Landing pages are ordinary web pages, but instead of being referenced somewhere within your website from a menu item or related link, it is either completely separate from your website and referenced from an external website or directory, or intentionally referenced from within the site to track a specific action.
You will only know if a marketing campaign for a specific offer, product or service is a success if you measure it.
When you use internet directories and search engines to advertise, instead of just providing a link to your homepage, you can use a specific URL that points to a special landing page that matches the offer you are promoting.
You can then use the AWstats report to tell you how many visitors you have had to that page. Because that particular landing page is only accessible from the chosen directory or search engine, you’ll know exactly how successful the advert was.
If your landing page is focused only on the offer, highlights all the right benefits for the targeted customer type and has a specific call to action, then the visitor is far more likely to respond compared to initially landing on your homepage that is full of distractions.
AWstats only tells you the number of visitors to a page and does not tell you how they got there. Without using web analytics tool that is designed to track behaviour, it is only possible to determine how a visitor got there by setting up tagged doorway to that page.
Behind each image you can add a specific landing page so that the number of visitors to that that page tells you how many visitors could only have taken that route.
Depending on the functionality you require, these landing pages can provide additional information for the visitor, or turned into simple redirects that point to the intended internal page and never get seen by the visitor.
This 45 minute call will cover the following areas:
The complete workshop programme includes Marketing Analysis, Content Marketing, Information Architecture, Improving Communication and Measuring Success. These workshops can be arranged as 45 minute telephone / Zoom calls to be held once a week (a time and day that fits). Those companies who wish to take this further can arrange one-2-one training or join an existing workshop group held on Wednesdays or Thursdays.
This data can be used to make performance predictions for changes in any of the measured data. Standard performance indicators are:
The performance indicators for conversions are: Number of views Number of submissions Number of completed enquiry forms How successful your website is depends on your ability to measure this data and then compare them with your expected results.
Based on these figures, you need at least 4 enquiries a day for your website to be judged a success.
If you have a clear path set for the actions you want your visitors to take, you can either use web analytics to track these specific actions, or you can include tagged pages or landing pages throughout the path your visitors take and then count the number of visits to those pages using your webstats analyser tool.
You can then measure the number of visits to each page on a daily, weekly or monthly basis and compare with previous results to determine whether things are improving. As soon as unexpected results are discovered, you will be armed with enough information to make business decisions to get the results back on track.
Depending on the results, you can do things such as price changes (up or down), create or modify offers, or analyse whether the marketing material is expressing the advantages to attract the right prospect.
This 45 minute call will cover the following areas:
The complete workshop programme includes Marketing Analysis, Content Marketing, Information Architecture, Improving Communication and Measuring Success. These workshops can be arranged as 45 minute telephone / Zoom calls to be held once a week (a time and day that fits). Those companies who wish to take this further can arrange one-2-one training or join an existing workshop group held on Wednesdays or Thursdays.
If you know your purpose, then you need to assess what key performance indicators (KPI) you need to start measuring.
This is achieved by determining candidate indicators and build ways to measure them.
These can be broken down into tangible and intangible results.
Tangible results are things like more visibility, more leads, more conversions, more sales etc.
Intangible results are things that facilitates the needs of the customer. These could be things like 'information found', 'enquiries resolved', 'fewer complaints'.
The objective of this exercise is to create a list of required information or candidate indicators, whether directly measurable or not.
For tangible results, this could be the creation of special landing pages, tagged buttons or images.
For intangible results, this could be the creation of additional buttons and images to be strategically placed on existing pages to track behaviour, or perhaps adding questionnaires or polls to attract the visitor to provide feedback.
This 45 minute call will cover the following areas:
The complete workshop programme includes Marketing Analysis, Content Marketing, Information Architecture, Improving Communication and Measuring Success. These workshops can be arranged as 45 minute telephone / Zoom calls to be held once a week (a time and day that fits). Those companies who wish to take this further can arrange one-2-one training or join an existing workshop group held on Wednesdays or Thursdays.
7 steps to keep your pages search engine friendly:
These keep much of the formatting for your page separate from the content. The result will be text that is easier for the search engines to read.
Where you need to include formatting, for example, on page titles or text headings, decide on three or four different types, sizes or colours which you are going to use and stick to them. This keeps things straightforward for your human readers, as well as limiting the amount of code the search engine will have to wade through.
