There is a person looking for a computer on the internet, but he has trust issues so he wants a computer with a 10 year guarantee - he searches for this indistructable computer using a search engine and types in "computer 10 year guarantee". imagine being able to target this consumer not only from a geographic perspective but also from a phychographic one.
At no time in history has there been a medium where this is 100% possible. search engine marketing allows businesses to laser target website visitors and to custom make their offering to suit the clients needs to exact specifications.
Think about it you have something to offer that is quite generic and in the past it was difficult to differentiate your product, now there are many differentiating factors that can be applied online. Whether it is to overcome risk perceived or status needs, affordability, better service or any other factor reflected by the search criteria chosen by the target market.
This is how...
No 1 you have to know what people are looking for and fortunately search phrase statistics are available and can be researched online. This information is invaluable as it is unbiased market research, a person does a search in the privacy of his computer screen so there are no external pressures to be sociably accepted or not to hurt the feelings of the interviewer. What they type in is exactly how they feel and what they want.
Once the most viable phrases have been selected the website content, layout and functionality need to be designed in such a way to make the targeted visitors (self-qualified prospects) feel at home when they arrive and prompt them to enquire or buy.
It is then necessary to get the website ranking in the first page of millions of search results, beating other websites to the punch. This is done by making the optimised page search engine friendly and giving the phrases high relevance with optimisation techniques like key word densities in the meta area and body text, link popularity.
Measurement and testing like in offline promotional campaign it is crucial to measure its success. The site statistics need to be monitored and evaluated. This gives insight into visitor behaviour, if for instance vistors are leaving after less than one second it might be that the home page is loading too slowly and visitors are not seeing the content, or if they do spend more than a second but do not go deeper into the site it could mean that the unique positioning of the site is not clearly conveyed.
Testing should be done, one aspect at a time, many a rookie web marketer makes the mistake of changing several things at the same time and then doesnt know what caused the change in visitor behaviour.
This is how to do it:
- Make changes to Website over a predetermined test period
- Make one change at a time (to evaluate its impact)
- Keep a record of changes
- Extract the Following Information From the Site Statistics (over test period)
Number of visitors (v)
Number of page views (pv)
Duration - percentage of visits longer than 2 minutes (d)
Enquiries - number of enquiries (e)
Working out the success rate
Visitor to page view ratio (vpr)
vpr=pv/v
Average duration - divide each months visitor durations longer than 2 minutes (mvd) by total to get average visitor durations (avd)
avd=mvd/tvd
Average enquiries - add number of enquiries to get total enquiries (te).
Divide monthly enquiries (me) by total enquiries (te) to get average enquiries (ae) [ ae=me/te ]
Success rate (weighted average) = (vpr*2)+(avd*3)+(ae*5)
Give vpr, avd and ae a relative weighted number out of ten based on the importance
We now have a weighted average for page view, duration and enquiries. When making changes to a website (one at a time) one is now able to test how this change influenced design. Should there be an improvement in the success rate, then you know that the change had a positive impact on visitors, the inverse is obviously also true. This way one can optimise the design and get a higher visitor conversion rate.
Author Resource:-
Gary Terrazas is an online marketing consultant. Owner of Website Marketing who helps website owners to successfully promote their businesses online.
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