Are you thinking about starting an e-commerce store online? Or perhaps you have one already but you don’t believe it can never compete alongside some of the big brand websites like Amazon?
Here’s the good news, according to a new survey by Forrester Research, the web has created a world stage where consumers no longer need to value brands.
This means that your website can compete for market share alongside big brands. But to do this you’ll need to make sure your site gets found in the search engines and that you pay attention to conversion rate optimisation.
Here’s the thing, almost 60 per cent of UK shoppers have not decided on the brand before researching or buying a product online.
With e-commerce sites like eBay and Amazon battling it out for the cheapest prices on the internet, it comes as no surprise that online shoppers are weighing up their options.
What’s interesting about the results of this survey is that 86 per cent of respondents use ratings and reviews for online purchases. So if you want to improve your conversion rate optimisation, you simply have to have a rating and review system on your website.
Patricia Evans, research director at Forrester, said many companies see integrating user-generated content as an end in itself and fail to appreciate the value it can create, both online and in-store.
“Businesses are still scared by how much they’ll get, that they won’t get enough, or that customers will say something negative,” she said. “They have the approach still that we tell our customers what to want.”
Evans believes that the UK is a relatively mature market for e-commerce, with annual order value per customer the highest in the world at about £576, compared with £480 in the US.
And another thing an additional 44 per cent of shoppers check for product prices online before buying products in-store. This is great news if you also have a local bricks and mortar business to complement your e-commerce store. It means that you have got two channels for selling your goods.
Of the 500 shoppers surveyed, 42 per cent use their mobile phone while shopping. The research identified that out of that 42 per cent, 16 per cent used it to compare prices with other stores.
Competing on price is something that I’m always wary of. It can start a downhill spiral that can kill your business. What this research doesn’t pick up on is that most people look at prices but that is only one factor in their buying decision.
Reviews and ratings will have a huge effect on your conversion rate as well as every element of your website’s design, colour scheme, wording, guarantees and cost of shipping.
Here’s the thing, if you make it easy for someone to buy from you and they feel they can trust you, the likelihood is that they will be happy to pay slightly more from a website that is easy to use with a simple checkout, has good feedback and free delivery. It’s all about convenience.
So before you jump into the battle for the cheapest prices for whatever you’re selling, have a look at other ways you can use conversion rate optimisation to maximise the profit from every visitor you get to your website.
So what is uQast?
It’s a powerful, easy to use free website that enables anyone with valuable digital media to build an audience by showcasing their content in any format.
Here’s the thing, it’s the first significant platform that allows anyone to monetize the ocean of user generated videos, mp3s and e-books that are out there on the internet. It connects people searching for the best stuff on the internet with the people that create it.
In the same way that set Google itself apart from its competitors Brad Fallon and his team have come up with a patented ranking algorithm that gets the best free content the most attention. This means that the site will attract a lot of searchers looking for free information.
But here’s the best part, using uQast you can sell your digital products in several different ways.
Firstly, you can build your own digital media store on uQast.com so that you can promote and sell your mp3/s, videos and e-books.
So if you’re a rock band looking for a cheaper way to get your music and videos out there than iTunes or you want to sell your ‘How to’ video guide this is the best platform to build a following and make money.
If you think of it as the Amazon and iTunes for all digital media with a built in affiliate network that continuously sends you new customers for any topic imaginable. This affiliate network can become your army of commision based sales people and promote your content for you.
In addition you can use uQast for video marketing. You can promote your videos on any website in the world that allows you to embed them. So instead of embedding your YouTube videos on sites like Hubpages and Squidoo, why not embed your uQast videos so that someone can click through to your digital media store.
You can even embed your videos on your own website and benefit from the built in shopping cart with one click upsells that comes with uQast.
A lot of very smart people are saying uQast just may be “the next big thing.” They don’t say that lightly. Here’s why…
- Have you ever wanted to collect email opt-ins right from your videos?
- Or maybe create a drag and drop video upsell and downsell funnel?
- Or collect “tips” in your internet tip jar when people enjoy your free streaming video?
- Ever wished your content was truly ranked by its VALUE (instead of at the mercy of whoever does the better job of marketing)?
- Or make money from someone just embedding your video on their website?
