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If your website isn’t capable of converting visitors into customers, you could spend thousands of dollars on advertising and still never see a sale.

The key to improving a website’s conversions is relevance – particularly, the relevance of your site to the priorities and interests of the people that visit it.

If they can’t see something they need, they won’t become a customer. But if you can give them exactly what they were looking for as soon as their browser loads the page, the likelihood of their clicking ‘buy now’ will show a marked increase.

1. Simpler checkout

For online retailers, the most important part of a website is the checkout page. It’s the most crucial stage in the conversion pipeline, and yet is often the part of the site that sees the highest abandonment rate. Simplicity is key to encouraging curious visitors to follow through with a sale.

“If you’ve got a 14-step process for somebody to purchase, you’re going to lose a conversion,” says Victor Navarro, commercial manager at search marketing agency Outrider. “You may have converted them to the sale point but when they’re actually going through the process, you lose them.”

For this reason, it’s best to avoid making visitors sign in to purchase online, although it does provide an efficient way of capturing their details and tracking their interest in your business. It’s also essential to use a number of recognised options for payment processing. As a bare minimum, an online store should offer a credit card gateway hosted by a well-known bank, along with the possibility of paying over PayPal.

While it’s obviously crucial to have basic security measures in place throughout the transaction process, Sasha Gilberg, managing director of ConversionBOOST, also suggests it’s also a good idea to let customers know the lengths to which you’ve gone to keep their details safe.

“On the checkout page, when you come down to the place where you want to enter your credit card details, simply highlighting the credit card fields with a security seal can make you look a lot more safe,” he says.

For more on how to build trust with visitors, read Nett‘s guide to increasing conversions by building trust.

2. Research

The first step is to have an idea of what your customers are looking for. Google offers a free keyword tool that gives users an indication of the search terms that generate the most traffic, both locally and internationally. Enter your site’s URL and some keywords you think customers might use to find your business online. The tool will show the volume of traffic these terms generate and how competitive they are to purchase in Google Adwords. It will also show similar information for a list of related keywords. This list is particularly useful, as it shows how customers are trying to find businesses like yours.

Google provides the keyword tool to help its AdWords customers improve their marketing campaigns online. AdWords is a service offered by the search company that lets businesses bid to have text ads placed in the search results for particular terms. Once displayed, the business that purchased the listing also pays for each click it attracts.

If your business has an online presence for the purpose of generating leads or selling products, it’s a good idea to investigate AdWords. Quite apart from the exposure it can create, it offers businesses a way to find out what sorts of messages web users respond well to.

For a visitor, the first step in the conversion process is that very first click on a search listing. If you have an understanding of why they clicked, the rest will be a matter of trial and error.

3. Where am I?

When a visitor lands on a page on your website – be it on a homepage, category landing page or customer contact form – they need to know within seconds whether that page is relevant to them. The copy (or writing) that appears on the page plays an enormous part in this process.

Make sure that all copy on your site is concise and to the point. Visitors need to be reassured that your site is actually relevant to the search listing they clicked on, so make sure your copy outlines what your business does quickly and simply.

Don’t overlook the importance of headings. People scan webpages rather than carefully reading every word, so make sure that all the headings in your content can provide a quick overview of what the page is about. The use of relevant keywords in headings will not only anchor the eye of readers scanning the page, but it also helps with search engine optimisation (SEO).

It’s also best that all writing addresses readers directly. The visitor isn’t interested in the company itself – they’re interested in what it can do for them, and the copy should reflect that.

4. Don’t load your homepage with calls to action

Calls to action (or CTAs) are the bread and butter of conversions. They are the parts of a webpage that tell the visitor to do something, like ‘Click here to sign up to our newsletter’. Once a web user has clicked on a search listing for a particular product or topic, the webpage they land on has to direct them to act on their curiosity.

Although CTAs are an important tool in the conversion process, it’s essential not to do more than simply fill your homepage with them.

“Visitors don’t want to be scrolling through pages and pages of content to try to find the information that they want,” says Outrider’s Navarro.

More than three calls to action on a single page will only work to confuse and alienate the visitor, and disrupt the conversion.

