Posts tagged web traffic
3 Ways to Improve Ecommerce Web Marketing Success
Feb 10th
Ecommerce sites have created some of the greatest success stories in the world wide web. Just think Amazon and eBay, and you’ll start to get an idea of how many dollars are generated through ecommerce and the associated web marketing. It’s actually likely that the cheapness, availability and choice that buying on the internet provides, actually boosts the number of dollars spent worldwide and shores up the world’s biggest economies.
How healthy is your website's shopping cart?
So how do you get a slice of the pie?! If you have an ecommerce site, today we are looking at 3 big tips to make life easy for your customers, and therefore sell more online.
1. Look at what happens after the click
There aren’t many actions that you should take without first investigating them. When it comes to ecommerce, it is vitally important to see what visitors do after they land on your site. What is your bounce rate like? What pages do they go to most? What pages do most people exit from? This information forms the building blocks of a successful ecommerce site.
Smart ecommerce sites (and those with a reasonable marketing budget) can also gain plenty of benefit from customized usability testing, eyetracking studies and heat mapping.
2. Add ratings and recommendations … and personalize them
The easiest way to understand this tip is to think of how Amazon interacts with you. If you have an ecommerce site of your own, but no experience with Amazon, go check it out now! While there are some complaints about their site, they generally represent the embodiment of best practices in ecommerce.
Amazon provides personalized recommendations for new products based on what a user has viewed before, and what they have bought before. eBay now does the same.
You can also provide ratings from other users based on a person’s behavior on your site – don’t wait for them to click through to a product page to find out that other people love a product.
3. Add a Live Help function
Most of the problems that people encounter with ecommerce sites can be overcome, or at least mitigated, by offering a Live Help service. When something happens that a consumer isn’t expecting, they don’t have to go searching for their product all over again at a different site. That is actually a lot of work – though it is possible. Live Help keeps customers on-site, even if:
- There isn’t enough product information on a description page
- An error occurs during checkouot
- Return policy is not clearlt stated
- People need to enquire about shipping
- The product is expensive
“Would You Like a Cup of Tea?” 4 Usability Steps to Keeping Your SEO Traffic Around
Jan 20th
It’s difficult to persuade people to do things (and even to remember things that you say) when you aren’t directly looking at them. This fact has been confirmed by neuroscientific studies across the world, but in SEO we are intimately familiar with it. Most visitors to websites leave within 8 seconds if they don’t see what they are looking for, or if the site seems like hard work, or if it doesn’t match their expectations. Today we are exploring the top 4 usability steps you can take with your website to keep all that traffic so hard-won through SEO, on your site long enough to see how great you are!
A clear visual hierarchy
Step 1: Make use of visual hierarchy rules
Things that are more important on your page should be made obvious with a combination of the following web design aspects:
- Being larger
- Being bolder
- Being more colourful
- Being closer to the top of the page
- Being surrounded by more white space
Step 2: Be conventional
This isn’t business or general marketing advice, but it makes good sense for web design. Take advantage of conventions like putting a search box in the top right of the page, naming certain parts of your site ‘About Us’ and ‘Contact’, etc. This makes you effortless to understand.
Step 3: Segment your pages
If you run Adsense, it’s tempting to make the ads look like content in order to get people to click on them. Design-wise, it isn’t optimal … it simply makes the site harder to understand, and likely to have a higher bounce rate.
Step 4: Link appearance
Make it obvious when something is clickable, either by making it blue and underlining it, or creating 3D effects on it. At the very least, put a single underline on your links. As a side note, you should always make both the picture and text related to a link clickable. If your users can’t figure out how to get round their site, they’ll click off … wasting all that precious web marketing time!
The Things that Make us Think in Website Design
Jan 15th
One of the best known laws of marketing (including web marketing), is that people aren’t interested in you (despite the fact they clicked on your website) … they’re interested in what you can do for THEM.
Another of the most important rules of owning a website is that if you make people think, they will avoid coming back to you. “Argh, my prefrontal cortex!”, they’ll subconsciously scream 
. And in a jiffy, there goes all of the link building, content optimizing SEO effort you’ve put in to get your site to number one in Google in order to get clicks.
Riddip - I didn't want to think!
So, today we are looking at the common website design mistakes that make people think too much, and how you can get around … thereby staying focused on the REAL goal of your internet marketing, which is not to get visitors, but to use visitors to make money.
