Every prospect I speak to knows exactly what they want their website to be doing for them but very few have a handle on exactly how successful their site is at achieving these goals.

First you need to be clear about the goals you have for your site and second, you need to be measuring them. Only then can you see what’s working and what isn’t so you can take action.

What you need to do to get your site on track:

1. Define your business objectives for your website
2. Define goals and funnels in analytics to gather data
3. Define your KPIs and measure them month on month
4. Know what to do with the data you gather

Points 1 to 3 ahould be fairly easy but point 4 is where the gold is. If you know what the data is telling you then you know exactly what to do to to get better results. You need this business information to make informed choices otherwise you are just guessing so don’t do it, measure it and know for sure.

Let’s look at these points a little closer:

1  Define your business objectives for your website

This is probably very simple and most likely to be one or more of the following:  more sales, more leads, more visitors, better relationships with prospects/customers, brand building.

2 Define goals and funnels in analytics to gather data

You probably already have Google Analytics installed but if you don’t go do it now. Then set up your goals, analytics has a good help system to show you how to do it but first decide what your goals might be – these are likely to match your business objectives by measuring a successful completion. For example, you might have a goal for a completed sale, a completed lead form, a completed registration for a newsletter or download. Whatever your goals are they should mark something that you want people to do on your site

If there are several steps involved in a successful goal completion then set up the funnels too. If you have 4 steps in your checkout that people have to follow in order to buy something then make each step a stage in your funnel. When data collects here you will see if you have unexpectedly high fallout from steps in your processes. Making changes will allow you to measure before and after so wee if you can make improvements.

3 Define your KPIs and measure them month on month

You can set up custom reporting in analytics to produce a KPI report month on month. KPIs would include your goals but would also include other crucial measures. For example: traffic from organic search, traffic from specific referral sites, number of keyphrases used to find your site, total revenue, number of transactions. The idea of KPIs is that they are measures that should be increasing every month – no excuses (except for seasonality of course but definitely year on year!)

There are other measures you can use that are useful to track that will have thresholds and so won’t increase indefinitely but are worth keeping a close eye on, such as: average transaction value, conversion rate, bounce rate, average time on site, number of pages visited per session.

4 Know what to do with the data you gather

This is the key to making this work and this will make your website make you more money. Having all of this data available is crucial for you to be able to see what is currently working well for your site. Watch out for paralysis by analysis identify some key reports to watch. You need to know exactly where your sales are coming from and where you might have problems with your site that you can take action to fix.

Lets look at a few examples of what you can see now you have all this wonderful data

• See which key phrases are bringing the most traffic (easy)
• Looking at this same report but clicking on the goals tab will show you which convert best
• If you have an ecommerce site, look at the ecommerce tab & see which phrases make the most money
• Look at which landing pages are popular and have the highest/lowest bounce rates – why might they be high?
• You can see which phrases brought traffic to which page & then how well that worked out for you
• See which referral sites bring the best quality traffic, can you get more traffic from them or other sites like them?
• If you run PPC Campaigns look at the same reports for your PPC data – Adwords will show a conversion but analytics will show you the value of that conversion.
• Look at Funnels for you various goals – is the fallout disproportionate at any particule stage in the process
• If you see “problems” make an improvement on your site, make a note of the date then compare your data before and after that date.
• Analytics lets you compare this week with last week, September with June & this quarter with the same quarter last year – any time period you want.
• This is great if you have seasonality as you want to compare with last year, not last month.
• Note that not all data will behave the same way, for instance your bounce rate for direct traffic will be lower (better) than PPC traffic because people know your site & have bookmarked it or know exactly what they are looking for.
• Bounce rates for contact us pages could be high because people find the details they want quickly – that doesn’t mean the page is performing badly.

Get to know your data and your visitor behaviour so you can interpret your data to get the best results.

