Have you ever wondered whether different layouts on your website would improve the conversions and sales you receive as a direct result of your website?

Google website optimiser will help you to answer many questions by allowing you to run simple but effective tests to see what the visitors to your site prefer and what aspects encourage them to pursue their interest further by making an enquiry or by purchasing a product directly from your site online.

Firstly you need to sign up for a free website optimiser account and then you need to look at your site with either your marketing team or your web designer. Deciding what elements of your site you would like to test is the first step you need to take.

Once the aspects of the site you would like to test have been decided you will need to create a duplicated page of the site with the alternative change made. This variation page will be uploaded and registered with website optimiser as the variation page and certain java script code which is provided will need to be added to the html to show the aspect which wants testing.

What the optimiser will then do is divide the visits to your site. One half will be sent to the original page and the rest to the new changed variation page. You would have stated a landing page for the goal completion, for example a thank you page following a purchase or an email enquiry.

The results will be taken and you will be able to see which page variant results in the most conversions.

The great thing about the website optimiser is that you are able to conduct multi-variant tests along side each other in one go so after the recommended period of time has passed you will be able to see all the results which indicate the best aspects from all the tests and put together a super site based on the best conversion features.

Things that can be tested are up to your imagination and creativity but common aspects to test are things like company message on headings, images, text sizes, thumb nail images of best products, different prices, colours and web page layouts.

So try web optimiser it could make fantastic changes to the success of your website and your Internet marketing campaign.

A successful Internet marketing campaign doesn’t just start and end with SEO.  Sometimes your SEO campaign may prove harder and more competitive than you initially anticipated.

A good internet marketing consultant would ensure that the all clients website needs are looked after from the start.

Finding out what your client wishes to achieve from their campaign is essential so you can ensure that you can meet the clients expectations in the best way possible. Once you know what your client wants to achieve you can integrate a combination of the best Internet marketing techniques to ensure that they get the best from their website.

The different areas you should cover are as follows:

SEO

SEO is ultimately the best form of Internet marketing for the long term but sometimes, the time to get to the position where you start to get the kind of return on investment expected, can be longer than you wish to wait. Once the site is at this position you will  need to maintain it by regular checks of the competitors and continual link building to quality industry specific sites.

PPC

A Pay Per Click campaign is often a solution to increase a websites sales from the very start of a campaign that can be ran alongside an SEO campaign, whilst the organic results are building. A PPC campaign is also an excellent method of finding out which keywords are the most successful for the website in question.

Email Marketing

Depending on your client and the products or services on offer an Email marketing campaign could be the solution to increasing sales for the client. This method will use the companies database of existing customers and will encourage them to return to the site to make additional purchases often with offers and benefits. It is easier to sell to existing customers than to generate new ones!

Article Marketing

Writng articles about the products and services offered by the website is a great way for you to really build a reputation and a relationship with the  potential customers. You can support the SEO campaign here by using long tail versions of the keywords for the article titles and linking the articles back to the site. Articles are a way of building trust in your clients website  with the potential customers which is invaluable when it comes to getting new customers to make purchases.

Conversion Rate Optimisation

Finally the look and feel of your website has to be optimised and set out in a way that works well and in a way that encourages visitors to the website to make a purchase or complete and enquiry. This can be in the way of a quick contact form or a clearly visible contact number.

Ensuring you get the customers message clear on the homepage and make sure that the visitor can find out the answers to what they require from the site easily and without having to search to hard. Make sure that e-commerce sites have a clear and easy payment system and that the best methods are used to encourage people to buy are used,  for example it has been found that  “buy it now” buttons produce better conversions with higher total sales if they say “add to cart” . This is less forceful and the visitors believe  more a free will choice and will respond better to this kind of button. These points should all be thought about considering the view from the visitor of the site as the most important part.

If you ensure that you consider all of these aspects when working either on a clients website or on your own, you will achieve the end result of increasing sales to  a much higher capacity.

Since the new launch of Google instant preview there have been many speculations as to whether this is good or bad for Internet marketing campaigns?

The arguments that have arose come in the form of queries on how this can effect analytic data which many Internet marketers base much of their strategy developments and assumptions of how the public are responding to the site.

One argument that has surfaced states that as the site can be previewed like this each view of the preview can be classed as a page view. The additional consequence of this is the thought that if following the preview people don’t continue to click on the site this will create a bounce. This argument says that as the visitor doesn’t get a proper look at the site, the  frequency of bounces could be higher and distort the analytics results to making them look like the home page has issues  when in fact it is a good standard.

I on the other hand sit on the other side of the fence with this and feel that after looking into many of my own clients analytics accounts can see no evidence to suggest that this is the case. I have completed comparison checks for this month compared to the previous month and see no significant changes in the bounce rates and visits for these clients who generally have quite consistent monthly results for these variables.

With this in mind my assumptions regarding how the Google instant preview can have effects on Internet market campaigns is more to do with conversion rate optimisation techniques.  The reason I come to this conclusion is based on the thought that potential visitors are in fact going to see a reduced image of your site to ultimately make the decision as to whether or not your site may provide what they are looking for.

Making your home page as aesthetically pleasing as possible, even in this reduced view will help. Decide on what improvements you can make to your site and the impressions people will get from this preview image of your site.

Do you feel you would get more people clicking on your page if it has lots of text or minimal text? What relevant images would give your company message in the best possible way? Can people see options for call to actions such as quick contact forms in this small preview and is there an easy to find navigation?

This is always good practice with Internet marketing and if you get it right with your website, I feel that when people do click on your site it will in fact reduce bounce rates as people will already have a sense of what style your site is.

