Posted by richardbaxterseo You are missing out on extra sales! So, my awesome team at SEOgadget have crafted up a handy infographic for you on how get started in Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO, and that’s “optimisation” over here in the UK) to get the best ROI from your hard earned traffic. We’ve developed and applied this methodology to help struggling businesses out of financially difficult situations all the way to adding hundreds of thousands of pounds of revenue, per day, to become some of our largest clients. We believe there are two paths to Conversion Rate Optimization. When we see companies fail in CRO, it’s because they’ve adopted random testing, guesswork, “best practice” changes and most fundamentally, they’ve chosen to avoid proper testing. We call this the bad path (queue Darth Vader’s Death March Theme …). To get good at driving real change, you’ve got to define a CRO methodology. The real trick to improving your conversion is pretty simple: identify, and target the core barriers to conversion and then, scientifically test the changes. This is the good path (queue The Star Wars Force Theme ) and the path that we advocate for all inbound marketers to follow… Here’s A Spiffy Step-by-Step Infographic Check out our beautiful step-by-step guide in glorious technicolor. Would you like to see it in even more super-glorious HTML-O-Vision? Check Out The Full Guide in HTML Here! Embed this infographic on your site A CRO infographic by SEOgadget.co.uk , read the full guide on SEOmoz So, What is Conversion Rate Optimization? Just think of CRO as detective work. It’s a lot like using a fine comb to pick off the weak points in your site’s conversion funnel, while building on its strengths. At the heart of conversion rate optimization is the notion of removing barriers to conversion. These are the forces stopping your site from converting visitors into sales. Barriers to conversion can include usability errors, weak persuasive techniques and often, page relevancy issues. By learning about your customer’s objections – “barriers to conversion” you’re addressing the real reasons why people don’t convert. The most important part: CRO is a scientific process of diagnosis, hypothesis and testing. Why bother guessing when there are tools to really help you learn about your customers? Why doesn’t guesswork, work? Let’s say you own a store on the high street. You’re keen to increase your sales, so you paint the front door a different colour. That’ll improve things, right? Of course not! You’re not addressing the real reasons why customers aren’t buying your stuff. The same applies to websites, changing the colour of your buttons will have no effect if people find your website lacking in credibility. Targeting the root cause with security logos and social proof (for example, reviews, accreditations, and association) is a much better solution. So, here’s how we do it at the GadgetPlex: Step 1 – Set up Funnels Setup your funnels and analyse the points where your users enter, until the point they exit. Try to identify the “missing links” or barriers to conversion. Find out where they abandon and create benchmarks for improvement. Tools such as Google Analytics , Omniture and Kissmetrics are great for creating conversion funnels. If you rely on phone conversions then tracking phone calls is pretty important. Tools such as Adinsight and Mongoose Metrics are pretty comprehensive at phone tracking. Step 2 – Analytics Find out what’s actually happening when people land on your site, analyse what they do, what keywords they discovered you for and where they land. Obviously, tools such as Google Analytics are great at telling you this, but think about digging deeper. What browsers are your visitors using? What screen resolutions are most popular? Usability tools such as ClickTale are also great for funnels and their form analytics reveal where users drop off along your forms. CrazyEgg is another simple and effective tool that we use for click density analysis. Usability testing tools such as Usertesting and Whatusersdo are a great way to see videos of people using your site and where they hit conversion barriers. Ethnio is handy at recruiting your own site visitors to participate in usability tasks. Competitive data tools such as Hitwise and comScore can be really useful but come at a cost. Step 3 – Barriers To identify barriers to conversion, you’ve got to build up a profile of people’s objections and opinions. Tools such as Kissinsights (Bought out by Catchfree , who are awesome), Pop-Survey , Kampyle are really good for page level surveys and pretty simple to setup. Live chat tools such Olark and LivePerson are useful for dealing with user problems instantly. Other survey tools such as 4Q survey , Survey Monkey and Survey Gizmo are really useful at discovering what your users are saying. When it comes to using these tools we’ve found that all you really need is one question. Allow users to really express themselves by asking them an open-ended question. Acquire their email address (optional) for those that want their feedback to be responded to. Collecting an email address and promising a follow up really improves response rates, which allows you solve any objections early on. Step 4 – Go Offline If we know our target then the objective becomes easier. Study your website and understand your customers. Speak to sales staff to learn the likely barriers they face when they sell and use the site. Your sales team deal with customers every day and uncover objections and seek to solve them in order to close the deal. The first time we did this we were surprised at just how useful this can be for exposing problems on your site. Become a secret shopper and create scenarios i.e. rude customer vs. extremely polite vs. technically challenging – test how your staff deal with each scenario. Finally, try actually phoning your own customer service number and see