In part 1 of this article
we looked at first five of ten basic steps to drive traffic to your
website and help convert as many visitors into buyers as
possible.
It's really all about capturing relevant searches AND engaging
with visitors when they're on your site.
There are many more actions that can be taken, but we are
focusing on just the basics at this stage. The reason for
this is that so many online businesses - and off-line businesses
that add an online presence - fail to do the simplest of things to
help grow revenue.
Most of what can be done involves modest costs or none.
But, without taking at least some of these ten steps, your internet
ROI is unlikely to be healthy.
6 Build an email
list
This can be one of THE most effective things you can do -
especially if you are selling a higher value product that customers
are unlikely to buy on first visit.
Building an email list is a great channel for talking directly
to your customers and potential customers. Many marketing
experts regard a strong email list as the king of ROI(Return on
Investment) because it gives you so much useful information about
your customers.
Once they have signed up, you can track them and tailor offers
and products to their needs and wants.
So, how is an email list built?
There are many ways and some quick internet research will throw
up lots of creative ideas; and, although few, if any, will be new,
there will be suggestions out there that are suitable for your
business.
Here are three simple methods:
- Give something away when people sign up - perhaps a report or a
fact sheet - something that is useful.
- You could start a simple newsletter if this is appropriate to
your business.
- Simply ask visitors if they would like to be kept informed of
product and price information from your business - if you can add
incentive offers, so much the better.
7 Update your content, again and
again…
Search engines love fresh content. The equation is simple
- the more dynamic your site, the more the engines will like
it.
Your site needs new pages and existing pages need to change
often. This is how the search engines will know your site is alive
and active.
There are many innovative ways to add content to your site, but
perhaps the simplest way for businesses with little time or
resource to devote to the effort, is a blog.
Everyone and his wife has a blog these days, but, to make one
effective, you do need to have something to say, and of course you
need to key word optimise it (see the first part of this
article). Be careful not to go over the top, though, as this
will be counter-productive.
Blogs, though, are ideal for many businesses because they lend
themselves to content of varying length and are often written in an
informal, more inviting style than traditional articles. That
shouldn't mean they are carelessly thrown together, though. A
sloppily written blog, with a poorly constructed viewpoint will do
nothing to increase dwell time; and at worst it will reflect badly
on your brand. In short, if you want to create a good blog, give it
some thought and effort.
A good piece of advice is to stick to writing about your
business and those of your clients, at least to start; this way
your blog will automatically be keyword rich. Use
industry news and snippets of information as entries or as
springboards for comment. Make it useful and/or make it
interesting.
8 Create a site
map
This might appear to be a luxury add on for many sites, but it's
actually an excellent way of helping search engines see all your
pages, even so-called orphaned ones - those that aren't directly
linked to the rest of the site.
To see what a site map looks like we can do no better that look
at one for a leading business insurance website - this one!
A comprehensive site map can also help customers navigate in a
more traditional, list-focused way, if they want to. But the
main benefit is that search engines will find it easy to spider all
the pages you put in your map.
Creating a map in XML is fairly straightforward and, once again,
free. Sign up for Google's Webmaster Tools, and follow the
instructions, then upload the file to your
site.
9 Test your
site
Often overlooked, but possibly one of the most insightful and
useful things you can do is to keep testing your site. Optimisation
isn't just about inserting the right words and phrases into your
site copy. You also want to make site navigation as user-friendly
as possible. Even tiny changes can make a big difference.
When you use Google analytics you gain excellent insight into
who's coming to your site and how they behave while
there.
If what you discover is that there are shortcomings on the site
- few people click on a 'Go straight to checkout' option, for
example - you want to know why. How do you test changes that
might improve matters?
You can, of course, just make a change, like the colour or
prominence of the 'Go straight to checkout' button and see if
more people click it. But that doesn't create a control - how
do you know if the prominence or colour really have made a
difference or whether it was all to do with that BOGOFF offer
you're running?
Do you care, so long as sales rise? Well, yes, very
probably you should, because small changes - say site navigational
changes - that make even slight percentage gains on sales will
mount up significantly over time.
So, we need to carry out split testing. This is a superb
facility offered by Google. Just go to Google's
'Website Optimizer' to use it. This hugely valuable tool genuinely
takes the guesswork out of optimising your site's usability.
At the simplest level - and for those sites that don't have vast
amounts of traffic - the optimizer offers the straightforward A/B
test.
Here you can set up variants of a page and site visitors will be
directed to each. You can then see their different responses and
actions in detail.
10 Off-site
content
It's worth keeping in mind that by many estimates, You Tube is
now the second most popular search engine after Google, especially
among young people.
And an increasing number of people are looking for How To
information - information that is often far more quickly and
effectively conveyed audio-visually than via text.
Does your product or business lend itself to a series of short
How To video presentations? If you run a restaurant, why not
offer a series of How To cook videos; a plumber or any tradesman
can reveal some tricks of the trade - how to change a washer on a
tap, how to plaster a wall and so on. The list is almost
endless.
The benefit here is lots of lovely in-bound links to your home
site - along with some nice brand building.
Not every company will consider this kind of content suitable
for their line of business, but, for many, it's certainly worth
thinking about.
Similarly, it's also worth setting up social network sites, such
as on Facebook and Twitter. The more in-bound links you have
- and each person following you creates one - the better.
So, that's ten basic steps that can really help drive your
website to success.
Too often businesses seem to believe just having a web presence
and a pretty design is enough to do business online. It's
not.
It's also not enough just to drive traffic to your site and then
hope for the best. You need to optimise to gain traffic, for
sure, but you also need to engage visitors once they've
arrived.
The great news is that much of the mystery of online success is
increasingly being diminished by free and effective services, like
the Google ones mentioned earlier.
Ultimately, the measure of your site's success is your
conversation rate, or the worth of those conversions to you - your
rate may be low, but each conversion may be extremely high
value.
The generally received and accepted wisdom (which means there
isn't much data to actually back it up), is that the average
conversion rate is around 2 to 3%.
But that's the average, dragged down by a lot of dysfunctional
sites. Get optimisation right and keep trying to improve your
site, and your conversation rate could rise far higher than the
average.
