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Website Improvement Crash Course Part 1 Getting More Traffic
Added by
David Coleman
on
16 August 2010
You might be reading this for one of the following reasons:
• You’ve lost interest and enthusiasm for your website
• You’re disappointed in the results your website returns
• You’ve got to the top of Google and you’re wondering where all your sales are
• You’re willing to invest time and money improving your site but don’t know where to start
• You only had a website made because you were told you needed one
The beauty of the Internet is that the practises you can use to make your website a small success are scalable to make your website a massive success. The more sales and leads you get from your website, the more you can justify spending time and money improving it.
As we state at every opportunity, an underperforming website is likely to have one of two problems. Either you’re not getting enough visitors to your site, or once they’re there, your website isn’t doing a good enough job of convincing them to buy / contact you / sign up to your newsletter
.
There’s no silver bullet to having a high-performing website; you just need to come to realise that there are lots of straight-forward, common sense points that all work together to make your site a success.
Preparation
OK, so how do you tell which problem you’re suffering from...lack of visitors or a website that’s not very good at selling? Most of the people we work with suffer from lack of visitors. They’ve got a website and don’t know what to do about getting people to it.
Before we start, firstly and most importantly get some kind of visitor tracking system on your website. I love Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics) because it’s free, and is simple to install; just put some code onto your website.
With visitor tracking installed, you’ll not only get a feel of how many people are currently visiting your site, you’ll also be able to judge the success of your improvements.
Before continuing, take the time to answer the following questions to get into the right mindset.
• What is the aim of your website? What do you hope to achieve in having one?
• Have you got a marketing plan for your website?
• What type of customer do you want to attract, or are already attracted to your website?
• What problem do they have they’re hoping you will solve for them?
• What questions and objections might they have that you should answer?
• What do your competitors’ websites look like or do?
• How are you going to stand out from your competitors? What are your Unique Selling Points?
Read the points above again, this time replacing the word “website” with the word “business”. The same questions apply to both. You should think of your website as a business in need of its own business plan.
The following advice is an overview of the most common problems we solve. Think about every point and how you can apply it to your own website.
Get more people to your website, for free
The best website in the world won’t get anywhere without people visiting it. How to get more visitors is the number one problem facing website owners.
Visitors from Google
Yes there are other search engines that people use, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask, for example, but through tracking visitors to our own websites 90% of them come from Google.
As I’m sure you know already, you ideally want to be the first result on a Google search result page when a potential customer searches for a product or service that you provide. Being in this number one spot is referred to as “the top spot” or “being at the top of Google”.
In 2009 I spoke to a gentleman whose website used to come up top for the search term ‘colour printing’. He told me that they received over 80 phone calls per day because of it.
When someone searches on Google, it has to decide which websites are the most relevant.
The more generic the term being searched for, the harder it is to prove to Google that your website should be shown first over the hundreds or thousands of others that are competing for the same phrase. It would be much easier to get to the top of Google for the phrase ‘colour printing in Stafford’ because there’ll be less competition, but it’s a trade off as there will be less people searching for it. More exact search terms are called ‘long tailed’ search terms.
If you want to get to the top of Google for the more generic phrases, one strategy is to first get to the top for some of the longer tail phrases so that Google can see you’re relevant.
OK, so how do you get to the top for any phrase?
There are two main things you need to concentrate on in order to get anywhere with Google.
• Links to your website from other, ideally similar websites
• The regular addition of original and relevant content to your website (articles / news / blog posts)
Links
On a basic level, Google sees links to your website as votes. The more websites that link to you, the more important and useful your website must be.
Links from websites that are of a similar nature to your own will have more “weight” behind them than links from completely unrelated sites. A higher value is also placed on links from more established sites that have a lot of links going to them, i.e. votes from sites with a high amount of votes. It’s a big interweaved web of links and the more links that point to you the better.
Big companies spend thousands of pounds and employ a lot of people to build links to their website to get to the top for the more generic phrases because they know how valuable those top spots are.
If any of your clients have a website, ask for a link to your website from theirs. Find people asking questions on Internet forums that are related to your area of business and give them helpful answers and a link to your website if it will aid them further.
Don’t be afraid to give information away, like this very article. If it helps people, adding it to your website can attract links from other websites. Announce the fact that it exists with sites like http://pingoat.com/
Also consider writing articles about your area of expertise and submitting them to sites such as www.ezinearticles.com . You can put a link back to your website in the “resources” section at the bottom. There’s more about articles in the “content” section below.
Content
You’ll most likely have heard that you should keep your website up to date with interesting and original content. Do you know why you should? Maybe you’d be more motivated if you understood why you are being forced to do this?!
Keeping your website updated with interesting news and articles will not only make your website look more ‘lived in’ to your visitors, but search engines give greater preference to websites that are regularly updated, helping you show higher in the search results and in return get more visitors and more leads. New, interesting content on your website is also a great excuse to post a message on Facebook or Twitter. Not only will you get interested people visiting your site, but you’ll also be building links back to your website, again helping you in the search results. If your content’s good enough, other people with websites may link to your site, AGAIN getting you more direct visitors and helping you out in the search results!
