While most analysts are still buzzing about increasing mobile technology, Paul Rouke, of econsultancy.com, hopes that 2013 will finally be the year where conversion optimization becomes the buzz phrase of the business world. If your department is experiencing a low client conversion rate, the culprit may be your site design. That’s right, your virtual business card (your website) needs work. Here are a few ideas from ConversionXL.com on how you can optimize your site.
When a company’s server is down, that means no conversions, no customer support, no nothing. When your server is down, so is your business. There are plenty of virtual private server hosting services out there that offer server packages with 99.9 percent uptime guaranteed. Purchasing a reliable virtual private server that has a high percentage of uptime will help ensure that your site is always open for business.
Businesses that use security seals — to ensure customers that their online purchases are secure, that they have a guarantee of satisfaction with services, or that they will match a competitors price — can increase their chances of conversion. Posting these guarantees of satisfaction can tip the scales between businesses, especially if both sellers are offering the same product or service at the same price as their competitor, but the competitor is not offering a seal of satisfaction.
If you’re having trouble getting prospects to fill out your contact form, reduce the number of fields in the form. Think about it, how much information do you really need? Name, email and the option to send a message is all a company needs to make contact with a client who is interested.
Lots of sites use bullets and headlines that get to the point, to grab a visitors attention. Being brief and bold in your verbiage will call attention to details on a homepage faster. The faster a customer can find what they need, the faster you can make a sale.
Many of the tips that were offered by ConversionXL.com referred to using the color red to draw attention and to illicit a sense of urgency. Using red to highlight special offers and sales can also call attention to details. Using red buttons or hyperlinks, to help a user to see what they need to click on faster, is a tip that retail giant Target has successfully used on their website.
Sometimes conversion optimization can happen when a company realizes that less is more. Using negative space and limiting the amount of information on the home page can cause a customer to become curious for more information. More company sites are seeing that the facts behind their product or service are what is selling their products and services. Sometimes it’s just as simple as that.
With so many countless tools and salesmen calling you day in and out telling you that you can be number one on google and they’ll have you up and running in a matter of days this graphic really helps to visualize the reality of what it takes. We believe it also helps our clients really truly understand all the variables which in turn helps them work harder in all aspects of their online marketing.
Review the material below and if you have a question please feel free to give us a call, our advice is free!!
Amber Janke
The Active Media
310-272-6343
Obviously you want the most optimized website possible but have trouble communicating with the technical folks running it?All these crazy terms shouldn’t stop you from making your site the powerful marketing tool it can be.
Here are some pretty important and prominent SEO terms you may have probably seen already. Get familiar and keep them close to your heart 
301 Redirect – A way to make one web page redirect the visitor to another page. Whenever you change the web address of a page, apply a 301 redirect to make the old address point to the new one. This ensures that people who have linked to or bookmarked the old address will automatically get to the new one, and search engines can update their index.
ALT Text/Tag or Attribute - A description of an image in your site’s HTML. Unlike humans, search engines read only the ALT text of images, not the images themselves. Add ALT text to images whenever possible.
Anchor Text - The actual text of a link to a web page. On most websites, this text is usually dark blue and underlined, or purple if you’ve visited the link in the past. Anchor text helps search engines understand what the destination page is about; it describes what you will see if you click through.
Blog - A part of your website where you should regularly publish content (e.g. commentary on industry/company topics, descriptions of events, photos, videos, etc.). Each blog post on your website is a new page that a search engine sees, and therefore a new opportunity to get found online. Make sure you keep your blog within your own domain.
Bookmark - A link to a website saved for later reference in your web browser or computer. Social bookmarking sites (example: Delicious.com) let users share websites they like with each other. Having links to your site in social bookmarking sites is a sign to crawlers that your website content is interesting to people.
Canonical URL - The canonical URL is the best address on which a user can find a piece of information. Sometimes you might have a situation where the same page content can be accessed at more than one address. Specifying the canonical URL helps search engines understand which address for a piece of content is the best one.
Conversion Form - A form through which you collect information about your site visitor. Conversion forms convert traffic into leads. Collecting contact information helps you follow up with these leads.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) - The part of your code that defines how different elements of your site look (examples: headers, links).
Directory - Just like directories for people and phone numbers, there are directories for websites. Submitting your site to a directory gives you more than just an inbound link; it helps people find you. The most popular web directories are Yahoo! Directory and Dmoz.
Domain - The main web address of your site (example: www.yoursite.com). It’s good to renew ownership of your domain for several years. Search engine rankings favor websites with longer registrations because it shows commitment.
