MSEOKING - How Do I Improve My Web Site Conversion Rate? Part 3

Did you really want to improve your web site conversion rate? Do read my article below to find out how to improve your web site conversion rate.

Question 1

How do keywords effect your conversion rate in terms of SEO/SEM (search engine optimization/marketing)?

Keywords are important for two reasons.

Firstly by using the keywords which relate to your reader you get listed by search engines accordingly meaning that people can find you. Notice that I phrased the last sentence carefully. I said 'keywords which relate to your reader'. It's important to understand that what you consider 'key words' might not be the keywords your visitors are using to reach you.

Secondly and from my point of view more importantly keywords help to qualify your audience after they have arrived at your web site. If you click through from a search engine to a web site and the headline or first paragraph don't strike you as relevant to what you're looking for you're likely to 'bounce' (in other words leave the site). The key words you use help to assure your visitor they are in the right place.

Good use of keywords embedded in your copy and content will firstly help you to attract the right kind of people and secondly help to effectively qualify them as being in the right place. If you manage to attract and qualify them, the reader is then more likely to click through to find out more about what your website is about. If they do that, there is a much higher chance that they will convert to your desired goal.

A good SEO or SEM company in my opinion is one that understands that it's about answering the visitors' needs, not simply packing the website with related key words and phrases.

Question 2

What Is PPC (pay per click) and is it worth the money? Does it effect conversion?

Pay per click (or PPC) is when you set-up an account with a search engine (Google or Overture for instance) and write ads which appear when a certain keyword is requested by a visitor to the search engine. If a visitor clicks your ad you pay a predefined fee to the search engine. PPC done correctly is a good way to drive people interested in your product or services to your website and clever PPC marketing should positively effect conversion.

One of our clients recently asked me about a PPC campaign (run by another company) that was converting poorly. The reason it was converting poorly is because the ad was optimized to be clicked through and not optimized to qualify the reader. To explain in more detail, the product in the ad was a mobility scooter costing $1850. The ad explained you could get great discounts on mobility scooters and therefore the click through on the ad was quite high. Therefore it was an expensive campaign for our client which didn't convert into sales.

In my opinion this particular ad should try to qualify the reader more by having the price and location in the ad. My reasoning is that a fair percentage of visitors who are interesting in purchasing an expensive item like a mobility scooter will want to see it first. Therefore a good way to actually sell this particular product is to tell the reader the price and location so they know without going to the website whether the product is for them. If they click through and look it doesn't matter if they don't purchase but then come to the physical store and buy because they know the product is in their home town. Price in the ad pre-qualifies that they have the money. So if they have the money, are in the market and are in the same city there is a much higher chance of a purchase.

Another thing you should remember in PPC campaigns is the relevance of the ad to your landing page. It's an often overlooked problem that the PPC ad doesn't relate directly to the landing page. In the case of our client they did this correctly by linking the Google ads directly to the page about mobility scooters. A common mistake however is to link the ads to a home page which expects the visitor to work to find what it is you're selling.

Too many PPC companies work on click through as their gauge of success. They see it as their job to drive the traffic rather than convert it. The idea of successful PPC marketing is simple economics. You spend less than you earn from the visitors that arrive and make a profit. However ads that use the shotgun approach aren't doing you any favors. Ads that you're paying for should bring in very interested and pre-qualified visitors that convert at a higher level than free traffic.

Question 3.

When people first arrive at your website they are a mixed crowd (coming from everywhere with different expectations) how do you cater for them all?

You can't please everyone and it's fatal to try to do so. You have to figure out your best chance of business from your audience and cater to that area of business. If you have a large varied audience or are running some kind of portal then you should have a clear strategy to attract people to dedicated sections of your website.

For instance in the field of small business there are 1000's of different wants, needs and requirements to cater for. Your landing page (home or index page) is going to have a very hard time catering for all of those people effectively. 

So quite simply don't try. Figure out by measuring how people find you, what the biggest segment of traffic look for and cater for that group. Then take the second biggest segment of traffic and develop a different landing page for them, using content (and embedded keywords) more relevant to their wants and needs. 

It's possible to develop big websites which cater for a variety of different audiences but not all in the same page.

For instance, a small business owner in need of a sample contract of employment isn't immediately going to be interested in accountancy services. He might be interested in a resources section which has sample documents for download and lawyers who cater for small businesses. 

If therefore this visitor arrived to find a website with a plethora of choices when all he wants is a sample contract then he is likely to leave.

If however a section of your website was dedicated solely to business documents and sample downloads for small businesses and the visitor clicks through to this page from a search engine, there is a much higher chance he will browse to find what he is looking for. If then he sees that you have more resources (like an accountancy portal link) then he may even bookmark your site before leaving and that's what you want, repeat visitors.

Question 4.

I know about testing, but how much traffic (people landing on the test page) do you need to determine if something is not working?