5. Dedicated conversion pages

For a CTA to really work, it needs to be placed in the right context.

If you want to turn search traffic for a particular keyword into conversions, then that term needs to have it’s own landing page on your site with a dedicated and unique CTA tailored to match the customer’s interests.

“It’s wise to treat every page as an opportunity to convert a customer,” says Outrider’s Navarro. “If a customer, lands on a page, and is viewing content which is obviously relevant to them, what’s the next step that you want them to take? If you can put yourself into the mindset of the consumer, you’re on the way to improving the return on investment you’ll get from your website.”

For example. if a dentist offered teeth whitening as a service, they might purchase an AdWords ad against that term and make the mistake of linking it through to their homepage.

“This gives the visitor a list of the company services, its background, its location – all this random stuff. It’s a bit overwhelming,” says ConversionBOOST’s Gilberg. “Some people will dig through all that to get to the relevant area, but most people click back. A better way to do this is to create a custom-landing page about teeth whitening. As soon as people get there, you have a headline or a video that talks about that specific problem, and meets the person where their mindset is right at that moment.”

6. Feature a secondary CTA

Not every visitor that lands on a product page is necessarily ready to hand over their credit card details immediately.

“A lot of traffic that is coming onto the page may not necessarily be at that buying point in terms of the purchase cycle,” notes Navarro. “They may still be in research mode.”
To ensure that click hasn’t been wasted, it’s imperative to have a second, softer call to action. For example, directing them to request a quote or like the business on Facebook allows for future contact with the business.

7. Contact details

Perhaps the most essential form of secondary CTA is to encourage visitors to pick up the phone. A website may be the hub of all your business’s marketing strategies, but it still pales in comparison to a brief conversation with one of your sales reps.

If possible, include a ‘contact us’ CTA on every page of the site. Uncertainty is often the only thing that’s keeping a visitor from following a search listing through to a sale. It’s in your interest to make it easy for them to ask a question.

8. Time to test

If you haven’t already, install Google’s Analytics so you can see where visitors are coming from, what search terms they’re using, and at which point they’re leaving the site.

This will give you insight into which parts of your site are performing well, and which may benefit from a revision to their CTAs.

9. Improve the value proposition

While the look and feel of a site can have a considerable impact on conversions, a simple tweak to what’s in it for the visitor can be enough to tip them into making a transaction or signing up for a newsletter.

Whether it’s a matter of revising a landing page to better deliver on the promise of an AdWords listing, or simply lowering the price of a product, it could be worth experimenting with value proposition alternatives when testing.

“It can be something like improving a guarantee,” suggests Gilberg. “By offering a longer money back guarantee, nine times out of ten that increases conversions. It also reduces refunds, because it shows customers that the company believes in the product. It builds trust.”

10. Be patient

Most processes involved in setting up and running a website take some time to refine, and improving conversions is no different. When testing, it’s wise to observe the effect of your changes over a considerable period of time before deciding whether they’re effective or not.

“Give it time,” says Navarro. “Don’t take the first ten clicks on each landing page as your results. Give yourself a timeframe which is going to allow for any fluctuations that may occur in traffic during a week for instance.”

Cheap Expert SEO Services | HAPPY Hosting

by Luke Telford | Nett

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Adelaide SEO Services & Website Design

platform and Android the fastest growing mobile OS platform. If you have an Android powered device and want to choose from a variety of Twitter Apps, then you are not going to be disappointed, simply because that there is plenty to choose from. Here are five of best Twitter Apps for your Android device.

TweetCaster

At first, TweetCaster looks like it has a little confusing design than most of its rivals, but it’s actually very easy to get used to. And, if you choose the Pro version, you’ll find that getting rid of the ads cleans everything up slightly. TweetCaster has plenty to offer. URL shortening is readily available and it’s easy to post photos and videos from your phone.

Twitter For Android

Twitter’s in-house Twitter for Android production cannot be taken for granted. The home page is minimalist, with large icons for its eight main functions, including viewing your latest tweets. The app isn’t without its flaws.  It’s not very customisable, but it’s extremely accessible. The option to compose a new post, for example, is available via a shortcut in the top right-hand corner of every screen, so you’ll never find yourself having to keep bashing the back button if you decide you want to tweet your mind.

