Hello and welcome to this week’s SEO video blog with me James and my colleague Joel. Here at Creare we talk a lot about direct SEO techniques such as link building and on site optimisation, but today we want to look at little more closely at conversion rate optimisation.

Yeah more specifically, we want to offer a few useful tips on how best to optimise your landing pages to keep bounce rates down and send conversion rates up. It’s great having loads of traffic coming to your site through your keywords, but if a large % of your traffic is bouncing away or not converting, it can all be in vain.

1. Are your visitors navigational, informational or transactional searchers?
The first thing to do is to work out if your target audience are navigation, information or transactional, and to make sure your landing page accommodates their needs accordingly.

Navigation searchers know of your site and are simply using the search engine to find it, so make sure you page has clear navigational links allowing them to access the rest of the site. Around 10 links in your navigation is probably the most we’d recommended.

Informational searches often come in on longtail phrases and are looking for information so they need relevant info which is easy to digest, so think bullet points, specification info etc. Remember to emphasise calls to action too to turn these searchers into customers.

Transactional searchers are more ready to buy, so they’ll be interested in product specific information, such as price, shipping details etc etc. Make that checkout button nice and prominent on these pages.

2. Make your pages relevant to your keywords.
This may seem like a basic tip but if your customers come through on the keyword ‘boxing gloves’ and your page is mainly about football kits then your conversion rate will be low. Staple your colours to the mast early by including your keywords in headings, bullet points and titles.

3. Use images
Following on from this then why not use images above the fold to reinforce the relevance of your landing page? Images are instantly recognisable, and tell the visitor that your page is relevant to their keywords. Local landmarks are also reassuring for regional campaign landing pages and help to build trust in you as a local company.

4. Calls to Action
Once you’re confident that your landing page will have a healthy bounce rate, add some vibrant calls to action to encourage user to do what you want them to do. Contrasting colours are important for call to action buttons and numbers, and be sure to leave plenty of blank space around them to guarantee that they stand out.

5. Product Videos
Video is an excellent way of engaging users when they land on your page – especially for product pages. Why not use a short video to praise the virtues of your product or service, but be sure to keep videos brief and ensure they don’t take up too much space on your page.

The placement of videos can also be crucial to conversion rates. If you have a product which is available in multiple brands but there’s one specific brand which is cheaper and which you make the most money from – why not place a video about the more lucrative brand on the other brand landing pages to ensure it’s the more profitable brand which sells most.

So that’s all for this week, we hope you can take something useful from this video. If you have any to add please feel free to do so in the comments below.

Thanks for watching!

Hello and welcome to this week’s SEO video blog. Today, James and I thought we’d talk about how organic SEO and Pay Per Click advertising can work together in the best way, for the best results.

We all know that running a PPC campaign before your organic campaign begins performing can be useful, but how about running the campaign while your organic SEO is working?

Yes we see too many webmasters and SEO consultants who believe that SEO and PPC are two services which shouldn’t be used at the same time. This simply isn’t the case, so we thought we’d run through a few tips for making the most of both aspects of online marketing.

1. Testing Keywords

This is probably the most useful feature of using both PPC and SEO at the same time. Basically, you can use PPC click to overcome the biggest problem with Organic SEO – the time it takes to start, configure and be successful in a campaign. PPC keywords and campaigns can be changed instantly, allowing you to experiment with different keywords at the touch of a button.

Once you find a keyword which has a good Click through rate for PPC, you can roll this out to your organic campaign and you don’t have to wait 6 months to know whether the phrase will convert or not, as you already have this information.
2. Testing landing pages

There are other things you can test with PPC too, such as landing page optimisation. Why not run two campaigns using the same keyword but different landing pages.

Using the data gathered, you’ll be able to see which landing page converted better and then you can choose this one for your cheaper and longer term organic campaign.

3. Testing locations

The final test you can do uses PPC ads to test which location works best for any given keywords. The ad manager allows you to only display your ads to searchers from a specified area or radius. By changing this radius and recording the CTR, you’ll be able to gauge regional interest in your product or keyword and then adjust your regional SEO campaign accordingly.

4. Umbrella vs longtail

Using SEO and PPC together can enable you to dominate the SERPs for your industry’s phrases. For example, why not target large umbrella phrases with your organic campaign whilst focussing on longer tail variations with your PPC ads.

5. Google Merchant Integration

The final point on the list integrates your Google merchant data with your adwords campaign. Basically, using product listing ads and product extensions, you can feed product data from your online shop directly into your PPC ads so that product details and price begin to appear in your adwords campaign.

This can lead to better click through rates and if it doesn’t then it’s a good indication that perhaps your prices aren’t competitive within your market place and changes are needed across your campaign and business model.

So that’s it for this week, thanks for watching and please add any of your own tips and tricks in the comments below.

Welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, Recently Google integrated it’s privacy policy for all of its products including mail, search, social and youtube.

The reasoning behind the change is to improve the usability and user experience of their core products and will effect PPC, Organic, Social and Video results.

So with ‘James and I’ living and working in the SEO world how will this effect us?

