Keywords, Buyer Intent and Conversion Optimization

Doug Williams @ 8:45 pm

This blog entry was posted on August 30, 2011.

People arrive to your website with a specific intent. This could be intent to learn more about a problem or a product. Others come looking to take action and are ready to buy. Different keyword phrases will indicate different levels of buyer intent.

Use keywords to get insight into buying behavior. Understand how people think about your products. Learn what questions people are considering as they are preparing to buy.

Buyer Keywords: You want to identify buyer keywords. These are phrases that show intent to take action. These are different than information seeking phrases. Simply focusing on attracting visitors that are motivated buyers will improve your website’s conversion rate.

Example: If someone searches for “website optimization” they are likely seeking information. But people searching for “website optimization services” or “website optimization Denver” are likely looking to buy.

Local Intent: Including a city or other geographic reference indicates buyers that are searching for local businesses.

Phrase Length: People begin their buying process in the research phase with short 1-2 word keyword phrases. They search for more general phrases. As they get closer to making a buying decision, the search phrases become longer and more specific. They will include make, model or geographic location. Buyer keywords are typically 3-5 words or even longer.

Customer Words: You will want to think like your customer, not an industry expert. Did you know most realtors instinctively want to be found for “real estate for sale” yet most people actually search for “homes for sale”?

Focused Content: Focus your website on solving a narrow set of problems. This will be more attractive to someone seeking a solution provider. Specialists are more trusted than generalists.

Need keyword research assistance? Try our keyword research services

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Filed under: Conversion Rate Optimization

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Do an SEO Audit before Starting Search Engine Optimization

Doug Williams @ 7:43 am

This blog entry was posted on August 26, 2011.

The SEO audit is the first step for any business trying to boost its marketing presence on the web. The SEO services company should always start with an audit of your website before recommending any website optimization.

This should include a thorough SEO audit to see if there are any technical problems with your website. This should be followed with an analysis of potential keywords. This will become the basis for recommending what type of SEO should be performed on your website.

Technical Problems: These are things that would prevent your website from getting top rankings. This could be an all Flash website, a site built in frames or a website that is all graphics with little or no text. There could be spamming methods such as hidden text (white text on a white background), cloaking, keyword stuffing, etc.

Website Review: The website itself is looked at for number of pages, current traffic volume, Title tags, H1s, and the number of pages that could be optimized. The number and quality of inbound links as well as what anchor text is being used to link back the website.

Keywords: The SEO services company will need to know what keyword phrase or phrases that you will want to be found for. They will look at searches per day, competition level, should local terms be used, etc.

The SEO Audit allows the SEO services company to accurately recommend the level and type of SEO that will give the best results. SEO should include both an initial SEO (on-page) as well as continuing monthly SEO. The SEO recommendation should include keyword research and selection, optimization of pages, content growth strategy, a linking strategy and a way to measure progress.

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Filed under: SEO Strategies

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Identify Your Best Buyers to Maximize Online Sales

Doug Williams @ 7:17 am

This blog entry was posted on August 23, 2011.

What separates an average website from a top converting site? It is focusing and targeting the needs of your buyer. Not just any buyer, your best buyer. Your best buyers are the most interested and most likely to buy your product or service.

Your website appearance, messaging and your offer need to target their needs. Understand the psychology and motivation of these buyers. People come to your website to solve a problem or a need. Start by asking yourself 4 questions.

What is the focus of your site? What products or services do you offer? Your website, like your business needs to have a clear purpose. What problems do you solve for your buyers? How is it unique and better than your competition? What benefits will your buyer experience by buying from you? Your home page should address and answer those questions.
Who are your best buyers? What do you know about them? How old are they? How well educated? Income level? Live or work in a particular area? From a particular industry? What position do they hold?
Why would they come? What are their motivations? What personal desires are they trying to satisfy? What are their pain points? Are you closely matching their needs with what you have to offer?
What makes them buy? What is the trigger that will cause them to buy? By showing that you clearly understand their pain, people become much more open to buying. You want to present a website that clearly solves their issue.

Show them you offer what they are searching for and then build their interest. Drive your visitors toward a desired action. Online viewers can only focus on one thing at a time. If you present many options, then they won’t hear any of them.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing

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Does Your Website Give You A Good Image?

