MKLINK Internet Marketing Tips

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Online Form Buttons…Some Tips.
Right, now I know that this doesn’t sound like the most earth shattering piece of advice but here’s a few quick little tips that are free to implement and can make a surprising difference to your conversion rate.

OK – so you’ve got the visitor to your landing page and have given them a compelling reason to sign up, download or fill out their contact details for an online lead.

They look at the online form with your questions and right at the bottom is a button with ‘Submit’ written on it.

Not particularly compelling is it?

Far better to have the BENEFIT they’ll receive for clicking on the on the button.

e.g. ‘Download Your Free Report’ or even just ‘Request a Callback’ is more compelling than just ‘submit’

How to Make Online Form Buttons More Effective.

Firstly, try and include some urgency :

e.g. ‘Download Your Free Report Now’

The words ‘Today’ or ‘Now’ or ‘Immediately’ give more gratification to today’s lightning-speed low-patience visitors.

Secondly, try adding a couple of chevrons to make it obvious that not only is it a button, but it’s going to take you somewhere…

e.g. ‘Download Your Free Report Now >>’
(Capitalising the first letter of each word usually works well)

Thirdly, try experimenting with different colours of the button. The standard dull grey borderless doesn’t have a particularly magic conversion rate.
(I’m getting great results with a red border with a green mouse-over effect)

The Reset Button
How frustrating is it to complete an online form, click what you think to be the ‘submit’ button and all it does is clear the form?

Personally I never even have a reset button on any of the forms we make as I can’t see the point of them and have never needed them. If you MUST have one for some application, may I suggest it’s NOWHERE NEAR the Submit button and maybe even use a bit of javascript to ask people to confirm if they really meant to erase all the information they’ve just typed in!

Increasing website conversion by improving buttons is just one very small way to boost your sales for no increase in cost. Why not let us help you make massive differences to your web marketing? Talk to us…

Register Now…for a complimentary consultation! Surprise yourself.

The PR and SEO Online Paper Trail

Our understanding of the Internet, the Web’s structure, the need to access information quickly and the businesses and markets which have arisen to help us do so, coupled with our need to organise and understand the world around us are just some of the contributors to the common perception that there are central points where we all go first to search and research.  Search engines meet this description with Google being the most widely used in our western countries. Social networking websites and micro blogging platform sites also provide first and maybe the only places for research about news and specific information.  Each of us as individual web users is therefore aware of the value of a central point such as Google to find valuable and important information.

The important point here is that journalists and those able to provide exposure on and off the web, use the web themselves, and more precisely the main search engines, social networking, blogging, and micro blogging websites to find reliable sources of stories which are of interest to their target market.  Since one of the main jobs of PR is to raise the visibility of something, and one of the main jobs of SEO is essentially to do the same thing (except purely online), both of these promotional tools could be used in unison to create a kind of online ‘pull’ paper trail to whatever the newsworthy item is, and create the maximum impact over the maximum period of time for it on and off the web.  The word ‘newsworthy’ could be augmented with the word ‘interesting’ and the words ‘value adding’ to distinguish it from just any web content where its raison d’être is just to attract more visitors for a key phrase.  A high quality, holistic approach to SEO has at its core the understanding that just getting high rankings in the search engines for a key phrase and just getting the resulting traffic is not an end in itself.  Businesses need enquiries and sales to survive. Good web pages have an understanding of their business built into them – they have an understanding of conversion and retention at their core.  Similarly, effective PR conducted on the web incorporates the understanding that there is little point in raising the visibility of something without taking into account its credibility.  The other important points to take into account where effective PR combined with SEO are concerned are that your target markets are often journalists, bloggers and influencers, and that it needs to be made as easy as possible for these target markets to find, access, and include the information you are offering.  There is also the added dimension that something that visibility is raised for online can also achieve exposure offline.  Leaving a durable and prominent online ‘paper trail’ to the source is therefore highly important.  So how can a high quality trail be laid for your target market by combining the strengths of PR and SEO?

• Research your target market well, and work on developing good relationships with them. Know who they are and how to reach them.  Also, have a good knowledge of the type and style of stories and information that certain bloggers and journalists are likely to be more interested in and take this into account when writing your press releases to them.
• Develop incoming links to your published online press releases and relevant web pages using a wide array of relevant key phrases.  This will help to keep these pages high in the rankings of search engines over a good period of time to get the maximum leverage and value out of them in terms of visitors, conversion, incoming links, credibility and visibility.
• Use keyword selector tools when writing your press releases and newsworthy pages to maximise the chances of your target market finding you with relative ease.
• Make sure that press releases and newsworthy content pages focus on only a few key points and that these are situated in the top left hand corner of these documents.
• Develop profiles in, and actively, positively, and openly participate in and contribute to social networking websites.  These are often used by e.g. journalists, and are often the source of stories which find their way into offline mass media e.g. the newspapers and TV.

 MKLINK Internet MarketingTips

Predicting – the Future of Google Searches?

This week Google announced the introduction of a new way for us to use its search engine.  Google calls this innovation “Google Instant”, and as the name suggests it is intended to allow Google users to get the results to their search engine queries more quickly and easily. In fact Google tells us that the new system could save us between 2 and 5 seconds per search. Don’t get too excited yet though as at the moment you can only use it in the UK if you’re signed in to Google and have an “Instant-capable browser”, although hopefully the system will be gradually rolled out to all Google users over the next few months.

What Is The Big Change?

The Really big change is the coming together of various technologies at the back end by Google in order to give us a search engine that adaptively predicts, searches and compiles results as, and all at the same speed as we type each character in. 

What Does It Do For Us?

Most of us have already become used to seeing predictive suggestions of what we may be trying to look for appear below the cursor with each character we type into the search field on Google’s search engine home page. 

Google Instant however takes this one big step further. 

Billed as a “search-before-you-type” system, yes Google still gives you a list of predictive suggestions of what you may be searching for, but at the same time it can now dynamically and instantly display results for each of these predictions as you arrow down through the list.  For many searches this system therefore means that you don’t have to finish typing in the query, and you won’t need to press the enter key or click on the search button, and you will therefore save time. 

MKLINK Internet Marketing Tips

Russel asked the following question :

Hi Mike,

I heard on the news this morning that Google are changing the way companies are now searched for, as they will be providing listings against first letters of words rather than whole words, if this is true, do your clients and prospects need to be addressing this now?

A newsletter on this maybe helpful.

Kind Regards,

Russell Greig-Bartram

Response :

Hi Russell

Google Instant describes Google’s new search innovation which means that search engine results are displayed as soon as you start typing things in.  Previously you would type something in and hit enter or search, and then the search engine results were delivered.  With this new way of searching, Google are hoping that it will lead to accurate search engine results (because you can see search engine results and refine your search as you type), and you’ll be able to get these better results a lot faster.

This change therefore should positively affect your our experience of using Google to look for stuff on the Web.  It’s not therefore something which really needs anything obvious to be addressed in terms of search engine optimisation, conversion etc. As Mike says, I’ll cover it in more detail on the blog this week, but for your interest, here’s what Google are telling us about it:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/search-now-faster-than-speed-of-type.html

Regards

Paul

mkLINK