How to Use Google’s Multi-Channel Funnels

You’ve spent hours upon hours writing the perfect content for your website. It is engaging, insightful and interesting. You’ve even created helpful and illustrative graphics for your products and hand-picked photos (no stock-photos!) that grab your reader and won’t let go. If they gave out Nobel Prizes for Literature to websites, yours would be the first recipient! But- and I hate to be the bearer of bad news – not everyone who experiences your website will convert on the first time they visit.

Some products or industries simply have a long buying cycle. Perhaps you are selling an expensive product: people will want to get multiple quotes. Sometimes the person doing the initial search for a service isn’t the decision-maker, and has to pass a list of suggestions on to the powers-that-be (whether an individual or a large bureaucracy of technocrats and lawyers). Or maybe you’re my dad who takes a couple months before he decides to buy a basic, white oxford shirt.

There are two ways to measure conversions or leads from a website. By default, Google Analytics attributes goals to the “last-click” source. This means that Google Analytics credits a goal completion to the last way someone found your website. For most products or services (where someone just wants to get in touch to learn more) this is a fine way to attribute goal sources.

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Our Take: Changes to Google SERPs Display, Local Listings Integrated with Organic Results

So we may have jumped the gun here as Google appears to be testing these changes to the SERPs, but if we waited until Google stopped testing things before commenting on them then we’d still be without Gmail accounts and most other Google products.

Korey and I share outline the recent changes and share our initial thoughts, below:

Anyhow, it appears that sometime yesterday Google started testing changes to how they show the “local” (map-driven) listings in the search results.  Specifically, they seem to be doing away with the “7-pack” or “one-box” format where a map is showing (typically with up to 7 listings) immediately above the organic results and below the top 3 paid results.  Instead, they are showing the organic results higher on the page, immediately below the top 3 paid results, but this time with the local listings and related info (reviews, link to the places page, map marker, physical address) all tied to the organic listing itself.

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Q&A: Are SEO’s Responsible for Generating Leads?

I recently got an email from a friend who attended several Meetups I ran a few years back.  He had been doing SEO on the side until recently, when he started his own SEO consulting firm.  He emailed me with a problem / question:

His Question:

I’ve managed to get my clients ranking at #1 or #2 for their desired keywords, but they’re telling me that they aren’t getting many leads.  Do you feel that we’re responsible for generating leads, or just ranking them for their target keywords?

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