I was lucky enough to work with Brad Fallon and be part of the marketing team behind the launch of uQast. I’ve toured the site on a sneak preview and it’s impressive.
Go and claim your free uQast store.
I’m a firm believer in managing my client’s expectations because in my experience this is where most SEO companies go wrong.
More often than not when a client finds me it’s because they’ve had a previous bad experience with one and sometimes two or more SEO companies.
Let me tell you a story about a recent client of mine who competes in the buy to let property market. He had been spending £500 a month with an SEO company for almost a year before he came to me. During this time he had seen absolutely no return on his investment. In this case it was zero.
My client was frustrated and really disappointed that they had parted with a lot of money and gained nothing from it.
Why? It could be that the previous SEO company he was using were like a dodgy garage that relied on most people’s naivity and fleeced every innocent customer for work they hadn’t actually done. Sadly this happens in the world of search engine optimisation.
What’s more likely in this case, is that the SEO company had no idea how big a mountain they had to climb to get my client ranked for his keywords. In all likelihood they probably just asked him what his budget was or what he could afford and went off trying to improve his rankings for keywords that they had done zero research on.
And guess what? They failed.
Here’s the thing, if you don’t know how competitive your keywords are how can you possibly set a realistic budget for your SEO?
There are two ways to set a more realistic budget. One is to do a rough guesstimate at what it’s going to take to start competing on the first page of Google for your keywords. You can do this by analysing the number of backlinks the competing sites on the first page have compared to how many your site currently has.
Whatever the difference is tells you the minimum number of links you need to go out and get to compete. If the site currently occupying the number 10 spot on Google has 3000 links and you only have 200, you know you need at least another 2801 backlinks to be in with a shot.
There are lots of other factors to consider like your domain age, page rank and ‘on page’ factors like meta tags but as a rough rule of thumb it ‘s better than going in completely blind.
But there is something else that you need to look at. If you analyse the anchor text of your competitor’s backlinks you’ll get a much better picture of what you need to do to compete.
Going back to my earlier example of the competitor with 3000 links, if 420 of those links contain the anchor text ‘buy to let property’ this tells you how many specific links you need to compete for the keyword ‘buy to let property’.
Once you know this you’ll have a pretty good idea of how much work needs to be done.
On the other hand if you want the most accurate way of setting our SEO budget, you could invest in a Competitor Intelligence Report or Rankings Roadmap as I like to call it. Most SEO Companies don’t even know what this is or if they do, don’t offer one with anywhere near enough detail and research to give you an accurate budget for your SEO.
A rankings roadmap will give you a highly accurate budget of exactly what needs to be done to get you onto the first page of Google, then into the top three positions and eventually number one.
The roadmap analyses up to 40 SEO factors of each of your competitors in the top 10 to reverse engineer precisely what needs to be done to get your business where it needs to be.
Now let me tell you the whole story. Sometimes doing this homework in advance tells you whether you can afford to compete for those particular keywords or sometimes in that market at all. If the mountain is just too big to climb don’t leave basecamp.
When it comes to investing in an SEO campaign, the most common question we get asked is ‘How soon can I expect to see results?’ The honest answer is, it depends.
It depends on whether your website is new or established. It depends if your site has already had some SEO link building or if you are starting from scratch. It depends on the competitiveness of your keywords and how well optimised your competitor’s sites are.
As long as you are doing everything right, you can expect to see an increase in your search engine rankings over time. We usually see results to the top 10 in less than 6 months. Once we get you onto the all important first page, this is where the competition can really hot up.
The truth is that the more competitive a keyword is, the more time and money you’re going to need spend on SEO to out perform your competition.
Having done an initial analysis of your market and the level of competition, the investment is often an educated best guess at what it’s going to take to get you where you need to be.
If you want to know for certain, the only sure fire way is to invest in a ‘Rankings Roadmap’ which is a competitor intelligence report that completely reverse engineers exactly what your top ranking competitors are doing in terms of SEO to be above you.
A Rankings Roadmap gives you the precise SEO strategy and budget required to get to number 1 for your chosen keywords. Once you have this you have much more predictability to your search engine marketing campaign and a guaranteed realistic budget and virtually guaranteed results.
Is your conversion optimisation suffering because of your web design? Are you turning your customers off because your website is difficult to navigate? Does your site load so slowly that your bounce rate is sky high and losing you potential business?
