Note from Rebecca: Carlos del Rio is working with us on some conversion and landing page testing, and he agreed to author a few blog posts about the topics. Also check out his previous post in the series, "Can the Long-Tail Hurt Your PPC Campaign?"
Doing business on the Internet means you have an unlimited audience -- it also means you have many competitors. Thankfully, you also have numerous options to build your personal path to success on the web. They fall into two rough groups: Traffic and Customers.
Building Traffic
Traffic is all the people that see your site or pass on your brand to another person.
Web Traffic can be built through Search Optimization, both paid and organic. Increasing your volume through the search engines’ results can be a very time consuming process and requires a high level of maintenance. Your results are only as good as your current situation. There are regular changes to the search engines and ad distribution systems, and your many competitors will also be changing to take visibility for themselves.
A search campaign will include a combination of:
- Research to find keywords, link opportunities, and current positions
- Site changes to improve architecture and content
- Link acquisition through content creation, link buying, and link baiting
- Measuring results
- And then repeat the process
It is important to remember that the purpose of search optimization is traffic. Some people become obsessive about rank – that is a mistake. If you build your business on a handful of phrases, you are building a tower on wheels.
Search is a great option if you are already doing well, it will help you grow incrementally and increase your position to weather things like search engine changes.
Web Traffic can also be built through offline marketing like television and print. The Internet is not an island, and we are nearly immune to banners. Kia earlier this year aired a commercial that featured a man turning the pages of a book that was titled Kia.com, and every page of the book said in large letters Kia.com. The same goes for Burger King, who recently aired a commercial that ends with www.whopperfreakout.com. Both Kia and Burger King have successfully leveraged TV into web traffic; BK has even manufactured a query space around Whopper Freakout. And this isn’t BK’s first web venture; do you remember the Subservient Chicken?
If you already have an advertising budget, you should be incorporating your websites.
Going Beyond Traffic
If you’re in a position where you already have traffic, or if you don’t have time to wait, you may find a long distance to your next milestone. Traffic begins to degrade very quickly when not attended. If you focus on what you offer, you will find sustaining and growing easier, because a good offer does not disappear while you build traffic.
Unless your only goal is to capture a phrase for vanity, you should start your SEO changes by asking, “What am I going to do with these people once they get here?”
Building Customers
Customers are people that use your site: download, contact you, buy something, etc.
Where Traffic building is largely focused on distribution and visibility, Customer building is focused on people. Building customer base can be approached from a standpoint of retention or acquisition.
Retention means loyalty, giving each customer a reason to come back. Take, for example, Zappos -- they have a 365-day return policy. This keeps the customers coming back time and time again – because there is very low risk in purchase. The service level is so high that many people buy multiple pairs of shoes and return them many times. One of my friends bought five pairs of shoes in one work week and returned all but one pair. Zappos is so customer-centric that they will even send flowers if your mom dies.
Zappos has such good service that these repeat customers ignore the poor usability and low success rate in finding a shoe that fits. While good customer service can be labor intensive, it is something you have control over and can create word of mouth traffic.
Also, you can grow through customer acquisition. For the Internet we call this conversion optimization. But what exactly optimizes your conversions?
Really anything that you control can improve your conversion of Traffic to Customers:
- The colors you use
- The service that you offer
- The brand feeling you create
To improve your bottom line you need to make a clear path of action and show clearly where visitors should go and what you want them to do. Making sure that the action that is important to your business becomes valuable to your visitor is the key to successful customer acquisition.
The positive of conversion optimization is that it focuses on things that are in your power. Google changing their algorithm can’t take away your message, guarantees, or loyal customers. Changes that are made for your traffic building campaigns run parallel to changes that affect your conversions -- so it makes sense to do them both at the same time.
Kia builds brand, Zappos decreases barrier to entry, and Burger King offers entertainment; all get the same end, more Traffic. But these new thousands of people are no more likely to become customers than the previous thousands.
If you are changing content to optimize for a keyword, you should also be making changes that improve your path to action. When you are building traffic you will quickly find increasingly difficult barriers to scale. Pouring thousands of visitors into a leaky sieve is going to make improvement slow. So, how do you improve quickly?
- Change your return policy
- Change the way you handle abandoned purchases
- Change what you put at the top of your page
- Think about what you want when you are a customer
If you are currently considering SEO, you should also be considering why you need more traffic. If you need more traffic because you aren’t selling well, you are taking the long road. If you need traffic because you need to scale up, you might as well consider how you can reduce friction for your customers at the same time.
By reaching for the low-hanging fruit in Traffic building and Customer acquisition at the same time, you will reap the most benefits from both.
It is my sincere belief that focusing on customers will always bring the greatest benefit.
“What am I going to do with these people once they get here?”
That one little sentence is going to keep me busy for years I suspect (hope). :)
Excellent post.
Thanks, I'm glad you found it useful.
The two points which I am taking away from this are:
1. The holistic nature of search - the internet is indeed not an island and, with so many searched being for brand names, off-line marketing of an on-line resource is essential.
2. Keyword selection represents the single most important element of optimisation for me, and far too many clients are interested in ranking for vanity searches. That said, prestige keywords can have a massive knock on effect into brand awareness, particularly with larger corporate clients, which can increase CTR and conversions on the longer tail search terms.
The part I enjoyed reading themost was the building of customer loyalty and, in particular, your comment on the impact of colour. I am addicted to eye-tracking, user monitoring and test-beds. The difference between reported and observed behaviour in users fascinates me.
An excellent post, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
great article indeed. It's helpful for us (especially to those that are still learning the basics) since it's emphasizing the importance of getting traffic and other factors to achieve good conversions
Great way to explain that sometimes you need to take a step back before you can take a step forward.
