2012 Local Search Marketing Metrics | Infographic
Improving Website Conversion Rates
Improving website conversion rates is the enhancing the process of converting your visitors from passive readers to action-taking people. Marketing for manufacturing depends on it.
- Having a better website conversion rate does not mean you are definitely above your competition, it only means you are effectively meeting your industrial marketing objectives.
- The more successful your web conversion rate, the more popular your industrial marketing site will be to visitors and other sites, increasing your link exchange. The search engines love links and will bring more traffic to your site.
The problem with website conversion rate is the fact not everyone understands how to do it properly. The needed tools are not in place. The objectives are either unclear, or not being implemented properly.
Your website conversion rate may be lower than anticipated due to:
- Visitors do not trust you or your site. They feel uncomfortable doing business with you.
- Visitors have concerns about your products, services or other offerings.
- Your site is not user-friendly. It causes more confusion and frustration than desired.
There are a number of things you can do to improve your website conversion rate. These include:
- Utilize a number of trust factors throughout your pages. Visitors must feel comfortable with you and your company.
- Develop a variety of useful tools that enhance your industrial marketing merchandising.
- Make your website as user-friendly as possible to enhance your visitor’s experience.
- Analyze each page and determine which is meeting your objectives and which is not.
- Know what your objectives are. What action do you want your visitors to take? Do you want subscriptions? Product purchases? Appointments? Once you know your industrial marketing objectives, you can implement behavioral targeting.
Implementing a Solution for Higher Website Conversion
- Industrial marketing means you must focus on your trust factors. Display third-party accreditation on your home page and throughout your site. Clearly list your terms and conditions. Develop a contact us page and reveal your physical address, phone number, fax number, and other pertinent information.
- Marketing for manufacturing means staying current with your merchandising offers. Use price competitiveness, product relevancy, introduce irresistible product offers, utilize clear product descriptions, consider free delivery to increase conversion rate, maintain proper inventory and use images.
- Develop a user-friendly site by avoiding mistakes such as poor grammar, spelling and punctuation. Make certain your links operate. Be sure your pages download quickly. Test each sales step in your conversion funnel.
- Start using a “multivariate testing” tool, such as Google Website Optimizer, to simultaneously test numerous variables. You can determine which images and pages draw attention, which headings work and other relevant information.
- Use behavioral targeting to improve your website conversion rate. Analyze your page data to determine where to place targeted and relevant ads at optimum times throughout the call-to-action process.
Are you improving your website conversion rate?
Posted in: Industrial Web Marketing, Website
Leave a Comment: (0) →The Fine Line Between SEO and Spam
What do penguins and pandas have to do with SEO?
In 2012, a ton. Google frequently updates its algorithms to ensure that spam websites do not take away from the quality of search results. Panda and Penguin are the names given to their two algorithm systems to determine spam. So, with all these updates, how do you ensure that your SEO tactics keep up and don’t inadvertently land you among the 3.1% of websites labeled as spam? These insights will get–and keep–you on the right path to successful SEO with Google, no matter what types of changes the make to their methods.
So what are these algorithms looking for?
The Penguin algorithms differ from Panda by doing a more rigorous job at targeting over optimized anchor text, low quality links, and keyword stuffing, while Panda focuses promarily on lack of content. According to Google, regarding Penguin:
“Sites affected by this change might not be easily recognizable as spamming without deep analysis or expertise, but the common thread is that these sites are doing much more than white hat SEO; we believe they are engaging in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine rankings.”
The most recent updates to Penguin and Panda are Penguin 3 and Panda 20, which continue to develop new ways of tracking spam via sparse content, content farming, and low-quality links and link-spamming.
How can I avoid being affected negatively by this?
By following the Google webmaster guidelines, you can easily avoid being picked up as spam. Some specific things to avoid include:
- Keyword stuffing. The more you try to squeeze in those keywords, the more Penguin will be likely to consider your site to be webspam. Instead, focus on high-quality articles that have rich content.
- Low-quality article marketing. Put your best foot forward. Again, ensure that the quality of the information on your website is good. Sub-par articles that are repetitive and don’t deliver useful information do not reflect favorably.
- Black-hat webspam. These deceitful tactics never fail to mark webspam. Instead, use white-hat. These are search engine optimizers that improve your website’s usability and help create better quality content.
- Keyword stuffing in internal and external links. Manipulative linking and “link farming” will not positively affect your optimization. Creating link networks is deceitful and largely frowned upon. Include links where they are useful and make sense, but don’t try to trick search engines with off-color techniques. Be honest.
By putting a strong emphasis on delivering quality information rather than compromising content with an overload of keywords, you are setting your website up for greater success with not just search engines, but with potential clients, as well. As Google’s algorithms get more complex, they are more closely mimicking human responses. This means that if search engines think it’s spammy, so will your visitors. If your site is suffering from any of the aforementioned tactics, take time to rework your content as soon as possible to ensure your traffic is not sacrificed and that you are getting the greatest success possible on the web.
Do you Encourage your Salespeople to Research?
Many managers think that the more prospects a sales-person visits, the better; which is simply not true. In industrial plants and manufacturing organizations, decision makers have no time to entertain sales-people on fishing expeditions. In Industrial Marketing, which comprises selling of high or medium value systems, “cold-calls” can backfire on you.
Cold calling in industrial marketing was done for collection of market information in the past. Information is power. Having information gives you an immense advantage over your competitors. Today, the internet can help your sales-people to collect all information about prospects, making cold-calls redundant.