Again the focus is where your visitors are coming from. If you have well targeted traffic arriving at your pages (i.e. PPC or strategic links) a fair sample size is when 1000 people have visited the site (or test page). At least that's the minimum we use to make any decisions with. When traffic is less targeted and bounce rates are higher then you have to make a decision based on larger numbers. If for instance one week 500 visitors arrived at your website which weren't your target audience, it's fair to say that you should discount them from your testing.

It all depends on you knowing where your visitors are coming from which requires a good measurement tool.

Question 5.

Is it really necessary to be listed at the top of the search engines? What are the other alternatives that clients should consider or is this perceived 'holy grail' really something we should all be chasing?

Being at the top of the search engines is not entirely necessary but it certainly helps. You should try to get a listing on the first page of results for your chosen keywords. Put simply if people have to look through to link number 8074 on Google to read about your products and services then you're not likely to be found.

For example if you do a Google search for 'improving website conversion' our site appears in the top position as we've optimized for that key phrase. We hoped that this is what our potential visitor will key in when doing a search. However while this was part of our strategy it was only a very small part as you cannot rely on search engine algorithms to pay your bills.

The alternative and safety net to relying on the all powerful search engine algorithm is to find strategic partners who like what you do and want to re-print your information. That is what people go online to do, find information and surprisingly not enough businesses realize this.

Strategic linking while harder work than submitting your site to search engines works very well. The subscription conversion rate average from our top strategic partners is 31%. By that I mean nearly a 3rd of the visits coming from the partners who re-print our articles subscribe. 

Because the partners we're working with are well known and highly respected they are a great qualification vehicle. Upon visiting our partner website, the visitor reads what we've said (in articles, forum posts, blog entries, advertisements etc.), like what they see, click through to our site and subscribe. In this way the reader arrives warmed up to what you have to say so the conversion rate is much improved.

The added benefit of this is that the more outbound links you have pointing to you, the higher your ranking gets on many of the search engines. Another benefit is that even if you can't get listed on search engines directly for all your keywords, some of the partner sites will do so due to their own visibility, so more paths flow to you. This is a far more effective strategy than SEO/SEM alone.

Summary

This article has been about one subject, relevance. You begin with keywords which relate to and qualify your readers. This helps with search engine visibility and means your visitors feel like they are in the right place when they arrive at your website. PPC campaigns should qualify your audience initially and when clicked should land at a highly relevant and specific landing page. This means your advertisements are working for you and not simply driving traffic which isn't targeted well enough. Your web site message should not try to cater for everyone, it should be specific and relevant to a particular target market. This means that you can focus your message in relation to what your visitor wants. Finally you should find strategic partners who work in related industries with similar target audiences to your own. This means you improve your own visibility to your target audience. In simple terms being relevant means putting the right offer in front of the right people and by getting more of the right people to your website, you improve your conversion rates considerably.

MSEOKING - How Do I Improve My Web Site Conversion Rate? Part 2

Did you really want to improve your web site conversion rate? Do read my article below to find out how to improve your web site conversion rate.

Question 1

Does it help to track visitor behavior on websites through software?

Yes is the simple answer. No debate is required but I'll offer a simple explanation. If you don't measure, how do you expect to know what to improve? You can guess and hope you get it right, but if you have effective tracking software, then you simply have facts in front of you.

Effective measurement is more than simply having good software though; it's analyzing why things happen. One thing we measure is bounce, the number of people arriving at one page and then leaving without doing anything. The lower the bounce rate the better, because it means people are using the site more effectively.

One perfect example comes from a recent client. She had two pages with different articles on her site with exactly the same navigation left and centre. Most articles had a bounce rate of about 53%, but one had a better bounce of about 50% and another had a much worse bounce of around 90%. 

We looked at both and found that the one with the 50% bounce was much more relevant to the reader arriving at the page. It had better and more relevant links at the bottom of the article than the one with 90%. We concluded that by being relevant on the poor page in the same way, the bounce rate would be reduced. 

We would simply not have known that this was occurring at all without tracking software. So yes, it most definitely helps to track visitor behavior.

Question 2

What measurement software tools would you recommend?

We use IRIS Metrics. However apart from IRIS, I would also recommend browser-based software such as HitBox, WebTrends Live, RedSheriff, and Omniture. Generally, you get what you pay for. And while these systems are not cheap, they do provide the level of detail required to run an effective web campaign.

People have asked me if it's possible to use webalizer (free log software) to run an effective web measurement campaign. While it's possible to get a lot of useful information from free and cheap systems, you don't get path tracking, bounce rates, repeat visitor information, accurate visitor counts, accurate page counts and loads more information which is critical if you want to base business decisions on your measurements.

Question 3.

What is the difference between log-based and browser-based measurement?

Tracking tools that rely on server-based measurement are typically programs that are installed on your web server (by your ISP if your site is hosted) or installed locally on your PC using the log files taken from the server. Server-based measurement programs measure activity based on the text files held on the web server (referred to as log files).