Some key points are:

• Targeted Advertising
• Personalized organic results
• Suggested Videos & Interests
• Suggested Social Media Profiles

The data that is now passed between the Google products identifies your past search history, demographic and Google + profile details to decide which results suit you most.

One important thing to consider moving forward is your keyword choice and target demographic, think objectively to ensure your website suits your audience and the type of serp you want to appear in.

This sounds obvious, but consider the following keyword ‘SEO’, a marketing manager or business owner may understand the term but is looking for company like ‘Creare’ to take on their website.

hypothetically if we consider this is the first time this imaginary user has searched SEO this is what they will see. Essentially a list of businesses selling SEO.

<screen shot>

Where as if we ‘log in’ to My Google account we see a huge difference in the type of results, gone are the companies and instead we have social recommendations with Google +, Videos, Images, Blogs and Research Sites. The only company left in the SERP is Creare as Google knows through Google + I am a contributor to the blog.

<screen shot 2>

So if i wanted to target people specifically in the SEO industry to our site, we would have to set up our strategy in a different way.

We could look at guest authors from the SEO industry that have authoritative Google + accounts, be set up to deliver resources, industry information or guidelines. All to help encourage other industry experts to +1 your site to improve social signals and to link to you from sites within the industry.

We would recommend that ideally you would integrate all these methods in your SEO campaign anyway, but we believe you would have to increase this investment to target industry users and not joes bloggs the small business owner, especially in the world of SEO.

We are well aware that its a tough topic this week, if you feel that Google’s new privacy policy will be deterimental or beneficial to your campaign, please add any comments to the supporting blog post.

Thank for watching.

Welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, today we’re discussing more on schema micro formatting and looking at the postal address code.

Previously we mentioned that having micro formatting helps the search engine bots understand the content displayed on your webpage and how potentially it ‘could’ help a site local SEO campaign if you address supports your target area.

Lets take a look at the code and talk through the different elements:

<div id=”address” itemscope=”" itemtype=”http://schema.org/Organization”>

Let Google know what ‘type’ of mark-up tags you are using. Put this in your <ul>, <div>, <p> tags

<ul itemprop=”address” itemscope=”" itemtype=”http://schema.org/PostalAddress”>

Link to Schema’s address mark-up tags, again put this in your <ul>, <div>, <p> tags

<li itemprop=”name”>Creare Communications</li>

References your company name, put this in your <li>, <p>, <span> tags

<li itemprop=”streetAddress”>Boughton Leigh House</li>

References your Street/First line of your address, put this in your <li>, <p>, <span> tags

<li itemprop=”addressLocality”>Rugby</li>

References your Locality/City, put this in your <li>, <p>, <span> tags

<li itemprop=”addressRegion”>Warwickshire </li>

References your Region/County, put this in your <li>, <p>, <span> tags

<li itemprop=”postalCode”>CV21 1HL</li>

References your postcode, put this in your <li>, <p>, <span> tags

<li itemprop=”telephone”><strong>0800 01 999 06</strong></li>

References your phone number, put this in your <li>, <p>, <span> tags

</ul>
</div>

So that is it, a simple method of unsuring that Google and other mahor search engines can read you business address.

Make sure once you have added the formatting you double check it using the Google rich snippet tool.

We have added the all the code to supporting blog post, if you have any question or comments please leave them on the blog also.

Thanks for watching.

schema – download test page

Hi and welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, last week we introduced Schema mirco formatting and how it allows more information being filtered through into the SERP results. We have linked last weeks video on Google, Schema and SEO from the supporting blog post.

This week we are going to look in more detail how to add the star ratings to your search listings, there are several ways of displaying the same information. You can do it with a percentages or a ‘out of’ score and different variation of the schema standards.

All the code for any type of micro formatting code can be found from schema.org, but we have used the following code on www.seo-creare.co.uk for this weeks example. As you can see a few of our competitors have also installed the code on their sites:

<span itemtype="http://schema.org/Product" itemscope="" class="normal">
<span itemprop="name" class="normal"><strong>SEO</strong></span> Services
<span itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating" itemscope="" itemprop="aggregateRating" class="normal">
rated <span itemprop="ratingValue" class="normal">4.9</span> / 5
based on <span itemprop="reviewCount" class="normal">7</span> customer reviews</span></span>

The key pieces of information needed for the search engines to understand this code are the itemprop elements which are referenced from the item type at http: // schema.org/product and http://schema.org/AggregateRating

The four itemprops tell the search engines the ‘name’ of the service. the ‘aggregaterating’ for the site or webpage, the ‘ratingvalue’ i.e. whats displayed in the SERP and the count of reviews that have been made using ‘reviewcount’ also displayed in the SERP.

You can then integrate these itemprops into normal HTML code, in this case span classes. It is important that you display them on your site so Google can find them when it crawls your site.

You can visit the rich snippets tool to check if you code has been correctly installed, also linked form the video blog. As a side note Google do not guarantee that all micro formatting will be displayed. http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Thanks for watching, if you have any problems installing the code or a variation of the code, please leave a comment on  the supporting blog post and we’ll try and help you out.

byeeeee.