I’ve been optimizing sites for years, and last month made a “Magic Bullet” change . It was a 1 word change and more than doubled the conversion rate. This is worth sharing.
I’ve seen this on landing pages and emails, but never on a complex Internet Retail site with just a 1 word, not spending a cent on (paid) traffic, priceless! Literally!
My last post was about the Internet Strategy Checklist my firm uses to “cover all the bases” with clients when brainstorming their Internet Strategies (albeit a useless list if I don’t already know the client’s audience, objectives and opportunities). The list is arranged with the most important Internet marketing strategy components first, from the perspective of priority and hierarchy of what needs to be done 1st. The 1st category on the list is Website Optimization.
Without a website that can handle traffic, there is no sense of giving it any. So often companies get caught in the idea that sending more traffic to a site will result in more sales, and they are normally right, but not normally making profiting off of it the way they could be. The 1st thing we do for clients is audit their incoming traffic. If they are paying for clicks, we figure out the return on investment and estimate how they can better convert these “paid for” visitors once on the site. This is a minor step in the big scheme of things, but it does “stop the bleeding” so we can get to the point of getting sites on a path towards optimal health.
A good website is like a grocery store. People coming in have a sense of where items they want might be located and easily follow directions and conventions to getting what they want. This is no accident. Retail Strategists lay out stores be easy to navigate and promote. Sound familiar?
Website Optimization is getting the most out of people visiting an online property. This might be apply to a landing page, micro-site, website, online catalogue, online slide deck, Interactive tool etc. If your web presence is not handling visitors well, then paying to sending qualified traffic to it in large part a waste of money.
Good website optimization often starts with the website homepage strategy and how site visitors handle people once they arrive at it. I wrote a post on this a while back, click here to read it. The best place to start is to look at your website analytics and see were the top “landing pages” are (what pages people are entering your site) and then optimizing your landing pages (another previous post).
When I look at a site for the 1st time, I look at its “Promises”. What is the site promising the site visitor? Then, is the site delivering on its promises. This starts from the ad or search result that got the user to the site. Do they arrive on a page that fulfills the promise of the search engine (This shows why SEO without strategy is worthless, as it can just create “broken promises”. If you have a decent landing page and are getting more than a 20% bounce rate on it, it is likely caused by “broken promises”. I don’t want this to be an SEO post, but having an integrated SEO strategy is part of Website Optimizing (sending qualified traffic in any way is part of it).
Focus on website optimization as your primary web focus. This starts off by making sure the site is simple and well organized from the user’s perspective. Then it goes further into “giving people what they want”, when they want it and how they want it. It also means spending time on statistics and testing out different things (check out
Your customers have their own goals when they are your site (forget about your site’s goals for a minute). Once your site is organized from your site audience’s perspective, you need to set up analytic goals and track the “Goal Funnel” to see where visitors are falling off in trying to achieve THEIR goals. Once see where they are dropping off, you can critically look and very likely see why. Then you can fix it.
Now lets talk about your company’s and its site’s goals. These are really just the goals of the site visitor. If you achieve their goals, you will achieve yours. (This needs to become your mantra. Design it from your visitor’s perspective, give them what they want and help them achieve their objectives, you’ll profit from it, have faith).
It is so easy these days to get user testing (See Get Tested) there is no excuse not to watch people trying to achieve their goals on your site on a regular basis. This is the catalyst to website optimization because after watching your target audience trying and failing at core basic stuff, you will be compelled to do something about it.
Your site needs “Core Metrics”. These are what you need to measure. These metrics need to be from analytics, sales (or leads) figures, feedback data, and anything else that you could measure that would show that website optimization is working.
A Website Core Metrics Example
Give people what they want, do it from their perspective, make it easy and test test test. You likely have an SEO program. Now you need a Website Optimization program. They two have a lot in common. Neither give immediate results, seem simple but are not, and require a strategy and lots of work. There are there are website optimizing companies that provide such services, and even pair them with an SEO company. I suggest getting website optimization services before sending paid clicks at your site. So many companies build something and leave it. In reality, you can often get 100% better performance out of a page or navigational path through optimization.
Website user testing is now cheap on a per user test basis. Every website should undergo interface testing. If you need user experience testing, and at a great price, read this review.