The way that browser-based measurement (or ASP measurement) works is that information from each browser that visits your website is recorded, usually in a database, and then the data is manipulated into reports you can read. Typically, these services ask you to paste some JavaScript code into your web pages. A cookie is used to determine which user is accessing the site. This is then tracked on a remote server and you log in to view the reports.

I recommend the use of ASP measurement because it only measures how people using a web browser use your website.

The log files record everything visiting your pages. They need a number of added filters to stop email harvesters, search engines and a variety of other software generated crawlers or bots from being counted as 'visitors'; without them, you can get seriously skewed results. 

Server access is often required to get log file filtering right; otherwise, you're relying on your ISP to report your tracking correctly. The log files for one of our clients had 10 times as many page counts and visits recorded than shown by using an ASP. That's a 1000% error!

Question 4.

What is an average conversion rate?

This is a very good question and is the topic of serious debate. In other marketing industries they don't guess. They have standards that everyone follows. It's what's needed in online marketing before any real answer can be given. 

Analytics companies, the big research companies, and digital media associations are going to have to come together to define these standards and then people are going to have to follow what is agreed before accurate numbers can be delivered consistently.

Currently, we're in the process of trying to establish a worldwide benchmark with a number of other prominent people (The Web Analytics Association and the IAB to mention two) in the industry who also want to know the answer to this question. 

But meanwhile, here are some statistics we've gathered from different sources published both recently and over the last few years. I have figures for 3 types of websites: sales (e-commerce), lead generation, and subscription-based websites.

Generally, sales sites seem to range between a 0.5% and 8% with the average rate being 2.3% according to FireClick statistics published this year and figures published in 2003 by e-consultancy.com. In 2000, the average figure for sales conversion as published by shop.org was 1.8%. 

The high-end figures, I hasten to add, are the top e-tailers according to all sources. My own experience shows sites hitting between .5% and 5.3% so this seems to correlate with the published figures. Of course since there is no defined standard, these numbers have to be taken as a rule of thumb.

The only source we have for lead generation sites is e-consultancy.com. They quote 2-3% of users completing an optional or free registration process, with 5% being best in class. Our own experience again falls within the same ballpark.

Subscriptions to sale conversion is typically between 1 and 7% again the source is e-consultancy.com

We don't have figures for visitor to subscription conversion, but our own experience with clients has been between 1 and 8%. Our own site has consistently hit 15% for 6 months though the traffic is pretty well targeted and our methods very well tested.

Question 5.

How do you go about consistently improving conversion?

This is the million dollar question. What it really boils down to is treating web marketing as a science. We do it by consistently measuring how people use a website. Over time you will learn what works and what doesn't and stop wasting your time on the things that don't work.

First we look at the technical aspect of the website. It's amazing how many people overlook and ignore thousands of people who don't use Windows XP with Internet Explorer at a screen resolution of 1024x768. First make sure that you develop something that works for everyone.

One of the next areas we look at is where the traffic comes from. It allows you to concentrate your efforts on your best chance of generating converting traffic. Then we get into reducing the average website bounce rate. 

The lower the average bounce, the higher the number of people surfing your website and seeing the value of your offer. The higher the number who see your offer, the better the chance of a sale. Checking bounce rates also usually brings up some juicy problems to be solved.

Then look at testing and improving copy and graphical content, running split tests and measuring bounce rates on copy or simply testing the click-through on links. We do much more, but the basic premise is this: test and measure, follow up with experimentation, and then with more testing and more measuring. Sounds like science class doesn't it?

Summary

In part three of this series of articles we'll be looking at where traffic arrives from and how that effects conversion, specific search engine queries, PPC issues and other general topics. To summarize, I am suggesting that if you begin to scientifically measure and improve your websites based on facts and findings, not guesswork and theory, you will begin to improve your conversion rates.

MSEOKING - How Do I Improve My Web Site Conversion Rate? Part 1

Did you really want to improve your web site conversion rate? Do read my article below to find out how to improve your web site conversion rate.

Question 1.

What do you mean by conversion? Do you mean getting someone to answer the simplest call to action such as "read more here" or actually selling a product or service?

What you're talking about here are two different ways to measure your website. "Read More Here" is what I would call a variable affecting your conversion rate. I call these kinds of variables "Micro Conversions" because they are all small (microscopic even) steps toward a full conversion. 

A micro conversion is something that you should test and measure. "Read More Here" might get a worse click-through rate than "Click here to find out how to win a month's supply of vintage wine." So by improving this click through, you get the person browsing to take another small step toward your final website goal. By doing this, you improve your overall conversion rate, which in this case is to get someone to register or subscribe to win a month's supply of vintage wine. 

Micro conversions can be tracked by measuring the click through of links, or the read time for content, or the bounce rate for headlines and copy. Full conversion is persuading your visitors to do what you want them to do. In my example, it would be registering to win wine, but it could be subscribe to a newsletter, download an audio file, buy a product, sell a service or whatever, but it should reflect what your website's business objective is.

Question 2.

