Subdomain or Subdirectory- Which Ones for You?

One question many site owners make as their website grows- “should I use a subdomain or a subdirectory to place my blog in?”.

This common question isn’t limited to just blogs– news sections, articles, careers sections… any grouping of content will at some point cause the question.

For those who don’t know- ‘news.google.co.uk’ is an example of a subdomain, where “news” is the subdomain of “google.co.uk”.

A subdirectory is a folder within a domain- e.g.- ‘google.com/analytics/’ where “analytics” is a subdirectory (or folder) within “google.com”.

While these may appear relatively similar, subdomains and subdirectories have different uses for a site, as well as different effects in a pages ability to rank in search engines.

Generally, search engines will allow pages within subdirectories to rank easier in comparison to pages within a subdomain. This reason being subdirectories inherit more authority from the domain name, whereas pages within subdomains inherit less authority from the domain (thus being treated similar to an external domain, although still receiving some of the authority from the main domain.)

So if subdirectories inherit more authority from a domain, why do companies choose to use subdomains?

Subdomains are used to segment a large amount of content on a site by a specific topic. If the number of pages are relatively high for a section (e.g. hundreds of pages), it may be logically better to place these pages within a subdomain rather than a subdirectory.

Otherwise, we recommend keeping within the content within the domain (i.e. using subdirectories)- this will make it easier for pages to rank better in search results as these pages inherit more authority from the main domain.

Multiple Domain Names- More Harm than Good?

One common misconception many site owners make is the assumption that:

more websites = more traffic = more sales.

Logically, this may seem like a good idea- after all, two hands are better than one, five are better than two, right?

When it comes to domain names and search engine optimisation- this couldn’t be further from the truth!

Sadly, many site owners with limited SEO knowledge make this assumption- either, pointing many other domains to their existing site or copying their existing site and hosting it separately with other domain names. Both methods don’t work, and are likely to get your existing site penalised, causing less traffic and less sales. Why?

Search engines use links to crawl pages within and outside of a site. If links point to a page on a domain name, search engine robots will crawl that page. However, having multiple domains pointing to a site allows search engines multiple entrances to the same content, effectively presenting the same page multiple times.

E.g. if www.mysite1.com points to the same server directory as www.mysite2.com, search engines can see the same single page through more than one source- and if not correctly managed (using 301 redirects) duplicate content problems will occur which will result in the sites receiving a decrease in rankings and potentially a ban from search engines altogether.

In the second instance, by hosting the same content on multiple sites the duplicate content issue is also present, resulting in a drop and a possible ban for all duplicate sites (including the original site) in extreme circumstances and probable indexing issues.

How Can Multiple Domains Provide Any Value?

Having multiple domains can provide your site with additional value if managed correctly. For branding purposes, companies may purchase premium domain names which can potentially provide additional direct traffic from searchers typing in the URL directly.

For example, searchers for “cables” may directly type into their address bar “cables.com”, providing this site with additional direct traffic.

Other large corporations buy the localised versions of their domain name, partly to protect their brand and largely to help with usability.

For example, hp.co.uk provides the UK index page for HP, while HP also own hp.com, and hp.com.au, to name a few.

How is it then that large companies are able to use multiple domains and not get penalised in search engines? The answer is, these domains are managed correctly and redirect these domains to the appropriate pages on the server. By using a ‘301 Permanently moved’ redirect, these domains point to a single page on the server, therefore minimising duplicate content issues.

i.e. when someone types in hp.co.uk, a request is made to the HP server, where the server then identifies this request and directs the visitor to the UK main page on the universal site, therefore not duplicating the content on the page as search engines see the same file on the same server, be it through hp.co.uk or through http://welcome.hp.com/country/uk/en/welcome.html

Should You Consider Using Multiple Domains?

