Turn Your Visitors into Buyers

Hello people,

Last week I have written about the right keywords. Once you have created your keyword list, it is essential to create landing pages which contain these keywords. This is a crucial step to get conversions. A conversion is when a customer buys your products or signs up for a newsletter or takes any action you would like him to take.

When your landing page does not include the keyword your customer typed in when looking for your services, it is not very likely that he keeps browsing your website. Moreover, it is recommended that you create a separate landing page for each of your keyword, or combination of keywords. Each of your PPC ads should point at a relevant landing page. So how to make your landing pages bring you actual sales?

Content is King

Create useful and comprehensive content that's related to your market to keep your visitors there. Adding keyword-rich text that makes sense and serves the concept of the web page improves your ranking and keeps your visitors interested. The more text, the better for search engine spiders when they index a website; it is strongly recommended that your homepage has at least 200-300 “visible” words. Moreover, the search engine spiders crawl especially the first 20 words of your website so try to keep an eye on them and make them really relevant to what your site is about.

In addition, valuable, dense and regularly updated content is one of the most important items you need for your website because visitors who stay longer while visiting a website help measure popularity of the site in the search engines. When creating content for your landing page, you should pay attention to the following elements:

The Purpose of Your Landing Page

The first step when creating your langing page should be setting a goal you want to achieve. What is it that you want your visitors to do? This could be one of the following:

1. Buy a product
2. Sign up a newsletter
3. Download a free trial
4. Read an article
5. Do a survey
6. Participate in a competition

List the Real Benefits

When you know the purpose of your landing page, you should give your visitors a REASON to move towards the goal. Remember, it is not your goal that they will follow; in fact, people are always looking for what is in it for THEM.

To achieve this, always list benefits of your products or services; not features. The difference is that benefits mean something valuable to the consumer while features are just descriptions of your product characteristics. Nobody cares so much about what material you used when creating the product, or what the technical parametres are. Usually, what matters to them is what problems your product can solve, and more importantly, how they will benefit from buying and using it.

In addition, websites offering products that managed to fix a problem usually get highest conversion rates. Moreover, try to use "you" more often than "I" or "we". Remember: Your customers don't care about you at all. The only thing they are looking for is what is in it for them.

Include a Call to Action

Once you have decided what you want your visitors to do and after revealing all the benefits they get, it is crucial to tell them what to do next. It must be crystal clear what they need to do:

1. Click here to order your SEO eBook now.
2. Sign up for the Success! Newsletter here.
3. Press Enter to continue. Etc.

In order to make a call to action more catchy and attention gaining, there is one smart trick: use the red colour always you want to highlight something to be clicked on. However, do not overdo it, since when your website is red on its whole, the particular spots will not stand out.

Keep it Simple

In order to keep your visitors focused on the steps you want them to take, keep all possible distractions away. This means your landing page should not be stuffed with links that will direct them away from the page. The only links your landing page should contain are those in line with your goal: links to your order pages, newsletter sign up forms, etc.

Keywords to Attract More Visitors

Last week, I wrote about the first and most important step to take if you want to boost your website traffic. But what to do next?

The second step of your SEO (and PPC campaigns as well) is to make the best keyword list possible. A keyword is a word or a phrase people who are looking for your product type in Google or Yahoo. For example, if you are a marketing consultancy, one of your keywords may be “marketing advice”.

Creating a rich and appropriately targetted keyword list is a fundamental step that will have a strong impact on your campaign success. Avoid expensive general keywords: you will certainly get a high rate of impressions, but not necessarily high conversion sales. Focus on specific key phrases that will get more highly targeted people to your site. That means, do not use just “marketing” as there are many people typing this word in, but they are not looking for any marketing help or advice for their business. Instead, go for combinations such as “marketing help”, “marketing consultancy” etc.

Moreover, I would advise you to apply the following methodology to choose the right words:

1) Organise a brainstorming with your co-workers, business partners, friends or relatives to find keywords relevant to your business. Focus on the needs of your target audience, what they would type in when looking for your products. Having created your customer value proposition before, this should be now much easier to do.

