Conversion Rate Web Marketing Blog 

I was meeting with William MacLean from McLean Finance today and we found that his website is on page one in Google for the term “Development Loans.” He’s been getting a number of leads through his site for Development Loans and it’s an area that he specialises in.

So the question is, “How can we get more leads for development loans?”

So I thought I’d outline the basics of our strategy.

Step One - Website Traffic

By reviewing the Google Analytics stats for the site, we found that a number of people were finding the site by searching on Google for Development Loans.

We knew that the site was ranked number eight on the front page of Google. We know from experience that being number one in Google is likely to bring in far more traffic than being number eight. At a minimum, we would expect the numbers to go up by a factor of four, but it could be much higher than that.

So the strategy to get the site up to number one in Google for development loans is:

1. Check that the pages are optimised correctly
2. Get links to the site from other websites from pages that are relevant and use the keyword “development loans”.

Fortunately, William has a blog so he can write about the topic and link back to his site. He’ll also ask his business associates to link to him from their websites too, preferably using the keyword “development loans.”

Another good link would be from a directory that allows you write up a description of your business and link from the description to your website.

Step Two - Conversion Rates

The next step is to look at the content of the web page that is on the site to target development loans. Now we’re already getting a reasonable conversion rate for this page at around 6%. It could be higher, though, so I asked William about the types of people that have been enquiring about this product.

He tells me that there has been a range of people enquiring, from “Mom & Pop” investors through to property developers. So a basic way to improve the conversion rates would be to tailor a web page to each group of people that you want to attract. The page needs to:

1. Raise their specific needs
2. Use their language
3. Tell them how you can solve or address their needs
4. Show real pictures that relate to them and topic
5. Make it easy for them to take action
6. Show testimonials from similar people.

By implementing these basic strategies, not only will MacLean Finance get more traffic to their site, but they’ll also get more leads from that traffic.

From the author: If you regularly advertise for leads in the Yellow Pages®, in the newspaper or on the radio, then there’s a good chance that your website could be generating more leads for you than it is. The key is in your website’s conversion rates.

We know that to achieve high conversion rates and sales from your web marketing you need a team that includes seasoned marketers, web designers, web programmers, copywriters, editors, bloggers and search engine gurus. That’s why we created Bitemark.

And yes, we can get your website to number one in Google too ;-)!

Contact us on 1300 248 362 for a free conversion rate review of your website.

Yellow Pages® is an Australian registered trade mark of Telstra Corporation Ltd. This company has requested and has been granted permission from Telstra Corporation Ltd to use the Yellow Pages® trade mark. This company is not otherwise associated with Telstra Corporation or any of it’s subsidiaries.

I received this email today promoting guaranteed listings in Google and Yahoo in 48 hours. I think it’s unfortunate that many people in the search engine marketing industry feel it’s okay to prey on people’s ignorance.

I say this because what “getting listed” in Google and Yahoo means in this email is very different to what most people think it means.

You need to understand the difference between paid search engine advertising and free organic search engine rankings.

What these ads actually offer is placement in the paid search engine advertisements. Paid search engine advertising literally takes 15 minutes to have up and running, so why is 48 hours a big deal? Well, what most people think ”getting listed” means relates to organic search results, which usually take weeks and months to get. So whats the difference?

For the purpose of this explanation we’ll use Google to explain. Click on the image to the right for an overlay of the Paid vs Unpaid areas of Google search results.

Search Engine Ads (also known as Pay Per Click, PPC, Sponsored Links, Google Adwords):

• May appear across the top of a search, but always on a light yellow background
• Usually appear on the right hand side of your search
• Are noted by the text “sponsored links”
• Are limited to 35 characters of text per line
• Are paid for when someone clicks on the link in the ad
• Run when and where the advertiser wants you to see them
• Are not necessarily relevant to your search
• Can be set up and running in about 15 minutes
• Get about 1/7th of the clicks that organic listings get.

Organic search listings:

• Always appear on the left hand side of Google, and always on a white background
• Are based on the pages and text of your website
• Cannot be bought (you can pay a company like ours to “optimise” your site to help you get them, but you cannot pay Google for them)
• Are based on a computer algorithm that determines whether the site is relevant to your search
• Usually take at least a couple of weeks or months to get (The fastest we’ve ever got to number one in Google is 24 hours for this page about “cool flash websites“)
• Are 7 times more effective than paid search ads.

