With all the changes in Google AdWords and the increased competition these days, organic SEO looks more and more attractive to most of us.

The key is for your website optimization to out-perform your competition, without over spending with an online marketing consultant (or without taking up too much of your time if you’re going the do-it-yourself route).

Remember, affordable Search Engine Optimization is about increasing quality traffic, then

• converting
• that traffic to a sale or a sales lead.

If you miss these points I describe below, your SEO goals of increased conversions will tank, even if you have a Number 1 Google Ranking.

I often notice these missed areas when I’m Coaching a business owner about their Web site and their need to increase sales and sales leads.

So, here are 3 points for you to review that I hope will help your SEO goals of increased conversions.

What’s Above the Fold Counts Most, so Consider Monitor Resolutions

Living in the world of TV remote controls and browser back buttons, we have to capture our website visitors’ attention ASAP. Our visitors aren’t going to give us much time before making a decision to stay or to leave our website.

As much as this subject is discussed these days, it’s amazing the number of sites I review that have critical information missing from “above the fold”, in that area visible before your visitors scroll down.

This is the area to briefly summarize what people can do on your site and make your best case for your guests staying on your website and not clicking away. This may also be the area to place your contact information.

Keep in mind that what’s above the fold on your monitor will likely be different from what’s above the fold on the monitor for someone visiting your website. Browser resolution is set differently for various computers.

For instance, on my website, I know the top resolution of my visitors is 1280 by 1024 (53%) and the second most popular resolution is 1024 by 768 (37%). I get this information from my site’s analytics script, although not all analytics programs provide this critical information.

Since I make sure my site looks great for these 90% of my visitors and make sure I communicate reasons to stay on my site above the fold (my value proposition), I draw more people into my site, encouraging them to scroll down.

Remember to cross test your site with recent versions of the most popular Web browsers: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and maybe even Google’s new Chrome.

These steps raise my conversion rate and they will raise yours, too. And increasing traffic and conversions is the whole point of affordable search engine optimization, whether using an online marketing consultant or d-i-y, right?

So, don’t miss this important step.

Carefully Select Your Type Size and Font and Remember that White Space is Your Friend

I’m astounded by the improper text choices made by so many website owners today. Is there really any good reason to make people squint at your website, struggling to get the information they need?

Consider reviewing The Easy to Read Standard at Information Architects (you can Google it). I would encourage you to review the size of your text, the white space between your letters and words and between your paragraphs and headings.

Designers often believe whitespace is your enemy; if you want people to understand your message and stay on your website, whitespace is in fact your friend.

Also consider that fonts with serifs are easier to read than fonts without serifs.

If you want to successfully convey your message to as many of your site visitors as possible, then make it as easy for them as you can. When we’re talking about increasing conversions, it’s all about the numbers and appealing to the largest number of people possible.

Use Opt-in Email or Blog Postings to Maximize Your Sales

All website owners would like for people to buy from their website the first time they visit. But is that realistic?

Consider these statics from the National Sales Executive Association:

• 2% of sales are made on the 1st contact;
• 3% of sales are made on the 2nd contact;
• 5% of sales are made on the 3rd contact;
• 10% of sales are made on the 4th contact (and)
• 80% of sales are made on the 5th – 12th contact.

For most businesses, if you don’t offer an opt-in contact, like a regular email newsletter or blog postings, you’re missing out on most of your potential sales!

When setting up an opt-in Internet marketing campaign, you should offer incentives to subscribe. To entice people to opt-in, you can offer:

• special pricing for email list members
• a first look at new products
• ability for customer to select subjects and emails they receive (controlling the frequency of contact by choosing which of your lists to be on)
• promise not to share email or other personal info with other companies

Using opt-in contact allows you to significantly increase conversions by introducing yourself over time to your potential customers, in a soft-sell manner.

Website optimization is important; the goal is increased Internet traffic, sales and sales leads. But whether you’ve hired an online marketing consultant or you’re doing the process yourself, Affordable search engine optimization by itself doesn’t accomplish those last points of increased sales and sales leads.

You’ve got to remember to design your website to alleviate visitors natural apprehensions and make buying from you as easy as possible.

Properly mapping out the above the fold area of your Web pages, using appropriate size text, using adequate whitespace and offering an opt-in process to nurture your buyers will all help you accomplish the real goals you have with SEO and website optimization: increased sales and more sales leads.

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There is nothing more frustrating than checking your website’s analytics and realizing that, although a visitor has just spent over 10 minutes reading through a single webpage, they have not made a purchase. Sometimes it can be almost heartbreaking, because no matter how hard you try to increase sales, turning a prospect into a customer can appear to be a near impossible task.