I need traffic but it is targeted traffic which build my customers and increase the revenue of my site.
Yes, a lot of theory about the traffic, and I admire your writing. So basically not only be smart to get traffic but also be ready funds to build it. If it wanted to speed up traffic, its true?
I enjoyed reading your article, it was very informative.
Why color will convert more visitors to customers?
It's more about targeting your traffic like I found in my <A HREF="https://veikoh.wordpress.com/2007/10/07/successful-ecommerce-operations-internet-marketing-metrics-ppc-seo-tactics-and-web-20/">Internet Marketing Metrics Research</A>.
Then its also about your website sales strategy. What I learned from Corey Rudey once 1998 and his established Internet Marketing Center has become one of the leading consulting companies by now are:
1. People in internet seek information. You have 5-10 seconds to impress them that your site is giving exactly what they have searched.
2. The average page visit is 20-40 seconds. Thats the time you have to convince them to buy.
3. Use step by step pitces to convince them and after each point offer them direct link to buy.
4. Use testomonials (I had used facts and competitive information) to support your sale pitch.
5. If your sale pithes haven't convinced the visitors try to capture his/her email by offering something in future. Otherwise its lost visitor.
Veiko
To me, we always need more customers over more traffic.
Our customers mainly come from word-of-mouth so the better job we can do in each project, the better the chance that we will get referred from that client.
More traffic is always nice, however, but not necessarily our prime goal.
That is almost a trick question. What people need is targeted traffic. Targeted traffic = customer acquisistion.
:) I'm glad you like the title.
I feel targeted traffic does not equal customer acquisition. Even when you do a great job of drawing in people who are interested in you content it doesn't mean that they will do what you intend -- take Rand's recent linkbait article as example.
I guess I should have been more specific. Targeted traffic (as opposed to traffic en masse such as that often produced by link bait) has a higher likelikood of converting. I think that is why (to Rands point), much of what is offered as link bait isn't effective or as he puts it is "Content that Earns Social Media Votes, But Doesn't Get Links".
Take our industry for example, so much of the link bait that is generated is geared towards other people in the industry not the consumer market (the average consumer wouldn't get the obscure references - i.e. master baiter) so it isn't really considered targeted. Except maybe that portion in Rand's illuastration where the two circles overlap.
This is a great post. It definitely makes me think a little bit more about a major site redesign that I'm getting ready to take part in.
Here is a thought. Have you guys considered adding live online support? We use this and find that it helps in converting 'traffic' into customers.
For some reason, people are more likely to order your product or service if they can get to talk to human beings online.
Id love to hear your thoughts and comments on this, as i am a speaker on the topic of live customer service's benefits.
Alternatively, id like to offer this facility to those of you that would like to try it out. (free for 30 days)
If you are interested in integrating live support service on your site or your client's site, go to www.futuregen.sg and click on the live support icon. (gmt+8 office hours only)
We did several times. But honestly we did not see increased conversions. Possibly that was due to the niche specificity, but most people who contacted us via live chat were random surfers who just needed to talk to someone and they got very excited with the fact that someone out there really answered :)
That's quite interesting that asking how to improve conversions, the first answer you give is "colors"... Do you have any experience with the color impact (split testing or something)? I am interested because I just wrote a post on brand colors and would like to hear your thoughts.
Jonathan Mendez has a great post about the colors of call-to-action buttons.
I have done some A/B testing on the impact of color, both on micro-elements (specific text) and macro-elements (site scheme).
For an e-commerce company we tried a split of yellow based site scheme vs blue scheme and "in stock" in green vs red.
We found that the blue/red combination was most effective. Green "in stock" message, strangely, had a strong effect on cart abandonment.
Site scheme colors I feel can be generalized: blue makes me calm, red makes me hungry (excited), and yellow makes me look to anything else on the page. But micro-elements like specific text and feature bocks are more affected by interactions.
I recommend Elements of Color By Johannes Itten if you are looking for comprehensive color theory.
Personally, I find the "Psychology of Color" fascinating. Here's a quick link that gives a good general overview of the emotions attached to various colors. What I find most interesting is that regional differences have an impact on individual perspectives, as highlighted in this article.
Since we're talking about color, I thought it also apropos and interesting to note what this article has to say on one of SEOmoz' chosen colors "purple".
"Purple represents royalty, spirituality, nobility, ceremony, mystery, transformation, wisdom, enlightenment, cruelty, arrogance, mourning. Purple is considered an exotic color.
Purple dye was made from the mucous gland of a snail. It required thousands of snails to yield 1 gram of dye causing it to be a color only nobles could afford. Today purple is a trendy color targeting creative types."
Ask Seth Godin and his Purple Cow book. May be he was the one that made that trend.
Thanks a lot for the great resources. I'll check them all.
* Are you using Google's landing page optimizer at all?
I have used Google website optimizer.
Carlos, this is a really good article and you make really good points. If you think about customers and ways to create long term relationship with them when designing website architecture and online services, you will probably going to do a good job on SEO too.
Great article Carlos.
Thanks Pat. I'm glad that you liked it.
A well timed and nice post I was talking to my team about this exact thing today :)
It is simply an eye-opener, especially for those webmasters and marketeers who spend 75% on seo efforts and 25% on customer service. They need to reverse the effort!
Gireesh Kumar Sharma<br>Sr. Content Writer<br>Recognize, Nourish and Retain Talent
www.EmpXtrack.com
However, in order to actually do customer service you need to get that traffic first I find.
Both come hand in hand...