Consumers are cutting back spending so much that they are showing “a reduced desire to even search for new products, much less purchase them,” according to Majestic Research. IAC, whose Ask.com search engine’s ad sales are handled by Google, noted last week that the search trends “have not been good over the last 30 to 60 days … particularly on commercial-oriented queries.”

In addition, those consumers still in buying mode are browsing around for bargains more often, thereby reducing the returns on individual clicks. And that is lowering the price marketers are willing to pay for keywords, a point also noted by IAC.

We noticed some PPC slowdown last month in our client work, as well as significant overall traffic declines (despite unchanged or improved visibility on search engines). What was more interesting, however, was a decline in non-search-related visits to many client sites. I’ve wondered if the intense focus on the U.S. presidential election skimmed off a lot of the more casual traffic, including visits from those receiving updates by RSS or email.

One thing’s true, however: just as the stock market’s downturn benefits those with cash to invest at fire-sale prices, a shaking-out of PPC competition will benefit those companies who continue their PPC campaigns, and continue to optimize their websites for better organic-search positioning.

One study has shown that almost 75 percent of online shoppers do just that, no matter how attractive the price or service, if they can’t find what they need.

Companies and their site designers need to approach their site – before it goes live – as if they’re first-time visitors. They cannot assume or take anything for granted, including that visitors will automatically start on the home page.

Therefore, every page must have a corporate presence, with name, logo and toll-free number if applicable. Every page must have a navigation bar that starts with a home button and includes buttons linking to other pages. Every page should have a search button.

If visitors will be ordering goods, every product page should have a prominent link to the checkout page.

Each page must be logically organized and answer every question the shopper could possibly have about that product or service. With clothing, for example, it’s imperative to explain and/or illustrate fiber content, washing instructions, stock availability, size charts and options in color and size.

Product photographs, with zoom capabilities, are a necessity, and video is a must for product demonstrations.

Product reviews by professionals or satisfied buyers, whether displayed on the site or linked to on other sites, establish credibility and increase shoppers’ comfort level. That also can be boosted by prominently displaying the company guarantee and links to customer service.

The site must be well-written and well-maintained, with updated information and working links. Nothing destroys confidence in a company like a neglected Web site. Again, shoppers will simply move on to another site.

Sites should make it easy for shoppers to sign up for newsletters or other means of learning about exclusive specials or other events. This gives them a feeling of inclusiveness and reminds them to return to the site for future needs. However, it must be clear that they can easily opt out of the mailing list.

If site visitors are buying goods, the checkout page must include the following: shipping options and cost, turnaround time and accepted payment methods, plus the ability to revise the order easily and to generate a printer-friendly summary.

The Web site is the front door to that company – if shoppers can’t get in or don’t feel welcome and valued, they won’t come back.

]]> http://www.nsipartners.com/blog/2008/05/from-browsers-to-buyers/feed/ 0 http://www.nsipartners.com/blog/2007/07/seo-20-optimization-conversion/ http://www.nsipartners.com/blog/2007/07/seo-20-optimization-conversion/#comments Tue, 03 Jul 2007 01:55:54 +0000 Don http://www.nsiweblog.com/2007/07/seo-20-optimization-conversion Todd Friesen (aka Oilman) has written a new column in MediaPost’s OMMA Magazine (registration req’d – try BugMeNot for a reg code) in which he articulates something we’ve also realized for the past couple of years: that SEO is no longer just about driving more traffic to a site; it’s also about helping the site owner get more of those visitors to take a desired action. Todd sums it up nicely:

I propose that we redefine SEO. Rather than merely driving relevant traffic, I think SEO should be the practice of generating and converting organic search engine traffic, measuring it by raw traffic, ranking numbers, conversion rate, and new revenue year over year.

In other words, we need to lead the horse to water and convince him he’s thirsty.

NSI started increasing clients’ thirst several years ago, when we were approached by a local-entertainment provider who wanted to increase traffic to his site. Actually, he wanted to increase booking-leads from the site, but in his mind that just meant he needed more traffic. More traffic = more leads, right?

We were interested in helping, but a quick review of his website raised warning flags. The home page consisted only of images (graphic logo header and no text), the site was unattractive, poorly organized and had a muddled call-to-action message. I knew that if we took this project on, we could be successful at increasing traffic – even relevant, targeted traffic – to the site, but he wouldn’t get any more leads because few people would stay longer than a few seconds.

And NSI – not the crummy website – would get the blame. As Todd writes:

You can be the world’s greatest at SEO, but
if your clients aren’t getting a decent return on investment from what
they spend on you, I almost guarantee they won’t renew for year two.

That’s what was in the back of my mind, as we talked about this prospective clients needs.

What we did was propose something different for him: no organic SEO – just a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign – until the website was redesigned into a visitor-friendly site, with clear navigation, inviting graphics, helpful copy and a call to action on every page. The client agreed, and we helped redesign the site, making it both visitor- and search engine-friendly. In the meantime the PPC campaign provided targeted traffic, and yielded valuable market-research info in terms of real-world search terms (which were plugged into the new site).

