Why Don't Prospects Choose You?

The biggest issue for most people that have to make a decision is

They are afraid of making a mistake. No one likes to think they should have investigated or caught something and therefore they are a fool. Nothing like having to explain to someone else that you made a mistake in judgment and got caught.

What are four reasons people feel more comfortable about making a decision:

You were referred by a friend
You offer a guarantee
You have testimonials
You have referrals
You have a visible track record or portfolio or?


How do you warm people up on a website?

You mention how many years you have been in business or how many customers served.

You have "About Us", "Why Us", "FAQs", "Testimonials" & "Management Profiles"
You services are clear and so are your charges for them. People are not left wondering what they are missing or where they are going to get caught for extra fees.

You have a visible telephone number, a chat box, or an email. You invite people to call and talk about their needs.

Their decision is often instinctual and made in a second, so first impressions count, but if they decide to stay and read, give them ways to learn more about you.

Visitors, Leads and Customers from Internet Marketing

Image by kpishdadi via Flickr

Our Website is the integral piece of technology around which we build a functional marketing machine. Think of it as a race car frame to which we have to add the functions we are seeking. We are seeking customers so we must build in the engine that takes us to where they are gathering. We want people to stay awhile once they find us so lets put in comfortable seats. Finally we want them to become our followers or customers so lets put in seat belts and doors so they can't get out. No just kidding. Lets put in a great stereo system and sunroof so they want to ride with us for a long time.

Then we want others to join us so lets put in a phone so our passengers can call their friends and tell them what a great vehicle we have for success. But like a high performance vehicle, everything has to be just right. And most important, everything has to be tested and constantly adjusted because every race track has different conditions and requires a change of gearing. Weather changes and the competition changes so we have to be constantly monitoring and making our site dynamic rather than static.

And as things continue to change like the algorithm on search engines, we have to play by the new rules and engineer our efforts to stay the fastest. Not a game for the light hearted.

Web Designers and SEO

Most web designers will admit that they and SEO are like Army-Navy; in the military but with different functions.

For one, the web designer creates a functional, aesthetic product to please the client. Web designers are creative and have learned their craft. SEO is produced for the Search Engines. It is more science than art. No aesthetics.

The owner thinks that because the keywords are on the website and in the source code with metas, he has been optimized. Not even close. Maybe the website is strictly for credibility and a location to drive customers through sales teams and advertising assuming they will purchase if they like what they see. Good enough.

The next step is the giant one. Reaching for the millions of people who are looking for your service, assuming you don’t cater to only local clientele. What the optimized site lacks first, is knowing what the competition is driving.

Say you wanted to race in the Sunday sweep stakes so you bought the car your budget would allow and you show up to see what happens. It’s one way to go. Or you show up at a party late and ten guys are standing around the prettiest girl. (or visa versa) So you still want the girl and you are calculating the best line or approach. You notice four guys next to you and by the looks on their faces they are thinking the same thing.

That’s what makes it so exciting to win.

SEO usually becomes an after market add-on. Without it, you don’t get access to the sweepstakes. The best way to build a car that wins is to build it piece by piece and test it. Each time around the track it comes in and you adjust it. At the end, maybe only four or five cars have a real shot at the prize. That’s really being in the game. See more on Search Engine Optimization

Big Budget or Small Budget SEO

One common ingredient shared by most companies as the result of the recession
is retrenchment.

It’s crucial to cut costs but the way out is more business.

Two ways out are healthier customers or more customers. The internet cannot
make customers healthier but it can help find more customers. It can help
you find the customers that are already there that you are missing.

Most companies have three of the important beginning ingredients for search engines.
They have been in business for more than 5 years, own domain names
for more than a year out, and have their key words in their URL or title.

Three things they miss. The words span two different categories without being
supported by the site. Let’s say your title or description is Cold Storage Shipping Logistics. This is a great tail. A tail is adding descriptive words to a key word to narrow the focus.

Now, if the rest of the site supported these words and they were repeated several times, the site might be first in page ranking for the words. Usually what happens is the content and everything else abandons the words or only follows one, so the dilution hurts page rankings.

Secondly, the phrase used in the description is diluted with too much meaningless copy. This is what occurs when web designers not familiar with SEO have created the descriptions. And the site content does not support the words in the URL, title, headlines, description, and metas.