Now if you read the fine print of this ad, it does state that the offer relates to “sponsored links.” You’ll have to look hard to see it and you’d really need to know what sponsored links are to be able to discern what this ad was all about.

If you’re looking to get listed in Google and Yahoo, then first understand the difference between what’s paid and what’s not.

From the author: If you regularly advertise for leads in the Yellow Pages®, in the newspaper or on the radio, then there’s a good chance that your website could be generating more leads for you than it is. The key is in your website’s conversion rates.

We know that to achieve high conversion rates and sales from your web marketing you need a team that includes seasoned marketers, web designers, web programmers, copywriters, editors, bloggers and search engine gurus. That’s why we created Bitemark.

And yes, we can get your website to number one in Google too!

Contact us on 1300 248 362 for a free conversion rate review of your website.

Yellow Pages® is an Australian registered trade mark of Telstra Corporation Ltd. This company has requested and has been granted permission from Telstra Corporation Ltd to use the Yellow Pages® trade mark. This company is not otherwise associated with Telstra Corporation or any of it’s subsidiaries.

I had a number of people call me this week to say, “Have you heard this radio ad for ‘Website Rescue’?”  Well, I hadn’t heard the ad, so while I was still on the phone I said, “I’ll go to Google and type in Website Rescue and see what comes up.”

I was surprised. There was no scent… nothing!

After a bit of digging, I found websiterescue.com.au, but that website did not show up on the first page of Google.

It turns out that the Radio Ad was run by Darius Mikolajewski and his company Allwelt. The advertising campaign was running on the Melbourne Radio station SEN (AM 1116). I’d met Darius previously at a networking event here in Melbourne and we’ve had a number of discussions about web marketing (Good move with the radio ad Darius, I hope it’s doing well for you!).

The exercise reminded me of the importance of thinking about how your prospects will interact with your advertising campaigns. Here’s a few examples of how they might respond:

• Calling your phone number
• Typing your web address into their web browser
• Entering keywords into Google.

Remember that radio ad listeners are likely to be hearing your ad in inconvenient places like in the car.

The people that called me could not remember the web address (even though it was a good address, pretty simple to remember), but they did remember the key theme of the ad, “Website Rescue.” 

Radio Advertising and Web Marketing - Rule 1:

When you are running a radio advertising campaign, make sure that you are number one in Google for the words that form the key theme of your Ad!

Remember that radio ads are volatile, lasting only seconds. Your prospects and listeners will only remember a single key theme from your ad. It is likely that they will “Google” the keywords that they remember from your ads. Make sure you are found there!

The good thing that Darius and company have done with their website is including a banner promoting the ad on their home page. This is important since a great number of their website visitors are going to be looking for content that is relevant to the “website rescue” ad.

The banner links through to a simple pop up contact form with seven fields to fill out. It’s a good short form, but the site lacks any content to support the “website rescue” message presented in the radio ad. For this reason alone, the campaign will not be converting to its maximum potential.

Radio campaigns can be very effective, however, relative to web marketing they are expensive. Make sure that you use your website effectively with your radio advertising campaigns.

On a side point, it was interesting for us to note that a number of our customers listen to SEN…

From the author: If you regularly advertise for leads in the Yellow Pages®, in the newspaper or on the radio, then there’s a good chance that your website could be generating more leads for you than it is. The key is in your website’s conversion rates.

We know that to achieve high conversion rates and sales from your web marketing you need a team that includes seasoned marketers, web designers, web programmers, copywriters, editors, bloggers and search engine gurus. That’s why we created Bitemark.

And yes, we can get your website to number one in Google too ;-)!

Contact us on 1300 248 362 for a free conversion rate review of your website.

Yellow Pages® is an Australian registered trade mark of Telstra Corporation Ltd. This company has requested and has been granted permission from Telstra Corporation Ltd to use the Yellow Pages® trade mark. This company is not otherwise associated with Telstra Corporation or any of it’s subsidiaries.

According to the Marketing Sherpa Search Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008 long URLs are on the nose.

