Category: Blog

Gaining Traffic For Your Website: Quantity, Or Quality?

If you’re working on a content marketing strategy for your website (that is, writing content in order to drive search engine rankings), it can be tempting to push out something less insightful in favor of producing more content.

It’s a trap; don’t fall for it.

1 insanely high-quality article could drive more traffic than 100 low-medium quality articles.

Think about your own trip to your email inbox. Are you thinking: “I just don’t have enough email to check – anything at all is fine, I just need some reading material!”. I doubt it. You’re likely thinking “I don’t have time for any of this, I’ve more important things to do”.

It’s a rare occasion for you to spend time reading an article that’s come into your inbox – except for the 2-3 newsletters that you’re subscribed to that always have incredible content to share. They’re always fascinating and severely related to you, so you’re willing to take time out of your day to read because they enrich your life.

You want to make it your goal to write content that’s that good.

Google Panda Update

Another reason to really put yourself in the “great content” game is Google’s “Panda” update. This is a special system created by Google to penalize websites that produce low quality content.

So write all you want, if your content is just regurgitating the same old ideas found everywhere else on the internet, you could be straying too close to a ferocious stray dog.

If you’ve been hit by the Panda algorithm, the simplest way to reverse your penalty is to increase the quality of the content on your website. This might be a large job, depending on how much content you have.

The Hallmarks Of Quality Content

Adding in a unique perspective or commentary based on your expertise is the easiest way to make your content more unique and original. While you’re adding that in, make sure your voice and personality really represent the business well; this way visitors get to know you and come to expect your brand of information.

Some key indicators of incredible content include:

It has that “been there – done that” voice and flair.
It has specific knowledge that comes from real experience.
It supports a depth of useful information – you link to sources, such as this link to Make Your Content PreSell, which is where this “incredible content criteria” was originally listed.
It is spun or positioned in a way that is uniquely yours.
It is consistent from web page to page, newsletter to newsletter, Facebook post to post, tweet to tweet, from week to month to year.

Beyond those criteria, you might also consider creating content with:

professional images to help illustrate what you’re teaching
a catchy headline to grab a visitor’s attention
infographics or videos that make difficult concepts simple

Because you’re the expert in your field, you’re the best person to write this content. You might not have time though, in which case you should hire a writer to interview you and ask you questions related to whichever subject you’re talking about.

If you don’t have time for regular interviews, then you’ll want to find a writer who has knowledge and experience in your area of business.

And lastly, if you can’t find a writer who has experience in your area of business, at least find a writer who’s really good!

Summary:

Create content that blows visitors away
Producing huge amounts of low-quality content is a sure-fire way to get hit by Google’s Panda algorithm.
Hire a writer if you don’t have time to do it yourself

Visitors Into Customers Series 4: A/B Split Testing

If you have a website with over 200 visitors per day, and you make sales or leads through your website, then you’ll want to consider split-testing your audience.

There is a time where testing might be less helpful – if your customers can’t interact with you online. If your business only has a phone number to call, then the best thing you can measure with testing is engagement, and not actual sales; it’s less useful when testing your site if you can’t measure results.

If you have important actions for visitors to take, such as:

contacting you through your online form
making a physical or digital purchase
signing up for your newsletter list

…then split-testing becomes very valuable because you can track conversions. So let’s dive in!

What Is A/B Split Testing

Split-testing allows you to create different versions of your website, and test them against each other to see which one drives the most sales.

You don’t have to test your whole website though; you can create variations of just a single web page (such as a sales page) and then see which variation gets you the most sales or conversions.

It’s called A/B split-testing because you split your traffic between variation A, and variation B, and then test to see which ones provide the most results. You can have unlimited variations, so you might have variations C and D too!

In the above image (courtesy of Nitro Interactive), you can see that:

variation A had a 34% conversion rate
variation B had an 8% conversion rate
variation C had a 13% conversion rate

A 34% conversion rate means that 34 out of every 100 people who viewed the page took a desirable action (such as buying a product, or whatever you wanted to test).

Programs To Use – Free & Paid

If you’re on a tight budget and have time to spare, then try out Google Content Experiments. It’s free, and you just need to have Google Analytics installed on your website to use it.

The free price tag comes at another type of price – it’s time intensive. In order to make an experiment, you need to create a brand-new web page for every variation. Installing the tracking code can also be a bit of a pain, but it’s totally doable by simply following Google’s documentation and having the patience to deal with any technical hiccups.

For a more intuitive solution, you may want to try Optimizely. It’s a paid program, but comes with a 30 day free trial (after that it’s $19/month).

Optimizely is great because you can set up new variations in less than 5 minutes, and they have a very easy-to-install code that you can put in the <head> of your entire website; you never have to install it again, no matter how many experiments you conduct.

It’s much easier to use than Google Content Experiments, but obviously there is a monetary price, which we think is totally worth it.

Starting Your Own Experiments

To get started with your own experiments, try one of the tools above. You’ll want to have some goals in mind; do you want to increase sales, or increase leads? What is your most important sales metric right now?

