Tag Archives: CRO

Optimizing for (not provided)

November 8, 2011    Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Web Analytics

If you see "https" in your Google url, you are affected by this.

Last month Google made a significant announcement that literally shook the SEO community. To sum up, if a user is logged into Google, their default connection will now be secure. Not a big deal in itself, but search marketers now lose the ability to see which organic keywords brought traffic and led to transactions.

For example:

If someone searched for “web designers, in Charlotte NC” through a secure connection on Google, that traffic would now be lumped in to the (not provided) category.

We know they came from Google. We just don’t know what they typed into Google to get to us. Read More

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The Outdated “Home” Button

October 27, 2011    Design, Internet Marketing, Web Design

Time to abandon the idea of making "Home" primary in your navigation.

When we develop a new website, one of the first steps our account managers take is to develop the site map. The purpose of the site map is to outline the hierarchy of the website pages and how they will relate to each other. Invariably, we have clients who want to put the ‘Home’ button as the first item in their main navigation. Read More

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Making the Complex Simple

October 13, 2011    Internet Marketing, Marketing

There were MP3 players before the iPod but Apple made listening to music simple.

Last week, when Steve Jobs passed away, many of us weighed in on his accomplishments. As a lifetime Mac user (I started with a Mac Classic in 1990), the one characteristic that stood out to me was his innate ability to make complex processes simple. Yes, you pay a premium for Apple products but you know they will work right out of the box with an easy learning curve. Read More

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Increasing Conversions Mixes Art and Science

October 22, 2010    Internet Marketing, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Web Analytics

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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