Sometimes the key to turning a prospect into a customer is not a change in your website content, but rather a change to your purchase page:

• Is it easy to find?
• Is it easy to use?
• Can your visitors trust you with their credit card information?

One of the reasons that it is difficult to turn a prospect into a customer is because the customer may have a difficult time locating the final sales page, gets frustrated, and eventually leaves your website to search for a better purchase elsewhere.

In order to increase sales, you will first need to check and make sure that your order form is easy to locate. Sometimes the best way to do this is to write a small paragraph that tells your visitors exactly where and how to find the order form. Also, try placing the link to your order form in an attractive, noticeable box at the top and bottom of your webpage, so that no matter what part of the page the visitor is looking at, they can find it easily.

Offering multiple payment options is another way to increase sales. Some visitors to your website may be uncomfortable providing their credit card online and may instead want to pay with PayPal. Others may not trust PayPal and instead choose to pay with check or credit card. Whatever the reason, the more payment options you have available, the easier it will be for you to continue turning your prospect into a customer.

It is also a good idea to improve your website’s credibility. One of the ways to do this is to offer secure encryption technology on your website’s order forms. In addition, offering a money-back guarantee (and sticking to it – something that many merchants have a problem with) is a good way to increase sales and offer a better user experience.

Finally, increase your credibility by offering a method of contacting you, whether it be by email or phone number or both. And make sure that this method is easy to find on your webpages and is easy to use. Providing your contact information can be doubly effective, because if a visitor sends you an email asking you a question about your product, you will be able to remind them of your product when emailing back. Reminding a visitor of your product is an effective way to increase sales.

Turning a prospect into a customer is no easy task. If you have noticed that although you are continuously tweaking the sales pages, but you are still not getting sales, following these guidelines can help offer another way to effectively complete the transactions you’ve been waiting for.

Urchin visitor tracking is now renamed ‘Google Analytics’ and is available to everyone for free! For those of you lucky enough to have signed up in the early stages, Google Analytics will open up a world of information you probably never knew about visitors on your site. For those not so lucky, you’ll have to wait till Google gets their act together and reopens the doors for new sign-ups to the analytics system.

Why you need Google Analytics website visitor tracking

Google Analytics provides free information about the way visitors to your site interact with it. It is an invaluable tool that all webmasters should use if they don’t already have some form of visitor tracking solution in place. Here’s 10 reasons why you need Google Analytics on your site:

1. It is free. And it offers just as much if not more functionality than most expensive visitor tracking solutions!

2. You need Analytics to understand how visitors use your site

3. You can identify where visitors leave your check-out or sign-up process and modify it to prevent losing leads

4. You can identify which pages and links visitors click on most and spend most time on, and position these pages and links appropriately

5. Analytics also tells you which sites users came to your site from

6. You can find out the most popular keywords users type into a search engine to find your site, thereby helping your search engine optimisation efforts

7. Visitor segmentation by new vs returning users, geography and referral source will offer invaluable insight when planning future business

8. Analytics integrates seamlessly with Google AdWords so that you can have almost end-to-end visibility in your search advertising results

9. Analytics allows tracking of other non-search-engine marketing media

10. Analytics will save you money and help you gain more customers

Pros and cons of Google Analytics

The benefits of using the Google Analytics solution are numerous. The fact that it’s free is mere icing on the cake.

* The setup is very straightforward and takes hardly any time

* It is a great solution providing a wide range of reports with a lot of flexibility

* Multiple sites to be tracked under one login

* Tracking campaigns from a wide variety of media is possible

* A/B ad testing is easy

* It integrates with all marketing media and can be used as a single portal to track multiple campaigns

* In depth reports on site navigation and use are invaluable

* Ecommerce tracking is included

Whilst the Google Analytics package provides a vast number of useful bits of information, it lacks two major features which most search engine marketers need – the ability to track individual user activity or trace activity back to an individual user level and the ability to track activity akin to click fraud. The eCommerce tracking features are not very straightforward to use.

Most irritatingly, though, just like any other Google product offering, the customer service associated with Google Analytics is abysmal, if not completely non-existant!

How Google Analytics might change search engine optimisation

By offering a free web site analytics solution, google have made a very sneaky and superbly calculated move in the war for search engine supremacy. Now that they have visibility not only into how Google users search for your site and whether they convert into sales on it, but also into how all visitors, even from Yahoo and MSN reach your site, how they use your site and whether they leave your site without making a purchase. Armed with that sort of usability information, Google could not only undermine all your search engine optimisation efforts, but also use the data they collect about MSN and Yahoo! search results with respect to your site and use it to strengthen their stronghold on the search landscape.

Albert