The top ten tricks to get more traffic and conversions from your website. From some easy wins, some free methods, some paid techniques and the ones that take a long time to take effect but you can do yourself and drive sales.

1. @annstanley
An Integrated Approach to Driving
More Traffic to Your Website
by
Ann Stanley
May 2012

2. @annstanley

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Digital landscape

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Top UK sites by visits
Source: Hitwise week ending 8/5/2012

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Part 1 – Top tips

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Part 1 - Top 10 Tips
• Getting the basics right
– Customers and competitors
– Web Design and “Calls for action”
– Is your site mobile-ready?
– Measuring website performance with Google Analytics?
• Quick wins
– Email marketing
– Local listings/Maps
– Google Merchant Centre for ecommerce sites
– Using Google AdWords or pay per click (PPC)
• Slow burns
– Search engine optimisation (SEO)
– Social marketing - blogs, Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn etc

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Customers, competitors
and objectives

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Understanding your customers?
• Your website look and feel should be designed for your
target customers (especially age and demographics)
• All customers are consumers at heart – and they will
judge you against the sites they like and use - rather than
your competitors (the “John Lewis” effect)
• If you have more than one type of customer (eg
consumers vs trade) make it easy for them to know
where they need to go and what they can do on your site
• If you don’t meet your customers needs then your
competitors will!

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Target audience - site aimed at parents and kids

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Target audience - site aimed at techies

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Branding – lifestyle & aspirations

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Who are your competitors?
• Your competitors are not only the companies that
offer similar services to you, they include:
– Other companies that compete for your customers’
pounds
– Other companies that might appear for the same
keyphrases in the search engines
• If you are redesigning your website make sure it has
a better design and functionality than your
competitors - as they may be building a new
improved site right now!

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The key to getting the best website
Design
first impressions counts
We need to get a
balance between
these elements
Content Functionality
what the site says to what the site does for
the user and search the user and your
engines business

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Why is the design and first
impression of your website so
important?

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Instant impression of your website!
SECONDS

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Example Britain’s Best Breaks –
effect of design on web results

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Analytics
results

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Examples of “calls for action”

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Is your site mobile ready?

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Device responsive design
• Same url for all devices rather than a separate mobile site or sub-domain
• User detection agent (distinguishes device)
• Liquid or responsive design suitable for each size device/operating system/browser
• Mobile design often has a single column with most important content/features
moved to the top and in some cases some content hidden

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Amazon.co.uk responsive design
or Amazon.co.uk App
Main site – with adaptive CSS Amazon App

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Google Analytics

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Using Google Analytics

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Traffic sources

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Ecommerce – differences in conversion
rate by traffic source

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Analytics Conversion Attribution –
top paths to a conversion

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Quick wins!

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Email marketing

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Use of email templates and reporting

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“MailChimp” email marketing tool

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Spike in traffic due to email

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Analytics URL builder

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How to get a local
business listing - so you appear
next to the map?

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Local listings

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Getting listed in Google Places (Local Search)

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Add your company details

37. Bing Map – @annstanley
listing through My118 Information

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Using Google AdWords
or pay per click (PPC)

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Pay Per Click in Action
1
User
submits
search
2
Listings
dynamically
ordered by
bid price &
relevancy
3
User clicks
on paid link,
triggering
payment to
Google

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PPC Account Hierarchy
Campaigns (<20)
(set a budget and Timber
targeting)
Ad Groups
20-100 per campaign
Timber Timber Timber
(each has its own ad
Company Merchant Supplies
copy and landing page)
timber merchants
Keywords timber company timber supplies
builders merchants
3-30 per ad group timber companies timber timber supplier

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Typical PPC results
Glossary
Impressions = number of times your ad is seen
Clicks = number of times searcher clicked on your ad
CTR = click through rate clicks divided by impressions (>2% indicates a more
relevant keyphrase and ad combination)
Avg CPC = average cost per click (amount paid when users click on your ad)
Cost = total spent in period (clicks times average cost per click)
Avg Position = Average position achieved in results
Conversions = completed sales or completed registrations
Conversion rate = conversions divided by clicks
Cost per conversion = total cost divided by number of conversions

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Managing PPC – what’s important
• Quality Score – Google’s measure of relevancy – it affects
your position and how much you pay (eg QS of 8/10 you pays
half as compared with 4/10)
• Click through rate – pause phrases and ads with a CTR
below<1%, otherwise this drags down your QS
• Position and bidding – you may have to bid lower (cost per
click) and settle for position 3-6 to avoid the bidding war of
position 1-3, where the CPC will be too high!
• Cost per acquisition (CPA) – most sites have a typical
conversion rate of 1%. Your cost per sale or lead will be 100 x
your cost per click – can you afford this?

