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Five Ways To Turn Website Traffic into Business

Posted By Meagan Mills in Pay Per Click, SEO, Search Engine Optimization on March 11, 2010
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One of the first struggles that website owners usually deal with is trying to get traffic to their sites.

It’s often difficult to find traction and sometimes it seems like no one will ever visit your website. But, through some good website design, skilled search engine optimization efforts, website marketing and a pay-per-click marketing campaign, you finally start to attract some traffic. But you’re still not seeing any increased sales. Why?

Unfortunately, while it definitely helps to see increased website traffic, that increase in traffic doesn’t always translate to an increase in sales. Here are a five tips that can help you turn website visitors into customers:

Make your website easy to navigate

One of the main reasons that visitors do not turn into customers is because they website they are on is too difficult to navigate. You should have easy-to-understand links placed in a highly visible area of the website. In order to avoid confusion, try to declutter your page and only place the information you need on the site.

Introduce “Calls to Action”

Having a call to action button, logo or link on your website is an excellent way to convert website visitors into paying customers. This is a great way to direct your visitors to a contact form or a current promotion or sale.

Write compelling content

Well-written, informative and easy-to-understand website content goes a long way. If your website writing is persuasive and interesting, visitors will be more likely to purchase your products or services.

Have a professional website design

An up-to-date, professional website design that adheres to current standard is important. Your website could be the first time a visitor has ever heard of your company so it is important to look presentable. The graphics and the design of your site should represent your company well and you will want your site to look relevant, so use up-to-date design technology and standards. That doesn’t mean that your site needs to be filled with music, video, graphics and animation, but it does need to look good.

Make it easy for clients to contact you

Have a contact form placed in a highly visible location. Write your phone number and/or email address in large print. Offer online chats or “click-to-call” services. Do whatever is necessary to make it easy for a visitor to contact you.

First2Search is a Toronto website design company, pay-per-click marketer, website promotion and search engine optimization company. We specialize in getting your company noticed online and converting those visitors to customers.

For more information on our services and how we can help your business grow, please contact us today.

5 Tips for Choosing a Domain Name

Posted By Nathan Hughes in Internet Marketing, SEO, Search Engine Optimization on March 8, 2010
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One of the first decisions you make when setting up a website is what domain name you will purchase. For some people this may seem like an easy decision, but it is one that you should put some thought into. Choosing the right domain name can help with your online marketing plans, your search engine optimization and the popularity of your website.

Here are a few tips that will help you choose your domain name:

Include keywords

◦ Sometimes it helps to include some of your keywords in your domain name. This can help your search engine ranking and make it more obvious what your company does at first glance.

Make it short and memorable

◦ If possible, a short domain is usually better than a very long one. However, that’s not always the case. For example, VeryGoodDomainNameChoice.com might be a better name than VGDNC.com. A series of initials isn’t very easy to remember. Then again, neither is IThinkThisIsAReallyReallyGoodChoiceForADomainName.com, so you’ll have to put some thought into your choice. Unfortunately, you’ll likely find that many short, memorable domain names are taken, so you’ll have to be clever.

Notice how it looks and sounds

◦ A domain name could look great on paper, but it can be difficult to say. The opposite can be true as well. You should practice saying your name out loud to other people. It should be easy to pronounce and straightforward.

A dot-com if possible

◦ Most people still assume that commercial websites end in .com and most major websites do. If you choose a .net or a .ca address, you’ll have to make a point to specify your address to people. This is especially true if a competitor owns the .com. You could risk sending people to your competition if you’re not clear.

Check out similarities

◦ For example, if you want to buy domain.com you should also look at domain.net, domain.ca, domains.com and any other similarities of mistypings. If they’re available you may want to buy them. If they’re own by the competition, you have to be careful that you’re not infringing on copyrights and that you don’t accidentally send your customers to a competitor’s website.

Once you’ve thought of a name, make sure you pick a reputable domain name registrar to purchase it from and you’re on your way!

How Website Design Can Help SEO

Posted By Nathan Hughes in SEO, Website Design on February 22, 2010
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Many people consider website design and search engine optimization to be two separate, independent things. Web design is performed by web designers and SEO is done by SEO people. Both things are necessary, but for different reasons and they do not cross paths. This is not true.

The truth is that nothing exists in a vacuum. Your website design can go a long way to helping out your SEO efforts. Sometimes a few minor tweaks to your design will be enough to help you out a great deal. Other times an entirely new design is necessary. Here are a few reasons why website design helps SEO.

Better website design makes your website more straightforward

◦ Over time, many sites become convoluted. You add pages here and there. You create whole new sections out of no where. You unlink pages you no longer find necessary. This makes your website structure hard for search engines to follow. Having a brand new design will definitely help this. You can start out by taking a look at what you already have on your site, come up with a plan, and create a whole new structure. This is a great way to use your website’s design to your advantage.