If you are a large corporation and if this will help the usability of your site then consideration of multiple domains should be made. However, if your brand is not internationally known and if there is no main benefit and no potential direct traffic, we strongly advise against it. Remember- very few people are going to directly type in ‘this-is-my-nice-branded-domain.com’ or ‘thisismynicebrandeddomain.com’- domains such as this example will bring little (if any) direct traffic from the domain name, and whilst they may look good for additional branding, they provide no real support to your current sites domain.

Interflora Suing M&S and Flowers Direct over AdWords

After reading some interesting posts over at Holistic Search and Brand Republic, one of the largest florist chains worldwide is suing Marks & Spencers and Flowers Direct for using the Interflora brand name to trigger AdWords ads for their competitors.

Google updated their policy on brand name keywords and trademark terms that trigger competitor’s adverts to display back in May. Previously, competitors could not bid on other brand names to display their ads, but since Google updated their policies on brand name keywords and trademarks, competitors in various industries have been using competition brand names to trigger their adverts.
It has been reported keywords include “Interflora”, “Intaflora” and “Inter-flora” which have been used to trigger the display of competitors adverts.

Interflora’s argument is that the actions of Marks & Spencers and Flowers Direct are a breach of trademark law, as marketing director Michael Barringer stated:

“The Interflora brand is extremely valuable and we will not tolerate competitors taking advantage of it and infringing our right.”

However, both M&S and Flowers Direct are abiding by the Google Terms of Service- no mention of the band is made within the advert itself and is now somewhat of a common practice across industries, as a spokeswoman for Marks & Spencers was quoted saying they are “extremely surprised by Interflora’s course of action” adding it was industry-wide practice and not unlawful.

Interestingly, there has been no mention of Interflora or any other company suing Google over the use of trademark terms in AdWords for allowing this to happen.

This is not the first report of companies suing over the use of their trademark terms on Google AdWords either, as Dominic Farnsworth (a partner at Lewis Silkin) commented:

“There are a lot of legal letters flying around in the background at the moment and many disputes are being resolved without the need for legal proceedings”.

This poses an interesting situation for advertisers and search agencies- how long is it before competitors terms cause a lawsuit against your company or client, or how many more examples are needed before Google considers refining their policies? As Google have recently allowed the advertising of gambling and alcohol related sites, it appears they are expanding their policies to get even more from their advertising revenue—could this be Google’s solution to the current economic downturn? Let us know your comments.

Your Product Pages- How Copying The Manufacturers Description Harms a Site

If you own or operate an e-commerce website, chances are your competition may supply the same products you do. While competition is great, there are certain considerations you should make regarding the content on your product pages to beat your competitors.

Every product page should have great descriptions of the product, as well as inviting and well-presented professional photography to entice and attract searchers into making a purchase. However, one common mistake many e-commerce sites make is copying the descriptions written by the manufacturer.

Lets take the Apple iPhone product page as an example:

From the official product page, searching for the first sentence “With its beautiful 3.5-inch widescreen display and Multi-Touch controls, iPhone is also one amazing iPod” in Google returns 13,500 pages!

This shows there are hundreds of pages using the default description as the description on their pages- causing lots of duplicate content in Google’s index.

Why is This a Problem for You?

Duplicate content is a large problem search engines face. Search engines do not want to display pages in their results which contain the same content as another, as this can affect their credibility in delivering the closest possible results to which the searcher is looking for.

In addition, search engines do not want to waste their time indexing content which is provided on another site, so may skip a duplicated page, and are likely to skip an entire site if too many duplications are found. This not only has an effect on the new product page but also has a knock-on effect to other pages already indexed- penalising your site.

And this example is just for one product- supposing you sold other Apple products and copied the description from the manufacturers product pages? This means a large amount of the text on your product pages is copied.

This causes a problem for your site in search engines, as duplicate content is a major problem which search engines can and will penalise your site for!

So how can you avoid this problem? The ideal solution is to not copy the manufacturers description to begin with. Instead, creating your own product descriptions is far better- not only can you tailor it more specifically to your customers needs and desires (thus getting you a better conversion rate), but this also gives search engines more unique content to crawl when indexing your page.

