Internet Marketing Toronto - Ignite!

Don’t Waste Your Search Engine Marketing Efforts - Apply These 17 Conversion Principles And Generate Leads and Sales

Over the years we’ve had a chance to systematically test and prove many different conversion principles. Today we’re sharing them all with you so that you can benefit from all of this research!

Search engine optimization is a means to an end. That being the delivery of qualified traffic to your site. All that new traffic is wasted if you can’t convert it into leads or sales. Since our clients tend to judge us on how much we help grow their business vs. how many keywords we get them ranked for we’ve spent a lot of time working out strong conversion techniques for sites. Here is the list that we use when producing or maintaining our clients sites from a search engine optimization perspective.

1. Include the phone number in the top right corner of the banner on every page. If possible, use a call tracking service such as Who Called?
2. Use a “Click To Call” feature on the phone number. Let’s face it, web visitors are motivated by convenience and nifty things, and click to call fills both of those needs.
3. In the top banner and on every page include the value proposition for the visitor
4. Create strong calls to action in key scanning points on the home page. For example, give away something for free to get their contact information. Once you have their contact info you’re much more likely to sell them something over the phone!
5. Provide a short privacy statement on each form. This should be linked to a PIPEDA compliant privacy statement for us Canadians, or the equivalent in the US, or abroad. At the very least provide a “privacy” link to your privacy statement immediately next to the submit button of any form.
6. Also, provide point of action assurances as necessary. This includes the privacy statement on forms – but could also include a re assurance as to why a visitor should call, or complete a form and that you’ll respect their privacy, and meet their objectives.
7. Use Email Marketing to re assure users after they’ve converted. Send them a confirmation email (HTML) that confirms their submission was made, and that your team will follow up accordingly. Include any “next step” information which may be required by the user. Make them feel special.
8. Provide a contact form on the contact us page which has the following properties
   • Client and server side validation (server side if possible)
   • Mentions the privacy statement
   • Asks customer comments first, then collects personal contact information
   • Limits the number of fields to only those absolutely necessary. Additional information can be collected after contact with the prospect has been made
9. Include a site map for visitors
10. Include a “home” button in the main navigation bar (make current pages in active on the nav bar)
11. Ensure that copy is just the right length to explain the products, services and value propositions for the reader, and not any longer.
12. Use inline text navigation (anchor text) to allow the reader to follow the desired path through the website while reading the copy, and then take the ultimate step of converting to a lead by submitting a contact form, or calling from whichever page they decide to convert on! Don’t make them hunt for your contact information.
13. Use pictures of people - it humanizes your business and warms people up to your services.
14. Use an H1 tag on every page and break up copy using H2 tags. This improves the “scanability” of each page allowing the user to determine if they want to bother reading the page. It’s also good SEO practice.
15. Include all certifications, accreditations, association logos, etc. on the site and repeat them on every page perhaps in the footer, or header.
16. Remove the “Reset” button from all of your forms. Why give the user one more convenient way not to convert!
17. Always construct each page with the four types of traffic in mind. Note: we did not define the visitor types but cam across them in our research. If anyone knows who did, please comment and let us know. We’ll add the credits (with a link) to this post.
    • Visitors who know exactly what they want are looking for facts.
    • Those with a need but not all of the answers and are looking for facts but also reassurance.
    • Window Shoppers – those visitors who are simply looking for information which they may or may not act on in the future
    • The lost – visitors who would up on the site by mistake. Let them know they are in the wrong place as soon as possible – this happens naturally if you’ve done the above correctly.

Don’t waste search engine marketing efforts by not maximizing your opportunity to convert all of that traffic! If you take the time to implement these conversion principles we are convinced you’ll see an increase in conversions. Good luck and we hope this information helps you grow your business!

Two Common Blog Mistakes Which Will Hurt Your Subscriber Rates

There are two common blogging mistakes I’ve seen recently which will really hurt your subscriber stats. Avoid these and I am convinced you’ll see an increase in subscribers.

The two mistakes to avoid:

1. Not having a site search, or burying it towards the bottom of your home page
2. Not placing your RSS Feed Icon at the top of every page

Site Search

Why is this important? New visitors to your site may have been drawn to your blog by a recent post, but they may be interested in knowing if you’ve discussed other topics. Without a site search, there is virtually no way they can find out. Sure, they can put your feed into Google Reader and search that - but it’s not all of your blog! Make your site search obvious and towards the top of the page!

RSS Feed Icons

Congratulations! You’ve got new visitors to your blog. The hard work has paid off! But hey, where did they go? Why did they not stay and subscribe to your feed? Because you’ve buried your RSS Feed Icons somewhere deep within the middle of your side bar - or obscured them with a million similar icons. Use a simple orange RSS Icon, and place it in the header of your blog, and put text links in your footer. No one will miss it then and they won’t have to go hunting for it!

As I said, I am convinced that if you do these two things you’ll see an increase in subscribers if your doing a good job of getting new visitors to your blog already!

Note: You can feed icons at http://www.feedicons.com

An Overview of Eye Tracking and Single- & Multi-Variant Testing

You’ve probably heard a lot about eye tracking and single / multi-variant testing, but you may not really know what they mean. WebProNews recently wrote up a small but informative overview of these two topics. If you’re interested we recommend you give it a read.

