Luring clients and employees to shore

From Kenneth Jepson, Seattle WA

Begin with the End in mind…

The Karps have identified 3 of the top 4 frustrations that over 80% of small business owners struggle with nationwide:

Team
Money
Exit Strategy
Time

Barry alluded to a goal of exiting the business after doubling their current earnings. Not a bad idea, since the Karps are still young and might enjoy spending more time cruising around the world as pampered guests, rather than frenetic business owners. Though – with their apparent energy and spirit – I wouldn't be surprised if they can’t sit still for too long!

Barry & Julie should approach each of their concerns with the end-goal (exit strategy) in mind, and that means careful Systemization of key processes with a view toward handing over a turnkey business to their successors. Doubling earnings may provide the Karps with a nice exit – but only at a fraction of the value they could achieve by carefully systemizing their entire business and strategizing now on how & when to exit.

Done properly, they might even find alternative exits to be more rewarding. For instance, a well-systematized business – having a good team in place – can operate & even continue to grow very successfully – becoming a veritable cash cow of the happy absentee owners for some years prior to finally cashing out.

Kenneth Jepson, Business Growth Specialist
kjepson at focalpointcoaching dot com.

From Paul Burani, New York, NY

They should consider adding social media to their internet strategy. The first step would be to start a blog soliciting reactions from satisfied travelers. It's a natural spinoff because people are always eager to talk about their vacations, and in this case are likely to have photos and/or video to share. The best content can be posted to the blog to engage new and repeat business, and also help increase "long tail" hits in search engines.

From Karla Patterson, Mabank, Texas

The Karp's would achieve better customer response by including video clips of those wonderful vacation destinations on their website.

There are many interesting ways to market with video on the web. In addition to the professionally created destination videos, the Karp's can offer a discount on future trips to customers who post their own vacation videos. Their customers can post those videos on product review sites, such as ExpoTV.com, or on sites like YouTube.com, and Google.com.

Additionally, videos posted to YouTube.com and Google.com can be embedded on the Shore Trips website.

The "Reviews" section is lengthy, and can definitely be improved with customer testimonial videos.

Karla Patterson, Producer
Video 7 Production Co., Inc.

From Rob Wood, Daly City, CA

I am the special projects director for HyperGold Web Services, a web design, development and marketing firm just outside San Francisco. Jean-Pierre Khoueiri has covered many of the technology issues I noticed when browsing the shoretrips.com site, and I would only add that the site lacks internal text links that would help search engines index the site.

Since the technical issues have been covered pretty thoroughly, I will focus my comments on the content, both from a search engine and user experience point of view.

What is the mission? The site lacks a descriptive introduction of the company's mission and purpose on the home page. Even though the About Us page states a mission ("Their mission is to allow you to enhance your island trip, whether you arrive by boat or plane."), and then goes on to specify the Carribean as the place they love, the website is not about the carribean, nor is it specifically focused on island trips. (To illustrate this, Google "bermuda excursions", and shoretips.com comes up first; Google "caribbean excursions," and there's nothing in the first 100 results.)

The site is actually about adventure trips where land meets water – not about islands or the Caribbean. When a website–or any marketing material, actually–has a confused message, the prospective customer is likely to become confused as well. The home page of a website has approximately 6-8 seconds to grab and hold a visitor's attention, and to do that, the text has to be sharp, concise and compelling. It seems as though the owners are thinking that the products (excursions) will sell themselves – a common mistake of business owners who are too involved in the nuts and bolts of their day-to-day operations to be able to see their enterprises objectively.

The mission of the website should be to convert the visitor into a buyer. Every square inch of every page, from the copy to the images to the navigation, should be tailored to get the visitors into a kayak, onto a cruise ship, bus, or whatever, as quickly as possible. That's what the qualified visitor is there for, right?

It pains me to say this, but most web developers do not understand even the basic fundamentals of marketing. Technology is not the message – it is the medium by which the message is delivered. The message for shoretrips.com should be: We have every possible shoreline adventure trip you can imagine, from tropical islands to rugged Alaskan wilderness. We're affordable, we're trustworthy, and it's easy to order from us. Here's how…

I tried ordering a trip, and as jean-Pierre pointed out, it's easy to get lost in the rhetoric. If Shoretrips were clients of Hypergold, the first thing I would do would be to help them analyze every element of the entire website in terms of its mission, and then suggest wording and navigation that would streamline accomplishing it.