Thought-Inducer 1: Obscure Titles
When you design your website, use words that aim at the lowest common denominator. Try to let go of the urge to ‘corporatise’ your language. So:
- If you have a page full of jobs, put the word ‘Jobs’ on the button, not ‘Employment Opportunities’
- If you are selling movies on a page, use the word ‘Movies’ on the linking button or navigation, not ‘Digital Video Discs’
You get the idea! There is an example for every industry. Don’t be afraid of sounding ‘dumb’ – remember, people don’t care about you and your vocabulary, they care about themselves!
Thought Inducer 2: Link appearance
You need to make it obvious where you want a person to click on your page. The easiest way to call attention to a link is by using a coloured, beveled, shadowed button. Using a simple coloured square makes it look like a graphic, and using text devalues the importance of the link. Worst of all is not changing the color of your links from the ordinary text color … waaaay too much work!
Thought Inducer 3: Marketing jargon in links
Some common examples of this understandable (but deadly!) usability mistake include:
- ‘Quick Search’ instead of ‘Search’
- ‘Product Types’ instead of ‘Categories’
- ‘Assistance’ instead of ‘Help’
Use the same words everybody else does for standard pages – trying to set yourself apart here often drives your visitors away, and wastes all of those web marketing dollars!.
How to Turn Robots Into Humans! Web Marketing and the Impact of Latent Semantic Indexing
Jan 7th
Scientists have been working for decades on artificial intelligence … but perhaps the problem has always been that there was previously no way to make money off the research in progress! Well, it seems that the Google-bot is getting closer and closer to human status, with the ongoing development of latent semantic indexing technology to analyse the content of websites. Today we are looking at Latent Semantic Indexing, how it works and what it means for your SEO efforts.
What is Latent Semantic Indexing?
Basically, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI from hereon) is a mathematical way for Google to determine the relationships between words and phrases, based on their proximity, the number of times they occur together, etc. It’s knowledge base for creating an understanding of these relationships is the entire web. The easiest way to understand it is by example: If your company site sells car parts, you would expect to find the terms ‘radiator’, ‘engine’, ‘car’, ‘suspension’, etc, scattered throughout your site. Google analyses the number of times a word occurs with another word in order to determine which pages are more relevant to a search query … even though there may be only one instance of the search term. LSI isn’t new, it has been in full effect for a few years now; however some people still aren’t aware it exists.
How should that affect my search engine optimisation efforts?
The advent of latent semantic indexing means the end of keyword stuffing. Now you can write as naturally as possible, in language that speaks only to your consumers, and the search engines will still hear you, index you, and push you up the rankings.
You can now build a much broader profile of keyphrases (preferably long tail ones) that are related to your business, without the fear that you are diluting your keyword strategy and missing out on clicks, because your SEO strategy wasn’t focused enough on a particular keyphrase.
In fact, if you write for humans (which the Google-bot is increasingly becoming, remember!), you’ll get higher traffic figures, and more unsolicited links, which will be of big benefit to your web marketing campaign anyway. Enjoy your content freedom – and if it’s all a bit much, the specialists at Web Marketing Experts can help you out.
Top 3 Effective Article Write Ups – webmarketingexperts.com.au
Jun 17th
Article writing is slowly gaining an entity as an online industry. It is one of the most effective search engine optimization strategies. It is effective in optimizing a website because search engine spiders love articles, especially those that are keyword rich, unique and with quality.
There are four kinds of article write ups that are effective in drawing targeted web traffic because internet users love reading them.
(a) How To Article = Articles of this type always attract internet users because people normally have the innate desire to know everything. How To articles are their best tools to satisfy that desire. Learning is a continuous process that never ends and this is what makes this article type to continue being read. This works well for your online marketing business.
(b) List Article = List article is the easiest way to write. You only have to write the description of what the list is all about and then post the bullets. You have the option to make it more informative by giving details for every bullet.
(c) Review Article = Review articles on products are important for every storefront website. Potential customers do not only search for products and buy them right away; they often research for information about the product. With review articles, the potential customers’ researching task would come to an end and finally buy the product that best fit for them.
Twitter Marketing: Who Follows You – webmarketingexperts.com.au
Jun 5th
In Twitter, what matters is not the number of followers, much not the number you follow. What matters is who reads your tweets.