Better Positioning of Keywords and Headings

◦ If you’re changing your website design, it’s also a great time to reevaluate your SEO plan. Maybe you’ve decided to target different keywords than the ones you chose when you first set up your site. Your new design can start with these in mind. Structure your page in a way that allows you to place your keywords and headings in areas where search engines will recognize them.

A Good Design Attracts People

◦ If your website looks good and is easy to navigate, people will spend more time on it. The longer someone stays on your site, the more likely that person is to read the content. The more content someone reads, the more likely they are to share or link to your page. When more people share or link to your page, your traffic increases.

Some people may link to you just for the design

◦ There are many websites that have sections on “featured website designs.” These pages give exposure to websites they feel are well designed. If you can get your page featured on one of these sites, you’ll help out your SEO efforts.

Finally, and this isn’t SEO specific, but well designed websites have lower bounce rates. People like to visit pages that look nice and are easy to navigate. Having a good website design is a great way to make visitors stay on your web page longer.

Some Tips For Choosing Keywords

Posted By Meagan Mills in SEO, Search Engine Optimization on February 16, 2010
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One of the most important things you can do when setting up your website is choosing the right keywords. These words will be the basis of your entire search engine optimization plan and they will ultimately be the words that visitors (and potential customers) will use to find your website. Many people overlook this step and they will have problems attracting traffic to their website.

Since keyword research is so important, it’s a good idea to spend some time on the process. It doesn’t make sense to just whip off a few keywords and get started. Proper keyword research takes a bit of time, but ultimately it’s worth it.

Here are a few tips that will help you with your keyword research:

Write down as many words as you can that have something to do with your website. This is the “brainstorming phrase” so don’t worry about the quality of the words and don’t filter yourself. Just write down as many related words as possible.
Think of key phrases as well as key words. Most people type several words into a search engine at a time.
Think about what you yourself would search for if you were looking for your own website. Most people have learned how to search and they usually type only the words they are looking for into a search engine. For example, you might type “blue widget company” into Google instead of “Company than manufacturers blue widgets”
Edit your list down to 15 or 20 key phrases.
Now perform those searches online. Type the list of words and phrases into Google, Yahoo! or Bing and pay attention to the websites that come up. Are they the kind of sites you expect? Are they similar to your own website? They should be.
Also pay attention to the number of sites that show up for your chosen phrases. The more sites that are listed, the more difficult the competition for those phrases.
Revise your list as necessary.

There are a number of sites online that can help you with your keyword research. Google’s Keyword Tool is a popular one. These tools can sometimes give you an idea of how many people have searched for those keywords in the past.

The keyword selection phase of your website development is definitely an important one. You need to choose keywords that represent your site, words that are not too competitive and words that people are actually searching for. If you choose the right keywords for your website, you’ll be off to a great start!

Turning Visitors Into Customers

Posted By Sara Bergeron in Pay Per Click, SEO, Website Design, Website Promotion on February 12, 2010
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Webmasters spend a lot of their time trying to increase traffic to their websites. So do SEO professionals, PPC marketers, social media marketers and website copywriters. And it’s obvious why.

You can’t sell a product or service without people knowing your company exists. In order to get noticed, in order to spread your message to as many people as possible, you need to increase traffic. There aren’t many website owners that can honestly say the don’t want more traffic and there are even fewer than would say they want less traffic.

But you don’t just need traffic, you need to convert that traffic into sales. If you run a website that makes money off of ad revenue, having a lot of traffic could be good enough. But if you’re selling a product or a service, you want to increase your sales.

So how do you turn casual visitors into paying customers?

There are a few ways. First of all, having a clear call to action on your website is important. You may want your visitors to fill out a contact form, or call you on the phone ,or purchase a product ,or request a quote or something else entirely. The bottom line is that you have to make this easy to do and you have to make the link that starts this process stand out.

A good call to action is obvious. It is the most obvious link on the page. It should be larger than the rest of the links on the site or use a different font or text colour. It should be positioned in a place where it is easily seen. A visitor’s eye is naturally drawn to certain areas of the screen and your call to action should be placed in one of those areas.

Another way to convert visitors into customers is through well-written website content. Your content should be persuasive and informative. It should give the user the information that they are looking for and it should also sell your company and promote the products or services you offer.

A well-designed website with quality content and good calls to action will convert more visitors into customers than a badly designed one that does not clearly point the user in the right direction. Sometimes the best way to test this is through trial and error. Move elements around the screen until you’ve found one that converts well. You’ll be happy you did.

Search Engine Optimization and the Bing/Yahoo! Merger

Posted By Nathan Hughes in SEO on January 30, 2010
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Most search engine optimization professionals spend most of their time focusing their efforts on Google. And that makes sense most of the time. Google is by far the most popular search engine. No one “Yahoos” or “Bings” anything, but people everywhere “Google” terms.