Strategy use these methods to define goals and measure success so that we can get the best results for our clients. By working together to define goals and set up KPI custom reporting on your analytics this provides transparency for the way we work. If there is anything you want to measure and you are not sure how, we will work with you to set this up.

In addition, we work on results so your success is our success. Find out more about our exclusive 100% Pay-Per-Results SEO Service and our new 100% Results Based CPA SEO.

Bristol based furniture company www.oakfurntituresolutions.co.uk is delighted to be number 2 in Google for their top term oak furniture.

We were tasked with increasing traffic to their website so we started by getting a good understanding of the business objectives of the website, a clear idea of who the target audience is and collected a thorough briefing that we could refer to throughout our planning and strategy development. The main objective of this ecommerce website is increased sales so getting a top ranking in Google for their most popular search term has definitely contributed to this goal.

Oak Furniture Solutions sell beautiful ranges of quality yet affordable oak furniture for the home and home office. They sell pieces crafted from reclaimed oak and also other woods including Pine and Ash. By focusing on a range of very popular phrases as well as paying close attention to the phrases that convert well Strategy have been able to help this business go from strength to strength.

Because we take a strategic approach to SEO we identify where we want to go and develop a plan for how we are going to get there. This involves measuring success against efforts all along the way and evaluating the strategies we are applying for each client.  We also monitor the positions we achieve very closely so we can take action if a competitor gets aggressive about the top terms.

While we are striving for the number 1 slot if oak furniture ever slips we are all over it!

Do you know your conversion rates for different sources of traffic? Measure your website conversion rate using Google Analytics ecommerce tracking or by setting up goals.

Conversion rates will vary for different kinds of traffic that visit your site and that’s to be expected, what you want to learn is what is your best converting source of traffic and how can you get more of it. Track it back to referral sources, if it comes from organic search find out which phrases convert best and focus on improving the rankings for those phrases.  If it comes from PPC which are your money phrases and conventrate on them for SEO.

The following is a list of Conversion Factors that could be affecting your conversion rate. Scan down the list… do any of these factors affect your conversions? Can you take action on any of these points to improve your Conversion Rate?

If you are not sure where to start consider doing some Usability Testing to get feedback from real people using your website to perform tasks designed to test your specific website conversion goals.

Trust Elements:
- Safe Shopping Icons (hacker safe, BBB)
- Free or Local Cost Phone Number visible
- Address visible
- Quality of Design
- Quality Domain Name
- Money Back Guarantee
- Risk Reversal (We’ll pay the return postage costs)
- Accepts all forms of payment
- Nice Logo
- Testimonials
- About Us prominent
- Contact Us prominent
- Privacy Policy
- Order / Postage / Invoice tracking
- Privacy Policy
- We don’t spam you messaging
- Clear and unambiguous optin/out for marketing & 3rd party marketing
- Ability to get offline help at physical locations

Look and Feel:
- Site is easy to navigate
- Easy to grasp what the site does
- Clear Calls to Action on every page
- Links to further information are easy to find
- Great site search returns relevent results
- Checkout / Conversion process is clear
- Forms are forgiving (e.g. taking dashes, spaces for credit card)
- Forms error handling – clear, concise errors & instructions for correcting
- Does not require registration up front
- Fast Page load times. Adverts render last.
- Pages load consistently (high availability)
- Renders in all major browsers
- Accessibility Issues have been addressed
- Pictures are good quality and highly optimised
- Good quality help / FAQ system
- No Broken links or broken images
- Relationship Marketing, encourage 2-way interaction through Facebook, Twitter etc

Product / Selling Proposition:
- Product / Site Exclusivity
- Compelling Product
- Brand Name awareness and reputation
- Good Product Pictures, quality and quantity
- Compelling Offer / Price / Clarity
- Price easy to find
- Add to cart button is inviting and prominent
- Terms and Conditions highly visible
- Path to checkout is unencumbered with no distractions
- Extra charges (postage) are low and easy to find
- Speedie Postage
- Free Postage
- International Shipping
- Good Comparison Matrix (including competitors)
- Independent Product Reviews
- Good Headline
- Good Tagline
- Supporting Copy
- Supporting resources (buying guides, blog, forum)
- Scarcity (limited Quantity or limited time)

