This post corresponds to podcast Episode 9: Site Optimization and conversion with Marketing Experiments which is included in the Free Marketing Made Easy Core Program, accompanied by workbook and video tutorials that show you how to do this on your own.
As we previously discussed when defining Search Engine Optimization, getting traffic to your website is a good thing but you want it to be relevant traffic. Once you are able to get the right kind of visitor, you need to guide him through an ideal experience. Otherwise he will leave your site and go somewhere else.
Let’s face it; we live in an age of short attention spans. Website optimization and conversion is about turning this potential limitation into a competitive advantage. It’s also about maximizing return on investment and making more money through your website (we like that idea, right?).
Some background (to motivate you):
There are two frustrating things about traditional advertising (things like print, radio and television):
1. It’s expensive.
2. It’s hard (if not downright impossible) to determine how effective it is.
By comparison, there are two really great things about online marketing:
1. It’s inexpensive, and often times free!
2. Everything online is measurable, especially when it comes to our own websites.
Because we can track all of the actions that happen when a visitor interacts with our site, we no longer have to guess about what’s going on. In fact we can take measurements, decide that one process or one page performs better than another and correlate income to the changes we make. Cool, eh?
And now for the Definitions (aww come on…it’s not too bad, we swear!)
In order for us to really illustrate website optimization, we need to explain five distinct pieces. We’ll list them here then break each one down for you:
- Website Optimization
- Conversion
- Click through rate
- Landing pages
- It’s NOT about best practices
Website Optimization is a broad term that applies to:
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the subset of overall website optimization that involves getting your page ranked as highly as possible in the search engines.
• Paid Search, which involves paid advertisements that can also be optimized.
• Website design, indicating how attractive, functional and engaging your site is. This is a critical point that we can best illustrate through a graphic from our friends at Marketing Experiments:
Conversion represents the relationship between the actions we want our site visitors to take, and the frequency with which they do so. For example, conversion to you might mean buying your product, downloading a white paper, becoming a subscriber …any of those things.
Click Through Rate is a measure of someone moving from one place to another. For example, if your site appears in a search engine result and 1 out of 100 people click on your link, then we would say you got a click through rate of 1%. We can use click through rate to measure performance on our site in other ways too, such as how often people coming in via our home page actually make it through to a shopping cart and purchase.
Landing Pages are designed to address specifically motivated subsets of your traffic. These pages are topic-specific, featuring unique keywords and phrases that people were searching for. Our friend Paul Clowe from Marketing Experiments puts it this way:
“If a company doesn’t know what a landing page is then they’re probably leaving money on the table. The reason is this: most companies have an array of products. So when you deliver a user to your homepage they have to decide between all these different products and figure out ‘where’s the one that I want?’ Astute advertisers are now directing their traffic to what we call a landing page; they match the motivations of the searcher to what they are searching for exactly.”
Paul offers an example of someone searching for blue tennis shoes. If you sell blue tennis shoes you’d be much better off putting them on a page that specifically lists only blue tennis shoes because you already know what they are looking for. You don’t want to put them on a page that sells just shoes in general, where they have to click through four or five different pages to get to the one they want because they are likely to get bored or distracted and leave your site.
It’s NOT about best practices: all of those terms we just defined boil down to one thing: the only way to know what works best it to test. Testing different messages and appearances takes time and effort. But it’s almost impossible to measure how your website is doing unless you compare it to something else. This represents a philosophical shift, a willingness to be in an experimental mode on an ongoing basis. This might be counter intuitive for you if you are thinking “I just want to get my website done so I can move on to managing the rest of my business.” We’re here to tell you though, that approach doesn’t work any more. Here’s Paul again:
“The best way to describe this is to draw a comparison with a sales person that is converting leads at 20% and has annual sales of $200k. Typically you can compare him to other sales people in the exact same environment, selling to the exact same audience. Well, your website is a sales tool really. Individual pages are sales people, and unless you have something to compare them to you don’t really know if you are doing poorly, or if you are doing well. But by implementing a testing program on your website you can start to say ‘you know what? This page design is really working much better than this other page design.’ And that really translates into serious dollars.”
To sum this up, the challenge is that we need to look at our websites in a new way. We need to see them as sales tools, and we need to be willing to play around to find out what’s working best, then not necessarily leave well enough alone but instead keep trying new things so we can be sure that we are always optimizing.
At this point, if you are following the Free Marketing Made Easy program, you have learned how to research your market, create a message worth spreading, source your brand identity, build your website on WordPress, optimize for search engines and optimize your website to turn visitors into customers. Now we are going to get into Social Media, so it’s time to turn our attention to a very important subject: Blogging for Business.
AfriGadget
Kiva