Conversion Rate Web Marketing Blog 

Last year, Google Maps quickly became the number one online map directory service in Australia, surpassing whereis.com.au. 

 Did you know that you can put your business on the Google Map?

If you haven’t yet done so, head over to Google’s Local Business Center to list your business. The Local Business Center allows you to add your business to Google Maps and list additional information about your business.

Once your business is listed, it will soon come up on the Map in many Google web searches that include a location. For example, if you search on Storage Melbourne, you will see that the search result features a Map like this:

One of the handy things that Google Maps adds is the ability for customers to get directions to and from your business by just by clicking on your business name.

You can see how this change to search results has changed the game a bit. If you had a number one ranking in Google for a location based search, you might now find your website way down the page. So it’s vital to ensure that your Local Business Listing is showing up on the Map.

From the author: If you run an eCommerce website then you might wonder, “How do I know if I’m getting as many orders as I could be through my website?” The answer to that question is in your website’s conversion rates.

We know that to achieve high conversion rates and sales from your eCommerce website 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 to find out how you could boost the conversion rates of your eCommerce website.

 A number of our clients have noticed that their websites have completely dropped out of Microsoft’s Live Search Engine recently. It was first brought to my attention by Gavin Hodges from Flexitank in early October 2007.

Whilst the Flexitank websites receive a lot of traffic from Google searches like “4wd tanks“, “pillow tanks” and “marker buoys,” they have practically disappeared from Microsoft Live Search.

We notified Microsoft’s Live Search support team and the response was that there wasn’t a problem with our site.  They reassured us that the problem would be looked at - no guarantees of course. It appeared to go no further.  

Digging deeper, we found that Microsoft have been radically overhauling their Live Search algorithms and spiders. A new blog, a forum and tools for webmasters were launched which would initially seem like a good move.

Unfortunately for Microsoft and, more importantly, website owners it appears that there are some serious problems at Microsoft Live Search…

Many of the hundreds of posts on the Microsoft Live Search Webmasters forum relate to websites that have recently disappeared from Live Search. The responses by the Microsoft reps to the pleas for help are canned and monotonous. It’s certainly not a reassuring read.

It’s not that the forum administrators don’t want to help, it genuinely appears that they’re being silenced or kept in the dark.

The forum admins are dutifully feeding lines such as:

• Your site has disappeared from Live Search because it doesn’t have good enough backlinks
• You should join an association or start a blog / participate in a blog to get better backlinks
• Our index isn’t big enough to fit everything in, so we left your site out because it wasn’t good enough . . . because of the backlinks.

Not big enough… 

The size issue is something I find particularly strange. It raises a number of questions for me:

• Isn’t the index actually shrinking from disposing of all those good sites that don’t have enough good backlinks?
• Is Microsoft’s technology not big enough for the task that Brin and Page performed with Linux and Pizza Boxes?
• Are the technicians at Live Search feeling Google index envy?

Google have a much better way of dealing with this, called the supplemental index.  Google know that just because a site does not have many good backlinks does not mean that it has no value. Supplemental results are returned in search results by Google all day every day.

It appears that Microsoft are taking a “head in the sand” attitude to this problem. They’re not acknowledging it or addressing it (at least publicly). Instead they’re blaming their problems on webmasters.

That’s not going to help them to gain, or even hold their dwindling market share. Instead of having a shiny new algorithm to brag about, it’s looking more and more like a bomb that’s just not up to the job.

According to Hitwise, in December 2007 Live Search carried less than 6% of the world’s searches. Compare that to the 65% stake that Google is growing.

From the author: As a web programmer I have been involved in developing several content management systems. I was hands on in developing our own content management suite called eComMetrix®.

What I know from working on hundreds of lead generation and eCommerce websites over 11 years is that there is something far more important in creating a website than the system that you use. It’s your conversion rates and it’s a measure of how effectively the content of your website engages with your website visitors.

We know that to achieve high conversion rates and sales from your website 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 362to find out how you could boost the conversion rates of your website.

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.