Website Conversions and Stuff
Lets talk about conversions for a minute…this topic seems to come up from time to time so thought tonight I would throw a few thoughts out there for you to chew on.
First and foremost….if your site does not turn visitors into “paying” customers it does not make a bit of difference how much traffic you get to your site. But in order to find out if your site is going to convert you have to send visitors to your site.
So you have to buy the traffic…you can use PPC, banner ads, text links and/or organic traffic (yes organic traffic cost money)
Talk about the chicken and the egg debate – do I optimize my site for traffic first or for conversions first.
I have a good friend of mine who is working with a bankruptcy lawyer…it’s a long story about how they made contact but basically the lawyer wanted my friend to improve his Adwords campaign. Tony told him not…he would not work on that campaign because his site sucked. So he was a little more tactful than I am but that is basically what he told him.
The lawyer was investing $1000 a month on Adwords and getting nothing for his investment. (his brother was helping him with his site) There were so many things wrong the site that it basically had to be redone.
Before Tony started rebuilding this lawyer’s site we had a long discussion on a number of topics.
The first thing we went over was what keywords did they want to target. The reason for this is simple…if you know what people are searching for and how hard it will be to rank high in the search engines you can build content around those words.
In this case they chose “insert city name” bankruptcy lawyer, stop wage garnishment, stop foreclosure. They chose those based on the pay per click data they had.
Next we talked about the layout of the site…this is the point that most people get messed up. It was my suggestion that they start small and then add to they site on a weekly basis until they had what they wanted.
The basic layout started with “insert city name” bankruptcy lawyer as the primary keyword and that is what the home page was targeted to. (keyword density was to be about 2%) (alt image tags were used) (meta title, meta keywords and meta description were prepared)
The rest of site had the following pages to start off:
- about us (using the law firm name)
- contact us
- privacy page
- testimonial page (client reviews)
- stop wage garnishment
- stop foreclosure
Not much to it by some standards but if they optimize it right they should 2000-2500 visitors a month.
The site was built using WordPress as the platform because of its ease of use for the client and it SEO benefits.
Here I would like to take a minute and go back to our initial conversation…
Do I optimize my site for traffic first or for conversions first?
The answer is a bit of both but as you can see, my opinion is that SEO considerations come first but only because you have to know who you are targeting.
On to the next stage…I’m not going to go into a great deal of design detail but there are some things we consider when we build sites.
There MUST be a balance between building a site for human eyes and search engine spiders.
The selling content must be above the fold.
Each page has one specific purpose
I’m not a big fan of strictly flash type pages…no text for the spiders to figure out what your site is about.
Images are great…in moderation
Everything we put on our sites is centered about solving whatever problem your clients have.
There are more but I think you get the idea.
Those items I just listed are the things we have control over as it concerns conversions. We like to get the site built initially using our best guess of what type of content will convert well.
The we send traffic to it….in the case of the bankruptcy lawyer Tony got him on the front page using Google Maps and the client is now on page 2 and climbing for his primary keyword.
Another place he put the clients site was Universal Business Listings (search for it on Google)
So now that we traffic going to the site we can start to test different thing on the site to improve conversions. This can be tricky and if not closely monitored will result in mass confusion…
So what about the lawyer…how well did his site convert for him? Month one it generated 2 paying clients with a LCV (lifetime customer value) of $1800 each.
The bottom line is this…when building your website you cant just focus on the SEO portion and not what your visitors see no more than you can concentrate on what your visitors see over SEO considerations.
You can not test for and improve conversions if you are not getting traffic just like all the traffic in the world will do you no good if your site does not convert.