SEOHonolulu.com

How to find the best keywords

How to increase website impressions

How to increase your CTR

How to increase page views

How to increase sales conversion rate

How to increase website revenue

Here are some ideas you may want to think about as you review your SEO/SEM Plan:

Product:
What should or shouldn’t you offer? _______________
What is your real product? _______________

People:
Who uses your product? _______________
What do they care about? _______________

Price:
Can people afford your product or service? _______________
How do they value it? _______________

Place:
How do people get to your product? _______________
Where is it distributed? _______________
How is it delivered? _______________

Production:
Can you do what you promise? _______________
Can you meet demand? _______________
Is your production flexible enough to meet changing needs? _______________

Promotion:
How do you let people know what you have? _______________
How well does your promotion work? _______________

Description JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV DEC TOTAL

Initiatives to improve:

Keywords
Impressions
Click-Thrus
Page Views
Sales Conversions
Sales Revenue
Total

Sample Graph created from worksheet to track sales and expenses over time:

Complete these 2 quick surveys to see how your SEO/SEM performance and strategies measure up against the competition:
Determine your SEO Benchmarks
SEO Self-Assessment
Determine Your SEO ROI

Answer these questions to see how you can make improvements to your SEO/SEM strategies:
How are you Targeting and Acquiring New Customers?
How are you Improving Your Competitive Analysis?
Choosing the Best Converting Keywords?

Answer these questions to see how you can increase the number of impressions to your website:
Increasing Impressions?

Answer these questions to see how you can increase click-thrus to your website:
Increasing Click-Thrus?

Answer these questions to see how you can increase page views when visitors are on your site:
Increasing Page Views?

Answer these questions to see how you can increase sales conversions:
Increasing Sales Conversions?

Answer these questions to see how you can increase sales revenue and reduce pay-per-action:
Increasing Revenue?

Contact Us
Request for Proposal
About Us

Do you use Trust-E Logo - about $700 per year

Do you use HackerSafe Logo - about $1,700 per year

Do you use Control Scan - about $500 per year

Do you use VeriSign - about $1,000 per year (or use your ecommerce secure shopping logo)

Do you use BBBOnline Reliability Logo? about $500 per year

Do you use BBBOnline Privacy Logo? about $500 per year

Do you use Alexa Traffic Rank Logo? free

Do you send an email confirmation of the order to the customer with useful information?

Do you know what your shopping cart abandonment rate is within each level of your shopping cart and why?

Do you understand that doubling your conversion rate is achievable?

Do you use FedEx, UPS, USPS Logos? - free

Do you use the FedEx, UPS and USPS shipping calculator? Most eCommerce packages have them built it.

Do you offer online shipping tracking code for customer to know when then can expect their product?

Do you enter the shipping tracking code in right away? The sooner the better. This will encourage repeat purchases.

Do you have an “enter your coupon” field on your shopping cart? Sometimes people don’t like seeing a code field if they don’t know one.

Do you use shopping comparison search engines and use them as trust icons?

Do you use nextag?

Do you use shopzilla/bizrate?

Do you use pricegrabber?

Do you use pronto?

Do you use google base? It’s free

Do you know how many people abandon their shopping carts before they reach the final checkout page? Your web analytics tool will show you exactly how many do.

Do you put insecure image or links in your checkout pages? If you do many people will abandon your cart right away.

Do you put too many tracking codes on your checkout pages? They may slow or stop your pages. You may only want to use the google adwords and yahoo tracking codes since they are more robust and trustworthy.

Do you repeat your offer and main benefits on the first page of your shopping cart or order form?

Do you understand that some customers click on the ‘Buy Now’ button just to see what the price and shipping cost will be, so you don’t want to miss out on this chance of persuading them? See if your eCommerce software can allow shoppers to preview shipping costs before they enter the shopping cart.

Do you ask for too much information in the shopping cart, which can be tiresome and off-putting for the customer. Do you really need their fax number before they place an order? Try to streamline the ordering process as much as possible.

