Conversion Leadership

The Importance of Website Usability – 10 Tips For An Improved Visitor Experience

Conversion Leadership — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:21:23 +0000

There’s nothing more important than the website when it comes to online marketing. Your website is your business’ public face and, as they say, “There’s no second chance to make a good first impression”.

The success of your online business is based on its ability to deliver a great experience to visitors. Follow these simple usability tips to ensure that your business’ site is making a creating a great experience to your visitors.

Ensure Your Visitors Understand What You Do

Many companies make the mistake of assuming that their site’s visitors already know what they are offering. This is not necessarily true. Testing has shown that if visitors aren’t able to clearly understand what your company does within 7 seconds of landing on your site, chances are they will leave. Let your visitors know they’ve come to the right place right. Give them the information they’re looking for.

Keep Distractions To A Minimum

When focusing on lead generation or website conversion, your call to action is perhaps the single, most important element on the page. Know what your main calls to action will be and ensure that there is nothing else that could distract visitors. Keep their attention focused on what you want your visitors to do.

Create Easily Digestible Content

Large amounts of copy can be overwhelming. Use headings, bolding, bullet points etc, to break up the copy and help visitors easily identify important concepts and main ideas. Font size, spacing, colour and contrast are important also. Ensure that your information is presented in a way that is easy to scan and digest.

Clean Up Your Forms

When creating website forms, keep them as simple as you possibly can. Remove any information that isn’t absolutely necessary to completing the form. Long, detailed forms can be a deterrent. As can the requirement to have a visitor enter irrelevant information.

Be Fast & Responsive

Websites with long load times quickly lose visitors. Websites with long load times will also slip in the search engine rankings. Ensure that your site is fast by avoiding Flash or cumbersome plugins. You could look at services like Google Page Speed.

Monitor Website Usage Patterns

Learn about what your visitors are doing on your site. Find out where they drop off, where they click and what catches their eye. Use this data to further improve your website. Register your site with Google Analytics.

Test, Test, Test

A/B or multivariate tests are a great way to test different parts of your website – whether it’s copy, design, layout, images etc. It’s easy to think that you know exactly what your target market wants and prefers – but only by testing can you know for sure. Google offers a simple testing tool (Google Website Optimizer) that can be easily used with just about any website to conduct a whole range of tests.

Talk In Your Customers’ Language.

Long and convoluted page copy that is full of vague and abstract industry jargon does not make for a good experience. Your copy should have a conversational tone that is easy to digest and resonates with your target audience.

Don’t Hide Content.

Don’t force your site visitors to go hunting around your website to find what they need. Many of them simply won’t bother. Your most important information should be accessible by just a click or two from anywhere in your site. Your navigation should be clear and consistent throughout. Navigation that disappears or changes on inside pages is confusing and frustrating and likely to cause visitors to abandon and surf to another site.

Make Your Contact Information Clearly Visible

Buried contact information sends the message that you don’t really want to be contacted and forces the visitor to do extra legwork. Your contact details or at the very least, your phone number should be accessible from each and every page.

Online marketing and lead generation success depends on a great website. And, wherever you are guiding visitors to perform a task, website usability will be the difference between failure and success.

The 4 Rs of SEO Success

Conversion Leadership — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 14:47:36 +0000

When creating software, we often talk about the difference between doing the right thing and doing the thing right.

In business as in life and Search Engine Optimisation, success is so much more.

In school, we were taught the 3 Rs – Reading, Writing and ‘Rithmetic. (Hmmm. Has no-one else worked out that it should be “arithmetic”?)

Success, on the other hand, is the end result of doing:

the Right Things…
at the Right Time…
for the Right Reasons…
the Right Way…

Link-building, Content Optimisation, Social Bookmarking, Social Media, Blogging, Authority Building, Pagerank, On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, Keyword Research. All of these are essential elements of your keyword strategy and all of these combine to offer their own unique benefits in specific scenarios.

If you end up using the wrong technique at the wrong time for the wrong reasons and in the wrong way, you may find your site’s rankings slipping away faster than a dog can raise it’s leg.

