Marketing on Internet Road 

In the previous posts we discussed two of the important aspects of a website’s Conversion Architecture: the website’s USP and the importance of profiling your customers online. This post will present a content formula to design the content of  the internal pages of the site.

If you have dealt with the pillars of Conversion Architecture correctly, you should get a stream of segmented visitors going to your internal pages along with visitors that landed directly on those (designed for conversion) internal pages of your website. All of this makes the internal pages very important, so special attention is needed to their content.

Internal Pages Content Stats and What They Mean

Studies show that the average time someone spends on an internal page is 45 seconds.
Is 45 seconds enough time to read a full page of text…? Well, obviously the answer is “No”. This means that your text should be structured in a way that it could be scanned by the reader, highlighting the more important words and broken down to paragraphs and bullets.

Taking into account that the average number of (mouse) scrolls on an internal page is 1.3, it is important to make sure that the most important content and the important calls to action are located at the top of the page (“above the fold”).

Match Content to your Target Audience

Take this recommendation as a baseline: text should be written at a grade level of 13 years old or to target audience.

A bit confusing? Not really: With the lack of a specific target audience – write your content to match a 13 years old visitor. However, your content should be written to your target audience and you may write differently for each profile.  If you profile your customers by their age you would speak very differently to a 25 year old then you would a 75 year old.  If you profile them by company size you will speak differently to a small business owner then a large corporation. 

Learn from the successful sales people: they know how to speak directly to their audience and adapt the pitch to the person or people in front of them.

The words you use, the benefits you have, the reasoning you use should fit the person who is reading it.
Think of your page content as your sales person and try achieving the same level of communication. If you are facing problems doing that, try thinking what a prospect would need to see/read/hear before making a decision. Basically – how a sales call would go. This is typically the same information that could go on the website. If it is built this way, conversions will increase.
 

The Internal Page Content Formula

So, here is the basic formula that you should follow when writing content for your interior pages:

First you want to show that you understand their problem or need;
Then you want to focus on the benefits of fixing that problem;
Only then present the features.  

With anything that you write, make sure to be using informative headlines and make the text easy to scan as most people do not read every single word on a web page.


To summarize, design your website with conversion architecture in mind. Match the content to your target audience, make it “scannable”, pay attention to your headlines and structure the content so it leads from understanding the need to the benefits of a solution and only then to the features.

Most websites are built from the perspective of the business owner or web developer.  This means that even if it’s done right it will only sell to one type of person.  Take into account the fact that your prospects are different. Using Conversion Architecture helps to set a path to customer profiling and getting the different prospects to find what it is they are looking for, resulting in more business to the website owner.

When customers come to your website they are looking for a specific piece of information or they have a specific problem.  If you are able to address that specific problem for them, and then help them solve it, you will get the business. 

All of your prospects are potential customers, but...:

• They want different things
• They have different problems and/or needs
• They are at different points within their buying cycle
• They will make the buying decision in a different way

it is important to understand this concept: every single prospect is different and should be treated differently. 




While each individual is unique, it is not possible to directly appeal exactly to that unique person, so we group customers into categories.  Each category represents a profile of who a typical customer from that category is, and what they are looking for.  Every business should have at least 2-3 categories, but should try to have no more then 12. 

Beware of the average website visitor! Referring to all of your visitors (prospects) as the same will probably cost you in losing conversions you could have had.

Your Home Page as the Tool for Customer Profiling
The main purpose of a home page is to identify (profile) and categorize your prospects and funnel them through the section of the website that has the information they are looking for.

You start with a large pool of prospects who enter the home page.  Then you allow them to qualify who they are and they choose which path they would like to go down.

With the importance of search engines and the fact that many of your visitors (if not most of them) will get directly to your internal pages, the home page had become less important page. However, if you got traffic to your home page (either directly or from someone that landed on an internal page and wants to check the home page), use it correctly to reflect the answers of your customers profiles so they can easily find what they are looking for and continue their visit in the website's most suitable page or section for them.


Ways to Profile Your Customers

• Some of the ways to profile your customers will include:
• The problem they are having
• The solution they desire
• The products/services you offer
• Geographically
• Demographically
• Who they are/how do they see themselves
• Where are they in their buying cycle

You can profile your customers by more then one of these but you should avoid having too many profiles on your home page as this will only confuse the customers.  Probably the best way to profile your customers is by the problem they are having because most people will be able to identify with their problems. 

The key is to get the person to say "that’s me".

It is also possible to profile them and then profile them again on the next page to make the information more specific.  An example of this would be what country are you from, then on the second page what service are you interested in. 


In conclusion, use customer profiling as part of the conversion architecture in your website design. Start with identifying your customers' needs, create categories and present them with the correct options that will drive them to the pages that are most relevant for them, aiming at getting conversions.

A USP ("Unique Selling Proposition") is a reason why a customer would do business with you.  Most sales people know that if they do not get the USP across to the customer, the customer probably won’t buy.  Once they do manage to have the customer understand what makes them different, the path to the purchase is by far easier. If sales people know that it is so important in order to get the sale, then why would you not have your USP on your website?

When dealing with "Conversion Architecture" and aiming to design the website in the best way to convert the visitors into customers, the USP is one of the main cornerstones that should be considered and outlined properly.

On a website the USP is even more important as it is harder to differentiate between competitors. 
When a customer or a prospect visits your website, he/she is deciding whether or not to do business with you.  It is therefore important to display your unique selling proposition so that it is visible upon entering your website.
 
