What’s the Most Important Part of Web Marketing?

Summary

This week I have a guest blogger, Joe Seidler, who is an expert in the field of internet marketing. He is going to discuss an often important, but often overlooked part of Internet Web Marketing...

What’s the Most Important Part of Web Marketing?

1. A.  SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
2. B.  PPC (Paid Ads like Google AdWords)
3. C.  Social Networking
4. D.  Affiliate Marketing
5. E.  Local Business Listings (like Google Places)
6. F.  None of the Above

Sometimes the right answer is F…

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

This is often overlooked. But what if after you spend a lot of effort and money getting people to your website, they don’t like what it looks like or don’t understand a particular important web page and often leave the site before accomplishing your goal (i.e., buying your product or service or leaving their contact information)?

Two free tools from Google can make CRO highly successful in the right hands. Using Google Analytics, you can easily determine which web pages are not performing well in enticing visitors to stay on your site. And then using Google Website Optimizer, you can test new versions of the page leading to website changes that yield much better conversion rates of visitors into customers.

Why is this important? Here’s an example from a recent client. She said that her site was getting about 5,000 visitors a month, but she wasn’t selling very much. If this sounds familiar, then you need CRO before you spend more time and money on getting more people to your site.

So how does CRO work? First you need Google Analytics tracking on each page of your website, and it needs to have been there accumulating data for at least a few months, preferably longer. With Google Analytics, you can look at the Bounce Rates of your important pages. Bounce Rate is the percentage of time a visitor lands on one of your web pages and immediately leaves your site without going to another page. For instance, if the Bounce Rate on your homepage is 75%, that means that 3 out of 4 visitors to your homepage do not click on any of your links and visit any other page – a very bad sign – and likely very few sales. Bringing more people to your site is probably only going to yield small improvements in your sales.

But let’s say that if you change the homepage to include a better explanation of your product or service, and/or add a great photo or video, or an enticing call to action, your Bounce Rate goes down to 50%. You have just doubled the number of visitors who are learning about you without increasing how many come to your site! That is, 2 out of 4 now stay and read about your product or service as opposed to only 1 out of 4.

And the tool Google Website Optimizer will help you test whether your new homepage is better than the original. So you never have to rely on your or someone else’s opinion about what is best, you can easily test every idea and let the visitors to your site tell you which is best. Then throw out the version that doesn’t work well and make the new version the permanent one.