After recently attending the SES 2010 conference I have finally found the time to upload my blogpost on Brian Eisenberg session on How to Increase Conversion Rates. It was a great session by Brian and I hope you take as much from the tips as I did.

Everyone loves a secret. Some people keep secrets, others like to gossip. Similar to the latter I couldn’t hold this one in any longer, so unlike most secrets here is one that can really benefit you. You ready? Ok, come closer…

Did you know the average conversion rate of a website is 3%

Even after all the vast increased capabilities of technology, design and analytics in the last 10 years it still hasn’t improved. Why? Read below and see.

1.    Communicate UVPs/UCPs (unique value propositions & unique campaign propositions)
Online users on average decide whether they want to purchase your product or service within 7 seconds so ensure you communicate your UVP/UCP simply and effectively

2.    Persuasive and Relevant Offers
In the B2C environment messages like ‘Free Shipping’ has a very small cost but a massive impact on conversion rates, surprisingly even scrapping a few £’s. For the B2B environment, consider ‘Free Trials’ as a persuasive offer.

3.    Reinforce Offers Sitewide
Surprising how many websites reinforce offers across the website except for the most important page – the checkout. Jacob Nielson said “Don’t make them think”, if you make them question whether they missed a stage and do not qualify for the offer then you are going to lose a sale. Customers make a decision on every click.

4.    They Maintain Scent
The term and concept ‘scent’ was discovered by Xerox in the late 90s. It essentially details the clues that a website can give to ensure users follow the right path. This includes imagery and colours as they can be visual clues that separate ages are connected. It is important not to focus on one page but the whole journey.

5.    Strong First Impression
Every type of advertising needs to create a human connection. It is widely believed that advertising mediums and even human interaction has 8 seconds before you form an opinion.

6.    Appeal to multiple personas/segments
Online users can be placed within 4 individual character types; competitive, spontaneous, methodical, humanistic.

Competitive
-    Price orientated
-    Know what they are looking for

Spontaneous
-    Make quick decisions
-    Look for clickable features

Methodical
-    Most time spent on pages
-    Analyse every detail

Humanistic
-    Look for human elements (reviews)
-    Like images of product/service

7.    They don’t do Slice/Dice Optimisation
The issue is time and resources; you need to look at the opportunity cost of implementing multi variations. The best way to test is for impact not variation and this is best suited to creating hypothesis such as ‘if A changes then would affect will this have on B’.

8.    Leverage Social Commerce
It is important to not only listen but to utilise the voice of the customer. Reviews make HUGE impacts on the conversion rate of websites.

9.    Using Social Voices in Navigation
By adding features such as ‘rating’ in the navigation it allows customers to view honest and peer opinions which is great since 78% of users trust peer reviews.

10.   Use Social Voices in Promotions
Let customer voices shape the content you write. By analysing customer conversations you can review strengths and weaknesses of your brand/product and address these issues in promotional content. Additionally, utilising user generated content in emails works well to increase conversions.

11.    Use Social Voices to Build Credibility
By implementing user generated content you increase your authenticity which will have a direct effect on decreasing bounce rate.

12.    Use Social Voices for Feedback and Research
Jacob Nielson states that “5 people can identify 80% of problems on a website” Ensure you use the free tools or undertake studies to highlight usability issues within your site. If you search Google for “69 free tools” you can find great resources.

13.    Use Persuasive Principles like Scarcity
Utilising persuasive statements such as “until stocks last”, or “for a limited time” can help drive conversions. This is especially important for spontaneous buyer types.

14.    Make Forms Engaging
Just because you managed to get users this far it doesn’t mean you should stop paying attention to the little details. The brand colours and design should be kept consistent so users know they are on the right path.
It is also a strong recommendation that you should you the thank you page as an opportunity to up sell your product or service.

15.    Provide Point of Action Assurances
Ensure that when users enquire they receive an assurance of a time when they will be contacted. Leads are shown to lose effectiveness by 6% after 1 hour delayed response time.

16.   Keep You in the Process
Don’t necessarily take people to the basket once clicked.

17.    Consider Email Preview
Ensure that the message you are trying to portray in emails can be read without downloading images. A large percentage of people with email will disregard emails if they have to download images.

18.    Budget for Experience
Clients will often spend budget on methods which aim to drive traffic to websites yet will debate whether to spend the same amount of time on website testing. Prioritise what is more important, increasing traffic by % or increasing conversions by %

You should build a better customer experience. Amazon run over 400 tests at any given time and are constantly monitoring what changes could positively affect their business.

19.    Utilise a system for Prioritization
When making changes to your website use a simple methods which highlights the ‘impact’ over ‘resources needed’. This will let you assess what changes can be made with relatively small effort and can let you plan further changes with your resources.

20.    They make data driven design decisions
Make educated and informed decisions based on data.

21.    How to execute Rapidly
The key to online is change. Websites need to be flexible and react to changes in the online environment.

