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Layout Affects Your Conversion Rate

Doug Williams @ 6:26 am

This blog entry was posted on April 29, 2011.

How you layout your home page will affects the conversion rate of your website. You need to grab their attention, get them interested and then build desire for your offering and then get people to take action. Answer the three questions: why you, why now, and what’s in it for me?

People search for answers. Your home page should address and answer those questions. This means you need to understand your customers and the problems they need to solve.

Initial Hook: Grab their attention with a compelling headline that includes the phrase they were searching for.  Your objective is to grab their attention and pique a potential customer’s interest. Your opening paragraph should address the question they came to get an answer for.

Start with Benefits: Visitors arrive wanting to know what’s in it for them. How will you make your customer’s life better? Spell your benefits out clearly on your home page. State the advantages of your services over your competition. Save your product features for later steps in your selling sequence.

Call to Action: Drive your visitors toward a desired action. Make it clear and highly visible. This could be to sign-up, join, call or buy now. Place your primary call to action where it can be easily seen and above the fold. It needs to be highly visible to arriving visitors. Examples of calls to action include- “Buy Now”, “Order Now”, “Join Today”, and “Sign Up For A Free Report”.

Placement: The upper right quadrant of your web page gets the best response. Place your phone number in upper right with email sign-up forms just below.

Information Overload: Avoid overloading your visitor with too much information. Keep paragraphs short and give “bite size” nuggets of information. This makes it easier for people to scan your content and find what they are looking for. Include a link with “Learn more” that will lead them to more in depth information.

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Filed under: Web Usability



Impact of the Google Panda Update

Doug Williams @ 7:08 am

This blog entry was posted on April 26, 2011.

Google’s Panda Update or sometimes called the farmer update first arrived in Late February and then part 2 arrived about 2-3 weeks ago. This major algorithm shift has affected about 12% of the search results according to Google’s own estimates with many of the affected sites now receiving about half the number of visitors than prior to the update.

According to the Google Blog: “This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.”

This means that content farms that produce low quality and duplicate content are strongly affected. This includes article syndication sites where duplicate articles or weakly spun articles are posted. This means “scraper sites” that harvest content from around the web are affected. Sites with excessive ads were also affected.

Websites with content or links with little value or relevance seem to be affected the strongest. Major sites such as Hubpages and eHow were strongly affected.

10 Things You Should Be Doing

  1. Plan how you can provide a good user experience.
  2. Focus on creating plentiful, useful original content.
  3. Avoid using duplicate content.
  4. Promote your content so that it naturally attracts links.
  5. Keep adding fresh new content and prune away old, low quality content.
  6. Make regular updates and improvements to pages with a high bounce rate or low visit time.
  7. Make your content easy to share via Twitter, Facebook, etc.
  8. Keep your site in good repair. Quickly fix broken links, broken RSS feeds. Broken features will be viewed by Google as an indication of low quality.
  9. Having ads are OK, avoid excessive ads that exceeds the amount of useful content.
  10. Moderate comments on your blog and delete the spammy comments.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing



Conversion Tip: Your Website Must Anticipate Your Visitor’s Needs

Doug Williams @ 5:28 am

This blog entry was posted on April 22, 2011.

The difference between a good website and an excellent website is how much in tune you are with your “best buyer” visitors. A visitor comes to your website to solve a problem or a need. If you clearly understand their needs and you can anticipate their questions, your website will be a welcome answer to what they are seeking.

Start by answering the question, “Why are they coming?” What problem are they trying to solve? As an example, if you were a fertilizer company… People do not come to learn about your fertilizer. They come to learn how to make their grass greener. What you have is the answer to their problem.

Think about your website from their point of view. Once you understand their questions then you need to answer and address their needs. Just provide the answers they are searching for.

Make your graphics, your message and your navigation clear and intuitive. The message on your website needs to be clear. This means having an offer that is relevant, understandable and visual. This offer is your call to action.

Make your website interactive. Deliver more than they are expecting. Your site could have free reports, instant quotes, price and feature comparisons, or even free samples. Try and deliver a concierge level of service.

Help them improve their knowledge and skills. Deliver education through a blog, videos or an eCourse. Education in your website helps build trust and rapport. If you strategically build trust, people will be more open to your offer.

The most important thing is to anticipate what your visitor might be looking for and deliver that information… and more. Work to exceed their expectations.

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Filed under: Web Usability



16 Tips on Marketing Your Restaurant on the Web

Doug Williams @ 6:19 am

This blog entry was posted on April 19, 2011.

With print yellow pages becoming obsolete, restaurants have turned to the Internet as their main way of attracting customers. What is the best way for restaurant managers to market using the web? What makes for a great restaurant website?

