There seems to be 2 reasons why we are asked to develop websites for our customers:

• First, because we know the “tricks of the trade” to get visitors to respond and convert – our customers love that
• Second, because they trust us and enjoy working with us – our customers love us
• Third, our websites rank well with the search engines. In Google, this site is ranking at the top for “succession planning calgary” – our customers love that too

Send me an email or give me a call if you would like us to  develop your website.

Jeff Nelson

jeff.nelson@anduro.com or 403-410-3803

Heat maps can help you to provide data of where human eyes naturally gravitate towards and which elements on your site are interesting. In the image shown above, you can see different colors denoting the visitor’s eyes behavior. A color closer to red shows regions the user’s eyes are looking at more often. It seems that for Google’s search results web page, only a certain amount of hits are fully taken into account. Heat maps based on mouse hover or clicks do produce quite similar results. Running a heat map on your site is helpful and maybe even surprising. Once you find the hot spots on your site,  you can use them to improve your site design and conversion rates.

If you are a business owner, one of the challenges is to identify which information is valuable to reach your goals. I bet your time is limited and you do need to focus on the key performance indicators. In the end, what matters is that your visitors convert and keep coming back. Heat maps can certainly be helpful in this process, but they are just another indicator of your overall website performance. Have you used any heat maps on your website and did you find them useful?

I have seen Ernest’s presentation and it is excellent. If you are in sales, marketing or website development, I would highly encourage you to attend. During the seminar Ernest will be looking at the connection between a prospective buyer and your landing page after they do a search or click on a pay-per-click ad.

What I like about Ernest’s presentation is his straightforward style, great examples and practical tips. During his presentation he uses his own custom slides that are engaging, interesting, and well designed.

To find out more details and to register please go to:

www.quickinars.com/2011/03/landing-pages-that-convert-to-prospects-customers/

I’m looking forward to meeting you at these session.

You won’t be disappointed.

Jeff Nelson

Troy is a writer who focuses on helping businesses tell their story and impress their clients. You can find out more about Troy and what he offers on his website, www.troywhite.ca.

Today Troy told me about 2 websites that are interesting and worth mentioning. The first is www.simplyamishedmonton.com. This company sells Amish Furniture – part of a franchise. A long time ago my Dad showed me how to build Shaker furniture which is similar. I love the simplicity, the lines and wood grain. Years ago I made a blanket box and a 2 step stool. But enough of me. If you are looking to buy simple, well made furniture, have a look at the site.

The second site is www.saddlebackleather.com. Obviously, this company is selling leather satchels, bags, and luggage. As Troy pointed out to me, what sets this site apart is that it is chock full of stories – a dog named Blue, a list of competitors, a small travel case in the middle of Serengeti Park (I’ve been there), and of course their story. What a fantastic way to tell people about your company – what you do and what you offer. I love it.

As a result, we had an objective (do the video) but this was one of those situations where we had no time, no media room, dysfunctional equipment, and no one to shoot the video.  Being 2 resourceful guys we improvised. We met at Mount Royal University, snagged a classroom, set up our cameras on a tripod, hammered out a script (very loose) and shot the video. Here is what we came up with. Enjoy.

I was definitely intrigued by the post which is why I am sharing it but the more I think about it, there are a lot of missing components here. The article How Much is a Google Top Spot Worth? posted on the SearchEngineWatch blog is definitely interesting.

To sum it up, there are some graphs and pictures and stats that show how important the first spot is and how much more traffic a company gets if they are in the first spot as opposed to the 2nd and 3rd etc. While it is our goal in life to get people in these top positions on Google, there are definitely some things to point out here.

I am in no way, shape or form trying to diminish this article or argue with it. It is definitely important to be in the top spots in Google – if it wasn’t, Anduro wouldn’t exist how we do now. And I agree that the top few positions are where the eyeballs are but there is a point that is being overlooked.

What about conversion rate?  I agree that you want traffic but if it is unqualified traffic because everyone is just clicking on the first result since we all trust Google to know what we are looking for, maybe it is better to be a bit further down on the page and catch those people who are really, truly searching. Maybe those people are more qualified. Of course, it makes sense that the chance of getting a conversion increases with more traffic but I think this study is inconclusive. There are other factors to consider – conversion rate being one of the biggest ones.