In the spirit of World Usability Day on the 11th of November, I thought it would be useful to create a checklist for the top 10 usability items for your website to help you increase your conversion optimisation.
The idea of World Usability Day is to focus on creating awareness for designs, products and services that improve and facilitate communication around the world so let’s communicate more clearly with our web visitors.
So here are 10 basic usability questions you MUST ask yourself to ensure that your efforts are converting your traffic into sales!
1) Is your website difficult to read?
Is your copy reversed out? Are you using light coloured text on a dark background? If you are, you’re reducing the readability of your website or more importantly your sales copy, it’s going to cost you sales. Use a black serif font on a white background, you might think it’s boring but it works.
2) Is your site easy to navigate?
If you jumped into a new car and the gear stick wasn’t where you expected it or the indicator stalk wasn’t on the steering column you struggle to pull away in a hurry, right?
We’re used to cars having the essentials in the same place, that’s what makes it so easy to drive any car. So why try to confuse your visitors by not putting your navigation in a familiar place with a predictable format? Keep it simple and it will improve your conversion optimisation.
3) Are you Waffling?
Here’s the thing, if you are not talking in plain English you are going to lose your reader’s interest pretty fast. Don’t use technical jargon just because you can, keep it simple and you’ll keep their attention.
Keep you paragraphs brief discussing just one idea per paragraph if you can.
4) Is your page layout and design consistent throughout your entire site?
How frustrating is it when you are trying to buy something online and you get to the checkout but can’t see the proceed button because it’s not in the same place as the previous page?
How does it make you feel if you click on a link on a website and what you get is a page that has no similarity to the one you were just on? Do you think that you have been redirected to another website and cheated in some way? Keep it consistent and it will be reflected in your conversion rate optimisation.
5) Does your site load quickly?
Internet users are getting increasingly impatient as broadband speeds get quicker and we expect instant results. But if your site takes more than just a few seconds to fully load you’re going to have a high bounce rate and lose sales.
Make sure your pages are compressed and images don’t have missing height and width attributes. If you use “image expires” in your header, then browsers will cache the images until a specified date, speeding your load times for returning visitors.
Don’t have nested tables, pages that contain tables inside other tables make the page load slower, since the web browser is forced to find the end of the table before it can display the whole page.
6) Is your content arranged properly with the visitor’s eye being drawn to the desired action you want them to take?
The golden rule here is one page, one action. This means that you should only have one desired action for your visitors for every page on your website. Confusing them with multiple ‘calls to action’ will lead to inaction because they won’t know what to do.
You can use subtle cues like the person in your image looking at your call to action or you can have a big red arrow. And another thing, make sure your written content flows in a way that your visitor ends up arriving at your call to action. Do this and you”ll be rewarded with increased conversion optimisation.
7) Is any text other than your links underlined?
We’ve been trained that underlined text is a clickable link and our eyes are drawn to them. When a site uses underlined text it’s confusing when it’s not a link.
8 ) Is Your Help Section Helpful?
If a visitor has a question they want it answered quickly and easily. Don’t bury your FAQs where they can’t be found. Make it easy for people to get in touch with you. Have your telephone number prominently displayed at the top of every page on your site. Make sure your ‘Contact Us’ page can be found easily and has a short, simple form for emails.
9) Does your site have dead ends?
If you’ve moved or deleted a page or the visitor types int he wrong URL by mistake or you’ve got a broken link, what message do they get? Is it a helpful message that tries to point them in the right direction or do they just get a dead end 404 page not found message?
Make sure you have a custom 404 message that keep visitors on your site.
10) Do you use videos on your website?
Video has proven to increase conversion optimisation because it engages your visitor with you. It’s a great way to build a relationship with your customers and really powerful for search engine optimisation. Use it!
Are you wondering where to start with it all? Have you read so much information that you just don’t know where to begin and you’ve got paralysis by analysis?
Here’s a simple guide that will help you to get the most return on your time and money when it comes to search engine optimisation.
If you’ve got a site that’s been around a while, the best thing to do is to start with keywords that you are already in the top 20 results for. Take a good look at your Google Analytics and see if there are a few stand out keywords with decent volumes of visitors coming to the site and a healthy conversion rate.
