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Josh McCoy | Dec 6, 2010 | 0 Comments

In “SEO the SERPs and Your First Impression,” I emphasized the importance of creating a great first impression for searchers in the hope of driving traffic to your site. This is achieved through a concerted effort to create relevant content for all that is visible in the SERPs.

Of equal importance is your “second impression,” or the moment a referral reaches a landing page. Within search marketing the old adage rings true that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink.

In the rat race of SEO we often become consumed with reaching top rankings and driving massive amounts of traffic. We then forget to assess the next step: helping these visitors reach our intended goal.

Step 1: Identify Your Intended Funnel for Visitors Entering Your Site

Before you delve into what your visitors are actually doing, it’s wise to step back and ask yourself a series of questions:

What message am I delivering to my visitors when they reach a site page?

Where do I want my visitors to go next on the site?

Are my calls to action prevalent on site pages?

Step 2: Assess Your Visitor’s Landing Page Behavior

To gain a complete understanding of your visitors landing page behavior, you must review a few areas of your site analytics. I use, recommend, and provide examples with Google Analytics.

To begin, we can easily take a look at bounce rates and exit rates to get a broad view of what top landing pages just aren’t working. However, a more thorough view is often needed.

Review the Entrance Paths report in Google Analytics. This data will show you that from a given landing page what pages are visited next as well as the overall percentage of visits traveling to these pages.

Taking your analytical abilities to the next level, view site pages from within the Google Analytics On-Page Analytics section. This section, once known as Site Overlay, affords you the opportunity to view your site pages with appended CTR percentages on page links to help you better identify where your visitors who decide to stay on the site are going next. This provides a better visual representation of what’s going on for those of us who like images more than reading numbers.

Step 3: React

By now hopefully your analytical data has given a clear indication on where your traffic prefers to go when entering your site. For many, it may become apparent that your intended funnel isn’t represented well on your home page or other top landing pages. Traffic may be traversing your site in an unintended path due to several different reasons.

Ways to improve your Visitor Click Path:

Include top site pages (products/services) at the far left of horizontal main navigation or at the top of vertical navigation links. Leading navigation sections with your intended “next-page” helps to reinforce to users where they should travel next. On that note, ensure that you use similar footer navigation so that anyone who reaches the bottom of the page knows where to head next.

Text links in your body copy should link to supporting pages relevant to the content of the respective, or one step closer in the conversion funnel. Visitors who are interested in the page often use these first text links to travel further into the site. Ensure that these links direct traffic closer to your goal not further into other areas of the site.

The “good stuff” goes above the fold. Calls to action and product offers must be above the fold of the page. If you don’t present a reason for a visitor to continue through your site, why would they want to scroll down the page and search for a reason? There are many types of searchers on the web but few wish to continue searching for your offer if you don’t quickly make it available. At first sight, the page’s above the fold view should contain a compelling headline, supporting content that helps to validate your headline, and links to current products/services or promotions.

Moving Forward

Depending on what your data reveals, you may need to get “nitty-gritty” and step into A/B and multivariate page testing to assess what will give you a more direct visitor click path and get you to higher conversion rates. However, the above steps serve as a quick way to help you identify and answer questions about your site traffic.

These steps also ensure you have the simple steps covered that many people don’t realize they are forgetting.

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SEO Google Analytics, landing pages, page, site pages

Posted In: Affiliate Marketing

Comments: 0

This is a guest post by Jason Acidre, a marketing consultant for Affilorama, an affiliate marketing portal. Affilorama provides affiliate marketing education and advanced affiliate marketing tools for beginning and advance affiliates.

There are a lot of challenges to face in affiliate marketing, just like with any other business. There are pitfalls you need to avoid and certain things you need to do to keep your affiliate marketing strategies working and bringing in consistent ROI. So whats the best way to do it and how do you stay on the right path to maintaining and growing your business? Here are 10 key tips you should know and remember for making your affiliate marketing business a successful one.

Tip #1. Dont skimp on SEO. Just because youre ranking well and bringing in traffic from other sources doesnt mean you should disregard SEO. Search engine optimization is a long-term strategy that will bring you residual traffic for years to come. Investing weekly or monthly in backlinking or press releases is a great way to keep your site relevant and climbing up the search engine results. Even if youre ranking well right now for your top keywords, going lax on your SEO will result in someone else outranking you its just a matter of time.

