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

Big thanks to Brian Eisenberg who gave us this overview at SES 2010.

http://www.bryaneisenberg.com/

This month, I was profiled in Sage Pay’s Moving Money magazine, which is quite exciting in itself. But in addition to interviewing me they also sent a Photographer; Will Amlot to do the photography to go with the profile.  To be honest, I thought this would be a guy with his camera just quickly snapping a few photos, boy was I wrong, Will and his assistant rocked up with two crates of photography equipment and rigged up in the communal area of our offices. I must admit I quite enjoyed the photo session, and I loved the “oh so forgiving” camera lenses even more. Will was fabulous and made me feel quite at ease. In addition to all the photographs he also did this video interview with me; about setting up my own business and general chat about the search industry. As usual it didn’t take me long to get me ranting about Search and business.

So for anyone that is remotely intrested in my ramblings, here’s the video:

A quick post to welcome our new Verve Search employee; Freya Jones. Freya has been working in Search for 2 years, mostly within Pay Per Click adverising. At Verve Search she will be doing both PPC and SEO and of course also some Social Media. When I interviewed Freya it was clear from the start that she was going to fit in well with the Verve Search team. She has bundles of passion and drive and most importantly; she’s excited about search. In fact, she wrote her first “paper” on Search Engines when she was only 10 years old, how cool is that??!

So from everyone at Verve Search; Welcome Freya, let’s kick some traffic butt!

Follow Freya on Twitter!

We are turning 1 year on the 28th January, and to celebrate we are giving away 2 places to our SEO Training Course.  Worth £499 per place!

Interested in the chance of WINNING a place at the SEO Training Course on the 28th Jan, 2010? ALL you need to do is FOLLOW us on Twitter AND retweet the following:

RT @VerveSearch We are giving away 2 places to a 1 Day SEO Training Course on the 28th Jan, to enter visit http://is.gd/644WV

We will pick 2 winners on Friday (15th January) and contact you via DM on twitter.

NB! The place is not transferable and you must be available on the 28th January 2010. The prize does not include transport to the Verve Search offices, which is in Kingston Upon Thames (20 min from Waterloo station, London)

Click Here to view full details on the 1 Day SEO Training Course

Are you running your own PPC campaign? Has Google told you it’s as easy as 1 2 3? Even gave you £50 to start spending?

I’m shocked at how many advertisers take the bait, it really isn’t as easy as 1 2 3. I’m not saying PPC advertising is ‘rocket science’, but what I AM saying is that Google makes it look too easy. I believe businesses are wasting bucket loads of cash on Google AdWords for traffic that is NOT relevant.

The misconception that Google AdWords is still based on an auction model is blinding people. You might think when bidding for the keyword “office furniture” your ad will only show up when someone types this keyword? WRONG. The default setting within your AdWords account can also make your ad appear when someone searches for: “office design”, “cheap furniture”, “office furniture designers”, possibly even appearing for “Ricky Gervais” due to association.

Google AdWords have advanced settings to determine how accurate the connection is between; what you are bidding for and the key phrase the searcher uses, called “keyword match types”. A keyword match type is the rules the search engines use for controlling when and which ads are displayed, dependent on the search query entered by the user. The most common match types are: broad match, phrase match, exact match and negative match. The default match type is broad match.

Having all your keywords default to Broad Match means your ad can be displayed for keywords/phrases in any order or combination, with additional words. In fact, it can even be just one of the words you are bidding for and another word that is Google “associates” with the keyword you are bidding for. The real issue is the association Google makes with words, I have seen ads displayed for “Mac Air” when searching for “flights” as the words “flights” and “air” are associated. You could argue that if someone searches for “Ricky Gervais” it’s unlikely that they will click on an ad that mentions “Office Furniture” but would you like to bet money on it? That is what you are doing.

I’m not saying that “broad match” shouldn’t be used as a match type, but you should be aware of the consequences. And if doing so you should be monitoring carefully using the “Search Query Report” within AdWords to see what actual queries your ads show up for. In fact, I urge you to check your Search Query Report, right now! Go to your AdWords campaign => Reporting => Reports =>Create a New Report and then chose “Search Query Performance”. This will give you a list of all the words your ads showed up for in the previous month!

Further reading about Google AdWords advertising Pitfalls

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.

It’s day 2 of A4Uexpo, so far it’s been a great conference, many new faces as this is an Affiliate conference and not just SEO. Today I spoke on the Web Analtyics panel with Will Crichlow from Distilled and Joanna Butler from Lattitude. My presentation focused on the very specifics on how to track Google Local Business Listings , which Verve Search has recently successfully implemented for our clients. Tracking Google Local Business listings within Google Analytics is something that doesn’t happen automatically within Google Analytics (although it should). Verve Search is one of the first in the UK to implement this tracking successfully in the UK! I also went through in detail how to implement Ecommerce tracking on a third party domain. All in the presentation below. Let me know what you think.

I promised I would share my presentations from A4U so here’s the first installment. On Day1 of A4U Expo I spoke on the panel “Beyond Linkbaiting” with Kelvin Newman from Site Visibility and Dixon Jones from Receptional (and MajesticSEO). I very much enjoyed speaking on link development as it’s a key area of SEO and one Verve Search takes very seriously. At Verve Search we do all our link development in-house and don’t outsource as we believe it’s crucial for success to have SEOs working closely with the clients.

The presentation gives an insight into the key areas of link development strategies:

- Content Syndication (referred to in this presentation as Contentlinkation)
- Link baiting (the process of creating content with the objective of recieving links)
- Site Seeding (the research you do beforehand including competitor backlink analysis)
- Relationship building
- Press releases
- Events and Offline activity
- Social Media

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!

