Posts Tagged ‘Web Promotion’

SEO Day 1: Keyword research

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 by Lorenz

Why are keywords important?

When someone does a search on Google for a product (e.g. mortgage), Google will look at its database and list all the sites they think are relevant to this search. There are about 140 different factors that influence how high Google will rank a site, the two most important ones are:

  1. if the keyword is actually present on the page (in other words, the pages they list must have the keyword “mortgage” in their content)
  2. and how many sites related to the keyword “mortgage” link to that page (preferably, the link to that page will have the word “mortgage” in it.

So if you are a smart business owner, you want your site to rank well in the search engines for a keyword relevant to your brand, product or service. This means that you will get targeted traffic: people who are actually looking for your product and will want to buy it.

But with millions of competitors trying to rank for this keyword, that is an almost impossible feat.

Start with the low hanging fruit

You don’t want to start with the most competitive keyword first. They way to rank for a difficult keyword is to first start ranking for an easy keyword.

This is where keyword hierarchy comes in.

Some easy keywords that people actually type into Google when they search for mortgages are:

  • best fixed rate mortgage (266 searches a day but only 20,000 competitors)
  • jumbo mortgage rate (325 searches a day but only 10,600 competitors)
  • fixed interest mortgage rate (398 searches a day but only 26,100 competitors)
  • fha mortgage rate (398 searches a day but only 11,400 competitors)
  • mortgage quote online (266 searches a day but only 11,000 competitors)

(You might wonder how we determined this. Keep reading, we’ll show you how you can find out how many competitors you have in the field, what people actually search for and how many searches there are on average a day).

26,000 competitors may sound like a lot, but trust me, if you follow our guideline, you’ll beat them all.

One you start ranking well for the keywords above, Google will conclude that your website must be relevant for the term “mortgage rate”, because you already rank well for the keyphrase “best fixed rate mortgage“, “jumbo mortgage rate“, fixed interest mortgage rate” and fha mortgage rate“.

As you can see, the term “mortgage rate” is present in each of these search phrases. Once you start ranking well for various shorter keyphrases with the word mortgage in them (e.g. “fixed mortgage“, “best mortgage“, “home mortgage”, “mortgage deals”, etc. your site will start to look very relevant for the keyword “mortgage”.

In other words, the trick isn’t to try to rank well for the most difficult keyword in your industry but to get in via the backdoor by trying to rank for easy (”long-tail”) keywords.

This is what the keyword hierarchy looks like for the term “mortgage”:

keyword-research-mortgage

Keyword research for the phrase mortgage

Keep in mind that this is a simplified list. At the bottom, you will need to rank for more than four “long-tail” keyphrases. In the middle you will need to rank for more than two keyphrases. At the top, you will eventually rank for the one word keyword, but by then you will already have millions of visitors.

The important thing to remember here is that for each of the bottom keywords you rank for already bring you visitors. The four bottom keywords in our example alone will expose your listing to 1387 views a day. Worst case scenario only 6% will click on your listing. That’s 83 clicks a day. Imagine only 2% actually decide to buy from you (onsite marketing can improve this ratio). That still culminates in almost 2 sales a day. With no effort on your part, and no other cost than your time or that of a SEO specialist). And once you rank well, chances are high that you remain ranking well for years. So there is no repeat cost.

That is why SEO is so powerful: it automatically generates sales for you while you sleep.

Establishing the keyword hierarchy for your site.

The model you will be using is the following:

Micro niche keyword research

Micro niche keyword research

You already know the Major Keyword you want to rank for. Now you need to find a number of niche keywords. Each one of these niche keywords has a micro niche that you can easily rank your site for.

But how do you establish these niches and micro niches? Two words:

Keyword research

The truth is, it’s easy. Google itself will tell you what people type into its search engine and how many searches there are on average a day for that keyword. Google also tells you how many competitors there are for that given keyphrase.

If you want to find what keywords people search for, and how many searches you can expect a day (on average), go use the Google Keyword tool.

Make a list of all searches you think people might type into Google’s search box and enter them into the the box.

keyword-research

Note that at this stage, you don’t have to have a clue what people are actually searching for. You just have to guess. Google will analyze the keywords you enter, and match them with actual search results!

Make a list of five keyphrases that you are interested in. Make sure they have a minimum of 80-100 searches a day. Research these keywords on Google.

Now do a search on Google for your keyword preceded by ” (e.g. “plumber Dallas). This will then list only the competitors who actually have the words plumber Dallas in their copy.

If we do this on Google, we find that 25,100 sites have this keyword in their text. This is a great indicator that these sites aren’t optimized for this keyword and that we can beat their listings with ease.

number-of-competitors

The rule of thumb is that if a keyword search returns less than 30,000 sites indexed by Google, we have stumbled upon a keyword that is non-competitive. Nobody is actually trying to rank number 1 for this keyword in an organized way.

So go ahead, and research your 5 chosen keywords in Google. If the search returns more than 30,000 pages in Google’s index, take it off the list. Find another keyword, until you have a list of 5 keywords that have more than 80 searches a day (the more the better of course) and have less than 30,000 pages indexed by Google.

Now you have a list of 5 non-competitive keywords we can start ranking your site for these keywords.