Do you show thumbnail photos of the products in your cart to increase the likelihood of customers completing their order?

When you ask for information, do you explain why you need it?

Under the email field, do you say something like “We hate spam as much as you do” – and consider including the McAfeeSecure/HackerSafe logo?

Under an email newsletter opt-in box, do you have a link to your privacy policy?

Under the “Order Now” button, do you remind customers of your guarantee and returns policy?

Do you show additional ways of ordering? By toll-free number, will-call.

Does your shopping cart software fit your business?

Do you analyze keywords your visitors type in their search bars?

Do you use google analytics to find out what keywords are being searched and how well they convert?

Do you sort keywords by conversion rate which drive the most traffic and buyers? Use google analytics.

Do you make sure keywords surfers use to get to your site are the best match to your content?

Do you have 10-15% off discounts available on rotating basis? Try either monthly or seasonal specials.

Do you allow subscribers to register to your newsletter or RSS feed?

Do you use robust affiliate software?

Do you track affiliate sales?

Do you analyze the computer specificiations of your visitors? Use google analytics to find out?

Do you submit to free/paid directories?

Do you use google website optimizer? Google has just released a powerful tool that allows you to test changes to your website and will tell you which changes brought in the most customers.

If your website conversion rate doubled, did you know your cost-per-acquisition would be cut in half? http://www.paloalto.com/common/calculators/conversionrate.cfm

Do you analyze your field and potential competition? Use compete.com and spyfu.com to see how many unique visitors they get compared to you. See how many keywords they place for and how much they bid on them.

Do you use google.com/trends to see what companies, brands and products are hot?

Do you review your products/services on other sites?

Do you compare your website statistics with your competitors? Use google analytics tool on google dashboard.

Keywords – words that people use when the are searching for something that interests them.

What keywords do you want people to use to find your products and services?

How many times do people search for those keywords each day?

How relevant are those keywords to a sales conversion?

How difficult will it be to rank for those keywords in free and paid clicks?

To get the highest converting keywords, you need:

1. Keywords that target your audience
2. Keywords that get traffic
3. Keywords that get conversions

You can get and optimize a lot of keywords that will do well in 1 or 2 of these areas, but the best keywords are those satisfy all 3 requirements.

You can target your audience with low traffic keywords, but your conversion rates will be low.

You can get traffic that doesn’t convert, but sales rates will be low.

You can get conversions by targeting low traffic keywords, but your traffic rates will be low.

You can target your audience with poor converting keywords, but your sales will suffer.

You can get traffic without targeting your audience, but your conversions will suffer.

You can get conversions without targeting your audience, but your traffic will suffer.

The best keywords ever are keywords that you have determined to be relevant and have tested to get results. Anything else and you are just wasting time and money.

Sales revenue– when a sales transaction is made (very difficult and potentially expensive)

Do you track conversions? Use google adwords/analytics

Do you set conversion goals? Use google adwords/analytics

Do you analyze search engines’ results? Use google adwords/analytics

Do you participate in SEO campaigns? Use google adwords/analytics

Do you track your SEO campaign’s effectiveness? Use google adwords/analytics

Do you track your sales conversions rate? Use google adwords/analytics

Do you analyze your conversions resulting from natural search engine results? Use google adwords/analytics

Do you submit to niche paid and free directories?

Do you use referral systems?

Have you started an affiliate program?

Do you ethically promote your site in communities?

Do you join online and offline business associations?

Do you have a podcast?

As the number of orders increase, does your company leverage the greater bargaining power with its suppliers, so its costs-per-unit-sold tend to fall – so the company becomes more efficient because of economies of scale which makes it tougher on the competition.

Do you use keywords in image files?

Do you write appealing headlines?

Do you avoid flashy banners?

Do you avoid using frames?

Do your customers write testimonials about your company, products and services?

