Chasing Down The Bogus Leads

These are some of the keywords that led you to this page. This is something any online communication manager or web strategist learns first. But what's often overlooked is the importance of knowing which keywords to avoid to keep unwanted traffic away.

The subject of this article is keywords search relevancy. Most online communicators understand search relevancy as how a search engine determines whether a Web page or site is important for a particular search query. But I'm looking at it from an online business perspective.

These days, with the numerous online tools available, most business websites can quickly figure out the basic set of keywords that will drive traffic towards them. Once regular traffic has been established, the next step is in ensuring that a higher percentage of traffic results in sales. This means focusing on the quality of your traffic, rather than quantity.

As always, the first step is measurement. Which of your keywords are resulting in sales and which are not? Most good web analytical tools will tell you this, once you've set your conversion goals. But they won't tell you what percentage of each keyword is bringing in people who have no interest in your product or offering.

For example, if you're selling the Volkswagen Beetle, you may be driving a large number of naturalists to your site, who may be more than happy to fill a form for a free-test drive. But as a target they are unlikely, if ever to make a purchase. And if you're paying for every naturalist who clicks on your Beetle ad, that's just money down the drain. This gets further compounded when multiple teams are involved in following each lead up.

You will therefore need to track backwards (from your sales team, registration page or whatever your conversion goal), every bogus lead based on the keyword search. And then identify which keywords are resulting in the highest misses.

This is basically the opposite of lead conversion. By tracing bogus conversions and knowing which keywords are resulting in high misses, you can then take action.

Unfortunately, once you find the problem there's really no single way to solve it. It's often a combination of trial, error, fine-tuning and getting specific with negative keywords.

f you know of another way, do let me know.

Why Surfers Coming From Search Engines Still Won't Buy From You!

You've given your web site a rigorous SEO. You know you've done well because you've got some good search engine listings. People are coming to you site – but they are still not buying. What is happening?

Whilst this is very important to completely optimize your web site for the search engines, please don't forget that you can get a #1 listing in the search engines and still not get a sale! The reason for that is that when someone comes over to your web site they are looking for what they have just searched for.

1) Does your search engine listing lead to the product or service that they were looking for? Check your web stats and find out what search engine terms are being used and then what page they are landing on. Make changes to your pages so that they find what they are looking for where they land. If this is not feasible then put a link on these pages to the correct page and review the keywords you are using for the offending page.

2) Can people get around your web site and find out about you, your business and what you sell? Again get someone to check this out for you by visiting your web site and following all the instructions and menus on your web site.

3) Can people easily buy your stuff? Is it easily explained, logical and appears safe to use? Use a good and recognized payment processor and explain all of the payment and deliver processes and what will happen next. People are still confused when buying things so spell it out very clearly.

4) Can people contact you if there are problems? This makes people feel much safer, able to contact you about questions they have and also allows you to sell your product or service directly to them. Nothing like the personal touch to open a wallet!

If you get these things right - then you are getting closer to making your business profitable! Good luck.