Market Samurai

If you have $149 to spare, then Market Samurai can make keyword research easier for you. It essentially will do the exact same task as what I’ve shown you so far, but it will speed up the process for you:

Over to you

If anything isn’t clear to you, or you want additional information or know of other great ways to research keywords, let us know by leaving a comment. We respond fairly quickly to all your questions and suggestions.

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Posted in Generating traffic to your website, SEO 101 | 7 Comments »

What is SEO and how to rank your website well in the search engines

Friday, April 2nd, 2010 by Lorenz

Last month we discussed how to create a successful business website. That is a necessary first step before you start generating traffic to your site. There is no point in having lots of visitors if they don’t stay on your website and don’t perform the action you require for your website to be successful and profitable.

We also discussed the steps you should take to generate traffic to your site without SEO. This will give you your first traffic and help you gain some local awareness of your business.

But of course, the world is your oyster. Now that you have a well planned website and are diligently working on making a name of yourself in the offline world, it is time to focus on one of the most effective ways to get traffic to your site and capture leads: SEO.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the art of having your website rank on the first page of search engine results when they search for your product or service.

Example of a search engine listing.

The below example shows a search result we’ve achieved for one of our clients. The box in grayish pink are the sponsored search results. Somebody actually paid to be shown there. Below are the “organic search results”. These are the results that Google thinks offer the best content about the search “residential architect”. As you can see, our client is listed twice on the Google home page for searchers in Dallas, Texas. People looking from other towns will see a local results for Google maps, but searchers in the USA will still see our client featured in 3rd place (these results are accurate on 04/02/2010, search results may fluctuate). These “organic search results” are free! All you have to do is optimize your site well enough to be listed on the first page of Google without having to pay them a penny.

seo

(You can read a case study about our work for this client here).

SEO is the art of having your website positioned on the first page of Google when someone does a search related to your products and services.

Search engines want you to do SEO

The mission of Google and other search engines is to list the most relevant result when someone uses their search engine. But they do understand that their results aren’t always perfect.

In order to help businesses that try to rank their website well, Google has provided a brief SEO manual.

They also provide advise via the media. Google engineer Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team elaborates on some tips and techniques in an interview with USA Today:

Tips and tricks to rank well in the search engines

But the advise that search engines dispense usually won’t get you very far. There is simply too much competition out there, all following the same advise.

That’s where we come in: throughout this month and the next we will be featuring a tutorial on how to rank your website well in the search engines. It will give you practical step by step advise and give you measurable results along the way.

So stay tuned.

Bonus Content: how do search engines work?

Matt Cutts, engineer at Google, gives you a brief overview on how a search engine gets all these great results to you:

Over to you

Please leave a comment with your questions and / or opinions. You can also ask questions in our SEO forum, that features many helpful tips on how to get your website ranked on the first page of the search engines.

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Posted in Generating traffic to your website | 6 Comments »

Creating a successful business website design

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010 by Lorenz

This month we have created a series of blog posts that take you through every step of creating a website for your business. We looked at creating effective content, finding a web designer and creating a marketing funnel to convert your visitors into customers.

In this final blog post of the month, we’ll do a quick round-up with every step required to create a successful business website.

Step 1: Define your target audience

target-audienceBefore you create a website, you will need to understand who your customers are.  Understanding your customer needs and lingo will determine the look and content of your site.

The logic behind this is simple: you want your website to be found by someone who is looking to solve their problem with your product or service. Your content will have to clearly outline that you understand their problem and that you have the solution, and explain this in terms that your audience can understand.

Use the steps outlined in our article on defining your target audience.

Step 2: Buying a domain name

domain-nameNext you’ll need a domain name. A domain name is a web address that people can type to find your business. E.g. the domain name of this website is http://onlinedesignbureau.com.

You could of course trust your web designer to buy the domain name for you, but then ask the designer to immediately transfer it in your name. Your domain is the most important part of your online presence, it is the place where your visitors can find you again and again. If you don’t own it, you are vulnerable to losing your domain one day.

Read this article for more information (and inspiration) on buying a domain name.

Step 3: Hire a web designer

web_designOf course you might think we are biased: we are a web design agency and we advice you to hire a web designer.

But the logic behind it is quite simple: if your website doesn’t look professional, you are going to convince only a small amount of your visitors to buy from you. Looks do matter. And a web designer can make sure that your website looks like the rest of your brand (or help you create a brand that presents a unified look and message to the world).

Another advantage of hiring a web designers know what converts visitors into customers and can help you develop powerful calls to actions for your website (more on that later).

If you are looking for a web designer, this guide will help you with you to search for and interview web designers.

Step 4: Write effective content for your website

You’ve already established who your audience is. Now you need to convince them that you understand their problem and provide an expert solution.

Delivering that type of content is where many websites fail. If your content is to self-centered, you will not convince anyone you care about them and will deliver great value.

Your content needs to be customer focused, discuss the problem they are facing with detailed information on how you will solve this problem. But your content also needs to be short and easy to absorb.

Content creation seems like an art, but there are some simple principles at play. You can learn more in our creating effective (sales) copy blog post.