By the time we conducted organic SEO on the redesigned site, leads were already up and analytics showed us that although traffic hadn’t increased very much, search-generated traffic had become much more targeted on important keyword phrases. What’s more, visitors were staying longer and visiting more pages. Analytics also helped us show the client what sites were providing the most referred traffic, which helped him direct his ad dollars to those sites rather than spreading money around and hoping for the best.

By looking at this client’s needs holistically, as Todd Friesen recommends – rather than just through an SEO lens – we helped our client far more, and got the renewal, as well. Since this experience, we ask prospective clients a lot more questions than before about their overall marketing goals and needs, instead of just taking their word when they say they need to improve business via SEO. And, we find most are open to accepting us as an online-marketing solutions provider – not just “the SEO guys.”

Some interesting opinions from Jeff:

• AdWords continues to pull money away from Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter, just because it’s easier to use, has much more traffic and has a better conversion ratio. [that last point is not supported by independent research and my own experience]
• For continual AdWords fine-tuning toward higher clickthrough rate and conversions, turn off not only the content network, but the search network as well — target only the Google search engine. [again, this seems to be a "YMMV" opinion)
• Use broad match, but as a research tool: use the number of broad-match impressions as a clue to how much traffic is around the base phrase -- then use site analytics to mine the long tail of related results. [bingo! AdWords is the cheapest/easiest market-research tool ever invented]

Jeff described how PPC campaigns can grow to thousands upon thousands of phrases over time, through a combination of data-mining and manually entering newly discovered, relevant words/phrases into the PPC platform. [Been there, still doin' that! Eventually, after all this heavy lifting, the campaigns run almost by themselves, with some continual review and tweaking. But it can take a long time to get to that point.]

He touched briefly on landing-page quality, but I’m sure could’ve given an earful on that if Scoble had known enough about SEM to ask the right questions. [Google's recent Quality Score changes have affected just about everyone's AdWords campaign results.] Overall, however, it was an excellent off-the-cuff interview, done during a break at a Seattle tech conference.

I couldn’t possibly make this up; I’m not that bright and have little time for idle thought. Here’s a snip from the first post in the thread:

When we sent this information to Google, they replied:

It is possible for two-word keywords to expand to one-word keywords if that one word is highly relevant. In my case, they said “widget” had a 4% CTR and therefor Google judged this to be highly relevant to its users. They also suggested I use the negative exact match -[widget]

This concerns me.

First of all, when does expanding a two-word keyword reduce it to one single word? Expanding means less?

Secondly, why have they now placed the onus on their advertisers to find negatives for broad matches that they’re not even bidding on?

Thirdly, why are Google now deciding when to ignore certain words within your broad matches, and reduce them to single words?

Fourthly, why are Google doing this so silently? If we hadn’t spotted this in our logs, we’d never have known.

The rest of the thread contains highlights of other users’ experiences. What I noticed there is what SEOers have been saying since the Florida Update in 2003: Google makes changes to search-index, AdWords and AdSense algorithms, and inflicts them suddenly on their user base – including paying AdWords customers – without so much as a “by your leave, guv’nah.”

Having Matt Cutts make cryptic comments about what Google might do in the future is no substitute for actual, formal notices sent in advance to customers. Press releases are nice, too.

Yes, I know – but it makes feel better to say it anyway.

Google has expanded the broad-match option, to include related — but not identical — words and phrases that their algorithm identifies with the phrases selected by the AdWords customer. We immediately thought that a bad idea, as research and experience have shown that CTRs increase when selected phrases are used in the ads themselves. Hence, letting Google select its own search terms to match with our ads would, we believed, lower our ads’ CTRs and increase our clients’ overall costs.

A new SearchInsider column by Tim Daly of SendTec has validated our concerns. Tim’s company ran some specific tests, changing all their chosen phrases to “exact match” — the opposite of “broad match” — and tracked the results. They found their CTRs improved and costs went down, proving that “shotgun”-style broad match was less efficient than “rifle”-style exact match.

Here’s a quote from Tim’s article:

Curious about the effect that this natural extension of the broad match is having on advertisers, we conducted a test to find out. The foundations of the test: Change all keywords in a relatively small campaign to exact match and see what happens to performance data. After just one week, we evaluated impressions, clicks, click-through rates and cost-per-click — and what we found was astonishing. Impressions decreased by 24.38%, yet clicks only decreased by 15.68%, thus resulting in an 11.36% increase in the click-through rate. Since the click-through rate plays an integral role in the Quality Score algorithm, the average cost-per-click decreased 23.77%. Most interesting, the performance changes were instantaneous, suggesting that expanded broad match negatively impacted Quality Score and Ad Rank.

So, what does this all mean?

In summary, these results suggest that Google’s expanded broad match is potentially serving less than optimal ads, lowering click rates, increasing cost-per-clicks and negatively impacting your Quality Score. Because some marketers are blind to Google’s ad serving, bid changes are being made to the wrong “broad matched” keywords, causing changes to Google’s Ad Rank. As a result, the wrong ad gets served and advertisers may then unknowingly pay more than they should for the ad placement. In worst case scenarios, Google may be sending traffic to the wrong page on your Web site given the ad it chooses to service — which in turn could negatively impact your conversion performance.

Thanks, Tim!