The Fold - The “fold” is the point on your website where the page gets cut off by the bottom of a user’s monitor or browser window. Anything below the fold can be scrolled to, but isn’t seen right away. Search engines place some priority on content above the fold, since it will be seen right away by new visitors. Having too many ads above the fold can be seen as a negative issue, too. (See Panda).
Headings - Text on your website that is placed inside of a heading tag, such as an H1 or H2. This text is often presented in a larger and stronger font than other text on the page.
HTML - The code part of your website that search engines read. Keep your HTML as clean as possible so that search engines read your site easily and often. Put as much layout-related code as possible in your CSS instead of your HTML.
Inbound Link - A link from one site into another. A link from another site will improve your SEO, especially if that site has a high PageRank.
Internal Link - A link from one page to another on the same website, such as from your homepage to your products page.
Indexed Pages - The pages of your website that are stored by search engines.
Javascript - A scripting language that allows website administrators to apply various effects or changes to the content of their website as users browse it. Search engines often have difficulty reading content that is inside of Javascript, but they are getting better at it over time.
Keyword - A word that a user enters in search. Each web page should be optimized with the goal of drawing in visitors who have searched specific keywords.
Link Building - The activity and process of getting more inbound links to your website for improved search engine rankings.
Long Tail Keyword - An uncommon or infrequently searched keyword, typically with two or more words in the phrase. Small businesses should consider targeting long tail keywords, as they are lower difficulty and often have more qualified searchers. Common keywords such as ‘software’ are more competitive, and very hard to rank high for them in search.
Metadata - Data that tells search engines what your website is about.
Meta Description - A brief description of fewer than 160 characters of the contents of a page and why someone would want to visit it. This is often displayed on search engine results pages below the page title as a sample of the content on the page.
Meta Keywords - Previously used by search engines in the 90s and early 00s to help determine what a web page was about, the meta keywords tag is no longer used by any major search engines.
mozRank - A logarithmic ranking provided by SEOmoz from 0-10.0 of the number and quality of inbound links pointing to a certain website or page on that website. A 10.0 is the best linked-to page on the internet, and a 0 has no recognized inbound links.
Nofollow - When a link from one site does not pass SEO credit to another. Do not use nofollow when linking to internal pages in your website. Use it when linking to external pages that you don’t want to endorse.
Page Title - The name you give your web page, which is seen at the top your browser window. Page titles should contain keywords related to your business. Words at the beginning of your page title are more highly weighted than words at the end.
PageRank - A number from 0-10, assigned by Google, indicating how good your overall SEO is. It is technically known as ‘Toolbar PageRank.’ Note: PageRank relevancy is changing.
Panda - Refers to a series of updates released by Google to its search engine ranking algorithm that are intended to discourage people who create large amounts of mediocre content in an attempt to claim many keyword rankings without generating much value for users. Read a marketer’s guide to understanding Google Panda here.
PPC (Pay-Per-Click) - Advertising method in which an advertiser puts an ad in an online advertising venue and pays that venue each time a visitor clicks on his/her ad. Google AdWords is the classic example of this.
Ranking Factor - One element of how a search engine determines where to rank a certain page, such as the number of inbound links to a page or the contents of the title tag on that page.
Referrer String - A piece of information sent by a user’s browser when they navigate from page to page on the web. It includes information on where they came from previously, which helps webmasters understand how users are finding their website.
RSS Feed - RSS stands for ‘really simple syndication.’ It is a subscription-based way to get updates on new content from a web source. Set up an RSS feed for your website or blog to help your followers stay updated when you release new content.
SERP (Search Engine Ranking Page) - The page that you are sent to after you run a query in a search engine. It typically has 10 results on it, but this may vary depending on the query and search engine in question.
Sitemap - A special document created by a webmaster or a piece of software that provides a map of all the pages on a website to make it easier for a search engine to index that website.
Social Media - Online media created by and shared among individuals. Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+, and Twitter are popular social media websites. Links from many social media sites now appear in searches. It’s important to have links to your site spread throughout social media.
Spider - A computer program that browses the internet and collects information about websites.
Traffic - The visitors to your site.
Title - The title of a page on your website, which is enclosed in a <title> HTML tag, inside of the head section of the page. It appears in search engine results and at the top of a user’s web browser when they are on that page.
Traffic Rank - The ranking of how much traffic your site gets compared to all other sites on the internet. You can check your traffic rank on Alexa.
URL - The web address of a page on your site (example: www.yoursite.com/contact).
What others SEO terms do you think are useful for marketers to know?
1. Lowest cost, most efficient way to reach many people. Websites are a very cost-effective way to promote your business compared to printed material and advertising. A website is easier, cheaper and quicker to update than print. You can save printing, reprinting and mailing costs. Its’ capacities are almost limitless, so you can give more comprehensive information with unlimited distribution.