Effectiveness and Efficiency of Your SEO Strategy

The way to evaluate which tactics to use is to evaluate them on the basis of “Effectiveness” and “Efficiency“.

Effectiveness is doing the Right Things…for the Right Reasons.

Efficiency is doing them the Right Way…at the Right Time.

Keep this in mind…No matter how efficiently you put your strategies into practice, if they are the WRONG strategies… or you’re doing them for the WRONG reasons…you will never achieve the success you desire.

Worse still, you might find yourself falling on your Rs.

See how we apply SEO strategies on LinkedIn for massive results on the Google SERPs.

Why Your Website Needs A Redesign – Infographic

Conversion Leadership — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 14:37:19 +0000

Website design and navigation can have a large impact on how customers view your company so its imperative that you review your website and how it meets customer expectations.

Recently spotted on SEO.com, there’s a nice infographic on why you need to redesign your current website.

In the last 12 months, nearly 70% of marketers redesigned their websites either to modernise its appearance and bring it in line with their branding efforts or to optimise for better lead generation. Modern design elements and an intuitive navigation structure can have a large impact on how customers view your company, so it is extremely important that your website meet customer expectations and contribute to your SEO efforts.

When you begin a website redesign, always keep the search engines in mind. 62% of search users click a link on the first page of the search results. If they don’t immediately see what they need on that page, 41% of these users won’t bother going to page two. They will simply refine their keywords or switch search engines. 77% of search users still chose organic results over paid ads, so make sure that your website redesign can help propel you to the top of the rankings and appeals to your new customers.

Want to know how fast a Website Redesign for Lead Generation can be done for you? See how the SocialSTREAM Marketing System brings online lead generation to your business. for a live 60 minute consultation.

ROI – Not The Only True Measure of Social Media Success

Conversion Leadership — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:07:10 +0000

If you search the internet you’ll find a lot of information regarding tracking social media and Return on Investment (ROI).

ROI will always be the standard in determining the ultimate success, but many metrics will provide an indication of whether or not you are on the right track. In working with our big clients, we focus on tracking five key performance indicators to help determine if we’re on the right track.

Community

The first and easiest to track is building communities on the various social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Website Traffic

You can track traffic using tools such as Google Analytics or shortened URL services such as Bitly. There is a tremendous amount of information available and you need to decide the tools that best provide a means of benchmarking and tracking results.

Conversations/Engagement

Another key statistic you can track is how your communities respond to your efforts. You can track the number of engagements on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You can tally up the likes and comments on Facebook, Retweets on Twitter, and comments on Discussion Posts and News Articles in LinkedIn or use a variety social listening tools.
Leads

If you want to track leads you’re going to have to implement some means of tracking results. You can use tracking URL’s, specific campaign forms, lead tracking phone numbers and many, many others. For offline leads, simply ask those who contact you how they found you. These are just a few of the tracking options available.

Conversion Rate

The last piece of the puzzle is to quantify the dollars produced by your activity. Conversion rate tracking is perhaps the least understood and often-ignored aspect of tracking ROI. But, it is perhaps the most important because without it, you have no idea of the profitability of all your hard work.

You can also use Correlation to track results. Suppose that prior to launching a campaign you averaged 500 people per month to your site. Since launching your campaign your traffic has increased to 700, 900, and 1,100 visits per month over the previous three months. It is possible for you to correlate and attribute the increase to the beginning of the campaign.

If you’ve struggled with tracking your social media efforts these five KPI will help you start to measure your efforts. Just remember that in the end the only true score is ROI – if you’re investing $1, you want to know you’re getting back $1 + X or your campaigns are worthless.

Learn the practical techniques for doing Social Media the right way at How To Be A Social Media Expert.

The Best Tools For Distributing Your Content

Conversion Leadership — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:24:27 +0000

It’s never been easier to become a content publisher, but remaining a publisher can often be a challenge.

Whilst content creation is something that can be easily overcome, today, it seems the scarce resource in the publishing world is not content; it’s audience. To compete for reader attention, bloggers and content producers are finding they not only have to produce better content, they also have to figure out a way to get it in front of people.