Have a look at some of the comments under the post. Pretty interesting to see the different reactions from people.

What do you think?

I was complaining to my co-workers about this because the only way for me to check a site is to go through EVERY SINGLE PAGE of the site and check the html code to see if Analytics is there. This is, as you can imagine, incredibly time consuming. SEO-Browser makes this a bit easier because you can click through the pages of the site and it checks the html code for you.

Still though, you have to click on every link to every page of a site. Now you can imagine, this is no easy task if you are looking at a 100+ page site.

So while I was complaining, Jeff sends me a link to this great tool. I was skeptical at first but thought I would try it out. It is called SiteScan by EpicOne and it does just that – it scans any site and spits back a report letting you know if any pages are missing the code, and if they are, it gives you the URL of the page! Brilliant! The free version let’s you run 11 or 12 tests a day!

I have gone through all of my clients and checked. Luckily, there has only been one who had a bit of code missing. Phew! This tool saves me hours of time. Maybe it can help you as well!

He lists a variety of tools but the one that caught my eye was the Keyword Tree developed by Juice Analytics. To used the tool you need data in a Google Analytics account.

This tool combines the value of tag cloud and relationships. Very quickly you can see which combinations of keywords people are using to get to your site. The menu of keywords at the bottom of the screen show a list of all the keywords – it is so easy to use.

The Referrer Flow Tool is also interesting and valuable.

The purpose of this tool is to answer 2 questions:
a) What pages are visitors viewing?
b) Where are they coming from (referral page)?

The tool takes a bit of practice to understand but in about 5 minutes you can gain an appreciation for which pages are valuable and where referrals are coming from.

When you have a bit of idle time, try out these tools.

Let me outline how our company is using this tool to help our clients. We have a few clients in the industry of global positioning systems (GPS). One is a manufacture of industrial hardware and applications, www.novatel.com and the other is a retail seller of mobile GPS units for consumers, www.gpscentral.ca. For both clients we are preparing a “gap analysis” to determine how their website is ranking for terms related to “gps”.

Note: The following data is aggregated industry related data, not data specific to GPSCentral.

Our analysis for companies like GPSCentral is a typically along the following lines:

• Enter the search term “gps”
• Adjust the filters to your specific interest: Web Search / Canada /  All subregions / Last 12 months / All Categories to get the resulting page and graph
• Click on News headlines to see related news
• Click on Forecast get future trends (you must select 2004 – present for this function to be available)

If you login using your Gmail account you can get additional detail related to search volumes. When logged in, the y-axis becomes a percentage scale with 0 being zero and 100 being the highest volume during the selected time period.

For the gap analysis example, our next step is to review the Top Searches and Rising Searches and determine how the website is performing for these specific terms. For example, the top search term listed is “gps garmin”. When we look at Google.ca we can see that the website is performing well for this term – 2nd and 3rd positions. The website is also listed on the first page of Google.ca for the next 4 terms including “garmin”, “gps canada”, “magellan gps”, and “magellan”.  But when we search for the 6th term on the list, “gps review”, www.GPSCentral.ca is not listed in the first 10 pages – room for improvement.

By using the “site” command in Google we can quickly determine that a pages has not been specifically optimized for “gps review”. A few pages on the website contain this term but none of the pages have “gps review” in the title of the web pages.

At this stage we have a few options:

1. Select one of the existing pages and optimize the page for this term.
2. Develop some new optimized content and add that page to the site.
3. Start a linking campaign to improve the performance of the existing page or the new page

We haven’t started yet, but we will over the next few weeks.

Contact me if you have comments, questions or suggestions.

Jeff Nelson

http://www.seo-news.com/archives/2009/oct/8.html

This is something we do when optimizing for our clients as well – without access to title tags, it becomes very hard to optimize a website. When working on a client’s website though, I differ slightly from Jill’s method of putting the company name in the tags: though I agree that including the name is good SEO practice, I usually I place it at the end, rather than the beginning of the tag. So for example, a websites Title tags would look something like “Cat Food and Food For Cats – Umbrella Corporation Foods” after we optimized the site.

But that is a minor differentiation in technique.

We also find that we can usually fit up to three keywords per page – anything over that cap though and the Title tags (as well as other on-page elements) begin to look stuffed and unprofessional. This is not a hard rule however, as we have made exceptions in the past – but it is one we typically abide by for the most part.