Global Internet Consulting

TRAFFIC CONVERSION PRIMER

admin — Tue, 26 May 2009 21:27:01 +0000

HOW TO INCREASE YOUR CONVERSION RATIOS BY UP TO 300% OR MORE IN LESS THAN 90 DAYS

If you’re interested in increasing the traffic to your website, you’re on the right track. But don’t stop there! Yes, traffic is great, but if your visitors aren’t converting into customers, it won’t do your bottom line much good.

More importantly, even if you are converting a fair amount of visitors into buyers, unless you’re regularly testing the multiple variables of your various marketing messages and landing pages, we guarantee you that you’re missing out on easy money.

Q. But how can we test every variable on our website that could affect sales?

A. This is where Multi-Variate Testing comes in.
But first, let’s talk about the traditional method of testing, also known as “Scientific Advertising.” This will help us answer the more immediate question, “Just how important and profitable is testing?”

SCIENTIFIC ADVERTISING

Claude Hopkins revolutionized advertising with his marketing handbook, Scientific Advertising. In it, he explained that advertising need not be a gamble. That we can scientifically track, analyze, and guarantee profitability for any advertising campaign—provided we test each element of the marketing message to continually determine the best version of a headline, an offer, pricing, and so on.

To properly compare one element’s effectiveness against another, advertisers would conduct A/B Split Tests. These would provide two identical versions of an ad or marketing message with only one element altered.

So, if we were to test the headline first, we would create two versions of the headline. 50% of the recipients would receive the marketing message with Headline A and the other 50% would receive the one with Headline B.

We would then take the better performing headline and test it against yet another headline until we were satisfied with conversions.

Next, we’d test another element, such as the introductory paragraph, in the same way, and so on, across all elements.

THE CHALLENGE WITH SPLIT TESTING ON THE WEB

Split Testing is considered a requisite for any advertising campaign. However, few business owners bother to test the marketing messages that appear on their websites, their landing pages, in their email campaigns, and product descriptions/purchase pages.

One reason for this is that sometimes we forget that our website is a sales channel—that every word of text, every link, every image and even the layout, color, and design, are all sales agents responsible for selling our product or service.

Therefore, we concentrate on driving traffic to our website, accepting whatever conversions come our way. We forget that we can systematically improve our website’s sales conversions.

Now, the second reason few business owners test their website’s conversionability is that the web simply moves too fast. Many sites are now dynamic with constantly updated copy, new offers, and shifting markets or demographics.

Scientifically testing marketing messages online is nearly impossible when you are forced to test one element at a time across a large enough audience. By the time you know which elements work best, that particular product or service is no longer being sold, or your company’s messaging has shifted.

THE COMPROMISE

Businesses have found a compromise between the low-risk/high-profit scientific advertising methodology and just plain giving up. This is where traditional website analytics come in.

Though a company would be hard pressed to scientifically test and improve its marketing messages, it could track and analyze its visitor behavior to try and ascertain what its audience wanted and how they would behave.

Such analytics are powerful, but they cannot give us definitive answers that directly translate into increased sales conversions.

This issue leads us back to Multi-Variate testing, which we promised to cover…

WHAT IS MULTIVARIATE TESTING?

Multivariate Testing is a unique and rapid methodology for testing mutliple variations across dozens of elements to not only reveal the winning version of each element, but the winning combination of various elements.

Until now, such testing was impossible. For instance, if you had 15 elements on your website that you wanted to test, and 2 variations for each element, that would require 32,768 different versions of your website that would each need to be tested among a large enough sampling of your visitors. This would take nearly a century to test and is of course not nearly plausible.

However, just as search engines have developed sophisticated algorithms to measure and analyze numerous elements on your website to determine relevance, we now have algorithms to accurately rotate, measure, and analyze thousands or even tens of thousands of variations of your website. The process does not alter your website’s code, nor interfere with your visitor’s experience.

Now, you can determine in as little as 90 days the absolute best combination of elements to create a marketing message or web page guaranteed to far outpull all your previous website efforts.

WHERE TO BEGIN

As powerful as multivariate testing is, you’d expect it to be an excruciating process to get moving and implement. But thankfully, it’s not!

Unfortunately, very few professionals or companies offer multivariate conversion analysis. You can probably count us on one hand.

However, this this actually works to your advantage! Our analysis experts will work with you to determine which elements you’d like to test and how many variations of each you would like (you can have two variations for one element, four for another, and so on). We will analyze your current traffic, support inquiries, and competition, to ensure we’ve covered all your bases.

Next, you’ll create the different variations of copy necessary for testing (or one of our professional copywriters can do this for you), and provide any graphics for design variables.

We then customize our software with your data and let it run through a series of mathematical queries to determine the 10-20 combinations of element variations that will deliver the highest impact to your sales.

As each new visitor lands on your site, our software rotates these versions, (we track repeat visits so your visitor will see the same version each time), collecting data to determine which version pulls the best results. You receive daily results and weekly reports during this time.