Doug Williams @ 9:47 pm

This blog entry was posted on August 19, 2011.

What is that first impression that your website communicates about you? People quickly evaluate a site and your business by visual appearance alone. Do you have a professional image that shows trustworthiness?

Your website is a reflection of your brand. You wouldn’t want to market an upscale restaurant with a poor quality design. Your website needs to capture the atmosphere and the dining experience.

A good brand has good visual imagery and emotional impact.

If your business differentiates itself with a high level of service and customer care, don’t simply show products and technology. Show photos of people that show how people react to your service and demonstrate people-to-people relationships.

First Impression: This includes layout, typography, images and consistency. The visual design should be consistent with the site’s purpose. Do they see the most important things first? Use placement of graphics and headlines to determine what captures your audience’s first impression.

Credibility: Your website should have a professional appearance. Does it have the image and branding that people expect. This is much more than design; it is organization, layout and messaging. If you are marketing to large corporations, does your website show you as a credible supplier? Make your offer clear and identify the benefits that they will get by using your product or service.

Trust: Your website should have a professional image. Include trust logos on your home page such as BBB, certifications and affiliations that you have. Include your phone number on every page. Create a good about us page. Including a blog helps build you up as an authority in your field.

Make sure your site represents you well. Remember that according to a Stanford University study “75% of web users admit to making judgments about the credibility of an organization based on the design of its web site”

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Filed under: Website Design

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How to Use Keyword Research to Plan Your Website Content

Doug Williams @ 6:18 am

This blog entry was posted on August 12, 2011.

For many people, keyword research and SEO are some of the last steps in building a website. That is completely backwards. When I am going to create a new website, keyword research is my very first step.

You want a website to have maximum appeal to your market niche. You not only want to attract the right visitors, you want to engage them once they arrive. You do that by designing your website content around what they are searching for. This is the process i follow as I work on a brand new website (or even a website redesign).

Topics: Create a list of topics, services or market niches that you are planning to cover in your website. This is your list of what you want to talk about on your website. If you are a sales consultant, you may want to talk about sales coaching, sales management, sales process and lead generation.
Intuitive keyword list: Create a list of about dozen phrases that describe your topics in step one. These are the phrases you believe people would use to search for your topics. They could be the same as your topic list or they could be slightly refined. These will become your “seed keywords” that you will use in your research. You will want one or possibly two keyword phrases per topic.
Keyword research: Using a keyword research tool like Market Samurai, perform a search on each of your seed keywords. Each search should yield 400+ search phrases. Export your list to Excel and refine your list to the 25 best phases for that topic. Repeat this for the remaining seed phrases. Combine these onto a master spreadsheet.
Relevance check: Rate each phrase on a scale of 1-3. 1 = Our best buyers are looking for us. 3 = this is a low probability that they would convert into a customer. About 25% of the phrases should be rated as ones.
Analysis: Using just the phrases rated as a “1.” Look at the number phrases in each category as well as the searches per day, calculate how many pages of your website should be weighted for each topic. This gives you a rough content plan that your visitors want to see.
Next Steps: You are now ready to plan your website. Refine this into a structured sitemap. Define what actions we want visitors to take (Sign-up, request quote, buy, etc). Identify examples of website you like (reference websites for design). Create a wireframe.

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Filed under: SEO Strategies,Website Design

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The 5Cs of Website Navigation

Doug Williams @ 6:23 pm

This blog entry was posted on August 9, 2011.

Navigation provides the clearly marked path that guides visitors toward the information they are seeking. It should be easily understood by the even an inexperienced web user. The navigation system should allow search engine spiders to fully crawl a site to index content.