If however it is essential to copy the product description from the manufacturers site, ensure you add additional unique content to the page- and don’t forget to reference and link to the manufacturers page.

By applying this small change, search engines are less likely to penalise your site for duplicate content, giving you a better chance of outranking your competitors, along with other on-page and off-page optimisation techniques!

Footer links vs Breadcrumb Navigation

I read an interesting post over at SEOmoz regarding footer link optimisation last week, and after stewing it over for a few days (and finally getting the time to) I’ve decided to share my thoughts on footer link navigation, and more importantly- how you can improve the internal link structure of your site (and hopefully see the results in search engines!)

For those who don’t know, footer links are a common method for linking pages to other pages within a site. Placed at the bottom of the page, footer links link to some of the popular pages of a site- like this fine example from ebay-

The advantage is search engines will potentially crawl these links more often as they will come across them more often, thereby noticing any changes made to these pages and follow the links on these category pages to pages deeper within the site.

This in principal is a great idea- take a category page for example, which lists all of the products within that category. If you add a product to that category and place a link to the product on the category page, if that category page is linked from other pages in the footer links, chances are search engines will crawl the category page and follow the link to the new product page (in principal anyway).

The problem is search engines do not have as high a regard for footer links (or any links towards the bottom of the page) as they do to links towards the top of the page. Because of this, footer links are no longer as effective as they once were (but this doesn’t mean they are redundant, yet).

My thoughts are how long is it before footer links become worthless? In my opinion, footer links do little for visitor navigation anyway- when was the last time you scrolled to the bottom of the page to find out where in the site you are, or to find other pages which might be of interest?

My take on this is this- in time, footer navigation will have little effect to the internal link structure of a website in the eyes of search engines. Enter breadcrumb navigation!

For those who have no idea what it is, breadcrumb navigation is a form of navigation placed towards the top of a website (either in a vertical or horizontal format) which uses hyperlinks to show the depth of the current page within the site, allowing easier navigation to previous (higher level) pages. Here’s a great example from The Financial Times.

Users and search engines can easily identify related pages and can work backwards to higher level sub-category and category pages.

The beauty of breadcrumb navigation over footer links for SEO purposes is breadcrumb navigation is at the top of the page, therefore having a higher regard than footer links in the eyes of the search engines, as well as being useful for site usability (a visitor is more likely to click a breadcrumb link than scrolling to the bottom of the page and clicking a footer link).

Breadcrumb navigation is also better for larger sites with hundreds of pages, as dynamically generating breadcrumb links is relatively easy to achieve (remember to avoid doing this in JavaScript- search engines have difficulty in indexing JavaScript). By using keyword rich anchor text for breadcrumb links, search engines will be able to get a better understanding of the pages content, as well as being able to traverse links up and down the site, improving the accessibility for search engine spiders.

I’m not suggesting everyone rushes out and does away with footer links- footer links are still an effective method of internal linking. However I am suggesting you look into implementing breadcrumb navigation in your site if you haven’t already done so, especially dynamic sites with 100+ pages. Having the two is not likely to hurt your rankings (although this is dependent on the number of links already on the page) and you are likely to find an improvement in the number of indexed pages over time by implementing breadcrumb navigation.

The Online Spend Disconnect - PPC And SEO

An interesting post over at SEOMoz highlights the spending disconnect that exists in the way that many companies allocate their online marketing spend.

Not surprisingly, search advertising should continue to be the largest category, growing from $9.1 billion in 2007 to $20.9 billion in 2013.
- Source: C|Net News, June 30, 2008

While the current spend on natural SEO?

SEO: $1.3 billion (11%)
- Source: SEMPO data via Massimo Burgio, SMX Madrid 2008

So, out of a total of around $10.4 billion spent on search, only $1.3 billion, or 12.5% is spent on natural search placement. Therefore you would expect the potential traffic from natural search to be the smaller piece of the pie, right?

Wrong.

Looking at the Google heat map we can see that it’s the natural results that catch the attention of users viewing the page.

