RootsWebSolutions

Quite often when working on an SEO project it can be a lot quicker and cheaper to improve the conversion rate (CRO) of a given page rather than to get more people to it. For example, if you have a page that receives 3,000 visits a week and 1% of these visitors buy your product or sign up to your mailing list it can often be easier to make a few simple tweaks to your page to improve your conversion rate to 2% than it would to double your web traffic.

There are lots of techniques that can be adopted and below I’ve put down some of my favourite quick and easy ways that you can improve your sales pages straight away with little cost.

1.       Appeal to Skim Readers

That’s right people are lazy readers, congratulations on writing that 3,000 word epic blog post but if it’s hard to read people will switch off and go somewhere else. The simplest way to appeal to skim readers is

• Put Key points in bullets
• Use Sub headlines
• Introduce White Space

2.       Use Images & Graphics

Pictures appeal to the skim readers and a few well placed and well thought out images can make it easier for your readers to visualise what you are selling. Remember they are shopping online and don’t have the ability to have a physical relationship with the product they are buying.

3.       Increase Trust and Provide Proof

Your visitors will not believe your claims until you provide solid evidence to back up what you are saying. The vast majority of people are sceptical of big claims, especially online where the personal element of selling is not present. This can be easy to do on an ecommerce site for example you may want to include a section for user generated product reviews, look at the success of sites such as Amazon who encourage community product reviews.

Always ask your customers for feedback and testimonials to be published throughout your site. If it all possible get video testimonials from your clients these will build trust quicker and are easier to digest than even more words on the page.

Finally, offer a cast iron Guarantee, be bold offer a great guarantee and don’t promise anything you can’t afford or won’t keep.

4.       Write Amazing Titles that make your Life 500% Better

OK, OK I know that’s a terrible example of a title but you want something that will capture your audience’s attention and get them to keep reading. I highly recommend you head on over to Copybloggers guide to Write Magnetic Headlines and get some inspiration.

All of these tips should only take a few minutes each to implement on your pages and hopefully mean that people stay longer on your site and become customers.

Do you know of any quick and easy ways to increase your conversion rates? Just leave a comment below, and let others know your super smart CRO tips.

Changing all your URL’s – One of our clients had over 4,000 indexed pages in Google their page views were up in the high 80,000′s every month. They decided to carry out a rebranding exercise and decided to change their URL structure to be far more search engine friendly containing brand and product keywords etc. They did their keyword research, redirected all the old URL’s with 301 redirects, page titles and meta descriptions were re-written and on paper these new URL’s were far superior to the old one yet their traffic fell through the floor. it wasn’t until they called us to ask for help that we told them the last important point to remember when carrying out on-page SEO and 301 redirection….. don’t do it all at once! It took a few months for us to help them get back the traffic they had lost and more.

The dreaded no-index – all to often we discover that people’s websites are struggling to be found by Google due to a no-index tag left in the robots.txt web designers add a no-index attribute to a site or page when they are designing it so that the search engines don’t add the unfinished content to their index. All too often web designers forget or forget to tell the site owner to remove the no-index attributes from the robots.txt; so much so its the very first thing I check on any new on-page SEO contracts.

Do you trust your WordPress theme? –Be sure to check your theme on your WordPress site. I once heard a story about someone who underwent a website redesign and chose a brand new theme to use for her site. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that she discovered  that her website wasn’t being indexed properly. This was because the theme didn’t allow title tags on the page, so the crawlers were having a hard time indexing the site properly. This goes to show that no matter how pretty your theme is, if it ends up messing up your site in the process then it’s not worth using it.

Who is handling your SEO? – There are lots of businesses selling SEO Services these days be sure to check them out thoroughly. Ask for references and ask them lots of questions about how they plan on inporiving your SERP’s. Below is a great Halloween themed guide on Black Hat SEO Methods. Nothing can ruin your year like Google black listing you.  Be very careful of who you and your business trust to improve your Search rankings.

Happy Halloween please feel free to leave your SEO horror stories in the comments below…

8 Great Linkbait Headlines Anyone Can Use

The most considerable and perhaps the most difficult part of website optimisation is building back-links to your site. One of the best ways you can build lots of links is by producing great quality content that may potentially go viral. This SEO technique is generally referred to as “link baiting”.

Trying to engineer the perfect piece of link bait to land you on the front page of Digg or get your article tweeted all over the Twitter-verse is the ultimate target. No, matter how well written your article is it won’t attract new visitors if the headline is poor.

I have come up with some popular headlines I have used over the years, and I am sure you might have some excellent suggestions too, so please leave a comment below.

1.      17 Amazing Websites about ________

2.      How I managed to increase my _____ by ____%

3.      9 Secrets to make your  _______ better

4.      The Truth about _____

5.      What to Ask Your _________ Before Hiring Them

6.      Why You Must Read ______

7.      7 Rules You Must Follow When___________

8.      The 3 Reasons I Hate  ______

I’ll publish some more great tips for generating excellent LinkBait for your site very soon.