Clear: (Not confusing.) The menu names should clearly describe what lies beyond. Stay away from obscure or general phrases. Excellent navigation is clear, precise, predictable, instinctive, familiar and even boring. Make your menus simple enough for a third grader to read. Clear navigation helps build trust with your visitor when they can intuitively move around your site.
Consistent: Navigation should appear in the same place on every page. Use the same phrases, in the same order to make navigation usable and predictable. Menus should be in the same color scheme and fonts. This helps visitors interact and move through your website intuitively. You should still add sub-menus for specific sections of your site.
Categorized: Experts on information architecture suggest a maximum of seven main site categories. Navigation becomes a problem when there are too many options. More choices often mean less action or even site abandonment. Group related topics together into categories and apply a clear category name. This works for drop down menus or in organizing a page of links (sitemap).
Conspicuous: Place your navigation menus in a prominent easy to find location that is above the fold. This is usually in a horizontal navigation bar near the top of the page or in a menu on the left hand side. People using the web are impatient and expect to quickly find your site’s navigation. This gives them clues to what your website is about.
Crawlable: Provide a crawlable site architecture using HTML link navigation. This provides anchor text for links to all internal pages. Use sitewide links to guide the search engines to high level pages within your site. Image links may still connect the search engines to all your site pages, but they lack the valuable context of anchor text.

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Filed under: Web Usability

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Creating Your SEO Plan

Doug Williams @ 4:36 am

This blog entry was posted on August 5, 2011.

Your SEO plan should help you reach your business goals. In crafting your plan you will need to identify your goals, keywords, look at your competition and the state of your website. You then need to create your SEO strategies and then decide how you will measure your progress.

SEO Goals: Decide what your business needs are. Is it rankings, is it to make sales, generate leads or build a community? SEO will attract traffic, but you need it to be the right visitors that are more likely to be interested in your offer. Identify what is important to your business.
Keywords: Research and select which keyword phrases attract the visitor traffic that you want. Choosing keywords is part art and part science. You need to understand the psychology of how and why people search. People search the web to find information, answers and a solution to a problem.
Competition: Take your most important phrase and do a search on Google. The top 10 results will be your competition for that phrase. Analyze your competition for domain age, number of pages and the number of backlinks. What strategies are they employing?
Site Assessment: Look at your own website. How does it compare to your competition for those same factors? Is your content engaging and focused on what your potential visitors are searching for. Once you attract visitors, is there a clear and visible call to action? Does your site give you a professional and credible image?
Strategies: Craft a plan for both SEO and conversion once visitors arrive. Create a keyword page plan that identifies primary and secondary phrases for each page of your website. Develop on page SEO strategies, content growth strategies and link acquisition strategies.
Measurement: Identify how you will measure success in meeting goals. Will this be rankings improvement? Will you be using an analytic program like Google Analytics. Record your starting metrics as well as your end goals. Measure the progress at least monthly. Don’t be afraid to alter your plan if you are not reaching your goals.

Having a sound plan for your SEO campaign is much like planning your business growth. A plan will help ensure you reach your objectives.

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Filed under: SEO Strategies

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How to Build an Excellent Website

Doug Williams @ 6:02 am

This blog entry was posted on August 2, 2011.

Goals: Start with your business goals for your website. Your website, like your business needs to have a clear purpose with clear measurable results that you expect. Will your website generate leads, sales, build a community, or?

Visitors: Do you understand why your visitor is coming to your site? What problem are they looking to solve? You want to present a website that clearly solves their issue.

Content: Write first for your visitors with the search engines in mind. Make your content original, engaging and useful to your visitors. Targeted keyword phrases are weaved into marketing text so search engines take note of the important phrases. Use keywords as a central theme in your messaging, your page headlines and your hyperlinks. Stay away from having duplicate content.

Call to Action: When they first arrive, they need to immediately see your sales pitch, your offering and even your order button. Don’t make them scroll down or switch pages. End your page by asking for some sort of action. Have questions? If you need answers call, email, click on live chat or?

Navigation: Use the page headlines and navigation to communicate your offering. The navigation should be SEO friendly HTML links rather than JavaScript links or an image map. Use keywords as much as possible in the navigation links. Keep important pages within 3 clicks from the home page.

Sitemaps: Create HTML and XML sitemaps to make it easy for search engines to index your website. Create a separate mobile sitemap and submit to Google Webmaster tools under the mobile sitemap section.

Link Structure: Create a flat file structure and keeping the number of levels to a minimum. Extensive use of subdirectories and sub-subdirectories is harmful to rankings. Cross-link to relevant internal pages using your keywords. Providing HTML navigation links so that search engines can easily crawl the website. Eliminate broken links.

NoFollow: Add a nofollow attribute to pages that are not important or pages that you do not want indexed. This could include member login pages, duplicate content or pages you do not want indexed like a privacy policy.

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Filed under: Website Design