For most businesses, the initial focus is strongly on getting a high ranking in the search engines plus, for example, Pay Per Click advertising for immediate visibility and traffic flows.
However, what matters then is that you get the enquiries and sales you need to give you a good return from your site.
Hence we have covered in (1) below the key question of improving your web site sales conversion. Like most web management, it is mainly a question of good, continuing process, rather than radical actions.
1. NET ISSUES
Important issues that could impact on your website approach:
Need to Improve Your Web Site Sales Conversion?
Your stunning new web site is receiving lots of traffic but you aren’t receiving many enquiries or orders. If this is the case, I hope the following tips are useful:
Validate the site technically
It may have been checked before publication but check it out again:
- Can you see all the site in the major browsers or are important pages garbled or cut off?
- Does it work well in the main screen resolutions? - Do all the key links work?
Find out what your visitors have been doing
- Check your site visitor statistics – what do they tell you?
- Which pages are your visitors landing on?
- How long are they staying? Do they bounce off the first page or are they looking at several? Which pages do they leave from? Which pages are viewed most/least?
Check what first impression your site makes on visitors
- Imagine you are a first time visitor to your site. What impression do you get from the site – especially in comparison with your main competitors?
- What do other people say? Get other people – colleagues, acquaintances to look at the site and possibly even try to buy something.
- Ask your customers (those who have bought or enquired from the site) what they thought of their experience. What was easy / what was difficult, confusing or off-putting?
- Ask for feedback from other users. If necessary, offer a small reward (free sample, download, T shirt etc) to encourage this.
Check you are displaying all the ‘credibility’ / ’comfort’ material you can
- Your physical address and contact details
- Professional affiliations, certificates, warranties, guarantees; testimonials
- Terms and conditions / delivery details (for e-commerce sites)
- Provide telephone and email contacts for enquiries – and respond quickly to them
Test – everything and monitor the results
Change and experiment with anything and everything and check if it has improved your web site sales conversion for a set time period – it could be a day, week or a month for example. Be ruthless, never assume:
- Page headings, page design, colours
- Your copy – is it stodgy or is it easy to read and does it sell?
- Navigation, consistency and ease of use
To read the full article on our site just click here
2. NET HAPPENINGS
News, themes and trends from the Internet – home and abroad
Technology enablers still developing strongly…………….…………..……………
Text messaging - 32 billion text messages were sent in 2005. In Q1 06 this increased further to reach a record monthly total of 3.16 billion for March.(mda-org)
Broadband – 3m broadband connections were installed in UK in 2005 – only 5 countries worldwide now have more broadband lines than UK - China, US, Japan, Germany and France.
Mobile web use – close to 20% of mobile phone users now use their mobile phone to access the web, i.e. around 12.3m people per day access the web in this way during H1 2006 (Text.it)
Web Usage – 16-24 year olds now increasingly substitute the internet for television – on average they now watch TV for one hour less per day than the average person – social network sites, e.g. Bebe, are a major factor in this.
Online Shopping Update - UK figures showing strong growth……………….….
- UK internet shoppers will be Europe’s second biggest online by 2011. (nma.uk.uk) – 66% of Britons are predicted to join the online shopping population over the next five years. By 2011, 32m UK consumers will be shopping online.
- UK Retail spend reached £8bn in 2005, and will total £21.5bn pa by 2010. (Verdict) – some 19m people bought goods and services online in UK in the second half of 2005.
Internet Promotion – continued shift away from traditional media…………...
- Advertising - Online advertising spend grew at 63% in 2005 – internet advertising now runs at three times that of radio, and is already in excess of one third of television. (nma.co.uk)
- E-mail marketing – email marketing will overtake Direct Marketing in the UK by the end of 2006 – in the UK last year 4.3bn marketing emails were sent compared with 5bn direct mailers. (dma.org)
- However, it is estimated that there will be over 6bn marketing emails in 2006.
3. NET TIPS
Some hints you could consider
Avoid unnecessary barriers - make sure your developer doesn’t do anything to prevent you attracting visitors to the new site – e.g. make sure he doesn’t:
- make extensive use of Flash (this hampers search engine spiders in accessing your site to index it)
- encapsulate your site text in image format (see the note below)
- put your text content within frames (this could prevent search engine spiders reading your text and therefore indexing it)
Be legible to the search engines – we find new clients whose text on their existing pages is encapsulated in an image format. It looks very much like normal text, but is actually just a picture – the search engines cannot read or classify a word or syllable from it, and cannot serve up the site in response to user searches!
4. NCS FOCUS
News and services from NCS that might help
Link building – this remains the key to a good ranking, i.e. gaining good quality links, preferably non-reciprocal. The links should really be from sites with a higher page rank than your own – we now use tools to enable us to find sites, which are relevant and have the page rank needed. Just click here if you think we could help you in developing your link popularity further.
Banner–based links – you have probably already noticed, when searching for good directories, that often a high position in their site needs a banner entry from you – these are not expensive, and are very useful in link building – just click here if you would like us to develop a banner for you, or need guidance on their parameters.
5. NET NOTHINGS
You probably already know that:
Freshbot and Deepbot are not fish species- they are two search engine spiders used by Google. Freshbot looks for fresh content on sites – part of Google strategy of ranking more highly those sites which add new content.
Deepbot crawls sites deeply via the links structure to capture and the structure of the site for Google’s cache.
Heat maps are not about the weather – they are guidance from Google on the best place on a web page to put your Adsense ad – i.e. where they will have the greatest impact for site visitors.