Fortunately, tools are emerging to help publishers reach new audiences. Though getting more readers won’t be much help if your content sucks, the following six solutions can help publishers build an audience with the push of a button.

Check out the following six content distribution tools and services and make sure you commit to using at least one of them this year. They’ll help with traffic!

Outbrain: Headline Distribution

Outbrain is a lot like Google Adwords for content. Publishers provide an RSS feed of their content or submit individual links, and Outbrain produces headlines at the bottom of stories on major media sites under the label “Sponsored” or “Related” posts.

You pay a few cents per click, and Outbrain’s marketing team claims the relevancy of the traffic generates 44% higher pageviews per session than search or social media referrals.

Visit Outbrain »

SimpleReach: Suggested Story Distribution

SimpleReach helps publishers find and expose the content that will drive the most traffic through social channels, according to its president, Bryan Birsic. Its primary product, The Slide, is a tool that surfaces the most shared – and most likely to be shared – content a publisher has in its archives, and encourages users to share it. It also allows publishers to distribute their most social content across other publishers’ sites.

Visit SimpleReach »

ARC: Newswire Distribution

An acronym for “Access, Reach, Connect,” ARC Engagement Platform is an “all-in-one” tool for automatically distributing text and multimedia content across social networks, top 100 video sites and about 6,000 media outlets, according to PR Newswire.

Visit ARC »

Zemanta: Link Distribution

Zemanta is a link distribution engine cleverly disguised as a text editor plugin. The consumer-facing side of Zemanta’s software analyzes the content of blog posts-in-progress and suggests relevant photos and links for authors to add on the fly.

“About 75,000 bloggers actively use Zemanta,” according to Tin Dizdarevic, Zemanta’s director of marketing.

Visit Zemanta »

TubeMogul OneLoad: Video Distribution

TubeMogul calls itself, “the most powerful video distribution and tracking solution available.” Whether that’s hyp or not, the service is free, flexible and powerful enough that social video baron Gary Vaynerchuk plugs it relentlessly in his book Crush It.

Visit TubeMogul »

StumbleUpon: Paid Social Distribution

For inexpensive and hopefully viral pay-per-click content distribution, the standby for many marketers and publishers is StumbleUpon, a social network that serves users page after page of “random” content from around the web.

Visit StumbleUpon »

With distribution tools like these, publishers like can worry less about reach and more about producing quality content.

The real key to content distribution is to create great content that people want to engage with. Once you do this, the distribution methods you choose will support its growth.

Your Checklist For Online Lead Generation

Conversion Leadership — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 14:23:11 +0000

Online Lead Generation seems to be often met with a great deal of confusion and mystery. Follow this simple Online Lead Generation Checklist for great results.

You’ve got your website up and running and now you’re waiting for leads to come knocking on your door. The problem is “your thinking may have been spot on but your execution may need some work”.

In this article, we’re going to assume you would like to increase traffic to your website so that when people do a search and click through to your business, you have at least some confidence of converting them from visitors into leads.

Know Your Keywords Do you know the keywords that will lead buyers to your site? Do they have too much competition?
Write Regularly and Write Frequently Have a business blog that you can use to create frequent keyword rich articles target towards your prospective customers.
Have a Clear Call to Action Make it obvious what you want the visitor to do on every page of your site.
Backlinks You can use many backlink strategies to create more ways for people to find you, including Social Media. Post about your site on the Social Networks.
Include Your Phone Number If you want phone calls, be certain your phone number. It is generally accepted practice to place this in the upper right of your site where people will look for it.
Get some basic search optimisation with WordPress, there are a number of easy-to-use (and free) SEO plugins that will add some tremendous value.
Go Broad There’s no limit to the number of websites you can have. A web-based lead generation strategy can take months to really get going and some niches perform better than others. As Brad Sugars (CEO of ActionCOACH) says, “Set up multiple sites” each targeted to multiple kinds of keyword and give it enough time to start working.
Online Lead Generation Works! However, you need to pay attention to many details and be realistic about how quickly it is going to work.
Want to know how quickly an Online Lead Generation Strategy can work for you? See how the SocialSTREAM Marketing System brings online lead generation to your business. for a live 60 minute consultation.

