[mc src="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPJ5meBPxNI" type="youtube"]Finding Your Google Place Link[/mc]

One of the continuing challenges that we’ve found that local business owners face with online marketing is the endless complexity of how the technology companies have set things up.

Why does it have to be so damn complicated? Seriously… why? I surely don’t know; what I do know is that it certainly hasn’t gotten any better since I started online in 1994. It seems like the rule is that everything has to have it’s own unique way of doing things – intricate little steps, convoluted pathways, secret gotcha’s. By everything I mean hosting, video, email, software, wordpress, etc., and don’t even get me started about seo!

So to attempt to make things a bit easier to navigate, please check out the above video showing how to access your Google Place page link. You need this link in order to send it to your customers, in order for them to give you a review.

Remember: Google Places Reviews are very important; both for your local search rank and to get more customers into your business.

Some SEO experts say that the only measurement that counts is your conversion rate. I ultimately agree. It still takes a high rank to get traffic and it takes traffic to be able to refine your website so it does convert visitors into customers.
Just makes sense.

What are the elements of a high converting website? A compelling headline; an easy to navigate site; a strong graphic design; persuasive copy and a good call to action would all be top items.

Donna over at SEO Scoop just wrote a fine article on “10 Tips For Creating Calls to Action that Convert“. It’s not just packed with good information but has examples from online campaigns that I found really helped illustrate each concept. Highly recommended read.

For more on website conversion also check out: Website Optimization: the Basics

“83% of U.S. households now use the Internet as an information source when shopping locally for products and services… the Internet will soon surpass newspapers as a local shopping information resource.” Source: The Kelsey Group

People who are searching for local businesses online, do business at a higher rate than other searchers. However, your website still must do a solid job of turning those visits into customers.

Website conversion is about taking website visits and turning them into phone calls, coupon downloads, searches for directions, online bookings, etc.

For your website to get more customers requires certain actions. First: Create a helpful, easy to use website; Second: Be seen where your local customers search; Third; Give them the exact information they are looking for.

Here’s a great article on building trust factors into your website by local search expert Tom Crandall at SEM Report Card. The article is titled How To Convert More Local Business With Trustand it is brimming with great advice and examples of trust factors your can add to your website. Have a read!

There is a direct correlation with higher trust leading to more business. If you want more insight on this, give us a call.

Here’s a customer appreciation promotion that I received by email today – they were also texting me about it at the same time.

Epic Marketing Fail

Here’s the text of the email I sent them to the return address on the email.
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Re: Rogers Customer Appreciation Event

Why do you have a splash page? The instant I get to those – I’m out. Thanks for not respecting my time!

Why all in Flash? Did anyone in the management team realize that smart phones don’t use flash? Fail!

Stunning Fail. Marketing at it’s most disconnected. I’ll blog about it though, so thanks for the fodder.

For whoever is in the trenches and gets this, pass it on to your bonehead upper management. That’s who it’s meant for, not the hard working people who just did their best implementing a flawed plan.

Isn’t it time for real telephone competition in this country?
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Rogers enjoyed being the only cellphone company in Canada to have the iPhone until very recently. Sending a promotion to smart phone users that they cannot see on their cellphone is not well thought out, is it? It says, “We appreciate you so much that we’re willing to give you stuff in exchange for marketing to you more, but we won’t let you see it on your kick ass cellphone – we forgot that Flash doesn’t work on the iPhone… hehe!”

What a bunch of maroons. (Bugs Bunny reference there…)

My email’s response? I got a bounce back saying that email address is not monitored. Go here or there so “we can ignore you even more!” Meh.

The CRTC needs to be abolished. They prop up this sort of incompetence with price fixing, so the big companies in the cellphone business can make large profits, no matter how bad they are or how much their service blows! Competition is the only thing that will make them do a better job.

The core of website optimization is testing. There’s an axiom in internet marketing, “Always be testing.”

(It comes from direct mail marketing, and the people who developed that industry pretty much invented everything we know about conversion!)

Looking at the tasks associated with a website, it seems there are numerous other areas to concentrate on. Site design, copywriting, video, offers, article writing, blogging, traffic, even SEO… many, many paths to follow and expertise to acquire.

After 15 years of doing this, I would strongly suggest that the online skill that underpins success more than any other, is testing. The best tester in the world will “always” win out over the best copywriter or the traffic genius, or best conversion expert (except the best conversion expert is an expert tester.)