What strategies would you suggest when there is no "online" conversion possible? I need them to call me for more info, to learn more and to eventually give them a proposal.

There is no such thing as "no online conversion". You're looking for leads who will eventually phone you but the visitor is the one with the power. If you don't give your visitors a reason to let you continue to have a dialog with them, then they won't. Using opt-in is one answer. 

If, for instance, you ask for a name, email address and telephone number from your visitor so that he can then get useful information from you in the form of a free report or audio file, you do two things. First, you qualify the visitor as someone who is interested in your services, and second, you get permission to contact him/her again. 

You need to build into your website a powerful reason for your visitors to give you permission to email or talk to them rather than expect someone to pick up the phone. In your case, you say they need to ring you to learn more. Put what they need to learn into some form that they can opt in to get, such as a white paper, report or audio file. 

Then you have a conversion rate that is the percentage of people who give you permission to continue the dialog with them by giving you their email address or phone number so that they can learn more about your offering. People visit a website to get information, so give them the means to get it.

Question 3.

What if the product you sell is also sold by several others on other websites? How do you get someone who is browsing the Internet to notice your site and want to order from you?

In offline marketing, a successful tactic is differentiation. It's no different online. If you stand out from your competition, then you get noticed. What makes you different (not necessarily better, just different) from your competition? 

A USP makes an enormous difference to conversion rates. We improved subscriptions by 11% per month for six months by differentiating ourselves. The second point is that your site should be of use to your visitor. 

The one thing that all people online have in common is that when they browse they are looking for information. So give your visitors what they want in the form of education. 

If your potential customers become educated about your offer and take away something useful from your website, they will remember you over your competition.

Question 4.

How do you get the address, telephone number and name of the owner of any company that you're trying to get in touch with to see if they would be interested in what you sell?

You need to get permission from the visitor to get that information. It can't be done with any tracking tools available. There is a very good reason for this and it's called privacy. 

If you or I went online and could have our names, addresses and phone numbers tracked by software, it could be potentially dangerous. Imagine if you were online and were talking in a chat room about going on holiday in a faraway land for the next few weeks and your personal information could be gathered. 

The person who sees that information then knows when to go to your address and rob you while you're away. It's OK to track browser behavior because no personal details are ever tracked. I for one hope it stays that way.

Question 5.

What should one look for in the web logs to determine conversion rates?

Web log files are a problem because they record everything. Web logs record every request to your site's pages from search engine indexes, to email harvester software, link harvesters and visitors. So first you need to filter out from log files the information that isn't relevant to visitors. 

Then you're looking for unique visitors (not visits) or unique sites. Once you have that filtered figure, you have the approximate number of visitors coming to your site, still not close to 100% because of proxy servers recording multiple visitors as one browser, but it's as close as you can get with log files. 

Then you divide the number of people who complete the conversion action by the total visitors. That is your conversion rate. If you can get software that doesn't use logs like IRIS Metrics or log software that works out the filtering like Web Trends, it makes your job much easier.

Question 6.

What factors have the biggest impact on conversions on my web site?

The short answer is differentiation, target marketing, your site's relevance to your desired audience, measurement, experimentation, and most importantly trust.

Differentiation is the first step in the process. You must find a way to stand out from the competition. It should start with the domain name, and continue throughout your entire website's strategy.

Then in your content, your copy and your design, you must smack your target audience between the eyes. You have to find out exactly what it is they want and answer the wants and needs of that audience.

Relevance is hugely important, too. If you're running a campaign on Overture or Google with certain keywords, your audience should land at exactly the right place after typing those keywords and finding your website. 

So if the audience types "Red Vintage Wine" into Overture and your link appears, on clicking through they should be taken to the page on your site talking all about and selling red vintage wine. They shouldn't land at the home page of your website which has a small link to the red vintage wine section and 5 or 6 other types of wine for sale.

Measuring and experimenting is then the key to improving conversion rates. You can't improve conversion without measurement unless you're making educated guesses or you're just plain lucky. So get a good measurement system, learn what it's all about, and test your changes.

Finally and most importantly trust. You can't sell anything if your audience doesn't trust you. You can help them to trust you by prominently displaying your privacy policy, your shipping procedure, the fact that you use SSL encrypted protection for the forms on your site, that hundreds of satisfied customers have already bought from your store, that you make it very easy to find contact information such as a name and address as well as support via email. You could educate via your website with articles and 'how to sections' or newsletters and instill trust over time. In short, your prospect must trust you to part with his or her money.

What's next?

In part two of this series, we'll be looking at measurement software tools, the pros and cons of logs versus ASP vendors, average conversion rates, why it helps to track visitor activity using the software which is available, and what you should test and tweak to improve conversion rates.

MSEOKING - Without Conversion Rates You Don’t Know If You’re Mickey Mouse Or Mickey Mantle

Did you know, that without a conversion rate you will not able to know what are your customer want, demand on the world, how to find out what they want and you are not miss to sell it? Read my article below to find out more. 