You can use these to explain many things including what the page is about or whereabouts in the world you are based – handy if you wish to address an audience which resides mainly in your own country.
As the internet standards improve, the search engines will inevitably be programmed to favour pages which comply to the standards.
Try to make sure your site complies with WC3 readability standards – you can check each of your pages for errors using the WC3 mark up validation service at this address: http://validator.w3.org/. The content management systems we offer will be WC3 compliant, if you use them with the wysiwyg editors switched on.
The popular keywords may not be the ones which spring to your mind.
If possible, ask others what they would use. Consider using keyword research tools, like Wordtracker or - if you specifically need to search for a UK database of keywords - Trellian.
The search engines follow the rules of good grammar to carry out Local Context Analysis.
If you want them to understand your pages, you need to use good grammar.
Using alternatives reinforces what your pages are about, meaning they can be catalogued more accurately.
That said, be careful using colloquialisms, slang or less well known alternative meanings or contexts for common words.
The more closely you stick to your chosen topic the easier it is for the search engines to catalogue.
This 45 minute call will cover the following areas:
The complete workshop programme includes Marketing Analysis, Content Marketing, Information Architecture, Improving Communication and Measuring Success. These workshops can be arranged as 45 minute telephone / Zoom calls to be held once a week (a time and day that fits). Those companies who wish to take this further can arrange one-2-one training or join an existing workshop group held on Wednesdays or Thursdays.
The companies running the search engines, themselves, are also aware of this and in order to make their results more accurate, they are turning to increasingly sophisticated information retrieval techniques.
Gone are the days when improving your ranking on the search engines was a simple case of repeating a number of keywords and phrases on your pages. In the past, to achieve page one ranking, all you needed to do was to have more keywords on your pages than any of your competitors. Now the search engines regard this as spamming.
Google recommends that web pages should be written to be easily read by humans, as opposed to search engines. (Quality guidelines: www.google.com/support/webmasters )
Once the weighting is calculated, this can be compared with other websites to determine which is the most relevant. This is a far more accurate method of ranking web pages because the meaning, or semantics, of the page text is captured. This makes for a system which is far less open to abuse than simply weighing up the density of relevant key words in the text.
Calculating the weighting of given keywords in a website varies with each search engine, but the methods are basically the same.
There is also code embedded in the content which tells the browser your visitors are using how to display the page. The first thing a search engine does, when it reads a page on your site, is remove this code, a process which is called linearisation.
How linearisation affects you: The more code you have on each web page, the more difficult it is for the search engine to perform linearisation with any meaningful result.
For example, if your page displays tables which are defined in html, that is, with the definition embedded in the page content, the search engine will remove the code defining the table. It will then read just the text.
Some search engines may read the text column by column others may read row by row. In other words, the search engine may not read the text in your table the way you intended. The best way to get around this is to use cascading style sheets. These allow you to put much of the formatting information in a separate document leaving just a handful of codes in your content. This, in turn, makes the meaning of each page clearer to the search engines.
These are words which appear often such as conjunctions and pronouns… words like “if”, “but”, “and” or “to”.
How the removal of stop words affects you: If you are using keyword density techniques to optimise your site, that is, if you have typed in your key phrase again and again, there is a very real danger that the search engine will see it as a stop word, too, and remove it. This would mean that when your target audience searched for those phrases or words on the web, your site would be invisible to them.
Every sentence has a subject and a predicate. The subject is usually at the beginning of the sentence and refers to what the sentence is about. The predicate is the rest of the sentence that gives information about the subject. Within the predicate is usually a verb and an object. The object is normally the thing that is affected by the verb.
Local context analysis attempts to determine the subject, verb and object of each sentence in each paragraph or page.
Using each subject found, it collects all the associated objects and builds a two tier hierarchy. Then for each object, it collects all the associated verbs, synonyms and other words and builds the third tier of information.
This three tier hierarchy of information is known as a 'lexicographical tree'.
For any given subject, the richer your description, the bigger the tree will be. Local context analysis will result in a relevancy score for each subject and object based on the size of the tree.
This relevancy score will be used later to determine the overall weighting of your web page. How building the lexicographical tree affects you: If the sentences in your text are not properly constructed the search engine may not pick up on the interrelationship of the nouns and verbs in your text and this may cause it to catalogue your site incorrectly.