I have been recommending User Testing for years. It used to take a lot of time, a lot of work, and be a royal pain in the butt .
There is a lot of pain in there. 1st, finding the right audience and getting them to actually show up is always a challenge. The part I hated the most was the time of day user tests were held, since most users groups are held after work to allow for people’s schedules. Well, that was then.
That’s it!
UserTesting.com is simple and effective. No, I am not being compensated in any way here, they don’t even have an affiliate program (although I would love to set up an affiliate strategy and program for them!). They are the real thing. A service that makes a difference. Refreshing really.
How it works – Tell them what you want users to try and do, making sure your target demographic is clear. Typically it takes about 3 days to get the 10 user testers I want, as opposed to about 7 business days for setting up a User Test. It also costs $30/user test (see coupon below) as opposed to about $150/user test the old way (My client’s costs have been cut in half as a result).
Here is a screenshot of my account , the test you see are for a client of mine (sorry I had to blur out their name etc for confidentially reasons) that really needed to improve their website. In fact, it was completely insane to throw paid traffic at their site, which they were to the tune of $6K/month, with the site in its current condition. In order for me to illustrate how much their eCommerce site needed a major revision (I don’t believe in redesigns, but that is another post), I conducted a simple 10 user test session with UserTesting.com.
After watching bit of 3 tests, the company stakeholder through up his hands and said "WE SUCK".
Here is what I suggest , get user testing for your site right away. Start with 3 Tests just to get a feel for it and identify the big issues. I even have a coupon making it $19/user instead of $30/user (if you use it before the end of May).
Get excited, your about to make discover you site’s biggest issues.
By the way , the service I use is www.UserTesting.com , and to my knowledge they are the only such service.
Here is the coupon , good till the end of May, 2009. Enjoy!
Anyone writing copy for web needs to understand how to write web copy. The reason is that copy writing for the web determines how and what of what your write actually gets read. If you write to have your copy scanned, then you are writing good web copy!
A page’s headline needs to interrupt and be relevant. It does not need to be descriptive, explain or introduce anything. It just needs to stop people and get them to the Sub-Header.
A Sub-Header needs to engage a website visitor while expanding on the headline and its relevance to what the subject of the web content.
Following reading the headline and Sub-Header of a page, people will turn briefly to images and then read the image caption. This is why it is so important to write the best image captions possible, as this is what people are reading to determine if going further is going to be a waste of time or not.
Write in bullet form;
Keep your paragraphs short. I suggest 6 lines or less. It really helps to bold the first part of your paragraph (no more than 1/2 of it), and place the most "to the point" copy there.
Use your website colours as the colours for your headline and Sub-Headers. You don’t have to use the exact colours, but doing this will help your copy stand out a little.
Calls to Action (what you want people to click on to fill out a form, become a sale or go further in the sales or lead process) should not be copy unless it is also accompanied with button that repeats or expands on the text link.
Just look at those image captions! This comes from www.eightbyeight.com , the website of an excellent eCommerce optimization company. I have met Amy Africa who is a partner at Eight by Eight and knew I would fine the best practices she and I both advocate.
I hope this helps!
Lets step back from the site objectives and underlying need for business profit for a minute. Lets talk about website architecture design and how to structure information in a way that it will get found and consumed by its intended audience.
For a lot of years (and still today), web professionals and website owners have organized websites as they saw their business , that is from their Internal Perspective . For those same # of years, months, days and hours, visitors to those sites have had trouble finding what they were looking for. This is because customers were looking for information from their external Customer Perspective .
So, website information architecture is often ignored or undervalued. Why does it matter? Well, lets step ahead again. When it comes to the way information is organized, which perspective, Internal or Customer, do you think ultimately leads to achieving more site objectives and more profit? I’ll give you a wild guess.
The problem with organizing information from an Internal perspective, or what a business feels is the "logical" organization of the business they know so well , is that customers don’t know the business that way. Customers only know their needs, and at the end of the day, they won’t put much effort into learning more than that, they’ll just leave the site.
Nine out of Ten people will not search until they have failed trying to navigate a site and have failed to find what they’re looking for. Therefore, search can be viewed as an indicator of customer frustration, more so than customer interest.