what happens. Test your customer services aggressively, as they can be the difference between retention and people going to your competitors. A 5% increase in retention can have an uplift of around 25 – 85% in profitability (Treytl 2002). Step 5 – Prospect for Missing Links It’s all about wheeling and dealing, discovering those hidden gems within your company and using them to grow sales. When you apply for a job and have to send a CV or fill out an application, the employer knows nothing about you other than what is on that piece of paper or application (unless they’ve checked you out on Facebook). If you don’t sell yourself and mention all of your achievements, they won’t easily learn about you. The same rule applies for websites. If you have loads of testimonials and expert reviews but don’t shout about it, then how will your potential customers know? Treat your website users like they’re the employer and impress them, tell them why they should buy, making the value proposition crystal clear. Study your website carefully and consider what you’re missing. For example, showing expert reviews, customer reviews, testimonials, or even taking the time to build a community (just look at SEOmoz for inspiration). Prospecting is really about selling your site to your users and using clever mechanisms to grow conversion rate and sales. Step 6 – Strengthen Average Order Value (AOV) There are so many ways to strengthen your AOV, which Fabian covered beautifully in this blog post . As an AOV strategy, bundles work amazingly and it doesn’t even matter if you’re not strictly a retailer. Look at Unbounce for inspiration. They offer conversion bundles on their products joined with offerings from other companies which is a clever technique to offer a cost saving and acquire additional sales. (Unbounce use “conversion bundles” as way to boost AOV and get more leads) SEOmoz have a Pro Perks store (check it out). Not all competition is competition, strategic partnerships can be a great way to grow and gain maximum exposure especially for start-ups. Step 7 – Wireframe the Solutions As soon as you’ve got a plan, list and prioritise the main conversion killers and derive solutions on how to fix it and increase conversion. We use tools such as Balsamiq and Cacoo to wireframe the solutions and then prepare hypotheses for testing. Test scientifically, the most important thing to take away from testing is to learn what works and what doesn’t and to keep building structurally to increase conversion rate. No guesswork! Step 8 – Testing “One accurate measurement is worth more than a thousand expert opinions” – Admiral Grace Hopper ( Wikipedia ) We love this quote because it really captures what testing is all about, forget about guesswork, opinion and egos (think: HIPPO) and instead, test your variations accurately. We primarily use Google Website Optimiser (which is now becoming content experiments ) and Visual Website Optimiser . There’s loads of split testing and multivariate software. But remember: it’s not the testing tool that increases your conversion it’s the ideas you put into it. What we’ve learnt is don’t test too many things, instead create a clear structured hypothesis. Attach CrazyEgg or ClickTale to your variations to monitor the difference in click density and interaction between your pages. If you’re optimising forms then applying ClickTale to your variation pages is really useful. Try running page level surveys on the variations and original page, ask the same question, and monitor the difference. Always test your variations in multiple browsers. Browsershots are pretty good for this. For mobile testing we use Mobile Moxie’s excellent phone emulator , which is really handy at testing across different phone operating systems and platforms. Step 9 – Review Review your test, analyse the analytics, click density and form analytics (ClickTale) and compare it to the original page, check the difference. Tracking AOV and revenue is so important when testing. Structure your follow up tests and build on your success, or failure. Failure doesn’t always mean the test was wrong, it means the original is doing something really well, so learn and iterate. Apply your winning test candidates to other pages on the site (we always like to test these usually via a multi-page multivariate test), and then consider applying your learnings to other media channels such as magazines, adverts and brochure ware. Step 10 – Rinse & Repeat Repeat the process and keep building successful tests. Each time you test and find winning variations, you build up a portfolio of increases. Conversion rate optimization is an iterative process, which builds on the success of the previous test. Follow this methodology and it will be extremely hard not to increase your site conversion. That’s how to get more happy customers and more happy customers equals more bang for your buck. I hope you enjoyed our epic guide! Do check out the full HTML version of our infographic – and, in the meantime I’d love to hear how you’re working CRO into the inbound marketing process! I’d like to say a special thanks to Fabian for his hard work on making sure this post happened, follow him on Twitter here! Sign up for The Moz Top 10 , a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!
The SEOgadget Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization
Make Money From Home with Weight Loss Shakes Doing the Body by Vi 90 Day Fitness Challenge!
90 Day Fitness Challenge with Weight Loss ShakesI’m excited that I just joined the body by vi 90 day fitness challenge! This is one of the most exciting things I have ever joined. A way to make money from home, lose weight with your friends and family, and get the freedom YOU deserve!In this video, I break down exactly what you get, how to…
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Make Money From Home with Weight Loss Shakes Doing the Body by Vi 90 Day Fitness Challenge!
