6 Web Design Strategies That Turn Your Website Into a Sales Machine
There are a number of strategies you can use to turn your website into a sales machine. Let’s start at the top.
1. Where Is Your Phone Number?
We may be deep into the internet age but the age of the telephone has yet to go the way of the dinosaurs. So, where is your phone number positioned on your website? If you say anywhere other than top right and on every single page then your website is performing like a V-Dub rather than a Ferrari.
Let’s make it easy for people to contact you. Sounds simple doesn’t it? And hey, often a chat with a potential customer can make all the difference in the age of email… it’s been proven time and time again to be effective.
2. Navigation
How easy is it to navigate your website? At a glance does a potential customer know exactly what to do or what you do? How much thought is behind the words used in the navigation and how descriptive they are?
What if? The Australian Election Online
The federal election has come and gone and yet the public is none the wiser as to its leader as all remains too close to call. At a time when every vote counts so dramatically, one cannot but wonder about what could have been.
With about one and a half million young voters under the age of 25 eligible to vote this year, Labor should have been able to attract this group if they had adopted a stronger online election mobilisation like Barak Obama in the last U.S. election, or even Kevin Rudd’s successful 2007 campaign. Australia was a world leader in this area of online election mobilisation, so what happened in 2010?
While the average Australian voter is probably not directly affected by this turn of events its implications are more significant and do impact all.
The 2007 Election
Kevin 07’s digital campaign highlighted a key difference between himself and John Howard (ie contemporary vs old), however, its effectiveness was much greater than that. The Labor party and Rudd in particular were able to communicate directly and effectively with the electorate. Messages got through and were understood.
Also, many young Australians, a lot of them first time voters, were galvanized into action and helped to sell the message for the Labor party. Of course, this didn’t happen overnight but it was planned for and when they were needed, these supporters went to work.
What Is A Good Conversion Rate?
As an online marketing agency that develops websites we often get asked the question ‘what is a good conversion rate?’. And while it may seem like a simple question, the answer is a little more complicated.
There are 6 factors that define what a good conversion rate is:
- Source of the traffic
- Cost of the traffic
- Type of conversion you are measuring
- Maximum amount you can afford to spend for a conversion
- Sales conversion rate
- Number of sales you want
Now let’s take a look at each of these factors in a little more detail…
1. Source of the Traffic
Different traffic sources produce different types of traffic. One source may produce higher quality traffic than another. And the higher the quality of the traffic, the higher the conversion rate. For example, running a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign on Google Adwords is one of the highest converting advertising channels because you can choose to only show your ad when somebody is actively searching for your product or service. Banner advertising, on the the other hand, is a much lower converting advertising channel because you are advertising to prospects that are not actively searching for your product or service.
SEO Guide To Launching A New Website
With all the time, effort and money that goes into getting top SEO rankings and building a stream of consistent organic traffic, great care must be taken when developing and launching a new website that replaces an existing one.
It can take months or even years to get top SEO rankings but you can lose these rankings in a matter of hours. With this in mind, here are a set of guidelines to help maintain your website’s SEO value and minimise any negative impact on your rankings.
Maintaining URLs and Linking Structure
If your website has been online for a while then you have likely built some value for your current website through internal and inbound links. Before you develop your new website it’s important to keep in mind that any changes to the URL of any existing pages will diminish the value of those pages. With this in mind, and wherever possible, you should maintain the same URLs and linking structure in your new website.
If your website has a large number of pages indexed by Google or if internal pages on your current website are already ranking you should use the same URL structure for those pages so that all previous links do not need to be redirected. If your current website uses a search-engine-friendly link structure it would be best for SEO purposes if that structure was carried across to your new website.
How Domain Names Affect SEO
One of the most common types of question we receive is about domain names and how they affect SEO. While your domain name is, in most cases, the least important part of a top SEO ranking here are answers to the most common questions about domain names:
Should I buy a domain name that includes a keyword in it?
Having keywords in your domain name only makes a difference to your SEO when your domain name is the exact-match keyword that you want to rank for AND is the .com or local .com version (eg .com.au) of the keyword. Two examples of this are homeloans.com.au and travelinsurance.com.au, which both rank at the top of Google for those exact keyword phrases, which are highly searched for.
