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What is conversion optimisation testing?

7 October 2011

If 100 visitors come to your site, how many of these end up in a sale (be it buying a product or service, signing up for newsletters, retweeting in Twitter or ‘liking’ a post on Facebook)? These ‘sales’ are known as ‘conversions’. Understanding what works best to create these conversions is known as conversion optimisation testing.

If you create any advertising campaign, in any media, there is a risk of a low return on investment (ROI). Fortunately, instead of having to keep a track of how many coupons are returned to your shop, or asking every new client where they heard about you, the online environment has methods that can show you where your business is coming from.

Your website is a main media platform which is a 24/7 advertisement of your business. Conversion optimisation is all about having more of your visitors actually take action. Optimisation conversion testing is all about measuring which changes you make to your site have the best impact on converting your customers. It can take several similar forms, but essentially works on steps such as these:

  1. Plan a targeted campaign to sell something to a specific group. For example you may be a travel agent wanting to launch a newsletter about travel to the beach at Noosa for families because you are now managing a holiday unit development there.
  2. Create a web page, or section of a web page that includes information for your target market with a call to action (CTA) to encourage subscription to your newsletter.
  3. Create a second page with similar information done differently, also with a CTA for the subscription.  The first page may be text heavy verse the second which is mainly images.  Or you could test different colour options or image placement options between the two pages.
  4. By comparing the path of your visitors from each of the two pages to a final action (subscribing, in this case) you can compare which of the two web pages was most successful in gaining the end result.

There are various other testing methods available such as split testing and multivariate analysis but the reason you use them is all the same – to work out what is most attractive to your users to result in a conversion.

Conversion optimisation testing is both an art and a science. You start with a working hypothesis and use the science to look at the quantitative website statistics to understand what is working and what isn’t. It also has the element of art in that conversions are often a response to the visual, qualitative message components of the site.

In most industries traditionally, it is much more economical to sell more to an existing customer, than to continually try and find new customers. Web site commerce is no different. If for every 100 visitors who come to your site, 1 buys/signs up/retweets (converts), you have a conversion rate of 1%. If by spending some money on conversion optimisation testing increases your conversion rate to 5%, ROI benefits to your business can be staggering. Additionally, your website is constantly available, not some billboard advertisement only there for 30 days, or a newspaper advertisement for a week.

When ROI is difficult to calculate on many forms of marketing, conversion optimisation testing can significantly improve conversions whilst being measurable at the same time.

Filed Under: Return On Investment Tagged With: , ,

10 top tips on how blogs help SEO

5 October 2011

What is a blog? A blog (the shortened form of weB LOG) is an online series of entries rather like a journal, which can have content added to it very simply and quickly. They have a front end which allows the user to merely type in their content, no coding required. You click on the ‘publish’ button and instantly your article is available for all to read.

So in what ways does a good Blog help with Search Engine Optimisation of your website?