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Ad Extensions, Local Listings (map)
and new Product Listing ads

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Remarketing in AdWords (aka stalking)

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Remarketing results
Client 1 Client 2 Client 4
(from Aug 2011) (from Jan 2011) Client 3(from July 2011) (from Jan 2011)
View- Conv. View- Conv. Conv. View- Conv. View- Conv.
Conv. (1- through rate (1- Conv. (1- through rate (1- (1-per- through rate (1- Conv. (1- through rate (1-
Campaign per-click) Conv. per-click) per-click) Conv. per-click) click) Conv. per-click) per-click) Conv. per-click)
TOTAL 445 84 1.7% 2833 220 2.57% 559 118 2.44% 862 1716 1.06%
Brand 39 0 6.7% 413 0 8.99% 433 0 5.13% - - -
Remarketing 9 84 2.3%* 54 215 3.11%* 15 118 1.34% 179 1716 3.06%*
Competitors - - - 216 0 2.01% - - - 184 0 1.88%
Vouchers 29 0 15.26%
Product 1 133 0 2.3% 1 0 50.00% 109 0 0.96% 2 0 1.57%
Product 2 12 0 1.9% 1 0 14.29% 17 0 1.48%
Product 3 156 0 1.7% 6 0 11.76% 85 0 1.29%
Product 4 30 0 0.8% 1 0 11.11% 13 0 1.18%
Product 5 5 0 0.7% 1 0 11.11% 25 0 1.05%
Product 6 2 0 0.5% 3 0 8.33% 155 0 1.03%
Product 7 93 0 7.98% 2 0 0.62%
Product 8 16 0 6.35% 22 0 0.61%
Product 9 3 0 5.88% 31 0 0.59%
Product 10 1 0 5.56% 31 0 0.58%

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Google Merchant Centre for
ecommerce sites

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Integration with Google Merchant Centre
New Product
Listing ads
AdWords
product
extensions
Shopping results from Merchant Centre

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Summary of different shopping results in Google
Keywords =
Samsonite luggage
Organic shopping
results AdWords Products Map
Product Listing ads
ad extension and Places listings
(Merchant Centre)

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Increase in daily traffic due to
Merchant Centre
Merchant Centre set-up

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Slow burn

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Search engine optimisation (SEO)
On-page optimisation

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Search engine results
Display options
Organic or natural
results
Universal results –
news, shopping etc
Ads - paid

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How to get into the Google results
• Map – create a free Google Places listings (also in Bing)
• Shopping results – feed your ecommerce database into Google
Merchant Centre
• Images & videos – make sure these have keyphrases in the file
names and tags
• News, blogs and Twitter results – create ongoing blog content
on your site or via Twitter and news feed sites (PR)
• Sponsored Links – set up an AdWords pay per click account –
where you bid on relevant phrases and you pay if they click on
your ad
• Organic or natural listings – search engine optimise your website
ie SEO

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How Search Engines Work
A search engine is made of three basic components:
A Spider or Robot A Storage System A Matching Process or
An automated browser, it or Database Relevancy Algorithm
searches the web for new A record of all the pages The rules that tell the search
websites and changes to viewed by the Spider engine how to determine
websites then views the what would be relevant to
web pages and strips out your search
the text content

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Check that your site is indexed?
Do you have
keyphrases in
your url, title
and
description?

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Google keyword research tool

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Determine the level of competition

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Page plan with levels of monthly searches
vs competition (results in Google)

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On-page factors
• Title Tag
• Meta Tags (description, keyword etc)
• Content
• Heading content
• Frequency of phrases (how many times they are
mentioned)
• Density of phrases (proportion of the text)
• Internal Link structure with anchor text)
• Image optimisation (file names, Alt tags)
• Avoid Spam techniques and over-optimising
• Create new ongoing content on your site eg a blog

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On-Page Factors

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Keyphrase density (using SEOQuake)

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Checklist for optimising your website
• Carryout keyphrase research
• Prioritise your keyphrase by high search volume and low
competition (use pay per click data if you have it?)
• Produce a topic and a page plan (ie which pages are to be
optimised with which phrases)
• Write new optimised content or existing and new pages,
(URL, title, description, headers, keyphrase density, anchor
text, image optimisation)
• Upload your content through your CMS and add new links
from the homepage for new pages eg in the footer (you
may need to get your developer to do this)
• Add new optimised content every week via a blog
• Review results using Webmaster Tools and Analytics

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Search engine optimisation
Off-page

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Off-page factors
• Domain age
• Domain name
• Filename/full URL
• Directory listings
• External Link Structure
• Anchor text of inbound links
• Page quality of inbound links
• Social bookmarks
• Reviews and testimonials
• Social indicators especially Google +1 and Facebook
“Shares”

