The latter is not a new idea by any means, but is generally considored to be a positive practice to implement on any site.

SOC and Ecommerce

The effect is compounded on ecommerce sites – sites that usually have a heavy template footprint. For example, a typical ecommerce site may contain a category listing with child categories in the form of a “mega drop down menu”, as they seem to to be coined. This is fine, as such menus do contain a lot of good keyword rich material that will be relevant to your site.

However, I have recently been experimenting a little on an ecommerce site I regularly perform SEO on, that does have a fairly beefy drop down menu. I have been focusing on product pages – I like to think of these as your most important pages and pages you’d want people to land on, as it tends to help conversions. In my eyes, any white hat technique to give greater weight and meaning to such pages is a good thing.

For the site in question I edited the source to force the top menu to the very bottom of the page and used absolute positioniong to force the top menu to the top of the screen for the user, when the page is rendered. I performed a similar action for the product description. As a result the important content i.e. the product title and description are now very close to the top of the page within the HTML.

Further Product Page Optimisations for SEO

Additionally I made a couple of other minor optimisations that I’ve noticed some bigger sites are using. At the top of the site in question, there is a company logo – a link, styled with a background using css. For the product page I amended this to a h1 tag with the product title within the header tag. I then used text-indent to hide this. Further down the page, I replaced the old header one tag (was further down the page previously, next to the product description) with a h2 tag and placed the product strapline within a h3 tag. So, the HTML for my company logo, for a product page is as follows:

<h1>
<a href="/product-url.html">My Product Name Here</a>
</h1>

I’ve been runing the above for a month now and have noticed the following trends in Google Analytics – I can’t be 100% sure this is directly down to the above though:

• Increased traffic to product detail pages from Google
• 1.2% increase in sales conversions

Over the next month I’ll be experimenting with replacing the logo with the category name, on my category listing pages too. I’ll update this post with my findings.

Have you had any similar experiences using the above, or similar?

Let me elaborate.

As much as I love the web design forum, some of the advice given is frankly, awful, I can’t not post a reply. A lot of the advice given is a range of generic seo quotes that people have picked from the web. E.g. ‘use headings’, ‘have a keyword density of 4%’ and ‘get backlinks’. The majority of the advice centers around simply getting people on a website or appearing for a generic, competitive term. Compare the latter to SEO’s calling me up at work (and I quote) – “there are 9,000 people searching for xxxxx every month, imagine having 9,000 more people on your site every month”.

All this is fine in theory. However, say you do manage to appear for a generic competitive term or get 9,000 new people on your site – what then. There is a high likelyhood that your boucne rate (or percentage of people who leave your almost immediately) will increase a lot.

Enter Conversion Rate Optimization

So what exactly has happened in this instance? You now have a lot of traffic coming to your site with lots of people boucning off. For websites that require their visitors convert – basically any site that sells a service or product (read: any business website) this is bad news, not to mention a total waste of time.

As a website owner, if you found your site at the latter stage, you’d want to investigate something called conversion rate optimization (or CRO). This is a term given to the science of converting more of you visitors into actual customers – which is what any business requires from their website. Essentially, it the measure of success of a website. For clients who say they want a nicely designed site, with lots of graphics, or clients who want to appear number one for lots of keywords – they really mean they want a site that converts and makes them money.

This one factor is overlooked so much and seems to be a highly vicious circle. SEO and CRO go hand in hand, indeed they need to go hand in hand as they are tighly linked. Quality SEO practice is needed to get more people onto your site, while CRO is needed to convert these visitors into customers.

It amazes me that I still get marketing calls from professional SEOs who say they can get me onto page one for ‘web design’, without any mention at all of CRO – they simply say they’ll get lots of quality backlinks to my site. This is wrong for two reasons. Yes, my site will recieve a lot of traffic, but is it fully optimised to convert visitors into customers (currently it isn’t, currently undergoing a redesign). Additionally, it’sd a well known fact that short tail terms don’t convert as well as a long tail terms. I’m currently much happier being ranked highly for a longer tail version of ‘we design’ – ‘web design xxxx’, where xxxx is my county. Yes, it has less traffic than ‘web design’, but the traffic is more targetted and relevant. Additionally, I have a geo targetted page in the SERPs for this term, which helps too.

