How concerned are you about your landing page conversion rate? Hopefully your answer is a great deal. What is the point of building a great site on first page of Google or Yahoo if your user clicks over, sees no call to action and clicks back to search for your competitors pages? I was recently looking through Google’s analytics webmaster tools to dig in deeper and gain a better understanding of the breadth of the tools available. In their conversion university is an area that describes the six steps to good conversion. Most of these 6 steps are well known, especially if you have ever built any ecommerce type of website. While I believe all these are essential, I especially like the 7th step, or the actual “test it” tip. You must test, test and test again. Test what works and more importantly what doesn’t is very important. Whether in paid either trying the old A/B split testing or a multivariate testing - be sure to test and make sure you applying those positives to your landing pages. Happy Conversion and Happy Testing!
According to Matt Cutts in a recent interview he has espoused the following top things to continue or focus on in 2008 with regards to your search programs. Some or most are pretty obvious.
1. High Quality Content - Is this news to anyone out there? Yes, my friend you need some seriously good regular unique keyword rich content that your readers will appreciate and want to come back for more.
2. Personalization - Specific demographic niches, something that will attract your users to the community of what ever site your working on and engage them.
3. Local - This goes for every business, large and small - you have a business address and no local maps? This should also include your branch addresses as well. If you have a local address in Google and it’s showing as incorrect, you can edit the map to the correct physical location. This does take some time to actually get updated in Google. Same goes for Yahoo and MSN Live too - don’t forget them!
4. Mobile - I know this is still fairly new, but it will be very big! When you consider that Google and Yahoo have produced mobile search engines - some very basic Mobile SEO components should avoid tables in your design, have concise titles, have a small page size, and include good content. And finally, don’t neglect the Mobile Sitemap
Happy Holidays and Happy SEO in the New Year!
When starting out on your quest to find the “best” keywords for your overall site side strategy - one could go about doing this in a number of ways
1) No real planning - just find any word that you might find in your site
2) Develop a real competitive strategy and find the most relevant keywords your competition is showing for - check to see if your site is anywhere in the top 2 pages.
I’d personally go with the 2nd strategy listed, but that’s just me. I have worked with a number of SEOs from the most experienced to those just starting out, all have varying ways of trying to accomplish this sometimes heavy task.
First understand who your competition is. That alone will get your keyword research going. Knowing they have the same audience as you do, understand what keywords they are found for on the first page in Google and Yahoo. Are these keywords being targeted on any of your pages at all? If not, you had better revisit your high priority content and get that updated to reflect this.
Develop a list of those competitive keywords - they should always be as specific in nature as possible to your products and services. Always take into consideration the size of your site as compared to your competition, can you displace any of those results? That should be your overall goal - also of course keeping in mind your conversion rate too.
As you know link building is very important to the overall health and well-being of your SEO campaign, so get the keywords right - this will set the stage for bigger SEO factors later.
This now leads me to really start talking a great deal more about link building, and other off page factors.
Recent Comments