Optimising The Conversion Rate Of Your Website
27/8/2009 15:40
Attaining the no.1 spot on Google is great achievement. It's not so great when you see that you get a lot of visitors through your high search engine ranking but only a few actual customers.
Search engine optimisation is pointless if your website does not convert visitors into customers. You'll actually lose a lot of money if you don't take the time to optimise the conversion rates of your website pages.
Why is optimising the conversion rate of your website important?
Suppose you sell a product / service for £50. If the conversion rate of your website is 1% then 1 out of 100 website visitors will buy your product or service. That means that you will sell 2 units if 200 people visit your website.
If you want to double your sales, you have to double the number of visitors that come to your website. That's usually quite difficult. So what now?
If you optimise your web pages so that you have a conversion rate of 2% then you can double your sales without getting more visitors. Increasing the conversion rate of a website is usually easier than getting more customers and obviously far more profitable.
What can you do to improve the conversion rate of your website pages?
There are several things that you can do to improve the conversion rate of your pages:
1. Drive traffic to the most relevant pages on your website.
Your website visitors should come to the most relevant pages on your website. If you advertise on Google AdWords for the search term "buy big green bottles" then your landing page should be a page about big green bottles and it should be possible to buy these bottles right on the page. The same applies for visitors that you get through your regular search engine rankings.
2. Check your website statistics for your pages with a high bounce rate.
There are many packages out there that measure this but as a starter use Google analytics, its fast and easy to set up and best of all is free.
Analyse your analytics stats to find pages on your site that have a high bounce rate. If too many people leave your website without fulfilling the desired task then you have to improve your pages and make them more relevant to the user's query. Also check your statistics to find "404 not found" and other errors.
3. Add a call to action on all of your landing pages
Every landing page should contain a call to action. Chances are that a website visitor will see only a single page of your website. That's why all pages should contain a call to action so that your website visitors know what to do. If you can link your call to action to your payment facility or contact form then this will increase conversation rates.
Don’t under estimate the results that on-page SEO can bring your business. Contact Us today for a no obligation discussion.
How Many keywords Should You Optimise
26/6/2009 1:56
Achieving top 10, even top 3 placement on Google and other leading search engines is the goal of any search engine optimisation efforts.
If you have already invested time in researching the best keywords for your website then you will have a list as long as your arm of words / phrases you wish to rank highly for.
With this in mind, how many keywords should your website target? Perhaps I should rephrase. How many keywords should each of your webs pages target?
Answer:
#1
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You should not try to optimise one webpage for one than one keyword / phrase. The phrase can of course consist of multiple words but a different phrase will require a different page. |
Why? Well it’s much better for ranking purposes if a web page is highly relevant to one keyword than somewhat relevant to many search terms. If you concentrate on one keyword per page then it is much more likely that your web page will get a top listing on Google for that keyword / phrase.
You will get the best possible results if you optimise different pages of your website for different but related keywords.
How to optimise a web page for your chosen keyword
When you optimise a web page for a keyword, it's important that the right elements of your web page contain the keyword in the right frequency. In the old days simply hitting the optimum % of keyword density used to do the trick. Not any more. The only true way of measuring keyword density levels is to evaluate your top 10 competitors for that exact phrase and evaluate how much / how little they use the keyword phrase within the core elements of the website content, i.e. meta data, h1 tags, inbound links, outbound links, the content itself.. and the list goes on.
The keyword competitor analysis is a task the SEO-Authority do as part of an SEO Audit & Analysis Report, or please contact us for more information
Single keywords Vs keyword phrases
You should always aim to optimise your web pages for a very targeted keyword that consists of many words. A keyword that consists of many words is called "key phrase". This has several advantages:
1. It's much easier to get top 10 rankings for targeted key phrases because the competition is not as fierce as the competition for single word key words.
2. Key phrases attract much more targeted website visitors. People who search for "Football" might be interested in magazines, clubs or even the players. People who search for "Buy Cheap football kits" are looking for inexpensive football kits and they are ready to buy. There is little reward in optimising your website for keywords that don’t result in orders to your basket. What it will result in is a high bounce rate of traffic from your site.
