Driving Conversions Through Good Website Design

Whether you obtain traffic to your website through Natural Search or Pay Per Click, it is imperative that the ratio of unique visitors to conversions (sales) is high on your list of key stats. A recent article we have been reading on Entrepreneur.com highlights the big difference between a well-designed website and a great-looking one!

A well-designed site is one that sells! It leads visitors through the sales process without getting in their way. If it’s pretty on top of that, fine.

What you want your design to do is entice people to stay on your site when they get there, draw them into your message and make it easy for them to keep reading so they can make a buying decision. However, many sites do just the opposite. Below are the Seven Deadly Sins which could be killing your conversion rates:

Website design sin #1: Slow-loading pages and graphics
Count out three seconds. In web time, it feels like forever! If your home page takes that long to load, you’ve got trouble on your hands. Web users are extremely impatient people. If they can’t begin reading or viewing your page right away, they’re going to leave and go to another, more user-friendly site.

If you absolutely must use large graphics on your homepage, provide a small icon that links to the larger graphic and warn people they may have to wait as it loads. Here are a few things you can do to speed up your loading time:

Reduce the file size of the graphics on your page. Specify the dimensions of your graphics files in your HTML code. Substitute coloured text for a graphics file whenever possible.

Website design sin #2: No eye-catching headline to grab your visitors’ attention
Now you have to capture your visitors’ attention right away and convince them your site has exactly what they’re looking for. The best way to do that is with a well-formatted, attention-grabbing headline that’s packed with intriguing benefits and compels them to read further.

Website design sin #3: Distracting banners and links
On your site, don’t put up banners or links that send people to someone else’s site (and that includes Google AdWords ads). Everything on your site should directly relate to its ultimate purpose – whether it’s to get more opt-ins for your e-mail list or to sell your product. Anything on your site that doesn’t serve this main purpose should be immediately deleted.

Of course, if the purpose of your site is purely to promote affiliate products or sell advertising space, then obviously you’ll want to include banners or links. But if you try to promote affiliate products on a page that’s also meant to sell a specific product, you’ll end up doing a lousy job of both.

Website design sin #4: Too many dizzying colours or fonts
Nothing screams “amateur!” louder than a dizzying mishmash of different fonts and colours. To make your site look professional, use a basic colour scheme with two or three colours and a couple of fonts. Look at any well-designed site and you’ll see that it’s pretty conservative with the colours and fonts it uses.

Website design sin #5: Patterned backgrounds
Make sure your background stays in the background! If you add textures or use dark backgrounds on your site, people won’t be able to read your copy easily. And if you aren’t making it easy for them to read your copy, you aren’t making it easy for them to buy your product.

Tests have shown over and over again that the sites with black text on a plain white background – with colours limited to the margins – get the highest conversion rates. It might seem boring from a design perspective, but better sales are pretty exciting from an income perspective.

Website design sin #6: Too many distracting graphics, animations, or video clips
Here’s another amateur mistake: thinking that lots of images, fancy graphics, animated gifs or video clips will make your site more interesting. Unless those visual elements help persuade people to buy your product by showing visitors what your product looks like, or demonstrating how it works, they’re useless decorations that will distract your visitors and prevent them from following through on what you want them to do.

Website design sin #7: Huge blocks of text that are nearly impossible to read
What happens when you run into a giant block of text on a website? Do you read it, scan it or skip over it to something shorter?

If you want your visitors to read all the way to your “order” button, make it as easy as possible for them to do so. Limit your paragraphs to six lines. And make sure you vary your paragraph lengths so they don’t all look the same. A choppy paragraph structure makes online text much easier to read.

SEO Consulting on the Rise

An interesting article from The Times Online highlights the rise in the number of firms using reputable search engine optimisation companies to drive ‘Natural Search’ traffic to websites. We have published the juciest bits of the article below for Betwixt readers to digest:

Searching to get to the top of Google
THE hotels website Superbreak had a problem three years ago. The volume of traffic arriving at its web pages was worryingly low. Surfers were confused by cybersquatters trying to pass themselves off as the business and, to make matters worse, it shared the same name as a popular brand of American rucksacks.

Search-engine optimisation (SEO) proved to be the answer.

Part crystal-ball watching, part trial and error, it is the practice of improving lacklustre internet commerce by getting a firm noticed on the results pages of search engines. And it is perhaps the fastest-growing sector in the marketing industry. Cracking the code of how search engines like Google work is forecast to be a £400m industry in Britain alone this year and it is growing at 60% a year.

Superbreak called in the experts to ensure its name rose to the top of search lists when users tapped in queries for “short break” and “hotel break” into Google or other search engines. The plan involved redrawing every web page to focus on the word “break”, simplifying its design, and making information more sharply relevant to weekend trippers.

