conversion

There are 4 posts tagged conversion (this is page 1 of 1).

Reading Best of inbound: February and March

February

Complete list of link building strategies
This is just insane – tons of different strategies and you can even filter them!

The New SEO Process

  • Opportunity Discovery: What opportunities arise with regard to:
    • Business Objectives – what’s the goal?
    • Market research, keyword research, site audit, etc.
  • Content Strategy
    • Ideation
    • Content build
  • Technical Development
  • Social Strategy
    • Link strategy
    • PR
    • Contests, Events, Social Media
  • Measurement
  • Optimization

Link Building resources
an other insane list

Quick Queries For Link Wins

  • Do you have sponsored something but didn’t get backlinks?
  • Find sponsorships under $100, that give you a backlink
  • Find interviews you did
  • Do the same for your competition!

Broken Link Building Guide: From Noob to Novice

  • Pointing out dead links on an other site and recommending others
  • Find broken links: look for high authority sites and high authority pages
  • Contact owner but without any urls in the initial mail if possible
  • Get Link!
  • 301 Redirect Broken Link: If a 301 exists that points to an other location

Buying Links is Shallow, Short-Term Thinking. Buying Blogs? Now that’s a Strategy.

  • Look for blogs in your niche (which may covered you)
  • Propose a monthly payment and a lump-sum at the end of a 3 year period
  • The blog will then move to your domain – but you won’t influence the writings
  • You will help to boost the traffic, improve the UX and design

Findings about how graphics affect conversions

  • Images can reduce readership
  • Try to put the image above the fold
  • Headlines below an image are 10% more read than above the image
  • 80% of people read headlines
  • Captions are read 300% more than body -> try to catch attention and bring the reader back into the text
  • Don’t break the left margin
  • Images without clear relevance are useless
  • Avoid obvious stock photos, poor quality images and oversized faces

March

Link Building Tools We Use at Distilled
Distilled is one of the finest online agencies and Will Critchlow lists some great tools they use.

Incorporating video into your link building strategy

  • You can start for about $1000 producing videos
  • Look for students or graduates from film schools
  • Video in content almost triples the avg. number of links
  • Video is a form not a content – if a video is better than text, make a video
  • If your videos don’t provide value, then they are useless
  • Film in high quality – high quality audio is the most important
  • Create (if feasible) indexable transcripts
  • Make sure that you include a link to your site in the embed code
  • Create Movie schemas and video sitemaps for better indexing

AuthorRank

  • Reputation as a content creator – could influence the SERPs
  • Different Ranks for different topics
  • Google+ as a identify platform and rel=author as your signature
  • AuthorRank could be influenced by shares, time, comments, etc.

How Sitelinks are quietly costing you conversions

  • Under certain circumstances google may swaps your website for a sitelink
  • Monitor analytics and webmaster tools frequently to avoid some problems

Google Places Ranking Factors

  • Places math broader categories if available; e.g. pizza => restaurant
  • Business name is matched: “Alfonso’s pizza” works better than “Alfonso’s Restaurant” for “pizza”
  • 5+ reviews help
  • Category term in reviews helps
  • The physical address is not extremely important but influences the results
  • Average review score matters: score of 1 penalizes heavily

How to Uncover 100s of New Longtail Keywords in Minutes

  • ubersuggest uses google suggest to get new keywords
  • Use these keywords to get even more longtail keywords
  • Now you can add search volume, competition, etc. and work with them

How to rank product pages for SEO

  • Limit global navs -> exploit categories
  • Clear anchor texts
  • Canonical links
  • Similar pages should be interconnected
  • Minimize cross-category links
  • Related products work well: 5 – 10 max
  • Short urls
  • Keep product categories alive

Using a Glossary to Rank and Build Links

  • Helps providing internal keywords
  • Can get you inbound links
  • Enter public resource lists
  • People maybe going to quote you
  • My tip: Find people how search for definitions and prove it

SEO Experts discuss link building for affiliates

  • Interesting, unique product pages: videos, copy, images, comments
  • Guest blogging on vertical and horizontal reach
  • Create a good about us page
  • Ask the product provider if they use your review as a testimonial
  • Create infographics / widgets
  • Ego bait, interviews and crowdsourcing can help you to produce more content
  • Get active in your product’s community
  • Create useful press releases
  • Blog commenting
  • Compare your product with competitors
  • Be as unbiased as possible

Editorial Calendar for Content Marketing
Incredible extensive post about creating a editorial calendar – take a look and be amazed!

