Why Focusing on SEO is Not Enough

We have been talking about Web site conversion on our last couple of BLOG entries. I just want to emphasis again, that if you’re just focusing on SEO and getting traffic to your site you’re missing the boat. Traffic is great. Don’t get me wrong on that, but what is your traffic doing on your site is a question you should be asking.

Many may think that more traffic to your site means more sales. Yes, that is true. There is a direct correlation to site traffic and results, but what would it mean to you if you got more results first from the traffic you have now?

Look at our July 27th entry and you’ll see how we explained that if you could increase your site conversion ratio by 1% you could increase profits by 160%! Before you spend a dime more on SEO or Adwords first take a look at the performance of your site.

What should you look at? That’s a good question. We have clients that many times want to review their site statistics on their own. We encourage everyone to be actively involved with their own site, but many times we find that most people have no idea what they are looking at when it comes to site statistics. Who can blame them when many stat programs can produce hundreds of reports?

Let’s first consider some simple things. First, what are you trying to accomplish? That’s different for everyone and the type of site you have. We take a look at for now, a lead generation site.

Most lead generation sites have some type of Contact Us form. We’ll start with that page. Find out how many unique visitors you have on your site in one month. Eventually, you should know how your reporting tool counts unique visitors but we’re going to keep it simple right now. Keep in mind that we are going to consider trends over all. Don’t get too hung-up. Trends can tell you a lot of information and it’s a good place to start for beginners.

Next, look at how many unique visitors came to your Contact Us form page in the same month. That number is your first conversion number. Let’s say you get 1,500 visitors to your site in one month. Of the 1,500 unique visitors 120 come to your Contact Us form page.

To get your conversion rate take 120 divided by 1500 and you will get 0.08. So your conversion ratio for the page is 8%. That sounds pretty good. But let’s look a little closer at that number and what is going on.

Next, let’s see how many people completed the form. Depending on your statistical package the only way you may know this number is to look at your responses in your database or email – however your form is programmed. We’ll say that you have 30 responses.

What is conversion ratio now?

From visitors on the page to completed form your conversion ratio is 25% (30/120= .25). That looks great, doesn’t it?

What is your conversion ratio from site visitors to complete form? That is only 2% (30/1500= 0.02).

The questions you should be asking include:

How many people started to complete the form but didn’t finish it?
If they started the form and abandoned it, where in the form did they stop?
Why didn’t more people complete the form?
How do I get more people to complete the form?
How do I get more people to the form page?
Are the people filling out the form quality leads?
Where are the people that complete the form coming from? How did they find out about the site? How often did they come to the site prior to completing the form? What else did they look at?

Those are all good questions and I’m sure you can think of more questions. Let’s consider the first question. How many people started to complete the form but didn’t finish it?

I’m always surprised when people don’t think to ask this question. In fact, I have clients tell me, at first, that if site visitors are interested in the product they’ll complete the form. They’re thinking that the only reason someone didn’t complete the form is because they don’t have an immediate need.

Well that may be part of it. Then I ask them this question: How many sites have you been on where you are highly interested in the product or service and for some reason didn’t complete the form or stopped in the middle of it. Everyone I’ve talked has abandoned a Contact Us form for one reason or another even when they were highly interested in the product or service.

You may not have the tools or program that can tell you where in the form a site visitor stopped. Depending on what you’re selling and how important a lead is to you, getting that information may be extremely valuable to you. Most sites do not have the capability of giving you that information but there are other ways to find out the pit falls of your form.

If you don’t have tools that can tell you where on the form someone stopped you might want to try a usability study on the form. You may think your form is simple enough to complete and anyone that can read can complete the form, so why take time and money to test it? You’ll be surprised at how little changes on your form can make a big impact on results. Read our February 14th entry on We Value Your Privacy. You can see how changing a few words increased conversion on a form by over 250%

Next we’ll talk about how to improve this conversion ratio and what a lead means to you in dollars.

Website Conversion - What is it costing you?

In converting Website visitors to leads/sales, etc. let’s first look at what an increase in conversion could mean to your bottom line.

This information is on our Website under Website Conversion, but we feel it is so important to understand we are going to address it here.