Step 5: Build trust in your website

trustGreat, you’ve got a professional design and have great content that is customer focused. That means your website will be converting visitors into customers quite nicely already.

But you can increase this conversion rate by adding features that build even more trust in your website, such as:

  • Social proof
  • Security
  • Transparency
  • Guarantees
  • etc.

In our blog post we discuss in detail how you can increase trust in your website.

Step 6: Create a marketing funnel and powerful Calls to Action

The logic behind this is straightforward: if you clearly tell your visitors what to do, it is more likely that they will do it. You don’t want your website to just get lots of visitors. You also want your visitors to perform an action, whether it is clicking on an ad, contacting you via email or phone or subscribing to a newsletter.

And the way you can increase the chance that visitors will perform this desired Call to Action is simply by telling them exactly what to do.

For more information, read our article about inserting Calls to Action in your website.

Over to you

Feel we left anything out or need clarification about this topic? Leave us a comment. Or if you already have a website and need advice on everything to do with website creation and marketing, ask your questions in our forum.

And of course, if you are looking for a web designer, have a look at our web design service, contact us or call us: (214) 302-7631.

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Posted in Creating a business website | 7 Comments »

Google employee discusses some effective link building techniques

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 by Lorenz
Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts

Building links to your website is one of the major strategies in getting your website to rank well in the search engines. Google and other search engines need to determine somehow what content is relevant to the user and what is not. In order to establish this relevancy, one thing they look at is the amount of links to your site.

Google assumes that every link is a vote for the value of that content. To determine why someone linked at you, the look at the topic of the webpage that links to your site and the topic discussed in your page that received the link. It then runs an elaborate computer program that determines why you got the link (for what topic material you received the vote) and matches that with the topic the searcher is trying to get information about (Google determines the topic by looking at the user’s search phrase.)

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, discusses some techniques to get links from others.

Below you’ll see his video, followed by a discussion and summary of his advice.

Build great content

Content that is valuable has a better chance of getting linked to. In other words, post something that people care about and adequately satisfies their thirst for information on the topic. If you effectively solve the problem or provide an education, your content will be seen as useful and ‘linkable’.

Types of content that gets linked to are:

Build a blog

Matt Cutts says there is no excuse for companies or even individuals not to have a blog. It is great way of having authorative discussions about a subject you know a lot about. Create tutorials that solve problems or educate.

Controversial posts

Matt Cutts isn’t to flattering about people who use controversy when writing their content. His main issue is that it is part of an anti-culture, where people define the world in a negative way, by emphasizing on what is bad and should be hated.

Saying that, if you truly believe something controversial and can back up your claim, it is worth sticking to your guns and try and convince your readers of your position. It might get you lots of posts linking to yours decrying what you wrote, but it is still a link.

But Matt Cutts is right in pointing out that there is a responsibility towards our culture as well. We don’t want to promote a culture that defines itself in the negative or creates controversy without basis, as a sort of knee jerk reaction against the prevailing attitude which one finds uncomfortable and attacks without proper examination or merit.

Humor

People love to laugh. Add some humor to your post and you can get lots of links.

Originality

Research and write about topics or issues related to a topic that nobody ever talked about. By doing that, your site will be the only site anyone could possible link to to further explore the topic.

Originality will truly help you if it is related to your overall search engine strategy (if you write a post that is far removed to the overall topic of your site, the links to that particular post will carry less weight in terms of helping you with your overall ranking in the search engines.

Building lists

“10 ways to do x” is a popular form of content writing on the web and are articles that get linked to often. It is part of our fast-food approach to knowledge.

Matt Cutts acknowledges the effectiveness of top 10 lists, but warns against a dumbing down of culture. Do create lists where appropriate, but make sure it isn’t all you do.

How to’s and tutorials

A great way to establish authority is by taking on an issue a lot of people struggle with and create a tutorial on how to solve it.

Have great site architecture

Matt Cutts is surprised at how many people ignore this. Make sure that your site is easy to link to: it must have linkable URL’s, your content should stay in one place (if you build content that moves around, it will be impossible for someone to link to that post) and have a site structure that makes sense both to humans and search engines.

Participate in communities

Join forums and leave comments on blogs that offer valuable insights. If you can help someone understand a topic better through your contribution, they will remember you, and might even be willing to link out to your site that discusses similar topic material.

It also spreads awareness: people who receive valuable feedback from you will start to regard you as an expert, and if they ever have a need for your services, they might just pick up the phone and call you for some business.

Social Media

Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook are all great tools to reach people where they hang out. Join discussions and groups and help them out in the same way you help out people on Forums. Again, this enables you to build authority. Once your authority on a subject is established you could be invited to conferences to speak on your chosen topic, and live bloggers could be linking out to your site – or people might simply remember you as an expert and give you a call to take on a project.

Newsletters

By allowing people to subscribe to your content, whether through RSS or email, or sign up for a newsletter enables you to deliver content more effectively. You don’t rely on the content consumer visiting your website, they can be notified of your content in their inbox. That heightens awareness of your content, and providing your content is of interest, might inspire someone to write a blog post about your discussion and link to your content.