In relation to narrow views expressed on the web design forum, well, those people aren’t helping anyone and seem to measure the success of SEO in terms of ‘how many’ people land on their site. As I’ve explained above, this is only part of SEO. I’ll take a typical scenario. Someone asks how they can improve the SEO on their site. People instantly jump in with the generic seo quotes (which are a pet hate of mine). I’ll have a quick look att he OPs site – awful design, no useful content there at all, sometimes not even contact details are present. This is where people need to work backwards before quoting the seo quotes they love so much. Firstly, perform some CRO on the target website and ensure that if a visitor does land on your site that are more likely to convert.

To illustrate some examples of CRO, I’ll explain a few simple and small examples I’ve personally used on some sites I’ve been working on:

• Make call to action button stand out and adjust the button text – on a corporate site website, increased enquiries by 2.5% in the first month
• Adjust the way an existing ecommerce store displays related items – instead of selecting 10 random products on the basket page, select 10 products that people have ultimately ordered, based on the current shopping basket – increased sales by 2.5% in the first month
• Removed unecessary fields in our website enquiry form – cutting it down to 3 fields, from 6 – increase in enquiries
• Boldened and increased font size of first paragraph of text on inner, informational pages – resulted in people spending more time on the site and allowed the page to focus a clearer message to the visitor
• For one company, that had worked with several recognizable brands, I added their logos onto the site in prominant place to build instant trust and reputation – increase in conversions of 3.5% in first month

I’m by no means an internet marketer, SEO guru or leading web designers at all However, it doesn’t take any of those to realise that once you have attrcated people to a site you need to do everything humanly possible to get a conversion. On the flip side, you need SEO to get a decent level of targetted traffic on a website.

SEo and CRO, a match made in heaven

Personally, I wasn’t aware you could track specific links with Analytics and only ever considored this when a client asked ‘why doesn’t Google show me the numbers of times my marketing report (read: a PDF file) has been clicked?’ – a totally valid request that I wanted to investigate.

Use JQuery to improve Google Analytics and track downloads, RSS, Email & external links

First things first, make sure you have a google Analytics account, the latest version of JQuery and the latest version of the analytics code running on your website

As with the majority of the JQuery magic, everything happens within the doc ready event listener – this will used to capture various clicks to select elements.

Tracking Download Link Clicks (PDF, ZIPs etc.)

$(document).ready(function() {

	$("a[rel=download]").click( function() {
		var fileName = $(this).attr("href");
		pageTracker._trackPageview(fileName);
		return true;
	});

});

Then on every link you wish to track, simply add the rel attribute to your non HTML files as follows:

<a href="myData.zip" rel="download">Download My ZIP Data File</a>

Tracking Downloads of Specifc File Types (E.g. PDF files)

Using the dollar sign to match against links that end in .pdf (or any extension you wish to track).

$(document).ready(function() {

	$("a[href$=pdf]").click( function() {
		var myPDF = "/pdfDownloads/" . $(this).attr("href");
		pageTracker._trackPageview(myPDF);
		return true;
	});

});

The /pdfDownloads/ is used to identify and seperate report data within Google Analytics.

Tracking the click of a specific link such as an RSS feed

Simply add an identifier to your RSS feed link (in this example the link was given an id of ‘rssFeed’):

$(document).ready(function() {

	$("a#rssFeed").click( function() {
		pageTracker._trackEvent("RSS", "RSS Subscriber Link Clicked");
		return true;
	});

});

Tracking mailto: Link Clicks

$(document).ready(function() {

	$("a[href^=mailto:]").click( function() {
		pageTracker._trackEvent("Mail", "User clicked on mailto link");
		return true;
	});

});

Tidying up….

