The High Search Engine Ranking Myth

It’s an easy and obvious assumption that higher search engine rankings will inevitably lead to more sales or sales leads from your website. It stands to reason that if your website was a shop on the high street and on Monday you had 20 people in your shop and on Tuesday you had 100 people in your shop that Tuesday would be be a better day for everyone. More people in my shop and more visitors to my website equals more sales – Right? Sorry – dead wrong.

Forget high search engine rankings and forget getting more people into your shop because more people does not equal more sales. Okay, maybe on a superficial level you could expect a marginal increase in sales but in terms of profit and return on investment (ROI) it’s a loss. What you need to be thinking about is your conversion rate.

Let’s go backwards a bit to go forwards: Getting more people to your shop costs money. Advertising on the radio, the TV or local press does not come cheap (And isn’t even remotely as targeted as you might think these days but that’s another story) but it does work to a degree, as does web advertising (Banner ads, Sponsored links, PR coups) but it’s costing you money. Usually quite a bit. Now if you’re like me you don’t like spending your hard earned dough on marketing efforts unless they can show a significant (or at least profitable) return on investment, and if  you’re not watching your conversion rates then I’m sorry but you’re wasting your money, both on and off-line.

Fact: It is cheaper and easier to get more sales out of your existing visitors than it is to get more visitors.

In other words, if those 20 people who came into your shop on Monday didn’t buy anything – Why spend more money to get more people into your shop on Tuesday? This is the importance of your conversion rate.

Your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website who take a desired action. For example, if 4 out of every 100 visitors bought a product from your website then your conversion rate is 4%. Of course, it is entirely up to you how you define the ‘action’ to be performed. It might be to make a purchase on your site or it might be to complete and submit an enquiry form (lead generation).

So here are the first 2 things you need to do to make more money out of your website:

1: Define the clear goals of your website (Sales, lead generation etc) and define the actions you want visitors to take.

2: Measure you conversion rate.

How do you measure you conversion rate? You obviously know how many sales you’re making and how many leads you are generating via you website, regardless of how web savvy you are – All you need for this sum is the amount of visitors you are getting to your site. If you don’t have access to this directly then your web developer or web host will certainly be able to help with this.

The metrics associated with measuring visits can also reveal all sorts of fascinating information about your website. Or more specifically, about the behaviour of people who visit your website. It is this information that really lies at the heart of improving your conversion rates.

You can uncover, not only where visitors come from (Search engines, keywords used etc) but also what pages they looked at whilst on your site, how long they spent viewing products, which product was most popular and even which pages most often encouraged people to leave your site altogether!

You can build up a picture of what is working and what is not. You will see patterns emerging that will help you iron out all the wrinkles in content and usability that might be putting off potential customers whilst building a streamlined and effective sales and marketing tool – Just like you hoped it would be when you paid a fortune to have it built!

With this sort of information, correctly interpreted you can start to make a real difference to your conversion rates in a very short space of time. Search engine rankings take a long time – conversion rates can be improved overnight.

3: Analyse website statistics to find out how your website is performing for your visitors

Now it’s time to act on the data you have gathered. If a high percentage of people are leaving your website on a specific page you might have a look at the content on that page an try to figure out what’s putting them off. Or why are they abandoning your shopping cart? Or what is wrong with the homepage that means most people don’t navigate any deeper into the site?

9 times out of 10 it will be for the most common reason people leave websites – Their problem is not being solved here, so they go and look somewhere else. Either that or they simply have no idea how to proceed.

Here are 5 tips for improving the conversion rate of your website that you can do right now:

1: Ensure that your homepage tells people immediately ‘What you do’ and ‘What they need to do next’. A homepage should convey a simple message to visitors that confirms to them that they are in the right place to solve their problem and make it easy for them to go ahead and solve it.

2: Keep the copy skimmable. When people visit a web page they usually scan it for clues that confirm it’s what they are really after. Use bullet points and bold type to highlight important parts but always keep it as brief a possible – eliminate unnecessary words.

3: When writing about products and services try to keep it ‘benefit’ based rather than focusing on features alone. People always buy based on an emotional decision so talk about how your product can benefit them in a specific environment or situation that they can relate to.

4: Keep contact forms brief. Don’t ask for more information than is reasonable for the purpose of their enquiry. A good way to get visitors to commit to submitting a form is to put a tick box at the top. For example, the first element of the form is “Tick here to receive a brochure about this product”. The visitor ticks this box to request his brochure and has ‘committed’ himself to completing and submitting the rest of the form.

5: Your ‘call to action’ (Buy now, Click here to.. etc) should be bold, obvious and easy to find – Preferably a button. Remember – convention works so use conventional methods to make it easier for your visitor to understand how to proceed.