Once enough data has been collected, our software calculates precisely which combination of variables will maximize your sales gain (in addition to just the 10-20 combinations actually tested).

This results in 3 or 4 “greatest gain” versions of your website that are then tested in a traditional A/B Split test. We compare these to your control (original) version of your website so you can see the precise increase in conversions and sales.

The entire process takes roughly 90 days or less.

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ILLEGAL SEO TECHNIQUES

admin — Tue, 26 May 2009 21:06:50 +0000

Dangerous, unethical strategies that are very likely to get your website blacklisted or banned by the search engines.

1. Link Farms (Also known as spamexing or spamdexing)

A link farm is a series of websites created solely for housing gratuitous links that point to a collection of websites. It can also be a network of websites interlinking with each other.

Such websites are considered illegal in the eyes of Google and major search engines because they aim to achieve high rankings for websites that haven’t earned those rankings through good content and overall quality.

As a strategy, utilizing link farms, or spamdexing a search engine, is highly dangerous.

Even if your website has great content, if you or your SEO consultant use this technique, your website will still get penalized or banned because the engines figure that if you did have good content you wouldn’t resort to such sneaky tactics designed to trick them.

How to Guard Against It:

When an SEO professional tells you that he or she will secure incoming links for you, ask them to tell you specifically how they will do so.

The correct answer is that they will target specific, pre-existing and established websites to gain an incoming link from them to you (in most cases without having to link back to them).

If a professional tells you that they will build you hundreds or thousands of pages across different domains that will link to your website, do NOT work with them as this will severely cripple your website.

Also periodically search your domain name in the major search engines to see which sites are pointing to you. If you see anything out of the ordinary, such as websites whose domains are extremely long or gibberish (lots of numbers and random or inappropriate words) or pages that are simply long lists of links, approach your SEO professional about getting your site removed from these pages and find out how they appeared there in the first place.

2. Doorway Pages

Doorway Pages are a form of landing page that is designed solely for the search engine and oftentimes isn’t even viewable to the human visitor. These pages often use a redirect script that automatically points the visitor to another page on the website without the human visitor ever seeing the doorway page. This is also known as cloaking and is clearly defined as an illegal practice by Google and other search engines.

The only time a landing page is acceptable by search engines is if it is in the form of an informative, well written article that human visitors read and enjoy, where they are not tricked into clicking or being redirected to the website’s main pages.

HOW TO GUARD AGAINST IT – Make sure you understand exactly what kind of pages are being added to your website and be sure to look at most of them.

Ask your SEO professional point-blank whether any of these pages will automatically redirect to your website’s main page. If they say yes, then they are breaking the rules and are well aware of it, and we recommend you do NOT work with such an individual or company.

It doesn’t matter if they say they use a special javascript or other redirect that is “legal” or acceptable to Google. This is never the case and though Google may not know about that particular trick yet, it will find out fast enough and your site will get penalized as a result.

3. Keyword Stuffing

One of the original illegal SEO techniques, keyword stuffing occurs when you load a webpage full of particular keywords, either in the meta tags, other script tags, or in the content itself.

This is different from optimizing the page for particular keywords because the same words are being repeated dozens or hundreds of times in no credible or informative way.

Keywords are hidden several ways, for instance some people will make the text the same color as the background so search engines see it, but no human visitors can. Others will hide keywords in script tags. Still others yet will use CSS to position keywords outside of your visible screen area, again so that no human visitors can see it – but search engines can.

Though on the surface, using such techniques might sound like an attractive idea. However, search engines can detect whether a keyword is being used properly and will penalize or ban your site for using any of the above techniques to stuff keywords into your site.

HOW TO GUARD AGAINST IT – Often times, the only way you can know if your site has been stuffed with keywords is to view the source code of your website (visit your site in your favorite browser, click “View” and then “Source Code.” A page of HTML will display.

If you see the same keywords repeated hundreds of times anywhere, then your page has been stuffed and will be considered in violation of every search engine’s rules.

4. Scraper Pages

Also known as Auto Generated Pages.

Scraper pages are those comprised of search results or content automatically pulled from dozens or hundreds of websites or search engine results. This is a form of plagiarism as no part of the scraper page is original content.

Most often, such sites are used to display Google Adsense Ads or other ads that pay the site owner every time a visitor clicks on it. However search engines have gotten very good at banning such sites from their results and human visitors can detect them easily as well.

Scraper sites are easy to spot as they are largely illogical. They are snippets of other webpage content, or search results, and therefore have no sensible point and do not make sense when read.

HOW TO GUARD AGAINST IT – As with other illegal techniques, it’s important to first ask your SEO professional directly whether they will employ such unethical techniques. Then you must monitor their work. Make sure you have access to your website’s hosting service so that you can view all pages that are hosted on your site’s domain.

Periodically view pages at random to be sure they do not contain this or other illegal content. Also get reports of your site’s rankings and search the keywords you rank for. Click through from the search results and check the landing page’s source code and content for anything fishy or inappropriate.

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Global Internet Consulting

TRAFFIC CONVERSION PRIMER

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