2) Try to make a list of 100 keywords minimum. Providing that you barely reach this goal, do use search term suggestion tool (such as http://www.inventory.overture.com/ or http://www.wordtracker.info/). These will give you an idea what phrases based on your keyword have been looked for recently.

3) Don’t forget dashes, apostrophes, spelling variations, plural versions and various tenses. Your potential customers will not search a keyword in the same way. For instance: website, web site, web-site.

4) Check out your competitors’ webpages for ideas. View the source HTML code and take a look at keywords in their meta tags. They could be a good tip for yours!When you are combining your SEO with PPC advertising campaigns, it is very helpful to use tracking results from Google Adwords or Yahoo! Search Marketing to revalue your keyword list. Try to put emphasis on those which gain the highest number of clicks in your PPC campaigns.

What Offering Will Bring You Fortune?

Hello People!

If you want to boost your website traffic, the first step you have to take, is to create your customer value proposition. Success in a company is governed by three key factors;

1. How valuable, your target market believes, your offering is.
   
2. Your ability to market, sell and service the offering.
   
3. The quality and skill set of your management team.

Many excellent companies have all 3 ingredients for success. Where strong management teams, or entrepreneurs, have a great offering, but realise they may need help in the marketing and selling of their product to reach their true potential, they should turn to external experts.

Some companies seem to find the selling and marketing of their products a particularly daunting task. The reason is that their product is often intangible. Many companies find huge difficulty in accurately articulating their Customer Value Proposition (CVP).

Without a clear definition of value to your clients, it is going to be difficult or impossible to formulate your sales and marketing messages to define why people should purchase from you. When creating your CVP, there are 5 key steps, which lead to 5 deliverables:

1. Know your Customer
Select Target Customer
Deliverable: Customer Needs, Wants & Pains Identified

2. Know your Product or Service
Identify Customer Value
Deliverable: Customer Benefits identified

3. Know your Target Market
Select Target Markets
Deliverable: Addressable Market identified

4. Know your Competitors
Choose Competitive Differentiators
Deliverable: Competitive Differentiators chosen

5. Create your CVP Statement
Create a Value Proposition
Deliverable: Value Proposition created

We are able to help with this crucial task via our 3R Customer Value Proposition full-day Workshop that is strongly recommended to take before attending the 3R SEO Workshop. However, if you decide to go just for the SEO one, we will cover the topic of CVP briefly at the beginning. Without a clear CVP statement, you cannot move forward with your SEO and PPC strategy.

What You Get from SEO?

Hello, people!

This week you will learn more about the magic acronym SEO (meaning Search Engine Optimisation) you have probably seen dozens of times. So how could understanding of this magic drive your website to the top positions in Google, Yahoo, or Msn.com within specific search terms your ready-to-buy customers type in when looking for your products?

SEO means that your website is "optimised" for search engines, meaning that, ideally, your web site will come up as one of the first 10 sites when people search for keywords pertinent to your business. This is essential to your website traffic which might lead to further sales generation.

Getting a top 5 search ranking in Google, Yahoo! and recently in MSN.com as well is the key factor to advertise your product online. Optimising your website will generate more traffic than all of your other Internet Marketing efforts combined. By simply getting traffic coming to your website, you have got better chance to generate more sales....

During the 3R Boost Your Website Traffic Workshop you will learn about SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns before you waste a lot of money on a campaign that doesn't work. This ebook provides essential overview of SEO and, together with the workbook coming from the workshop, it will help you to launch or optimise your online advertising campaigns with Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) or Microsoft AdCenter. However, given the current market trends in Ireland, we will focus on Google Adwords above all.

Although SEO might seem to be a simple and relatively easy-to-use way of improving your website ranking, which helps your customers find your website easier, there is also a possibility of abuse. This can finally lead to your website being excluded from the search engines listings. Therefore it is crucial to know the difference between techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design (so called “White Hat” SEO) and those that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimise their effect (referred to as “Black Hat” SEO or spamdexing).

Another interesting fact to know is that search engines change their search criteria daily. There are usually very subtle changes an average website owner does not have to track. Their purpose is to prevent spamdexing or at least make it as difficult as possible.

Well this is just shorly now, will write about this topic somewhat more in the coming posts. However, if you cannot wait and are hungry for information on SEO, contact me now.