Twidroyd

Twidroyd is easy to navigate, clean and well laid out. Like many Twitter apps, Twidroyd Pro offers a useful widget for your home page with three differently sizes. There are lots of integrated features but probably the coolest thing about Twidroyd is “LivePreview”. Turn your phone on its side and you get a landscape view of your Twitter timeline, with your tweets on the left and a preview of any links, photos and videos on the right.

Plume

Plume (formerly Touiteur) has come to be one of the most popular Twitter clients for Android phones and it’s not hard to see why.

Notifications, link shrinking and everything else you might want is present. But the biggest bonus is its interface. Not only is it highly intuitive, it’s also extremely customisable, offering lots of options, including various font sizes, colour coding and more.

The paid-for version is comparatively cheap and well worth trying. It comes with multiple-account support, view filtering, integrated picture and Web browsing, and even more interface customisation options.

Twicca

Twicca is best of all completely free, fast, stylish Android Twitter client. All the features you might expect from a paid app are available in Twicca for free, in a refreshingly ad-free format. Both old- and new-style retweeting are supported, as is URL shortening in your own tweets. Notifications, profile editing and landscape mode can also be ticked off the wish list. One simple, yet surprisingly useful feature is the option to set a colour label for certain people or groups of users that you’re following. This provides a quick way of browsing relevant posts on your timeline.

Do you know know of more great Twitter App for Android that we’ve missed? Please leave it as a comment below.

Adelaide SEO Sevices | HAPPY Hosting

by Sridhar Ramunajam | Smedio

Build your business online presence & increase your website traffic with our a brand website. We are offering for a limited time only a massive $500 Trade in on your old website.

All of our website packages come with our Content Management System (CMS). This gives you the ability to create and manage UNLIMITED pages within your website.  Along with media and language management, banners, contacts, polls, ecommerce and much more.

We find that the best way to understand a customer’s website requirements is to discuss it with them. Please fill out the form on the contact us page or call us on 08 7070 0500 or Click here to Request a trade in of your old website

The bedrock of conversion rate improvement is testing. However, testing is almost always easier said than done. You might lack the technical or executive support to implement a test program. A test or series of tests might already be in the works, but you’re sitting on your hands while the data is being collected.

What can the motivated marketer do to improve conversions today?

While testing will always provide you with the best guidance in making website conversion improvements, enough testing has been done collectively that certain conversion-facing improvements can be made in the absence of test data.

While you will always want to measure the impact of page changes on conversion rates by comparing data before and after those changes have been made, there are a number of measures you can undertake with relative safety that are almost certain to improve how many visitors complete a website goal.

1. Remove One Unnecessary Web Page Element

Singularly of purpose is important in maximizing conversion rates. In general, the fewer elements you have competing for a visitor’s attention, the more likely that visitor is to follow through on actions that ultimately lead a conversion, whether that conversion takes the form of an online purchase, successfully completing a form, or making a phone call.

If you’re only going to remove one thing to improve your conversion rate, the biggest bang for your buck is almost certainly going to come from removing an unnecessary form element. People don’t like filling in forms, and they also don’t like divulging personal information. By removing an unnecessary form field, you’ll increase the likelihood that a visitor will fill out and submit the form.

Review each form field and ask yourself two questions:  is it helpful to collect this piece of data, and is it necessary?

Gender declaration is a useful example here. If you ask visitors to select “male” or “female” on a form, what use do you make of that information? This is frequently the sort of data that’s collected solely to be able to report on visitor demographics, or is being collected for “future reference.”  In both of these cases, there’s no actual benefit in collecting gender information, so it should be dropped from the form.

Perhaps that information is used – say in differentiating subsequent email offers by gender. Then you need to ask if that information is necessary, even if it is helpful.

Put another way, is this essential information, or are you willing to see it omitted if this results in more conversions? If conversion trumps data collection, then at the very least make that a non-mandatory field, which will also likely improve your conversion rate on that form.

