How to improve conversion rates – People visit websites to get information or buy a product or service

So you are getting a lot of visitors to your website every month and analyzing your stats you can see that your keywords are working and your bounce rate appears to be low – all good things, but you don’t seem to be getting many of those visitors to contact or call your firm – what is needed here is a better ‘call to action’ to improve the conversion rate of visitors into leads says Peter Bowen of First One On a leading SEO company in the UK.

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Measuring what works is vital to understanding the behavior of the consumer in your location, and yes, consumers in different regions react to different mechanisms – so what works here may not work there.

We often see “read more” on a webpage – referring to additional text about the subject matter being discussed but this doesn’t add any value – a better solution is to word it with a call to action like “click here to start your claim now”. What you are trying to do here is to get the visitor to take the next step toward your final website goal, and by doing this, you improve your overall conversion rate, which in this case is to get someone to register or call you to start a claim.

The eventual aim of the webpage then is to get more interested visitors or qualified leads who will eventually phone or contact you - but it is the visitor who is in control. Peter Bowen, Search Engine Optimisation expert says "if you don’t give your visitors a reason or method to communicate with you, then they won’t", and "they won't come back either".

Using a pro-active mechanism for instance enables you to ask for a name, email address and telephone number from your visitor so that he/she can then get useful information from you in the form of a free report or an answer to a question – by doing this you will accomplish two very important tasks; first, you qualify the visitor as someone who is interested in your services, and second, you get permission to contact him/her again. You need to build into your website a powerful reason for your visitors to give you permission to email or talk to them rather than expect someone to pick up the phone. People visit a website to get information or buy a product or service, so give them the means to get it.

Finally and most important of all is trust. You cannot sell anything if your audience doesn’t trust you. You can help them to trust you by prominently displaying your privacy policy, reference to the satisfied customers that have already bought from you, that you make it very easy to find contact information such as a name and address as well as support via email. You could educate via your website with articles and ‘how to sections’ or newsletters and instill trust over time. In short, your prospect must trust you to part with his or her money.

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Peter Bowen is a seasoned SEO Marketing specialist who has been involved with the internet since 1994 when he won the Entrepreneur of the Year award for developing an online internet shopping website. He has developed software for learning and now concentrates his efforts on helping others to understand and market their products and services through effective search marketing strategies. Search Engine Optimisation expert First One On helps clients through the maze of SEO to get top search engine rankings.

Digital Marketing Seminar Delivers Results

Busines by word of mouth (mouse) in a world where Google, Twitter and Facebook write the rules was presented yesterday 30 November by SEO expert Peter Bowen, Managing Director of First One On and Social Media evangelist Paul Clegg, Executive Director of BNI (Business Networking International).

The weather was not the best and the roads were icy but delegates arrived from far and wide battling through adverse winter driving conditions to attend this morning event. The room quickly filled even before the 9am registration and the prime seats taken.

Paul Clegg presented an in depth look at how social networking is having a profound effect on the business of marketing products and services and how decisions are being made to buy services. He noted in his address the power of Twitter and how Facebook is being used by all types of businesses to reach consumers.

With barely a moment to refill cups at the 5 minute refreshment break, delegates were then treated to an overall presentation by Peter Bowen about how to get a websites' content pages to the top of Google and why most business fails to embrace the basic steps to achieve domination for primary keywords.

Changes to the way Google presents search results was discussed and examples shown for Google Places search - emphasising the need for even greater optimisation of page content to beat out competitors for top placement.

In a followup questionnaire, delegates agreed that further hands-on seminars would be of great value in the future - stay tuned for announcements from the Bowen Clegg team of a followup day long session in February 2011.