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

21 Secrets to Improve Website Conversion Rates is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency

The value in regards to SEO is not the only factor that we will be analysing, the effect bold and italic tags has on usability and their ability to convert customers will also be considered.

Halt…. Attention:

Beliefs are split into two camps; some people believe that the bold tag is now ineffective whereas others still believe it holds value.  Within the SEOmoz ranking factors, the contributors (various respected industry figures) draw the conclusion the bold tag has a moderate importance.   Opinions and attitudes here range from “Has some weight as a ranking factor, but not very much”, “I’m still doing it sometimes, but I’m really starting to wonder why” to “We focus on communication to the user; we never bold terms in an effort to rank for them”

These opinions contrast particularly to the views from 3-4 years ago, where contributors to the SEOmoz ranking factors (2005) commented: “I think that this is still very important” and “H1 and BOLD are still vital indicators of important factors.” The belief was the algorithm used to determine that any keyword placed within a bold tag would be given value as to determining what the page is about. The question is, has Google now realised this was being manipulated for the search engines and not for the user as was its original intention? Additionally, is the bold tag now obsolete?

Why and How to utilise the bold tag

Personally I believe that the bold tag still holds slight value and should be incorporated within on-page content.  Search engines spiders can read and understand html code so it seems logical that the assigned keyword within a bold tag would carry a degree of importance to the page.  This question still remains to be decided whether it carries any ranking weight but undeniably it does carry visual weight.

The usability of a website is a big feature of converting visitors into customers. Bold tags are vital for catching readers that scan, reinforcing the belief that they have found the right page. Various eye tracking data indicates users are drawn to breaks in the text, including bold and italic fonts.

Furthermore, when online users read or scan text, they apparently will only re-evaluate their scan strategy when they detect particular formats. One of the main factors, that subconsciously make users eyes stop and evaluate; is bold tags.  So even if they hold no weight within search engines, I feel it is vital to ensure you give your website the best possible chance to connect with visitors.

Research always shows that user behaviour when consuming information on the internet follows a very basic pattern. In Jakob Nielsen’s words; site visitors don’t read; they scan. His study found that only 16% of people will read a post word by word. The implication is that readers need to be able to extract the key messages of a post at a glance, and not have to work for it. This means that content must be made scannable. Roll out the red carpet; cue the brass band and the victory march parade!  Welcome home Bold…

So to end, I was recently watching the film American History X and related to the part in the script when he said “it’s always good to end a paper with a quote, if someone else has already said it best. So if you can’t top it, steal from them and go out strong”.

So here is my victim, Seth Godin.  He undertook an experiment regarding eye tracking and said he learnt the following:

“The biggest lesson wasn’t news to me, but it might be to your boss: your visitors are not rational and organized and linear. You can’t count on them sitting still and hearing your story from beginning to end. They won’t. The answer is not to try to change human nature. It’s to embrace the hunting skills that people are bringing online (and to their daily offline media consumption) and to make your media match their needs.”

Resources:

The following resources can help you monitor how well your online content is doing in terms of time spent on page and users clicks.

Heat Mapping

Crazy Egg, ClickDensity, Google Analytics (Site Overlay)

How to be Bold and Influence People is a post from: Verve Search - SEO & Social Media Agency