However, Bing and Yahoo! have recently announced that that they will be working together for search. Yahoo! search results will be powered by Bing and that means more people will be seeing Bing’s results than ever before.

How does this affect SEO? In many ways it doesn’t. Google still controls a large portion of the market it doesn’t look as though that will change drastically in the near future. However, it does mean that Bing will have more pull in the future, so it’s probably a good idea to focus at least some of your SEO efforts on Bing.

It’s entirely possible that the Bing search algorithm will change once they start working with Yahoo!, but right now there are a few things you can do to increase your Bing search position.

First of all, make sure you submit your website to Bing. While their web crawler will likely find your site on its own, it helps to submit it anyway.

It also helps to sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools. This will help you see how Bing sees your site and allow you to troubleshoot any issues it finds. You can also submit your sitemap and view your website statistics here. You will need a Windows Live ID to do this.

There is also some evidence that Bing puts more stake into meta tags than Google does. Of course, you do not want to spam your keyword field with every term under the sun, but adding in a few targeted, relevant keywords could be helpful. Google has said that it does not use the keyword tag any longer due to spam, but it looks like Bing gives it some stake.

Bing also focuses on multimedia more than Google does. Images and video are given priority for some search terms. Bing also places the “related searches” along the left side of the page, inside of at the bottom like Google does. That makes these terms more visible for searchers. You may want to focus your SEO efforts on some related terms if you want Bing searchers to notice you.

Overall, Bing search seems mostly similar to Google. You do not want to abandon your Google efforts to focus on Bing as a site that ranks highly on Google will probably do quite well on Bing as well.

Internet Marketing During a Recession

Posted By Meagan Mills in Internet Marketing, SEO, Website Promotion on January 28, 2010
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Unfortunately many companies are still hurting and feeling the effects of the recession. Naturally, this usually means cost cutting and tightened spending. There are some things companies just cannot justify paying for during hard times.

Online marketing is NOT one of those things.

In fact, Internet marketing is one of the best possible ways to spend your money during tough economic periods. Why? It’s simple. When compared to traditional forms of marketing such as print ads, television, radio and direct mail, online marketing has a much higher return on investment. When there isn’t much money to go around, you need to spend what you have in a way that sees the highest possible return. That way is Internet marketing and promotion.

Possibly the most cost-effective form of online marketing is pay per click advertising. These ads are proven to deliver. First of all, they are only displayed when a potential customer searches for a particular, related term in a major search engine or visits a related website. This ensures that every person that sees your ad is a targeted customer that is interested in the product or service you provide. This sort of efficiency makes pay per click advertising incredibly affordable and cost-effective.

Secondly, pay per click companies only charge you when someone clicks on your ad. If you have a direct mail campaign, you will be charged for each flyer or catalogue you send out, even if the recipient immediately throws it away. With pay per click ads, you only pay when targeted customers choose to visit your website. This is definitely an economical way to spend your marketing budget. Why pay for ads that aren’t performing? Pay per click advertising allows you to only pay when a customer is delivered to your site. It just makes financial sense.

Finally, pay per click and Internet advertising can be tracked quite accurately. Using website analytics, you can determine exactly which terms your visitors are searching for in order to land on your site, which pages of your website are the most popular and exactly how affective your advertising campaigns are. This allows you to modify your efforts in order to attract the highest number of targeted customers for the lowest possible price.

This sort of focused, direct advertising will offer you much higher returns on your initial investment and is an intelligent way to spend your marketing budget, especially during a recession.

During troubling economic times, many people are turning to the Internet as a form of communication and entertainment even more than before. Advertising online is the best way to reach a wide audience at an affordable rate as quickly as possible.

Why Keyword Research Is Important

Posted By Meagan Mills in SEO, Search Engine Optimization on January 26, 2010
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There is perhaps no more important aspect to Internet promotion than keyword research. It should be the starting step in just about everything you do regarding your website and doing it wrong, or not doing it at all, can have dire consequences for your web page.

Visitors find your website based on keywords or, more accurately, key phrases. These are the words that they type into a search engine in order to find a site. Google, Bing and other search engines all have different ways of determining how to rank websites, but they all scan pages to look for keywords.

This is a good time to note that you should not just fill your website with as many keywords as possible or stuff the same words and phrases all over your page. This tactic may have worked at one point in time, but those days are long gone.

When picking keywords, it’s important to think about what your potential clients may be searching for online. Think about how you use search engines and try to figure out what you would type in to find websites similar to your own. You will then want to use a keyword research tool, such as the one provided by Google AdWords, to discover how many people are searching for the terms you have chosen.

Both of these steps are very important.

For example, if you sell blue widgets, you want your clients to be able to find you when they search for “blue widgets” online. You don’t want your website to come up as the first result for “green things” and appear no where for “blue widgets.” Customers searching for “green things” may visit your site, but they likely will not find what they want and you will not do any business.