Once you’ve determined your exact goals, you’ll want to come up with different elements to test. You can test:

headlines
colors
fonts
images
navigation (or no navigation)
headers
footers
and anything else you can think of.

Recommended reading: 71 things to A/B test (by Optimizely)

You may want to hire someone to do these types of tests for you. At One Yellow Tree, we’d be happy to help you with that, though we’re also just really happy to be teaching this to you, so feel free to use your newfound knowledge to try out your own experiments!

Next week we’ll be going into part 5 of the “Visitors into Customers” series, where we’ll be talking about name dropping.

Visitors Into Customers Series 3: Testimonials Or Die…In Business

For many of us, referrals are the lifeblood of our business. Local businesses aren’t Coca-Cola – we have limited marketing budgets and mouths to feed. Getting clients ecstatic with your work so that they share with their friends is incredibly important to keeping food on your table.

Online, referrals work in a different sort of way. Yes, you can have a customer share your business with their friend on Facebook or through email, but another very useful way to have someone “refer” you is to use a testimonial from them on your website.

With this review in place, when a stranger arrives to your site, they are right away able to see that other clients are happy with your service, and why.

Testimonials work because they provide credibility for you and your business, the best testimonials helping to conquer common objections about your business (ie. “I thought it was going to be too expensive, but it turned out that Accountant X saved me hundreds of dollars because he was so experienced and efficient!”)

What Does A Stranger’s Opinion Mean To Me?

Yes we’ve all heard the hokey “as seen on TV” testimonials of some “real user”, and they’re largely unconvincing for us as we know it’s just some paid actor.

How do you make sure that visitors to your site don’t perceive your testimonials as “hokey”, but instead see them as a credible source of information?

You do this by providing testimonials that are:

real
detailed
personal

You can’t make this type of testimonial up. That’s why it’s always good to get your current clients to write about how happy they are with your service.

But then, we run into a problem. We go and ask all our clients to leave us a nice review, and they promise “oh yes I’ll do that for sure”, and then…

…they never do it.

You see, a customer runs into a big problem when they need to write something nice: writer’s block. you see, most customers aren’t like you or I, who can come up with something special to say off the top of our head. They need some momentum to get going.

And that’s where questions come in, to help your happy customer’s mind start thinking.

6 Questions To Ask Your Clients For Rich Testimonials

Ask your customers these 6 questions, and you’ll start getting rich, specific, and engaging testimonials in no time at all.

What was the obstacle that would have prevented you from buying this product/service?
What did you find as a result of buying this product/service?
What specific feature did you like about this product/service?
What would be 3 other benefits of this product/service?
Would you recommend this product/service? Why?
Is there anything you would like to add?

Now, once you receive your answers from your customers (you can email them these questions, if it’s easier for you) you’ll probably want to edit them a little bit. Ask them to answer with full sentences so that you can do less editing.

You’ll want to remove the most generic parts of the testimonial, because sometimes a customer gets stuck on a question and just gives a “swath” answer; they don’t have an answer so they just make something up that’s generic and boring.

Take care in editing the reply, as you don’t want to change the meaning of what your customer has said – you just need to condense it down to 2-5 sentences so that you can easily display it on your website. You can keep some of them very long if you feel it’s appropriate too.

By the way, these questions were first developed by Sean D’souza from Psychotactics.com. He’s also written an entire little book about testimonials.

Where To Put These Testimonials

Once you have your testimonials in hand (these are worth thousands of dollars), you can start putting them on your site.

Place testimonials in some, or all of these places, such as:

your home page
a “Testimonials/Reviews” page
on your purchase page
on a specific product page
on your contact page
in a right-hand sidebar
on your Facebook/Twitter page

Use testimonials to bolster your credibility, and add a “multiplier” effect to the rest of your online sales efforts.

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Here's a sample testimonial that we wrote for a sign company, so you can see what one might look like in action. — Here’s a sample testimonial that we wrote for a sign company, so you can see what one might look like in action.

On a barely related note: you can also ask clients to review you on Google+ Local, where more reviews help increase your business’s ranking on Google.

Next week we’ll be discussing one of the most exciting online strategies for increasing your sales and leads: A/B split testing. That might be an unfamiliar term right now, but we can help you get over your temporary ignorance. Read next week’s article and feel your knowledge gap disappear!

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Visitors Into Customers Series 2: Display A Prominent “Click-To-Call” Phone Number

“Most of our customers call; they don’t email us”.

If that’s you, then displaying a phone number in a very visible location is important. Beyond that, you’ll also want to make sure the phone number is “click-to-call”.

What’s click-to-call?

When a potential customer is on your site on their mobile phone, they can simply touch your phone number on their screen, and their phone will prompt them to automatically “call you”. It removes the dialing process entirely so you’re just a click away.

The click-to-call link is very easy to make, just send the following HTML to your webmaster (with your phone number in it):

If someone on their desktop computer clicks the link, they’ll just be directed to call you via Skype or another calling app. On a tablet (iPad), they will be prompted to add the number in their contacts book.

Breaking The Mobile Web has a great article about the click-to-call code if you need some more information about it.

Where Should You Put Your Phone Number?

Everywhere!

