What do you sell? Does your website scream the message?
Today I was told about a 70-year-old CEO who didn't like the new design of his home page. The feature areas didn't have enough "meat" for him. He much prefered a 4th level page of the site comprised of 8 paragraphs of technical content speaking about his product. Text...
How presumptious to think that early visitors care what you have to say until you prove yourself. If you want to sell on the Internet, you need to push your vanity aside and provide for the audience.
Qualify before you speak!
There are many metaphors that say the same thing -- Let them look around before you tackle visitors with information. Don't presume to know what they want until you qualify.
Visitors to a website are like shoppers at WalMart coming in from the rain. They may be buyers or they may be seeking shelter in your magazine aisle. Either way, in their mind, it's easier to head right back out the door than deal with an over-zealous sales pitch 10 seconds in.
Your website is the same. Realize what you are doing if you fill your home page with too much content. You are pitching them a white paper while they are shaking off the rain.
Stores have Aisles
If clients come in for soup you've insulted them by showing hair nets, motor oil, fruit juice, mascara, and push pins all at the same time.
WHERE'S THE SOUP!!!
Too late, they left!
Fix your home page before your next customer comes in. Organize your content and save the sales pitch until they've qualified.
We are a Minneapolis web design firm, providing professional web design, web site hosting and search engine optimization - SEO. Our blog posts address all sorts of website and technology topics.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Friday, September 21, 2007
Keyword Research and Design lead to Increased Conversion
In early June Stoney Wolf Productions, which sells videos for sportsmen contacted us for help. They were slipping in the rankings for their keyword terms and showing decreased traffic and a decreased conversion rates across the board.
Our first step in the process was to make the site have more of a structured feel. The past design had quite a bit of text on the home page and the content area had around a dozen different directions available from the home page. The content in the shopping cart area was organized into a few broad categories with too many choices.
Our Approach
First, we re-organized the shopping cart area into more specific categories to make things more intuitive to find. Next we cleaned out the content area of the home page, trimmed the text down and added some nice photographic images to depict a few of the more popular categories. In the end, only 4 categories were show-cased on the home page.
After design came the all important keyword research. The first thing we looked at was the old keyword terms in use. We saw a lot of fishing video, hunting video, etc. but became evident that the last time this site was optimized there was not YouTube and internet videos were not the norm.
In today's searchable content videos are all over the place. We concluded people were coming to the site to see hunting videos, and when they found out it was DVD's they quickly left the site which was hurting our conversions. We researched new terms around DVD's and VHS to get qualified traffic to the site and raise conversion rates. The results surprised even us...
Our first step in the process was to make the site have more of a structured feel. The past design had quite a bit of text on the home page and the content area had around a dozen different directions available from the home page. The content in the shopping cart area was organized into a few broad categories with too many choices.
Our Approach
First, we re-organized the shopping cart area into more specific categories to make things more intuitive to find. Next we cleaned out the content area of the home page, trimmed the text down and added some nice photographic images to depict a few of the more popular categories. In the end, only 4 categories were show-cased on the home page.
After design came the all important keyword research. The first thing we looked at was the old keyword terms in use. We saw a lot of fishing video, hunting video, etc. but became evident that the last time this site was optimized there was not YouTube and internet videos were not the norm.
In today's searchable content videos are all over the place. We concluded people were coming to the site to see hunting videos, and when they found out it was DVD's they quickly left the site which was hurting our conversions. We researched new terms around DVD's and VHS to get qualified traffic to the site and raise conversion rates. The results surprised even us...
July 2007:
We made our changes the last week of July.
August 2007:
The first full month after the changes have gone live. A 7.1% conversion rate blows the previous conversion rates out of the water.
September 1-20 2007:
About 2/3 of the month as an example. Conversion rate is over 8%
Quality analytics helped us track the conversions on the site allowing us to show the client the immediate results of our work on their site.
Thursday, September 6, 2007
iPhone price drop highlights obsolescence
The "neatest, niftiest, coolest gadget ever" that you purchased for $499 less than three months ago is no longer available. That's right, this morning Apple announced that the 4gig iPhone is no longer available and they are slashing the price of the 8gig version from $599 to $399.
Obsolete already?
There are too many variables in the question around "how long does it take a computer to be obsolete?" For most people a computer is never completely useless. You can still type a report on a 286 processor from 1990 but you'll have a tough time finding a printer with 17-year-old drivers.