Create tools and services

Create free tools that people can access to solve their problems, such as a knowledge database, plug-ins for Wordpress, clickable lists that solve problems in interactive ways, calculators (e.g. mortgage calculators), etc.

Create videos

Don’t just write, create videos as well (and provide transcripts). Video is a popular way to connect with a demographic that rather watches you talk than read your blog posts. It allows you to tap into a whole new demographic.

Conclusion

Matt Cutts adheres to the philosophy that content should be valuable, and that we have a responsibility to our culture not to clutter the web with spammy information or fast-food blog posts (such as mindless top 10 lists). He argues that backlinks are created by creating good content across platforms (e.g. blogs and video), networking and participating in the open source solutions.

There are many more link building strategies, and we will be discussing his suggestions and others in next months SEO tutorials.

2010 Predictions for Google and SEO

For a summary of Matt Cutts’ predictions and some extra’s, visit the related topic in our forum: search engine predictions for 2010.

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Posted in SEO 101 | 15 Comments »

The Benefits of Running a Forum

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 by Lorenz

Welcome to our series on how to create a successful business website. If you followed the steps in this tutorial, you now have a professional looking website with effective copy and powerful calls to actions to get business from your business. You’ve added a blog and started writing content and have clear idea on how to promote your content. Today, we’ll discuss the pros and cons of adding a forum to your website.

SEO + Automated Content Generation

Forums = automatically generated content. The content generated by your users in a forum helps your site rank better for what is called ‘long tail searches’. A research report from Google astonishingly revealed that about 50% of all searches are completely new, never seen before. A forum, having essentially randomly created content, is one way of catching these ‘long tail searches’ that you simply can’t plan for.

Another benefit is that we don’t always know the vocabulary of our demographics. Forums can catch this vocabulary, since the content is used by the target demographic.

Visitor Loyalty

If your forum is high quality and truly provides useful content, visitors can get very focused on it, checking in every day to learn more, ask new questions that arose and connect with their virtual friends.

Market Research

Being in direct contact with your target group allows you to be better informed about their needs, wants, questions and general culture. It is a great research tool.

Community Building

Forums are ideal to provide your community with a way to connect to each other. It is a fantastic tool to swap ideas, create meaningful relationships within overlapping industries and create a sense of belonging.

The challenges of building a forum

The many benefits that come with building a forum doesn’t mean it is a walk in the park. When considering building a forum, ask yourself the following questions in order to assess that you can meet the demands put on yourself:

Kick Starting Your Forum

It can be very difficult to attract visitors to your forum. An empty forum basically has no hope of attracting people that participate. People need to see content, need to be able to explore topics. Creating all this content can be a lot of work. I spend a lot of time trying to share my expertise on our Online Marketing Forum and providing the visitor with answers to questions they posted. I am lucky to have a small community who provide so much useful content besides the posts that I submit.

As with everything in life, you need to ask yourself if you have the time to put into making your forum a success.

Managing Your Forum

Even a popular forum cannot be left alone. True, forums generate automated content, but still require a moderator who makes sure that the forum stays on topic and that valuable content is added everyday. Especially when you run a successful forum, this can become a full-time job. One way of coping with the volume of work is recruiting volunteers to moderate your forum. I am always surprised how many people want to contribute free time to develop a forum that discusses ideas that they are passionate about. From a sociological and psychological point of view, this can be explained by the fact that some forum members would have contributed content anyway, and enjoy the added status of being selected to become a VIP, a Forum Manager.

Spam Wars

Forums are a target for spam bots that leave all types of nonsense on your forum. Here at Online Design Bureau we upgrade our forum every month to deal with the ever growing sophistication of spam bots to take advantage of a sites capability to accept user generated content. The benefit of these upgrades is that forum managers don’t have to worry about spam, as the spam bots are outsmarted each time they find a new way to bypass all the security.

Is a forum right for your website?

You need to assess whether:

  • you have enough visitors to make a forum viable
  • Whether they would appreciate having a forum made available to them
  • Whether you have the time (or the money) to generate the initial content that a forum requires to become successful.
  • Whether you or your web design agency has the technical know-how to set up and run a forum.

If the answers to the questions above is an resounding YES, you can reap the many benefits of owning a forum, which include repeat visits and visitor loyalty, the early beginnings to create a community around your brand, the benefits of having automated content generated and the SEO boost this brings by ranking better in the search engines for search terms you aren’t even planning for.

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Posted in Creating a business website | 9 Comments »

15 steps towards monitizing your blog

Monday, March 15th, 2010 by Lorenz

E-commerce

This post is part of our ‘How to create an effective website‘ series. If you followed the series, then by now you have a website that looks good and is customer focused. Today, we’ll be adding a blog in the mix and teach you how to promote it.

Yesterday Sirius, an online member of our Community, spoke in our Forum about his strategies to make money online. You can read the discussion here.

We just wanted to add to the discussion by giving you a quick overview of the 15 steps we recommend to create a popular blog and make money from it.