Generally speaking, eye tracking is the science of identifying where users eyes travel across a web page as it loads. Statistics from these studies help site developers understand how best to “design” the elements of a web page and where in the design the most important calls to action should be placed so as to maximize users interaction with the site.

Single- and Multi-variant testing is the art of evaluating one or more changes in a page to determine which change improves conversion rates. Google has a Web Optimizer program which handles single-variant testing fairly well. Unfortunately multi-variant testing is quite complex and the tools to do this kind of testing are not necessarily affordable for the small business.

Read the WebProNews article to find out more.

The Perception of Security Increases e-Commerce Conversions

When evaluating prospective clients sites we always look for Versign Seals of Security, and HackerSafe logos on e-commerce sites. Why? Because it’s a well known fact that these along with some other simple items will increase your e-commerce sales as they reassure potential customers that the site is safe and will now steal their money.

At the recent Search Engine Strategies show in San Jose, one of the sessions discussed this very topic. If you are running an e-commerce site we highly recommend you read this WebPro News posting about this session. It may just help you bottom line!

Leverage H1 and H2 For Search Engine Optimization and Usability

Many of you may be wondering what an H1 and H2 tag are. They are short forms for Heading 1 and Heading 2. In fact, there are multiple sublevels as well, for example h3, h4, etc. However, for most pages the H1 and H2 are all that are necessary. So what exactly is Heading 1? It’s an HTML tag that defines the main heading of any page, and it should be used in conjunction with H2 to define subheadings on a page.

Using style sheets you can define the look and feel of the H1 and H2 to fit within the style of your website.

There are two main reasons why you want to make use of these two special tags.

1. Usability
   We always want to be developing websites to ensure an exceptional user experience both from a content and usability perspective.First time visitors to a page always “scan” the page in a backwords “S” starting in the top left corner. By providing a clear and well written H1 and H2 tag, the visitor can grasp the topic of the page by scanning the headings much like scanning the page of a newspaper. After about 2 seconds of scanning the visitor decides if they’ve landed on the right page or not.It also serves to break up the content of the page into easily consumed sizes making it much easier for a user to read the page, and understand the meaning of each section of content.
2. The second reason is Search Engine Optimization, of course
   Search engine spiders are very sophisticated pieces of software, and continue to get smarter over time. Since the beginning, the’ve been programmed to parse the content of an HTML page and seperate the H1 and H2 tags from the rest of the page. They use the keywords in these tags to understand the topic of the content on each page. The H1 keywords define the most important overall meaning of the content, while H2 Keywords define the topics for those smaller sections of content.By reinforcing your pages most important keyword within these two tags you stand a much better chance of having that page rank well for the keyword.

Have a look at your website and see if your leveraging the H1 and H2 tags. The quickest way to do this is to “view the source” of your home page and do a text search to find “<H1″ or “<h1″ and “<h2″ or “<H2″ without the quotes of course. If you don’t find these tags then your not using them at all. If you find them, read the text between the opening and closing tags - it should be well written to reflect the topic of the page and include your most important keywords.

If you think you can do better - ask your webmaster, IT Department, or SEO firm to make the necessary changes as soon as possible!

Creating Strong Calls To Action Improves Length of Stay and Conversions

It’s a well known fact that internet users are impatient and will not take the time to “figure out” your website. Most of us have an objective to achieve when we’re researching businesses or products online and more often than not we only have a few minutes to do it.

As a business you may be doing a tremendous job with your internet marketing and driving traffic to your site, but what’s happening to that traffic when they get to you? Your analytics program can help shed some light on some important statistics about this such as length of session (how long a visitor stays on your site on average), and conversions (people who take a predetermined action on your site such as completing a signup form, or signing up for your newsletter).

There are many factors that can influence these two metrics. “Calls to Action” are the point of our discussion today. As I mentioned earlier, visitors don’t have the time or desire to “figure out” your website. They have an objective to achieve and little time to do it. So, make it easy for them! Take the time to figure out what visitors to your site are most interested in finding out, and doing.

In our case, visitors are interested in finding out how we can help them with their internet marketing, and how their site shapes up against our experts opinions. If we were not great internet marketers, we’d probably just have a home page that talks about us, and only have a contact form on our “Contact Us” page. We’d probably not have a good conversion rate either, and many people would bounce off our home page because they did not easily find what they were looking for. Instead, we have a strong call to action placed in the top left column on every page our website called “Free Website Performance Report”. We also include a link to our privacy statement right there to ensure people are assured their information is safe. By doing so we’ve clearly met the visitors needs up front making it easy for them to complete their objective - find a reputable Internet Marketing firm and find out what condition their site is in.

Ask yourself these questions about your site:

1. What do visitors to my site need to accomplish?
2. What do I want visitors on my site to do?
3. Can they do these right from my home page?

Now that you’ve answered these questions take the time to write out some clear calls to action that address these needs directly. It may require forms on your site, or just textual calls to action to draw visitors into other parts of your site. Either way make it easy for them. After you’ve made your changes start reviewing your analytics and monitor the results! We’re confident you’ll see a marked improvement!