3. By optimising your web page for a key phrase, you automatically optimise your web page for the parts of that key phrase. For example, your web page will automatically be optimised for "football kits", "football" and other keywords if you optimise your page for "Buy Cheap football kits"
Optimise one web page for one keyword and introduce and optimise as many webpage’s as necessary. More is defiantly better!
If many pages of your website have been optimised for many related keywords then your website will look relevant to the topic of your keywords (in the example: "football"). If search engines think that your website is relevant to a special topic then it will be easier to get high rankings for the individual keywords.
17/6/2009 1:55
Our very own Jon Smith (Co-Director of the SEO-Authority) has kindly agreed to offer a sneak preview into his new book which will go on public sale on the 1st July titled:
Dominate Your Market With Twitter:
Tweet your way to business success
To avoid infringements of publisher rights (Publisher: Infinite Ideas) we can give you exclusive quotes from the book that will give you some insight into Jons Twitter research and findings, but to get the full story, yes you guessed it, you will have to buy it.
This blog post isn't about plugging the book as much as possible (did I mention its available in all good book shops) it's simply extracting some of the key points relating to SEO Strategy.
We all know the importance of back links and authority ones at that, however Twitter isn’t great for providing such links but that doesn’t mean it cant help with your SEO efforts:
Jon states:
“A <nofollow> tag is an instruction to the search engines not to follow a link to its destination and to essentially ignore it. Twitter could be a great tool for generating thousands if not millions of links, because every time you post a web address in your Tweet this could be a valuable backlink to your website... in fact lots of people are including their URLs in their Tweets for that express reason – however, what they don’t realise is that Twitter is adding a <nofollow> tag to those links essentially nullifying them from an SEO perspective.” (JS)
He goes on to explain:
“Why? Well, if links within Tweets were taken into account by search engines, spammers would immediately try to take advantage of it and flood Twitter with useless links and spam. For that reason Twitter is adding the <nofollow> tag to ensure the party isn’t ruined by spammers and abuse of the system” (JS)
So should you even bother with Twitter links?
Very much so, regardless of the <nofollow> tag, the search engine web bots may not be able to follow them but humans certainly can. Additionally if you have something informative to Tweet to your Followers then include it, after all quality content as with websites will attract a natural flow of targeted traffic.
Jon does point out that:
“Although links posted within Tweets are not relevant for search engines… Don’t forget that you are able to add a link within your profile to your website – the web page you point to on your profile does not have a <nofollow> tag so it will indeed assist with your search engines rankings.” (JS)
Twitter Trends
Twitter is a great way to visualize trends and observe what are latest hot topics. SEO is very much related to keywords and Twitter is a great mechanism for tracking those keywords and in real-time conversations, so back links are not the be all and end all of SEO.
Jon writes:
“So, instead you can focus your attention on Twitter to see what is becoming interesting, which keywords users are using in order to create relevant articles or content. Therefore Twitter is a great way to both anticipate and to monitor interesting subjects, and to ensure that you are first to know what is already or is becoming important.” (JS)
Tip: Check out some of the TAG cloud tools such as Tweetscoop which present visual depictions of a sites content to help you quickly identify those trends.
Finally Jon talks about Twitter and SERP’s
“Twitter posts and accounts appear on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), especially if you have linked to them from other sites (like your blog or your website etc.)"
"Using Twitter regularly and including relevant keywords in your Tweets will increase your Twitter account visibility on search results, whether or not the search engine user is a Twitter user. This is a great way to drive that traffic to your website.” (JS)
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To find out more about this book and other publications from the Author Jon Smith please visit our Publications Page
How Does Microsoft BING Compare To Google?
5/6/2009 15:14
Bing is a search engine from Microsoft officially announced on May 28
On looks alone, Bing is not dramatically different from Google. There are however some visible changes:
* Bing shows a preview of the web pages in the search results when you hover your mouse pointer at the right side of the search results.
* Bing displays fewer results if it is certain that it has understood your intent. The search for "Facebook", for example, brings up just one result linking to the site itself.
* Some search results are divided into categories. For example, if you search for the popular musicians "Oasis", you'll get results in the categories news, songs, movies, biography, wallpaper and downloads. In addition, the search results show images, videos and the popularity of the musician.