  1. Create a blog about something you are passionate about.
  2. Design it well. First impressions matter on the web.
  3. Develop your personal brand e.g. ‘the marketeer who guarantees return on investment’, ‘the chef who tells you what really happens in kitchens’, ‘the merciless burger connoisseur of DFW’ (burger joint review site), etc.
  4. Clearly profile your target audience
  5. Try to blog in audio, video and of course, written word. Make sure you do it well. If one of these methods just isn’t you, drop it.
  6. Create social media pages: Facebook Fan page, Twitter account, YouTube, etc. Update them in one sweep with Ping.fm and TubeMogul.
  7. Create your call to actions for your blog: Facebook connect, Facebook Fan page, Follow on Twitter, Social bookmarking, email to friend option, contact us info, provide a RSS feed for your blog and publish a newsletter with subscription, etc. Capture leads and use every medium to keep your audience engaged with your brand
  8. Post content to all these channels
  9. Create community: use blogsearch.google.com and find relevant blogs, engage through valuable comments and blog post exchanges. Search for topics on Twitter and communicate. Join topically relevant forums and engage. Join Facebook Groups and fan pages and network with the audience you find there.
  10. Keep doing this, day after day: write one blog post, network in social networking sites and forums, interact with bloggers, it will build awareness of your blog.
  11. Once you have plenty of content and some following, offer yourself up for speaking engagements. Come up with an original theme, offer to speak for free to begin with until you are known in the circuit.
  12. Approach magazines online and offline and offer to write articles.
  13. Leverage all the attention you get: start creating seminars and teach people. A seminar of 10 people works for now. You’ll get big soon enough.
  14. Now that you are building some worthwhile traffic, start adding affiliate programs to your blog: Commission Junction, Amazon, local businesses, etc. Now you’re making some money.
  15. Write a book. This will get you more exposure, more speaking engagements, more seminars and some TV and radio gigs.

Now you website should be attracting lots of traffic. Start reaching out directly to advertisers who share your target audience and begin raking in the money.

Remember that as with everything in life, it is all about a combination of hard and smart work. Blogs and books about online marketing tap into the 80’s yuppie culture of making big bugs fast without much effort. For most of us, this is a dream. Some of us do win the lottery.

But you can slug it out for 18 months, creating a blog post every day, raising awareness of your blog daily using the methods we suggested in our 15 step program, and you will start seeing results. Make it easy for yourself and do work with offshore workers, virtual PA’s, etc. You’ll get more done and it doesn’t cost all that much.

Don’t get fooled, this isn’t about making astounding fortunes. Your blog, providing it has valuable content, you communicate with a carefully selected audience in the social networks they hang out in and treat them with respect, will provide you with a steady income. The ammount of income will be dictated by your negotion skills with advertisers and the amount of traffic your site gets.

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Posted in Blogging, Creating a business website | 8 Comments »

10 ways to make your website more successful

Friday, March 12th, 2010 by Lorenz

This blog post is part of our series on how to create a successful business website. If you followed our advise, then by now you have a website up and running that looks great, has great sales copy and can gain the trust of your visitors. It also has powerful calls to action that tell your visitors what to do once they land on your site, meaning that you can capture leads and start a permission based marketing campaign (because your users signed up for this!). Today, we’ll be looking at how you can make your site even more successful.

With 92,000 websites being created every day, competition online can be fierce.

That means, you have to give your site that little extra in order to win the sale from your competitors.

In this blog post, we aim to give you the 10 ways in which you can achieve this.

1. Have a Unique Selling Proposition

uspPeople never visit just one site to buy a product. They compare prices and features. Being the cheapest option isn’t necessarily the best solution, people also want ’service’ or a sense of cool or just greater usability. The iPhone isn’t at all the cheapest solution on the market and Apple’s service can leave a lot to be desired, but it has the add-on value of being ‘cool’ and extremely versatile.

Understand that your product, service and company will be compared to others. Therefore, you need to show why you are different, and why people should choose your product over others.

2. Content is King

Good content does several things. First of all, it informs your clients about your product. Second of all, it helps them to explore all the different facets of your business. They might arrive looking for one thing on your website and discover another product or service they weren’t aware of. And content helps you to be found in the search engines. Google and Yahoo really do nothing else but analyze content on the web and then try to match people’s searches with the content that is the most informative and useful to the searcher.

If you want to learn more about content for your website, visit our article on creating effective content.

3. Have a Powerful Call to Action

It is not enough that a user finds what he or she is looking for on your site and wants the product. The user must know what to do next. And it needs to be right there and easy to use. If you prominently feature buying options in your content, you will promote more impulse purchases, if you prominently feature contact details in your content, you will see an increase in people contacting you. Learn more about Calls to Action and creating a marketing funnel for your website.

4. Accessibility

Make your website compatible with all the different operating systems and web browsers available. Somebody visiting your website in FireFox or the Opera browser should still see your website correctly. People who use a Mac instead of a PC must see your website the proper way. Many website owners visit their website only on their PC with the Internet Explorer browser and aren’t aware that people who use a different browser or system might not be seeing their website correctly, or might find that certain menus don’t work.

People with disabilities make up a large percentage of the population. You can increase your sales by that percentage by making your site more accessible to people who may have an issue that make it hard for them to buy your product. A visitor might be visually impaired and require your website to display correctly in their special software. Deaf people who want to view your video content will need an option to turn on subtitles.

