Online PR UK & Expert SEO

I WANT MORE CONVERSIONS !

Fortunately for me I can write persuasive copy and I have studied online conversion for long enough now to have a few clear ideas on how we are going to do this.

One thing I will be doing is making the SEO pages i am working on , more linear. I.e. harder for the users to jump out and go somewhere else. All I want them to do is buy from me. To do that they need to click a big button saying join now.

(I am also using this conversion page for pay per click traffic, since I think the mind set is very similar. it may be in time I’ll seperate the two, but for now I’m thinking combo pack!)

Interestingly I have noticed an obsession with MORE TRAFFIC ! ! ! ! and not with conversion. this explains why the relatively inexpensive process of improving conversion often gets ignored , or simply not given the priority it desserves.

So the user has clicked and they start travelling along the road to understanding and value build.

So last week, me and the creative guys got on and set up some ideas for an ideal user
path.

The Pathway
The user clicks one of 3 links on the SEO pages to a landing page. (or they click on a pay per click advert) These links are embedded with keywords which trigger off a tool run by mediaplex which then presents text tied in with the keywords they came in on.

The cool thing about a text based pitch is that:

• It is ‘words that sell’
• It is very easy to change.
• I can have different pitches for different users
• I can test, test, test to see what pictches work best
• It will upload immedately, so in the 1st 2 seconds it will be read.

The other plus is that different keywords = SEO’able content. I’m not suggesting that its going to do terribly well, however Its more keywords for engines to hang on to.

The diagram below explains the structure of the page. The core ideas are:

• 2 seconds to check the page out
• 8 seconds to decide wether to stay or not
• Build up the value by treating the page like a pyramid, with the most basic info atB the top and the most detailed at the bottom
• Have jump off points to registration
• Where they do want to trawl around, make sure the users dont stray too far, hence the i frame at the bottom.
• When I’ve got this page together I’ll set up a proper demo for you to play with and hopefully it will all work!

So there it is - now we will have to see if all this big talk works and gets me the results!

for your interest books I have read, and read, and read on this subject are:

• Scientific advertising by Claude Hopkins. It was written 85 years ago and is about direct response advertising. the core principles appily today as they did then , excepy you dont have any .com hype. Just sensible practical ideas totally relevant to online marketing. (now out of copywright, so its downlaodable) Here for the HTML version | Here for a PDF | and here for audio
• NEW AIDA - a great common sense book with a focus on direct mail marketing.
• Ogilvy on advertising. A seminal book on solid ideas for advertising. not specifically geared for direct response, although he was a passonate for getting your moneys worth from ad spend.
• And of course look at competitive terms on google and read the adverts. Try phrases like ‘home loan’ ‘credit cards’ ‘new car’. remember the top ads are paying about £5 a click, so they have to make whatever they sell very, very persuasive!

It’s goal setting time for me and that means presenting various people stats on how rankings are progressing.

It’s nice to show an upward trend and everyone gets excited…too excited I think. Just because you rank for a keyword , does not mean traffic, or good traffic.

On looking across my BIG income generator’s rankings, it seems to me that converting the traffic is a bigger immediate priorirty than just getting more users.(on to that later)

I have a rough idea of what keywords matter to me, through measuring the monthly search volume using overture keyword finder tool, but what is most revealing is when I measure the traffic for given keywords against my rankings.

And I have found an interesting disconnect. For instance on keyword X were ranked 4th or so, but on a particular site I’m working on, it has been the biggest single keyword referred to us by google forthe last month.

So I guess what im saying is that chasing rankings for their own sake can be like looking into fog when it comes to the bottom line.

Its chasing the keyword that converts, which matters and they may not be the keywords ones overture or other keyword tools suggest.

This is because the numbers are distorted by loads of factors, like automated queries….and seasonal variations ( becasue the stats are about 30 days old.)
Overture are happy to let the inflated figures persist, since it jacks up their numbers for potential advertisers.

So on analysing my stats, I found that we are getting the usual SEO conversion rates of about 1/2% and for me to meet targets, I need to jack up the traffic by 30% and bring up the conversion rates by about the same.

Then I should be doing ok.

Just a quick thought. as many of you know, wikipedia has set up ‘no follow’ with all the outgoing links form the site.

‘no follow’ is a tag used to tell search engines not to follow a link. of course its up to the search engines as to weather they actually do or don’t follow a lnik. Google say they acknowledge this protocol, but i bet they follow the links nevertheless, but don’t give those links any value to the reciepient site.