How To Keep Your Website Fresh

Conversion Leadership — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 13:59:13 +0000

Business owners find themselves constantly on the back foot whenever Google announces a change to the way it ranks searches online. The good news is that there are effective ways to optimise your online content and make the best of the changes.

when Google first unveiled “Panda,” a major change to its search algorithm, it announced to the world an intention to place a higher priority on what it considers high-quality content. The search giant updated its algorithm several times through 2011, giving greater priority to “fresh”, relevant content.

The rationale?

People who seek information on the latest news and events will likely want the most up-to-date content possible.

It’s important to note that not all searches are affected by the new freshness guidelines. For example, someone looking for a list of past Australian Prime Ministers doesn’t need the latest information about, say, Gough Whitlam. Google knows this and estimates that the most recent freshness change will affect about 35 percent of search phrases.

Specifically, the types of searches that are being ranked according to freshness include:

Recent events or hot topics that have begun trending on the web
Regularly recurring events such as the UCi Indoor Cycling World Championships or the Tour de France
Information that is updated often but isn’t necessarily a hot topic or recurring event

Even though this update doesn’t affect all searches, you may still be able to benefit from Google‘s algorithm change. Here are three steps for optimising your web content for Google‘s freshness rankings.

1. Create a Publishing Calendar

There’s one obvious consequence of Google‘s freshness update: The more often you post, the greater your chances of getting indexed and displayed in search results. So consider creating a publishing calendar to help you set and achieve more ambitious posting goals and then…stick to them.

We find that you can get very good results by putting up new content on your business blog at least two or three times each week. You don’t necessarily need to know exactly what you’ll be posting each time in advance, but, if you take the time to schedule the days you’ll publish content a month in advance, your set what is known as your Reticular Activating System (RAS) and by the time you come to actually write, you’ll have your topic nailed.

If you run your website on the WordPress blogging platform, plug-ins including the Editorial Calendar can prove to be very useful. If not, you can add your posting deadlines to whichever “to do” list management system you use.

2: Stay on Top of Industry News

Now that you know when you’re going to post, it’s time to come up with some timely topics to write about. Keep in mind that with the new freshness guidelines, the content of your post matters as much as the frequency.

To qualify as “fresh” content, you’ll want to create posts that comment on relevant topics and events in the news. Naturally, some news and events will be more relevant than others to your particular business but, you should find at least a few opportunities each week by leveraging off current events.

Remember, you don’t need to write novel-length analysis of every news item you come across. Time-crunched business owners should aim to write posts that summarise the news and offer analysis on how it might affect your industry in 300-500 words.

3: Be Your Industry’s First-Mover

If you’re the 1000th blogger writing about an industry news story or an upcoming event, you probably aren’t providing the fresh content Google is looking for. You should aim to be among the first 10 to post on it.

To get the first-mover advantage, it’s imperative to stay on top of news as it occurs in your industry. Setting up Google Alerts for certain target keywords will provide you with a constant stream of fresh and important events as they happen. Also, spend time each day on news aggregation websites for your industry.

It will take extra effort to regularly monitor news and trends and to be among the first to comment on them. But such vigilance can pay off big-time if your fresh content skyrockets to the top of a Google search results page.

Need assistance with making the most of your website investment. Get help from SEO professionals who balance the needs of the search engines with the need of your market.

8 Steps to Effective Search Visibility

Conversion Leadership — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 13:32:39 +0000

There’s nothing worse than putting in a bundle of time, effort and money into an online business – only to see fail in the traffic generation stakes, or worse still, not being able to find it in the Search Engines

The following search engine checklist for your website is sure to avoid it fizzling into an online non-event.

1. Keyword Research

Good marketing requires familiarity with the target audience. As a business owner, you need to know what words and terms your customers use to find businesses like yours online.

Whenever we start a new project, We do create a persona for an ideal target customer. We consider the specifics of age, demographic and psychographic factors. Once you know who they are and understand their problems, then you can work out what they would be typing into Google to find solutions. Make sure you get the keywords that match what it is they’re looking for.

Be specific.