This superior visibility is matched by the click through rate data,

The natural results in Google drive more than 70% of search traffic, though only account for 12.5% of online spend.

Why is this? Take your pick from any one or more of the following,

• PPC is an easier concept for people to understand, there is a general lack of education and understanding of the SEO process.
• PPC is quicker (almost instant) to get results and you only pay for traffic that you actually receive. There is a higher perception of accountability and control.
• Traditional marketers pay far less attention to SEO, column inches in the business press given over to SEO are far less than PPC. Again this may well be due to a lack of SEO understanding amongst journalists.
• There is a lack of trust in a segmented and unregulated SEO marketplace. A basic lack of understanding handicaps buyers and can lead to acceptance of poor advice and wrong buying decisions.

Link Building- What’s the Point?

All website owners and business owners want their websites to succeed online. Whether it’s an ecommerce site, company site, forum or any other type of website, you want your site to be seen by others, and you want to be seen as an authority within your particular industry.

If you take your website seriously, you’d hire a professional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) company who dedicate their time to improving the visibility of your website, and all good reputable SEO companies will provide link building within their package… (and if they don’t then I’d stay well away!)

BUT… what exactly is link building- What’s the point?

First we need to understand what a ‘link’ is. Short for hyperlink, a link is navigation to another web page- this can be on the same site or a completely different website. Search engines ‘crawl’ the web based on these links, and more importantly, links from other websites are considered votes or recommendations. The more links your website has from greater authority websites, the more ‘votes’ have been assigned to that page, which search engines take into consideration when ranking your website in their search results.

A web page can have two types of links- inbound and outbound links, inbound being links coming to your page from other websites, outbound going to another webpage on a different website.
Reciprocal links are links from different websites that exchange links for the purposes of creating more inbound links. Search engines can see that the two (or more) websites have linked to each other and give less weight to these links in comparison to one way links.

Inbound links are the focus of a link building campaign, and there are several ways of achieving inbound links. There are also several other factors to consider in inbound link building. For example:

credit

•    The topic of the webpage linking to you- If a site linking to you is within the same topic as your site and the page being linked to, the link will have more weight than from a page from an unrelated topic. E.g. ‘dog grooming’ page linking to ‘dog brushes’ on a different site will have a greater weight than a link from a ‘real estate’ page to ‘dog brushes’.

•    The authority of the site linking to you- The authority of the linking website is also important- a link from CNN.com to your website will be far more important than a link from AdamsHomeMadeNews.com as CNN have a higher authority.

•    The location of the link on the page- The location of the link- search engine robots read the code on a webpage from top to bottom. Generally links at the bottom of the html code have less weight than a link in the middle of an article.

•    The text used within the link- (known as ‘anchor text’) The text used in an inbound link- the anchor text helps inform the search engines what the page is about as it crawls your page. So if your webpage is about dog grooming brushes and the anchor text is ‘dog grooming brushes’, this link will have a greater weight than the same link but with less relevant anchor text such as ‘dog stuff’.

•    The text on the page linking to you- (including the text surrounding the link) The text on the page and around the link also helps in the weighting of an inbound link. The text on the page and surrounding the link (i.e. within the same paragraph) should contain the keywords to the pages topic, and if the topic is closely related to yours (as it should be), the search engines can identify this is relevant to your page, thereby increasing the weighting of the link.

… as well as several other factors.

So now you have an idea of some of the factors used in link building, how can this help your business? Well firstly, if you are performing your own link building of your site, taking these considerations onboard can greatly increase the effectiveness of the inbound links you get.

If you’re already hiring a company to do this for you, you can evaluate their efficiency. If you’re currently looking to hire a company to do this, you can find out how much they really know about the topic.
You can also assess the status of your current inbound links. You may find that potential changes could increase the visibility of your website in search results (inbound link statistics are taken into consideration when search engines rank your website in their results), you may also find that changes may need to be made to improve the navigation to your website for human visitors also.