5. Test, test, test

Faults might be hidden in pages buried deep in your website. That page might however be the page that people land on first via a search in Google. Therefore it is important that you adequately test every page and make sure it displays and works correctly.

6. Communicate

Make sure your website offers capabilities and reasons for users to leave their email address or other contact details. It is important that you can send out communication materials to your customers from time to time to keep your company ‘front of mind’, to keep reminding them of your existence until the day comes that they need your services again.

A great way of doing this is by offering subscriptions to a newsletter, or a blog, or automatic updates on your latest special offers.

7. Know what your customers do on your site.

Google_Analytics_DashboardUse an analytics package that shows you how visitors found you, what they do once on your site and that keeps track of how many visitors eventually do what you want them to do: buy your product, contact you or subscribe to a service such as a newsletter. Knowing what makes visitors convert to a lead or sale and what turns them off is the most important knowledge you can accrue in order to learn how you can tweak your site to increase sales and lead generation.

8. Optimize your site for the search engines

SEO is the art of having your site come up in the search engines when your target audience types in keywords relating to your products and services. In fact, the search engines are the most likely way that you have found this page.

Understand what keywords your customers use and then use these words on your site to improve your visibility in the search engines. If you need help with this, you can always contact us or learn about our SEO services.

9. Advertise your site

Clearly feature your website on all your sales materials, from business cards to billboards. If your target audience sees your ad but needs more information before they buy your product, then your website can be a great information tool.

Also make sure you offer search as an option on your site, so that those people who type in your website address but are looking for a specific product or service, can easily conduct a search for that item.

10. Have a professional looking website

Looks do matter. Professional design builds trust. People will project the feeling they get from your website onto your company. If your website looks good, they will have a better feeling about doing business with you. This in turn will increase the number of visitors that convert to customers. in an earlier article we discussed how to choose a web designer.

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Web Design For Conversion: Creating a Marketing Funnel For Your Website

Thursday, March 11th, 2010 by Lorenz

Welcome to our series on how to build an effective business website. If you’ve gone through our previous articles, then by now you have a professional looking website, created great content that is based on what you know interests your target audience and implemented valuable techniques to gain trust in your website. Today, we’ll take it a step further and discuss creating a marketing funnel for your website to convert your visitors into customers.

You Design a Website To Sell Your Product / Service

That is your ultimate goal, so you should always keep it in mind. So why is it that so many websites are so inept at selling? Because they forget the two main functions of a website:

  1. Lead Generation
  2. Converting Visitors to Customers

This isn’t just done by having a website. You need to have a website intelligent enough to actually make the sale.

Designing a Marketing Funnel For Your Website

Marketing funnelWith Marketing Funnel we mean the process by which a prospect becomes a customer. The funnel is the instrument with which we guide them in this process. This process could look like this:

  • Prospect becomes aware of need
  • Prospect becomes aware of the brand that offers the solution
  • Prospect visits brand website
  • Prospect leaves contact details
  • Communication between sales staff and prospect
  • Prospect buys product / service.

Not all funnels will look exactly like this, and some steps in the funnel might be skipped. It is perfectly possible that your prospect visits your site and buys your product straight away. Other’s will need some convincing.

The important part is that you have a strategy in place for all contingencies, and a way to capture vital information along the way.

Coaching Visitors To Leads and Leads To Customers

Design your website with a few simple marketing strategies in mind to achieve higher sales.

Generating Visitors

SEOIt is imperative that you have an SEO strategy in place to attract visitors to your websites. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is the art of creating a website that ranks well in the search engines for searches related to your brand, product or service. This is the most common way to attract visitors.

Other very effective methods include: PPC advertising (advertising via Google Adwords for instance), or any type of marketing that mentions your website. Always push your website in all collateral, from business card to thank you slip to brochures. If your collateral is missing material, your website can offer a living breathing brochure of information, updated with the latest information, easy to navigate and searchable. A website is the easiest way for customers to find information relevant to their need – and I am not just saying that because we create websites!

Converting Website Visitors To Leads

Okay, so you got the prospect to visit your website. Now, you need to convert him or her to a customer.

The prospect will either immediately buy your product, or you need to somehow capture their contact details and permission to market to them, so that you can maintain a meaningful relationship that keeps your brand front of mind until the prospect is ready to purchase your product or service.

Customer conversionCalls To Action That Lead To the Sale

Make sure that your phone number is prominent. Have a prominent link to your contact page and where possible offer a free chat opportunity, where the prospect can ask the questions that he or she has relating to your offers.

Capturing Contact Details of the Lead and Get Permission To Market

The following information will focus primarily on collecting email addresses. It is important that your prominently feature your Privacy Policy and if applicable, your Terms & Conditions, in diminish any anxiety of your more discerning subscriber.

Make sure that important landing pages feature at least some of the following:

Blog subscription

When you have a blog, clearly show subscription options to RSS and Email. If the prospect finds your blog interesting, he or she will sign up for future updates. The trick is that you keep your blog interesting and occasionally promote your services. Try to offer your blog content in three forms: textual, video and audio. That way you cater to all profiles, from the jogger who likes to learn from Podcast, to the visually oriented person who needs to see a video to keep their attention going to the avid reader.

