Testing Your Business Sales Pages in a Google Experiment
Your business website’s sales pages are probably the most important pages on your entire site. If they’re put together the right way – you’ll have more conversions – more sales. If they’re put together wrong that could mean the demise of your business altogether. Yep, they’re THAT important.
How do you know what the best converting pages are? Do you try one and see if you get some sales, and if so – that’s it – you’ve got a winner?
That shouldn’t be the process – but, often times that IS the process most businesses follow. Most webmasters don’t test multiple iterations of sales pages either. Most don’t recommend that to business owners they’re developing business websites for. Why? Great question… anyway, we’ll show you what to do.
Basically all the answers are at Google. No, I don’t mean at the search engine and you have to go searching for them… Google has an amazing program where they help you test multiple pages of content to see which one converts better. Over time they will tell you, statistically, the chance that one page has to outperform other pages you’re testing against. It will pick a winner for you!
Go to Google Website Optimizer:
www.google.com/websiteoptimizer
There you’ll find everything you need – detailed instructions for how to test multiple formats of sales pages against each other in an “experiment” as they term it.
Basically it goes like this.
1. Create as many sales pages as you’d like to test against each other.
2. Add some code to the pages so Google can control the experiment.
3. Tell Google which page you want to be the “goal” – the page visitors arrive when they go from sales page to finishing the goal. The goal can be anything you like. You can choose the goal to be enrolling in your email list or competing a transaction in Paypal or some other payment system.
4. Add some code to the goal page.
5. Start the experiment.
You’ll need some conversions over time so Google can tell you which page is outperforming the others. Some people run multiple tests – once a winner is found from the first batch they create a second batch with slight variations around the winning pages format from round 1. They test again to find the ultimate winner.
This is free. Top internet marketing experts highly recommend this for sales pages.
Choosing Keywords for Your New Business Website
Choosing keywords to focus your business website on is no easy task.
Why would you want to choose keywords to focus your business website on in the first place?
Google and other search engines take a look at all the words, images, links, page names, all the files on your business website they can ‘see’ and they create a profile of your site according to a very complex algorithm that allows them to compare sites to each other. This helps them pick the right results when someone goes to their search engine search page and searches by using keywords.
Search engines want to report great results that match what the searcher is looking for – so there can be a match between what the searcher wants and what s/he sees in the results.
Google is pretty good at this. Some say, the best. Though there is a lot of up and coming competition – even Microsoft is getting back in the game with it’s new “Bing.com” search engine.
When you choose keywords to focus your business website on – you’re essentially choosing the keywords that you hope searchers will find your business for in the search engines. If you sell stainless steel cups you probably want to be found on the phrase “stainless steel cups”. Makes sense.
However… if you have a business in which the keywords are very competitive… like maybe you sell mobile phones and you have iPhone 3GS phones to sell you might think that “iPhone 3GS” would be the best phrase to be found for. You’re probably right – it’s one of them. However, the competition to get in the top 10 search results is so tight – that if you tried for 2-3 years you probably couldn’t do it. An expert would have a very hard time accomplishing this. The competition on that phrase makes it not worth trying for. It’s not really worth it to focus your entire site on this phrase because the payoff just won’t come.
What should you do in that case? If you’re selling stainless steel cups and you don’t find much competition you can target that phrase. If you’re selling iPhone 3GS phones you’ll need to find some other phrases that aren’t as highly competed for. There are many tools to use to find related phrases and terms. I like to use the Google search term tool. Enter a general term, or the phrase that describes your perfect keyword for your business and search. Keep the synonym box checked so you’ll see more results.
This tool will display a large list of keywords that you might target instead of the heavily competed phrase. If you find some terms to focus your website on that get a good number of searches each month and they’re not heavily competed for you will be much better off than you would targeting the most targeted keywords.
For business websites to be found in the search engines they need to be focused on a small group of words. This tight focus is really rewarded by the search engines as they like to find sites that are expert at specific topics, not sites with a wide focus and no real focus. Keep this in mind as you choose keywords for your business site. Don’t post articles that are off-topic. Don’t add fluff to your business site just because you want to add some extra content. Try to ensure the entire focus of the site is tight and gives a range of information about the most important subjects your business is focused on.
Shortly we’ll be coming out with an elearning course you can sign up for here in which we’ll teach you all about choosing keywords for your new business website and how to go about choosing them and implementing them. Stay tuned…
7 Easy SEO Tips for Your Business Website
SEO, Search Engine Optimization, is something every business owner needs to be aware of and in-tune with to keep their website in the search results for keywords that are important to them.
Here are 7 easy SEO tips to help your business website:
1. Remove links to the designer of your business website from the footer. If you bought your WordPress theme you can remove those links. If you are using a free WordPress theme you can probably remove any hyperlinks to the creator of your theme and yet keep the web address intact. At the very least you can use the “nofollow” attribute in your code like this… <a href=”http://www.webdesigner.com” rel=”nofollow”>Web site designer</a> and that way you won’t be passing any Google juice (page rank) to the designer’s site and you’ll retain it for your own links. Do this for ALL outside links you don’t wish to pass PageRank votes to.
2. Use unique Title tags on each page of your business website. Use just 1 title tag for each page. Make sure the title matches the content of your page very well.
3. Search “http://blogsearch.google.com” using keywords that are important to your business. Leave comments at blogs. Instead of just using your name in the name field use your name, vertical line, and your business like: Dean | StartUSABusiness. Most site owners will allow that. Don’t try to put hyperlinks in your comments – most webmasters see that as spam and just delete your comment.
Leave amazing comments – add something to the article – make people think you really know the subject of the article. What you’re trying to do is help the website owner out enough that they don’t delete your comment, and entice other readers of the article and comments to visit your business site.
4. Include your business address, email, phone, fax, and copyright statement in the footer of every page. Google is one search engine that considers these things important – especially for business websites.
5. Register your domain name for your business website for at least 3 years, or for 10 years if you want to be sure. Some preference is given toward domains that are registered long-term because that implies the site owner is dedicated to this business website with a long-term vision.
6. Ensure your website is not hosted on slow servers. There are a number of places to check the download time of your business website’s pages. A page should never take a second or more to download on a very high speed connection. Keep the size of your pages under 100kb for best results too.
7. From your business home page link to the most important pages of your site. Then, from all pages of your site – ensure that the most important pages are linked to. Google looks at the internal link structure of your site to determine what you think are the most important pages – those that are linked to prominently and most – are the most important pages and stand the best chance of being ranked highly in the search engine results pages.
Of course there are another couple hundred things to make sure you’re doing correctly to keep your site ranking highly in the best search engines. If you’re interested in learning a lot more about it – so you don’t have to pay someone to optimize your website for you – we’ll be offering some elearning courses in the near future to help you out. Stay tuned…