“It was like replumbing an entire city,” said David Ranby, Superbreak’s internet-marketing manager. The benefits of coming top of search lists are clear. Although click-through rates vary from query to query, results that make the second page or lower of a Google search stand only a 1% chance of being clicked on. Not surprisingly, the top result on the first page gets perhaps half of all clicks.

Revenues at Superbreak’s hotels division have risen to £154m a year and Ranby says the SEO programme is responsible for 35% of the increase in online revenues over the past three years. It is no easy task to work out how to get a website to the top of the results thrown up by a search engine. Google — which with 85% of the search-engine market in Britain is by far the dominant player — keeps tweaking how its algorithms read web pages and indexes them.

“There are 200 signals that determine a page’s relevance,” said Matthew Trewhella, Google’s developer advocate. “Imagine it as a big wall of dials with a bunch of people turning them slightly every day.” While Google offers plenty of guidance and advice, it won’t tell companies exactly how its system works.

Such results mean that spending on SEO grew faster than pay-per-click online advertising — also known as paid search — for the first time in Britain last year. SEO addresses “natural” search results that appear in the left column of the Google page, while pay-per-click relates to keywords it auctions to create the sponsored links ranked on the right-hand side and often shaded at the top. For a decade, these have been the moneymaking meat of the search industry.

The specialist online site E-consultancy said spending on SEO rose by 68% to £250m in the UK last year, compared with a 56% rise in pay-per-click spending to £1.97 billion. Microsoft, which last week souped up its own search site with an easier-to-use system, thinks that pay per click in Europe, Middle East and Africa could grow by only 20% next year. There are two reasons for this.

First, pay per click is extremely buoyant compared with traditional media and its cost is rising quickly. Search marketers argue there is little point in, say, banks paying £15 to Google every time they want to be connected to a customer that has entered “credit card” into a search form. With a conversion rate of one in 100, it takes a long time to earn a return. Even more targeted searches, say for “student credit card”, have shot up in price.

Firms have also worked out that more than half of all web searches do not involve a transaction. To appeal to window shoppers, they are better off polishing their reputation and profile with future trade in mind. And then there are increasingly shrewd customers to contend with. They often take against being spoon-fed overtly commercial messages by never clicking on a result from the right side of the page.

“Big firms are looking more at SEO than pay per click because they realise that consumers are becoming aware the listings on the side and top of the page are paid for and that natural listings are in some cases more credible and more relevant,” said Rebecca Jennings, principal analyst at Forrester Research. Her firm forecasts that spending on pay per click in America will increase between 2007 and 2012 by 125% to $10.1 billion (£5.1 billion), compared with SEO soaring 365% to $8.9 billion.

As well as using appropriate vocabulary, a website also needs to be well-networked to gain traction. Links to esteemed websites such as the BBC or a national newspaper act as advocates for its content, boosting its ranking with Google.

Historically, boosting a site’s volume of web links has been easy. But Google has been clamping down on “link farms” — machine-generated websites created purely to connect with the central site to make it look more popular than it really is.

Offenders have had their rankings reduced on the back of such exploitative behaviour in the past. Google went so far as to suspend the carmaker BMW from its search index for two days in early 2006, although the carmaker denied any wrongdoing.

“The vast majority of SEO firms are good,” said Trewhella at Google. “But it is a constant battle. They will do one thing; we will discover it; they will do something else.”

While Google welcomes SEO for making searches easier and findings better quality, it doesn’t make any money from the left column of listings. Instead, it hopes better searching means more use, yielding it its fair share of clicks on paid-for links. Fredrick Marckini, the chief global-search officer at Isobar, part of the media buyer Aegis, said SEO was no threat to the search engine’s business model.

“There are no $10m SEO engagements but there are many $10m, $20m and even $100m pay-per-click search-advertising engagements. SEO is a necessary and critical component.” Marckini argues that the shift in spending patterns is beginning to better mirror consumer behaviour. He cites research that shows 72% of web users click on natural listings and not on the paid ads.

“The European market seems to spend money on search marketing in a way that is inconsistent with the way the audience is using search engines,” he said. “European marketers must place a higher priority on natural SEO to more successfully target their audience.”

Of the two, SEO was invented first, with the concept of paying for positions in search results introduced only a decade ago by Goto.com, now part of Yahoo. Its renewed importance is only set to grow.

“This presents a great evolution opportunity for the advertising agencies,” said Chris Dobson, acting boss of Microsoft’s online UK business. “It shows you need a human touch to add value to technology platforms on behalf of clients.”

Quality Score for Google Adwords Pay-Per-Click

Many businesses who advertise with Google through their Adwords Pay-Per-Click Network are unaware of the ‘Quality Score’ elements now applied by Google.

Most marketers undestand the concept of buying/bidding for placement on search engine results pages for a flat (bid) price. In today’s world however marketers need to understand how to manage both bid prices and relevancy targeting.

