It is nearly a New Year, and it is always a good time to stand back from your website and take a long hard look at it. And the first people you should ask to review it are not in-house, but your customers. Ask yourself when was the last time either you or your internet marketing agency actually spoke to your real life website visitors. Not a survey, because we all lie in surveys, but an honest appraisal of what your site visitors think.
Are you a retail or customer-oriented environment? Then, you have a first class opportunity to quiz your visitors about their experience on your website. And the time of goodwill is the best time to encourage your customers to be honest. Ply them with mince pies and Xmas cheer, a happy smile from a member of staff, and a gift voucher or a chance to enjoy the best your company offers, in return for an honest reply, and you could be entering 2011 with a critical yet positive approach to e-commerce and internet marketing.
You can do the same through your website but website visitors invariably behave like small children rather than a focus group – they answer what they think you want to hear in order to be in with a chance to win a prize. Or they behave like really stroppy children and tell you untruths because they dislike the present you are offering.
If you only ask one question this Christmas, ask about your page layouts. Whether that is your homepage, landing pages, e-commerce site or your comments page, find out whether it works for your customer. For repeat visitors, are they finding the information they require or do they need to scroll through interminable blog posts to finally find the offer they were looking for? Are people following you specifically for certain content, in which case, are you making it a simple task to find that content? Do your website pages interlink naturally and logically? Or are there no links per se or just ones to major product pages? Ask about social media and learn about your audience. If you can’t talk to them as Christmas approaches, you never can!
Use this Christmas season to establish if your website works. Not just for your customers, but also look at how it works for the search engines. And then consider if it is actually working for you.
Try entering http://hmrc.gov.uk. As this is the website for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, one would assume that just entering HMRC without the www would work. After all, it’s a very minor setting for any hosting provider to set up a TLD (Top Level Domain) so that there is no requirement for the wuh-wuh-wuh part of it.
If you are accessing websites through a mobile device, which an increasing number of people do, typing www is a bore. And completely unnecessary as you shouldn’t need the 3 w’s to get to a site.
Just as you don’t need to know which letters are capitalised in either a TLD or an email address. eg. eXpErTs@ClIcKtHrOuGh-MaRkEtInG.cOm will arrive as easily as experts@clickthrough-marketing.com
Any website designer who uses a mish mash of capitals and lower case letters in file names below the TLD (e.g. http://www.fsb.org.uk/accessAbility-intro) should be shot as it invariably leads to a 404 error and often a lost punter or conversion, particularly when the website address has been communicated verbally, but in the TLD, neither capitals nor WWW should matter.
Check your site today. You could be losing visitors unnecessarily if you don’t regularly review this much-forgotten aspect of web usability best practice.
Interest-based advertising could be beneficial to companies offering internet marketing services.
In a post on its Inside AdWords blog, Google explains early testing results of its new function, which includes remarketing and interest category marketing, have been positive.
It gives users more control over the advertisements they read, the search engine explains, while new categories allow professionals to target their campaigns at people of a certain demographic, such as their age or gender.
These categories can be edited using Ads Preference Manager, while the function also allows people to opt-out of receiving the ads.
While the development allows firms to deliver better advertisements to their customers, Google claims it also results in more effective campaigns and higher website returns.
Testing of interest-based advertising is continuing and the company states it will be working with advertisers on the matter.
Google recently revealed it has launched an updated Keyword Tool that combines two separate functions.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a best practice Internet Marketing Agency.
The TopSEOs awards for August 2010 are out, and ClickThrough has been given two of them!
We’re delighted to see that we have been ranked fifth in the global Conversion Enhancement category, the only UK headquartered internet marketing company to make the list. TopSEOs state that they judge companies on their ability to conduct client site analysis, develop conversion strategies, as well as implementation and ongoing testing. It’s a testament to the work we have done to put conversion optimisation at the centre of our Digital Strategy Wheel, which defines the approach we take to client’s businesses.
ClickThrough also got a nod in the list of UK Online Reputation Management companies, coming in seventh place in the August 2010 rankings. Our ability to combine social media marketing, online PR and SEO techniques to provide a robust reputation management service to clients is gaining momentum.
A big pat on the back to all our search conversion experts as they continue to deliver a great service to our clients.
“Our website doesn’t work” is a common claim from businesses. The site may be attracting visitors, but the conversion rate is low or the bounce rate is high. Too few businesses analyse the real problems and will often plump for a re-design rather than getting to the bottom of the actual issues.
Common problems are a failure to call the visitor to complete a particular action; the ‘eye candy’ drowns out the real messages and content; landing pages without a purpose; badly written or presented content; non-functional aspects of your site e.g. shopping basket, search, or non-standard HTML which doesn’t render correctly in your visitor’s browser or on their mobile phone.
Before your website design company advises starting again, think about changing and testing various aspects of your site. WhichTestWon website testing gives very good examples of how even minor changes can make a considerable difference to a website conversion rate.
Delve deeply into your web stats first. Many businesses pay only the most cursory attention to their site stats, and yet this is where you will find the clues and evidence as to why your website is failing you. Look carefully at the pages with high bounce rates – these bounce rates clearly indicate a problem, or two. Set up goals in your stats so you can see if people are dropping out part way through a process eg in the shopping cart. Check the conversion rates from your landing pages and consider what changes you could try to improve them.