Rob Wood, HyperGold

From Jean-Pierre Khoueiri

After reading your recent article on ShoreTrips, I thought I’d put my SEO chops to good use. Here is my view on ShoreTrips.com. From SEO to user navigation suggestions & tips, I hope this helps.
First of all, I checked wether your non-www domain (shoretrips.com) was 301 redirected to the www version (www.shoretrips.com). It wasn’t so I’ll explain why it should be.
301 Re-Direct
The Problem
Search engines consider http://site.com and http://www.site.com different websites. As a result, if your website has been linked-to from other websites using a mix of the two URLs you are effectively splitting the potential benefit of valuable link popularity.

NOTE- There is a actually a 1,000 in-bound link difference between the non-www and the www version of http://www.shoretrips.com HUGE!

The Solution
Using a 301 redirect on the “non-www” version of the URL, which is essentially a “permanent” redirect in server talk, you can effectively consolidate all of your link popularity to a single URL. This consolidation will serve to increase your websites chances of obtaining and maintaining top rankings.

User Navigation

If you would like to dramatically increase the number of clicks on the different destination choices located on the homepage, simply underline the geographical locations and change the links color to blue. This simple, but often over looked tactic increases click through, by making the link easily identifiable to your visitors. After all, from the early days of the web, links are blue and underlined!

Also underline the links on the left hand navigation bar. You don’t have to underline the top lever horizontal navigation tabs/links as these are understood to be links.

Trust

I noticed you made the smart move of adding the BBB Better Business Bureau Logo to your left hand side bar, the BBB also has an BBB ONLINE logo, that you have to jump through some hoops for, but it’s well worth it.

Also, consider registering for the Hacker Safe and Verisign logos which have shown to increase sales of up-to 14% or more on some sites when placed near the checkout button through out the shopping process.

Checking Out

Your checkout process is so tedious that I wasn’t buying anything and I was annoyed! Imagine when someone actually wants to spend money.

First off, REMOVE all road blocks to checkout.

Forget registration, until they’ve already input their credit card info, this way their time is invested and they’ve mentally already made the purchase. HOwever, if you ask someone to register first, you’ll lose a ton of business, because, most people are too lazy to fill in stuff, they just want to give you their money and run.

I’m old and I can’t see your intsy bitsy font!
Your font is so small that I have trouble reading your content. Additionally, your top level navigation tabs are choppy and of poor quality imaging, that I feel I’m dealing with an unprofessional company.

Logo doesn’t link to homepage

The gravest of errors. Please, always remember to make it intuitive for your visitor to reach your homepage and there’s no better way than to link your logo to your homepage from every page on your site.

Dynamic URLs vs. Static URLs

There are several issues you may want to consider when choosing dynamic URL’s orstatic ones.

Here is a video from Google’s own Matt Cutts explaining some of the pros and cons: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6860320126300142609

Websites that utilize databases which can insert content into a webpage by way of a dynamic script like PHP or JavaScript are increasingly popular. This type of site is considered dynamic. Many websites choose dynamic content over static content. This is because if a website has thousands of products or pages, writing or updating each static by hand is a monumental task.

There are two types of URLs: dynamic and static. A dynamic URL is a page address that results from the search of a database-driven web site or the URL of a web site that runs a script. In contrast to static URLs, in which the contents of the web page stay the same unless the changes are hard-coded into the HTML, dynamic URLs are generated from specific queries to a site's database. The dynamic page is basically only a template in which to display the results of the database query. Instead of changing information in the HTML code, the data is changed in the database.

But there is a risk when using dynamic URLs: search engines don't like them. For those at most risk of losing search engine positioning due to dynamic URLs are e-commerce stores, forums, sites utilizing content management systems and blogs like Mambo or WordPress, or any other database-driven website. Many times the URL that is generated for the content in a dynamic site looks something like this:

http://www.somesites.com/forums/thread.php?threadid=12345&sort=date

A static URL on the other hand, is a URL that doesn't change, and doesn't have variable strings. It looks like this:

http://www.somesites.com/forums/the-challenges-of-dynamic-urls.htm

Static URLs are typically ranked better in search engine results pages, and they are indexed more quickly than dynamic URLs, if dynamic URLs get indexed at all. Static URLs are also easier for the end-user to view and understand what the page is about. If a user sees a URL in a search engine query that matches the title and description, they are more likely to click on that URL than one that doesn't make sense to them.

A search engine wants to only list pages its index that are unique. Search engines decide to combat this issue by cutting off the URLs after a specific number of variable strings (e.g.: ? & =).