Put your phone number in any place that makes sense, the most obvious being the top right corner of your screen (and right at the top on mobile devices).

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More ideas: you could put a call button after each article on your website, and even just spaced throughout your content or eCommerce store. You’ll want your web developer to spend some time designing new buttons to grab attention.

If you have a fair amount of traffic (over 100 unique visitors/day) you might even consider some A/B split testing on your buttons to see which ones get the most calls. We’ll cover A/B split testing in part 4 of this series.

Call up your webmaster today and get some phone numbers on your business’s website![/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

Visitors Into Customers Series 1: Use A “Call-To-Action” On Your Website

You have a beautiful new website, and you’re running some ads or an SEO campaign to bring new visitors to your site.

Now what?

Imagine a bakery that’s full of people, but no one buys anything. They just walk in, take a peek around, and then leave. If that was your business, what would you do? I can guarantee you’d at least think “why isn’t anyone buying anything?”

It would be perfectly natural to think that, yet sometimes we don’t have the same thought process about our website:

“Why isn’t anyone buying?” Or possibly “how can I get more people to buy?”.

Given this question, we’ve decided to introduce a new series called “Visitors Into Customers”. We’ll be giving you a new idea every week that you can apply to your business’s website. It’s not a huge job, and most tasks can be done in under an hour (bar week #4, which has one of our most important tips).

We’ll provide examples and tools that you can apply yourself, or get your webmaster to do for you. Let’s start with tip #1:

Use A “Call-To-Action” (CTA) Throughout Your Website

Also known as “telling your visitors what to do”, a CTA is short, and it contains your “Most Wanted Response” (MWR).

Most-wanted response definition: the action you most want visitors to take that is most valuable to you. Common MWRs for a small business are to get a visitor to:

call you
fill out a contact form
make a purchase online
fill out a form for a free quote
book an appointment online

Your MWR is valuable to you; it usually represents a lead or a sale.

It may seem shallow and possibly even cynical, but simply saying “Call Us Today!” will dramatically increase the likelihood of a visitor calling you, instead of just leaving your website.

You have two action steps now:

Decide on a most-wanted response
Turn that MWR into a call-to-action, and put it throughout your website

Examples Of A Call-To-Action

Let’s say you decide that your MWR is for a visitor to email you. You’ll want to place some prominent buttons around your website, “calling” your visitors to take action. Here’s an example:

You’ll also want to put a “contact” link in your navigation.

One successful idea is to put a call-to-action at the end of your articles whenever appropriate. For example, a local mechanic in Chilliwack puts this button at the end of his articles:

Because they’ve already been reading his content, and are sold on his credibility (because he answered all of their questions), providing a CTA at this time is very effective.

Where can you put a call-to-action on your website? If your site is built on WordPress, you should be able to find shortcodes that make creating buttons a snap. If not, you can always use Button Optimizer to make your own custom CTA buttons.

And in our very own “call-to-action” style…

…create your website’s call-to-action now!

How Does Google Work? (Part 2)

How Does Google Know Who Has The Best Information?

In part 1 we spoke about how Google about information, not location. Instead of location, location, location – now it’s information, information, information.

Now that you’ve written the best valuable content about your niche, how does Google KNOW that it’s the best? After all, they aren’t going to physically read all the billions and billions of pages on the web, are they?

Well, yes and no. No, Google can’t have a real human read all of your web pages, but they can see how real humans (your visitors) react to your content.

For example, when a visitor clicks onto your site:

do they stay there long?
are they so impressed that they click through to the rest of your site, or do they leave immediately, back to Google?
are other websites linking to your site to help educate THEIR visitors?
are your social media pages thriving, thus displaying how active the community surrounding your website/business is?

There are over 200+ factors as to why Google might rank your website highly. Many of them revolve around how good your content is. Beyond writing something good, you can also help the search engines know what your site is about through something called SEO (search engine optimization).

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the process of helping your website gain better rankings in Google. Writing content is actually a big part of SEO, but there’s more that can be done to give Google clues about what your content is about, such as:

sprinkling in keywords that are relevant to the content
getting your articles published on other high-profile websites (such as a local newspaper, or an industry-leader’s website)
running an active social media presence for your business

Not only does building and marketing your expert content build your rankings online, but it also builds credibility for you as an individual, and for your business.

Think about it. When someone finds you on Google, they don’t know you from a hole in the wall. But when they arrive on your site to find content that answers all their questions, they can’t help but be convinced to call you.

Great content builds traffic, and simultaneously increases your conversion rate. If you want to get your website ranked on Google, build content. We recommend either;

writing the content yourself
hiring a writer to interview you (the expert), and write the content for you.

Unless you can find a writer who coincidentally is an expert in your field (it does happen occasionally), we wouldn’t recommend just hiring any old writer to “research” it themselves.

They’re likely to recycle the same-old information that’s available online, providing little real value to your visitors; Google notices that type of thing. At the very least, they need to interview someone who is an expert in your field (but who better than you, or one of your knowledgeable employees?).

In the final part of this series, we’ll talk about some ideas for you to write about that can really provide value for your visitors, and drive paying customers to your website.

content marketing google seo