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How to Beat the Economic Downturn with your Web Site
In the current economic down turn many business owners are looking at how they
can make their businesses more efficient. Read on to find out how to make your
web site more efficient and turn prospects into sales.
Efficiency
Efficiency is key to making an effective web site. In general web site users
are impatient and lazy so you need to address this by making a simple and easy
to use web site.
An efficient web site will make the most out of the traffic it gets. Its all
well and good having high rankings and lots of traffic but if your web site is
not efficient you will be losing out on a mountain of potential business.
Simplicity
The KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) theory is very applicable to you your web
site. Simplicity equals success.
Some of the most successful products and businesses are incredibly simple.
Simplicity is a tried and tested approach so Keep It Simple Stupid! Simplicity
equals Success!
Download Time
One of the biggest turn offs to any web user is a slow loading web site. If
your site takes more than two seconds to download you start losing visitors at
an exponential rate.
By the time you get to 7 seconds if your page isn't fully loaded you will have
lost around 90% of visitors. Think about that, you have lost 90% of visitors.
Thats not 90% of potential visitors, that's 90% of people who tried to view
your site that clicked back because it doesn't load quickly enough!
Can you really afford to lose 90% of potential customers?
The majority of web sites have incorrect or non
W3C complaint
code and common errors that cause a slow loading web site. What is surprising
is that many of these errors are surprisingly easy to
rectify.
Make it Easy
OK, so you have visitors to your site and it loads quickly, great! That is the
first hurdle taken care of.
But is your web site easy to use? It sounds like an obvious thing to do, but
getting someone out side of your company to find a product on your site might
highlight some problems. Just because you know where something is located
doesn't mean a potential customer will.
If its not easy for a customer to find a product and purchase it within 3
clicks from your home page you stand a high chance of losing that potential
customer.
This is called the 3 Click rule and is something that all web sites should try
and adhere to.
Don't try and do too much
Many websites fall down by trying to do too much. Your corporate logo might
look nice dancing around the screen but the reality is nobody cares about it!
People generally want information and they want it now!
Don't over complicate things by asking lots of questions or requiring lots of
clicks. Why should someone have to click through 5 menus to see a standard
price?
Converting Visitors to Sales
OK, so you have kept hold of your visitors with an efficient and simple
website that loads quickly. Good job!
Now you have to convert those visitors into sales. That's easier said then
done!
This next section explains some of the things you need to be aware of when
trying to get visitors to convert into sales.
Types of Traffic
Some search terms just plain don't convert to sales well. You may have a new
hi tech product that the world needs to know about and you have checked that
lots of people are searching for it. The trouble is, these are all research
based searches that have no intention of purchasing anything!
This highlights the fact that you need to know your market, research your
keywords and understand the commercial value of a search term.
A good indicator of the commercial value of a term is its competition score
and value in CPC in Google AdWords. If people are paying to get listed for a
term then it is likely that it will be a good commercial term.
Call to Action
People are emotional beings that act on impulse rather than logic. Ironically,
one of the most important yet over looked areas of on-line marketing
is incredibly obvious and logical.
Ask your customers to buy your product. Better yet Tell them!
You need a "Call To Action".
You literally need to say things like "Call us Today!" or "Buy Now!"
Think about how many times you have clicked a link that says "Click Here". You
did it because of the call to action.
One of the biggest causes for leaving a site is a site that is not very user
friendly. I recently came across one such travel site that looked good, I
liked the product. It offered unlimited travel around Europe. I thought "this
looks good for my trip, I don't have to work to a time table and can pick and
chose where and when I travel". I would very likely have purchased a ticket if
I could have found out how much it cost before I had to buy it.
As far as I could tell I would have had to enter all my personal and payment
details before finding out how much it was. Further more it had a map on the
home page that said "select your country of departure". Well, I was planning
on starting in Paris, France so I clicked France. It took me to the French
version, so I had to click back again. I wanted an English version but that
had trips departing from France.
This site was also split across several "partner" sites.
So here I am, a qualified buyer who want's their service and they didn't get
my business! Why? The site was very irritating and not very user friendly so
they didn't get any business from me.
I also went looking for some contact details so I could tell them about my
experience - couldn't find that either! The end result was that someone else
got my business! Don't let that happen to you!
Usability Audit
My experience with the travel site could have easily been avoided if the site
had addressed a few fundamental issues.
This highlights the necessity for conducting a usability audit of a web site.
Website usability is a whole subject in its self and is out side the scope of
this article. The following bullet points will point you in the areas you
should be looking at.
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Download Time
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Page Layout
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Browser Compatibility
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Headings
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Navigation
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Search Function
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Static Site Map
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Content
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Simplicity
Keyword research is, in my opinion, the single most important part of an SEO
plan. It is surprising that most business owners have never had any proper
keyword research done and do not really know the search market that relates to
their business.