I couldn’t agree more with the headline of this article and it’s one I’m afraid I can’t take credit for. I found this line in Paco Underhill’s book, Why We Buy – The Science Of Shopping, and found myself comparing many of the things he has measured in the retail world to the tests I’ve done with online, visitor-based activity. The conversion rate on a website is easy to measure. 

Unfortunately, businesses too busy concentrating on their bottom line most often overlook it. The point of this article is to define what a conversion rate is and show you how you can begin to start improving your own website’s conversion rate and therefore your bottom line. At the same time, I will relate my observations to Paco’s on offline retailing.

In Cyberspace No-One Can Hear You Shop

According to Paco, the main problem with websites is that, owing to media attention and the love of technology, retailers went online without knowing why. It’s true that in the late 90’s businesses were going online because their competition had, or because they feared that they would be left behind by not embracing the new technology. Not great reasons to spend time, money and resources on a website. 

he painful thing is that, since going online, most of these websites have not changed much for the better. Yes, they look nicer now, but the number of glorified poster sites I still see never ceases to amaze me. In order to combat this lack of purpose, I propose you look at four goals and adapt them to your own business requirements. One of these goals should be the primary focus of your entire website design.

1) Prospect Acquisition

To deliver qualified leads and prospects through the website.

2) Sales/E-commerce

To sell products and services online directly through an e-store.

3) In-House Cost Saving

To cut costs, usually resources such as printed material or time, by automating in-house processes online such as timekeeping systems and human resource procedures.

4) Customer Service

To improve customer service by providing answers to queries and complaints online automatically where possible.

With the goal clearly defined, it is easier to measure the effectiveness of your site because you know what to look for. Conversion is defined in relation to the goal you’ve chosen.

So measure prospect acquisition as the percentage of visitors who give you their details out of the total number of visitors to your website. Measure conversion on sales as the percentage of people buying a product against the total number of website visitors. 

Conversion on in-house cost saving is simply the number of people using the system as a percentage of the number of people supposed to be using the system. A good internal policy here will mean this is a 100% conversion rate. The number of people using the resources and systems you have put in place as a percentage of total visitors to the support web pages can give you your customer service conversion.

So why measure conversion? Because it allows you to accurately measure the impact of changes you make by measuring the performance of your website before and after the change. With that valuable information in hand, you can make adjustments accordingly.

The Butt Brush Factor

In many instances in his book, Paco refers to ‘The Butt Brush Factor’ — the way people, women in particular, don’t like enclosed spaces where other people constantly bump into them from behind. It usually led to the prospective shopper feeling frustrated or feeling uncomfortable and leaving the store or going somewhere else. You might be thinking, “well how does that relate to an online experience?” 

It is true that no-one usually bumps into you from behind while you’re sitting in front of a computer, but how many times are you made to feel irritated, uncomfortable or just downright frustrated by a website? How often do you leave one and look at another because the first one doesn’t have what you’re looking for? This ‘Butt Brush Factor’ is incredibly relevant to websites, more so I think than even in ordinary retail. Here are some examples of common online ‘Butt Brush Factors’ that you will see in many business websites.

1) Latest News.

The landing page has the latest news about the company links. What exactly is the point of having a bunch of latest news links on your landing page? What good is that to a browser arriving at your landing page knowing and caring little about your company? A browser wants to know what you can do for him right there and then, not how your company stock is doing. An ‘About Us’ section is a much more reasonable place to put these links.

2) Awards.

A landing page with awards screams, look at us, look at what we’ve achieved, aren’t we clever? It also completely wastes space on the most important page of your website. It can be compared to what Paco said when he talked about going into a car showroom and seeing manufacturer awards. That is unlikely to make much of an impression on the average shopper.

3) Poor Headlines.

‘Welcome to Company Name’ is the most common waste of a headline I ever see. Probably the company is unknown to the visitor so you’re wasting his or her time. A headline, which communicates the need of the target audience and how you can solve that need, improves reading and click through by up to 35% in recent tests we made.

4) Submit Buttons.

Why tell the visitor to ‘submit?’ Submit actually means “To yield or surrender (oneself) to the will or authority of another” according to dictionary.com, so why ask innocent web browsers to do that in order to read your monthly newsletter? Subscribe to our newsletter is much more friendly, I would say.

5) Bad Use Of Flash.

This is a common problem with media companies in particular. I understand why they do these all singing all dancing interactive flash websites, which often are works of art and showcase their ability. However ‘skip intro’ is a common link on the majority of these websites. That is because some people find them a waste of time. Why have an intro at all? Why not just have a showcase of what you can do on a normal fast, efficient website which tells me what I need to know quickly? If I decide I have the time to look at flash animations I will.

6) Poor Use Of Imagery.