 ”What we discovered was that long URLs actually work as a deterrent and stop viewers from doing what they’re supposed to do (click!). Instead, viewers spend time trying to decipher what’s in the URL itself. Those viewing the listing with the long URL actually ended up clicking on the listing immediately after it 2.5 times more than those viewing the listing with the short URL…”

So to rephrase, if your website has long URLs it’s likely that people seeing it in Google will skip right over your site and click on the site after yours.

Here’s an example of a long complicated URL: http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/12454-64287-89301-321860-f50-1844701.html

Here’s an example of a good URL: http://www.harrisma.com/promotions/promo_hp_compaq_dx2200.html

This is a serious problem for many content management systems that generate long complicated URLs. If you’re using a content management system, make sure the URLs it generates are people friendly. If they are people friendly, then they’re likely to be search engine friendly as well.

From the author: If you regularly advertise for leads in the Yellow Pages®, in the newspaper or on the radio, then there’s a good chance that your website could be generating more leads for you than it is. The key is in your website’s conversion rates.

We know that to achieve high conversion rates and sales from your web marketing you need a team that includes seasoned marketers, web designers, web programmers, copywriters, editors, bloggers and search engine gurus. That’s why we created Bitemark.

And yes, we can get your website to number one in Google too!

Contact us on 1300 248 362 for a free conversion rate review of your website.

Getting your search engine keywords into the right places in your website copy doesn’t always come easily. We’re working on a website at the moment whose keywords include the terms “life planning” and “life plan.”

The trouble with those terms is that they are searched on fairly frequently by the target market of our client.  However, they’re just not phrases that you’d use in this type of website copy.

Referencing our recent article on getting to number one in Google, you’ll remember we need to work the search engine keywords into the heading, title and opening paragraph of the copy. Preferably we need the keyword in the first sentence and, if possible, the opening words of the line. 

We want the search engine rankings, but we also want the website to make sense! Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

You could say, “I was working on my life plan today,” but probably not in the opening line of this type of website.

After kicking around a few ideas in the office, we’ve gone with a question, “Will your life plan become your reality?” Seems obvious now, but there are so many times when it just doesn’t jump out at you. It can be tempting to break the rules of good copywriting at times like this.

Like life planning, successfully weaving keywords into website copy can be challenging. But it’s better to take the challenge of writing good readable website copy than to waste your effort on something that just doesn’t make sense.

From the author: If you regularly advertise for leads in the Yellow Pages®, in the newspaper or on the radio, then there’s a good chance that your website could be generating more leads for you than it is. The key is in your website’s conversion rates.

We know that to achieve high conversion rates and sales from your web marketing you need a team that includes seasoned marketers, web designers, web programmers, copywriters, editors, bloggers and search engine gurus. That’s why we created Bitemark.

Contact us on 1300 248 362 for a free conversion rate review of your website. And yes, we can get your website to number one in Google too!

Yellow Pages® is an Australian registered trade mark of Telstra Corporation Ltd. This company has requested
and has been granted permission from Telstra Corporation Ltd to use the Yellow Pages® trade mark. This company is not otherwise associated with Telstra
Corporation or any of it’s subsidiaries.

“You have to pay to get into Google right?” Too often there is confusion about what’s paid and what’s not in Google.

It’s time to set the record straight. Click the image to the left to see which areas of Google are paid and which are non-paid.  

The listings that appear with a light yellow background at the top of a search page are “sponsored links” or paid listings. There can be up to three listings here.

The listings to the right are also “sponsored links” or paid listings.

The listings on the left hand side on the white background, sometimes under the yellow sponsored listings, are called organic search results. These are non-paid, computer generated listings.

So how do I get my site into Google? 

Organic listings in Google can be achieved by Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. They rely on copy writing and other techniques.

Paying for sponsored links is called Pay Per Click or PPC. For Google, this involves running a Google Adwords campaign.

Which should I choose, SEO or PPC?

Well, both can yield fantastic results when coupled with a high conversion website. We consider SEO to be important since our research indicates that it:

• Attracts up to 80% of the traffic from search results
• May carry a higher feeling of trust because it’s not an ad
• Can deliver a longer lasting and higher return on investment.

However PPC is also very useful because it enables you to quickly:

• Test page conversion rates
• Supplement SEO traffic
• Explore new search terms.