The most effective thing you can do to improve your conversion rate is to measure the behaviour of visitors on your website and test the effect of changes you make against your conversion rate. There is no more cost effective way of getting the most out of your website in terms of sales and sales lead generation.

Then, when you’ve mastered all that – You can go back to worrying about search engine rankings…

Soundproofing Products [A Case Study]

JC Wilkins are the UK’s largest supplier of acoustic soundproofing products. They’ve been selling acoustic sound deadening products and materials and recording studio soundproofing services from their offices in London & Bolton for many years and traphic marketing are very happy to be assisting in their search marketing and SEO efforts.

Their website acoustic-supplies.com has recently been redesigned by Worcester based eCommerce website designers – Blue Box Software – and the focus has been on usability as much as it is search engine marketing. The site covers the majority of the services they offer such as:

• Acoustic wall and floor soundproofing solutions
• Part E of the Building Regulations
• Business and domestic soundproofing solutions
• Affordable housing sound insulation solutions
• School acoustic solutions
• Acoustic sound insulation training and advice
• Recording studio acoustic solutions

Our brief was to make sure they got a better return on investment out of their AdWords campaign, converted more of their visitors to sales leads for their sales team and helped them to generate more traffic from their target keyword terms.

This project has involved a great deal of ongoing keyword research, often facilitated by the AdWords

campaign management we undertake for them alongside On-site search engine optimisation to make sure their website is highly relevant for the terms we’ve identified as worth optimising for and a targeted link building campaign to ensure they outrank their competitors for target terms.

Key terms such as ‘soundproofing products‘ and ‘acoustic soundproofing materials’ and ’soundproof doors’ are already ranking well and driving plenty of converting traffic.

We’ve had a lot of early success and the client is very happy with results.

How to get visitors to your website and then make them do what you want…

…Whatever that might be.

Welcome to my beginners guide to generating traffic to your website and then making them perform a desired action:

Making sales
Some of my clients are ecommerce clients – they sell stuff via their websites. For some of them them this is the only place they vend their wares and their website is the sole channel for their product. Some of my clients are service based and don’t sell tangible products on their website but rather the concept of their service.

Add to basket – again & again & again…
Ecommerce clients want visitors to their website to add a product, preferably several, to their shopping basket and pay for them via the online checkout. Ultimately they want the visitor (now a buyer) to enjoy this experience and come back regularly to do it again. Maybe to tell their friends about how good it was and get them to do it too. And they want this to happen over and over again every day including bank holidays.

Automatic sales people?
Service based clients don’t usually have an ecommerce solution attached to their website because they are more interested in leads than they are in online sales. Leads are the life-blood of a company who needs to talk to people in order to sell them something. They might sell holiday homes or legal advice and whilst it’s technically possible to allow people to purchase just about anything on a website, it’s not quite so easy to convince them that they want to. DVDs, CDs, books – easy. Houses? Our websites are not quite automatic sales people just yet. Although that ability is not as far away as you might think.

So regardless of the ultimate website goal of my client, they all have the one thing in common; they all want people to visit their website and then perform and action. Whether they want the visitor to buy something online, fill in a contact email form or pick up the telephone and call, the process is remarkably similar. So my job is two-fold; get people to your website and then make them do something.

This is not a sales pitch
Now before this starts to sound like an advert for me and my services, let’s get one thing straight – I’m not touting for business. With the work/family balance I’m currently booked to the hilt and the time it takes me to write this blog is about all the time I have left. So whilst I’m happy to engage in conversation and debate, I’m not available for any consultative work. If that changes, believe me, you’ll be the first to know…

Free, holistic search marketing & website conversion advice
This exercise is hopefully going to shape itself into a useful guide to the whole process of marketing your web presence effectively both in terms of visits to your website and the action you want visitors to perform when they get there. There is a wealth of information out there for folks looking for SEO (search engine optimisation) advice and there are many (often self appointed) conversion gurus and web design and development professionals. Not one of these areas, left to there own devices, will show you how to become an overnight success but a sound understanding of each will give you the best opportunity to succeed at whatever you online goals might be. Make money probably.

So over the coming weeks and months (And for as long as it takes to make sense) I will be sharing the stuff I know and the stuff I learn as we go. These are the 2 main areas I’ll be covering:

Search Marketing:
This is the stuff that makes you rank highly in search engines like Google, Yahoo & MSN. It’s not brain surgery but it is an important part of your online marketing strategy and it does involve time, effort and sometimes a bit of money. It is not a black art and it is well within your grasp to do this yourself. We’ll look at the do’s & don’t’s, examine current theories on best practice and explore the art of link building, content development and search engine friendly site design.

Website Conversion
Once we have generated a stream of targeted traffic to your website we will develop strategies to retain them at your site and furthermore to ensure they perform the action that defines the purpose for which your site was built.

So – without further ado – lets push on and look at where we start…