I’m guilty of this myself. We used to have a picture of a squirrel flying through the air with ‘what’s your objective’ on our landing page. It might have worked had we been selling nuts or seed, but a company improving website conversion? Not really relevant! It was more a result of my ego, pride and photographic luck in capturing said squirrel with my digital camera, and then thinking of a way I could use the picture, than thinking of a good picture which was relevant to what we were trying to say and using that. This kind of thing is repeated on many websites — people with briefcases, bridges, animals and other general graphics, which can be turned with words into anything you want the image to say. But on first glance, they don’t really show any relevance. All communication should be relevant and, ideally, persuade the user to do something.

Again, conversion is an important measurement here. It can be applied to all of the changes you make to your site as you eliminate these ‘Butt Brush Factors’. Later in this article, I’ll explain how.

Attention All Shoppers…

“For the next fifteen minutes, in the frozen food section, free passion fruit sorbet for everyone” is a perfect way to instill urgency in shoppers to go to that section of the store and get the freebie. They know they only have 15 minutes, and they know that after that time they won’t get the lovely sorbet. This was Paco’s way of showing how stores could be more imaginative. The store knows that that section of the store is going to be jammed with people for that 15 minutes and can capitalize on impulse sales. That’s how it works in the retailing world, but what about online? Instilling urgency online is a major factor overlooked by many business websites. Some examples of how you might want to start employing this technique online are listed below.

1) Time Expiry Offer.

Just as in the above example, you could let your readers know they will miss out if they haven’t subscribed or bought your product by a certain time.

2) The First Number.

Your website could offer the first 50 subscribers a free e-book or could advertise that the first 50 items sold will be at a 30% discount. This could be combined with a counter showing the number of places/items left, so that the browser thinks “I have to subscribe before those places are taken up”.

3) The Nth Number Competition.

The website states that if you are subscriber number 1000, you get a free website makeover, again combined with a visible counter of the current number of subscriptions. This could be tied into a referral deal so that if the subscriber is not the lucky number and does not get the deal, at least he could be offered something for making the referral while his friend might still end up being the lucky number and win the prize.

So how does conversion relate to all these changes? The conversion rate should and can be measured in every instance.

The Science Of Online Marketing

There are two incredibly significant lines in Why We Buy:

“Science is by and large the study of very small differences” and “When you change one thing, everything changes”.

The first ‘very small difference ’ and ‘changing one thing’ situation I came across in my online marketing career was a complete mistake. I was working for a large press organization and one day I had to change some HTML code on a sales form. By mistake, I removed a voucher entry field from the form. As a result, people could no longer enter their voucher number to get a cheaper deal. 

Conversion improved by three times. I told our editor who was amazed but instructed me to put the voucher field back on the form while they figured out what to do. There was a good reason for the voucher; in fact, it was the entire reason the page was there. 

However, putting the voucher entry field back resulted in a drop in conversion to almost the identical sales that we had been getting before my mistake. The voucher idea was eventually scrapped on that page and sales sky rocketed again. The reason, we ascertained, was that visitors figured that they could get a cheaper deal with a voucher. 

The voucher could only be gotten by physically buying a newspaper and that limited us to around 10% of the audience. Nine out of ten people visiting the website did so from a place where they couldn’t buy the newspaper at that time, so it was obvious that the voucher idea could only be good for the local readers. 

This experience was a catalyst for me personally, and from then on, I began to understand the importance of measurement online. In particular, the measurement of conversion.

So in order to turn the online changes you make into a science, follow three simple rules.

1) Measure Conversion.

Conversion is a percentage, a calculation of the number of people who take the action you desire as a percentage of the total number of visitors to the page. Using percentages makes the actual number of people arriving at a page irrelevant. It becomes possible to compare a busy week with a quiet week.

2) Change one thing at a time.

An average page has lots of variables: graphics, headlines, paragraphs, sentences, links, testimonials and probably a lot more. By only changing one thing and always measuring for the same period of time (30 days is good), you will get a fair result. So for instance, if you change a headline, look at the page click-through and if possible the length of time an average visitor stayed on the page for 30 days before the change. Make the change and measure the results for the next 30 days. Then if conversion is higher (more people reading or more people clicking through), keep the change. If it’s lower, revert to what you had before.

3) Experiment.

Don’t limit yourself to headlines. Copy, content, graphics, adding competitions, etc. — try them all. But remember the rule: change only one variable at any one time.

Summary

I’ve desperately been trying to keep this article short; I think I could have written an epic on this subject. If I were in the same room as Paco Underhill, we would have an awful lot to talk about. However what I’m trying to say is that businesses should start waking up to the fact that online marketing is as much a science as Paco demonstrates in the retailing world. Measuring conversion rates online is the beginning of making it scientific.

MSEOKING - 6 Ways To Attract Search Engines To Your Website More Often

Did you want to attract Search Engine into your website more often? Still looking for the guide? I do recommended to you read my article how to attract the search engine to visit your site often.

Adding fresh, updated content to your website is the surest way to get search engines engines to spider your site more often. Search engines are known to index sites updated on a regular basis more frequently.

Updating and adding to the content on your website frequently will give you an advantage in the search results and also help you expand the number of search terms or key phrases you can get found for.