Targeting the wrong keywords is an excellent way to get a lot of traffic that you don’t want. There is little benefit to drawing uninterested customers to your site. It would be like opening a store and marketing yourself as a dress store when you actually sell electronics. People coming into the store to buy dresses will not be too happy when they find the shelves lined with televisions and computers.

Secondly, you’ll need to find terms that people are actually searching for. You can rank first in the world for “purple pieces” but if there isn’t anyone searching for that term, it doesn’t help you.

The same holds true for pay per click advertising. If you’re going to spend money to advertise yourself online, you want to target the right keywords and drive in the right traffic. A good, experienced pay per click advertising company can help you with this.

Keyword choice is important when purchasing a domain name, designing a website and writing the site’s content. It also plays a very key role in your search engine optimization efforts and your online marketing plan. By doing good keyword research upfront you will save yourself time, money and hassles and you will bring in the traffic you want. This will make your business grow.

The Single Most Important Aspect of Internet Promotion

Posted By Meagan Mills in Pay Per Click, SEO, Search Engine Optimization on January 22, 2010
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There are many, many important things to take into consideration when you are developing and promoting a website. Website design, keyword choice, written content, site structure, onsite SEO, link building strategy and pay per click advertising are just a few aspects you’ll need to pay attention to and keep track of. However, there is one thing that more important than all the rest of them put together.

Give your visitors what they’re looking for.

This overarching thought should be in your mind every single time you do anything related to your website. You shouldn’t design your site solely for aesthetic or SEO purposes. You shouldn’t produce your written content only for search engines. You always need to remember that the final decision to use your company or not will be made by a real person, not a computer.

When you are putting together a PPC campaign, keep your customers in mind. What would they be searching for? Just because Google keywords or another similar tool can tell you what the most popular search terms are, it doesn’t mean that the clients you are looking for will be using those terms. “Widgets” may be the most searched term on Google, but that doesn’t matter if most clients looking for companies like yours are searching for “Green doodads in Canada.” The bottom line is that you need to structure all of your efforts with your customer in mind.

When you design a website there is a lot of pressure to rank highly on major search engines, and for good reason. If people cannot find your site, they won’t be able to purchase your products or services. You could have an amazing website that no one ever sees. So it is important to use SEO techniques and pay-per-click campaigns to drive traffic to your page. However, if your site doesn’t meet your customers’ needs, you will be left with a high bounce rate, very few clients and a serious issue on your hands.

Keyword choice is key, as picking the wrong keywords to optimize and advertise can bring in the wrong traffic and definitely hurt your business. There’s no point in receiving high traffic if almost every person that visits your site leaves almost immediately. Web design and written content are incredibly important as well. When a client reaches your site it’s important that they find an attractive, easy-to-use, informative web page. Otherwise they’ll be on to the next site almost immediately.

If you have a site that gives clients what they want and it’s promoted and optimized well, you’ll be set for success.

Search Marketing and SEO are Ongoing Services

Posted By Meagan Mills in Google Analytics, SEO, Search Engine Optimization on January 21, 2010
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If you want your website to be successful, you need to implement a good SEO and search marketing plan from day one. It is much easier to structure your site with SEO in mind than it is to change your site later on if it isn’t performing well. However, SEO and search marketing should not be “turned on” at website launch and then forgotten about shortly after.

For a website to consistently receive traffic and grow over time, SEO and search engine marketing should be ongoing services.

For example, you should not stop link building. You can never have enough related links from quality sources. Your competitors are likely trying to secure additional links every day, and you need to stay at least a step or two ahead of them. The same is true for website content. Frequently updated content is an excellent way to draw in visitors and improve traffic.

The same can be said for all forms of search engine marketing. This is not something you should do once and then leave alone. If you put together a pay-per-click advertising campaign when you launched your website, you should be monitoring and updating it as time goes on. Choosing a few keywords once and then doing nothing more is not the most effective way to run a PPC campaign.

Good search engine marketing campaigns require frequent maintenance. You should be aware of which terms are performing well, how effective your bids are and any other related terms that could help improve your traffic. Keeping track of what’s working and making changes to fix what isn’t won’t just bring more visitors to your site, but it will also save you money. You’ll avoiding spending money on terms that do not deliver the kind of traffic you want and you won’t sit around for months wondering where your traffic is.

You also need to watch your website analytics and statistics. This way you will notice any traffic trends and be able to modify your site to match these trends. If certain pages or more popular than others or if your site has a high bounce rate, it’s important to know these things as soon as possible. You may need to change your website design if certain pages are not being noticed.

Remember, search engine optimization and online marketing are not one-time services. To be most effective, they should be monitored, updated and changed when necessary. This will ensure steady website growth and help your business.

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