Do your customer supply user-generated content such as text, images and video? Use contest for each type of media

Do you keep adding sticky content?

Impressions – when a person sees your website ad or link on a search engine

How do you increase the number of impressions your website receives?

Buy forced traffic (easy but traffic is not targeted very well and a person is not expected to see it, it may be blocked by pop-up blockers)

Buy PPC from google.com/adwords, marketingcolutions.yahoo.com, adcenter.msn.com, etc. (easy but expensive)

Optimize your website to get free listings. (difficult, time-consuming but free)

INCREASING OFFLINE IMPRESSIONS

Have you tried offline advertising to promote your website?

Have you tried magazine ads?

Have you tried newspaper standard ads and classified ads?

Have you tried radio ads?

Have you tried TV infomercials?

INCREASING ONLINE IMPRESSIONS

Do you track PPC advertising campaigns? Use google adwords/analytics

Do you analyze PPC searches? Use google adwords/analytics

Do you analyze potential traffic? Use google adwords/analytics

Do you use time split tests?

Do you use Pay-per-click? It keeps getting more competitive and increasing your bids is not the answer.

Does your website lose bucket loads of money each day because it does a terrible job of selling to visitors?

IMPROVING SOCIAL MEDIA OPTIMIZATION:

Do you use social networking?

Do you use a blog such as wordpress.com or blogger.com?

Do you use facebook, digg, sphinn, linkedin, stumbleupon?

Have you created a MySpace page for your site?

Have you created a RSS feed from your blog? Try feedburner.com

Do you mention leaders in your field?

Do you make your blog lively?

Do you write press releases at least once a month? Try prweb.com

Do you advertise your site through forums and discussion boards? Don’t overdo it though.

Do you write authority posts?

Do you reply to comments left on your blog? It’s a good practice

Sales Conversions– when a person clicks on a desired action on your website such as a lead or a sale. (difficult)

Reducing Shopping Cart Abandonment:

Level 1 -Product info

Level 2 - Customer info

Level 3 - Shipping info

Level 4 - Final Step

Click Thrus – when a person clicks on your website ad or link and goes to the respective landing page, (difficult, relative and attractive ads need to be written)

A/B TESTING

Do you use split tests of your AdWords ads? www.splittester.com

Do you use multivariate testing software? They contain in-built statistical analysis

Do you test things that your usability testers told you to change.

Is your message straight before you start?

Have you ranked the top 5 points you want to communicate to your visitors?

Do you test everything?

ANALYTICS

How do you define how long visitors stay on separate pages of your site? Use google analytics

Have you considered geo location of visitors?

Have you analyzed the most active hours and days that your customer visit and purchase from your site (considering your time zone). Use google adwords to block times that are unproductive for phone sales and weekends.

Do you use live chat? Sometimes it’s helpful, but sometimes it can slow your web page load time.

Do you use multivariate tests offered by optimost, offermatica, maxymiser, vertset, kaizentrack?

Do you use time split tests If your orders go up and down based on day of week, month of year, etc

Do you use web analytics? Use google analytics

Do you check your log files to check customer behavior?

Do you let the customers decide what works best on a website?

Do you think of your business as a constantly shifting experiment?

Do you use Google Website Optimizer?

Do you test your company’s strapline, your headline, your introductory text, your offer, your guarantee, your picture, your readability, your usability, your navigation, your call to action, your products, your pricing, your offers, your premium, your testimonials, your “call to action”, your site layout, your returns policy, etc?

Copy what works for others (within limits). In particular, copy companies that appear to be tracking and testing. You can spot them because they are using the techniques in this list.

