If you have not started already; NOW is the time to prepare your PPC Campaigns for the Holiday Shopping Period.

More and more people are turning to the internet to doing their Holiday shopping. Need more incentive, last year during the Holiday season consumers spent $24.4 billion online according to comScore. So you need to get your PPC Campaigns ready and loaded to take advantage of the increase in internet shopping for the Holiday Period.

Your campaigns should already be up, but if not you need to get them up soon.

You should start by making sure your Holiday PPC Campaigns contain all the holiday keywords appropriate for your products and don’t forget to make sure your ads are relevant and contain as much information as possible on your specials. With all the completion for the holiday shoppers you will need to be creative with your Ad content to draw attention to your Ads. You may want to make smaller Ad Groups where you can be sure to include Products in the Ads and any special prices you may have on those items. Also, remember that offering Free Shipping and including that in the Ad is advisable if possible.

Another must do, is make sure that in December as pace really increases to monitor you Campaigns more closely. The increase competition will mean that you may have to adjust your bids more often to keep your Ads in positions to get noticed. Also, don’t forget to have multiple Ads to allow you to do Ad testing and to continue to make tweaks to the Ads to draw more visitors.

Good Luck and Happy Holidays.

Conversion, when used in the context of internet sales/leads, is the process of compelling a site visitor to take a desired action. These desired actions, or conversions, can manifest in many different forms. Some examples include sales, contact information left, catalogs ordered, membership registrations, and newsletter subscriptions…just to name a few.

Having a high conversion rate can depend on several factors: ease of site usability, a good value proposition, driving qualified traffic to your site, appropriate length and tone of content, and many, many more variables. Your conversion rate is easily calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the number of unique visitors in any given time period. For example, if a site gets 1,050 visitors in a month and 26 people sign up for membership (if that’s the objective), the site’s conversion rate is 2.5%.

26 ÷ 1,050 = 2.47%

Obviously, you will need to have some type of tracking system set up on your site to know your unique visitors. People often ask what a “good” conversion rate is. It has been said that if you’re converting at 3 - 5% you are doing well. This standard should be taken with a grain of salt, though, because it can vary greatly by industry. Some high-commitment, complex sales may only convert at less than 1%, while some others may convert visitors at 33%.

If you feel that you are not converting enough of your visitors, you may want to look into having a conversion analysis done on your site. This can provide some valuable insight into your site and you will surely learn some things that you may be doing wrong without realizing it. A conversion analysis typically involves an expert in the field “peeling back the layers” of your site by exploring the navigation, testing your shopping cart system (if applicable), conducting surveys, persona development to look at your site from several perspectives, and possibly multi-variate a/b testing. The depth of your conversion analysis will vary depending on what you opt for and the price.

MorePro Marketing, Inc. has a fantastic offer for site owners not looking to spend much money, but want to get some really great pointers. This is a great way to start figuring out where your site is really lacking and what services would benefit your site, your sales, and your bottom line the most.

Give us a call today for more information!

(866) 249-2432

Ask yourself in, at most, 10 words: “Why Should People Buy from My Website?” This is the start to finding and expressing your value proposition.
 
A value proposition is a statement that expresses the key reason why a prospect should buy from you or leave his or her contact information.  It should leave an impact on your visitors and be displayed prominently on the landing pages. Continuing on within your site, it should be expressed somehow (with logos, images, etc.) throughout.
 
A competitive analysis will help you identify your value proposition by uncovering your company’s strengths and weaknesses. By differentiating yourself from your competitors’ offers, you will excel in at least one element of value; thus, becoming the best choice for some customers. But…you cannot determine what the best choice for your customers is unless you know and understand your customers. It is important to discover your market’s motivation, perceived risks (or concerns), and obstacles they have about purchasing your product/service or leaving their contact information. Once you understand your market, you can address their needs and concerns in your value proposition.
 
Touch Points for Assessing your Value Proposition:
 
a.       It shouldn’t contain too much promotional language.
b.      It communicates who your market is, what you can offer them, and why they should accept your offer.
c.       It is articulated in 1-2 sentences.
d.      It differentiates you from your competitors.
e.      You can really deliver what you’re promising.
 