So there are 5 strands here:

1. Wikipedia is a give / take thing. you give your effort and in return you are rewarded with something which will help you in the search engine rankings with Google and possibly the other major engines.

2. The founder Jimbo Wales has recently launched a new search engine called wikiseek which trawls through wikipedia for results and shows links shown on the site. These results rely on great entries and a buzzing community adding new content and keeping the whole thing in order.

Wiki seek say “The contents of Wikiseek are restricted to Wikipedia pages and only those sites which are referenced within Wikipedia, making it an authoritative source of information less subject to spam and SEO schemes. ” - so what if there is no incentive by a huge part of the online community to add content and place links ?

3. I thought wikipedia was a democratic thing!, so whats with Jimbo simply telling us all - ‘no follow’ where was the community participation ? For more on wikiseek see Danny Sullivans comment

4. whats Search Wikia all about? and why take on the search engines? As you may know search wikia uses community participation to rank content. you may remember Yahoo triedhuman editing with their directory… and ultimately failed with it. So can humans do a better job than an algo? We shall see. I think the spammers will kill it in the end.

5. ever heard of a wiki nazi? with any society, when the ‘police’ get out of control it turns ugly. I think of my personal wikipedia experiences HERE and the laughable case of the linkbait page where all the references to Matt Cutts the google engineer and blogger were savagely culled. They were only reinstated after uproar from the SEO community. Fools.
So in conclusion, I see too much power with too few. fast erosion of goodwill. open day for the spamming community. dictatorship with a community front. Too many things on the boil at one time. And the core principles of ‘give and take’ being eroded with Wiki. All this will probably come to an unhappy ending much like DMOZ

Google created a superb service by being engineering driven. it also understood the power of influencers - the likes of you and me (ordinary poeple dont read blogs generally) who raved about it and made sure when ever they were asked to fix a PC, Google would become the default page of IE

And of course we would always be asked our opinion and most tech users will always say google.
Aside: to those of you in internet marketing, you will know that the MSN search demographic is better converting and more non-internet savvy than traffic from google. I believe its because they cant tell the difference between natural search results and paid for ones.

So what if MSN live began doing stuff which impresses the influencers? Stuff like being able to hack the search box when you embed it onto your web page:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa905322.aspx 

______________

or the new operator LinkFromDomain

See it here:  LinkFromDomain

Syntax
Green   LinkDomain:YourSite.com
Yellow   LinkFromDomain:YourSite.com
Blue   Either LinkDomain or LinkFromDomain
Green + Yellow + Blue
LinkFromDomain:YourSite.com | LinkDomain:YourSite.com

See diagram:

Or MSN AdLab keyword cluster tool
Interesting tool which shows you how MSN clusters keywords. If you a google centric SEO person (most are) then you could try using the google equivalent of typing the ‘~’ berefore a keyword i.e. ~sep , ~seo and so on in the search box.http://adlab.msn.com/src/

other MSN tools:- Demographic Prediction Tool - predicts the demographics of searchers by keyword or site visitors by website

Online Commercial Intention Detection Tool - estimates the probability of a search query or web page being commercial, informational-transactional.

http://adlab.msn.com/searchfunnel/ How users search before and after a given search query

There is just a ton of geekery here and I do think there will be a tipping point when microsoft turn from being seen as evil, to being the good guys and when MSN Live becomes both the geek ( influencers ) and dumb end users favourite.

The outlook isnt great on the market growth numbers for MSN, but remember when the tipping point, tips it will spread like wild fire. My guess is that this time will come in about 3 years.

I know this has been done to death - the whole google might be evil thing etc… Having read both John Battale’s book ’search’ and an unauthorised biography of google and Robery Scobles naked conversatios I get the clear impression that:

• Google is:
• A very regimented secretive organisation (of course we already know that!)
• Its founders really do have an iron grip, so what they say goes ! - this is because being contrarian and sticking to what they think works has worked very well so far.
• They dont blog as a company, because Serge and Larry are secretive by nature ( it seems), so you could argue they are not conversing well with the market.
• I think search is a core interest, but data collection and usage thereof is the real google.

So what !?

Well there is a love affair with google that is burning very bright and the brighter it burns, the greater the fallout when the tide turns.
Its the nature of .com. massive rapid uptake and then massive rapid uptake for another service or product.

So if effective ownership of your window to the internet and data collection are the underlying prizes (remember good data collection and perspective ownership means marketing nirvana) Then any big company with deep enough pockets will fight for the most important marketing space for the next couple of decades.

How about telling soemone 20 years ago that you could track a space station across the earth real time on a box that sits on your desk?

Well you can here : Hooglesat2