* Despite the background image, Bing's homepage loads very quickly in your web browser because the search box and logo load first. You can turn off the background image.
* Wikipedia searches can be displayed inline in the search results without leaving the Bing site by clicking the "Enhanced view" link.
Bing's video search lets you watch videos without leaving the search engine.
* Bing offers specific health, shopping and travel search engines, as well as instant answers to travel searches. For instance, the search "London hotels" displays a selection of hotels in Las Vegas, including hotel stars and prices.
* Bing's search history lets you return to your most recent searches of the last two days. This feature can be turned off to protect your privacy.
* Bing features a different background image every day. The image contains special hidden hotspots that lead you to more information (soon advertising?) about the image.
* Some of Google's features are missing, for example, Bing doesn't seem to recognize misspellings and returns no results in these cases.
How Microsoft BING differs from the LIVE / MSN searches in terms of the Algorithm will become evident following further testing. We ourselves are carrying out significant tests against BING in comparison to Google and yahoo to see if there have been any significant updates. What this space…..
Does Google Analytics Affect My SEO
5/6/2009 11:29
Analytics toolsets have come along way since the early days of simply tracking the volumes of visitors to your site. These evolved toolsets can now track what visitors do once they get to the website and how your website caters to or meets their needs. Words like Conversion Rate, Landing Pages, Bounce Rate, etc are now as important, if not more so, than just measuring the number of visitors to the site. This need to understand in greater detail the degree to which a website meets its objectives has given rise to a whole new industry of Web Analytics toolsets.
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There are many website analytics packages available on the market. This article isn’t about reviewing those. I will focus on how you can use the outputs of such tools to monitor and improve your SEO efforts. I will lean towards Google Analytics as a toolset as this has the lions share of market. |
When first accessing Google’s Analytics tool and without customisation you are immediately presented with a summary page showing a whole host of information that can steer your SEO efforts. Your eyes are immediately drawn to the map of the world showing your visitors geographical location. We all love graphical and picture representations of data, it’s pleasing to the eye, especially when you’re tracking hits to your site. In addition to looking good, it serves an important purpose for your SEO efforts. This is called Geo targeting.
“Geotargeting” refers to using Analytics data to gain information about the geographical locations of visitors to your website. This information is crucial in deciding whether to focus on a particular geographic location for maximising growth and whether it will be viable to increase advertising in areas where the company has less visiblity.
Geotargeting can also be used to decide if there is any value in translating your website to cater for foreign languages. For instance, if research shows that a high number of visitors to your site are from China, it might provide fruitful to create a Chinese language version of the site to home in on this potential market. You will note that I use the words “create a Chinese language version of the site” and not use the phrase ‘translate your page’. Their are hundreds are translation software tools on the net, many free but even with the paid tools, the accuracy of language conversion is not 100%. If you are serious about targeting internationally, ensure your page is professionally translated. The equivalent of ‘Pigeon English ‘is not going to maximise on your opportunity.
Another important measurement that Analytics provides is Bounce Rate. “Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.”
The Bounce rate of a website can be used to measure the ‘Visit Quality’ of a visitor to your website. If the Bounce rate for your site is high, this suggest that the landing page for the visitor is not relevant or compelling enough for the visitor to explore further.
To reduce the Bounce rate, ensure that your landing pages match what was promised on the links to those pages or from links from your web ads. A high bounce rate will significantly reduce your conversion rate and if you are adopting a Pay Per Click programme, it will be costing you money.
Looking at your traffic sources is another important factor when planning your SEO. Understanding how visitors find your site, i.e. organic search, referring sites, Pay Per Click etc is essential when calculating marketing cost and effort in each of these areas. If your highest source of traffic is via PPC, then your efforts should be focussing on Organic search with the aim of reducing your PPC costs and improving free search traffic. If your site frequently refers visitors from partner sites than its essential that your partnership / linking agreements remain in place. You can then also start exploiting similar sites to these referring sites with the aim of increasing this source of traffic.
I have only touched on 2 elements of analytics and the list of benefits goes on. Off the shelf so to speak and without customisation you are offered whole host of data you can use to plan your SEO. If you would like assistance in interpreting your analytics data or if you would like to take it to the next level, please contact us for a no obligation discussion