In my opinion and that of other Internet professionals, sites with static URL’s fare better.

You Don’t have a SiteMap?

SiteMaps

The Sitemaps Protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. Sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol, and complement robots.txt, a URL exclusion protocol.

Sitemaps are particularly beneficial in situations

* when users cannot access all areas of a website through a browsable interface. In these cases, a search engine can't find these pages. For example, a site with a large "archive" or "database" of resources that aren't well linked to each other (if at all), only accessible via a search form.
* where webmasters use rich AJAX or Flash, and search engines can't navigate through to get to the content.

The webmaster can generate a sitemap containing all accessible URLs on the site and submit it to search engines. Since Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Ask use the same protocol now, having a sitemap would let the biggest search engines have the updated pages information.

Sitemaps supplement and do not replace the existing crawl-based mechanisms that search engines already use to discover URLs. By submitting Sitemaps to a search engine a webmaster is only helping that engine's crawlers to do a better job of crawling their site(s). Using this protocol does not guarantee that your webpages will be included in search indexes nor does it influence the way that pages are ranked by a search engine.

More information on sitemaps implementation here http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

I hope this helps! If you would like to contact me for further questions my email is jp@constantclick.com http://www.constantclick.com

P.S- Don’t judge our new site yet, we just changed it and we’re making updates in between our clients projects.

From Betsy Harper, Sales and Marketing Search, Beverly, MA

The Karps can go a long way towards hiring the right people and keeping them doing just a few simple things. First, make sure in the reference check stage of hiring they ask the right questions. They can email me and I will send them a reference checking sheet that works very, very well in finding out critical info on their potential hire.
Also, make sure their benefits package is a good one. There's nothing more frustrating than losing a good employee because you don't have the right benefits in place. It's a real competitive edge in today's candidate-constrained market. For example, vacation is a cheap benefit. Make sure you start with three weeks. For the right team, it's worth it – and they'll love you and won't leave you!

From Gleb Esman

ShoreTips website has rather interesting-looking design. Although it's text contents and link structures need a big makeover to attract free organic traffic from search engines.
For example internal link "Bermuda" encoded as http://www.shoretrips.com/common/search2.asp?rcode=BER
For google to rank that page for "bermuda" keyword – it better to have this word to appear within URL.
Many pages has title tag that starts with "Welcome to ShoreTrips® – Your Guide to Shore Excursions". I think most of them. And this is what Google rank them for! Try to search google for "welcome to ShoreTrips" phrase – and you see the website on solid first and second position on the very first page of Google organic listings. Sadly potential clients don't search for this phrase. Replacing this standard title to something more descriptive and specific to different destination that company offers – would definitely change the picture in organic traffic to the better.
ShoreTrips.com site has already excellent page rank for many pages on Google – thanks to intense linkbuilding work by the owners. I think just by taking a few good steps to optimize internal site structures would make a world of difference. I'd suggest to perform these steps:
- Rewrite title tags of pages to include important keywords.
- Change internal URLs (if possible) to include keywords.
- Follow earlier advice about bold/italic/underscored keywords within the text.
- Add proper H1, H2, H3 headings to the pages
- Add more interesting travel-specific text information into the site.

I actually see the hardest part of work already accomplished – that was earning a good ranking at major search engines. The only steps are left – is to do a bit of internal cleanups to tip search engines *what* you want to rank for.

Gleb Esman, SEO Consultant for MENSK Technologies
gesman@mensk.com

From Tony Karrer, El Segundo, CA

The previous comment about doing SEO is good advice. In fact, they likely can change their system to make it very search engine friendly based on the data set they have.

Their system should also be getting much better and richer content from the excursion operators. This would improve the value of the site, help in SEO, and likely convert much better.

Unfortunately, the site doesn't look like a $4M business. It looks much smaller and riskier. As a traveler or travel agent do I feel safe?

The other thing that struck me here is the comment that you pay $60K in paid search and get $20K in return. Likely everything you are doing is very measurable and you should figure out what's working and not working. You turn on spending in a particular area, you see what works, you ramp what works, you turn off what doesn't. That's one of the wonderful things about online.

Of course, you first need a site that's really going to convert.

Congrats on the success of the business. I hope some of this helps.

From Dan Salas, San Diego, California

Those are some great suggestions. Looks like ShoreTrips.com could use some SEO (search engine optimization) improvements such as focusing on keywords in the page title and (currently nonexistent) header. Plus with their wealth of experience, the Karps could improve traffic by spreading their knowledge through article marketing. Hope that helps!