Find Niches you didn't know existed
With keyword research you can often find some useful niche market areas that
are an untapped resource with a decent amount of traffic and little
competition. Thats a keyword gold mine and many
business completely overlook this kind of research
and analysis!
Don't assume you know your keywords
The fundamental principle behind keyword research is that you shouldn't assume
you know the keywords people use to find your web site. You may well know what
keywords you use to find it, but not what your customers are searching for.
I was asked by one company to get them the #1 rank for a machine that they
made. The machine had a generic product machine name and number. This was what
they asked me to rank them for.
They were horrified to learn that nobody searched for that keyword. They knew
that the machine was an XT40, but nobody else did!
So, I could have got the #1 spot for the term and they would not have received
a single enquiry for their new machine. Imagine if they had spent £5K on
on-line advertising targeted at that keyword!
There was a specific application that this machine catered for, and
that was what people who wanted the machine searched for, so this is what we
targeted.
The moral here is DO NOT assume that you know your keywords.
Its not all about volume
Another major mistake in keyword targeting is going after top level generic
keywords that have the most amount of searches in your industry.
Get the number one spot for Insurance and you might get lots of traffic but it
is not highly targeted traffic. For example, if you sold pet insurance and got
ranked for insurance, the majority of people searching for insurance are
probably not looking for pet insurance so your site will be of no use to them.
Some of the best converting and most valuable keywords
are surprisingly easy to get, you just have to determine which ones
are the best to target. This is addressed in the next section. Targeting key
phrases with 3 - 4 words are usually better because they are easier to rank
for and are much more specific.
Proven KEI Analysis Technique
Keyword research will usually involve a KEI analysis. This is something I am a
big fan of because it uses reliable data and proven metrics on which to
calculate the value of a keyword.
KEI stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index.
There are lots of ways to calculate your KEI value but all methods hinge
around the basic principle that more searches and less competition gives a
higher KEI value and thus a better keyword to target.
To tie in with the 3 - 4 word key phrase it is often the case that 3 - 4 word
key phrases will have something like 1/5th of the search volume of a generic
term but only 1/10th or 1/20th of the competition. This highlights
the benefit of keyword research. Find more people more easily!
Given the current economic climate sometimes you just need business NOW!
With Organic Search Engine results (the normal results you get in a search
engine) you will have to wait a period of time (usually several months) before
your efforts come to fruition. That might just not be viable for you
right now.
If this is the case, then PPC (Pay Per Click) tied in with Keyword Research
could be the answer for you. With PPC, you can start getting targeted traffic
right away!
Use Specific PPC Sales pages
PPC or sponsored search pages can be sale targeted pages that are more "hard
push" and graphical in nature. They do not have to follow the same rules as
search engine optimised pages.
You can create a set of specific pages that you can track success of though a
web analytics program such as Google Analytics.
PPC Sales pages can be tailored, tweaked and made to convert better in a much
shorter time frame than normal web pages in Organic Search Results.
Using Web Analytics will help you identify areas of your site that are not
performing well which can tell you that you need to fix an error or rewrite a
page.
You can try and monitor the success of different page titles, layouts and
colour schemes etc. You can get results in quite a short time meaning that you
can quickly capitalise on your existing traffic levels. That means you get
more business for the same level of traffic and advertising spend.
This feeds back into the whole Efficiency principle outlined at the beginning
of this article.
There is just NO excuse for not following up a web enquiry form an email or
form but it happens a lot! I just refuse to give my business to anyone who
doesn't want it. I should not have to try to get you to take my business, it
should be incredibly easy for me to pay you my hard earned cash so
don't fall down at the first hurdle!
Respond to all enquiries!
You might be very busy, and that's OK, but at least let me know you got my
email!
Set up auto responders to web forms and sales email addresses ensuring your
potential customer that they are important to you and that someone is looking
into their enquiry and will get back to them shortly.
If you get an enquiry make sure you follow it up! Anyone is a potential
customer.
Why wait for an email or web enquiry to come in? Add an on-line chat
assistance to help customers on your site. You can get a sales person in touch
with someone on your site before they leave and can also convince them to
purchase where as they may otherwise click back.
This section can be summarised by a phrase I like a lot - "Look
after the customer of someone else will!" - and that is very true!
Summary
There are many ways that you can make more out of your web site for very
little cost.
By following a few of the fundamental issues outlined in this article you will
be able to drastically increase your conversion to sale ratio without spending
any more on advertising and without getting any more traffic.
That almost sounds like something for nothing! Well its not! You have a lot of
hard work to do but if you do it properly you will make your web site much
more efficient and be generating more business to help you get through these
difficult economic times.
Go forth and be efficient!
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