By the way, if you want to subscribe to our blog, this is where you can do it:

Enter your email address:

Promote email subscriptions to a newsletter.

Make sure the prospect can preview the latest issue.

Make some content only available to registered users.

It is a great way to capture email addresses and offer the registrant alternative subscriptions that he or she might not be aware of.

Other reasons to leave contact details:

Offer an ezine, ecourse, special report or ebook that requires signing up for periodic updates by leaving an email address.

Offer subscription to channels other than your site, where people might prefer to follow you: allow people to become a fan of your Facebook page with the click of a button (you can then push relevant info to them via Facebook), offer a Twitter link, Google FriendConnect and any other social network that is relevant to your audience.

Incentivise Word Of Mouth

And what if you have a visitor who knows somebody who needs your product? You want to make it easy for that visitor to spread the word!

In order to accomplish this, offer a “Tell a Friend” option that forwards the page via email to a friend, with a personal message from the sender. Offer “Social Bookmarking Buttons” so that visitors can share the article with their community and followers. Some sites might even benefit from offering a ‘bookmark this page’ button.

Your Site Is As Good As You Market It

Web Design is not just the art of making your site look good. It is the art of making your site an effective sales tool. Using some of the aforementioned tips will definitely help you to boost conversion.

Over To You

Do you have other ideas on how to effectively promote your website? Leave us a comment!

If you need a Professional Web Design focused on maximizing visitors and leads, feel free to contact us.

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SEO: The Basics of Ranking Well

Friday, March 5th, 2010 by Lorenz

We get a lot of questions on how you can rank well in the search engines. This is a vast topic matter that will be extensively discussed in our blog. For now, we just wanted to give our audience some quick pointers about the essential components of an SEO strategy. If you have specific questions, feel free to ask them in our SEO forum.

A brief overview

As with every specialized knowledge, we can draw broad strokes, while reminding the reader that the devil is in the detail.

Our SEO 101 Guide will open with describing the broad principles. They will give you an eagle eye overview of the framework in which we work coupled with a short overview of how these principles have developed historically in the search engine algorithms.

Raw PageRank (a.k.a. Link Juice)

PageRank by GoogleLet’s start with the smallest factor of interest.

PageRank used to be an important factor in SEO optimization for Google. Today, it is somewhat important, but it’s advocated effectiveness is more myth than reality.

PageRank was a simple algorithm that calculated the likelihood that a person randomly clicking on links will arrive at any particular page. In other words, it wasn’t the amount of links that point to the page that were important (this is a frequent misconception) but rather the chances that somebody could stumble upon your page.

In the hay day of SEO, PageRank was extremely important. You could install the Google Toolbar, that gives you an indication of the PageRank of each page. The trick was then to get links from pages with high PageRank, as this would increase the probability of a surfer randomly clicking on links to arrive on your page. The algorithm would then list you higher in the search engines simply based on this algorithm.

Since the beginning of the Naughties search engines have gotten smarter, and PageRank has declined in overall importance, in many ways because it was such a random way of assessing the value of a page.

Key Words on the page

keywordsNext on the list is optimizing the keyword distribution on your page. Although the second least important factor, this can really give a boost to your site, and it is recommended that this is where you start your SEO efforts. We will be giving you an in-depth guide on On Page Keyword Optimization.

But for now, a quick overview:

It is important that keywords that are indicative to the search appear on the page. In other words, if a searcher looks for ‘electric kettles’ and your page is about ‘electric kettles’, those words better be on the page. Seems obvious, but quite often we don’t know what search phrases our audience would use. This would then require us to first find out what key phrases are the most popular when people look for our services. Once we know these key phrases, we should then include them on the page.

There is a whole ’science’ behind on-page optimization, and we will be addressing this in-depth. The science also extends to optimization for visitor to customer conversion, and this will be addressed in November’s tutorials.

Anchor text in Backlinks

Backlinks move your site to the center of the web

Backlinks move your site to the center of the web

More important than the keywords on the page is the words used in the link from an external page (on a different domain) than your page. If your page is about search engine optimization, and an external page links to you for the keywords search engine optimization. than that will count towards how relevant your page appears to be to the search engines, especially if the link comes from a page that is contextually relevant to your topic material.

The influence of anchor text in external links has been declining in the past, because this is yet another element that can be gamed by SEO’s. But if you have a lot of backlinks to your site, you will see a definite uplift in your position in the search engines!

Domain Trust / Authority

Way way back in the history of SEO, when the industry was still in its infancy, an astonishing 7 years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, Domain Trust didn’t really play a role that I knew off. Today, it is THE factor in SEO.

If Google decides that you are a trusted domain (like the BBC or Wikipedia) you will do well in the search engines for all key phrases that are relevant to topics you discuss. That is not to say that you can’t be beaten by pages that have lots of backlinks (see the previous page), but you will have to try a lot less to get far superior results. In fact, Google’s algorithm update this year (called Vince) has given even more weight to the fact whether Google trusts your brand or not.

So the task at hand is to write lots of quality content and become a trusted domain (this can take years) – or the second best thing: get lots of links from trusted domains (we’ll discuss this in future updates).