Your USP will allow your customers to really understand why they should be doing business with you and not with your competition. Furthermore, if you are engaged in Search Engine Marketing strategies such as Pay-per-Click, you are probably stating a USP on your ads (if not - you should). Clearly stating the USP on your landing page and your site in general will help your prospects to "follow the scent" of the ad, get more assurance on your offering and better tendency to do business with you.

There are three critical factors to a USP:

• The unique selling proposition is true and you actually can deliver on what you promise.
• The unique selling proposition separates you from your competitors as they do not offer this feature, or do not do it as well as you do.
• The unique selling proposition is valued by the customer as something they want or need.  

You should probably have more then one unique selling proposition but try to limit the number that you display on the home page of your website to the most important ones.  You can present the others as sort of supporting arguments to the main USP as well as in different pages of the site.

To sum up, a USP is what make you different from your competitors. Because it’s so important in sales and therefore also a websites success, make sure to prominently present it correctly on your website.

WSI E-Services conducted a while ago a workshop on Conversion Architecture, where the importance of the USP was outlined as one on the main elements. You can find the details and the workshop's presentation on our page for Conversion Architecture Workshop.

Keywords research is a fundamental and highly important factor for any Internet Marketing and/or Search Engine Marketing activity; no news here. A new research by MarketingSherpa shows that the traditional ways of doing keywords research are not necessarily the most effective  nor commonly used ones.

Keywords research is not anymore about using a keyword suggestion tool like the one from Google, the one from WordTracker or others. Those are still very valuable but limited and are not considered as the most effective tactic. It's a good starting point for any campaign and surely for a new website, but it only a starting point and limited in its results.



The results of the research MarketingSherpa conducted shows that companies are using other means and tactics for getting effective results for their keywords research.

The most used tactics reported in the research is analysis of the Web Analytics data. This makes a lot of sense: since Google Analytics is free, there is no barrier to use it on any website and the profficiency of using the data collected by Google Analytics gets better all the time. Regardless of the tool, analyzing the keywords used by your visitors to find your site is a priceless tactics and actually shows any website owner if his/her SEO and PPC efforts are on the right track as well as gives new ideas for keywords that are a great opportunity to optimize the site's pages for.
As the research shows, a bit of further analysis on those keywords - which of the keywords convert better and which of them are being used more frequently - will take the keywords research to the next level. There is no surprise those are reported to be the most effective tactics, regardless of the size of the company.

The ease of using web analytics tools such as Google Analytics to track and analyze the search phrases visitors are using on the site's internal search makes it another great way to learn on the website's keywords to get optimized. What is more simpler than that: you collect data on what visitors are searching to get to your website as well as what they are searching when on your website.

But your site and company don't operate in a silo: how about your competition? More and more website owner realize that just like competitive analysis served them in traditional marketing, it is greatly effective online. What's better than to see which keywords your competitors are competing for with their SEO efforts and with they Pay-per-Click campaigns?

The new entrant in the list of most effective keywords research tactics is "social semantic mining". Using social media by monitoring the major social networks and bookmarking site (e.g.: delicious, StumbleUpon, etc') enable analysis of new words in your market and niche. If your target audience is using those keywords to communicate and engage in the social networks, what is better than to optimize your website (and your social media presence) for those keywords?

A word about the budgets: for some, the amounts that are presented in the image above might look irrelevant. They shouldn't: Most of the tactics reported for the keywords research don't cost or don't cost much (Google Analytics is free) and there is barrier to use those tactics. It is simply a good practice to see what the bigger spenders are doing and use the same tactics even if your budget is significantly less.

As a conclusion: there are multiple ways available to perform keywords research, beyond the simply straight-forward ones. Use a combination of the keywords research tools with your Analytics data, competitive analysis and Social Media monitoring to get to those best keywords you are looking for.


The full article on the effective keywords research tactics from MarketingSherpa could be found at: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.html?id=31582

A new research report from Hubspot proves what we knew: companies that runs a website with more pages indexed on Google get more leads!

In its report from March 2010 (a free download of the full report is available here), Hubspot analyzed the Internet Marketing activities and results of 1400 companies. The findings match the increase investments in Search Engine Marketing activities and shows clearly that employing the best practices of online marketing result in more leads, hence more business:

The study found out a correlation between the size of the website in terms of number of pages indexed by Google and the amount of leads the website owner gets per week. An increase of 50-100 indexed pages means a growth in double-figures in the amount of leads received, until a level of 311 and more indexed pages.
An increase of almost 240% was revealed for increasing the number of indexed pages from 176-310 to 311+ (from 22 leads per week to 74!).

Further analysis continued to present the beauty of the internet: you don't need to be a big company with hundreds or employees to act like one and be really big (and successful) online:
The group with 176-311 indexed pages contained many small customers (1-10 employees), and those were actually the biggest group in this category. In the top category (311+ indexed pages), 57% were companies with 1 to 50 employees.

The conclusions of those findings are simple and straigt-forward:
1. Size does matter: Since Google is looking for quality content, you will be rewarded nicely for posting more of this online.
2. Blogging is a must: The best way to have more pages indexed by the search engines is to have a blog and to engage in posting good content on a regular basis. This will increase constantly the amount of pages your site has on Google index and will generate more results to your bottom line.
3. Invest in Search Engine Optimization: Following Google recommendations for on-page and off-page SEO practices on each of your pages will increase even further your situation, improve your rankings and other online factors and will bring you more leads.