There are many tools and resources you can use to automate the process of adding fresh, updated content and creating more spider-food on your website.

Here are six ways to add fresh content to your site:

Blogs

A blog is an online diary or journal. Setting up a blog is easy and the many free blogging services make it possible for just about anyone to get started. Several blog programs allow your users to create an account and post their comments to your blog, thereby adding more fresh content for you. I use WordPress to create my own blogs.

Newsletters or Ezines

Publishing a regular newsletter or ezine is an excellent way to add content at regular intervals and get repeat traffic to your site. Archiving your newsletters online is one way of automatically updating your pages and adding new content.

Content Management Systems

Content Management Systems (CMS) allow you or your website visitors to add, edit or delete content to your website without having to create and format the pages manually. Article exchange scripts are a type of content management system.

There are many zero-cost or open-source content management systems, that are included with hosting packages and can be set up quickly. Some open-source CMS include Joomla and Drupal

Forums/Bulletin Boards

A forum or bulletin board is an excellent tool for building content and creating an online community that will bring repeat traffic. Many web hosts now provide packages that include bulletin board scripts on your server.

The best part about a forum is that it allows your visitors to build your content for you. However, it does require time and energy, and some technical knowledge to moderate and maintain forums. phpBB is a popular open-source bulletin system.

Reviews/Interviews

Reviewing and publishing a write-up on new products or resources in your field is becoming a favourite technique with affiliate marketers looking to boost their commissions. It is also an excellent way to get found for the keywords related to the product you review. You can also do regular interviews of experts in your industry and put up the transcript on your site.

RSS or Newsfeeds

RSS is the latest craze in online publishing because it allows syndication of *expert* news and content that is regularly updated at the source. Using RSS feeds you can enhance your site content without the need to write a single line on your own. Search engines love RSS feeds and are known to spider pages with such feeds more often.

MSEOKING - Beyond Hits!

Did you really want your site getting ramking and get hit beyond hits? Then you are recommended to reading my article below for how to make your site Beyond Hits!!!

Your Website visitor reports are a goldmine of information. If you don't review these on a regular basis, you can't fully evaluate the return on your Web investment. And, you could miss critical clues as to how user-friendly your site is, how effectively your message reaches your visitors, and what unmet needs they may have.

But the reports can be overwhelming - a confusing mass of graphs, numbers and URL's. How can you find the information that you really need, how do you know what to look for, and how do you make strategic decisions using the answers that you obtain?

Step 1: Knowing Your Markets

First, identify all the different types of visitor to your site, together with the reasons that they might be coming to you.

This may sound obvious, but in my experience there are nearly always visitor segments that are overlooked. Here are my starting suggestions for an association site:

• Current and prospective members 
• Board members and staff 
• Current and potential vendors, advertisers and sponsors 
• Media 
• Content seekers 
• Job seekers 
• Your competition!

If you don't have a press center on your site, you should consider it if you're interested in publicity. Reporters are increasingly looking for information online, and appreciate ready access to press releases, sample interview questions, and downloadable photographs of your key spokespeople.

The content seekers category describes visitors looking for content that you provide, but who are not prospective members. They might be searching your member database for a referral, or they might be interested in your information products - and so they're great
prospects for non-dues revenue.

Step 2: Knowing Your Goals

It's also key to know the required outcomes, not only for your overall site, but also for each individual section and page.

I have a mantra in my speaking programs:

"Every page of your site should have a strategy".

Too many pages on the Web give great information, and then tail off, with no clear call to action. They expect visitors to go back to the navigational elements, and decide what to do next - but instead, many of them will leave.

Step 3: Asking The Right Questions

Now that you have the audiences and outcomes for your site, you can start to make sense of all those numbers and graphs.

Based on what should be happening, you can formulate questions with which to approach the traffic reports to measure your site's effectiveness.

Here are some ideas:

Are your long pages effective?

Often, I see long pages with key content "below the fold" - below the first screenful of information. Many visitors won't scroll down the page if they're not immediately engaged by it; therefore they'll miss the lower elements.

Is this happening on your site? Look for clicks on the links that are further down the page - are you getting an appropriate amount of traffic to the inside sections that these lead to? How much time is the average visitor spending on your long page - are they clicking off to the first thing that catches their eye - if so, is this really where you want them to go?

Can you measure member benefits?

If you provide an online database for prospective customers to find a supplier, track how many searches are done, and how many click-through's your members receive. This can give you some powerful statements for your member benefits material.

What are the hot content areas?

Knowing your "Most Requested Pages" gives you some key clues about what's hot - and from that, which content might be worth developing further, either as a member benefit, or for non-dues income.

It can be helpful to design your site to delineate this. For example, instead of having a long page of different pamphlets, show each product on a separate page. Now you can track which ones are most sought after, and perhaps consider offering these as online, instantly downloadable e-books.

What are your conversion rates?

If there's a hot content area - a highly requested page that doesn't translate into its required outcome, something's wrong.

