Posted: Sun 30 July 2006

Part 1 - How do I get more visitors to my website?

Firstly, this question is a bit like how do I make more money. It's vague, has no reference to a starting point and is also not necessarily the right thing to do.

This article will end up being massive so I'm going to make this part one of many... Should we focus on quantity...

Often when we are asked to do search engine optimisation work for clients they want to appear top for the most generic phrase for their industry. Usually after discussions it becomes apparent that it is not an effective way to achieve any extra sales.

Lets take a real life and extreme example to illustrate the point...

Take the example of a children's designer wear outlet. Lets say they sell designer label clothes to under 11 boys; whilst the consumer is a child the customer is generally an adult buying a present or a parent buying for a special occasion.

Lets say we have a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign to set up to attract potential customers to the new online store.

At around £5 per click we could send people to the site for the keyphrase designer wear. Now let's say we have a budget of £1000 - that's two hundred people interested in our products visiting our store. Good value eh?

NO. Terrible value. Think of all the poorly targeted visitors we are paying to get to our website. The proportion of the children's wear market as a percentage of the UK total designer marketplace is 18.9%. As that includes 11-16 year olds we can assume this figure to be more like 12%.

So from our top keyword, out of the 200 people who clicked it potentially only 30 of them were buyers of our product when a simple age filter was selected. Now take out half of them because they were shopping for girls and we're down to 15. Take out the tyre kickers, the badly thought through search, the price sensitive etc... and you really are left with a handful of visitors that are in a position to buy from us from a £1000 investment.

OK. Before you start thinking PPC is a bad idea... Let's apply a bit of Eazytiger magic!

Let's research our keyphrases and setup our campaign with more specific phrases that are better targeted to only be displayed when a real potential prospect searches.

Boys catimini trousers
Miniman autumn 2006 range

Add phrases like;

Buy Boys catimini trousers
View Miniman autumn 2006 range

to be even more specific!

And so on. Each one of the above would be a well targeted person ready to buy our product.

We could even geographically exclude people from our search by adding our territory in;

We are at the minimum PPC of 10p for each of these terms... They aren't going to result in as many hits, but lets say they resulted in 30 (Google won't estimate low numbers so I can't tell you the real figures). Those 30 visitors, infinitely better targeted and ready to buy will cost us three quid, instead of a thousand Pounds!!!

Suddenly the few pounds you'd pay a search engineer seems like excellent value when compared to making those kind of mistakes!

It also makes PPC advertising seem very good value again!

In our next related article we'll discuss the analytics that help us to see not only how much a keyphrase cost your business, but how many visitors it drove to your site, where they went, and finally how much they purchased... Giving you an exact ROI figure! Cool stuff!

If you'd like to know more about our search engine optimisation and pay per click PPC services, just get in touch. We'd be happy to help.

By: Gary
http://www.eazytiger.net
Web design and ecommerce Leicester

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