Copy the techniques that have been developed by people who have been testing for decades: that is, copy direct response advertisers? The internet may be new, but your visitors aren’t, and direct response advertisers have been running split tests to find out what works for about a hundred years.
It’s easy to spot their ads in magazines, newspapers and direct mail – they have tracking codes and coupons on the bottom corner. And they tend to look a bit ugly, (ugly sells, unfortunately.)
Place bets with your colleagues as to which of your test samples will win. You’ll be amazed at how often you are wrong. Only the top few percent of marketers appreciate that it’s impossible to always spot the winner. Race to become one of them. Don’t try to outsource this: this is the most important job in your company. You have two options: do it in-house, get experts in and do it in-house No passing expert will ever know enough about your business to be able to do it as well as you could. Use that to your benefit.

Have you become your company’s best salesperson?

Do you understand that only person-to-person selling will teach you the reactions of prospects to certain types of argument and approach? It is by far the quickest and most effective way of finding out what appeals to your prospects and what doesn’t.

Have you tested your website on real people?

Are you worried about temporarily lowering your conversion rate during a test? If a test is a failure, you get one bad day of business. If a test is a success, you get a lifetime of success.
Don’t end the test too soon! Make sure you have enough data! Some people say you need to test for two weeks. Some people say you need to collect at least 30 orders. Some people use “gut feel”. They are all wrong. The only correct answer is to use the right statistical tool.

Have you identified the weak links in your marketing funnel? Map out a brief overview of your marketing funnel, from advertising all the way through to closing the sale. This includes your advertising, your sales force, your homepage, your product pages, your checkout pages, your order confirmation page, your call center staff, how the package is sent out? This will help you to identify which step has the most scope for improvement. That’s the step to start working on.
You will probably find it’s the step that you had forgotten existed, or that no-one in your team knows anything about. Perhaps it’s the step that everyone thinks is “someone else’s problem”.

What’s your unique selling proposition (USP)? In other words, what makes you different from or better than all your competitors?

Have you ever tested your USP against possible alternatives? Consider all the different types of people who might view your site, try to write for all of them. You might find it easier to create customer types for this.

Do you identify which products bring you the most overall profit? They need to be aboce the fold so. a customer won’t have to scroll down to see it. The left side should be best.

Headlines are extremely important. If your visitor doesn’t like the headline, they won’t read any further. Express your main message in a headline that are worded in terms of benefit to the customer, not in terms of product features. Suggesting that the person will get the results with ease. Make your promises believable.

Have you imagined a customer looking at your headline and asking “Why should I care about that?” The way you would answer their question is likely to be worded in terms of a benefit.

Have you realized that the strapline under your logo will be viewed almost as much as the headline? Make sure it clearly expresses a distinct USP.

Have you tested odd-pricing? Odd pricing is prices that end in 9’s and 7’s, which tend to sell better.

Have you tested different offers?

Have you divided your product or service into a standard version (for the prospects who are price-sensitive) and a premium version (for the ones who aren’t)?

Have you tested different premiums? Bonuses they get if they order. Examples include free reports, gifts and accessories.

Have you added a guarantee or test different ones? Start with the bravest guarantee you dare test. And if it works, test a braver one.

Have you added testimonials from happy customers? Video testimonials are best.

Have you added testimonials from the media? If you don’t have any, try giving them free samples in exchange for reviews and feedback.

Have you developed a systematic way for collecting testimonials? Ask your sales staff to request a testimonial whenever they receive a compliment. Email your customers asking for testimonials.

Do you test different “calls to action”? The call to action is what you want them to do next. It is usually written on the ‘proceed’ button. Test direct ones such as “Buy Now And Get 10% Off” as well as indirect ones such as “Learn More”.

Do you make your “call to action” button nice and visible? Large brightly-colored buttons often convert better – they seem to draw the readers’ attention.

Do you test different reasons why the visitor should act promptly? For example, “offer ends Wednesday”, or “only 42 tickets left”.

Do you make the right stuff stand out? There are several ways to do this: using bold, italics, yellow highlighter

Have you considered a single-column layout allowing you more control over the order in which your visitors view your site? When a visitor sees your page, make sure the things they see first are the things you want them to see. This is one of the reasons for the effectiveness of those long pages in the style of single-column long sales letters; because they have more control over the order in which the visitor views the page.