Lastly, one thing to keep in mind, the creation of your value proposition may be an evolutionary process. I recommend using A/B Testing to determine which versions have the greatest impact on your potential customers. If you would like more information on A/B testing, Multivariate Testing, or Conversion Studies feel free to give us a call!

866-249-2432

Welcome to the first set of tips from MorePro’s Conversion Corner. Rebecca is a conversion analyst, based out of Phoenix, specializing in consulting with website owners on how to convert more of their visitors to customers. Certified through Marketing Experiments, she uses the most recent techniques and up-to-the-minute research to find the best layout for a site.

Below are some free pointers from Rebecca on how to improve your site’s conversion rate:

Create a sense of urgency with stimulating copy, bold action statements, and special promotions. Effectively communicate how visitors can benefit from the product or service. The next step is to tell your site visitor exactly what you want them to do.

For your site: Add action statements, or call to actions, that speak to the visitor and their needs throughout all of the pages, for example:

• Call Today
• Get Your Quote Today
• Need Help Choosing?
• Questions? Contact Us
• Contact Us for More Information
• Compare Cases
• Buy Now
• Learn More
• Add to Cart
• Get Organized!
• For a short time only
• Act now – offer expires August 31st

In order to give the visitor the option to read the content on the page or just take action, the call to actions should be located at the top of the page and at the bottom. Use clear actions statements at the end of every topic and consistently throughout the site. However, be careful of not overdoing it as you might come across as being overly pushy, but being too conservative won’t produce strong marketing results.  You need to find a balance.

Feel free to reply with comments, ask questions, or just give me a quick call toll free at (866) 249-2432. We’d be glad to give you pointers for improving the conversion rate of your website.

One of the top site analytic/measuring companies in the world, Nielson/NetRatings, announced plans to shift from reporting Page Views as the metric of how popular a site is, to using how long users spend on a website (or Time Spent on Site).

With the continued emergence of AJAX, dynamic content, online videos and other new technologies, the “page view” has lost it’s accuracy, which has led marketers to rely on other metrics like “time spent on site”.

There’s a lot of talk about how this affects where Google ranks among other sites… The talks are trivial in my opinion, since Google is primarly a search engine and visitors aren’t suppose to spend a lot of time on the site.  The visitor is suppose to quickly find what they’re looking for and go to another website.  Spend time worrying about non-search engine sites, not Google.

“Just got a job with someone in town who found me in the top spot on Yahoo. FYI!”

Thanks!

Janet Ault
Female Voice Over Talent

In an article published in the SEO-News newsletter this morning, Kanga Internet’s Chris Diprose details 10 of the most common SEO mistakes that you’re bound to make on your website. Whether or not the mistakes are done on purpose, are done because of a lack of SEO knowledge, or you had someone else build your site - these SEO mistakes should be avoided. Some of the mistakes that Chris mentions were covered back in January, when we published our “Common SEO Blunders… Must read for web designers” post.

If you find that you’re guilty of any of these mistakes, take the action now to correct them so you can start improving your search engine rankings.

Here are Chris’ Top 10 SEO Mistakes:

1. Bad Titles
2. Filename of the Page
3. Duplicate or Bad Content
4. No Links
5. Incoming Link Anchor Text
6. Bad Internal Page Links
7. Live Links
8. Impatience
9. Keyword Selection
10. Keyword Spamming and Stuffing

I certainly don’t have any objections to the list that Chris prepared. I might rank Impatience (#8) higher on the list, only because becoming impatient with your SEO can lead to more problems down the road. You’re more likely to try an SEO tactic that’s untested or engage in some type of questionable SEO practice if you don’t plan out your strategy properly and if you don’t give it time to work.

1. Bad Titles
A survey of top SEO professonals on SEOMoz.org a couple months ago ranked the Title tag as the most important aspect of SEO, so it only makes sense that bad titles are probably the worst mistake you can make when optimizing your website.