  1. Good fresh content – everyone rewards great content that is new – users enjoy the result and return frequently to your blog as do search engines. It is so easy to add content using blogging platforms, there is no barrier to timing regular content updates, both users and search engine love fresh content.
  2. More pages for your site – there appears to be a correlation between the total number of pages on your web site and how frequently search engines visit you and thus index new content. Because it so quick and easy to add a blog post, you can quickly increase the number of pages on your site with quality content.
  3. More keywords – by completing your regular keyword tracking, you will know what keywords your audience is searching for. As this changes, you can quickly respond to the market by creating relevant blog posts including an optimal number of keywords in each post to satisfy both users and search engines. There are even some software plug-ins for blogging which works out the perfect keyword placement for you.
  4. Take advantage quickly of long tailed keywords – there is evidence to show that users who query using 4 or more keywords in a phrase are those most likely to convert into a sale. The longer the keyword phrase the closer the user generally is to the purchase decision in the buying cycle. Thus it is sometimes helpful to garner a small number of highly qualified buyers using long tailed keywords, than to get a huge amount of traffic that are really only “carpet crushers” and not ready to buy. Blogs can help you take advantage of these long tailed keywords simply and quickly to meet changing market needs.
  5. Helping users – why do you really exist? To inform, make sales, communicate, provide a service….. any number of reasons. Most importantly, to achieve any and all results, you need to help your user. As a blogger, you are in an exciting position to do exactly that – help your users – on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis by providing information that will help them. There is no other way in business you can have such an immediate relationship with so many people at the same time so simply.
  6. Users want to come back – because you are so successful following tip #5, you will know (or hope) that many of your readers will want to read your wise words regularly. To do this, they will link to you or subscribe to your feeds. In doing so, you will gain followers and link popularity, all great fuel for good SEO.
  7. Suggest your link to others – humans love to share. One of the three cornerstones of great SEO is links (the other two are awesome content and an architecturally sound site). To gain links you need good content as well as regular feeds. If you follow those principles within your blog, you are adding value and others will want to read your blog, share it and link to it. SEO is built on great links.
  8. Blog software has clear URL structures – making it easy for search engine spiders to crawl and index, this comes under the great site architecture part of SEO. As part of this concept, you can build your blog on a blog company’s domain (e.g. www.blogspot.com) or you can have your blog on your own domain (e.g. www.yoursite.com/blog). To gain the most SEO benefit, it is better to use you own domain. I have seen some writers suggest hosting your blog completely separately, even on a different host company so that you can link from your blog to your business web site, garnering links. I disagree, whilst in the short term your rankings may improve due to increased links, your long term goal should be to gain links from other real sources because your blog is genuinely linkable, not because of dodgy administration.
  9. Connecting with more people – Blogs are great at linking with other blogs and social media, they create an active community. There are even software plug-ins to help linking and improving the conversation. Good blogs encourage citations and contextually relevant links that are generally attractive to search engines and thus rewarded.
  10. Doing it for the right reasons – Remember you are using a blog to communicate – not just to get SEO rankings. By genuinely targeting your blog to meet a need in your audience you will gain in SEO organically.
Filed Under: SEO Tips Tagged With: , , , ,

How can I make sure my site is SEO friendly?

3 October 2011

Before you can ask yourself “how can I make sure my site is SEO friendly”, we need to discuss what is SEO? Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the website equivalent of being in the main entrance of the local Westfield or high street shopping centre. You want your site to be the most visible site your users see when they type a keyword phrase into the query bar of a search engine such as Google.

However, before we continue, I preface the rest of this article with the caution – search engines do not buy from you, they are not your target market – what we try to say is that it is important that your site is SEO friendly so that it appears in searches, but at the point, it must be human user friendly to create the relationship or make a sale.

To gain a great position on the first page of a search for keywords relevant to your business is the result of a multitude of factors, a few of which we will briefly discuss here. In the beginning, as in all marketing, you need to know your customer and know what they want. In the “satisfying search engines world”, that means knowing what keywords your potential visitors are currently searching for. This is the first step,

1. Do constant keyword research. There is a plethora of keyword research tools, not least is the free Google Keyword Tool. By knowing what keywords your target audience are searching on, allows you to keep your content current and aimed at the searches. This inherently makes your site SEO friendly.

Each page you create on your website must first be indexed by a search engine. The search engine spiders trawl sites on a cycle related to how often that site has new content. Which continues our list of SEO friendly behaviours with one of the most important items:

2. Maintain fresh new content. Regular new content will attract the search engine spiders to revisit your site often, thereby regularly indexing your new content. This means your visitors will have access to that content faster when searching.

3. Good quality content, written for your users (not just the search engines) means visitors will want to read your material and come back to your site.

4. Because you are maintaining fresh, current, and useful content, your users will want to come back time and again as well as sharing your usefulness with others. The outcome of this sharing is that your users will link to your site – a critical factor in making sure your site is SEO friendly. The more genuine links you have (with other related, credible sites) the more respect your website gains, thus showing the search engines you are a preferred site, thus improving your rankings.

5. Live in a nice neighbourhood – reusing the shop front analogy – if you don’t like visiting businesses in dark alleys surrounded by tattoo parlours, houses of ill repute and illegal drug labs, don’t expect search engines to stick around if you have links with sites that are known for spamming or other anti social behaviour. Make sure you know exactly who you are linking to.

By following these top 5 tips, you are well on the way to making sure your web site is SEO friendly.

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimisation Tagged With: , ,