Here are some other tips to help improve your current site:
Test and tweak, and monitor the results so you can discover what works and what doesn’t. Good web usability doesn’t come quickly. Don’t redesign in a hurry, particularly as this is likely to be an expensive solution to a problem which may be easily solved.
Whilst many businesses understand that their analytics can provide them with invaluable data, few use the features of their analytics packages to full effect.
Once you have installed the necessary tracking code on each page of your website, then there are multiple options which you can configure to make the most of the data available. For instance, you can set conversion goals to check whether your visitors are performing the tasks that a) you expect them to and b) without abandoning processes part way through. This will allow you to rethink your strategy if visitors are not completing goals, and check that all your processes are working correctly for the users.
E-commerce tracking is a little more complicated, particularly if you have multiple products. In Google Analytics you will need to activate e-commerce tracking within your Google account, and then place specific code for each product on your site. Full details of this and an example are given within the Google Analytics Help pages.
So, check you are gathering the data that your analytics package makes available to you, and then monitor how your website is performing. If required, seek the help of web analytics consultants. As ever, it is by monitoring, measuring, and adapting that you will benefit the most from your own data.
Everyone knows that websites need to be updated from time to time, and often completely restructured, and the problems caused by this type of rebuild making links extinct can be solved by 301 redirects. This will enable all of your existing links to point to the same content in the new location, without upsetting either your potential visitor or your search engine rankings.
But, how often do you follow a link from a search engine or a blog to find that the exact item you are looking for is lost in a page of multiple blog posts? Or worse, a page full of summaries of blog posts!
When writing your blog posts, always ensure that you give a permalink to each post. This is an individual link to a specific post and should always include keywords. The majority of blogging engines use the title of your post to create this permalink, so think about your blog titles when creating them.
By creating a permalink, any links to that post from other sites will always lead to that post, rather than to the summary page.
Find out more about how good website housekeeping can improve your search engine rankings in our SEO book.
If you are running a Pay Per Click campaign and a particular ad leads to a product that is out of stock, you are throwing money down the drain. The potential customer has clicked on the ad, arrived on your site only to find it is out of stock, and will then, more than likely, leave. Not only has this cost you the price of the click, but potentially it has cost you brand reputation in the mind of that user.
Whilst for some companies it may not be a simple or cheap matter to tie your inventory directly into your PPC campaign management, and automate the process when a product goes out of stock, it is only a matter of moments to do it manually. Put on hold any ads which relate to out of stock products and make it a priority in your daily tasks.
The click may only cost you a small amount but these can add up over time, and are so easily avoidable. And also, if a product is out of stock, make sure you offer your site visitor alternative products, or a chance to be informed as soon as the product comes back in stock. Harvesting email addresses like this will give you the chance to pick up potential customers in future even if the item they wanted at that moment is not available.
Many people assume, wrongly, that a site visitor will arrive at your site through the front page. If you have implemented website optimisation correctly, the search engines will list multiple pages in the rankings for different terms. These will lead people to enter your site at whichever page is linked from that search. Additionally, if you are using PPC correctly, you may well be driving people to a specific landing page from an advert, so this will be the entry page.
Reader journeys are about how a visitor to your site achieves their goal by following the easiest path possible. Hence, you design your site so that a visitor can easily navigate to the page or product or link that they wish to be at without any confusion. So, if you are basing your reader journeys on entry via the front page only, you have already created the possibility that a site visitor will land on an entirely different page and be unclear what to do next.
Think about the type of visitors who will come to your site. For instance, do you sell to both the trade and retail? If you do, and a visitor needs to immediately find the part of the site relevant to them, it may be worth considering having two entirely different sites, which clearly link to each other so that a site visitor can easily transpose to the alternative site as required in case they accidentally land on the wrong site to begin with.
Are your visitors there to compare product prices with your competitors, to make a purchase, to research information, contact you, sign up to a newsletter, find a download or white paper everyone is talking about or interact with your community? Whatever a site visitor is endeavouring to do, your task when designing your website is to make that easy. It is also important that the reader journey leads your site visitors to achieve your goals as well.
If your website is there to help you achieve sales, then make sure that it is the minimum number of clicks to your catalogue of products and your e-commerce store,wherever in the site a visitor enters. Make it a simple task to look at all of your products, find all of your white papers, sign up to your newsletters or find all of your contact details whatever it is you want your customers to be doing on your site.
Make a list of possible actions a site visitor may wish to take on your site, and then give it a go for yourself. How easy is it to reach the goal? Could you simplify matters? Add pointers to make a specific task really simple? Have a look at paths through your site for common actions and see whether people are dropping out at a certain point. You can do this by setting Goals in Google Analytics and seeing whether these are being completed by your visitors. Once you understand what your site visitors want to be able to do, you can help them achieve their goals, and yours, by tweaking your site accordingly.
Businesses using internet marketing services may be interested to hear about changes to the Google AdWords Report Centre.
Detailing the alterations on its Inside AdWords blog, the search engine explained that key elements from documents will now be moved directly into the Campaigns tab.
This means users will be able to arrange information using criteria such as what day of the week it is and keyword match type.
They will also have the ability to schedule and email downloads of any data they want to share on the same pages they access to manage their campaigns.
Google hopes this will allow enterprises to find key performance drivers with ease and speed.
When all reports have been moved to the Campaigns tab, the Report Centre will be retired altogether.
Last week, the search engine announced it has completed a full rollout of its click-to-call feature, which allows users to connect directly to a business when using mobile search ads and apps.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a best practice Internet Marketing Agency.