  1. Image: Your website is a reflection of your brand. Don’t market an upscale restaurant with a poor quality design. Your website needs to capture your atmosphere and dining experience.
  2. Photos: Include lots of photos of the exterior, interior space and the food. Consider a video to capture the dining experience and atmosphere.
  3. Search: Optimize your website for search to attract customers. Localize your search by including the cities you serve on at least 2-3 pages of your site. If you have multiple locations, create a page for each location.
  4. Menus: Include full menus with pricing and pictures of the food. Include appetizers, lunch and dinner menus as well as wine lists and specialty drinks. Include printable versions.
  5. Contact Info: Include your phone number and full address on every page. These should be in text rather than graphical images. This helps for search and for customers on mobile devices.
  6. Driving Directions: Include a location map that includes turn by turn driving directions. Make it easy for patrons to find your restaurant.
  7. Hours: Include the hours and days of the week your restaurant is open.
  8. Mobile: Your website should load quickly and display correctly on smartphones. Mobile searches will exceed desktop searches with the next 3-4 years.
  9. Reservations: Allow people to book reservations online using opentable.com, bookatable.com or other reservation service.
  10. Facilities: Describe your ability to accommodate large groups and parties. Describe your banquet facilities complete with many pictures and a booking form.
  11. Sell Online: Use your website to book catering events, promote and sell gift cards and sell promotional merchandise.
  12. Email Sign-up: Include a place for people to join your email list. Email people on your list special offers, discount coupons, planned events or a monthly newsletter.
  13. Delivery: If you deliver, include a map of your delivery area. Make it easy to order by phone, Fax and online order forms.
  14. Employment Opportunities: List your open positions and either allow for applications to be submitted online or have a downloadable PDF version of your employment application.
  15. Reviews: Include a link so people can leave reviews on your restaurant. 3 popular review sites for restaurants are zagat.com, dine.com and urbanspoon.com.
  16. Events: Include an events calendar showing special nights, events you celebrate, etc.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing



The Easy Way to Setup and Deliver an eCourse

Doug Williams @ 8:09 am

This blog entry was posted on April 15, 2011.

You have some subject that you are an expert at. How can you teach others? You could write this up as an eBook, but how could you deliver the information as a course over time? The answer is to use auto responders and deliver your content at regular intervals.

You can make this much more than a series of emails. Your content can be delivered as PDFs or as links to online content pages that you have created. You can include videos and even online tests where people can show their proficiency. You can even issue certificates of completion or even certifications.

Your eCourse can be free or paid. You can use it as a tool to build up your email list or as a revenue source for your business.

Here are the steps to set-up your eCourse

Lesson Plan: Map out your eCourse with learning objectives, course material outlines and how you will evaluate and assess that your students have acquired the desired skills.

  1. Course Content: Develop the content for your lessons. This could be written, audio or video. Preferably a combination of these. As you develop your content, create assessment tests to measure mastery of your content.
  2. Auto Responder: Use a quality auto responder such as a AWeber AutoResponders that will allow you accept sign-ups and deliver your course content over time.
  3. Video: Include videos as links within your autoresponder content. You can place your content onto video sharing platforms such as Vimeo or YouTube.
  4. Homework: You can create a series or questions at the end of each section and have students deliver their work to you via email. This can ensure that students work through the material, but it does add a workload to you.
  5. Online Testing: Use an online testing service such as ClassMarker or EasyTestMaker that will allow you to create online tests with immediate test grading. Include a link to the test at the end of each delivered lesson.

By combining several different tools, you can have your own professional eCourse for your business.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing



Building the Ultimate Dental Website

Doug Williams @ 4:59 am

This blog entry was posted on April 12, 2011.

Think of your dental website as your online marketing machine. Too many people get stuck on the platform or the technology. Applying technology to your website isn’t what will bring new patients and grow your practice. It is the fundamental marketing that is important. Let’s look at planning the ultimate dental website.

Start with understanding what you want your website to do for you. Do you want to establish your credibility with a professional image? Do you want to attract new patients with great information about your services? Do you want people to be able to book appointments online? Or perhaps you want them to call?

Rank your priorities in the order of importance. You will want to make sure your website addresses each of these starting with your most important objectives first.

Next, think about your patients. Who are they? What services are they looking for? Your website home page needs to communicate why they should choose you as their dentist. Are they searching based on location? Services you provide? Ease of booking an appointment?

The home page of your website has a maximum of 3 seconds to engage a prospective patient by answering their essential questions. The information has to be visually clear without scrolling down the page. If they immediately see what they are looking for, then they will look around your website for the next 2-3 minutes.

Place your call to action in the upper right quadrant of your home page. Why here? Because studies have shown that this area is clearly seen and acted upon. Generally your phone number should be in the upper right and a “Request an Appointment” email form should be just below the phone number.