Hopefully, if you are not “into” being a tester, you have someone on staff who can take up the tasks or can hire someone to manage it for you. This is so important that if you are not into handling it, I would seriously recommend that you rethink having a website.

Thankfully, this is an area where there is plenty of good, free information for you to get up to speed. Google provides!

An easy way to get started is available at this Google provided YouTube Channel.

Here’s a quick (1min 20sec) introduction to using Website Optimizer:

Once you have completed the first round of implementing the 4 basic conversion factors:

1. Increase your customers possible interaction points
2. Increase your customers trust of your website
3. Increase the available social proof on your website
4. Use promotions and ethical bribery to reward your most wanted behavior

… there are a number of other areas that can be addressed.

However the next areas do require a lot more work, more management and more expertise. The elements are straightforward however.

The most important elements include testing video, video sales letters, headlines, and your offer/s and their page placement. The key here is continual split or multivariate testing.

There is some exceptional multivariate testing software available. In my opinion though, most customers will get great results from Google’s Website Optimizer. It works well, and is easy to setup.

Testing accomplishes 3 things… it allows you to listen to your visitors and give them what they really want; it increases conversions; and it takes all the guesswork out of optimizing your site.

Video online has become very important and will continue to grow in importance. You Tube is the 2nd biggest search engine after Google in the english speaking world.

People love video! From a marketing perspective, video can dramatically shorten the time it takes for people to get familiar with and ultimately trust your company. That familiarity leads to more sales and higher conversions.

There are numerous examples of companies adapting their written sales copy into a video form and increasing their conversion rate. Depending on your niche, it can be very effective to have both, since some professions tend to process information in different ways. ie. Show an accountant a spreadsheet and an ROI analysis; show a creative person images that evoke powerful feelings.

Headlines can often turn a poor converting website into a champion. The good news is that you don’t have to be a good copywriter in order to benefit from this.

I have analyzed many websites that did not have an offer. An offer is just a clear way of asking for your customers business, and having one will outperform not having one! Testing different offers using persuasion elements like scarcity, limited quantities, and deadlines can clearly make a difference in your websites conversion.

Other elements to test later are copy, color scheme, elements that are emphasized and their placement on the page, if you are doing e-commerce – all the elements in the shopping cart and fulfillment page.

Website optimization is the action taken to increase your conversion rate on your current website.

Often I’ve found that customers are a bit obsessed with traffic. Traffic, traffic, traffic!

Think about it though. If your website sucks at helping your current visitors easily move to being clients, how effective is getting more traffic to your website going to be?

I propose that you improve your current website first. Then once you have proof that it is doing a decent job converting, turn on the traffic taps. Often it can make sense to tackle both of these jobs at the same time.

The first step in any journey into the unknown is to find out where you are. For your current website that means setting up analytics so that you can accurately measure how much traffic you are getting, from which keyword searches or website links, and to which area of your website.

What tool should you use? Google site analytics is a professional grade tool that you can add to your website in 5 minutes. It provides you with multitudes of data on your traffic and you can easily set it up to track your conversions as well.

It’s Free! There may be better deals out there, but I have not ran into them. OK?

If you want to know the ins and outs of how to use Google’s analytics program they even provide a complete training program – Conversion University.

So now that you have analytics installed on your site. you can begin to make sense of the traffic that you already are getting and what sort of job you are doing in converting that traffic into clients. You need a baseline in order to be able to accurately assess the next changes you’re going to make.

There are many areas of conversion to be addressed after this. However, the primary areas boil down to 4; interaction, security, social proof, and moving the free line (or ethical bribery…).

Multiple Ways To Reach You – Interaction

I think most humans like getting answers to their questions, quickly and efficiently.

Sidebar Rant: Please, everybody who enjoys talking to a robotic “smart” answering machine and who doesn’t end up yelling into the phone at it, put up your hands… OK – You guys can leave. A pox on the inventors, buyers and sellers of such abominations. Nothing says “we hate our customers” better than that crap.

Provide your customers with many ways to reach you. Telephone (answered by humans please), click to talk, click to chat, email signup, web contact forms, all make it easier for your customer to interact with your sales and service personnel, and that means more business and better conversion.

(Do a Google search for “click to talk” or “click to chat” if you do not know what these are yet. They are extremely effective tools for conversion if your customer value warrants using them.)

You can also use polls, online surveys, and newsletters – emailed, (and if you really want to stand out) old fashion mailed! Ask your customers how they want you to communicate with them and then build your newsletter strategy from that.