If you’re company specialises in business coaching in the Melbourne, Victoria area, don’t just make keywords “business coach”. You’re ideal customer is likely to be looking for something more like “business growth in Melbourne, Victoria”.

Targeting longer phrases means less competition for your ideal customer and helps build some easy, relevant traffic early on in the life of your site.

2. Buy a Keyword Rich Domain Name

Search engines tend to favour domain names that contain desirable keywords. Also, people searching for that keyword are also more likely to click on it.

Regardless of what your primary keyword is, if you can get that into your domain name, it can reward you in the long run. Having a keyword rich domain name, when it’s something that your clients actually are looking for, will also likely increase clickthrough rates.

A quick search on Google for business growth Elsternwick will almost certainly reveal high-ranking domain names that contain these keywords in them.

3. Fix the Structure of Your Addresses

In the same way as keyword-rich domain names can improve search results, so can having static, logical web page addresses. It’s important to get this right at the outset, as you shouldn’t change a page address once it’s started getting backlinks. (Changing a page’s address will break the backlinks and undo all of that good work in an instant.)

A bad URL is something like www.yourdomain.com/p=?731. A good URL might be something like: www.yourdomain.com/model/product-achieve-specific-benefit and you want to make sure that when you’re creating new pages of information, that they actually represent the benefits your product or service offers your customers.

Not only do you want to reference target keywords, it also creates a hierarchy or taxonomy for the information on your website and this is great for the search engines.

4. Be Specific With Your Use Of On-page Keywords

It’s important that each of your key products has its own page. Each product will have associated keywords to target, but simply listing these on the homepage is not the most effective way of improving search results for those terms.

Rather than a classic page that says “we repair all makes and models”, you want to say “we’re a television repairer and we repair Panasonic LCD televisions [ with a link to something like www.yourdomain.com/panasonic/lcd-repairs] and we also repair Panasonic Plasma televisions [with a link to something like www.yourdomain.com/panasonic/plasma-repairs]. That helps search engines associate you as a specialist in that field, and will rank you higher if someone searches for your keywords.

5. Placing keywords

Once you’ve identified what your target keywords and phrases are, you need to place them in the correct places throughout the site.

There are two main areas in which you need to contain keywords.

In the copy that displays on each page; and
Within the html meta-data under the covers.

This is relatively simple to do, especially if your site is using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress.

Metadata is a combination of keywords and key phrases that you not only want to be known for, but are also relevant to what people are actually searching for.

There are four types of metadata that offer the biggest impact for SEO:

Tags;</li> <li><H1> Tags; and</li> <li>Meta Descriptions</li> <li>Meta Keywords</li> </ul> All of these can be found and edited within your CMS. If you’re using WordPress, we recommend using the <a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">All in one SEO Pack</a> plugin. It lets you to easily configure Meta Descriptions and Keywords without having to get a coder in. Title tags appear at the very top of the browser window, and should be kept to about 60 characters, or approximately three to five words, as this is all a search engine are likely to display. They are denoted in the source code of a page like this: <pre style="text-align:center"><title>Keyword Rich Title of The Page
Header tags, or
tags, are the bold text that acts as a headline in the copy of a page. They appear as follows in the source code:
```
A Headline Containing Relevant Keywords
```
The Meta Description of a page is a paragraph that describes the page to the search engine. It should be approximately two to three sentences in length, or 160 characters. It appears in the source code like this:
Once you’ve added you keywords to these three key areas, use them in the content of each page as relevant. Remember that readability and usability are more important than search-engine friendliness.
6. Keep Key Phrases Brief

Any information that is meant to provide information to a search engine needs to have a single, simple and clear message. Continuing with the “business growth Elsternwick” example…

When you land on the page that’s targeted for this term, it needs to say something relevant to the search term. You can add more to it, but the more you add, the more it dilutes the message. There should be one, single
heading that says something ‘Business Coach Elsternwick – Guaranteed Results’.

7. Internal Link Juice

Search engines like to see lots of relevant internal links within a site.

Don’t put everything you do on the home page. Keep all the pages simple. Put a paragraph or two with the top keywords and link from your home page to an internal page. Those links should include the keyword or phrase.