It’s no lie that to start with it can be very hard to think up things to write about. Write your take on the latest industry news or what the trade bodies are up to. Don’t be afraid of writing about things that are obvious to you either; they might be mind-blowing to your potential customers.
Whenever I write about websites and the Internet I picture search engine optimisation specialists reading it and thinking how basic some of the advice might seem! IT DOESN’T MATTER! Your target audience is on your website looking to solve a problem. If they knew the answer already they wouldn’t be on your site considering paying you for it! Show them you know what you’re talking about.
Almost every website that comes up at the top of Google for a competitive term is full of useful and highly relevant information. Aim to make your website a knowledgebase for your industry. The more content you put on your website that relates to your industry, the more of an authority you look to potential clients AND to the search engines.
I mentioned earlier that you can get more links to your website through writing articles.
When I say write articles, I imagine a lot of people thinking “Urgh! What does he think I am, a journalist?!”. An “article” may be a few paragraphs highlighting the benefits of your type of product or service. Don’t make it an out and out shameless sales letter. Include details of how your product or service helps the people who consume it and how they can get the best out of it.
If you’re a landscape designer, write a piece on the most popular styles of patio and garden wall at the moment, or how about an article briefly analysing the layouts of popular places. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box too if you’re struggling for ideas. What about an article about how to host a great garden party on your new patio?
A Search Engine Optimised Website
When Google takes a look at your website to decide what it’s about, it’s not a Google employee but actually a computer reading it. While to a human it might be obvious what the page is about, the Google computers have to work it out in a mathematical kind of way. You can help Google understand what your website is about by following a few simple steps, some of which you may need your web designers to help you with:
• Make sure the titles of your pages, i.e. the text that appears at the very top left of your web browser briefly describes what is on the page.
• It’s debatable as to its effectiveness but I always make sure my “meta tags”, a kind of hidden description of the page is filled in because Google can read it.
• Give your content a big title. In web design terms, the titles should have “H1 tags” around them to tell Google “This is a title, it’s very relevant”.
• In the main text on your page, use as synonyms, or words with similar meanings to your main subject so that Google can definitely cotton-on to the subject you’re talking about.
• Make sure that your pictures are relevant to the content of your page and that the picture’s “alternative text” is descriptive of the picture.
Google themselves say that the more advanced their computers get at reading websites, the more they’ll be able to emulate humans, and so their message is “Make it easy for humans to understand and Google will follow”.
WARNING: Some people may recommend using sneaky tricks to boost your site in the Google rankings. The use of sneaky tricks is referred to as “black hat” and while they may get you short term boosts, you will more than likely be penalised in the long term. Sneaky tricks include trying to manipulate the Google computers by writing out lots of related words in the same colour as the background so you can’t see them. No no no!
Buy more website visitors with Pay Per Click advertising – for those of you who haven’t heard of it
When you do a search on Google, you get the results on the left, which are called the “organic” results, and the ones on the right (and sometimes three at the very top) which are called the “sponsored links”. These are the Pay Per Click adverts. The most commonly used Pay Per Click system is Google’s “Adwords”.
It doesn’t cost you anything when these adverts are displayed. You only pay when someone is interested in your advert and clicks on it, taking them through to your website. The cost can vary from a few pence to several pounds depending on the number of competitors showing their adverts. You specify a daily budget so it doesn’t run away with your bank balance. When your daily budget is depleted from people clicking through to your website your adverts automatically stop showing.
When you sign up for a Google Adwords account, you are asked to set up your advert text, the page on your website you’d like it to go to and the search words you’d like to trigger your advert to show.
You can start with Pay Per Click by visiting
www.google.com/adwords
When you start paying to get visitors to your website, you can start to see why what I’ll talk about later in the “Getting More People To Buy” section becomes more important.
Even if you’ve never used Pay Per Click I urge you to read the following section for existing Pay Per Click users.
Pay Per Click advertising – for those of you who use it already
Pay Per Click does work for a lot of people. Sometimes though it can feel like you’re spending an awful lot of money with Adwords and getting very little in the way of sales or leads from your website.
The first concept to get to grips with is relevancy. Is what you’re saying in your advert text supported by what’s on your website when people get there? Does the same message flow through? There’s a reason they’ve clicked your advert so make sure you carry on in the same vein. This will help to get people to buy.
The price you pay when someone clicks on your advert is related to its “quality score”. Google looks at every advert you display, along with the webpage it goes to, and calculates how relevant your page appears to be. It expresses this as a score out of 10.
If you can get your quality score up to a 10 the amount you pay per click on that advert will PLUMMIT! Make sure your page’s title, headings and main text cover what you’re advertised in your advert.
If you program Adwords with different adverts, Google will automatically alternate them for you and tell you which ones attracted the most clicks. Always look to test variations of your best performing adverts against each other to squeeze the very most out of your advert.
In the list of keywords you want your adverts to display for you can enter what are called “negative keywords”. It’s essential that you regularly look at the Adwords reports telling you exactly what people are typing in to trigger your adverts because you are likely wasting a lot of money. If you sell the finest ceramics, you’ll want “cheap” and “value” to be in your negative keywords list to tell Google not to display your advert when these words are searched for.
In
part two, we look at how to get more people to buy from your website once they get there.
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