For sites where the conversion does not involve a form, or if you’re already asking for the bare minimum of information in your form, look at other places where an unnecessary page element can be removed. When a website visitor enters into the conversion funnel, you don’t want that visitor to be distracted from completing the goal at the end of that funnel.

The appearance of a secondary call to action, a link that unnecessarily provides a path out of the funnel, and even non-clickable visual elements that draw the visitor’s focus from completing an action can all potentially lower conversion rates.

2. Reduce The Load Time Of One Page

The longer a page takes to load, the less likely a visitor is going to stick around. According to arecent study, a one second delay in page load time can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. Furthermore, users are less likely to return to a website with pages that load slowly, and page speed is now acknowledged by Google to be a factor in rankings. There is simply no downside to making a page load faster.

Google has made diagnosing page load time easier of late with the introduction of page speed tools, including a simple form where you can enter a URL and page speed improvements are suggested. Common sense questions can augment tool findings.

Are any images being served that are being resized down with HTML that could simply be replaced with a smaller image? Are unnecessary scripts being run on the pages, such as tracking pixels that are no longer used?

Improving the load time of a single page may not send your conversions through the roof, but it’s a good place to start. However, as most sites are based on page templates, you may find that making one change has a positive impact on page load times across your website.

3. Add One Call To Action To Your Thank You Page

Thank you pages – the page that appears after a visitor has successfully ordered an item or submitted a form – are often missed opportunities. Yes, the visitor has already successfully completed the goal in this visit, but you want to facilitate future conversions by providing a follow-up action for that visitor to pursue.

Some of the calls to action you can consider adding to a thank you page include:

• Signing up for a newsletter
• Becoming a follower on Twitter or a fan on Facebook
• Inviting the visitor to share the offer they have just completed with others
• Providing a coupon for a future visit

Almost any call to action on a thank you page is better than simply saying “thanks” without providing any links for the visitor to follow. A visitor in this case is really left with only one easy course of action:  closing the browser window.

4.  Replace One Block Of Text With Bullet Points

Identify a page in, or closely related to, the conversion funnel that contains a large paragraph of text, and then rework that paragraph as a bulleted list. The bigger the text block and more convoluted the copy, the more likely it is that it is having a negative impact on conversions.

Among the reasons why bullet points may be more effective than text blocks:

• Bullet points are more effective for listing the benefits of a product or service, since each point is distinctly enumerated
• Special formatting stands out that much more in bullet points compared to a paragraph
• People find it easier to scan bullet points than a big block of text, which is important because the average visitor spends very little time on each page

The very exercise of reworking a wordy paragraph as a bulleted list can be beneficial. Self-promotional copy without useful information for the visitor doesn’t lend itself well to a bulleted list, and should be replaced with better information or deleted altogether.

There are any number of candidates you can look at for making this improvement, such as a product page with a verbose product description, or a wordy return policy FAQ. The existence or absence of a bulleted list won’t make or break your site’s conversion rate, but you’ll rarely be doing your website visitors a disservice by making the site’s copy easier to read and digest.

5. Use Analytics To Uncover One Actionable Insight

So you’ve got a fast site with nothing to distract or impede visitors in their journey through the conversion funnel. You edited your content and its presentation for maximum ease of readability. You’ve carefully considered possible post-purchase visitor actions and incorporated these into your thank you page.

Is there nothing you can do improve your conversion rate without testing?

Unless you’re not using analytics on your site (in which case it’s laudable, but bizarre, that you’re even investigating conversion improvements) the answer is almost certainly yes.

Sifting through your analytics with an eye to improving conversions, even without a specific purpose in mind, is almost certain to uncover at least one actionable insight.

Adelaide SEO Sevices | HAPPY Hosting

by Aaron Bradley | Search Engine Land

The Internet is like a buffet full of a variety of fruits, vegetables and meats to choose from. Web surfers have many enticing selections before their eyes, and they will naturally be attracted to the most appealing websites. Professional SEO Services can help you develop such an interesting site to attract customers.

The following are 12 clever ways to attract traffic to your website.