2. Filename of Pages
This one is a little off-base, at least in naming the mistake. This should be URL structure or “dynamic URLs vs. static URLs”. Certainly, having a site with long, dynamic URLs is a problem. Use Mod_rewrite or the Windows equivalent to rewrite your URLs to be more friendly. This is not a necessity unless your URLs have more than 2-3 variables on the query string in my opinion. We’ve had plenty of experience and success w/ single variable query string URLs.

3. Duplicate Content
We’ve covered this topic several times in the past and it’s probably one of the hardest mistakes to effectively communicate to site owners and content managers. They just don’t see the value of writing unique content for their products or their stores, when they can get a completed data feed from the manufacturer and plop it right into the site… unfortunately, that just won’t yield any long-term results.

4. No Links
This is a no-brainer… a site cannot rank on content alone.  Every website should have an ongoing backlink strategy.

5. Incoming Anchor Link Text
See previous mistake… Just make sure your backlinks use keywords.  Many site owners and marketers will try to use the company’s name and/or just the domain name as the anchor text.  This is much less effective than using keyword-rich anchor text on all backlinks.  Be sure to vary the keywords also - your incoming links (backlinks) shouldn’t all be the same. 

6. Bad Internal Page Links
A site w/ poor navigation or linking structure will struggle to compete with sites who have good navigation and structure.  Be sure to categorize your pages properly and to use keywords in the anchor text.  Another common problem w/ internal page links is the use of images for navigation instead of text - always go w/ text unless you already have a full text menu elsewhere on the page.

7. Live Links
Broken links hurt… check your site frequently to make sure you’re links aren’t broken.  If you find broken links, fix them ASAP.  Setup a custom 404 error page if you have pages that no longer exist and if you can’t get the links changed (from backlinks for example).

8. Impatience
This can kill an SEO campaign.  Do the work and use the methods that have been proven to work over time.  Allow sufficient time for all the work you’ve done to take affect (several months).

9. Keyword Selection
Selecting the wrong keywords is almost as bad as not selecting keywords at all.  Be sure that you’re optimizing for the keywords your target audience is using, not the keywords you think they are (yes, there is usually a difference).  Use keyword research tools like Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker or Google Trends to find out what your visitors are using, what’s most popular, and what keywords are slowly fading into oblivion.

10. Keyword Spamming and Stuffing
This is just plain dumb… Your website shouldn’t be stuffed with keywords you are targeting, let alone keywords you’re not (that’s a whole other story).  Common keyword stuffing takes place in site footers, comment tags, meta tags or other typically hidden areas of the site and/or the HTML coding itself.

Google appears to be beta testing some new search results features:

The first item allows you to quickly modify the type of search you’re performing, whether it be a standard search engine query, blog/news search, video search, etc.

The second section shows you Related Searches, or queries related to your search.

Not sure I like the layout just yet, but it seems a lot more like Ask.com.  I think they’d be better off moving the features to the right hand side of the page or at the bottom personally.  It seems to distract from the results themselves.

In a test of how powerful internet users are on social networking and media sites, rising social media site Digg.com has learned the hard way that their site is run by the users and for the users.

A recent cease and desist order caused Digg moderators to remove all posts containing a secret encryption key hack that would allow anyone to copy HD-DVD’s, something the entertainment industry does not want to see happen.  While Digg did not receive a notice directly, they felt it was in their best interest to squash all posts containing the encryption key, as evidenced by the founder of Digg, Kevin Rose’s comments at 1pm yesterday:

This has all come up in the past 24 hours, mostly connected to the HD-DVD hack that has been circulating online, having been posted to Digg as well as numerous other popular news and information websites. We’ve been notified by the owners of this intellectual property that they believe the posting of the encryption key infringes their intellectual property rights. In order to respect these rights and to comply with the law, we have removed postings of the key that have been brought to our attention.

Whether you agree or disagree with the policies of the intellectual property holders and consortiums, in order for Digg to survive, it must abide by the law. Digg’s Terms of Use, and the terms of use of most popular sites, are required by law to include policies against the infringement of intellectual property. This helps protect Digg from claims of infringement and being shut down due to the posting of infringing material by others.