The third common error is that the words selected do not have relevance to the way most customers search for the business. Understanding which words are used is important. Taking a stand and committing to a narrow focus of words is important to being selected for their query. Trying to cover everything gets nothing.

So with a big budget or small budget avoid wasting money by at least put some money into getting the primary ingredients for page ranking.
See more at Search Engine Optimization

Bond with The Social Media Crowd

A great way to create an instant connection with some visitors is to set up a blog on your website. For the Social Media crowd, this is the same as transparency. It takes them behind the corporate veil to the inner sanctum where the social media crowd thrives.

The advantage to you is it is a soft sell that still allows you to put links to all your important pages. In a very friendly conversational tone you can help bring down the visitor's guard because now you are relating one on one. The only thing missing is the coffee.

You can discuss anything. You can talk about trends in the industry, new technologies, company innovations, new hires, new clients, your community activiities, your convention appearances, your people in the news. It can be like your in house Facebook or Twitter page.

Experts say find the person who tells good stories and can write in a friendly conversational tone to your audience. With 300 million people on Facebook and 23 million a day engaging in Twitter for business and fun, some people in your audience will go to your blog first.

Understand the importance of Source Code for Page Rankings

Image via Wikipedia

When search engines look for the best sites to present to customers who have entered key words or phrases, they base their selections on several criteria.
One of them is the placement and use of the keywords on your site. The first indication of how you have used them is found in your Source Code.

You can see the Source Code on your site's landing page (home) and on most any other site by right clicking the Home page and then clicking “View Source”. This is a description of the words on your site. It indicates which words you have put in the most important places. The Search Engines look at your URL, your Site Title, the Meta Description, the Headlines, the Body content, the internal links, and the titles of each of the pages on your website.

Search engines know that sometimes the description that appears on the internet does not always match what is on your site. They want to know what you really are emphasizing. Your title is your most important headline and it describes the "core" of your site message. If your URL, your Title, Your Meta Description and the first line of your content copy and last line of your content copy all use the same words, it is a very strong message for the engines.

You have a better chance of being matched for these words with a customer's use of the words.

In the body content, you should use the words as well without distracting from the interest of the content. There should be images on the page that also use the words in the image descriptions.

Finally, each page of the site should have keywords as part of the title. For example http://www.FulfillmentCo.com/order fulfillment.html

The words you use will not express your whole business, but once you are on top of the page rankings for these words, visitors will see your other services in your title bars. Once you are on top of rankings for one word or phrase, you can start using more phrases to appear at the top of more categories because you will now have more authority.

This is just one ingredient to getting to the top but it is the key ingredient for companies just beginning to optimize. The other way would be to have hundreds of other authority sites pointing to your site with links, but that requires more time and is further down the road in the optimization process.

The Three R's of Internet Success

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Traffic
Retention
Conversion

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) increases traffic. This is often achieved with Pay Per Click until Organic growth can be achieved. SEO consists of optimizing the website for key words so that search engines will match the site with customers queries on Google or other engines.

Optimization is further improved by creating off page connections through linking with authority sites and then Web 2.0 techniques. These techniques are generally categorized into publication of blogs, articles and pr releases. Secondly it is achieved by getting referrals through interaction on Social Media sites.

Retention is the most underplayed aspects of internet success. The bounce rate for even the most popular sites is very high. The highest bounces rates are probably from pay per click advertisers who have taken the short cut of paying for placement instead of optimizing the retention value of their sites.

Finally, a conversion rate of a visitor to a purchaser or sign up is under 10% for most sites. If you visit a lot of sites like I do, the first thing I realize with static web sites is there is no emotional appeal. I often am not certain what the page has planned for me. Most people only give it a few seconds to communicate if they have lots of options.

I feel the next serious answer to retention and conversion is Video. We have fallen in love with it. It is not static, it is alive. It is welcoming and emotional. It can transition from retention to action. By comparison, it is so much more appealing than the static sites that I have visited that a good video has me enraptured. Not to mention that YouTube is now the second largest search engine.

As an example I provide one of the better video sites I have visited. http://digitorialmedia.com
It is time that sites that want to increase sales follow the three R’s and add video.