by Chaosmap on March 16, 2008
You lost them at Hello. Now what do you do? You are finally getting someInternet traffic on your site, with higher organic rankings or PPC activity. So what! Traffic alone will not pay the bills.Let’s be honest, the average site visitor will give you only five seconds to draw them in, to peak their curiosity. To maximize the value of this new traffic you must get these visitors to do something, to take action.Ask yourself these questions, with the correct answers you are on your way to higher click-throughs and conversion rates. What is the focal point of my landing page or Web site? Am I getting visitors to focus on what is important or am I distracting them? Do I have any calls to action, meaning does anything on my landing page prompt the visitor to do something? Have I tested different content, text sizes and other attributes for user appeal?There is an enormous amount of psychological differences in user base and target audiences, are you testing to find out what appeals to your specific audience? Is there any sense of urgency to prompt action?Answering these questions and leveraging your answers will have you on your way to keeping your visitors interested and helping them take action.
by Chaosmap on March 14, 2008
photo credit: Koshyk
Every week I am reminded of a common problem many businesses don’t even realize they have—the quintessential form over function problem. Many companies approach their Web site design from the perspective of the consumer only.
Unfortunately customers have very little impact on how you rank within the search engines. And without being ranked, those all-important customers will not find you.
“Businesses tend to spend it all to look cool online and not a dime on how the site can be found,” laments Gartner Research Vice President Gene Alvarez.“
“At least one-third of the design budget should be allocated to site discovery on things like keywords, reviewing pages for Web-crawler-friendly attributes and the development of a site map.”
When making the decision to launch a new site or embark on a re-design answer these three questions and you will be on your way to better findability:
- What is your objective for the newly designed site?
- What critical business information do want the search engines to find?
- Have you established a budget for search marketing?
Spending money on a new site which is invisible to your future customers is a wasted investment. For more information download our Guide to Findability here.