Below is the site production numbers for Sample Site A & B :

Average monthly unique site visitors: 1,500
Average monthly marketing cost for site: $500.00
Average monthly number of customers: 30
Average total purchase per customer: $50.00
Average gross profit margin 50%

Monthly revenue is calculated by:

# of customers x dollar amount of average total purchase per customer
= Monthly revenue in dollars

Gross Profit is calculated by:
(Monthly revenue minus gross margin) minus marketing expenses
= monthly gross profit (profit before fixed overhead)

Sample Site A has a 2% conversion ratio which yields
$250.00 gross profit

30 x $50.00 = $1,500.00 monthly revenue
( $1,500 - 50% profit margin)-500 = $250.00 gross profit

Sample Site B has a 3% conversion ratio which yields
$650.00 a month of gross profit:
1500 site visitors x 3% conversion ratio = 45 customers
45 x $50.00 (average purchase)= $2,250.00 monthly revenue

Profit ($2,250 - 50% profit margin) - $500 = ($1125) - $500 = $650.00 gross profit

That is a 160% increase in profit by increasing your conversion by only 1%

You can plug your own numbers if you know what they are. For many people the first place they need to start is finding out what their traffic is on their site.

Next we’ll talk about looking at some of your site statistics and what they mean in relationship to your conversion and marketing.

What is Website Conversion and Should You Care?

For years now experts in Internet marketing have been talking about Website conversion, but the message does not seem to be getting through many marketers. Any marketing manager or director I’ve talked to is very familiar with offline marketing conversion. They seem to fully understand conversion when it comes to their print, radio, TV advertising but they somehow miss the connection when it comes to the Internet.

Website conversion means measuring, monitoring and converting site visitors into leads, customers or clients. You want to convert people on your site from just visiting to take the desired action. For example, if you have 5000 visitors to your site in one month and 5 visitors complete your inquiry form you have a conversion of .1%. Divide your number of results, in this case completing a form, by the number of unique visitors.

Why should you care about this? Why not just get more traffic? Maybe the other 4995 people in the above scenario just weren’t interested.

Well, perhaps the other 4995 unique visitors somehow came on your site and found it wasn’t what they wanted and left. Perhaps the visitors are interested in your product or service but didn’t want to complete your form, couldn’t find the form or got lost, frustrated, or confused on your site.

Do you really want to spend more money to get more people to your site until you first find out if your conversion ratio is at its optimal level? If people are leaving your site because they are confused, or lost wouldn't you want to correct those issues? What if site visitors start to complete your form or buy your product and then stopped? Wouldn’t it be better if you first corrected that before you spent more money to have more people fall through the holes? Would you want to at least find out if you have that problem?

Tomorrow we’ll address what your current conversion rate is costing you.

Mobile Marketing Survey

If you've subscribed to our newsletter, you will receive a link to our newest survey on Mobile Marketing. There are only a few questions so it won't take long to complete.

The best thing about the survey is that your name will be entered into a drawing to win a free mobile webcam.

If you haven't signed-up for our newsletter you can click below to take the survey and enter the drawing for the mobile Webcam.

Click here to take our mobile marketing survey.

The survey will be closed on August 5th. Winners of the mobile marketing survey drawing will be notified by email and announced in our August newsletter.

ePlus Marketing Hires New Marketing & Sales Assistant

We're proud to announce that ePlus Marketing has hired Ari Fefferman as an Internet Marketing and Sales Assistant.

Ari is joing the staff to help us with our search engine optimization and marketing projects as well as assist with some of our sales projects.

Read our press release on our newest member to ePlus Marketing.

Search Engine Decoder

Early this year in our newsletter we posted a link to a site that is called the Search Engine Decoder. It's a great tool that allows you to see how all the various search engines are related.

Several people have asked us to post the URL of the decoder again so here it is:

http://www.search-this.com/search-engine-decoder/

We often use this site to illustrate to our clients various aspects of the relationships of the search engines. For example, this tool will without a doubt show you how important registering with dmoz is to your site.

Once you're on the site just click on the dmoz button and you'll hsee how many search engines pull information from dmoz.

Have fun with the site.

Free Whitepaper on Culturally Customized Websites

We've added a free whitepaper download to our site about culturally customizing a Website.

If you're marketing to an international audience and have only translated your Website you may have found that your conversation rates could improve. Customizing the site to fit your target audience's culture will improve the site's proformance.

Highlights of the paper:
•Consumers take action and make decisions based on culture
•Web sites that are congruent to a target audience’s culture are more successful
•The five cultural values that that contribute to a site’s customization

Download the paper Culturally Customized Websites by by Dr. Pereira