It’s important to note that using any other keywords in the domain name will negate the ranking benefit of having the keyword in the domain name. For example, mytravelinsurance.com.au will not have the same ranking effect for ‘travel insurance’ as travelinsurance.com.au but it will rank for ‘my travel insurance’.
Additionally, having a .net, .biz or any other extension apart from the .com version will not assist with your SEO rankings – you must have the .com or localised .com version (eg .com.au) of the domain name to rank highly for that keyword.
How to Write Effective SEO Articles for Your Blog
With the recent release of Google Caffeine, frequently updating informative, quality content to your website has never been more important. Regularly adding fresh content effectively increases not only the visibility of your website, but also assists with boosting your natural search engine rankings.
A perfect way to take advantage of this is to utilise a blog on your website and upload articles on a regular basis. This enhances the authority of your website and plays a major role in achieving top rankings for competitive keyword phrases. However, sometimes the hardest part of initiating the article writing process is gaining the inspiration or the article idea to start the ball rolling. Here are some article development and writing tips to make the process easier.
Creating Your Article Topic
The first task when writing an SEO article for your blog is to identify a high impact article topic. It is best to make your article topic short, snappy and appealing. Here are some ideas for topics ideal for your blog:
6 Ways To Make Pay Per Click Work For You
When it comes to Pay-per-click advertising, there are many aspects that can make or break the performance of your campaign. Use the following 6 strategies to turn your PPC campaign into a winner.
1. Use Conversion Tracking
When setting up your PPC campaign, make sure you install conversion tracking. If you are running a campaign already and haven’t used conversion tracking yet, you should set it up as soon as possible. Conversion tracking allows you to monitor and evaluate where your conversions are coming from. It is the basis for optimising your PPC campaign. It will allow you to see exactly which search queries are most profitable for you and which ones do not work at all. Based on this conversion data, you can optimise your campaign. Hence, without conversion tracking you cannot optimise your PPC campaign. It’s a bit like investing in something without knowing your return.
2. Avoid Low Google Adwords Quality Scores
Google assigns every keyword in your campaigns a quality score. The higher your quality score, the less you have to pay per click for the respective keyword. Contrarily, low quality scores will results in inflated cost per clicks. We have seen cost per clicks as high as $98 (yes, $98 for one click) as a result of an inadequate account structure. You don’t want your account to establish a low quality score because it becomes very difficult to reverse a low quality score history in Google Adwords.
10 SEO Strategies for Google Caffeine
In my last article I spoke about how Google Caffeine will affect SEO. In this article I share 10 SEO strategies that align with Google Caffeine to increase your SEO rankings.
1. Make Your Site Larger
Google Caffeine places a greater importance on the authority of your domain. The easiest way to increase the authority of your domain is to make your site larger. The larger your site, the more PageRank you will control and the more authority your domain will have.
2. Post Articles To A Blog On Your Site
Adding articles to a blog on your site is not only a great way of increasing the size of your site, it’s also one of the best ways to keep your site fresh in the eyes of Google. Caffeine is all about finding the freshest and most relevant content on the web and presenting it to its users, and posting articles to your blog aligns perfectly with this.
How Will Google Caffeine Affect SEO?
There has been a lot of buzz in the SEO industry with the formal launch of Google’s new indexing system Google Caffeine. Many of our clients are interested in how Google Caffeine will potentially affect their SEO. Here are some insights…
An Overview of Google Caffeine
Google Caffeine is not a change in how Google ranks websites – it is a change in how it indexes and then presents new information online. Rather than taking a few weeks to browse the web and then update its index (ie what you see when you conduct a search) it can update its index as soon as it finds a new piece of information. Caffeine was developed to improve the speed, relevancy, size and comprehensiveness of Google’s search.
SEO Will Be Picked Up Faster
As Google is able to index content faster, any SEO activities being implemented will have a faster impact on SEO rankings. So rather than waiting for weeks for SEO activities to be seen by Google you can expect them to be picked up almost straight away.
It’s important to note that the current ranking factors still exist but the work done to improve SEO rankings will take effect faster.
7 Website Optimization Tips For Top SEO Rankings
Achieving top SEO rankings for a profitable keyword phrase requires a link building strategy designed to get other websites to link to you with the keywords you want to rank for within the links. While on-site SEO only plays a small part in your overall SEO ranking success, a well optimized website can significantly reduce the amount of link building you need to implement to achieve top SEO rankings.
