One of the things that our new optimization customers find out is that we have services that go beyond the traditional website ranking improvements that come with SEO. We also offer advice, and even help pinpoint areas where site traffic is falling off due to programming failures, timeouts, or lack of trust. Therefore, while “search engine optimization” is all about getting people to your web presence, “web site optimization” is about keeping the traffic on your site until a goal (purchase, form fill out, phone call) is met.
“Friction” is an industry term applied to factors on your website that would stop people from completing a transaction. For instance, if people have to create a username and password before buying a product, they may leave the shopping cart before making a purchase. Many of our ecommerce optimization customers have found out (to their surprise) that sales increased significantly when this obstacle was removed. Other “friction” factors include missing images, a lack of trust indicators like the BBB or Hackersafe logo, or an antiquated looking sales interface.
The first thing we recommend for any customer concerned about sales is a test of the shopping process. A surprising number of site owners have not tried to make a purchase through their own websites. Many times we create a test order and will get to a checkout page with a popup that says the page is not secure. This kind of message will stop most of your shoppers in their tracks. In almost every case, the error message is the result of an image on the site (usually your logo) being pulled from a non-secure folder. Therefore, whenever you are in doubt about sales, try going through your own website as if you were a customer. If you are too close to your own site (like your webmaster) then you should find a friend or relative not familiar with the site and watch how they interact with it.
Most web site optimization can be done by checking Google Analytics statistics. (If you don’t have Google Analytics, you can install it for free, and the value of its information is quite high.) By looking at your “bounce rate” you can see what percentage of people come to a page and then leave the site. Similarly, the “exit rate” tells you how many people came from a different page on your site and then left. The only page where you should have a high exit rate is the one that thanks people for their business. Normally, a good SEO bounce rate is around 35% but a Pay-Per-Click bounce rate should not be higher than 30%, and ideally could be 15-20%. If your PPC bounce rate is too high, you should consider adjusting your keywords while simultaneously fixing the pages they land on.
Google Analytics also lets you track orders by setting up a “funnel” which is a list of steps in the shopping process. The great thing about funnel visualization is that you can see where customers are dropping off, and make changes to the pages where this is happening. Sometimes a single page in your checkout process is causing friction, and fixing the problem you can get immediate results.
For people who are willing to spend a little more time, the Google Website Optimizer is a great way of finding out how your customers react to different site elements. You can test multiple variations of the same page, and may be surprised to find out that customers will make more purchases if a picture or message is in a slightly different spot, or if some visual elements are removed from the page. Google Website Optimizer is ideal for sites with several thousand visitors per month, since better statistical samples give a better picture of customer behavior.
Web Site Optimization advice is part of the work offered by Web.com Search Agency along with SEO and PPC management services. We have found that our customers are more likely to engage in a long-term relationship with our agency when they are confident that the traffic we bring to their website is directed as efficiently as possible to the end goal. We have worked with thousands of websites, and much of the advice we give is fairly straightforward and easy to implement. In many cases a few small changes will yield surprising results, which helps drive the ROI numbers necessary to justify more aggressive and profitable SEO projects.
