Matrix Group International

Month: September 2018

  • How Do You Compete with Free?

    How Do You Compete with Free?

    I love Audible, the audiobook app owned by Amazon. I have a monthly subscription because listening to audiobooks with my sons has transformed car rides, plane rides and folding laundry.

    I usually have extra credits available because it takes us forever to listen to an 8-hour book in 15-minute chunks. But this summer’s trips have made me burn through my credits as we listened to the entire Percy Jackson series.

    Tonight, as I faced a mountain of laundry and with no Audible credits available until later this week, I had a conundrum:

    Listen to something again, buy more credits, or borrow an audiobook from the library?

    I decided free was the best solution for tonight. I love the Overdrive app that lets me borrow ebooks from my local Alexandria library. But I had never borrowed an audiobook. How hard could it be? Turns out, very.

    I did a search and found a bunch of great audiobooks available to borrow, even though Crazy Rich Asians has a waiting list a mile long. I downloaded The Wishing Spell with no issues. Trouble was, I could not figure out HOW to listen to it via the Overdrive app. There’s not an easy and obvious play button. I turned to Google. I was directed to try Overdrive Listen, which I couldn’t find in the app or the app store. I tried the website, I verified my account on my computer and iPad. Still no luck. I kept trying.

    After about 20 minutes, I gave up. I bought something on Audible and I will likely stick with Audible in the future. Because even though my local library has audiobooks, Audible makes it sooooo easy and such a wonderful experience to listen to audiobooks.

    In his book, The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly says most content these days is free, if you are willing to spend the time looking for it.

    If content is free, where’s the value?

    In the case of Audible, the value lies in the user experience. It’s so easy to log in to Amazon, find an audiobook and pay for it. Within a second, the book is on my phone and iPad. Within a minute, I can be listening. If I start listening on my phone and then switch to my iPad, Audible knows and lets me jump to the right spot. In this case, even though I could have gotten the same audiobook for free, I chose to pay for the user experience.

    How do YOU compete with free?

  • What REALLY Matters for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

    What REALLY Matters for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

    I do a lot of SEO consulting for clients. Clients want to know: how to optimize their websites for Google, how to drive more organic traffic to their sites, and what keywords they should focus on for optimization.

    At Matrix Group, we spend a lot of time on the mechanics of our client sites so that search engines can easily find them and index content.

    But here’s the single, most important question I ask clients to ask themselves when developing their content and SEO strategy:

    What are people typing into Google where YOU and YOUR SITE are the answer?

    Because most people want to go direct to content AND because Google is so darn effective, a huge chunk of your members, customers and potential customers simply type a natural language query into Google. They will type questions like:

    When is the ABC conference?
    What do I need to do to become a ….?
    What is the best training for (fill in the blank) professionals?
    How many credits do I need to become a ….?
    How much does it cost to…?

    If you don’t know what your members and customers are typing into Google, find out by:

    • Looking at the incoming organic search terms driving traffic to your site. Most of this information is blocked by Google, but it’s worth looking to see what’s available in your Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.
    • Looking at the search terms and phrases people type on your site search. If you aren’t logging this, start now and look at the report monthly.
    • Asking your customers what they typed into Google recently where they either expected to find a link on your site or expected a resource related to your profession or industry.
    • Going to https://trends.google.com and researching the top queries related to your business.

    Once you have a collection of these valuable search queries, make sure you have content (and lots of it) that matches those queries. Heck, you should be writing blog posts, news items and FAQs that perfectly match your most important queries.

    Yes, your website should also be mobile-friendly, be well structured, have clean CSS, have permalinks, have alt tags, yada, yada. But all of these technical requirements mean nothing if you don’t have the content your target audiences are looking for. Give it to them and make it easy for Google to match your content with your customers.