If you focus your initial SEO efforts on these profitable keywords you can start doing more of what’s working already rather than trying to target new keywords that you have not tested for profitability.
You can concentrate your efforts on getting these keywords into the top 3 results on the first page of Google. Getting inside the top 3 will give you an explosion in your visitors and sales.
Here’s what happens, by focusing on the keywords that already convert well for you, you will get a much better return on investment for your SEO budget and faster results. The truth is, this will save you spending a fortune on keywords that might only bring you browsers instead of buyers.
Here’s the thing, this method will help you bring in revenue to fund further SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC) & conversion optimisation.
If your website is brand new or you simply want to grow your business by ranking for new keywords, PPC advertising using Google AdWords is ideal. PPC allows you to test the keywords to see whether they bring you paying customers.
Finally once you have tested any new keywords for profitability using AdWords you can then go about trying to get them ranked in the organic search results using search engine optimisation.
Here’s some important advice, I recommend trying to optimise between 5 and 20 keywords at a time unless you have a huge budget. Otherwise what happens is you spread your budget too thinly and don’t see any real results for a particular keyword.
Conversion rate optimisation can be one of the most profitable strategies for an e-commerce or lead generation website. No matter how much traffic you bring to your site, if it’s converting poorly then you are leaving a lot of money on the table.
You get less than 5 seconds for someone to make up their mind about your page/ site when they land on it and if they can’t understand what your page is about almost instantly you’re bounce rate will be the death of your ROI.
Although every site is unique and any changes you make in order to improve your conversion rate should be tested here are some golden rules of conversion rate optimisation that are essential elements to every page.
1. Social Proof
We humans are social creatures and are tribal by nature, so putting video, audio or written testimonials on your page gives evidence that other people have trusted you and your website. ‘If it’s okay for them it’s okay for me’. Video testimonials are better, they don’t need to be studio quality, in fact the more authentic the better.
2. Use Trust Symbols to Your Advantage
Here’s the thing, certification, security seals, brand or association logos, even borrowing the logo from your internationally known courier all add trust and credibility to your website. The more people feel they can trust your website the more they will want to do business with you.
3. Show Your Phone Number
It still amazes me how difficult some websites make it for you to spend money with them. Don’t make your visitors trawl around looking for your phone number by burying it in your contact us page. Put it at the top of every page on your website.
And another thing, you can also test a freephone number vs. a local number and see which one brings you more sales.
4. How to Create a Clear Call to Action
Does your call to action explicitly describe what they’ll get when they click it? The truth is that the universal ‘click here’ does not describe the benefit the visitor will receive by taking the action you want them to.
Make sure you follow the rule of one page, one action. Do not try to get your visitor to take more than one action per page as they will get confused and take no action. Build another page if you want to offer an alternative action.
5. Have You Got a Clear Value Proposition?
What’s in it for me? Whether they are consciously aware of it or not, everyone who comes to your website will be thinking this before they take any action or your website. Make sure they can easily understand what it is you’re offering and what the benefit will be to them.
6. Reduce Distractions
Flashing widgets and gimmicks do not make it easy for a visitor to follow the path you want them to take. Equally random elements of your design can be a huge distraction. Keep everything clear and simple with the focus towards the action you want them to take.
7. Continuity
Do your landing page headlines match the words in your PPC ads? If they don’t, the visitor is likely to bounce as they weren’t taken to a page that matched their expectations when they clicked your ad. This oversight could get very expensive for you.
The same goes for your Title Tags & Meta Description which are what a searcher sees in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). Make sure they describe the benefits of what the searcher will find when they click through to your site.
If you are asking your visitor to take a series of steps through your website or to the checkout, keep things as consistent as possible. This means keeping the ‘Add to cart’ button and the ‘Submit my order’ buttons is the same place on each page and keep the design and layout of the pages as similar as possible.
The more a visitor has to think or hunt for things the less likely you will get the sale from them.
8. Are You Using Video on your Landing Page?
Video has proven to be one of the best converting ways of getting your message across. It allows people to get a real feel for your personality and integrity so use video wherever you can.
As I said earlier it doesn’t need to be studio quality or a highly polished performance. As long as the sound is loud and clear, it will work it’s magic for you.
