What is your online “persona” and how does it speak your message to your intended audience?

How to establish
Trust and Authority?

For what sorts of problems will your products and services offer help and remedy? What of the visitor’s needs and issues will your offerings be solutions? How will their lives be made better by contracting with you?

Webpage Speed Optimization, SEO, Web Analytics

Your pages should load as quickly as possible, look good and be easy to navigate on phones. They should be represented compellingly and cleverly on search engine results pages, for your most important keywords. They should talk interestingly about topics the visitor finds interesting and relevant to their lives, desires and available time.

When you can hook your products and service solutions into current events “news”, you can hook into emotional trends and hot spots and people make purchase decisions based on emotion at least as much as on logic. (As was published in Forbes article about Facebook manipulation of timelines and feeds…)

Caching and site speed.

Your server may have special “caching” available or you may have a “cache plugin” installed on your WordPress site.

Without caching,
your site seems to
take forever to load!

Caches are a technique to get sites to appear to load more quickly as they take stuff that is supposed to be fairly static and serve to the person’s web browser the cached version instead of, having site tell the server retrieve all the little bits and pieces required to construct the page from the database, assemble that into HTML and send that down to the person’s browser.

Then again on the person’s browser, there are cache settings there also. Basically one sets up some code that tells the browser how “fresh” the actual webpage is and if it’s within a reasonable time, to just use whatever the Browser has stored in its memory (from visiting the page in the past) instead of requiring a fresh download from the server. Without caching, your site seems to take forever to load!

Why bother looking at Google Analytics and what is it anyway?

You can’t determine the success of something you don’t measure. Hence the importance of Web Analytics. Google makes it so easy to install tracking code on all your site pages and as long as you don’t mind giving web visitor data to Big Brother’s servers, you have a free and powerful way to analyze monthly visitor trends and patterns.

You can’t determine the
success of something
you don’t measure

Knowing how to evaluate and navigate through the hundreds of “views into your data” available with any good web analytics program can reap you rewards of insights. These can serve as confirmation of both challenges and opportunities available for fine-tuning and adjusting on your website pages.

If you can define at least three business questions, Google Analytics can provide dozens of actionable insights – if you know where and how to look. Comparing standard metrics in current and past months can provide fruitful information that can help you spot trends and take advantage of timely current events and issues.

Befriending Analytics and active involvement with your site content (and any relevant conversations), You can organically grow, in Google’s eyes, your site’s relevance as a topically important and authoritative reference for Google’s main customers – those who consume web content suggested by its search results pages. Paying attention to this will get you noticed by Google and if getting more web traffic is a goal, noticed by Google can be a good thing!

(And remember, there exists Life outside of Google. What unique and golden opportunities are there for you because your competition may have focused solely on Google?)

The post What do you expect to see and experience when you visit a webpage? appeared first on JEO Webmaster Services.

On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy.

When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.
– David Ogilvy

Each webpage has to work for both search engines and people. You need enough on-point copy on a page to highlight strategic keywords for which you wish your site to rank in search results. Even if you show up #1 in Google, your page won’t convert a visitor into a sale if they get bored after the first paragraph.

Before you write a single word of page copy, you must have a goal. What’s this page going to talk about? What action do you want the reader to take if they scan or read the page? What impression and message do you want the reader to remember when they leave this page? How will you know you have been successful in achieving your goals?

Webpage META tags

You should create a clear and concise TITLE and DESCRIPTION statement for each page. Also, write an “intention script”. TITLE is 5-9 words sumarizing what the page is about. It’s also the phrase that shows in many browers at the top, above the address/URL bar. It’s the default phrase describing the link when you Bookmark the page. Most importantly, it’s the clickable first line representing your webpage in a Search engine results page.

The DESCRIPTION is 2-4 short sentences which tell more about what the reader can expect when they click into the page. Often, the DESCRIPTION is the text immediately under the TITLE in your search result listing. Here you can use a couple more keywords to influence the search engines, but more importantly, motivate the viewer to click your link.

KEYWORDS meta tag is no longer considered by Google, since it had been so horribly abused in the past. Never the less, I still find it useful as a sort of “scratch pad” on which I record the most important keyword phrases thsi page should cover. If it’s not on this page, don’t put it in the KEYWORDS list. If there’s something important on the list that doesn’t really fit on the page, create another page/post for that phrase and link it to this page. Your KEYWORDS list can later be harvested to supply CATEGORIES and TAGS  for your individual posts, which will provide alternative ways for people to search your site for things in which they may interest.