Off Page Factors:
- Time of Day
- Day of Week
- Holidays
- Seasonality
- The weather
- Event Timing (product will be regulated, taxed or discontinued)
- Item / site gets significant press coverage (TV appearances, BBC coverage)
- Relevant Advertising
- Type of Advertising (banner vs PPC)
- Visitor profile of site where advertising appears
- Compelling ad copy
- Ad copy matches landing page
- Click Fraud
- Quality and efforts of Affiliates
- Reputation of your Site
- Size of your Organisation
- Newsletter Quality
- Offline advertising
- Presence of offline locations
- Competitor Offerings and Marketing

The original conversion factor list that inspired this post came from: http://paul.webanalyticsdemystified.com/2008/08/15/conversion-factors/ I have taken the liberty of adding to it and amending it for our target audience.

What other factors would you add to this list?

To increase traffic to your website is of course a major part of an online marketing strategy but don’t overlook the importance of what your visitors might be experiencing when they get there. Afterall, high volumes of traffic are useless to you if these visitors are not converting. There can be many factors to consider when looking at low or falling conversion rates.

Little glitches or errors will frustrate the user and more than likely turn them away; like a search function that doesn’t work properly or a slow loading page. Worse still, a shopping cart that fails to add the products or forms that have errors.

There is one particular tool that you may find very helpful for looking at how your visitors are interacting with your site and in particular handling your forms. Have a look at www.clicktale.com

Broken Links between pages or image links that go to the wrong place will not inspire confidence in the potential customer.

Poor Quality images of products will not show them to their best advantage or entice people to buy.

These are just some of the reasons visitors may exit your site and seek out your competititor. It is important to have your usability testing done by someone who is not already familiar with the site as they will pick up navigation issues for example. A new user will really tell you how intuative or easy it is to buy from your site.

Remember too that webusers can be fickle and unforgiving as they scan for the results they want. They also have increasingly high expectations making them harder to satisfy with sub standard websites. Don’t make them search too hard or make them fill endless forms or they will quickly loose interest. Website usability testing finds out how much time users might take to search for a particular product or item on your site; what are the difficulties faced by them while conducting the search; do they face any problems related to your website design and features, such as navigating from one web page to the other, opening up links, downloading images or content, and the like.

In a nutshell, website usability testing is an approach to calculate the ease-of-use quotient of your site. Here at SIM we have perfected a system of usability testing that has been invaluable to our clients. Give us your target audience demographic and we can arrange for comprehensive testing of your site with a full report.

Based on the website usability testing analysis, you can then apply the changes and correct glitches and errors in the knowledge that you will be improving your customer’s experience.

The world has gone mad for social marketing and social networking. It now makes up a sizeable part of the marketing mix for most companies and advisors are suggesting that it should make up 10% of the marketing budget in time and spend. As a delivery tool the results can be very varied depending on the market sector and the effort put in.

Twitter for example is very popular at the moment. But how can I make it work for me? Firstly, you need to decide how to use twitter for the most effective results for your business. There is always the danger with social networking to let it take up too much time! As mentioned above; your social networking/marketing should make up 10% of your online marketing time. If you are on twitter all day – there is something wrong.

Listening out on the Twitter airwaves

The first way to use Twitter is to engage and open communication potential and existing customers. This has proved to be an effective strategy for many brands as they can be notified instantly if anyone mentions their brand or company name and react accordingly. Read this example:

A guy is sitting in an internet café using the free wifi service. The wifi malfunctions and he sends out a tweet on Twitter telling his friends that the wifi is down in the café and he is annoyed that he will have to move on to finish his work. The pr company (for the large chain of coffee shops) pick up the tweet as they have a search running for their client’s name. They contact the coffee shop immediately and ask them to locate the person packing away his laptop. The guy is given a free cup of coffee and the wifi connection is fixed. 5 minutes later he tweets a new message: singing the praises of the coffeeshop.

