords.

Go to 1997, where a couple of more guys from Stanford come up with a simple but brilliant idea: use the links between web pages to determine their relevancy. This was PageRank, and the birth of Google. Google produced more relevant results than the other search engines, and quickly become a rising star, turning that into real revenue with AdWords.

Search engine optimization (SEO) has never been the same.

In the tradition of Mel Brooks, there will be no Part II. But we are going to talk a lot about SEO and how it can help your spa.

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You've opened your brand-new spa and commissioned a beautifully designed website to go with it (hopefully a SpaBoom Dynamic Website). An obvious way for somebody to find out about your new business is to search on Google, maybe for "Albuquerque spa". There's only one problem: chances are very good that your brand-new website won't show up on the search pages, or will be buried so deep that no one will ever see it.

You're stuck in what many search engine experts are calling the Google sandbox. Your time in this Internet penalty box can last several months.

There's a simple explanation for this purgatory-on-earth: Google's goal is to return the most relevant results for searches. And they've decided that brand-new websites tend not to be the most relevant. It's part of the search engine's fight against "spam" websites. You've probably clicked on them after running a search: a website filled with junk surrounded by ads. Well, your brand-new website is caught right in the middle of this battle between Google and spam websites.

Note that we're not talking about a redesign of an existing website. Don't worry about updating the look of your existing site — you won't have this problem. This is only an issue for a brand-new website, or more accurately, a brand-new domain, e.g. "yourspa.com".

You only have one solution: wait it out. In the meantime, focus on the core marketing that will turn your website into a great asset for your spa:

• Include your website on every piece of printed material that you put out: your service menu, business cards, advertisements, etc.
• Direct clients to your website on your voice mail. Tell them they can buy Instant Gift Certificates and schedule appointments online. Consider custom hold "music" that includes your website.
• Ask relevant organizations and businesses to link to your site: the local Chamber of Commerce, the tourism department, the bed and breakfast down the street.
• Get listed in Discover Spas.
• Collect e-mail addresses on your new client forms and when you sell anything at retail. Then, put them in SpaBoom under Clients (we don't have e-mail marketing yet — but will soon!).
• Consider using Google AdWords to buy text ads for search terms that prospective clients are likely to use when looking for a spa. Yes, there is some serious irony here in paying Google for text ads to help compensate for Google penalizing you.

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