1. Real-Time Content With Specials on Certain Days

Restaurants have special deals for certain days to handle high-and-low traffic periods. Why not mix in exciting, real-time content with special features based on the day of the week. Some companies play music from a certain band every Friday – why not create a buzz with a special “day” that will give people a reason to visit and tell their friends.

Superior Customer Interaction

2. Run a Poll

Local television and radio stations are continually running polls to measure viewer opinion. People want to feel heard. A poll will make your website more interactive as you allow the visitors to determine content.

3. Respond to Customers Immediately

Web visitors return to websites that achieve “excellence” in some field. According to Super Blogging Tips, you can attract more Web traffic by rapidly responding to customer comments, questions and e-mails. A great response time could turn a visitor into a client.

4. Free Giveaways

People love to get something for free. Offer a giveaway for registration or the best comment. You can build up the contest over a period of time and have a special date for the big announcement.

5. Newsletter

When you provide good tips, information and news in a newsletter it can attract frequent visitors. Issuing a free newsletter regularly will keep viewers coming back.

Linking to Popular Sites

6. Social Networking

Social networking is very popular. Link into the vast networks of Twitter, Facebook and MySpace to attract customers on their turf.

7. Promote your URL

If you add your URL to interesting comments you leave on another site, it could lead to customers visiting your website. Tie into popular industry sites that your customers are likely to frequent.

8. Guest Blog

According to The WWW Observer, being a guest blogger can increase your exposure. Many famous people got their “big breaks” when asked to “guest host” a famous show. Similarly, if you do a good job people will search for your website.

9. Tell-a-Friend Referrals

According to Justin Michie, a good way to promote your site is to include a “tell-a-friend” form. These referrals are done for apartments and banking accounts – why not offer a reward to those who have the most friends sign up for your website?

10. Squidoo Lens

The experts at Super Blogging Tips suggest that sites should create a Squidoo lens, or ‘snapshot’ site, so customers can directly link to your Web pages. Squidoo is a great place to find “content, advice and recommendations.”

11. YouTube Account

YouTube is a great way for people of all persuasions to connect. Many people have become famous due to their “cute” YouTube videos. Adding your own videos could tap into a new market.

12. Yahoo! Answers

Develop your reputation as an expert by answering peoples questions on Yahoo! Answers. You can include a link to your blog as the source of the great information.

Increase Your Website Traffic with HAPPY Technologies

Source Sarah Howell | Business 2 Community

1. SEO  (Search Engine Optimisation ) results take time

Like many things, results take time. You cannot expect your optimised website to achieve results within a 24 hour (or even 1 month) time period. Great results take time. Search engine optimisation takes time – nothing worth doing happens overnight.

2. Update your web pages

Basically, any keywords which you want to be found must appear on your web pages and they must appear in the right elements on your web pages.

The most important elements to optimise are as follows (in order);

• The Title Tag
• The URL of the web page
• The Meta Description
• H Tags
• Image Alt Tags

3. You don’t just need links – you need the right links

Good backlinks are the key to high rankings and prioritisation on Google. Backlinks are like votes; the more quality backlinks that point to your site, the higher your site will rank with Google. The links to your website should ideally be from related websites and they should contain your keywords in the link text.

4. Choose your keywords carefully

Optimize your website for keywords that attract your target clientele, eg. “Adelaide Accountant” or “Certified Practicing Accountant”, not simply “Accountant”.

Some useful free keyword research tools which may assist you are:

• Google Keyword Tool
• Google Suggests & Instant
• Google Insights
• Google Trends

5. Be Realistic

Getting your business on the first page of Google for a highly competitive keyword such as “cafe” or “electrician” is possible but your competitors will be established websites with numerous backlinks. You will find it very difficult to outrank these pages. Ideally, start with less competitive keywords and then proceed to the more competitive terms. You need to gain the trust of Search engines before they will give you a high ranking for these competitive keywords.

6. Set the right goals

The purpose of search engine optimization is to obtain high ranking for your business, using the right keywords, so that your target clientele will be directed to your website. The goal you are working towards with search engine optimization is  to increase your sales. Make sure you maintain records, track your progress and review your strategies against this goal.

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