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 Crafford Blog 