The top search results for a site are far more likely terms of things that can’t be found, not popular terms. I had to be responsible for leads worth a million dollars each month before I drove to the bottom of that fact! In the end, after reorganizing the site with the theory I advocate in this post, the search results really were for the most popular items, as the 1 in 10 people who searched as a preference rose to the top. But this only happened after the majority of users found what they wanted, they way they wanted (site navigation).
The result : The company expanded the sales force.
A website needs to present content from the user’s perspective, then offer complete clarity how to get to the information they seek. The problem is, most sites have more than one type of audience and each audience likely has more than one perspective. This is a lot to handle on a site, in particular while designing a website homepage .
So how to you organize a site to handle multiple audiences with multiple perspectives. Enter Streaming.
Most sites have these 3 Streams.
If you know that your site has 3 types of visitors, you can "call out" each type of audience and lead them to what they are interested in. It is important to determine your Primary audience. They may not represent the most visits, but should represent either your greatest revenue stream or opportunity.
Lead people by the product categories and product types they are interested in . This approach works great for product everyone knows, but if your customers are not REALLY familiar with your product and service offerings, then they are not going to know how to get to what they want, or even what they want. Product & Service categories are most often a useful way to present information on a site for some customers, so by all means offer it, but don’t organize your entire site around it.
In some cases, when the product is unfamiliar to customers, but the products are key to organizing content, it makes sense to lead the product stream through a wizard to help users figure out what they need.
If your company’s audience or products and services span across markets, you need to lead people by the market they consider themselves to be in. Lets say you were a cleaning contract company. You could span the corporations, schools, hospitals, small business etc etc. Each market you service could have specific preferences (i.e. Government wants cleaners with security clearance). By streaming by market, you get to present your "pitch" to each market individually, so they know everything you have to offer them.
There are only two types of web pages when it is all said and done. They are;
Navigation pages are used to get people to where they want to go. Their purpose is offer information needed to make the decision on where to go next, then offer them a clear path in the direction they need to go. If you have good navigation pages, your search statistics will go down, the need to search will go down.
The thing most people don’t realize is that people on a mission don’t pay attention to anything except what they are after. Therefore, trying to promote something on these pages is useless, in fact it is a waste of time for you and your customers. Promote and offer "Next Steps" with relevance on the Destination pages AFTER people have found what they are looking for.
Destination Pages are the final page on the user’s "quest" for information. These pages are focused on providing the information on the product, service, topic or solution that customer has come to your site in search of. This is where you deliver what the site visitor needs and organize it from their perspective. This way, they understand it and take the action both you and they want to take.
Destination pages need to "hit the spot" everytime. There is a good chance you will have to have more than one destination page for one product or solution. This could be due to different audiences wanting the same product or different markets wanting the same solution. What ever the case, Destination Pages need to speak directly to the people reading it.
Once your site visitors are satisfied , you can lead them to a "next step", "promotion" or some other "call to action" you want them to take, and more importantly, an action you think they will want to take at that point as well. Keep the offers relevant!
So by now I hope your understand the need of stream and how they affect your site Architecture. Handling multiple streams throughout a site, and perhaps resolving each into Destination pages that drive leads and builds your business, requires a lot of thought and planning. Don’t just spend 20 minutes on a white board with a catalogue and your product manager (pssss, get sales and customer service in there).
I hope this help you think about how others are viewing and using your website, and helps you organize you site better.
…and remember, you can do this!
A lot of people do not understand Internet marketing fundamentals . So, for the local, niche and small business people reading this blog, I think it is vitally important to cover the fundamentals around internet business strategy and make sure they are understood and valued, as successful internet marketing strategies will not happen if each Pillar is not given its due attention.
When I do internet strategy consulting, developing a client’s best internet marketing strategy, there are 4 Pillars of Internet Marketing Strategy I consider.
My 1st Internet profession was as a Developer. After 5 years of programming, I thought I knew something about good web design. I KNEW NOTHING! It was not until I moved to the business side and was charged with increasing conversions, in that case B2B leads, that I started to really consider what good web design is.