You should also disable the clicked element to prevent multiple event recording and provide feedback. To do this, simple add the following at the start of each piece of code – disbabling the element and changing the cursor to an egg timer (although you could display a small graphic to make things look prettier):

$(this).css("cursor", "wait");
$(this).attr("disabled", true);

Recently an existing client came to me asking why his site isn’t showing up when people search for a particular long tail search term. Now, his existing site used a pretty awful content management system that didn’t even allow him to set his own pages titles or meta descriptions. Furthermore, he was lacking inbound links, which people ranked above him did have. This all sounds simple and straightforward but even after I had explained (in quite clear and non technical langauge may I add) the merits of good SEO and one page content the client simply wouldn’t accept this as a solution. He had his own short term and less costly solutions – basically revolving around the the idea me resubmitting his sitemap page to all the major search engines each day. I’m not debating that submitting a sitemap isn’t a good idea, because it is. However, the client’s main KPI for this project was increased site enquiries.

After much discussing this we had both come to a bit of an awkward silence – not a good thing if you’ve ever experinced this in client meetings. For some reason I remebered back to my unoversity days where I had read something about split testing (or A/B testing) – where you can turn a negative situation into a positive one.This is quite a delicate situation to be in as it can damage your client relationship quite quickly.

The idea was to use the client’s idea for a period of time and my idea for a period of time. At the start of this I would install Google Analytics (I was tempted to use Google’s website optimizer, but decided against it) and let the statisitics do the talking – as a no one can argue with statistics.

This method has been very useful previously when demonstrating the merits of creating a dedicated landing page for Google Adword campaigns, but can be used anywhere if you’re willing to a little bit extra.

This method is beneficial for the following reasons:

• The client’s idea are being dismissed as wrong (however right you think you are)
• You are showing the client that you care enough to demonstrate your ideas
• Occassionaly the client will back down as soon as you explain your plan of attack
• It prevents those awful awkward silences
• You have a real world example to use in your other client meetings
• You are speaking the clients language in that you are demonstrating how your actions lead to increased conversions
• You are being direct, which I personally think is alwasy a good thing – as such statistics are often a huge eye opener for clients
• If and when the client comes to the same conslusion as you, they won’t blame you

There is always the arguement that the client is the client and that it’s all business at the end of the day. However, I personally pride myself on doing things properly. Others will say just get on with, do what the client wants and forget about it – you can only offer your opinion. This is a good point but can still damage your client relationships when they return later on and you need to charge them again. It all depends if you require long or short term client relationships – as they are definately an investment.

If you use Twitter as a marketing tool to drive traffic to your site then you should treat it in exactly the same way as you would a newsletter, a PPC advert or a banner and track each Tweet’s performance beyond simple click data. How many visits do you get, how long do they stay on your site, how deep do they go, what is the bounce rate like and how much revenue do they generate?

The benefit to ‘tagging’ this link is that Google Analytics will record more than use basic click data – you can record a whole host of advanced user data such as how they navigate your site and length of visit. By default Google will track such links, but traffic from services such as bit.ly will be dumped into the direct traffic area of Google Analytics. The steps to get the latter up and running are quite simple:

1: Go to Google’s URL builder to generate an url . Enter the following information:

Website URL: your website address

Campaign Source: enter a relevant source here to identify your campaign E.g. twitter

Campaign Name: enter a name used to identify the campaign, this is used to identify the campaign in Google Anlytics E.g. twittertracking

2: Click generate URL and something similar to the following will be created: http://www.web-design-talk.co.uk/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=twittertrack

3: If posting to twitter you can paste this URL directly in the tweet box, as twitter will automatically shorten this url.

4: After approximately 24 hours data will appear in your analytics account. Simply navigate to Traffic Sources. If you’ve used the same terms to build the url as above you’ll see an entry called ‘twitter / social’. You can also view information by navigating to Traffic Sources > Campaigns where you can click the campiagn name (‘twittertrack’ was used in he example above).

Google Analytics Once Tracking is Installed