6 Cool Ways to Supplement Your Open Site Explorer Data
Posted by richardbaxterseo And so it ends. By the time this post goes live, Yahoo Site Explorer will be gone . Let’s take a moment to silently reflect on the passing of a once great SEO tool. Thankfully, there are a heap of Yahoo Site Explorer alternatives, with arguably more powerful features available than Y!SE ever had. Today, we’re going to take some fresh link data from your favourite link information mining tool of choice and supplement the hell out of it with even more data. Yey – let’s build a better Yahoo Site Explorer replacement. A Special Thank You This (long overdue) post wouldn’t be possible without the assistance of one of the SEO industry’s most unsung heroes – Niels Bosma . He’s the genius behind SEO Tools for Excel , which has opened up another level of SEO data analysis for Excel geeks all over the globe. I’ve written about Niel’s amazing work over at SEOgadget before, so check out these links for a primer on the basics or an introduction on how to find lost links and get SEOmoz API data into Excel . When you’re done, we’re good to take it to the next level. Here’s the finished product, click the image for a massive, full screen image of this awe-inspiring spreadheet. #1 – How Many Likes, Google+’s and Tweets Were Received to My Linking URL? Let’s start nice and easy with a count of the number of Likes, Google+’s and Tweets received by a URL. What’s not to love about a page that received a lot of social love? These two queries will churn happily through your link data until you’ve got more social than you can shake a stick at. Retrieve the Google+ count for a URL: =GooglePlusCount() Get the number of Tweets to a URL: =TwitterCount() Get the number of Facebook Likes to a URL: =FaceBookLikes() #2 – Are My Links Live and Accessible to Search Engines? When you’re looking at link data, you’re looking at an internet that has been and gone. At least, you’re looking into the past – and we all know that link decay is an everyday part of the evolution of the internet. To take a super accurate snapshot of your link data, you really need to know if your link is still live. On that note, check out this clever little formula: =IF(XPathOnUrl(C2,”//a[contains(@href,'seogadget.co.uk')]“)=”",”NOT FOUND”,”FOUND”) Translated, it means, “If you found a href link on this page with seogadget.co.uk in all or part of the href, say ‘FOUND’. If the response to that query was a blank cell, say ‘NOT FOUND’.” So you know, the SEO tools XPathOnUrl function returns nothing when no result is found. #3 – Did Google Even Cache that Link? In his post on automating SEO , Russ pointed out that not all of your backlinks may have been indexed by Google, and that you should identify them and link to them to get them discovered. That’s a very nice idea Russ! Russ’s solution was excellent, but required some fancy scripting work. Assuming you’re not tracking new referrers with snazzy custom filters in Google Analytics, here’s an easy way to do it with Linkstant and the =HttpStatus function. First, grab all of the new referring URLs. I do that with Scraper for Chrome . Export the URLs and then in a new Excel tab, put this URL in to cell A1: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cache: A cache: request will respond with a 404 if the URL is not cached. So, a simple concatenate, followed by a “=HTTPstatus” will give you a list of URLs that Google has cached. This is probably not the best way, but it works just the way you’d expect it to, most of the time: =CONCATENATE($A$1,[@URL]) Where $A$1 is our cache request URL. Next, use this function to get the http status of the URL: =HttpStatus([@Column1]) Grabbing the HTTP status of your URL list will give you a list of results like this: #4 – Get Search Volume Data for Your Inbound Anchor Text An interesting way to identify links that might be a little above the radar, penalty-potential wise is to look at the search volume for the inbound anchor text used in the link. I mean, if you’ve got a lot of massively overcooked, highly competitive anchors from PageRank 0 sites, you’ve got a problem. If you’ve got an Adwords API key , then it’s a piece of cake to use the Adwords API Extension for Excel – simply take a copy of all anchor text in the data, copy it to a separate table, de-duplicate it and run this array formula: =arrayGetAdWordStats(KW,”EXACT”,”GB”,”WEB”) Then, do a VLOOKUP back in your main table and you’ll have search volumes for every anchor text used in your inbound links. #5 – Extract the Domain From the Linked to URL In my link data I really like to know if there are any potential problems with the domain I’m getting links from. PageRank 0 links, with extremely competitive anchor text could spell trouble, or at least some less than savvy link purchases. We’re spending a lot of our time lately cleaning up this sort of thing, and this method makes it a whole lot easier. Check out this formula as a very simple way to extract the characters up to, but not including the first trailing slash in a URL (assumes there’s a “http://” at the beginning of the URL): =MID([@URL],8,FIND(“/”,[@URL],8)-8) If some of your links are from homepages (which often they are), simply add this extension to display the full URL, should there be no trailing slash in the URL: =IFERROR(MID([@URL],8,FIND(“/”,[@URL],8)-8),MID([@URL],8,LEN([@URL]))) #6 – Get PageRank for the Linking URL and Domain Yes, you heard that right. The old school link auditor in me can’t shy away from the fact that while PageRank is pretty useless as an overall proxy to rankings, it will come in handy if you’re trying to get a sense of the overall quality of the backlinks of a website. Like I mentioned above, a lot of PageRank 0 links from cruddy sites, with highly competitive inbound anchor text might be something you should make yourself aware of. Here’s how: =GooglePageRank() What Could You Build? There are a few more tricks left that you should go and explore in SEO Tools. I also happen to know there’s an SEO Tools v3.0 coming very soon, and it will kick ass! Though I’m really grateful for Yahoo Site Explorer, I’m not going to miss it. It’s sort of like an Overture Keyword Tool situation. When that disappeared, there was outrage, now, silence. Have fun rolling your own tools and, as always I’d love to hear how you’re getting on! – follow SEOgadget on Google+ Do you like this post? Yes No
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6 Cool Ways to Supplement Your Open Site Explorer Data