SEO’s Surgery Cookbook of Rankings!

SEO News – How Does Your Website Design Affect your Google Ranking?

When I was in school I had a buddy that had a 68 Mustang. He was always working on the engine trying to make the car go faster. The car was ugly, and when going down the road the steering wheel would shake, the front end would jump up and down and you had to hope he was able to pump the brakes faster enough to keep from hitting someone or something.

But all he wanted to talk about was getting the car to go faster!

Now…20 years later not much has changed, all anyone wants to talk about is getting more traffic!

Had my buddy thought about putting some decent tires on the car and getting the frontend and rear end aligned he would have gotten a much safer, better riding and faster car.

Think about it like this!

Let’s say you are a top divorce lawyer in Nashville TN.  and one case makes you on average $10.00. If you have a 2 percent conversion rate and get 500 visitors to your website per day, then you would have 10 sales per day.

Now…let’s say you’re about to get married and you are having a baby. The $3,000.00 per month the business is currently turning over isn’t going to be enough, so you’ll need to turn that $3,000.00 per month into at least $4,000.00 per month.

There are lots of ways to achieve this but let’s say for the sake of argument that you are on a budget and are currently being pitched on SEO or website conversion optimization.  I won’t talk about social media optimization as this would be the best place to start.

Let’s compare the two on how much money they can bring in!

Traffic	Conv. Rate	Sales	Avg. Order	Revenue	Notes
15,000	2.00%	300	$10	$3,000	Current
15,000	2.20%	330	$10	$3,300	Web Design Changes
16,500	2.00%	330	$10	$3,300	More Traffic

A 10% increase in traffic yields the exact same amount as a 10% increase in conversion.

Let’s Compare Cost

The quality of traffic is important, and at this moment and time Google has about the best quality of traffic out there. Delivering an extra 1,500 visitors to the site might require going after a new set of keywords. This requires content, links and a period of time for Google to find and credit your site with those links and content. This does not mean the site will rank it only means that you need to continue to work on the site for months before HOPEFULLY seeing results. I’d guess on the low side you might be able to get this done for under a thousand – to achieve an extra $300 per month.

Conversion Rate Optimization

So what steps should you take to try an increase your conversion rate? Step one is to figure out what you want the website visitor to do while he’s on that page. And everything after that is trying to figure out how to get him to do just that.

You start by looking for problems that could confuse the site visitor like forms, links, photos, content…

After you’ve identified a problem start creating alternatives and begin testing to see which results work best. Google has a website optimizer (a free tool) that allows you to run split tests on your website automatically and without affecting your SEO performance. The idea is to create a duplicate page of your website and make small changes to that page. Then add the pages into the system; the program will automatically serve either the new or the old page to the website visitor.

Conversion rates are then recorded by the system and a winner is decided.

The idea is to make small changes daily, measuring results and improving the user experience. Examples of small changes could be adding ‘Buy Now’ to buttons instead of “Add to Cart”, or removing a field from a form, changing text colors, photos, content, headers… You’ll be surprised at the affects these small changes can have on your websites success rate.

Focus on Upsell/Cross Sell

Now another way to increase revenue would be to increase the value of an order.

Amazon does an excellent job of getting every penny they can from each transaction by using their ‘Frequently Bought Together’ feature, with the upshot that customers actually love it. The key to getting this right is matching products properly. It’s no use matching widget x with widget y if they don’t work together, so you need to be sensible and match your products cleverly. With our supplements site this could be something like start offering a shaker flask with each supplement purchase. The two are required for the product to work and not all customers will have a shaker.

Key Takeaways

* Before doing anything else try and get the most out of the traffic you have.
* Use A/B split testing to test all pages on your site.
* Never stop testing.
* Use backend sales.
* Then go after more traffic.

Conclusion

Conversion rate optimization is cheaper, quicker and stronger than SEO. And of course the website is much better positioned to go after SEO once conversion rate optimization is done. Reason being, the websites able to convert more of the traffic it’s getting into clients and invest more money back into marketing.

The Shocking Truth about Our Future

Large companies are over taxed, and can no longer afford to hire large staffs.  Companies are investing in technology and calling employees partners, as they get rid of the low-end employees and seek to appease the best in their field.

These jobs are never coming back.

Unions, government overspending, class conflict, and tensions created by the government have seen to this.  I don’t think we’ll ever see a world like the one our parents grew up in.  But then who wants the low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, and low-benefit jobs?

Big businesses are rebranding to look more personal, roughed-up, de-branded and given a homely, independent and authentic look.  The old look is a haunting reminder of the flush times that are now gone.

It’s our generation that will pay the price for the failures of the generation before us.

The other day a professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before but had recently failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama’s socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

The professor then said, “OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama’s plan”. All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an “A”…. (substituting grades for dollars – something closer to home and more readily understood by all).

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a “B”. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.

As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little. The second test average was a “D”! No one was happy.

When the 3rd test rolled around, the new average was an “F”.

As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

To their great surprise, ALL FAILED and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.

Human nature will always cause socialism’s style of government to fail because the world has producers and non-producers (makers and takers).

It could not be any simpler than that.

1. You cannot create laws that will make poor people rich by making the rich people poor.

2. What one person gets for free, another person had to work for without receiving.

3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!

5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.