Search engines generally likes that approach, especially if people click on the links.

8. Include an XML sitemap

An XML sitemap is basically a text document that outlines exactly where all the pages on your site are, and how users navigate to them. It shows all of the separate pages and how they’re linked, and helps search engines to index the site.

Many CMS packages have plugins or modules that can generate sitemaps for you automatically and submit them to Google. (If you’re using WordPress, you might want to look at the Google XML Sitemaps plugin which will also suggest to the search engine bots how frequently they should return.)

The important take home is that if you want to rank highly on the search engines, you need to make it as simple as possible for them to discover you and to understand what you’re about.

If your planning to increase your SEO budget, it’s important to make the most of your website investment. You can do that with the assistance of SEO professionals with a ever-growing list of successful internet business and marketing experience.

The 5 Must-Have Elements for Your Online Strategy

Conversion Leadership — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 08:34:32 +0000

Listen in as the #1 Small Business Coach talks about Online Marketing and the 5 elements you absolutely must have in your Online Strategy.

What happens when Brad Sugars, CEO of the largest Business Coaching firm on the planet is asked about the Web and Online Marketing?

If you’re a small business owner, marketer, coach or involved in the growth of a business, then this is a must-listen.

Brad Sugars, CEO of ActionCOACH talks candidly about these five elements you absolutely must have as part of your marketing toolkit if you’re going to survive and thrive in the New Economy.

Today, you can’t be in business without a website.
Have multiple websites.
Content is King.
Search Engine Optimisation.
Interactive Databases

There’s some very interesting content in the recording that concisely sums up everything from how to get massive visibility into the search engines to how to use LinkedIn to hire new employees.

Listen to Brad Sugars Below

Discover how the SocialSTREAM Marketing System enables each of these for your business. Contact us for a free 60 minute consultation.

Social Media Users Becoming More Privacy-Conscious

Conversion Leadership — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 02:17:55 +0000

Users of social media sites have been found to be “unfriending” other users and increasingly “pruning” their personal profiles according to a new report from the Pew Research Center.

The latest research, conducted between April 26 to May 22, 2011, revealed more than 60 percent of social media users said last year that they deleted people from their friends lists, up from 56 percent in 2009; and 26 percent of users who keep their profiles private say they apply additional privacy settings to limit what some friends can see.

Also on the rise is Profile “pruning” or deleting comments that friends leave and untagging themselves in photos.

Women are significantly more likely to keep their profiles private, and are more likely to unfriend people than men are, with 67 percent of women saying they’ve removed friends, compared with 58 percent of men.

Young people are also more likely to manage their social media presences by deleting comments and untagging photos.

The report highlights a divide between those who appear to care about privacy when it comes to social networks and those who seemingly do not. As the Pew report notes, this could be that avid users of social media, who share lots of personal details, have abandoned any expectations of privacy, or are “uniquely unconcerned” about online privacy.

style=”text-align:center”>

On the flip-side, Pew suggest that the public still “cares deeply about their privacy online but those sensitivities have been ill-served by technology companies.”

Pew is careful not to point to Facebook directly throughout the report, but notes that Facebook is by far the most popular U.S. social network (in its recent S-1 filing, Facebook showed that its user base has ballooned to more than 845 million). Pew’s report says that the term “privacy settings” — as well as “unfriend” — are part and parcel of the Facebook experience.

The Pew survey on Internet usage, conducted between April and May of last year, sampled more than 2,200 U.S. adults 18 and older. The survey found that two-thirds of U.S. Internet users had profiles on social media sites, up from just 20 percent in 2006.

What does this suggest about the future of lead generation from social media sites?

In a word…Trust.

As a business owner or operator, the best way to get into the inner circle of your fans, friends, followers and connections on social media is to make sure you’re always providing relevance and value.

Whether on Facebook (with it’s 845 million strong community), Twitter (having surpassed 500 million) or LinkedIn with a professional community of 150 million members, you want to be seen to be solving problems and protecting their interests by offering sound advice and actionable insights.

If you’re truly the leader in your field, this will be a “no brainer”.