Search Engine Optimization or SEO has been the secret weapon of so many business marketing online. From gaining attraction with keywords to scaling out with content strategies, SEO is by far the most revenue producing online activity for any website. But, even Google is confused on what an SEO person actually does.
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Let dive into how to optimize a website for Humans and Robots with a Herbalife website. We’ll focus on User Experience as well as helping the search engine bots understand what the intent of the website.
Front End Developer vs. SEO
When thinking about a website from afar or with the big picture in mind, your visitors basically find your website, engage with it and follow the Calls to Actions. A front-end developer is great at easily helping a visitor get what they want from a website. The look, the feel, the speed, and navigation are in the best hands of a developer. The SEO is great for helping the “robot” software of search engines to find and list a website. The titles, the links, image attributes, and social shares are carefully examined and adjusted for optimal findability.
To paint a picture, think of it as the Search Engine being on one side of a bridge and your website on the other side of the bridge. SEO is the bridge!
SEO for a Herbalife Website
Herbalife is a global nutrition company with an MLM marketing strategy. They sell 80 plus products in the weight loss and wellness industries with direct peer to peer sales through distributors. Each distributor is granted an online store connected to the warehouse inventory to sell products and self-marketing.
The goal is to have the most ideal target market get to the online store. An excellent strategy is to create a website, optimize it for the search engines and visitors. Therefore, as a result, customer have the ability to place orders in an official online store.
The website we’re optimizing is http://orderherbalonline.com and the goal is to have traffic click the call to action, which is a link or button to the online store https://www.goherbalife.com/orderherbalonline/en-US/ to shop and place orders.
For the home page, the SEO will conduct some research into common search terms being used in the search engines. Many tools exist to research search terms, use a few and see what works best for you. We’re sticking with the term “order Herbalife online” for the home page.
Another search term we’re interested in is “Herbalife Shakes” and its variations, such as Herbalife shake flavors, Herbalife Formula 1 shakes. We built this page for Herbalife shakes – http://orderherbalonline.com/herbalife-shakes/ probably the better example for what a front-end developer will do and what an SEO will do to a page. So, for the remainder of this article, we’ll focus on this page for Herbalife shakes.
When visiting the page, the first thing of interest for a developer is how a visitor will navigate the page. We have the main header of the page followed by all the flavors of Herbalife shakes a visitor would be interested in shopping. If you click on one of the images in the list of shakes, you’ll immediately be taken to the section of the page that contains details of the flavor clicked. A YouTube video is present on how to make a Herbalife shake and the end of the page is ingredients.
An SEO will look at this page and focus on the domain extension, the title tag that appears on the top, the heading tag, how many times certain words are on the page and what can we tell the search robots about the images on the page. Let’s break each one the areas an SEO will focus on when optimizing this page.
Domain extension
The first indicator or clue to what a webpage is about is the in the domain or in the domain extension. For the term “Herbalife Shakes” we don’t have it in the main domain of orderherbalonline.com so the next priority is to have it in the extension the follow the forward slash “ / “ after the .com of the domain. This is why we have /Herbalife-shakes/
Title Tag
The title tag of the page is next priority for optimization. Like the extension, it’s another clue to what the website is about and the target audience that will benefit the best from it. Above all visual information, the title appears in the top of the browser and reads “Herbalife Shakes Flavor List”. A person searching for the Herbalife shakes list will greatly benefit with the navigation and information we created on this page.
Word Count
Word count has proven to be of value to deliver the narrative of the page. Aim for 1500 plus words with clear thoughts and properly laid out to prove to the search engines its worthy to be placed in front of visitors. Consequently, the content should also help visitor satisfy their search.
Image alt tag
Each image on a page can have an attribute that can describe what it’s about to the robots. The most commonly used attribute is the “alt” attribute with its value as the keyword(s) about the picture. It helps the robot understand what the image is and how it relates to the content. If unused, which is most likely the case in un-optimized pages, it will be considered a wasted opportunity to gain more visibility.
This is just 4 of the key areas of what is known as on-page SEO that an SEO person would do to a website. Likewise, schema and Rich Snippets, as well as XML sitemaps, are among others. But maybe a post on those topics with more in-depth information is warranted in the future.
Off-page SEO will consist of social sharing and post boosting for visibility. We’ll also create some short teaser post for content sharing. Teaser post will have an excerpt of the content and expectations of the page to help visitors see quick information before deciding to click.
Hopefully, this information gives a glimpse into what an SEO would do to a webpage. To see full details of what an SEO can do for your website, reach out to one, make contact and ask questions. We’re good people that love to talk SEO and explain how it can help a website gain the most ideal customers visiting a website.
A Proven Marketing Strategy for Any Sized Business
The online search engine and social media worlds have brought endless amounts of new business for the websites that sit at the top or constantly showing up in feeds. These advertising venues have proven to work for national and local business alike. The companies running the online advertising entities, like Google and Facebook, are publicly trading at astronomical prices. Yet, so many businesses are losing the game of marketing in these venues.
How many of your competitors have significantly grown their businesses while you struggle funding the payroll? Is the feeling of being “left behind” eating away at you? How much longer are you going to allow your competitors to easily steal your new customers?