The Internet as an Information Source
How do you collect information from the internet? Check websites of service providers usually involved in projects. A few website types, where information is available free are as below. (This is only a partial list and you can find many more classes if you are interested)
(1)B2B trading portals and Business Directories: These contain all information and all you have to do is collection and compiling.
(An example is Process Register which has a section on projects, which gives the location, value, status and the promoter. The website even has the projects classified sector wise. What else do you need?)
(2) Job Portals: These give out information in the form of “Project Managers required for…” or “We require for our new project…”
(3) Websites of Consultants: Consultants often give out details of new consulting jobs they are working on, or have bagged.
If you think that you will get full details of a project from tapping into the above or similar resources, you will be disappointed. What you will get is “leads”. You will get all your detail information then by doing some web research on these leads.
Industrial Marketing &Selling initiated by researching the web, has been named SBR (Selling by Research).
Encourage Internet Browsing
Therefore, teach and encourage your sales people to research the web and you will never be short of leads. The next time your salesperson visits a potential customer, he will know the prospect’s requirement. He can give his pitch based on the benefits of the prospect. He can point out the options available etc. Compare this to the competitor’s sales rep, who is cold-calling and is pestering the customer with questions. No prizes for guessing, who is more likely to be favored by the prospect with the inquiry.
Remember, you will have only won a battle, not the war, but a few more victories can very well result in your winning the war.
Marketing Content: Why “Telling” Is Winning Out Over “Selling”
Marketing Content? Ha! Who would have thought we’d one day fast forward through commercials? Our culture no longer has patience for commercials in their personal lives. Mentally, we fast forward through them and do anything we can to avoid them. We endure them only when we have to. That same mental calculus is taking place whenever there is a sales message presented. We are slightly distrustful of what a company has to say about itself, whether or not the message reaches us through a traditional sales person, through the traditional media or even through internet media.
Prove It
The web has created in us an expectation to be able to evaluate a sales message. Somebody says to us, “We have great stuff”. You say nothing to them in return, but make a mental note with an attitude of, “we’ll see”. And we then storm the search engines to avail ourselves to the vast amount of information available to us to “review” these claims. Our first interaction with marketing content. While this may not be the process by which someone comes to understand your brand, the effect is there when you are pouring your heart into how much your product will do for your clients. You’re subtlety saying, “Our stuff is cool”; prospects are subtly saying, “I don’t trust you yet”.
Count Your Blessings…And Your Curses
In that way, marketing content on the web is blessing and curse. It is a blessing because of the tremendous reach we have in communicating our message; it is a curse in that the mentality of a prospect is to hold up the process buying process until they have had time to review your claims. If there was ever any emotive function in the buying process, it is dissipating as the internet evolves. Prospects and clients want the entire truth and they want it to be verified. They neither need nor want, ‘the hype’.
All In How You Look At It
But savvy companies and marketers can use the both the web and the desire of customers to have facts verified to their advantage, by engaging in Content Marketing. Marketing content can be a subjective term, but in its simplest sense it is making facts about your products available and discoverable to lead prospects into your marketing funnel. It takes advantage of an aspect of human nature that makes us more trusting to solutions that we discover ourselves over those that are presented to us.
What Makes Content Marketing So Effective
What makes content marketing so effective is that it uses internet channels such as the search engines, video marketing and social media to provide solutions to problems that exist in the everyday lives of prospects. Content marketers make solutions available for clients and prospects to ‘find’. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the process is hit or miss. In fact, marketers who do it well conduct research on where these problems are being discussed and pondered.
Are these problems being discussed in an industry related forum? Are they being discussed in a social media group on Facebook or LinkedIn? Are they being queried on search engines (such as Google and Bing) or video sharing sites like YouTube? The skill in content marketing is finding out what the key questions are and where they are being asked.
The Home Improvement Companies Get It
Home improvement companies such as Lowes and HomeDepot are light years ahead of other industries in doing this. A simple internet search for problems such as “how to fix a leaky faucet” will present to searchers a number of instructional videos on how a customer can undertake this venture. A careful screening of the videos provides a couple of clues on the nature of content marketing:
- The basis for the video is solving a problem, not to sell.
- The companies (Lowes and HomeDepot) are transparent in their presentation. They are not holding themselves out as the only place to solve the problem.
The home improvement companies have successfully mapped the pain points of their target customers. They have provided information to help them solve perplexing issues, instead of selling them on how ‘wonderful’ their store is. This information is strategically placed so that those who have the problem can find it. The information is formatted so that it can be shared on the internet with others who might have a similar problem.
Conclusion
Is there a better way to build a brand than to truly help a prospect, instead to selling them on how helpful you are? Can you associate your brand or your company as a solution oriented partner, at the point at which a prospect’s problems are most mystifying to them? Can you use the power of the internet to be present when the most common problems are being discussed? If you can, you can overcome the human element of a prospect to distrust you when you need state your call to action for them to buy. You can also build stronger relationships for the longer term.
Companies can focus on marketing buzz words: SEO, Social Media, Inbound Marketing, and all of these are necessary things to undertake. It is pretty easy to get a YouTube channel, a Facebook Fan page or even to pay someone to make you visible in the search engines. But, are you willing to use these channels to be customer oriented before a sale is made? Are you willing to use them to position yourself as a problem solver? If you are, you will successfully embrace all of the power that the internet has to help you to market your business.