Good web design is not making things look pretty . Good web design is achieving the objectives of the site or page. Normally the objective is to drive conversions, and the disconnect is on this point. Sure, things need to look good and professional or they hurt convertions, but this is only part of the Web Design equation.
Business objectives need to drive the design of a website or landing page. There has to be careful consideration of what information is present where, and how it is presented. The information that the use wants to know must come first with anything you are trying to sell or tell them being secondary. Good Web Design can place focus of the user better, but its primary role is to answer the immediate questions, and get them where they and you both want them to go.
Take a look at the following website for a curtain shop in my area of Denver, Co. The design is good as far as look & feel goes. I know EXACTLY what this site does and if I am looking for curtains, I get the all important "ah ha!" a visitor needs to stick around a site more than 8 seconds (its like riding a bull). Not only is the top navigation clear, but so is the sub navigation. I could dig deep and pick on the "scent" of the site due to it not telling me "where I am right now" , or the page title not following the same font style as the top menu, or the menus not changing state when mouse over them. I could, but won’t because the architecture of the site, the layout of the pages, and the presentation of the navigation options make this site better than 80% of other sites right off the bat.
To learn a bit more about Web Design, and the importance of it beyond (or better said, before) "look & feel", see Nail a Niche with Landing Pages and Homepage Strategy & Tips .
As a former developer, this is the area I mastered early on, but was all I really knew . Not only do people have a hard time following things like navigation "image maps" (several links in one menu), but so do search engine "bots".
Another mistake is drop down menus (this is poor web design as well since people can’t "see" the options without having to take an action based on the limited information they get from a main menu title). Drop down menus are often done with Java Script and search engines don’t read this type of coding and with therefore not follow the navigation. With the search engines looking at internal links as a factor in ranking a site, sites with image map and java script drop down menus miss out on being more attractive to search engines and the result is less inbound traffic from the search engines. aka, You’re not being found.
Take a look at the site above again. Windows Dressed Up has image navigation. That is killing the site’s search engine rankings. In fact, I was searching for the site, but could not remember its name and tried a few searches like "Window Coverings Denver " and "Drapes Denver " and could not find them. They did not turn up noticeably in the search results.
These searches could have turned up Windows Dressed Up by this business doing 3 things.
There are also so other opportunities to improve search engine rankings.
This is the one Pillar most businesses focus on despite really needing to first handle Good Web Design and Coding first . Nonetheless, it is a key Pillar when considering strategy and internet, and where I spend a lot of my time as an internet strategy consultant. Driving people to a site that is converting poorly is a waste of money if the traffic is paid and a waste of effort if the business is engaging in social media or SEO efforts.
Once a site is ready to recieve traffic and can convert well, it needs to start driving relevant traffic to it. To drive relevant traffic, a business needs to know it audience, where they are online and how to best engage them. For instance, if you know your audience is interested in "home decorating", are women between the ages of 30 and 60 and reside in the Metro Denver area ( in the case of Windows Dressed Up ), then you could target them with Pay per Click, Online Advertising, Social Media Ads and a few other tactics that allow you to target by demographics and geography. You just want to make sure your traffic is relevant and highly targeted, as Internet Marketing is very unforgiving to those who don’t target well.
To achieve success online, you need more than good Web Design, Good Website Coding and Relevant Traffic. You need to to focus on convertions. You’re site has at least one objective. It might be to generate a lead, to make a sale, or have someone donate to your cause. Whatever the site objective, you need the following to start achieving them;
Streaming is identifying an audience and taking them through your site in the way you want them to proceed , but more importantly, the way they want to proceed. Lets say Windows Dressed Up in Denver had Interior designers as an audience. Calling out to them and leading them into a part of the site that addressed their needs, separately from regular customers would be streaming. As long as you provided all the information the audience wants, they will be where you can offer them relevant offers and in a place dedicated to your selling to them. Streaming audience types to areas meant for them will increase conversions.
All the best practices in the world will not make the best website. You need to analyze your site statistics, talk to your customers, learn from it and try new things. Try a new Headline or image. Move an offer up. Take out offers that are not performing. There is always better results with testing. I think what and how to tweak is a future post as well.
I hope this offers a foundation on Internet Marketing. It is important to understand the value of each Pillar and approach your web presence from the 1st to the 4th in order to save time and money.