The Intention Script describes what you consider the most important parts of your page, what you want the reader to do and what sorts of things you might measure in Google Analytics to measure the success or failure of this page. It can be a simple paragraph or two or even a bullet point outline of what you consider important about this page, how it is relevant to your Buyer Persona person and what you wish them to do next.

Your webpage Needs One and Only One Clear Goal:

So what is your goal for this page or blog post?

1. Can you clearly and simply state one goal for this page in a short paragraph? To many goals water’s down the power and effectiveness of your page and can confuse or frustrate your reader. K.I.S.S.! (Keep it simple, sweetheart!)
2. How is this page different and unique than others on the site?
3. How does it tie in with the overall goal and theme of the site?
4. How does it address the needs, desires and wants of the User Persona you have built for describing your audience?
5. What action are you trying to persuade your readers to take?
6. Is anything on the page distracting visitors from that goal?
7. Is there anything that needs to be added to anticipate “resistance points” to help people move forward through your site to the action you wish them to take?

Capturing interest is more important than being “creative” and clever. Every headline, image, subject line etc. should tie back to your buyer persona and be able to persuade such a person to take action. Be willing to put “innovative copy ideas” aside if they are boring to read. Create, concise, to-the-point copy that is relevant to this person’s interests.

Make your copy personable, believable, conversational, maybe even humorous but certainly relevant. You will only have 6 seconds to capture their interest and get them to read on past the first sentence or paragraph. Deliver a perception of authority and value to this person and you are more likely to convert them into a customer or client.

Exercise:

In your mind’s eye, picture the person you have defined in your Buyer Persona. Imagine they are in the room with you and reacting to the copy you are writing. How would this person react to your content and the layout of this page? Does it make sense to them? Does it answer their questions? Does it provide value? Does it have a clear call to action and make it easy to do that action? Does it reward the person for taking an action? Does it present benefits rather than merely list features? Do any and all images and pictures support rather than detract from the main message and topic of that page?

The post How to design an effective webpage appeared first on JEO Webmaster Services.

…thanks for the reports.  Any suggestions based on the info?  I’ve had 0 bookings for January and only one so far for February.  This has never happened before.

How come there is a listing for Catskill yoga retreats?  I am not a good place for yoga retreats because I don’t have indoor space for yoga.

My reply:

Web Marketing Takeaways

Notice that the links above in the very first page paragraph have special Google “UTM tags” included. This way I can view analytics for this client and easily see how many visitors came to her site from my blog post and all sorts of information about their visit! Here’s a handy tool to build your own, customized URL using UTM tags: ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder.

Google’s “freshness factor” is a really important consideration for your website. Creating a profitable web presence is not a one time “set it and forget it” event. It is an organically growing process. You want to create a good relationship with Google and you do this by delivering quality content to its customers that keeps up with changing times and events.

Your Google Analytics reports are a gold mine of information. But like a promising employee, it needs proper care and attention to deliver results for your business. (Check out this post about GA Spamming for important setup information.) Remember you can’t judge the success of something you don’t measure. Regular review of strategic reports is critical to your online success and can make a significant cost savings to any online marketing you may employ.

UTM tagging can help you quickly identify Campaigns in your analytics reporting.

Social Triggers are a tricky topic. Getting referrals and traffic from social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, linkedIn, Instagram, G+, etc will, no question, increase your traffic and sales.

But this comes at a cost – the cost of participating with and managing those web-social relationships. One needs to think about actual people coming from these social platforms. If you could picture in your mind’s eye an image of an actual semi-fictional person you’d like to interact with, how would you describe that? What is your USP (Unique Selling Proposition)? This tool will help you build a user persona profile and USP for your website and business.

And finally, become friends with your blog! Use it to communicate with your audience to give them value. Once you find out what people are searching for and for what your site is being seen, you can always use your blog strategically to gain more exposure for your products and services. Try our Quora.com, Google Trends and other research tools to gain valuable insights, increase your “authority factor” and boost your representation and success online!

Excited but overwhelmed by all the possibilities? Need Help? Contact us to setup a consultation to discuss how to make your site perform better for you. Or download these “Top-10 Tips to Online Success“.

Happy blogging!

The post My Sales Are Down. What can I do? appeared first on JEO Webmaster Services.