Our goal is always to maintain a purely democratic system for the submission and sharing of information - and we want Digg to continue to be a great resource for finding the best content. However, in order for that to happen, we all need to work together to protect Digg from exposure to lawsuits that could very quickly shut us down.

This is really where the power of Digg’s users comes into play.  Not long after this post, Digg members begin flooding the site with random submissions containing the HD-DVD hack key.  It wasn’t isolated to just the technology categories even - the entire site was slowed to a crawl and new posts were delayed significantly due to the overwhelming chaos that moderating Digg posts had caused.

Digg users quickly “dugg” all of the posts w/ the encryption key in order to get them on the front page of Digg.com and it worked very well.  At one point, every story on the homepage was about the HD-DVD hack - either a post containing the hack itself, a post bashing Digg for removing posts, or other related posts.

By 9pm the Digg management team had changed their stance on the censorship and issued the following statement:

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

The actions by Digg yesterday highlight the power that we, as web users posess.  Digg member’s posts and comments literally changed the moderation policies and legal standings of one of the web’s hottest social media websites.

Interview snippets from Vanessa Fox, Product Manager for Google Webmaster Tools. Full video interview w/ Rand Fishkin

I’ve tried to get the important points from the interview, so several of these items are very short and/or are specific statements made by Google’s Vanessa Fox.

Sitemaps.org initiatives

• Sitemaps.org content to be included in 18 different languages.
• New method of notification - specify in robots.txt file via:
  sitemap:filepath

  View the robots.txt sitemap inclusion discussion over at WebmasterWorld for more specifics

Webmaster Tools & Sitemaps

• Yahoo Site Explorer out of Beta.
• URL removal tool in Google (out fo 6 yrs now). Could make it’s way into Webmaster Tools.
• Real-time Google PageRank coming soon? Doesn’t sound like it (too many privacy issues).
• Google Supplemental Results - could start providing more information on why pages are in the Supplemental Index, but likely wouldn’t provide a full list of everything in the index. Not considered such a bad thing anymore - many supplemental results still rank well for specific phrases.
• Considering offering data on who’s linking to your 404 error pages and/or where your broken links are being linked from. Always try to redirect to the most relevant page on the site vs. using a 404.
• Could submitting an orphan page through Sitemaps get a page indexed?
  Yes… (but) it probably wouldn’t rank well. That means that all of the pages on a site should be submitted through Sitemaps.
• Google Link Reporting - Link sorting (currently alphabetized).
  Could make other options available in the future.
• Sounds like they could be adding features to allow you to verify more than one domain within your account (ie: multiple domains).
• Moving your website to another domain - Take pages from old site, move to new site (as is). Don’t restructure or re-design the website until after you’re sure the engines see the new domain & pages well. “Do things in stages” or “one step at a time”.

Pre-Sell Pages (ie: .edu hosted content)

• They’re aware of what’s going on and could devalue some of the trust that certain domains have (ie: .edu, .gov). “Always looking for ways to do things better.” Hoping to get some changes in the hopper and to see some changes soon.One example given was searching for “viagra” in Google - several of the Top 10 results are .edu sites that appear to have had content hosted on them. Several of the pages have custom 404 error pages coming up, so they must have figured out what was going on. Another appears to be forum/comment spam that’s somehow ranked well (???).

Buying Links (watch out!)

• Might make webmasters aware of detection of paid links (ouch!!!). The more information the better, including problems regarding ranking issues. No definitive answer though….

Sites Displaying Search Results (scrapers, shopping sites, etc.)

• She mentioned that the engines, in some cases, wouldn’t want visitors searching in Google to click a result, only to find another page of search results. I guess some filters could be expected.

Google Base

• Submit structured data (ie: feeds).
• Separate searching system from Google.com.
• Good for experimenting - “get in early”.

Google News

• Can submit News sitemap through Webmaster Tools.
• Send email to get included (for review) - English only.

In case you missed our last Vanessa Fox posting, you can view her December 2006 interview here.