9. How to Use Direction Cues
These can be subtle or blatant or even both. A subtle cue could be the person in the image you use on your web page looking in the direction of the link or button you want your prospect to click. If you want to be more than obvious, big red arrows can really help!
10. Beneficial Bullet Points
Since we all seem to be getting less patient and have shorter attention spans, bullet points are a great way of allowing people to quickly scan the content on your page and pick out the main points. The best way for you to use bullets is to list the benefits of the product or service that you sell.
Even if you started by testing just one of these 10 tips you will be ahead of your competition as the chances are they haven’t even heard of it. You can get started split testing on your website right away using Google Website Optimiser which is free.
If you need help testing elements of your design or a headline to increase your sales, Wizard of Web offers a full conversion rate optimisation testing service that guarantees to increase your conversions and put more money in your bank account.
You know how marketing on the internet has become so complicated lately? Trying to keep up with the latest fad, Facebook, Twitter, Article Marketing….
So you’ve finally realised that you can’t possibly keep on top of all this stuff and actually implement it. At least not at the same time as running your business, you’ve already got a million and one things to do right?
So how do you decide what makes a good SEO company? Here’s 9 useful questions to ask them to make sure they are on the ball and not using ineffective techniques that don’t give you any return on investment or that take you so long to see any results that it stops your business from growing.
Your main objective when questioning an internet marketing consultant is to assess their knowledge and ability to learn and grow. This will tell you that they are keeping up with changes as it’s a moving target. You also want to reveal their ability to pull the wool over your eyes too.
Here are a list of questions I recommend you ask to find the SEO experts.
- What SEO tools do you use every week?
You should know how well-versed they are in the specific market. An SEO’s toolset says so much about them, like the way a carpenter’s toolbox does. They ought to be using the SEO extensions for Firefox.
For SEO keyword research they should mention at least one of the following: Google Keyword Tool, WordTracker, and Keyword Discovery.
For other general uses: SEO Elite, Internet Business Promoter, OptiLink/ OptiSpider.
2. What strategies have you carried out to attain at least a Page Rank 5 (PR) for a current client and what is the domain?
Run a backlink check on the site they name, using Yahoo site explorer. Are there any shady links? Paid links? Link Farms? If it looks satisfying, ask them to put your name as the author (temporarily) in the meta author tag, or put your name somewhere on the home page to confirm they have control over the site.
If they begin to cook up excuses why they can’t or say, “Oh, we just completed the project last week so we don’t have the FTP info anymore” this tells you they’re lying and you can move on to the next prospect.
3. What’s the difference between PageRank and ToolBar PageRank?
I love this question. If you get “Aren’t they the same?” Stop the interview at once. What they should say is, “PageRank is calculated on a daily basis, however, Google only updates the PageRank data for public view about four times a year”.
4. How do you assess whether an SEO campaign is working?
Hopefully the answer here is “conversions” and not “traffic” or worse, “ranking”. The SEO must know their job is to drive BUYERS to the site, not just TRAFFIC. Anyone can drive traffic, but it is the specialist SEO who clearly understands the difference. That’s the SEO company you want to hire or you will end up with a lot of traffic and no customers and that’s just pointless.
5. Why does Google rank Wikipedia highly for so many topics?
Great question which should produce interesting answers but one of them better be Wikipedia’s strong authority.
6. Of all the famous SEOs, to whom do you pay attention to and whom are you not likely to pay attention to?
When they tell you, do a search on the names and see if you like what those specific SEOs stand for. If you can’t find any information on the SEOs that the person mentions, that means who they admire does not understand how to do SEO either.
7. What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you read on a regular basis ?
They better list less than a dozen or it is a warning that they spend too much time reading and not enough time working. Again, you want to check out where they spend their time and see if those are places which are worthwhile, SEO Moz, SEO book and Stompernet are recommended.
8. Tell me your biggest failure in an SEO project?
Good question – watch them squirm in their seat. If they say they have never failed, they are lying or this is their first ever project. Either way, you don’t want to hire them. I fail. I failed last week. It happens. You learn and you get better. Those who cannot admit failure are an unrealized outsourcing nightmare. Avoid it before it begins.
9. In what areas of SEO are you weakest?
Make sure they actually confess to a weakness. Those who say “I’m too organized” or “I have too much attention to detail” are warning signs. Everyone has weaknesses.