Where do people look? Eyetracking studies have shown that visitors tend to look first at the upper-left-hand area of the page, then at your headline, then at the left-hand side of the page. So put your best features there.

Have you removed clutter? Imagine that every pixel on your page either increases the conversion rate or decreases it – or just takes up space. If you can get rid of things that aren’t working, you create more space for the things that are.

Have you put all the best stuff “above the fold”. A surprising number of your visitors will not scroll at all, so it’s best to make sure that the area “above the fold” has important info.

Have you decided what to feature on your homepage? Write a list of the things that your visitors are looking for. Chances are, there are between 3 and 5 things that most of your visitors are trying to do.
Have you shared the space on your homepage between these 3 to 5 categories, and assign all the rest to a small space for “miscellaneous” stuff.

Do you test different navigation structures?

Have you removed any distracting links that lead to places you don’t want them to go?

Does your site contain any useless links that you never really considered your visitors might actually click on?

Have you used a nice large font for your headline? H1 is nice for SEO but can look ugly.

Have you made the first letter of your body copy a large “drop caps” letter? Drop caps letters are effective in “bridging the gap” between the headline and the body copy.

Have you considered using your introductory paragraph in a slightly more prominent font size or appearance.

Have you tested different images? Most effective tend to be images of product, images of product being used, image of a “role model” character using the product, happy customer using the product.

Do you use attention-grabbing images only if they help to communicate your sales message?
Have you given your visitors the option to “zoom-in” to see a larger image of the product?

Have you put captions under your images and test them?

Have you used call-outs (that is, text pointing to particular parts of the picture) tend to be effective?

Have you used test violators, which are attention-getting shapes such as starbursts, ovals and banners?

Are your pages too long and require scrolling? Consider having your call to action button repeated several times on the page.

Have you considered putting your website in the form of a sales letter to get a higher conversion rate? . Test whether this would work for your industry. Typical features of a sales letter include a picture of the person writing the letter, an image of the writer’s signature at least one P.S.

Are you aiming to condense as many persuasive arguments and relevant information into as little text as possible? This will usually require more words than most websites currently use.

Do you use simple straightforward language?

Do you fill your body copy with benefits, not just product features?

Do you include all the information that a customer could possibly require in order to make a purchase? Note that it doesn’t all need to be on the main product page.

Do you you address all the common objections that your customers bring up? As preparation for this, you might find it useful to compile a chart of objections and counter-objections, then rank them in order of importance.

USABILITY

Do you test different font sizes to make your text more readable?

Do you test different font colors?

Near the end of the body copy, do you consider having a series of bullet points that summarize the major benefits?

Do you rewrite your article for people who skim read. Use sub-heads (that is, headlines dispersed throughout, like where I wrote “Body Copy” above) and bold to make sure the right things stand out?

Have you considered putting the start of your order form on the product page itself?

Do you use multimedia such as audio and video?

Page Views – the number of pages a person views on your site, (it’s time consuming to write quality content)

Have you found out how and why people visit your website?

How do you track sales leads? Use google analytics

Have you tried to improve all inner pages surfers ignore?

Do you track online initiatives?

Do you use free listings on search engines to drive traffic to targeted landing pages?

Do you use PPC listings on search engines to drive traffic to your targeted landing pages (google, yahoo, msn)?

Do you use traffic programs to force semi-qualified visitors to your site (adbrite, trafficexcess.com, revisitors.com). Could help alexa and compete rankings.

Are you familiar with web analytics basics? Use Google Analytics for free?

Do you gather your website statistics?

Do you use customer surveys? Your customers know why they ordered. And why they nearly didn’t. Ask them about it. SurveyGizmo or surveymonkey are good.

Do your visitors prefer your competitors’ products? Why?

Do you create quality content?