You may want to suggest to other website owners within your industry to link to you (legitimately)- by providing your own linking html code (which of course takes onboard the above considerations), website owners may be more likely to link to you if you’ve made it easier for them by giving them the code to do so.

I believe it is important for any website owner, manager and webmaster for any business to have an understanding of link building, and how it affects your website. For human navigation, inbound links can bring visitors who are already targeted (may have read a review and now want to buy from your online shop, for example) which can maximise the conversion of your website. For search engine rankings, effective link building can have a massive impact in the ranking of your website in the results, thereby having an impact on the number of potential leads coming to your website. It’s a fact- good link building campaigns can make your website stand out from the crowd, and can make your company an industry leader—if done correctly.

New E-commerce launch - www.Yapp.co.uk

We took a dogs dinner of an old website and transformed it into a work of art that converts users to buyers. As always the project was delivered on time and on budget.

Design

Yapp Wine Merchants website now has a fresh, modern design, packed with tools to help you find the wine you need.  It is unfrightening and designed to cater to Yapps broad user base.  We’ve made searching for wine fun and easy whilst retaining Yapp’s connoiseur edge.

Usability
Everyone has their own ways of looking for wine so we implemented 4 ways to navigate the site:

• The Easy Wine selector uses dynamic searching
  Watch your search results change dynamically with easy to use search sliders. Have a play.  The great advantage of this is that it all happens on one page with no hopping backwards and forwards to and from search results.
• The Food and Wine selector allows you to search for wine by Food Type by clicking on images of different food types.  This is not rocket science but is dis-armingly useful.
• Advanced Search - for those who really know what they are after.
  Search by Regional maps
• “You recently looked at”
  Isn’t it annoying when you look at lots of different items and then have to re-find them by re-doing the searches.  Well we eliminated this problem with the “You recently looked at section” so you dont have to re-do previous searches.
• Tell a friend / Bookmark tools
  Not strictly a navigation tool but so simple and effective.  How else can you let your loved one know what you want for Christmas?  Simply post your choices to your Facebook page and invite others to have a look.

Search engine friendly

As always with Datadial, the site is built to be search engine friendly
All pages from the old site have been redirected to the relevant new pages.
The site uses Friendly URLs so http://www.yapp.co.uk/Wine-List/Rhone-South/Chateauneuf-du-Pape/ instead of
http://www.yapp.co.uk/?catid=6/?type=3/desc?=12/

Technology

Integrated stock control - the site is integrated to draw stock levels from Sage accounts.
The site is fully content managed, giving Yapp control over all aspects of the site including creating offers, mixed case offers and product information.
The site is also integrated with Datadial’s email marketing system.

SMX London - 25 Killer Tips, Tools And Strategies

Having just got back from SMX London I thought that rather than be one of 50 recap blog posts I thought I would try to do something a little different.

Sitting though about 15 hours of presentations and Q&A over the past couple of days was no mean feat. I’ve got a lot of sympathy for people with a short attention span!

Taking this sentiment on board I have put together a list of the best hints, tips, tools and strategies from the past couple of days, not just from the speakers themselves, but also picked up from around the conference halls and bars.

