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In the offline world, you wouldn’t invest tons of money in a sloppy-looking, incorrect-grammar-ing, confusing, and unknowledgeable salesman that wasn’t able to serve your customers needs in the ways they wanted to be served, would you? So, why would you do it online? Would you like to buy something from this guy?
The truth is, your website is your digital sales rep. It’s the go-to “person” in the online world for customers looking for your solutions. In light of all the activities you may do online, this is your digital home. It is THE preeminent piece of your digital existence. Kinda makes you think a little more about what you do with it, right?!?
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Shopping cart abandonment is the bane of e-commerce sites. Fairly recent studies by Forrester and MarketingSherpa indicate shopping cart abandonment rates are higher than 50%. That can certainly add up to a great deal of lost revenue for you.
In my latest post on Search Engine Land, How To Make Your Online Checkout More User Friendly, I share eight critical things you can do to improve the shopping-cart experience on your site and, hopefully, encourage more of your site visitors to become loyal buyers. If you decide to try them, let me know how they work for you!
I’m not into hunting. That goes for the real world, as well as the online one. (My guns and crossbow are strictly for target practice and the impending zombie apocalypse). When I use a search engine, I want to find what I’m looking for the first time. When I go to a website, I expect the navigation to immediately point me in the right direction.
However, I often land on websites with navigation that’s less than intuitive at best and downright confusing at worst. If I can’t locate the information I’m seeking in a relatively short period of time, I leave. I am not going to hunt.
Why would anyone want to send their visitors away in frustration when it’s so simple to create clear, consistent navigation? To learn how to improve this critical piece on your site, check out my latest post on Search Engine Land, Six Easy Ways to Improve Your Site’s Navigation.
You see it all the time: web marketing that fails to satisfy customer wants and needs in the buying process from first exposure to conversion. The problem is that it’s so easy to simply leave a buying trail that you’re on with the web. All it takes is a click. This puts buyers in total control and makes them uber-sensitive to what they engage with online. The challenge for us as site owners and marketers is to build trails from exposure to conversion that customers won’t want to leave.
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I love a good story – almost as much as our staff word nerd does. And even though I’m not a particularly sentimental guy, I also love a happy ending, especially when it comes to my clients and their websites.
Every time people visit your site, a new story begins. Hopefully, all will be bliss and harmony as they follow the conversion path you’ve carefully laid out, which could be anything from a newsletter sign-up to a purchase worth thousands. However, if a visitor experiences a lots of conflict on your site, he or she may not even turn the first page. Fast forward to a bad ending: site abandonment.
But there is hope. I encourage you to read my latest column on Search Engine Land: 12 Navigation Ideas To Give Your Website ‘Story’ A Happy Ending. In it, you’ll find (a shocker!) 12 helpful ideas for reducing navigational conflict on your site. After you read it, implement the ideas. Then, you and your visitors can live happily ever after. THE END!
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Not testing your website is like telling your investors, shareholders, employees or other stakeholders that you already make enough profit and you’d really not like to make any more in the foreseeable future. Crazy, right? So, why don’t marketers do it? Typically, they don’t know what to test, how to get approval, who needs to be involved and how it will affect their site. But, it must be done or you will fail to do your job correctly – which is to provide an online environment that will optimally meet your customers needs.
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Most companies don’t test their sites. Their main justification for this tends to be that they don’t have the budget to take it on. But, this is clearly a misunderstanding because free tools (like Google’s Content Experiments) make it VERY cheap. When you put that together with the logic that testing is just going to help you improve conversion on your site, not doing it is costing your more than doing it. Not doing it is like telling your investors, shareholders, employees or other stakeholders that you already make enough profit and you’d really not like to make any more in the foreseeable future. Your site exists to persuade visitors to take actions, right? Well, you don’t know how good it is, or how good it could be, until you fully embrace experimentation and testing with it.
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In a recent post, I provided a list of 10 Easy-Peasy Conversion Optimization Tips That Make Visitors Happy. That post barely scratches the surface of conversion optimization tips you can implement to build a more user-friendly site that out-converts your competitors. But they are all fairly easy to implement, and it gives you place to start.
Now you’re ready to move on to the next level. Again, this post barely scratches the service, but it does provide you with some additional, important areas to consider when looking at your site’s usability.
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If all our clients considered conversions to be as important as top search engine rankings, I think I would pass out. Or pass the beers! Unfortunately, conversion optimization takes a back seat to the age-old question, “Where are my rankings?” What businesses should be asking is, “Where are my conversions?” To paraphrase James 2:20, “But do you want to know, O foolish man, that rankings without conversions are dead?”
True conversion optimization takes time and testing. What works for one site may or may not work for yours. You only know by trying it out and looking at the data. However, there are some good old standbys that are generally recognized as universal. If you don’t know where to start on conversion optimization, here are a few quick and easy tips.
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Website rankings dead last? Not getting the website results your business needs? It’s time to get back in the race! Sign up for Pole Position Marketing’s Search Ranking Crash Course, a one-day Web marketing seminar built for speed, intensity and souped-up search engine rankings.
The event, which will include four separate sessions that can be purchased individually or as a full-day package (discount!), will be held:
Friday, April 27
8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Gateway Event & Conference Center
North Canton, Ohio
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