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Why are Links important?
Key to Google’s algorithm:
• Indicator of value: PageRank
• Indicator of relevance: Anchor text
Best links from:
• Highly trusted sites (high PageRank)
• Pages with relevant content
• Your keywords as anchor text

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Off-page factors - Linking

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Off-page factors - Linking

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Getting Links
• Content that people will want to link to
• Free stuff
• Blog posts
• Useful documents/articles
• Online tools
• Video and audio
• Funny or entertaining content
• Your content on other sites
• Article syndication site
• Guest blogging
• Online PR
• Directories

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Integrating PPC and SEO

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Why use PPC data to determine the
most effective keyphrases for SEO?
• It can take 6 -12 months to see the result of your SEO
activities
• But you may have wasted your efforts on optimising for
keyphrases with high volumes of searches but no
conversions
• We recommend you use PPC data as part of your SEO
strategy
– Narrow down your list to the keyphrases that convert
– Use as many months data as possible and use “See Search
Terms” to see the actual converting phrases
– If you are not currently using PPC then you may want to run
a PPC campaign before starting your SEO, in order to
understand your keyphrase profile

72. Selecting keyphrases for SEO @annstanley
using PPC conversion data
Competition PPC data See search
(Allintitle: Conv. (1-per- terms Total
Keyword Searches (phrase match) "keyphrase") Ratio click) conversions conversions
1 2900 14,200 0.20 307 307
2 27100 2,050,000 0.01 196 196
3 14800 598,000 0.02 185 185
4 2400 3,540 0.68 86 86
5 73 551 0.13 42 18 60
6 1600 472,000 0.01 29 29 58
7 590 82,400 0.01 49 49
8 58 168 0.35 48 48
9 4400 582,000 0.01 47 47
10 260 8,060 0.03 45 45
11 3600 516,000 0.01 44 44
12 880 210 4.19 43 43
13 16 366 0.04 25 11 36
14 260 28 9.29 16 18 34
15 140 10,500 0.01 29 29
16 210 8,270 0.03 16 12 28
17 3600 51,300 0.07 24 24
18 58 6 9.67 24 24
19 73 30 2.43 23 23
20 1600 205,000 0.01 22 22

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Increase in organic traffic and sales
Jan 2011 – Dec 2012 – visits from organic (dark blue line) vs revenue (light blue line)
Visits from organic 2011 (dark blue line) vs 2010 (orange line)
SEO project started July 2011

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Social marketing - Blogs, Twitter,
FaceBook, LinkedIn etc

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Importance of social
• Direct sales e.g. Facebook commerce
• Direct traffic e.g. Brand pages (Facebook,
Google Plus, Twitter)
• Community, loyalty and word of mouth
(Facebook Likes, Twitter, Reddit, Digg,
Delicious) and social shopping sites e.g.
Kaboodle
• Referrals, links and SEO benefit (Google Plus,
Facebook Shares, social bookmarking)

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Building Communities
• Why?
– Marketing to a specific target market that uses the platform
– Loyalty and referrals – viral marketing
– Link building benefits for SEO
• How?
– Recommendations and Social book marking eg Delicious, Digg
– Social Networking for promoting discount codes, events &
competitions
– LinkedIn, Facebook Group, Twitter profiles
– PPC on these platforms (paid social)

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Blogging

78. Social networking for businesses
@annstanley
(personal vs company profiles)

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Twitter account

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Google Plus

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Facebook

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Pinterest

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Part 2 – what’s new in Google?

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New Google layout

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Not logged-in

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Google’s “Search, Plus Your World”

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Universal results

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Local results

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Panda?
LSI – Latent semantic indexing
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2104571/Google-Panda-6-Months-Out-Still-Has-People-Baffled

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Google Panda update and need for
‘good quality content’
• In 2011, Google implemented a rolling algorithm
update known as ‘Panda’, which ‘penalises’ sites that
host poor quality content and/or provide a poor user
experience
• The effect of the Panda update was widespread and,
with every update, Google becomes more
sophisticated at judging the quality of content on a
site

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Optimise for the user –
not search engines
• Making sure a site is optimised to provide a rich,
relevant and rewarding experience for visitors is
the best way to avoid Panda penalties, which
means:
– No duplicate content
– All pages to have unique, relevant and useful content
(even the 1000s of product pages on ecommerce
sites!)
– Good levels of interaction on site (low bounce rates,
inbound links to ‘deep’ pages, social mentions etc…)

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Ecommerce optimisation –
unique content on category pages

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Ongoing ‘Fresh’ content
(blogging with social plug-ins)

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User-generated content
• User-generated content, or UGC, is still a great way to add unique and
relevant content to web pages – especially product pages in the ‘post-
Panda’ search environment:

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Video integrated with product pages

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Use of Schema.org and rich snippets

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Thank You
Ann Stanley
@annstanley
ann@anicca-solutions.com
www.anicca-solutions.com