1. Download the Microsoft AdCenter Excel plugin for keyword research. It’s incredibly versatile, users can easily manipulate long keyword lists and data. It even goes as far as adding extra data sets into the mix by offering historical data and demographic breakdowns. Unfortunately, since the is currently still in beta UK specific data hasn’t yet been made available.
2. In ushering in a new era of transparency MSN is giving users an unprecedented amount of access to actionable data though the impressive AdCenter labs, some of the best tools include,
   - Detecting commercial intention based on a URL or keyword phrase.
   - Keyword group detection tool for detecting related keywords.
   - Search funnels, for visualising search sequences and search funnels.
   - Ad text writer, for the lazy PPC marketer! Enter a page URL and it will spit out a list of ad text.
3. MSNs webmaster centre is now displaying lists of pages your pages that are penalised, contain malware or link to pages that contain malware.
4. “More than 60% of companies are planning to increase their PPC or SEO budgets in 2009″ Linus Gregoriadis. Recession? What recession?
5. Keyword phrase composition - consider all of the elements that may make up your users potential keyword phrases.
   For example - Use (For school) + Action (Buy) + Price (Cheap) + Attribute (Black) + Brand (Sony) + Location (UK) + Quality (New) + Your Keyword.
   Consider the alternatives for each of these and build your keyword lists accordingly.
6. There is a real lack of awareness of new UK laws (enforced by Trading Standards and The Office Of Fair Trading) that now make it illegal to offer fake editorial content, without first making this fact clear to the reader. This will also affect fake internet reviews, promotional blog posts and comments that don’t offer disclosure of payment. - Judith Lewis
7. Although there is/was some obvious disagreement, the consensus is that owning the local TLD is by far the easiest way of of ensuring rankings in the correct local search engines. Other factors include local hosting, links, translation and address data in both the WhoIs and on the pages themselves.
8. The Redfly Google Global Firefox extension is perfect for searching local versions of Google quickly.
9. Linkbait - It is now vital to keep it on topic/niche. Wandering off topic may make things easier, but it’s probably tempting fate. Jane @ SEOMoz
10. Facebook fan pages are live, indexed and the links are non-nofollow.
11. The Forrester Groundwell tool is great for understanding the likely social media engagement level of your target market demographic.
12. Social media campaigns must should be carefully planned - be sure that you know who your audience are, which social media channels they’re likely to use, the creative message that you want to get across and your delivery strategy - Ciaran Norris
13. Vanessa Fox - Duplicate content across local TLD properties “should” be properly dealt with by Google, the correct verion “should” be delivered in the equivalent local version of Google. - Notice emphasis Again, I would say to be sure to have key content rewritten.
14. Use psychological hooks in your linkbait. Take your core niche and add in a social media angle - environment, politcal, geeky etc. Be aware of the linking demographic, they’re typically male, intelligent and tech savvy. Linkbait isn’t linkbait if it doesn’t elicit links! - Lyndon Antcliff, Cornwall SEO
15. Use search operators to find expired pages such as keyword+”this page is no longer available” either, contact the page owners for them to add a link to content on your site, or, contact the sites linking to the expired page asking them to link to your content instead. Tom @ Distilled
16. Keep an eye on competitor business closures or bankruptcy, this gives an opportunity to either buy they domain, or contact sites linking to them to link to your site instead. Wiep Knoll
17. Use forums and similar Web 1.0 communities for user generated linkbait
18. Always try to use your keywords in the article title of linkbait pieces - it really helps getting your keyword phrases in links.
19. Try launching linkbait on forums before onto social sites. In this way you can test it’s effectiveness, get feedback, and frequently pickup better quality content.
20. Avoid foreign links from foreign sites, in large quantities these can be an obvious flag for closer inspection. Jay @ LinkFish Media
21. Some “killer” tools worth taking a look at - Linkscape, Majestic SEO, TubeMogul, Optilink
22. Buying websites for SEO can provide a competitive advantage in terms of links, or 301 redirecting the site to pass domain trust/authority and the backlink profile. Use these tactics sparingly though, too many sites being redirected can lead to a search engine penalty. Concentrate on buying traffic and relevance over PR and backlinks.
23. Web 2.0 linkbuilding! We’re moving away from Web 1.0 methods like exchanges, link pages, paid links and comment spam, and moving towards internal link optimisation, online PR syndication, targeted PR submissions, guest writing, linkbaiting and social media.
24. When buying domains change ownership indicators slowly, things like Whois data, hosting, design and content should be left as long as possible and changes staggered, Google will zero any link and age benefits if there is an obvious change in ownership. DaveN
25. Finding domains for sale - Google searches, forums, DMOZ listings etc Richard Kershaw

Thanks also to Rob, Bruno, Chris, Rob, Rishil and many other people who I had a lot of fun discussing all of this with!

The Search Buying Cycle

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.