Quality Score for Google 
Quality Score for Google is a dynamic metric assigned to each of your keywords. It’s calculated using a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad group and to a user’s search query. The higher a keyword’s Quality Score, the lower its minimum bid and the better its ad position.

Quality Score along with quality-based minimum bids, are clear indicators that Google evaluate many factors, such as your ad text and click-through rate (CTR) to determine the minimum bid for your keyword. Recently Google have incorporated a new factor into the Quality Score – the landing page.

Tip for Increasing Your Quality Score
Add the keyword into your ad. Common sense, although you would be surprised how often this is overlooked. With the keyword in your advert, a user is more likely to click on your ad, thus increasing the click-through rate (CTR) - an important Quality Score (QS) factor.

Guaranteed Web Clicks – Is the Jury Still Out?

Guaranteed web clicks – heard of them before? Ok, a little explanation is in order!

Do you already have a web site? If the answer is yes, a guaranteed web clicks package will bid for, buy and manage keywords for your business while delivering a (guaranteed) number of clicks to your web site.  Common features of guaranteed web click products offered by companies such as BT Web Clicks and DEX Clicks include:

• Sponsored links on multiple search engines
• Experts choosing optimised keywords
• Fixed prices to suit your budget

Your partner company will manage the bid process across major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN and other smaller search engines, while you get all the business! By utilising the strength of up to 30-40 search engines you will drive prospects directly to your company’s web site. 

However previous incarnations of guaranteed web clicks packages were not particularly well received by web site owners.

Often guaranteed click package fulfillment isn’t done by the partner company themselves. Instead, it’s passed out to a select number of virtually anonymous fulfillment providers.

Guaranteed click fulfillment providers must position a structured, constant click package on volatile Google and Yahoo PPC platforms, where both bidding and search volume are in constant flux. Such an environment isn’t well suited for advertising products based on predictability and stability.

Many thousands of small business advertisers will agree to guaranteed click packages. When they do, they’ll seek the ads they bought. They’ll hunt for their ads on Google, Yahoo or MSN. They’ll grow frustrated. They’ll wonder what they’re doing wrong.

Then, they’ll pick up the phone.

What happens next is played out every day in the world of small business search marketing.

“I can’t see the ad I bought anywhere,” they’ll tell the customer service rep.

He’ll reply, “Well, you’re getting the clicks.”

Advertising on Yahoo and MSN Live Search

The success of Google Adwords and the domination of online search by Google has turned many advertisers away from using sponsored advertising on Yahoo and MSN. There are however, instances where utilising the online marketing services of other major search engines makes sound business sense.

A good point was made to me recently. A client was looking to attract more female prospects/customers to the business by using a (search engine) pay-per-click platform. It was noted that the majority of the female staff in the (clients) office had set their home pages to either Yahoo UK or MSN UK - not Google.  Why?

The reason for this is that both the Yahoo and the MSN home pages are packed full of information such as shopping, lifestyle, weather, music, dating, horoscopes, all subjects which appeal to the fairer sex. Men, however will more often opt for the simple, no frills functionality of Google as their home page.  

Pay-Per-Click with MSN Search and Live Search
Every month, over 5 million people type keywords into MSN Search and Live Search to find products and services they’re interested in. Microsoft adCenter gives you direct access to these people at the exact time that they are searching for your product or service.

Yahoo Search Marketing
Over 2.3 billion searches occur on Yahoo! each month. Ads for your business appear in search results on Yahoo! and other popular web sites. Prospective customers could be searching for what your business offers right now. Cutting edge features such as geo-targeting enable you to target specific markets.

PPC Advertising – Where to Start?

This subject has been covered in depth by a multitude of websites and blogs in the past. However, it still makes good sense for Betwixt readers to gain a fresh analysis and insight of this subject.

Definition
Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising model used on search engines, advertising networks, and content websites/blogs, where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser’s website.

While online PPC advertising spend continues to grow at a rate of knots, thousands of companies across the globe are willing to part with hard earned cash to be part of the PPC marketing revolution.

Could it be possible that a considerable sum of this marketing spend is being wasted on pay-per-click campaigns which are poorly thought through, time consuming and lacking a carefully implemented bid management process. It is possible to achieve a successful PPC bid management process by:

• Identifying Your Maximum Cost Per Click (CPC) 
• Identifying Your Conversion Rate (CR)
• Start Your PPC Campaign In One Search Engine

Using In-House Data to Identify Relevant Keywords
One of the most critical parts of setting up and managing a PPC campaign is keyword research. If you run Google Analytics on your website utilise the data provided to kick start your own keyword research.

Google Analytics is a very valuable yet still under-utilised free tool. Google Analytics can be used for much more than simply seeing who links to you and how many visitors you get, it can also be used to create valuable keyword lists.