The Creare Communications website preview shown here demonstrates how despite the small image the main aspects of this site are still very much visible and someone looking at this can see this site has quick links to the main Internet marketing services available, a quick contact form for an SEO quote, an example of a client website and a nice piece of text to give more detail if required.

Utilise the benefits that instant preview can offer your internet marketing campaign by getting ahead of your competitors by giving visitors a snap shot of what they want in this snap shot. Each change that Google makes shouldn’t be seen as a way of destroying websites chances, they should be embraced and used as an opportunity to continue the development of your site and keep it continually updated with the latest techniques.

Is Facebook taking over SEO?

There has been a lot of talk about Facebook recently, with the recent release of “The Social Network” movie which concentrated on the legal battle, as well as the early beginnings of Facebook and also, their recent joint venture with Yandex, the Russian search engine where Facebook will supply them with status updates through a data feed, similar to the deal with Google (although not as tasty a deal as they struck with Bing, see here.
They have also announced this week that they are launching their own email system which, according to some industry insiders could compete directly with Google`s Gmail. So with Facebook`s growing influence taking hold in the web industry, should SEO companies worry and will businesses start to use Facebook pages as a way of hooking new links?

Facebook Vs SEO

With Facebook being so dominant and having a powerful grip on social networking services, it was inevitable that the SEO industry would feel the effects but how much of an impact does Facebook have on SEO as we know it?

Aside from the social marketing techniques used by SEO companies and businesses there is one key factor that could make the difference and make Facebook a favourable option and that is the freedom Google now have to crawl through key information from users profiles. A couple of years ago there was only certain data available to Google from Facebook`s personal pages, this information included name, profile and pictures. However, Google was allowed access to more specific information from users profiles which included the most important factor of them all, users “likes” and “dislikes”. Offered on a plate to Google was users approvals of certain products, groups, companies, restaurants, shops or any business or social environments. Of course with each “like” on any particular group or business page there came a link to that website which would therefore be indexed by Google, increasing the number of links to that site. It does have a feel of almost cheating but right or wrong, these businesses are using the popularity and visibility of Facebook to promote their business and this all comes from having a simple vote attached to them from a users profile. On top of this businesses have the opportunity to pay for ad space, similar to that of Pay Per Click and so enabling them to utilise the functionality and popularity of Facebook to give their business more exposure.

A place for SEO

So Facebook is an easy platform to promote businesses quickly and to get a lot of exposure for free as well as the option of ads, so why do we still need SEO? There is an extremely strong case for using organic SEO techniques on a website and this is still a proven method with good solid results. In comparison with the Facebook method, organic SEO will normally be within the rules of Google`s algorithm, allowing the site to be indexed cleanly and easily meaning strong results in the long run. Whereas with the possibility of hundreds, maybe thousands of links created due to the users profile information from Facebook, Google may see that number of links and penalise the site. This could have a very negative impact on where your site lists and would be counter-productive.

Natural link building that takes place in an organic SEO campaign will produce higher quality links and in theory should be more relevant to the industry you are in, which in turn should drive more productive traffic to your site. Its great to have thousands of links but in the long run quality will always win over quantity with Google.

Another huge benefit of organic SEO is the fact that unlike Facebook links you are not tied to promoting your business through one system. Don`t forget that although Facebook is growing daily with new users logging on all the time there is still a large portion of people who wont necessarily have an account or who never use social networking sites due to the negative press they have received. Of course there are many advantages with an SEO campaign over a Facebook product page and one of them is also the personal touch. With a dedicated campaign manager in charge of your account you will inevitably receive feedback and professional guidance on an industry that is proven to deliver results which could help your site become more successful.

Ultimately, what I have described here regarding Facebook is mostly unproven and has not been noticed as a viable SEO option and with the uncertainty on how Google will treat these increases in links its unlikely businesses will run the risk of solely depending on this newer method over the proven results driven organic SEO. So with Facebook pages becoming more open to SEO oriented techniques and its ability to mine specific information which could be like gold dust, there could be a threat to Google in the future when consumers can do everything from their Facebook page, from communicating with lost friends to promoting businesses online.

Claims have been made that Google are hard coding all Google service sites and linking them with a different algorithm to what everyone else in the organic SEO world has to adhere to, making sure that their products and services always come to the top of the search above everyone who has worked hard at their internet marketing campaigns.

Is this an unfair tactic of Google who claims to be fair in its measure of who gets placed where in the search engine? They pride themselves on their ability to differentiate between the sites with the best content, most relevant back links and highest page rank etc. which us as SEO consultants strive to achieve so Google will be impressed enough to place our sites well in the SERPS.

If Google go against this method for their own benefit what does this say to us about their reputation of trust in fairness etc.?

One example that has been demonstrated of Google doing this is in the financial sector where if you enter CSCO for information on Cisco systems and share prices, Google Finance quite unfairly is placed at position 1.

Another example that has been highlighted is with the Google maps. With any area related search the Google map image will always appear at the top of the search and never any other sites map and it is a common opinion that Google are placing their products at the top to cash in on the control they have over this very powerful search engine. The addition to the introduction of paid links integrated in to map listings give indications that this could be true.

So what should we in the world of SEO think of this? Will this become more of a common occurrence with time as Google develop more products and services to ensure that businesses, in order to get on page one take on a product or service from them to be picked up in a special Google product algorithm that somehow favours these sites?

This could indeed change the way we address SEO and our campaigns if Google go all the way with this method of segregating sites.

Lets hope that Google decides to retain its integrity and give everyone a fair chance of getting that top spot!