Possibilities include:

• You believe you have an exciting offering, but your visitors don't - so perhaps you should rethink your content or product.

• You do have an exciting offering, but the page copy isn't reflecting that effectively, or perhaps the price is too high.

• Something else is stopping visitors from completing the transaction - perhaps you're asking for too much information, or the shopping cart isn't working.

Your traffic reports may not tell you what the solution is - but they should give you a pretty clear idea of where your problems lie.

Step 4: Tweaking And Testing

The good news about the Web is that it's a great testing ground for new products and ideas. When you find an area on your site that isn't performing optimally, you can make small incremental changes, and immediately see the results reflected in your traffic reports. So you can keep tweaking until you hit the winning formula for each page.

Step 5: Don't Forget Your Internal Search Engine

Your internal search engine allows you to track the keyword searches that visitors perform once they're on your site. This also has some valuable clues:

You'll almost certainly see searches for content that should be obviously apparent. This proves that visitors won't work to find anything - but it can also give indications as to the usability of your structure and navigation.

Lots of searches for content that you don't currently provide will give you ideas for developing future products or services, based on visitor demand.

I think of Web traffic reports as "market research that cannot lie". They represent what your visitors do, unprompted, and really can contain some gold nuggets. Happy Mining!

MSEOKING - Are Search Engines Worth It Any More?

Did you think, that search engine mean every thing to your site? Are Search Engines Worth It Any More?

The "Number One" Question - the question that I (and probably every other Internet marketing expert on the planet) am most frequently asked:

"How do I get to be Number One in the search engines for widgets? After all, my company is the world's leading provider of widgets - it's ridiculous that these other nobody companies are coming up in search engines ahead of us . . . "

My response is almost always along the lines of:

"Forget that right now, and get a life!"

OK, so I am a little more tactful than that - and I do occasionally encourage an in-depth search engine optimization strategy, but usually I'll encourage clients to spend their website promotional budget in other ways.

Here are the main reasons why I'm not generally enthusiastic about free search engines:

1. You have to be really careful in choosing keywords

Many people make the mistake of focusing on very generic keywords. Not only are these even more difficult to get top placement in, but they also won't generate you targeted traffic.

A prospect approached me recently for help with a coaching site. This site promotes teleseminars to help clients implement life changes described in various motivational books. This prospect initially said that he wanted to be "Number One" on a search for "books".

I'd suggest this would be a virtually impossible challenge for any search engine optimizer. But in addition, someone searching for "books" is probably really looking for Amazon, or Barnes & Noble, and not my client's teleclasses. He could spend a lot of money for very few qualified leads.

2. You need to speak the language of your visitors

We all talk "geekspeak" - it's often second nature to us within our industry or area of expertise. And it's easy to forget that our prospects don't always use the same terminology. One of the most difficult areas in copywriting that I see is when technology sales people are trying to describe their products to a non-technical market - the result is usually incomprehensible!

But there's also the jargon that we use as a matter of pride, or because we've lost touch with how our markets think of us.

I worked recently with an association of plastic surgeons. They had their member database on their Web site, and wanted to attract visitors there to find a local practitioner.

Their "Number One" target keyword for the search engines was "rhinoplasty". Well, I can only spell this because I just looked it up for this article - but usually you and I in the general public would never think of that - of course, we'd be searching for . . . "nose jobs"!

The surgeons didn't like this at all from an academic standpoint. But they had to concede the point when I presented evidence on most common searches from the old Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool .

3. It's very passive marketing . . .

My most pressing argument for not spending too much time on free search engines is that it's a very passive form of marketing. You're relying on a prospective visitor waking up in the morning, and realizing that they need something that you might provide. Then, you're relying on them choosing the precise keywords that you've targeted for search engine optimization. It's a fairly hit or miss business.

When do I disagree with myself?

There are some exceptions to all this. I do believe that search engines are well worth it when you have a niche product or service with extremely unambiguous and well-defined keywords.

For example, an audience member in one of my recent programs was working on a Web site to sell some incredibly advanced yoyos. I did recommend a search engine strategy to him - after all, if someone puts in "yoyo" as a search term, they'd almost certainly be a qualified lead!

What do I do instead?

That's the subject of numerous other articles. To get you started, you can find twenty-three of my favourite techniques in my free tipsheet.

But in short, I much prefer aggressively seeking out sites where your target markets are likely to be reading, or searching for information. That way, you can proactively bring your ideas, products and services to them, in places where they are much more likely to be receptive and interested. And there are so many options for different budgets and campaign sizes, both online and offline.

So, are search engines worth it any more?

I'm not advocating ignoring search engines. And I do like the better paid models, such as Overture.

But I do suggest that you should be very clear about how much passive marketing you want to undertake, and whether the product or service that you're offering lends itself to this.

And if you do decide to optimize your site for search engines, pick the keywords that will be in the mindset of your customers . . . and be willing to settle for "Number Two" sometimes!