Can They Trust You? Security

Your customers must know they can trust you online and there are some important ways to communicate that. First and foremost is the ability to reach you easily.

After that, there are numerous industry certifications that would apply to your niche. There are also security assurances such as Trust Guard, Truste, BBB, McAfee, etc. and spam free certificates that are worthwhile. You want to prominently display your guarantees, and warranties and it’s best to show shipping guarantees and assurances during the shopping and checkout process.

(Search in Google for Trust Seals to find out more about these.)

Testimonials, etc. – Social Proof

One of the most powerful unconscious decision aids is social proof… which is where people are more likely to buy something if others have already purchased it.

Depending on your niche you can use client testimonials, awards and other recognition, reviews of your products and service, and case studies/success stories/white papers. These are also most effective when they are also available in other places online – review sites, Google local business center, referenced in articles, etc.

Every company has a different target customer base, so it’s important to know what type of content is most effective with them.

Retailers and companies with large catalogs of product or services can benefit from having “Best Seller lists” and “Recommended items”.

Promotions – Ethical Bribery

Giving way free stuff will always be an effective way to reward the customer behavior you want to create. Again, it is based on another unconscious decision aid called reciprocity. Basically it’s I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine. It works.

Offer your customers a free report, a valuable video, demonstrations, free trials, webinars and podcasts in return for their email address. Many retailers will have a sweepstakes in order to drive email subscriptions.

You can also offer contests, rebates, discounts and free shipping; these are all effective ways to spur action.

These are the cornerstone steps to improve conversion on your website… if they seem familiar it’s because they are used in many areas of marketing. They are based on researched and proven psychological principles and have worked for centuries. Use them and profit!

There are many elements that go into a website; design, brand, message, offers, most wanted response, usability, heck even coolness.

What about conversion and what is it? My definition of conversion is where the website, viewed as a marketing and especially sales tool, is effective!

I have expert internet marketer friends who would argue that, for the majority online, website conversion has never been found! Can’t really argue with the fact that many websites do not achieve much if anything, let alone an increase in business.

Others would say that they have always focused on and optimized their websites for conversion, “It’s the lifeblood of an online business, me boy-o!”

I think that for the most part, conversion has been an ignored factor in the creation of websites; especially in the small local business space. In my opinion, building a website without having conversion as “the” major focal point is a huge waste of time and money.

The components of creating a high converting website are well defined. They include elements such as: usability – does it do exactly what you expected; design – the look and feelings it evokes; site analytics and testing – tracking the results and continually refining.

Sidebar: Yep… continually. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in websites and internet marketing is: A Website is Never Done!

The best, most effective sites both grow and refine constantly, and that is why they double, triple sales and more!

In my experience, during the site planning and building stages, there are a couple other elements that 99% of sites completely ignore – these are creating a wireframe prototype and then user testing before launch. (I’ll get back to these later.)

There are global, critical questions to ask, that will ensure that you frame your website development around it being effective. These questions are:

1. Why am I building a website?
• Is it to get orders?
• Is it to get catalog or information requests, or to get the phone to ring?
• Is it to get email signups?

Each of these dictate a different conversion process. There can be different processes on different pages. Combining them on one page almost always doesn’t work and is what many sites try to do.

2. How does our customer see this?

Always, always, always look at the site from your customers point of view. The website is not for you… it’s for your customer and the more you can manifest that in the finished website, the more effective it will be!

3. What is the focus of the site and specifically this web page from my customers point of view?
• Buy Something?
• Give me information?
• Click deeper if I want to know more?

Another way of putting this is – What is the most wanted response?

4. Does our navigation scheme answer these below questions immediately?
• Where am I?
• Where can I go?
• Where have I been?

Ultimately, your navigation scheme must follow convention. It’s a mugs game to invent your own “cool” system. People spend most of their time somewhere else than on your site.

The #1 rule here is: Don’t make me think!

Your navigation must be obvious and unfortunately, the more familiar you are with your developing website, the more blind you become to the obvious and non-obvious. Here’s where user testing kicks butt!

You can test 5 people and catch 80% of your usability errors. Test 10 and you’ll see 95% of them. The key to this is simple; give them a task and then shut up and watch.

For example: “Sign up for our email list.” You’ll see where they get stuck. Save opinions and surveys until later… stand behind them and watch where they struggle and then ask them about what happened!

You will discover problems with how you’ve named things, organized and setup up the page layout, and with the expected sequence of your most wanted responses. These are gold because solving them means more effectiveness!