Your home page should answer your advantages over your competitors, the benefits your patients will experience and the conveniences you provide. I call this the ABCs of the website home page. Be sure and list the key services that you offer starting with what makes your practice special.

Think like a patient. What information or answers are they seeking? Make their life easy with printable new patient forms and answers to frequently asked questions. Use the questions asked of your receptionist as a guide of what to include on your site.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing



7 Ways That People Use The Internet

Doug Williams @ 5:21 am

This blog entry was posted on April 8, 2011.

  1. Internet Activities: According to 2010 US Census data, the top 3 daily Internet activities for US adults are: Send or read e-mail (62%), Use a search engine to find information (49%) and Get news online (43%).
  2. US Internet Population: There are 240 million US Internet users according to Internet World Stats , June 2010. With a total US population of 310 million, 77.3% of the population is online.
  3. Searching: In February, Americans nearly 17.0 billion total core search queries with 11.0 billion of these on Google. According to ComScore (Feb 2011), Google has 68% of the organic searches while Bing (Bing + Yahoo using Bing results) had 26%.
  4. Videos: According to ComScore, 170 million US Internet users watched 5.0 billion videos during February. This means that 82.5 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video. Viewers spent an average of 13.6 hours each watching these videos. YouTube.com was the top online source for watching these videos.
  5. Video Ads: According to a ComScore study, Americans viewed 3.8 billion video ads in February 2011, with 1.1 billion of these coming from Hulu. Video ads reached 42 percent of the total U.S. population an average of 30 times during the month.
  6. Internet Browsers: 42.4% of people use Firefox to view the Internet. This is according to February data from W3Schools.com. They also reported that 26.5% use Internet Explorer, 24.1% use Chrome and 4.1% use Safari.
  7. Number of Websites: In March 2011, there were 298 million websites worldwide on the Internet. This is according to NetCraft that tracks this data. This is a growth of 13 million over the prior month. Apache Linux servers make up 60% of all web servers according to this same study.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing



What are the Benefits of SEO?

Doug Williams @ 9:07 am

This blog entry was posted on April 5, 2011.

SEO or search engine optimization is the science and art of getting your website discovered, analyzed, indexed and then ranked on the search engines.

People are looking for what you provide. They are searching to buy. They are using the web to find a business to buy from. Every sale that you miss out on is one that your competitors will get, making them stronger.

Could your business survive long without customers? What would happen if your customers were unable to find your address or your phone number? The same is true if they can’t find your business on the Internet.

Why should you use SEO?

  1. Targeted Prospects: Search is pull marketing. People use search engines to find what they need. If your web page matches their search, they may well become your next customer.
  2. More Credible: People trust the natural search results more than paid advertisements. According to a Penn State study, searchers are 4X more likely to click on the natural search results over the paid listings.
  3. Lower Costs: While you may pay to have your web pages optimized, there are no payments made every time someone clicks on your listing. Paid search can be quite costly, especially for high volume, low intent phrases.
  4. Long Term: Once you obtain top positions through a SEO campaign, it is relatively easy to maintain it with only modest costs. Compare this with PPC (Pay per Click) where you need to continue paying for every click through.
  5. Measurable: Results are easily measurable using analytics. You are able to measure traffic, which keywords brought in visitors and even which ones brought in buyers.

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Filed under: SEO Strategies



Use SEO Metrics to Chart Success

Doug Williams @ 8:08 am

This blog entry was posted on April 1, 2011.

Before beginning your search engine optimization (SEO) journey, you need to establish your goals and ways to measure your progress. Goals could be to get more traffic to your website, to get more leads or conversions; they could be around branding and rankings.

Once you set-up your SEO goals, you can then select the best metrics that will show progress toward your goals. Select one primary measurement and then up to a half dozen other metrics to track on a weekly or monthly basis.

Traffic: Measure the volume and percentage of traffic coming from your targeted keywords. Track your daily averages of both unique visitors and total visits that occur. Measure the volume and percentage of traffic coming from your targeted keywords.

Visitor Activity: Is your campaign attracting the right visitors? Measure how well your website interacts with visitors by measuring and tracking bounce rate, time on site and page views per visitor. Set up conversion goals and measure which keyword phrases convert best.

Content Growth: SEO should include a content growth plan for your website. Measure and track the number and percentage of pages indexed by each of the major search engines. This can uncover structural issues that exist on your website.

Link building: Getting incoming links from other websites is very important in your SEO effort. You can use the SEO Open Site Explorer to track the number of backlinks and the anchor text for the links you are receiving.

Rankings: Check the rankings of your primary keyword phrases. Do this on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Chart these on a weekly or monthly basis to detect trends and improvements. You will also want to implement a companion long tail strategy.

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Filed under: SEO Strategies