A little background for you: When you develop as many websites and work on as many SEO or PPC Campaigns each month as we do, you start to document trends. Quickly determining which designs convert, which ones do not — and why that is.

Each and every client has his or her idea about what they believe may best work for their brand or in their niche — and in all fairness, most of our clients have a much better understanding of their own market than we ever will.

What we do have, however, is experience and insight on what an end user responds to.

So here’s a short, quick and straight-to-the point rule on how to get your message across & convert more visitors in to leads or sales:

The #1 Rule — Throw one ball at a time.

Picture this:

You’re standing on a football field, and there’s a group of 10 NFL footballers standing about 20 yards away from you. At the exact same moment, all 10 throw a football toward you. You have 10 footballs hurling your way.

How many do you think you will catch? Chances are, with that many footballs heading toward you at the same time: None.

Now let’s change the scenario:

I’m standing in front of you. Just you and I, and I have 10 footballs in a basket next to me. One after another, I throw a football toward you. Consecutively, one at a time. How many do you expect to catch now? Five? Seven? All of them?

The same can be said about sending a message when a visitor hits your website.

If you attempt to throw dozens of messages, Calls To Action and general bits of information to the end user, chances are; they won’t catch anything.

On average, you have about 3.6 seconds (yes we track these metrics) to capture an end users attention & get them to do what it is you want them to do, if they are bombarded with messages, calls to action & a myriad of different attention grabbing page elements – they’re not going to catch anything, nor do what it is you’re hoping they may do.

Need a real world example? Let’s take a look at our own website.

Less than 30% of all visitors will ever use the scroll bar down the side of your website. If you clutter the top half of your website (considered above the fold) with non actionable content, your chance of a conversion has just decreased by 70%.

Again, you have approximately 3.6 seconds to deliver your message and ask for the sale/lead/action.

Many would argue that the web is interactive, and that the “Fold” doesn’t exist in an interactive medium. We beg to differ, and did the research to prove just that. We’re not alone, either — check out the Browsersize Application published by Google Labs:

1. Visit: http://browsersize.googlelabs.com
2. Type in your website URL in the ‘Enter URL here’ field.
3. Click Go.

The page should refresh, and display a colored overlay. The percentages represent how many users will actually ever see your website. Now ask yourself — what % of users are actually seeing your Call To Action?

Repeat the process, and this time put in our website: www.loveclients.com in the ‘Enter URL here’ field.

Notice where our Value Proposition is positioned? And our Call to Action? That’s above the fold, first thing.

The botton line is, the more visitors that actually get to see what it is that you want them to do, and the less clutter you’re pushing out to them, the more those visitors will actually act.
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To learn more about how the team at LoveClients can assist your business in generating more targeted visitors, and more leads or sales visit www.loveclients.com & initiate a Live Chat with a Search Marketing Expert, 24×7 – 365. We never close.

Luckily, for those who are running their business online, the internet could act as a kind of “flotation device” in which we can ride out the storm. Don’t get me wrong, the seas of our global economy will still be fairly rough, but online businesses can make it through if they play their cards right. So far US technology stocks have not been reduced to ash the way other industries have. In fact Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo and IBM are all in very good financial health right now. Internet usage is up due to an increase in telecommuting and job searches. Which also suggests that the search demand is growing (or at least not shrinking) too. Granted increased searches and traffic don’t necessarily add up to increased sales if people are just searching for new jobs. However since internet businesses don’t have any major connections to the financial industry they automatically gain more faith from investors and consumers. Also, the internet is notorious for bargain hunters looking for good deals on essential (and even some non-essential) items. The trend towards consumers purchasing less from the brick-and-mortar counter parts of online stores should increase dramatically. In short, there may be less frivolous spending going on in the near future, but more of what sales do occur will be online.

Also, as our new “Net-Gen” gets older and starts to flood the workforce, we should see many new innovations, uses and opportunities for the internet to boost our economy. We should see an increase in consulting, freelance and contract workers as people start their own home based businesses. Internet jobs won’t pay what they used to as companies try to grab the cheapest talent possible, but there will be work nonetheless. Online businesses have super low start up rates by nature so if you haven’t already, find your forte and hit it.

If you already own an online business, be sure to play it smart. This doesn’t necessarily mean play it safe all the time though. It’s better to take a risk on a project that has a more predictable or quicker return on investment, as opposed waiting until something “better” comes along. Stagnation is very dangerous in times of recession. It’s also better for the global economy as a whole for business to take care of themselves and invest their time and attention wisely.

Also, now is a good time to closely analyze your overall financial picture. If you don’t think, or don’t know if you can weather out the next year or so, you should either cut your expenses and ultimately jobs, or invest in growth (the smarter and more responsible of the two options). Invest in traceable advertising and marketing to make ensure you’re not spending more money than you need to. SEO, pay-per-click, email blasts, webvertising are all intelligent choices for online marketing. Just remember to use offline marketing wisely and keep your offline and online marketing mixes fairly consistent.

This mentality is WRONG!!!!! Let me explain why. Before any search marketing campaign starts you should truly consider what your business goals are, some examples would be; Customer Acquisition, Information Requests (customer submitting a request for more information from your company), Click Volume, Revenue Per Visitor. Now there are many more potential positive outcomes from your search marketing but they were just a few examples. The reason why basing your SEM success purely on click goals or cost per click is that it doesnt accurately reflect your businesses ROI and this is where conversion tracking comes in.

Conversion tracking works by inserting code onto your website which allows marketers to track actions on your website and correlate which keywords, ads or adgroups are driving the greatest amount of real value to your business. This isn’t rocket science and let me reiterate what i am saying here; Without conversion tracking or properly defined business goals which allow for some kind of real world measurement of success you are THROWING YOUR MONEY AWAY!

Ok, so now that we have my little rant out of the way you may be asking “what options are there for tracking success on my website?” Who would have guessed that there are literally hundreds of free solutions out there however the two most obvious and most powerful are Googles conversion tracking and Yahoo’s conversion tracking tools. Both of these are good, free, solutions which allow every aspect of your campaigns to be measured against your business goals, optimised to increase the performance in relation to that and also to easily be reported on.

The distinct advantage that Google’s conversion tracking has over Yahoo’s tool is that it ties directly into Google Analytics and then becomes a far more powerful tool for tracking every aspect of your sites performance.

If you have any questions regarding conversion tracking and how it can benefit you, or if you just think you need some help in defining your business goals. Come on over to LoveClients.com and we are more than happy to speak with you!