A negative pr situation is instantly turned on its head.

Note: This doesn’t mean scouring twitter manually day and night in the hope of intercepting a tweet about you. Use the search functions on www.tweetdeck.com for example to be alerted when you are mentioned. You can also use this search function to be alerted of any tweet or conversation that mentions a word or phrase you are interested in.

Tweeting for tweeting sake

Don’t tweet for the sake of it – if you subject your followers to masses of inane updates about the state of your health and what your dog ate for breakfast you will soon loose that following (unless you are a blonde celebrity!).

However, broadcasting your offers and new products to encourage clicks back through to your website should also be part of your strategy but it is worth remembering that you need to make your tweets and updates interesting to your audience so that they will follow your links – address the issues that affect them.

If you only bombard them with self promotional tweets they will not feel that you are adding value and will cease to click through to your site or worse; unfollow you. If they really like what you are saying they may ‘Retweet’ your message to their followers, and so your message is spread further afield.

Tweet etiquette:

• Do follow back any followers that you have a genuine interest in.
• Do Retweet useful info from your fellow tweeple.
• Understand and use the @replies sparingly or you will be inundating your audience with half conversations – very dull.
• Cut out the running commentary – 25 tweets an hour will push other people’s messages off followers’ homepages.
• Don’t over use #hashtags, in fact don’t use them at all unless you are genuinely contributing to the conversation.
• Do Check your links before you tweet them.
• Do complete your bio information as fully as possible
• Do use a picture of yourself or an image that represents your brand well.
• No swearing or verbally attacking fellow twitterers
• Watch your follower/follow ratio. If you are following thousands more than follow you – you are probably a spammer.

What are your experiences of twitter? Do you have anything to add? Please do leave a comment…

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The major search engines and Google in particular considers inbound links as a significant factor in their organic search algorithm. Building inbound links, links from other people’s websites pointing into your website, would be part of your off-site optimisation strategy. Here are some common off-site techniques to maximise your SEO traffic:

• Link popularity: To enhance the ranking of your e-commerce website, ensure that it is well linked from other websites. Links are like votes, the more you get the better you will rank but its not just an issue of quantity, quality carries a much greater weight and one good quality link can improve your rankings significantly above hundreds of bad quality links. Whenever possible, solicit links from different websites. In fact, a website with links belonging to a wide variety of different IP addresses is a good example of an effective ecommerce SEO tactic.

• Relevant links: Search engines, especially Google, ranks websites that are linked from relevant websites higher than the ones which are just randomly linked to from other websites. The greater the number of relevant sites linking to your ecommerce site the higher your search engine rankings will be.

• Appropriate anchor text: SEO traffic can be enhanced by ensuring that the anchor text of your website’s external link has the main keywords. For instance, if you want to improve your rank for the keyword ‘burglar alarms,’ ensure that the link that directs the SEO traffic to your website uses the keyword ‘burglar alarms’. Vary your anchor text amongst your main key phrases and so not include any other irrelevant content in the anchor text link.

• PageRank (PR): Getting links to your website from high PageRank sites enhances the credibility and importance of your website and pushes your rankings up. This is because PageRank is passed from one page to another, so a page with 10 links on it will pass one tenth of the link juice to the pages it links to. If you have a link from a site with a high PageRank (PR6 or 7) and you are one of very few links on that page you will receive a lot of juice. This is a good link, actually a great link! If you have a link on a page that is PR1 or PR2 and your site is one of 100 listed then you will receive nothing of value from that. The higher the PageRank of a page the more authority it is considered to have, the more valuable the link and the harder it is to get a link from it. Note that PageRank is not passed through a nofollow link.

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