Although you can still use your mid-range, 2005 Dell computer for many applications, there is a measurable gain in productivity by moving to the same grade produced in 2007.
A few points:
Obsolete already?
There are too many variables in the question around "how long does it take a computer to be obsolete?" For most people a computer is never completely useless. You can still type a report on a 286 processor from 1990 but you'll have a tough time finding a printer with 17-year-old drivers.
Although you can still use your mid-range, 2005 Dell computer for many applications, there is a measurable gain in productivity by moving to the same grade produced in 2007.
A few points:
- In 2003 the state of Texas reported that they plan for a 4-5 year desktop computer life cycle. In 2007, 2-3 years is a common report.
- By the time you see a computer advertised at a retailer, the next generation is already in test.
- In 1990 the top of the line IBM PCs ran on an Intel 80386 processor clocked at 4.77MHz, 8-bit I/O buses. In 2007 a mid-range cell phone has many times more processing power.
- According to a Time Magazine article, an outdated computer is worth roughly $6 in recycled raw materials.
- Those annoying animated gifs were all the rage in 2003.
Monday, September 3, 2007
Can a pack mentality help your SEO?
In the wild a pack of wolves thrives from a hierarchy determined by strength and attitude. Not always will the strongest, biggest wolf be the alpha dog. Attitude plays a huge role in your pack rank. When working with an outside client it’s essential to find your role within the “pack.”
Finding the Leader
With most small clients the person in charge of the web site is the owner of the business, with larger clients it could be the president of the company, a marketing manager, an IT manager, or perhaps the web site designer. It’s critical to find out who makes the decisions and who you need to contact to make sure your SEO efforts are productive for the client while still keeping them happy.
Joining the Pack
The use of “we” can be a large part of joining your clients team. Most of the time clients are looking for sales or contacts from the web site. One way to make your client feel more comfortable is to talk like you’re all one team. For ex:
“When we get a contact from the site, what are we going to do with that information?”
With one simple sentence you’ve made your stance clear to your client. I’m part of your team when it comes to the web site, and it’s in all of our best interest to make sure we’re on the same page.
Your Role in the Pack
With some clients you are the alpha dog, you make all the calls on the web site. Typically these clients assume you know best so they just expect an update on what you’re trying to do. With larger clients things aren’t always this simple. There may be a few different sections of the company who want something different from the web site. It’s your job to make sure they know that you only want what’s best for the site.
As an example, Web Designers and SEO folks will frequently disagree with what’s best for a site. Both sides will have to give up something to make a happy medium.
A Large Pack
With larger clients it’s hard to make everyone in the room happy. As much as you might know about SEO or SEM it might not matter to some clients. They still have their comfort zone and might not like some of the changes you have in mind. You need to be clear that there are some things you might be willing to give up in order to get some of your other changes through the pipeline.
If you get traffic levels up, and conversion rates at an acceptable level you’ll be off to a great start in keeping your clients happy.
Finding the Leader
With most small clients the person in charge of the web site is the owner of the business, with larger clients it could be the president of the company, a marketing manager, an IT manager, or perhaps the web site designer. It’s critical to find out who makes the decisions and who you need to contact to make sure your SEO efforts are productive for the client while still keeping them happy.
Joining the Pack
The use of “we” can be a large part of joining your clients team. Most of the time clients are looking for sales or contacts from the web site. One way to make your client feel more comfortable is to talk like you’re all one team. For ex:
“When we get a contact from the site, what are we going to do with that information?”
With one simple sentence you’ve made your stance clear to your client. I’m part of your team when it comes to the web site, and it’s in all of our best interest to make sure we’re on the same page.
Your Role in the Pack
With some clients you are the alpha dog, you make all the calls on the web site. Typically these clients assume you know best so they just expect an update on what you’re trying to do. With larger clients things aren’t always this simple. There may be a few different sections of the company who want something different from the web site. It’s your job to make sure they know that you only want what’s best for the site.
As an example, Web Designers and SEO folks will frequently disagree with what’s best for a site. Both sides will have to give up something to make a happy medium.
A Large Pack
With larger clients it’s hard to make everyone in the room happy. As much as you might know about SEO or SEM it might not matter to some clients. They still have their comfort zone and might not like some of the changes you have in mind. You need to be clear that there are some things you might be willing to give up in order to get some of your other changes through the pipeline.
If you get traffic levels up, and conversion rates at an acceptable level you’ll be off to a great start in keeping your clients happy.
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