Reading Adobe’s Digital Marketing Blog (Part 1)

Another reading session. This time it’s the Adobe Digital Marketing Blog. One of the first posts are from the omniture blog which is now that blog.

Getting your daily dose of dashboards?

  • “feel good reporting” = long reports nobody reads
  • Instead of reading 50 pages, provide fast 30 seconds overviews
  • Daily monitoring helps you to fix problems fast

Industry benchmarks: everything you need to know

  • Problem with benchmarks: things are measured differently
  • Metrics vary between days, geography, etc.

More on conversion benchmarks…

  • How should I act based on trends in benchmarks?
  • E.g. conversion rate down – what does this mean?
  • CTR for emails up – which mails, which basis?

Got Alerts? Don’t let this happen to you!

  • Wanted to buy a new graphics card
  • While checkout a message said “your shopping cart is empty”
  • Check but couldn’t add anything to the shopping cart
    • Activate alerts for your most critical metrics!

The Dark Side of A/B Testing: Don’t Make These Two Mistakes!

  • Example: New home page with special offers and cleaner design
  • 90/10 split test, i.e. 10% to new design
  • KPIs: home page conversion rate and revenue per home page visit
  • both increased
    • Problem: Which helped increasing the KPIs – Clearer design or special offers?
  • Solution: Don’t change more than one element on a page – it helps you understand your customer’s behavior
  • Alternatively: use MVT
  • Example: tested new thing but CV lowered dramatically
  • Look at your customers – are the new or old?
  • Especially old, frequent customers can be unreceptive to changes
  • Solution: Segment your customers, better on RFM metrics

How to Spend Fewer Dollars, Smarter and Faster, during Tight Times

  • Search: real-time, easy measurable
  • Email marketing: fast, easy measurable
  • Online video: expensive but measurable

The Challenges and Value of Digital Marketing Integration

  • Customers are
    • Better Connected – more information, can easy switch channels
    • Bombarded – tons of information
    • Empowered – can publish reviews, write on their blog, etc.
    • Savvy – higher expectation for relevant and personalized experience
  • Harder to track customers on different platforms but possible

User-generated Content and Word of Mouth Marketing

  • Conventional marketing
    • Intercept – target and expose your message
    • Inhibit – make it difficult to compare your product to other
    • Isolate – remove all third parties
  • Digital marketing
    • Attract – create incentives for people to seek you out
    • Assist – be helpful and engage with people
    • Affiliate – mobilize third parties to become more helpful
    • Analyze – find out what’s working and where you can improve
  • Not only conversions matter, they rest of the people do too!

Reaching the Individual: Site Surfers Becoming People

  • Each visitor is unique
  • Provide relevant content if possible
  • Understand the behavior of visitors – how can you improve their experience?
  • Personalize as much as possible

Don’t Do This! 7 Pitfalls When Deploying Analytics (Part I)

  1. Neglecting key stakeholders – websites touch all facets of an organization!
  2. Focusing on tactical requirements – what are your strategic business requirements?
  3. Believing data equals requirements – don’t ask for KPIs ask for strategic goals
  4. Having too many KPIs – select these KPIs that are strongly tied with your goal

Don’t Do This! 7 Pitfalls When Deploying Analytics (Part II)

  • Get too much into detail – don’t neglect the global picture
  • Mul­ti­ple ver­sions of the truth – there are differences between measurements in tools. Get over it and start looking at trends!
  • Isolate yourself – Start teaching how to use analytics and bring power users into your circle for more innovation
  • Ana­lyt­ics suc­cess is all about build­ing a base­line for per­for­mance (your KPI trend), and try­ing new things to improve on this base­line. That’s it!