Do you analyze all your inbound and outbound links? Axandra

Do you keep an eye on links which fail? http://indiabook.com/webmaster/link.html

Do you delete links which cause traffic loss?

Are you always learning new SEO strategies?

Do you make your site Google-friendly? Use unique content, use copyscape to check

Do you use meta tags effectively? Check how top websites use their meta-taggs

Do you optimize each page for a separate keyword? Try http://speedppc.com

Do you give a title to each page using the keyword it was optimized for?

Do you give a keyword to each directory name using the keyword it was optimized for?

Do you make the most of on-page search engine optimization? Use axandra

Have you created an easy and functional sitemap with links to all inner pages? Google.com/sitemap, free sitemap creators. Try http://xml-sitemaps.com

Do you pay careful attention to the structure of links and their concentration? Use http://axandra.com

Do you work on link building? Linksmanager.com and axanda.com have SEO friendly systems

Accept links only from sites with relevant and quality content? Linkpartner.com

Do you identify your field’s gurus and link to them?

Do you deep-link into your site?

Do you add a page inviting people to link to you or bookmark to you?

Do you check the number of inbound and outbound links on each separate page linking to your site?

Do you focus on receiving one-way links?

Do you study referrers? Analyitcs

Do you make sure your site is easy to navigate in different browsers and computers?

Do you design your site for both humans and search engines?

Have you chosen a catchy domain name?

Is your most critical targeted keyword a part of the domain name? Not necessary, but helpful.

Do you use a reliable host for your website? See how much bandwidth and space it provides each month.

Do you make the main page and inner pages easy to show up in the search engines?

Do you test different versions of your ‘About Us’ page that shows you as real people, not some cold faceless corporation?

How consistent is your message? Do whatever you can to keep your message consistent all the way from advertisement through to order placement.

Do you cross-sell to your customers and provide additional offers. Don’t overkill it like godaddy does.

Do you have a refer-a-friend program placed on the order confirmation page?

Do you make your website navigation easy?

Do you use frames for navigation purposes? Most search engines penalize site with frames.

Do you have to click several times to make purchase?

Do you make links easily to remember?

Is your contact page contain your address, email and phone number easily found? Toll-free numbers are preferable. Live voice answering is nice. If not, the voice mail navigation should be easy and quick to follow.

Do you allow more and inexpensive ways for customers to contact you? Skype, boldchat, IM, toll-free number, email.

Do you write accurate and understandable shipping and returns policies?

Do you upload large images on your site? They can slow down your site.

Do you identify problematic areas and improve them?

Do you avoid special software requirements for browsing your products/services such as plugins other than flash?

Do you conduct usability tests? Ask your friends to help you out.

Do you use eyetracking software? It show the location on a computer screen that people look at.

Do you use clickmapping? CrazyEgg is a free service that allows you to see the parts of your page that your visitors click on.

Do you consider yourself as a master tester?

Do you understand that web analytics tells you what visitors are doing, but usability testing tells you why.

Do you use a focus group for usability tests?

Do you use entry pop-ups and exit pop-ups? Many browsers block them since they are annoying.

Do you tested your website using different browsers and screen resolutions, to see how your customers see it? Handy tools for doing this are http://www.browsercam.com/ and http://browsershots.org/.

Have you minimized your site load times? People will normally wait 4-8 seconds to look at a site before they move on somewhere else.

Is your site search feature working?

Have you made everything on your site clickable? Visitors click on everything, pictures in particular.

Do you split advertising into channels to test the following and measure which brings in the most revenue: different sizes, shapes, positions, colors of ad?

Christian Wilson - Born in North Hollywood and raised in Mexico, Brazil, New York, Idaho, Utah and the beautiful islands of Tahiti and Hawaii. Graduated from BYU Idaho and BYU Hawaii where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration. Christian spent the last 25 years in business, computers and marketing - primarily as a computer programmer, retail manager, nutritional supplement manufacturing consultant and as a SEO/SEM consultant.