Having an opportunity to thoroughly review some keyword data for one of my proposals while traveling on a train up to Sheffield, I came to realise that as much as we talk about regularly reviewing keyword data we just don’t actually do it enough! We all know that every month something like 20% of all searches are unique and have not been seen by Google in the last 90 days.  

One only needs to have a look through some of your analytics and apply some well thought out filters to your keyword data and you begin to get the picture.

This can however be a double edged sword – lessons learnt in the past have also taught me that it is possibly even more important to pick a route and stick to it. It is all too tempting to see the vast variety of (search phrase) opportunities open to a website and to want to grab all of them. It very quickly leads to a scattergun approach, with just not enough weight behind any of it. Result: dilution, mixed messages, a multitude of pages with similar content, confusion on the site, and ultimately poor performance!

The SES in London is in full swing and SEO experts from around the world are strutting their stuff and sharing invaluable amounts of knowledge that promise to boost the state of the entire industry. Brian Eisenberg yesterday did an interesting talk on website conversion and our very own CEO blogged on www.stateofsearch.com about this informative presentation. Louis’ blog boasts 21 steps on how to improve website conversion. I’ve summarized the most important tips from these two experienced gentlemen, right here, for your own reading pleasure:

Here are a few top tips to ensure that your site achieves maximum ROI:

1. Effectively communicate your UNIQUE value to the client

Continuing with the theme of conversion that we touched on in our previous blog post, this post focuses more on Website Optimization and how to get users to actually find, acknowledge and click on the calls to action that will result in maximum conversion for your site. Seeing as we’re focusing on getting visitors to do exactly what you want, I’m going to get straight to the point here as my objective for this blog post is to get you to

1. What do you want your customers to do again?

This is the VERY FIRST QUESTION you need to answer before going any further to optimize your website. You are creating a website for a purpose. Before you’ve even thought about any layouts or page wireframes or anything of the sort, you need to know exactly what you want from you site. Do you want visitors to buy something, register their details or maybe you just want them to call you? Don’t go any further until you have answered this question.

A large percentage of the online marketing companies out there are able to generate an increase in traffic to your website. The difference between a good online marketing agency and a great one is the ability to assist you in converting you visitors into paying customers. ROI is of course the primary objective when it comes to investing in an online marketing and this should be the joint goal of an online marketing manager and his client.

This (slightly lengthy) blog takes a look at some of the basics of conversion and how it can be monitored and optimized.

The definition of Web Conversion and Conversion rates:

This time of the month is always interesting, as our monthly reporting kicks in to evaluate how well we are doing for our clients. Pleased to say that by and large we’ve seen some great traffic growth and reduced cost per visit across the board with SEO once again outstripping PPC nicely. (Always enjoy the internal battle against the PPC department )

Anyway, lets get onto topic, while a lot of the sites we work with are experiencing great traffic growth a lot of them “dont have design budget right now” to aid in increasing conversions. Let me first clarify that we in no way want that design budget, far from it, but in my opinion it is one of the most overlooked areas of a website. Site owners are always obsessed with driving increased number of visitors to a website before adequately understanding what current visitors are doing once they get there. Conversion analysis is key!

I`ve been working on the redesign of our side site for a few weeks now, and one key question needed to be addressed. What type of menu structure works best? Typically, SEO companies will advise site owners to use a CSS drop down menu structure, as it brings the 3rd tier content closer to the home page and thus gives it more relevancy and link juice. But is this the best route for usability and conversion?

Search engine marketing is not short of acronyms that make perfect sense to us, but not necessarily to our prospective partner agencies and clients. From SEM, SEO and PPC to Online PR and ROI; it`s important not to forget that just because we understand what they all are, doesn`t mean our target audience does.

This brings me to the drop down menu. Are we asking visitors to make decisions before they even know what the options are?