How to Make Testing Successful

  • Do it right the first time, so you have accurate data
  • Start testing the important stuff and act on your findings
  • Start with politically easy things first
  • Be excited about testing and evangelize

Answers to Practical Questions about Targeting

  • Test site elements, content bits, CTA, etc.
  • Targeting helps to feel your customer at the right place
  • You can practically target everything
  • First-time visitor can be targeted by referrer, keyword, time of day, day of week, geography, browser, OS, etc.

Do You Have an Automated Response and Lead Nurturing Program in Place?

  • Strategy for lead nurturing / drip marketing
    1. Send email from your real sales staff with phone number
    2. Send relevant content for your prospect – e.g. shopping cart abandonment -> send email with reminder; different emails for different industries in a B2B setting
    3. The timing should be right – first contacts to leads should be within five minutes(!); try emails for longer periods
    4. Follow up quickly and then back off slowing – don’t spam your prospect
    5. Automate everything

The Art and Zen of Testing for Success

  • Don’t just take lift as a goal
  • Start witch question: e.g. should be button be blue or red? Is the navigation on the left or right more effective?
  • Try to answer ‘why’
  • Advantage: It isn’t about the goal anymore, it’s about insights

#96/111: Conversion Optimization

What is it about?

Increase your profit by 40% just be changing your slogan. Sounds suspicious but it is possible. You’ll just need tons of good ideas, some time and testing. Saleh & Shukairy talk about conversion optimization and how you can increase your profit over time.

What can I learn?

Personas: I talked about personas some time ago but this book used them really in detail, which was refreshing. The idea is that you define imaginative customers and think about them if you do any decisions in marketing/sales. This will help you especially if you got different types of customers. However, it is important that you do your market research first. Lots of people fall into the trap that they just make up personas without knowing their prospects/customers.

FUDs: Fear, uncertainty and doubt. This is why people won’t buy from you even when you got a product they would buy. You can use your personas here, again. Think about their fears, uncertainties and doubts when browsing your website, e.g. “is my data secure?”, “what happens if I want to return the product?” or “does this work on my computer?”. You probably can’t convince people that they should buy your product if they don’t like it. But you can help people buy your product if they are afflicted by FUDs.

Iterative testing: I talked about testing some weeks ago in detail, so I won’t say that much about its basics. After initial testing, you shouldn’t just assume that now everything is perfect. The idea behind iterative testing is that you design your product and presentation and slowly change it element by element. This will improve your presentation and product step by step. Amazon does a great job doing this. They won’t relaunch every few years with a completely new design. Rather they change just some elements a time.

Conclusion

I don’t like this book as much as Always Be Testing, mainly because most content is in both books. Conversion Optimization doesn’t really bring new concepts in the game which aren’t already known. The book is OK. If you haven’t read anything about testing or conversion optimization, I would recommend Always Be Testing.

#66/111: Advanced Google AdWords

What is it about?

This year online advertising expenses overtook traditional marketing expenses. A lot of this money is invested into Search Engine Marketing. Brad Geddes explains how to market your product/service with Google AdWords.

What can I learn?

Be user-friendly: This mantra applies to SEO as well to Google AdWords. Write relevant ads and landing pages. If someone searches for buy ipod nano, you should display an ad about buying an iPod nano, not about buying an iPod or buying a MP3-Player. Why should you do this? Firstly, it increases your conversion rate because people actually find what they are looking. Secondly, you position gets better if your maximum CPC remains constant.

Use thank you pages: After subscribing to a newsletter or buying a item, you often get these thank you pages. Don’t miss this opportunity to strengthen your relationship with your customer. You can provide white papers, offer them subscription to special deals or recommend other products.

Test everything: Everything. Test your headlines, your ad copy, your landing page and different keywords. Google AdWords offers you tools for testing your ads. So how do you test? A simple method is to write three headlines and three ad copies and combine each with another. Therefore, you got nine different ads. If you got enough conversions on the ads. Go with the winner and look for an other keyword to optimize.

Conclusion

Advanced Google AdWords is such a great book. It covers nearly everything you want to know about Google AdWords and SEM. There is so much to learn about in only about 500 pages. There are even plans for starting and running your AdWords campaign. Great book. If you want to learn about Google Adwords, buy this book!