Since Twitter is already a proven effective tool for web marketing, every web marketing professional is using it. They integrate Twitter as another social media tools to generate web traffic and sales for their business. However, the effectiveness of Twitter marketing depends on how you use it.
Getting more followers is good. It can be attained by setting an automaton through a web tool that’s increasingly available. Having a considerably big number of followers creates impression to people that you must be of something valuable in your chosen field. However, impressions are not the basis of success. You must have followers that would engage in whatever you tweet. Most of them are people who naturally follow you. Some followers are just automated and are not really interested in you.
Twitter can influence your internet marketing venture. Through retweeting, you can already have unlimited opportunities of getting potential customers. For instance, you got 100 natural followers or the ones that follow you because they are interested about your tweets and the service or product that you offer: these 100 followers would most likely retweet your links. The followers of those 100 followers you have could have 50-1000 or more, then those people would also retweet that, your tweet would certainly spread anywhere. One thing is certain; you get more web traffic for your site. Though it may not be certain to that you get customers right away with this method, the privilege to be exposed in wide audience is already great. It starts there, getting more web traffic for more chances of getting more potential customers.
Twitter Tips for Internet Marketing – webmarketingexperts.com.au
Jun 4th
Since the advent of Twitter and its invasion of the web by storm, internet marketing professionals discovered the potential of this microblogging service in the money-making industry. It has become a tool to increase web traffic of the online entrepreneurs.
Here are tips on making your Twitter marketing successful:
* Tweet with one thought. Complicated tweets, or the ones that are technical or the ones that expresses several ideas are most likely ignored. As a result, no one would like to click any URL that you post.
* Make a simple tweet. In few words, you must express passion, focus and intention clearly.
* Spend effort in retweeting. Even if you retweet the tweets of others who are not following you will appreciate what you do. They would most likely follow you as a payment of gratitude. If they don’t still follow you, they will repay your good deeds in other ways such as advertising your link to their followers.
* Do not just read information, be it in a form of news or videos of any topic. Create and share would help a lot.
* Get to the point when tweeting. You have to put in mind that when you tweet, it should be something that you want to share and avoid getting round-the-bush.
~oOo~
Contact Web Marketing Experts (webmarketingexperts.com.au) for more useful SEO tips and other relevant points of view.
Test Your Web Design Output
May 4th
Checking all the links throughout your site, checking the look of your site in different web browsers, and checking your site statistics on traffic and sales conversions are not enough. You also have to consider quick customer service survey as a web designer.
While it is beneficial for you to have site statistics for your site, surveying is far more beneficial in terms of knowing how well you are as a web designer. With website statistics, you can have the knowledge to know which of your web pages are strong and which of them are weak–the ones that are generating too low number of web visitors or not getting any.
Aside from this, you can also determine the problem of your site. For instance, you have a subscription page with five steps that are also equated to five links/web pages. If your “first step” page is getting more website traffic but not on the second and the rest of the pages, this only means that your “first step” page is good and there are problems with the rest of the page. This is the time that you would know the problems of the site pages and work on them. There are also some cases in which first to fourth step pages are getting more web traffic and only getting bouncing traffic at the final purchase confirmation web page. Again, there must probably be something wrong with that. Perhaps, some of the links are broken or that it is not working effectively.
4 Essential Techniques to Drive Web Traffic
Apr 9th
Generating web traffic for your site is very important in making your online marketing business survive. So, it is a must to know the essential techniques in driving web traffic to have more possible buying customers of product or service you offer.
Here are the 8 traffic-generating techniques:
1. Invest in PPC Advertising – Pay Per Click is the most effective way of generating traffic for your site. In order for your business to dominate the 3 major search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN, you need to subscribe to their advertising programs. Subscribing to Google Adwords would have your site gain traffic for Google users, Yahoo! Search Marketing for Yahoo, and Microsoft Live Search Advertising for MSN.
2. Master keyword selection – Keywords are the ones that serve are the key to have your website visited. Choose the appropriate keywords for your internet marketing business to achieve the traffic you desire.
3. Create a capture page – Capture page is where the visitors provide their name, email address and other contact information. This comes in different terms such as opt-in page, squeeze page and others. This page encourages the visitors to provide their contact information which will be added to your auto-responder mailing list.
4. Write articles and press releases – With articles and press releases, you get long-term exposure for your site. Articles have resource box where you are going to put the information about your web marketing business, your contact information and links, too.