Eyes go left – i.e. when someone clicks your site, they don’t focus on the centre of the screen - eye tracking studies have shown they start on the top left, pause, then work rightwards – only then do they look lower down the screen. Message clearly is to use the top and left of the screen strongly.
Developments in web marketing, site design, and web services
Social Networking and Mobile web use remain the two liveliest
issues in Web marketing currently - good use of both is a platform for getting better value from your site. In the next issue, we give an action check list on Social Networking, so this month we lead on Mobile web use – I hope the article and the rest of the content help you win more users for your site.
1 NET ISSUES
Significant issues that could impact on your website approach
Using Mobile access to bring more visitors to your site
Use this approach to increase your site traffic through Mobile web access:
a) Scale of web usage - using mobiles to access the web has stepped up sharply over the past year - according to Scoot UK, web traffic from mobile devices increased by over 4000% in the last 18 months. Apple hold by far the greatest share of this - their devices now handle more than 70% of mobile traffic on the web.
Even a year ago nearly 70% of i–phone users visited web sites via their phone on a daily basis.
b) Most popular uses - the most popular use of mobiles on the web is for email (59% of users); news headlines (46%) and social networking (41%)
c) Web brands – the most popular web brands were Google (55%); Facebook (42%); BBCNews (40%); E-bay (30%) and YouTube (77%)
d) Trends - Gartner reported in May that, worldwide, smart-phone sales increased by 85% year-on-year, so web usage trend seems likely to continue growing.
Clearly website owners should consider carefully the extent of the need to tailor their sites to suit mobile phone visitors, and how best to do this.
e) Our Approach - NCS assesses the degree of mobile relevance for all sites we develop, especially potentially high usage sites, e.g. information only sites, forums, social networking, sites addressing young user market.
Lower priority sites e.g. within certain industrial/commercial sectors will be identified also with, typically, a different technical solution being offered. Optimal domain usage, i.e. whether .mobi is best option, or whether non mobile domains will be adequate, are considered also.
f) Technical solutions - the optimal technical solution will be considered, e.g. for simple sites– the existing web site will often suffice for majority of mobile phones, with minimal content change needed, and .mobi use not needed.
For complex sites, e.g. for mobile-relevant sites with high content levels, (e.g. offering a wide range of products) a .mobi domain may be appropriate; the text content may need simplification; use of the flash/javascript content of existing site may need removing and image formats may need changing.
We will consider with clients the optimal level of search spend, once the site is up, to achieve the necessary level of visibility for the site.
g) Cost - the cost of specifying and developing fully mobile-friendly sites depends on the profile of individual sites. In some instances an effective solution can be delivered for minimal additional cost, as all requirements can be incorporated within the basic site specification.
In other cases it may be necessary to radically tailor the site content for mobile visitors - effectively a separate, mobile - orientated site is needed, although it can detect the mobile device and serve up a different set of pages suitable to them.
Under all options we closely tailor the price to reflect the work needed, with maximum re-use of existing content.
2. NET HAPPENINGS
News, themes and trends from the Internet – home and abroad
Mobile web usage - UK web traffic from mobile devices has increased by over 4000% in the last 18 months. Apple hold by far the greatest share of this - their devices now handling more than 70% of all mobile traffic (scoot.co.uk).
Social Networking - Facebook remains dominant – in the US 50% of the population is now on Facebook (Dreamgrow.com) – followed by YouTube and Twitter.
Online Shopping Update - UK online shopping is growing at 18% pa – the UK is Europe’s leading e-retail economy, with online sales likely to reach c£75bn in 2011 (imrg.org). By contrast, overall retail sales have actually shown falls in recent months.
Internet Promotion – double digit growth in online advertising spend is expected in 2011 – being driven by higher social media use, video, and display advertising. Paid search and mobile show strong growth also (nma.co.uk).
3. NET TIPS
Some hints you could consider
Use correct anchor text - when you put links to pages on your site, use terms for the clickable link which are the terms people will use when searching in a Search Engine for that activity. e.g. if you are a golf equipment e-tailer, and want to link to your new products page, don’t use “our new products” for the link, but describe the page more specifically, for example, “latest golf hybrids and drivers” – Search Engines attach far greater weight to specific terms like these.
Having said this, it is also important to vary the anchor text in your links – so don’t put the same text in all your links.
Get a long tail – long tail keywords are those which have several words, not a single word as the search term. Recent research (axandra.com) has highlighted that long tail keywords are much more likely to result in a sale than more general ones and often have less competition from other sites.
Thus, you will get both better conversion rates and more visitors if you focus on long tail keywords, rather than a single word, for your keyword.
Get on top - research (optify.net/axandra.com) has confirmed that if you get to the top positions on page 1 of Google, you not only get more clicks (the top 3 get 60% of the clicks), but you get a higher click through rate. Optify conclude that if you you double your site promotion spend to get to from 2nd position to 1st, you might triple your visits for that keyword.
NCS has 10 years experience in Search Engine marketing, so please contact us if you need help with this.
Think Firefox – the lastest Statcounter browsers statistics show that by May, Firefox held a share of 42% of browser usage - Internet Explorer was below 25% with Google Chrome increasing to nearly 26%. Clearly, Web owners need to check that their sites operate effectively with each of these browsers.
4. NCS FOCUS
News and services from NCS that might help
New Sites – we have launched a number of sites since the last newsletter – just visit our News Release page for a sample or click on our Portfolio page to see a much wider selection of our work.
Content Development - Google are reducing the rankings of shallow content sites, ie sites with minimal content. So be wary of relying on a minimal, passive, brochure site, to gain the search engine ranking you need. We have massive experience developing content for sites across a wide range of sectors – just approach us if you think your content needs enhancing.
