| |
|
|
| Webmaster Resources: Search Engine Optimization Information | |
|
|
|
How Do I Improve My Web Site Conversion Rate? Part 1
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. Steve Jackson is CEO of Aboavista, editor of The Conversion Chronicles and a published writer. You can get a free copy of his e-book sent to you upon subscription to the Chronicles web site (http://www.conversionchronicles.com).
Add to these social bookmarking sites: 
MORE RESOURCES:
Google News |
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
SEO -- Tips to Optimize Your Webpage to Compete for a High Ranking Search engine optimization (SEO) is very important to websites. If you rank high in search engines, your website are shown to a huge number of target users. Do Not Drop Your Web Site Off the Search Engine Cliff If you've been feeling like Tom Cruise climbing up the side of some remote jagged mountain in the blazing hot sun and concerned you're facing "mission impossible", chances are you own a web site.Adding to the intense thrill of web site ownership are keyword comparisons and bidding for good keyword positions in search engines. Meta Tag Tactics - Give Your Website Traffic a Boost with the Meta Tag Basics Getting your site noticed by the search engines and rewarded with top rankings is most webmasters main goal, however there are a lot of different factors that play into what the search engines are looking for, including Meta tags. So, if you don't know anything about meta tags but are interested in learning about them so you can use them to possibly increase your rankings, then read the following basic tips regarding meta tags. What You Can Expect From Search Engine Search engines will be a way for you to generate from as little as 20% to as much as 60% of your business online (depending on what other marketing techniques you use).Since there are over 130,000,000 webpages in existence (yes that is 130 million!), it is extremely important to understand how they work and how to increase your chances of being placed in the top 20 of the search results. How to Build Massive Keyword Lists As keyword marketing becomes more and more expensive and competitive, it has become essential when building your lists to focus on the maximum number of phrases and their variations that a surfer might enter into the search engines.Why?Because according to Amit Singhal, principal scientist at Google, a guy who really should know what he's talking about, over 50% of the 200 million searches performed a day have never been searched before. Maximize Your Search Engine Traffic - 13 Ways to Pull in More Visitors From the Search Engines Maximizing traffic from the search engines to your web site is not a difficult task but it does require you to think ahead and plan your Search engine optimization strategy carefully. If you have not yet built your web site and are still in the initial planning stages then you may have an easier time of it. Optimize Your Site Pt1 Listed here you will find the five of the most important points to remember when optimising your site and individual pages for the search engines.If you optimise your pages by working through these points one by one you will see a significant rise in your search engine rankings. Search Engine Optimization Tips For 2005 - Part Three Welcome to part three of our series of articles on search engine optimization. In the third and final part of our series of articles on search engine optimization we cover the topic of links, the types of links and what makes them so important. SEOs Relationship With Website Architecture SEO's Relationship With Website ArchitectureSearch engine optimization for today's search engine robots requires that sites be well-designed and easy-to-navigate. To a great degree, organic search engine optimization is simply an extension of best practices in web page design. 10 Ways to Tackle Keyword Research and Selection You need to be extremely careful with keyword research so that you don't miss excellent opportunities or aim so broadly that you target phrases that will never rank well. Here are 10 strategies to guide you along the way:1. The Myth of Rankings - Beyond Search Engine Optimization What follows is a condensed version of a conversation that happens all too frequently when I am approached by a prospect interested in search engine optimization (SEO):Prospect: We need our website optimized, because we aren't showing up for any searches. Me: What searches have you tried? Prospect: We don't show up for ANYTHING. The Role of the Robots.txt File to Improve Site Ranking! Not many web master take the time to use a robots.txt file for their website. Design A Spider Friendly Site To be successful in the search engines it's important to design your web site with the spiders in mind. Using the latest in web page design is not generally the best way to go. The Reality of Search Engine Submissions Over the last few months, search engine submissions have changed dramatically. Now is the time to analyze the way we're submitting our Web pages and to rethink our submission strategies. A Link From An Ugly Duckling Website With A PR=1 Could Give You 10 to 80 Times More PageRank Whether you want to start a business and sell on the Internet or you're an old pro and want more Internet sales, here's the easy way to do it.To get the most sales on the Internet you need to have a high PageRank on Google. How To Conceal Your Website's "Fingerprint" From The Search Engines The internet marketing industry is now flooded with various page and portal generators.In the good old days the gateway page generators did very well, earning a lot of money for many people. Writing Search Engine Friendly Webpages In order to tap the huge stream of targeted traffic an internet search engine can provide a website you need to master a few common sense principles when crafting your webpages.You can rest assured no sites receive top search engine rankings by chance in competitive keyword markets. Google vs. Yahoo -- How To Rank High On Each One Google likes incoming links, especially links from high-ranking, on-topic pages that include keywords in the link text. Google doesn't like over-optimized, high keyword densities and over use of keywords in headings, etc. Which SEO Company/Firm to Choose for SEO Services? In the last 2-3 years many new companies have mushroomed, providing cost effective seo services to their customers. In this whole galaxy of seo companies some are authentic, while others are not. Search Engine Optimization SEO Made Easy SEO is a never ending battle! So is SEO over-rated? I don't think it is. Some say that Google's automated PageRank? system and Alexa's Traffic Rank system are losing ground.
|
| Home | Site Map |
|
| © 2008 | |