2. Consistently attracts new (and repeat) business. A visible site with good traffic will bring people to you, then you can give them engaging information about
the services you provide, what differentiates you from the competition, your results, portfolio, etc. to attract potential customers. Existing customers, meanwhile, will appreciate answers to their questions on your site. Your site should answer the questions that people ask over and over again.
3. Supports all your other marketing. Your website is the foundation of your marketing efforts. Once people are interested in you, they will almost always go to your website for more information which expands the effectiveness of everything else you do.
Be sure to use your web addres
s on all your business materials: business cards, emails, flyers, ads – everything connected to your business (you’d be surprised how many people put time, energy and money into a site and then don’t include their web address on things).
4. Your business is always open. It’s like having a sales and support team providing information about your company, products, and services to customers and pot
ential customers automatically – 24/7!
5. Gives people what they want (hint: starts with an ‘I’). Instead of “location, location, location,” think “information, information, information.” Your visitors want to know more. They want to check you out – anonymously, at their convenience and with no pressure. Give them what they want, when they want it. Give evidence that you can deliver what you promise. Have testimonials, case studies, logical, persuasive arguments. Appeal to their emotions, make the next steps risk-free. Offer free samples, trials, newsletters, pictures, articles, videos, audio. Anything that engages them with your unique products or services.
6. Builds your credibility. The internet has become so much a given, that serious businesses are expected to have a good, useable site. Presenting a professional image instills confidence and shows that you’re the “real thing.” This is where good design is so important. Do you want your site to make you look like an amateur, or a professional? By now, your competitors probably already have a presence on the Internet. If so, keep up with them and find ways to make yours better.
7. Expands your market. Your re
ach can be as local or as global as you want and your marketing can be as targeted as your services. More than 8 in 10 American Internet users regularly look for information on the Web first (Pew Internet and American Life Project). Do they find you?
8. Levels the playing field. A well-designed web site can give a small business a presence as impressive as a large company’s.
9. Builds your relationships. By offering valuable information, (newsletters, articles, surveys, etc.) you can gather information about your customers and potential customers and build your database, which allows you to stay in touch with prospects. Your leads come to you. You stay in contact and turn them into cu
stomers!
10. Makes more sales. Selling in cyberspace is much cheaper than a brick-and-mortar business and a great way to supplement an offline business. Even for the smallest businesses, secure, online ordering is very affordable. Attract potential customers with a good “shop window,” provide enough of the right kinds of informatio
n people need to make decisions, make buying easy and you’ll make more sales!
Note: All of the above applies to well-designed, professional, user-friendly sites only! An amateurish, confusing site can actually hurt your business.
If you’re not on the internet, you’re probably losing business without even realizing it. Understanding what a website can do for you is key to making the decision of whether to have a website and what to do with it.
Your website needs to reflect you clearly and authentically and attract the right clients for you.
Call ActiveMedia at: (480)331-1025 for a no-obligation, free consultation. We would be happy to answer any and all questions you may have and help come to the conclusion that it’s time to have a strong online presence.
Services offered
• professional and basic website packages
• Website maintenance Programs
• Website makeovers
• (SEO) internet marketing programs
• Graphic Design, branding
• Professional business consulting
Portfolio online at: www.theactivemedia.com
Bringing activity to your website!
It’s time for you and your business to take advantage of the fact that 80% of local business lies within only a 5-mile radius from your place of business! It’s time to bring you and your business more customers, more money, while giving you the professional look and presence you deserve!
It’s time to live a less stressful life knowing business is consistently coming to your doorstep and your active customers help you to grow through viral and referral marketing. See what we do…
Use our proven formula, which leverages the marketing shift in how your customers communicate and look for businesses to fulfill their needs or wants. The Active Media Team provides the most cost effective way to help you market your business to your target qualified customers with our Active Media proven marketing process via mobile, online and our viral social media strategies, uniquely created by our Active Media Internet & Mobile Marketing Teams. See what we do…
Are you trying to bring more awareness to your business, however you are starting to realize that you may need help competing against either major corporations, or some of the other local Lake Havasu competitors who are taking some of your business away from you.
You may feel as you lack the knowledge of how to develop a smart web or marketing campaign, or believe that you can’t compete during these hard economical times. See what we do…
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Experience a professional internet marketing and mobile development company, which offers strategy, design and technology under one roof.
Building quality, effective website and Internet marketing campaigns since 1997,The Active Media has grown into a full-service marketing firm focused on creating integrated strategies, intuitive technology and leading-edge design work, which produce meaningful and measurable marketing results. Since 1997 The Active Media team have been meeting the needs of every organization we serve, while growing as a strong, creative and strategic business partner for small, medium and large businesses.
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