Posts in ‘Search Engine Optimisation’

However a visitor gets to your site, they can only see one page first. This first page is known as the ‘landing page’, and your visitors’ landing experience is crucial to the success of your site. The catch is that, depending on where they’ve come from, exactly which page that is could (and should!) be different for everyone. Many websites are built with the idea that the first page any potential customer will see is the home page, but by providing your visitors with content that is specifically and uniquely targeted to their needs, you should experience a dramatic increase in conversion rates.

An important thing to understand is that the landing pages designed for pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns are very different form the landing pages designed for organic search engine optimisation (SEO).

Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine coined the expression ‘the Long Tail’. His example was how Amazon.com makes most of its revenue from huge numbers of specialised titles, not the blockbuster, high-selling books we see in bookshops. Each specialised title may only sell hundreds of copies per year, but there are just so many of them, compared with the small number of ‘top ten’ books (which is, of course, always only 10).

So how do you make the Long Tail work for your website?

Kiwis love Google. Some 88% of internet searchers in New Zealand use Google when they start looking for products and services. This includes your customers and prospects. There are only two ways to get on the first page of Google results:

1. Pay Google, or
2. Plug away at Google

Smart companies use a mixture of both techniques, knowing that Google visitors use the different links at different stages in the buying process:

• Visitors who are ready to buy are likely to click on the paid links.
• Visitors still at the research stage prefer the natural, non-paid links.

We covered paid links last time. Getting high on the non-paid (natural) results is called search engine optimisation (SEO for short). This involves thinking like Google thinks.

Ever noticed those ‘sponsored link’ adverts on Google, at the top and right of the results pages? They are called ‘AdWords’, and this is how they work.

Imagine you have searched for ‘bike shop’. The sponsored link adverts on the results page are all sponsored by bike shops. If you click on an advert, the company behind the advert pays Google. The companies have chosen to bid for the search words ‘bike shop’. It’s an auction: the company that bids the most gets the highest position for their AdWords link. Companies that bid less get further down the list.

The company only pays if you click their ad: that’s why this is sometimes called ‘pay-per-click’ (PPC).

The bike shop decides what words to bid for and how much they want to bid. Some words are expensive. For example, in the financial sector, the word ‘mortgage’ could cost you $120 per click. Yes: $120 to get someone to look at a website. Other, more specialised search phrases will be much cheaper: for example, ‘mower repair’ may only cost the advertiser a few cents for each click through.