There are  good reasons to use both both SEO and PPC effectively for your website. 

Every business that takes web marketing seriously wants to be number one in Google. So we recently published this page - Number one in Google: The Secret Techniques that will get you there!

Now we like having a bit of fun at Bitemark and we’re not going to publish anything on this blog that we’re not prepared to back up. So we set about getting our page on getting to number one in Google to number one in Google .

Guess what? We’re number one in Google!

To see for yourself, search Google.com.au for “number one in Google” and select the Australian sites option or click on this link: http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=number+one+in+google&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3DcountryAU

How did we do it?

1. Search Term: We decided that we wanted to be number one in Google for “number one in Google.” Then we wrote a useful and informative piece of copy about being number one in Google.
2. Domain name: We couldn’t do this as we already have a domain name
3. File name: You’ll notice that the Wordpress blog software that we use allows us to create search engine friendly URLs like this one: /number-one-in-google-the-secret-techniques-that-will-get-you-there/. This is where most content management systems run into trouble.
4. Title tag: Our title tag is: <title>Number one in Google: The Secret Techniques that will get you there! »   Conversion Rate Blog</title>
5. Heading tags: Our heading tag is <h2>Number one in Google: The Secret Techniques that will get you there!</h2>
6. First paragraph: Notice that the opening sentence uses the search term
7. Links: We wrote lots of other supporting content about getting to number one in Google like this post and linked it across to the article like this: Number one in Google.

So it really is as simple as that. Now that you can get a number one listing in Google, the real challenge is to boost your conversion rates so that you can take advantage of the website visits that come your way.

About the author: As the owner of a web marketing business, I’ve spent the last 7 years studying ways to boost the conversion rates of my clients’ websites. Today, our best websites convert up to 20% of visits into leads and 50% of leads to sales. The target for our clients is a minimum 5% conversion rate on visits to leads which is staggeringly more than the typical website at 0.1%.

And yes, we can get your website to number one in Google too ;-)!
Bitemark specialises in designing, building, writing, managing and marketing websites with high conversion rates.

There was an interesting article from Dan Skeen in the Age yesterday about Google, Search Engine Optimisation, black hats, white hats and Matt Cutts… If you want to know what any of those things are, read the article here.

The following particularly interesting quote from the article highlights the subject of our recent post on getting to number one in Google:

“For SEO practitioners, it’s increasingly the case that strong organic rankings require an integrated effort from several disciplines (PR, writing, design, web development), making SEO a fundamental component of a web strategy rather than an afterthought.”

One of the most important pieces of Search Engine Optimisation is providing good information for people at the destination. Good copywriting is essential.

About the author: As the owner of a web marketing business, I’ve spent the last 7 years studying ways to boost the conversion rates of my clients’ websites. Today, our best websites convert up to 20% of visits into leads and 50% of leads to sales. The target for our clients is a minimum 5% conversion rate on visits to leads which is staggeringly more than the typical website at 0.1%.

Bitemark specialises in designing, building, writing, managing and marketing websites with high conversion rates.

I recently wrote a page about guaranteed Google listings that went straight to the top of Google. I’ve been taken aback by the response that it generated.

If you are looking for a company that can guarantee to get your website listed in Google and more importantly to get it listed under search terms that will generate website traffic then head on over to the Bitemark website and fill in the contact form there or email us at info@bitemark.com.au.

I guess it’s logical that there are so many people looking for a sure fire way to get their website into Google. After all, according to Hitwise Google represents over 80% of the searches conducted in Australia.

For small businesses in particular, getting listed in Google can be critical. Web marketing is often the most effective form of marketing within the reach of their budget. Getting your website listed in Google is the first step in an effective website lead generation campaign.

Once you’re listed in Google and the traffic is coming to your website you can get to work on your conversion rates.

About the author: As the owner of a web marketing business, I’ve spent the last 7 years studying ways to boost the conversion rates of my clients’ websites. Today, our best websites convert up to 20% of visits into leads and 50% of leads to sales. The target for our clients is a minimum 5% conversion rate on visits to leads which is staggeringly more than the typical website at 0.1%.

Bitemark specialises in designing, building, writing, managing and marketing websites with high conversion rates.