5 steps which would help you move forward and see real progress:
1)     Identify problems, identify high bounce and exit rate
2)     Create a to do list
3)     Document your hypothesis
4)     Prioritise your to do list
5)     Start testing

We are back from the A4UExpo and I have stumbled, wearily I hasten to add, into a new term. Step forward “EXPO LAG”, far, far worse than jet lag in my opinion and highly confusing considering the majority of the two days was spent sitting down listening to other people. Very peculiar.

I attribute it to not only the after party that happened on the last day of the expo but the constant churning of ideas circulating in your head about how the information you learnt in the sessions can benefit your clients, your company and also what a squirrel has got to do with the people at Conversion Rate Experts.  I should ring the R.S.P.C.A.

I must admit the expo was the best I have attended. I went to the expo as a blogger for Search Cowboys, so without them I wouldnt not have attended, so a massive thank you should rightly go to them and mainly Bas van den Beld. The organisation in particular was spot on; there was plenty of time in between sessions which allowed you to walk to the next room with plenty of time to spare. Not to mention great food and drinks all day.

Before I attended the expo I had reviewed the agenda and pencilled out the sessions I wanted to attend and thankfully managed to attend them all.  Not just search related either, as I chucked a couple of curves balls in by attending a few affiliate presentations and sessions on how to improve your conversion rates, an important aspect no matter what sector to operate in.  I came away from the conference feeling inspired and wanted to get stuck in to some work as soon as possible, after the obligatory drinks of course :0)

So what did I learn I hear you cry? I thought it would be best to summarise everything that I would be interested in hearing if someone else was blogging this, so read on, oh and get comfortable.

SEO Strategies

•    The top 3 ranking websites in Bing are ripped and have Encarta entries. I have checked and this is true. Aggressive optimisation of pages also seems to work quite well in Bing too so test and see what you can achieve.
•    Dave Naylor discussed Google focusing on returning results at a faster rate, that they are looking at speed metrics of a site when analysing ranking position.  Now, we have felt this for a while but it is nice to be supported by the man himself. So, through webmaster tools start analysing any broken links etc… Start treating the crawler like a user.
•    Subfolder Vs Sub Domain debate goes on… A lot of the panellists felt that it completely depends on your situation but all were in agreement that sub domains passed external backlink equity whilst subfolders passed internal link equity. One advantage of a sub domain is that it can be put on a different IP address.

SEO & Search Engines

•    Allow http compression, reduce the download time for users and bots
•    Organise your content, understand that value is placed on the hierarchal structure of a site.
•    MSN Videos will start appearing in Google results pages soon as they have overgone a complete overhaul of their site, reducing the amount of Flash and Ajax.
•    New feature from Google webmaster tools that allows you to adjust the return rate of crawlers.
•    25% of queries at present were not seen in the last 3 months. (This was the most astounding quote when you realise the significance)
•     Remember to submit video sitemaps
•    When content is in the same language but across two sites, for example on the TLDs .co.uk and .ie then alter the copy to reflect the country. Do not leave exactly the same. Use geographical references and symbols (currency) if appropriate.

Affiliate

•    When setting up a site is it better to have a keyword rich domain name or a brand name?  All panellists agreed that it depends on the competitive nature of your sector.  If you happen to be in a niche you can afford to build a brand name whereas if your sector is very competitive a keyword rich domain would help to get you ranked within the search engines.
•    Significant factor of success in terms of affiliate sites is obtaining a constant stream of returning visitors.
•    A lot of affiliate sites have thousands of pages of content. The key to obtaining traffic from search engines is to ensure this content is unique. Do not reproduce the content on similar affiliate sites as this will be deemed duplicate content and affect your ability to rank effectively.
•   Do not write about a subject, write for an audience. Ensure your content is topical and relevant to what the customer wants and this will in turn improve your returning customers.

Conversion Rate Experts – SEOmoz Case Study

•    Most important lesson is not to keep chasing new traffic but to improve your conversion rate of existing traffic. This will have a massive impact on revenue.
•    How do you treat New vs Returning customers? Build relationships based around their site activity and reap the benefits.
•    Analyse every action and the effects this has on the conversion funnel. Plan future steps based on results.
•    Multi variant testing is vital to improving your conversion rate.
•    Most websites don’t contain enough copy to effectively sell a product or service. If you imagine how long a sales pitch would take and compare it to the copy on your site you will get an idea of the difference. Improve and add copy but ensure you have call to actions throughout for customers that have been converted sooner than others.

Beyond Link Bait

•    Backlink analysis should never be overlooked as it can play an important part in link development.
•    Two tools that can help with researching backlinks of competitors and  process are Linkscape and Majestic
•    Panellists stress the importance of not wasting time in approaching websites where the chance of obtaining a link is low. Dedicate your time to prioritising the value of links and the likelihood of achieving a backlink.
•    Think about ringing potential link targets as it is more credible. It also increases the actual conversion rate of link requests. Most importantly, it allows you not only to build links but relationships.
•    The tone of voice is very important when approaching link targets; review the language used on the site and base your email around it.
•    Spend time finding the most appropriate contact rather than just sending an email to info@
•    Websites build links over time and the power of the older pages are lost due to broken links and poor site architecture. Link reclamation is a process of reclaiming these links and regaining the power.