Did you know women talk more than 15% more than men every day? Men smiling at that figure now should stop as 8% of you never cleaned your teeth this morning.  Welcome to the wonderful world of statistics. They give us an insight and a clearer indication of how successful our marketing campaigns are and highlight areas of weakness that need to be addressed. As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously stated:

“I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

Google Local is a relatively new channel for marketers to obtain traffic and however much we theorise and assume how valuable it is, nothing will give clearer data than tracking and monitoring. We track and monitor every other aspect of our organic and paid search so why wouldn’t we want to track other channels that generate site traffic?

From an analytical point of view Google Local could previously only be measured if a browser came through the Google Maps section to our site.  We were not naturally able to measure visits from a Local Business Listing (LBL) unless we implemented tracking codes.  Now there are a few posts around the web detailing how we should track Google Local, in particular from Martijn Beijk who specialises in Google Local. What I found interesting after reading these posts was that no one ever replied back, detailing whether implementing the analytic codes created any problems and if so, how they dealt with these issues.

We recently implemented tracking code to one of our clients’ local business listings. We experienced some issues along the way which inspired me to write this post about how to track Google Local.

Track URLs in Local Business Centre

One method that was recommended by a few people was implementing a tagged URL within your local business listing through the local business centre. This included giving each local business listing a URL with GA parameters. By doing this, theoretically it should then appear in GA under traffic sources – campaigns

In order to tag a URL you should use the Google Analytics URL builder tool, which you can find here: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578

You only need to fill in specific information in the tool. The campaign source (in this case; Google local), the campaign medium (local business listing) and also give it a campaign name to differentiate various listings, for example Search_Consultancy_London.

Just to clarify, if tracked correctly the statistics should appear within Traffic Sources – Medium – Local Business Listing

One aspect that you need to be aware of before you update the new tagged URL is to remove any “%2B” or “%20” symbols.  The symbol %2B is part of the URL encoding process and it merely means ‘+’, similarly to %20 which means space. In my experience and after discussing this with others these characters should be replaced with underscores. Hyphens are better from a search perspective but you are not trying to rank this page as it is merely a tagged URL.

Once you have inserted this tagged URL, the local business centre it states that it can take up to 48 hours for the change to be updated. We waited, and waited some more but the change never took place. Some people say you have to wait up to 2 weeks for Google to update their listings to include your utm source code within the URL. After 7 days the update still did not occur and we were not willing to wait any longer as a week without data was long enough. I still remain sceptical that this method works and would love to hear from anyone who implemented this -  was it successful and how long you had to wait? Are you still waiting?

Use Vanity URLs to track page views

Another option is to create separate landing page URLs for each listing that is within the Local Business Centre. The separate landing pages are essentially duplicate pages of the original URL but given a vanity URL name.

For Example:

Original URL:

http://www.example.com/location-service

Vanity URL:

http://www.example.com/localad-location-service

To avoid the duplicate content issue and to specify to Google the canonical URL we would simply input the canonical tag within the source code of the Vanity URL:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/location-service”/>

Once you have created this page, insert the vanity URL into the Google Local Business centre. The beauty of this method is that it appears in less than 48 hours and you can see instant results. Statistics would appear in content – top content – then type in “local” within the filter box.

However, there are some drawbacks to this method; the main factor is you are restricted to the amount of quantitative data you can analyse.

Since the URL of the local ad page has not been tagged it does not appear within the traffic sources as a ‘medium’. This prevents you from easily evaluating how much traffic this medium generated in comparison to other sources. Furthermore, site visits to the local ad page can only be determined through accessing the top landing pages within the content section of analytics which is not ideal.

Another negative aspect to tracking your local search this way is if you are running an ecommerce booking engine through your Google analytics you will not be able to analyse how much revenue was generated through Local search.

This can only be determined if you tag the URL, which brings me on to my last method.

Track Local campaign using 301 Redirects

This method may take a little bit more time in liaising with client programmers and web developers but it is the preferred and recommended method.

First you need to set up a vanity URL, but this time do not create a page, just a URL that will be 301 redirected to the original tagged URL which we spoke about in the beginning.

For Example:

http://www.example.com/localad-service-location

needs to be 301 redirected to the following URL

http://www.example.com/localad-service-location.htm/#utm_source=GoogleLocalutm_medium=local_business_listing&utm_campaign=london

This would then track all visitors and able us to see the TOTAL number of visits from Google Local Listings within the Traffic Source (separate to organic and everything else) under the medium local_business_listing (or whatever you decided to title your medium within the URL builder)

This will ensure reporting on monthly statistical data is far easier as you can compare the effectiveness of your campaign and evaluate individual segments.

The amount of data you can now analyse through this method is much greater than the previous method. Additionally to appearing under traffic sources – medium it will also appear as a tagged campaign under traffic sources – campaigns which will let you view each individual listings analytics.

It also provides you with further dimensions in which to breakdown the data, including:

•    keywords visitors typed into Google to trigger your listing
•    Visitor type (new vs. returning)
•    Visitor Country/territory/region

Most significantly, if you have e-commerce set up through analytics it allows you to view how successful your local ad is in terms of generating revenue.  Within traffic sources you can breakdown the following:

•    Overall Revenue
•    Transactions
•    Average Value
•    Conversion rate
•    Per visit value

We also found that by creating the Vanity URL and implementing this in the Local Business Centre it actually improved our local ranking.  We believe this is due to the added keywords within the Vanity URL so ensure you use appropriate and relevant keywords (without spamming) related to what you wish to appear in the local listings for.