Tip #2. Split-test your landing pages. Whether youre sending traffic via PPC or article marketing, youre leaving a significant amount of dough on the table if you dont split-test what landing pages convert better. For most people, changing things as simple as punctuation or background colors can make the difference between a few sales and a dozen sales. Spending the few minutes it takes to set up a script for testing and providing variations of your current site is all it takes to optimize for better conversions.

Tip #3. Diversify your traffic, right now. Putting all your eggs in one basket is a recipe for disaster, even if you pay for traffic. With Google slaps that can devastate entire campaigns, its a poor idea to depend on traffic from just one channel. Having organic and passive traffic that comes through articles or video marketing is a great way to provide some passive traffic that keeps coming no matter what. Even if you can get additional sources of traffic that trickle in a few clicks a day youre still that much better off when your other traffic sources dry up or go stale.

Tip #4. Outsource the tough stuff. If you arent already outsourcing the majority of your work, nows the time to get started. Outsourcing landing page creation, video creation, social media marketing and other tedious tasks is a great way to free up time to manage your overall marketing strategy. Utilizing sites like RentACoder.com or GetaFreeLancer.com is a great way to find people who will do your work for you, and you can stay protected via escrowing the payment.

Tip #5. Diversify your income streams. If youve been promoting one product for a while now and are earning a steady income, it may be time to branch out to new opportunities. What would you do tomorrow if the product youre promoting gets buried in a legal battle and is forced to shut down? Believe it or not, this does happen, and promoting at least two to three products or services is a good way to protect your affiliate marketing income and scale up your business.

Tip #6. Optimize your load time. If youre sending traffic to your landing pages and trying to make sales, optimizing your load time and your pages general performance is key to higher conversions. The faster your site loads, the more money youll make. This isnt just important for customers visiting your page it also plays an important role in SEO and getting more organic traffic. If you use WordPress, look into using Wp-Cache, a plug-in that speeds up load times dramatically for visitors.

Tip #7. Start using Web 2.0/social media. If youre not currently using any kind of social media or Web 2.0 services to promote your site, now might be the time to do it. While Web 2.0 and social networking has been a staple of affiliate marketing for quite some time, there are still a few people who arent using them to increase traffic and sales. Start leveraging sites like Twitter and Facebook to find people in your niche to sell to.

Tip #8. Find higher-paying products to promote. If youre already an affiliate of a top weight loss product, try to track down a program that converts just as well but pays a few bucks more than your current one. This goes for any niche or type of product, and promoting something that pays just a few dollars more can make a huge difference in your income. Another way to get more out of an affiliate product is to simply speak to your affiliate manager or the product owner and ask about earning more per sale. Depending on the volume and sales you do, they might allow you to earn more commissions.

Tip #9. Get laser-targeted traffic. If your sales are currently poor or your landing pages arent converting as well as they should, its probably a good idea to increase the quality of the traffic youre using. If youre getting broad or general visitors who arent necessarily interested in what youre promoting, youre just spinning your wheels and getting no traction. Focus in on more targeted visitors by switching up the keywords you target and making sure theyll attract the right visitors.

Tip #10. Offer more than one product on your landing pages. A good way to increase conversions across the board is to offer more than one product on your landing pages. This works particularly well on review blogs but can work in other formats as well. For example, if youre promoting a weight loss supplement, offer two other competing weight loss supplements and rate them individually. Believe it or not some people will purchase the competing products, which will generate money you would have otherwise left on the table.

SEO affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing portal, great way, landing pages

About this job:
Twitter is growing very fast. In this job, you’ll help accelerate things further. We are looking for someone to drive user acquisition/retention efforts including rapid a/b testing, SEO, landing pages, email programs, and more. We want to enable you to identify, test, and execute your ideas for how we can achieve our goals faster. This role provides a unique opportunity to be the first hands-on internet marketing expert on the team. As an early leader on the team, we will look to your guidance for building the processes, best practices, tools, and vendors to use to further these efforts.

The ideal candidate has proven success acquiring and engaging users across a wide variety of marketing channels including SEO, email, direct marketing, and various advertising strategies. He/she is a fast learner, embraces challenges, and loves making data-informed decisions.

Responsibilities:
Create, test, iterate, and scale campaigns to acquire and engage users (SEO, landing pages, a/b testing, email, widgets, etc)
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Requirements:
BA/BS/MS in a technical field preferred
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Love analyzing data – i.e. you speak Excel
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SEO A/B testing, help accelerate things, landing pages, user acquisition/retention efforts