Resources to bookmark

•    http://www.dwpub.com – Daryl Willcox Publishing. Their tagline is “If you have the story we have the contacts” Using a list of journalist they syndicate newsworthy content.
•    usertesting.com, 4Q and SurveyMonkey.com – low cost customer feedback tools
•   Google Alerts, serph, Twing, Omgili – free tools to monitor your brand mentions online
•    Clicktale.com – watching movies of visitors’ browser behaviour
•    www.conversion-rate-experts.com/101ways – how you could improve your conversion rates.

Just spoke at SEM Konferansen in Oslo today, a search conference organised by INMA (IAB Norway). It was the first time I have spoken at a Search conference in Norway, and i really really enjoyed it. I was suprisingly nervous, it’s my motherland after all. Today was day 1, and the line up has just been  fantastic, the audience was very engaging and suseptable. It was also staggering refreshing to have more than 15 min to speak, I had a 1 hour slot and for once felt I actually got to give an input that would have been useful to the audience. Allot of the time when I speak at a conference 10 min hardly gives you time to warm up and I would argue the audience doesn’t get enough quality content for such short presentations.

I promised I would make my presentation available, so here is my presentation about the Power of SEO where I go through the basics of SEO along with more in depth information about each SEO area (Technical, on page and off page SEO). If you were at the conference and still want to ask any questions or give any comments please feel free to do so Lastly I would like to say thank you to INMA Norway and especially Magne Uppman and Ola Hano for great organisation of this event.

To view the presentation just click the “play button” below in the slideshare window!

First of all I have to apologise for being slightly slack on the blogging front, for some insane reason I thought starting up my own company would give me more time to blog. WRONG! But I am hopeful that after the few months and with regular clients in place I will get time to blog more. I really do enjoy blogging, but I’m definetly one of those bloggers that rather leave it to when I have something to say. Honestly

New recruit – drum roll…
I can’t believe 3 months have already passed since Verve Search started, it’s flown by. And it’s been really amazing so far, in fact things are going so well that I have decided to recruit. And you might recognise him; Sam Murray! He used to work with me at Base One as one of the Search Consultants, and I’m really pleased to anounce that Sam has now been hired as a Senior SEO Consultant at Verve Search! Sam is a very talented search marketer, not only when it comes to SEO but also Social Media. He’s an ideas person, someone that takes initiative and most importantly someone that can actually handle working with me I’m very pleased to have him as part of the Verve crew. Exciting times. In fact I’m pretty sure he will be posting his first blogpost on the Verve Search blog tomorrow, so look out for a fab post by Sam. Yay!

SMX London – Next Week
Next week, Monday 17th & Tuesday 18th May SMX is in town again. A plesant change of ‘time of year’ for SMX as usually they come to London for November. I’m really looking forward to it, I’m a big fan of the SMX conference series. Not only do you learn loads from attending the session but attending conferences like this is a great opportunity to network with likeminded people and learn from others whilst doing it. Search is still a relatively small industry and what makes this industry so special (in my opinion) is the willingness between Search professionals to share their experience, offer advice and in general just be friends. In fact it’s nearly embaressing how many of my close friends are also search colleagues that I have met through the conference scene, including my fiance Jon Myers

This year I’m a speaker on the SEO Checkup panel, this is a different kind of session where there are NO presentations and boring repeats of what the speaker before said but a chance for the audience to pick the brains of 4 search experts. The other panelists are: my fellow SEO-Chick Jane Copland, the lovely and very knowledgable Dixon Jones and Jonathan Stewart from iCrossing (whom I haven’t had the pleasure meeting yet but I’m sure is a nice guy). This session will be all about you, your questions, your sites and how you can improve your indexing and rankings. This session is what it’s all about for me, and I’m geniunly excited to be on this panel. So if you are heading to SMX come and see us speak on Tuesday 19th at 4:15.

If you still haven’t decided whether to attend SMX, view the full agenda, this is going to be a fantastic SMX, with advanced session to help you evolve your search marketing knowledge!

LondonSEO Networking party
And if you are going to SMX London be sure not to miss the LondonSEO networking party on Monday 18th May from 18:00 at the Jewel Bar in Covent Garden. There is no charge to get in and you don’t need a formal invite, it’s simply a networking event for people in search, with a bit of a SEOdisco by Ciaran Norris . LondonSEO is always good fun and a fantastic oportunity to network. So even if you are missing SMX be sure NOT to miss this networking party. And if you do, make sure you come and say hello!

Tweet tweet
Hopefully we should be able to get some more blogpost on the Verve Search blog very soon, but in the meantime feel free to keep up with the Verve Search crew on twitter:

Follow Sam on Twitter
Follow Lisa on Twitter