Convert Convert Convert

I've said it before and I'll say it again...

I don't care how pretty you think your website is. I don't care how many cool features it has.

What I do care about is how your site performs.

Wayne Gretzky wasn't the best looking hockey player that every lived. But he was the best hockey player that ever lived.

Because he produced. He got the results. End of story.

How does your website convert? 2%? 5%?

If you are converting under 15% visits to leads then one of following may be a concern:

1. Your site sucks. Just being honest. The site is not actively helping to convert. So change it.

2. You are not tracking the data correctly. Are you counting unique phone numbers found only on your site? Your website will produce more phone calls than form submits (and more service related inquires than sales). Are these not leads??? who handles these?

Once you know a true conversion rate, you can do the math down the line to get sales from traffic. You can really dig in and analyze it deeper and you will know just how many follow-up calls you need to make an hour to sell your objective for the month.

You do know your TRUE close rate right?

Give me a shout if you want to dig deeper... and finally have an accurate measure of the ROI of that department... Read more!

Long (Tail) and Short Of It All

Long Tail. What is it?

Essentially, the long tail is the hundreds to thousands of keywords and key phrases that a site is found for, yet rarely noticed or exploited.

The principle of the Long Tail is the opposite of focusing on the top 10-20 keywords for marketing their sites. The "top keyword" concept is reinforced by agencies that contract to gain rankings for 10-20 terms, maybe 30. However, when studying the referrals from the search engines and the traffic they generate, those that focus on the top 10-20 terms may be missing the majority of their market.

People tend to focus on the thousands of visitors that come to the site for the most popular terms. Most site managers are very happy to see the numbers increase for those specific terms, and even happier to see those terms consistently ranking well. Conventional thinking applies the 80-20 rule that the top terms provide 80% of the business, but in evaluating multiple sites, this has proved to be the opposite.

In most cases, the top 10 terms provide a lot of traffic, but not nearly as much as the total terms after the top 10 or 20 most popular. Add up the terms that refer 1-3 visits during the month, and chances are, they will add up to more total visitors than the top terms. On closer examination, most sites will have the majority of their business (sales and leads) generated from these terms that are rarely tracked. This is the heart of the long tail -- the length, or total number of low-number referred terms outnumbers the height, or the total of top 10 terms.

Now you know.... Read more!