2010 October

For a time, when it came to internet marketing, many marketers would claim that their only job was to get a website to rank for competitive keywords and increase traffic. “What happens to the traffic”, they would claim, “is up to the website designer and manager.” But some search marketers (myself included) have held the belief that our main responsibility to the client is to increase sales, not just traffic. We call this practice conversion rate optimization or CRO and it is becoming more mainstream.

A flood of traffic does not always mean greener pastures. You have to convert that traffic into sales.

For me, I’ve focused on conversions out of necessity. My internet marketing career started over 5 years ago working in house for a large real estate agency. After about a year there, we achieved the top rank for almost every major phrase. Traffic was abundant but the expected increase in sales did not come. It became my job to find out why and thus began my education on conversion rate optimization. Here is what I learned:

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When considering a new website or a website redesign, it is easy to get lured by the glitzy showiness that a Flash-only site can provide. Before you go that route, stop and read why we at Alter Imaging think a Flash-only site is a bad idea.

A Little Background on Flash

Adobe’s Flash is a multimedia platform that allows designers to create interactive and animated web graphics (or even entire pages) for a wide variety of devices and browsers.  Many web designers use Flash because of its “design once, run anywhere” functionality and for the past 15 years (Flash debuted in 1996), this had been true.

Welcome to the new landscape….where Wired Magazine [October 2010] boldly proclaims “the Web is dead.” While their headlines was clearly hyperbolic and intended to sell issues, it does illustrate an important change in internet use:

More and more people are accessing internet content outside of the traditional desktop/laptop browser. Hand-held (iPhone, iPad, iPod) and set-top devices (iTV) are the new way we access content.
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Traditionally, a Yellow Pages print ad was a no-brainer; if you had a local company, part of your advertising budget was set aside to purchase an ad in the phone book. If you were aggressive, you would purchase a half-page ad or larger. On average, a half-page ad costs over $15,000.

These phones went out of style the same time as advertising in the yellow pages.

But in 2008, a major shift happened. According to ComScore, this was the year that Internet search surpassed the yellow pages in terms of consumer usage. In 2008, 31% of all local search enquiries for a commercial business originated online.

If you run a business, this is not news. You’ve probably reduced your print budget to focus on more modern forms of advertising, like Internet marketing. You are not alone. Wells Fargo/Wachovia forecasts almost a 40% drop in print and online spending on yellow pages over the next 4 years.

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