Before you can make decisions such as keyword targeting and page optimisation, it is first important to understand the search buying cycle and how this can impact on your keyword queries and landing pages.
Going back to my days in offline marketing, the sales and marketing funnel looks rather like the image on the left.
During the sales process there are several possible points of contact for the seller to influence the buyer. Everything from casual interest at the top of the funnel, though evaluation/research/comparison, and hopefully all the way to sale/commitment and possible referral.
The ability to understand this process is vital to an online marketing campaign, not just during the SEO process, but it should also impact on the website structure and build.
The Buying Cycle
Firstly think about how you yourself might behave online when you’re researching buying a product.
Taking a typical online purchase for something like a television. You might start with a search query for a very general phrase like TV or television. You’ll see that there are several irrelevant results for our purpose such as the BBC and ITV results, but using the informational properties such as Wikipedia, or the Google shopping results you may then make a decision that you’re looking for a plasma TV rather than an LCD TV.
Of course you may also decide to visit one of the commercial websites listed for these queries, or buy from the PPC listings, but it’s more likely you’ll want to research a bit more first.
Next you’ll probably search for Plasma TV, this is looking a bit more promising, there are several relevant shopping results some reviews websites and a few more relevant commercial sites appearing. After reading a few of the sites you decide that the Panasonic 50PZ800B looks fairly impressive and you want to find out a bit more about it.
Of course you search for it, possibly adding terms like review, test or comparison to bring up the more informational resources.
It’s about now that you feel you’re happy with your choice, you’ve compared it against other makes and models, you’re happy that it’s what you’re looking for and you want to go ahead and purchase.
To find online shops selling that specific model you may use buying trigger search terms such as buy or cheap, or possibly even adding geographic search terms such as London or UK.
Points to note…..
- A typical online sale is unlikely to result from one specific query, but is made up of several queries
- Some studies have shown up to 12 separate searches may be made before a purchase
- This process may take several days or even weeks
- At any point in this cycle the customer may decide to buy
- The process may crossover several mediums, the eventual sale may come from a phone call or a shop purchase
- The further into the cycle the higher the chance of a purchase
- The further into the cycle the lower the number of searchers
So how does this affect your actions when it comes to building and marketing your website?
Firstly you need to ensure that you’re targeting a range of search phrases that cover the entire sales process. If you’re only targeting the more general phrases such as TV and television then you’re probably missing some low hanging fruit in terms of the sales trigger phrases such as buy and cheap. Similarly if you’re only targeting the specific phrases then you’re also missing a lot of traffic that can be converted into sales.
Bearing the sales process in mind when building and organising your site can have a dramatic effect on sales and conversions.
Treat your site hierarchy as a representation of the sales process. Undecided visitors making generic searches need to be sent to the homepage where then you can influence their decision and funnel them further into your site using tools like buyers guides and FAQs or offers and other calls to action.
Visitors making more specific searches should be sent to relevant category or sub-category pages.
Product specific searches should of course be sent to the product page. Minimising the number of clicks that the visitor needs to make before buying will have a dramatic impact on search engine visitor conversion rates.
Although all of this sounds obvious, I constantly lose count of sites that try to optimise their homepage for as many phrases as possible when there are far more suitable landing locations on internal pages.
Please excuse the following rant but I’m increasingly frustrated, bored, let down, despairing, incredulous that there are still “graphic designers” out there who have no concept of how to design for the web, but who insist on designing websites for their clients
It’s fine if they stick to Quark and what they are good at, and all credit to them, but for some reason they think they have carte blanche to roam into areas which are not their concern.
For example, let’s say that you wanted to design a new boat. Who would you go to first? Would you go to a designer of aeroplanes? No, you would seek out people who have experience in boat design, because what you want is a boat, and you need someone who understands nautical things like waves, water, ballast, the pros and cons of different hull shapes, propellars, and the like. Would you really want to go to sea in a craft designed by a designer of aeroplanes? I think not.
Do you work for a web design agency? Does this happen to you that clients get their so called “brand” guardian to do the web design or the guy who did their brochure and aks you to implement it as a web site.
And is it just us or do you receive a complete load of tosh that disobeys practically every law of web accessibility, search engine friendliness, usability, extensibility and future proofing, font usage and image sizing hell?
What planet to these people live on? Why don’t they put up their hands to their clients and say we can give guidance on the design but we are graphic designers for print and you need a professional web designer who can take into account the requirements of the web. Because they work in the web every day they will know what is the right way and what is the wrong way to do things. Do web designers try to do design brochures?
I won’t get started on programmers who think that they are web designers as I’m far too angry. Just for the record, in case you are a print designer and you are still wondering where you went wrong here are few tips:
- Decide the width of your design and what happens to the site when viewed on different size monitors
- Think about usability and consider tried and tested conventions. No need to think of your own “unique” style of navigation. There’s a reason for some of the conventions.
- Think about search engine friendliness. Not enough space here to explain but be aware that 60-80% of traffic and sales on most e-comms might come from search engines.
- A little flash can be nice, it can look good. A whole site built solely is flash is pointless - just drop it. Nobody is interested in seeing your logo sliding in and out.
- Think what happens in the future. What happens if more menu items, or product lines are added.
- Think about who will administer the site and how many image sizes you really need. It’s a pain creating 4 different size images for each new product, (although yes there are ways round this programmatically).
- Splash pages - why? What are they there for? Why do you feel the need to make people click an extra time to get to where they are going?
- Consider the online audience - they do not know your company probably so help them help you by giving as much information about yourself and don’t try to be so cool that they have to be Sherlock Holmes to find out what you do.
Thanks for reading, I feel better now
Spending time looking critically at websites day in and day out, you begin to notice common themes emerging in terms of the mistakes that are made by site owners and we developers. Here are a few of the most common, and what you can do to avoid them.
Geolocation errors
Many people don’t realise that to target UK customers, then Google must recognise that your website is based in the UK. If you’re using a .co.uk domain then you’re almost certainly fine. If you’re using a generic domain such as a .com or .net then you must ensure that your hosting is UK based rather than in the US or Germany as happens often.
Additional Domains
Additional domains don’t mean additional traffic. Having 10 domains doesn’t mean you get 10 times the visitors or sales as you would expect with one site. In fact by dividing your marketing techniques over 10 sites rather than one, you’re probably diluting your efforts and actually reducing the potential traffic you’re receiving. Ensure any additional domains that you own are ‘301 redirected’ into your main domain to rectify this.
Failing To Optimise Internal pages
If only the homepage of your website is optimised for your keywords then you’ll be missing out on a huge proportion of your potential traffic. Each and every page on the site should be optimised for its own specific keywords.
Poor Navigation
Using search unfriendly technologies such as flash and javascript for your menus and navigation may well mean that search engine don’t even know about the majority of your internal pages. Thankfully this doesn’t happen so much anymore, but it’s always worth checking.
Online business success
Going back to my days in offline marketing, the sales and marketing funnel looks rather like the image on the left.
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