These questions face every company small and large. Let us share a proven strategy that has grown the bottom line of every business who uses it.
The Online Marketing Strategy Snapshot:
- How many websites do you have working for your business?
- Are you collecting new customer contact information?
- Stay in front of your customers on Social Media!
Websites Working for your Business
There are no rules to the online world on how many websites you can use to gain new business. This part of the strategy is a concept that will help you spread your marketing capabilities. Keep your main website and use it as the main landing spot for your customers. Your main website is most likely brand or company specific. Then create a new website that is less brand specific and more product or service specific. If you have products in several different categories or multiple different services, you create a new website per product category or service category.
When planning you’re your new website, consider the name, website platform and call to action as it relates to the reason why a potential customer would click on it.
The name should resemble the product category or the problem or solution if it’s service oriented. If you sell children’s clothing, could probably focus one website on boys clothing and another on girls clothing. Then have each website lead to the product areas of your main website. If you’re service is restoration, you can focus one website on fire restoration and another on water restoration with each leading the customer to your main website as the call to action.
The platform to building these websites should low cost and easy to manage. We recommend finding a low-cost hosting company with monthly fees in the range of $20-$50. We also recommend WordPress for the platform. WordPress is used by nearly 40% of all websites and you can easily find someone that has experience with this platform. You can also find an endless number of how-to videos on YouTube to show you how to use this platform.
The point here is to deploy many websites to get your business in-front of your customers.
Collecting Customer Information
Every online entity should have the ability to collect customer information while a customer is on the website. A list, the lead list, of your customers and potential customers will be the most valuable information for your marketing campaigns.
First, the dollar amount of each person on the lead list. This can be very complicated and broken down in many ways. In an effort to keep it simple, we view the worth of each person on the lead list as $1 per month. We know the worth is more than $1 but let’s keep the math simple to understand. If you run 1 main website and 3 feeding websites that generates 50 new leads a month, you’ll have a steady stream of new income at $1 each per month. If you generate 500 leads or 1000 leads at $1 each you can do the math on how many will generate a significant income.
Second, generating the leads will work on the feeder websites and the main website. Make sure to give your leads a compelling reason to give their information. Pricing has always been a great way to generate the leads in the early stages of the buying process.
Staying In-Front of Your Customers on Social Media
The best advertising in the world is one that gets an AD in-front of the right customers. On social media, you can upload the emails of your lead list and send specific Ads directly to them on their social media feeds. This is the most cost-effective way to turn your leads into customers.
On Facebook, we download the emails of all the leads from the list. Create an Ad specifically targeting the reason why someone would be on your list, then launch your ad campaign. Your ad will appear only to the emails you listed. We’ve launched monthly promotions, company branding, cross promotions and several others. Every campaign works well and produces results.
Example Campaigns
Let provide a sample service campaign and a sample product campaign.
The Service Campaign
Service is hardwood flooring. We had a leading hardwood flooring company in the 1980’s and 1990’s that has seen business drop off considerably after 2008-09. They advertised heavily in the phonebook of the local areas and had very little going on online. The owner was approaching retirement and had a firm belief that “this is the way I did for 30 years why would I change now?” They laid off several workers and are now dipping into retirement to keep the business running.
After an extreme arm wrestle with the owner they reluctantly hired us to deploy our strategy. We redesigned their main website, built 2 feeder websites. One feeder website was new install of hardwood floors with half the website designated to commercial and the other half to residential. The other website was designated to hardwood floor refinishing. Optimizing each site for the local areas they serviced.
We held pricing from the visitors until the joined the list on all websites. We ran pay per click campaigns in the beginning while waiting for our SEO to take effect. We had two list, one commercial and the other residential.
We generated over 100 leads a week with pay per click and 25 leads with SEO once it started to kick in. SEO leads capped at 50 leads a week and we maintained our 100 leads with ppc.
About six months into working with the company, they hired three more teams of workers to keep up with the business. We launched our social media campaign with a refinishing focus. This campaign produced so much business the company needed to hire commission sales reps to handle the demand for appointments. They ended up scheduling and sub-contracting some smaller jobs out local contractors.
The Product Campaign
The company was in the weight loss industry. They sold weight loss products direct to consumer on their e-commerce website. This owner was a breeze to work for and with on the campaign. We laid out our strategy and signed a deal that day.
We slightly revamped the current website. The site was in great shape, it just needed some work on the CTA’s (Call to Action). The CTA’s launched were “register to see pricing” and “coupon code”.
We build several feeder websites with some aimed at gaining ground in local searches and others to gain ground in national searches. We started a PPC campaign as well as SEO.
The leads increased in the first month from 59 to 301. The second month they generated 972 leads! Sales skyrocketed and as of the time of this article they already landed 900+ leads in the first two weeks of this month! We look forward to the results when we launch the social campaign.
Our proven strategy is employed by many online marketing agencies. Hopefully, this is something you can research and deploy yourself. We’re also glad to speak to you about this strategy in helping your business.
We would like to welcome you to our website. We’re currently in the building mode and our work will be released shortly. Hopefully, we can take this post down soon. In the meantime, Happy Marketing!