Here are 7 website optimization tips for top SEO rankings on Google…
1. Optimize Your Title Tags – your title tags are the words that appear as the first line (ie your headline) in your Google search results. Title tags are one of the elements used by Google to determine what a particular web page is about so you must ensure that the keywords you want to rank for are located within the title tags. Keep in mind that people read your title tags and make a decision on whether to click through to your website or not, so make sure it reads well for humans. Limiting your title tags to 60 characters will ensure that all of the words you use are visible in the search results pages.
10 Easy Ways To Improve The Performance of Your Website
Your website is the most important part of your online marketing strategy because it is responsible for converting as many of the people you send to it into leads or sales for your business. Whether you use search engine optimisation (SEO), pay per click (PPC) advertising, banner advertising or email marketing, your website holds the key to your profits – the better your website performs, the more profit you will make.
Over the years we have tested many different areas for improving the performance of a website – some of them easy to implement, some of them difficult. Here are 10 easy ways to improve the performance of your website…
1. Write better headlines - you would be surprised at how many websites still say ‘Welcome to XYZ company’. When a prospect visits your website for the first time they are looking for something specific so make sure to say what you offer in the headline of each page. Write in terms of the benefits to your prospects.
7 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Wait To Invest In SEO
The growth of the Internet (and Google) has provided one of the most powerful and cost-effective methods of marketing and growing a business this decade. The businesses that take advantage of the Internet are seeing massive growth year after year. And while there are many online marketing strategies that businesses can use to drive sales and business growth, one stands out from the crowd… SEO.
SEO is one of the most powerful methods any business can use to drive sales and growth on a limited budget. Whether you are investing in SEO or not, you can be fairly certain that your competition already is. Here are 7 reasons why you shouldn’t wait to invest in SEO…
Social Media Link Building Strategies
Building links using social media marketing is a little different to the link building methods used over the last few years. Rather than focusing on the direct link you get from the social media site your focus should be on getting as many people as possible to link to your site, naturally, from their blog or website.
Here are 7 steps for using social media to build links to your site:
1. Write The Best Very Articles You Can – the key to building links using social media is to write quality articles that provide extreme value to your readers. If you feel that you are giving away too much quality information then you are on the right track. The more you give your readers the more natural links you will receive in return. Keep in mind that the article has to be so good that it compels people to take the time to link to it from their own blog or website.
2. Create a Facebook Page – rather than sharing your content to your friends and family, create a company Facebook page and share your articles through there. Make sure to promote your Facebook page on your website to get as many fans as possible. Unlike email, where you are battling with spam filters and open rates, sharing content on your Facebook page will appear directly in your fans’ news feed right away.
Are You Targeting The Wrong Keywords For Your SEO Campaign?
“Keyword research” is a term thrown around by many search engine marketers but there is more to this than simply looking at a keyword tool and picking some related keywords. Keyword research is often the most important factor in a successful search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign. Why? Primarily because SEO is a long-term strategy; picking the wrong keywords can result in wasting upwards of 6-12 months and thousands of dollars optimising for keywords that you may never rank for or that will provide very little return on your investment. The right keywords, however, coupled with effective optimisation can mean massive growth for your business!
One of the biggest reasons SEO campaigns fail is because people are targeting the wrong keywords. It is essential for any campaign that the keywords targeted are both achievable and produce results. With this in mind, there are a few things that you must always consider when researching keywords for your SEO campaign.
7 Ways To Improve The Performance of Your PPC Campaigns
There are dozens of ways of improving the performance of a pay-per-click campaign. A sound optimisation strategy can turn a losing campaign into a winner. In a lot of cases inexperienced pay-per-click advertisers do not make use of all features, angles and targeting options that PPC marketing provides. As a result, they lose money on their campaigns and conclude that pay-per-click marketing does not work for them. Use the following 7 ways to improve the performance of your PPC campaigns.
1. Make use of all match types
Google provides three different keyword match types: broad match, phrase match, exact match. You should make use of all of them in order to maximise the potential of your campaigns. One of the biggest and most common pay-per-click mistakes is to only use broad match keywords in your entire campaign. Broad match is a great way of covering a large amount of keywords. However, it can also easily waste your money by spending your budget on irrelevant keywords. Add phrase match and exact match keywords in order to make your campaign more targeted.