Conclusion

Although we will discuss some tricks other than the four main categories above, adhering to the above rules will take up most of our discussions and activities when optimizing your site for search engines. The recipe is simple: don’t worry too much about the myth of PageRank, focus on creating quality content with strategic placement of keywords, accrue backlinks across the web and fight hard to become a trusted site (the best way to avoid calamity with each new search engine algorithm update).

Over the next month, we will give you step by step instructions how to achieve success in each of these categories.

Over to you

Do you agree? Do you disagree? Do you think we left some essential information out? Or do you have questions that require clarification? Let us know, we love to hear from you.

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How to Create Effective Content For Your Website

Thursday, March 4th, 2010 by Lorenz

This blog post is part of our series on how to create a successful business website.

Earlier we spoke about how to find a web designer. Design is an important part of creating trust in your brand. Today, we are going to discuss another important strategy to create trust in your brand: content creation.

When creating content, many website owners fail to recognize that content is an important element of your marketing strategy.

Whenever somebody lands on your website, your content and imagery are effectively your sales people. The content needs to be convincing, persuasive and give incentives to the reader to contact you and buy your product and service.

But how do you get your content to do that? We’ll, that’s what we are here to explain:

Website Content That Sells

The first thing to do when creating content is to define:

  1. Capture customersWho your ideal customer is and what their defining attributes are;
  2. Understand the problems they face;
  3. How you can offer them solutions that solve their problem.

Now understand the mindset of your customer. He or she is trying to solve a problem related to your product. In our case, our customers try to find a website. Since our ideal customers are business owners, we know they are looking for a professional website that can generate leads and converts customers. As a result, our content reflects that.

If you understand the NEED of your customer, and you can immediately show him or her that you can address this need in a professional manner, than the battle is already half won.

To better understand the needs of your customers, read our blog post on defining your target audience.

Caveat: The Best Sales People Are Mentors

Once you start trying to sell to someone, you activate the ’sales wall’. Many sellers approach a sales man with their guard up, the erect a wall of suspicion. And that is the correct attitude: after all, sales people could have their bottom line in mind more than the customer’s need.

To avoid skepticism, structure your content so that it becomes a guide or a mentor in the customer’s quest to solve his or her problem. You want to have a conversation with your prospect that is free of pitching and selling. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a call to action, but it does mean that you should focus on the problem, not the sale. At least, not just yet.

Add a Call to Action

There is a term that was coined in the late 90’s to describe the average surfer: ‘wandering drunk’. This seems a bit harsh, but on the Internet, everyone seems to have ADD. Content is scanned, people stare at pages an average of 10 seconds before they decide whether they like your site or not, and you get very little time to sell your proposition.

You already know that your content needs to be targeted. It also needs to be short, to the point, and visual where possible.

But you don’t just want your visitors to understand that you can solve their problem. You want them to CONTACT you.

‘That’s what the contact’ button on my site is for’, you say. We say: ‘on the net, you have to be more obvious.’

Numerous studies have shown that if you end your copy with a way to contact you, either by calling or via email, you will dramatically increase the amount of people who contact you.

On your website, it is important to tell people what you want them to do: ‘you found your solution, now contact us’.

Content and SEO

The more content you create, the more your website can be found for important keywords in your industry.

Just like in real estate, on the web, websites thrive based on three rules: location, location, location. In case of your website, you should be prominently featured on the first page of google when somebody looks for your product, service or brand.

How to do this is part of a longer discussion, and we’ll discuss how to attract visitors to your site via social media and SEO in the two coming months.

For now, it is important that you know what people type into the Google search box when they are looking for a company like yours.

How to do this is demonstrated in this video:

Now that you know what your audience is searching for, make sure that you include these keywords in your copy. This will help your users find your website. Don’t force it though, keep your site sounding natural.

Mention your keyword once in your contents title, once in the first paragraph and once in the closing paragraph.

There is much more to this – including coding of your website (talk to your web designer) and some advanced strategies. Stick with us, because we will be discussing how to get your website to rank well in search engines in the coming months. You can also get help in our SEO Forum, where our community is quick to respond to questions.

The Beauty of Content Marketing

Television ads work because of their wide reach, but they convert less. Websites convert more visitors to customers than TV ads (in general) and with the help of SEO can attract a large number of visitors month by month.

Why do websites convert better than TV ads?

Because TV ads interrupt. You are watching a program and all of the sudden your are told of a solution when you really rather be relaxing. It works, because with enough exposure, you start feeling that the brand is somehow ‘familiar’. But it takes a lot of repeated exposure, and that is why mobile phone companies for instance advertise so often on TV and elsewhere.

SEOWebsites are different. When you get a visitor, it is because he or she did a search on Google or another search engine and landed on your site. They have a problem and are actively looking for a solution. So if you can convince them that you have a solution right there and then, your chances of having the visitor contact you are dramatically higher than a TV ad.

And that is why you should pay attention to your content. It is a powerful marketing tool, but often misused. Follow the guidelines in this article, and you should see a rise in the amount of people who contact you after visiting your website.

If you need someone to design your corporate site, take a look at our web design services, or contact us here.

Any thoughts, any questions. Feel free to leave us a comment or see advice about building your website in our forum.

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