Finally, don’t forget to do a Google search on this candidate’s name (If you cannot find them, that’s a warning sign. And if you can’t find them ask why not.)
There you have it. That should give you enough information to really ascertain their worth, while not burdening them and yourself with too many unproductive questions.
I flew into Las Vegas yesterday for the Stompernet, Live 10 event and as well as getting a free upgrade which is always a nice surprise, I was also lucky enough to sit next to someone really cool and interesting.
Dave is from Leicester in the UK and has owned 148 very successful businesses in his lifetime and is now happily retired. Dave had some inspiring stories to tell about how he had bought bankrupt businesses and breathed new life into them. He had worked in everything from construction to catering and had always made a real success of everything he turned his hand to. A real life Dragon!
But his last business didn’t allow him to go out on a high.
Dave said the biggest reason for this business failing was because of putting his faith in an SEO company that ripped him off…. royally.
Dave ran what was at the time, Europe’s largest Interflora franchise employing over 100 people and he used to get all his business by advertising in the Yellow Pages. His business model was simple, he would advertise in editions of the Yellow Pages all over the UK and would get huge amounts of telephone orders to deliver flowers.
Dave was savvy enough to realise early on that advertising in the Yellow Pages was losing its effect because more and more people were going online to find florists and flower delivery services. He needed Local SEO Services.
Knowing this Dave got a website built for him. The deal was that the company he used would build the site for free and he would get charged for every visitor they brought him. This sounded like a really fair deal as he didn’t have any understanding of ‘IT’ as Dave put it.
The trouble was that the SEO company didn’t have a clue what they were doing because they weren’t actually an SEO company or even a web design specialist. They were a telecommunications business trying to branch out into providing web services for their clients. Dave trusted them as they were a national well known brand, that anyone would assume knew what they were doing if it had their name on it.
Once the website went live, Dave’s call centre started getting jammed with calls from gardeners asking for advice, people trying to find garden centres and all sorts. He couldn’t understand what was happening?
This was bad enough as it was stopping his actual customers getting through to him and being able to place orders. The killer blow was when Dave got his first bill from this so called SEO company. It was so high that he thought it was one of those situations like when you hear about a little old lady, living on her own who gets a gas bill for a million pounds. There’s obviously been a mistake right?
Dave was wrong.
The SEO company had been getting him a boat load of traffic to his website, they fulfilled that end of the bargain. The trouble was that it was so poorly targeted that when an internet searcher looked for something like ‘floral bedding plants’ his site ranked well and he got clicks that he had to pay for that were no use to him whatsoever.
Here’s what happened. Dave decided to fold the business because to him it was an insummountable problem as he didn’t know who to turn to. 100 people lost their jobs.
What a shame he couldn’t find an SEO expert that knew what precisely what they were doing, it could have been a very different story.
How many times have you lost patience with a website because it was too slow to load the page?
It’s almost like internet users have developed attention deficit disorder because of the amount of choice available to us from different websites. And if a site is just taking even a fraction too long we leave and go and find another site that will deliver the information more efficiently.
Here’s the thing, if your site is on cheap hosting it could actually be costing you more than a few quid every month.
In a recent study by Forrester Research they found that 7 per cent of web visitors expect a web page to load in just 2 seconds or less (0.5 secs faster than in 2006). So it seems we are growing more and more impatient.
In fact Google’s Vice President Marissa Mayer said in her last Web 2.0 Conference, “Speed matters. People do not like to wait. Do not make them“.
To achieve a better customer experience, Google’s research reveals that just a 0.5 second delay in page load speed can cause a 20 per cent decrease in traffic and it has used this in not only AdWords analysis but also in its complex search algorithm.
Speed wins for Pay Per Click (PPC) and Organic Search, Google Webmaster’s Official Blog states: “Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed – that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.”
If you’re running pay per click advertising on Google AdWords, if your site loads the landing page too slowly it will reduce your quality score. A low quality score will drive up the cost of your clicks.
The quickest and easiest way to resolve any speed issues is with your hosting, upgrading to a better quality service will mean that your going to improve your Search Engine Optimisation.
You will also reduce your bounce rate and increase your sales conversion because you are improving the user experience, making it more likely someone will make a purchase from you.