This is why Google advises the use of good grammar and encourages the use of readable text, because the search engine picks out subjects, objects and verbs from each sentence.
Having established the relevancy of the subjects and objects in each web page, the next step is to look for other pages on the website that appear similar or have equally high relevancy scores for the same keywords.
Part of this process investigates the use of synonyms to test how often the same or semantically similar words are used. This builds an index of semantics as the use of synonyms will help give the subject or object more meaning.
This can result in a higher ranking for a given page that may not even contain an exact match for the search keywords in question. This is because the derived latent semantics discovered on this page may be more relevant.
How Latent Semantic Indexing affects you: The better your description of the subjects and objects within each sentence, the more accurately the search engine can pin down what your site is about and hence determine the most relevant page. This will vastly increase the number of appropriate hits you will receive from the visitors you aim to attract.
However, while varying your vocabulary is good, beware of using words in an unusual context, even if it is grammatically correct to do so, as it may skew your results. It is often useful to relate an object being written about to senses or visual images – especially in direct copy writing – but pick your words carefully.
For example, a page describing a children’s ABC poster recently stated that ordering through the company’s online shop was “a piece of cake”. Shortly afterwards the site statistics started showing visitors who had been searching for information about cake decorating. An alternative way of putting it, without losing the informal tone or diluting the relevancy of the page, might have been “ordering is as easy as ABC”.
Having carried out Local Context Analysis and Latent Semantic Indexing, the search engine uses a mathematical algorithm on the results, called Term Vector Analysis, to give page a score for the total relevance, or weighting, to the search query.
This is performed by putting each keyword on an axis on a graph, and marking the relevancy score for each of those keywords for a given page. The result will be a vector having an angle and a magnitude. This then gives a method of comparing different pages for given combinations of keywords. The vector with the highest magnitude and the closest angle to search query will have the largest weighting.
See below for an example of the Term Vector Analysis Graph for the search terms "torches for cars": Compare the weighting for 'SITE A', with a relevancy score of 0.7 for torches and 0.2 for cars, with 'SITE B', with a relevancy score of 0.6 for torches and 0.5 for cars. The graph clearly shows that that 'SITE B' is the closer match to the ideal weighting and therefore 'SITE B' will be ranked higher by the search engines.
You need to build a high relevancy score for the important keywords. The calculated weighting for combinations of your important keywords on your pages will consequently be higher. This will result in a greater chance of your web page being found on the search engines.
This 45 minute call will cover the following areas:
The complete workshop programme includes Marketing Analysis, Content Marketing, Information Architecture, Improving Communication and Measuring Success. These workshops can be arranged as 45 minute telephone / Zoom calls to be held once a week (a time and day that fits). Those companies who wish to take this further can arrange one-2-one training or join an existing workshop group held on Wednesdays or Thursdays.
Your prospect is ready to buy, but needs a little persuasion to commit to the transaction. Use this auto-responder to keep connected to your prospect so that they return and make the sale.
Keep the message short. If you aim for around 500 words, you will have room to mention the big benefits without expanding too much on any additional and less important aspects.
Include scenarios of where there is a need for your product or service.
Show them where it meets their needs.
Include supporting material where appropriate.
If you are personally associated with the product or service, include a short biography. If you are local, you can even invite people to visit. If the auto-responder is focused on a product, consider outlining a complimentary product. If there are any shipping charges, explain how shipping works and any tracking if available.
Provide as many ways of getting them to contact you to make it as easy as possible for them. It will also be useful to provide the popular questions with your associated answers at this point.
This will be the final email in the auto-responder sequence. Provide them with one last offer.
If they don’t take this up, then the auto-responder will finish.
Provide further benefits by explaining what the product or service does for them. Close the email with a strong call to action and instruct them to make a purchase.
This 45 minute call will cover the following areas:
The complete workshop programme includes Marketing Analysis, Content Marketing, Information Architecture, Improving Communication and Measuring Success. These workshops can be arranged as 45 minute telephone / Zoom calls to be held once a week (a time and day that fits). Those companies who wish to take this further can arrange one-2-one training or join an existing workshop group held on Wednesdays or Thursdays.
When your prospect is looking for more information about a given product or service, they may not be ready to buy, but will be open to advice and persuasion.
Take small incremental steps to nurture the relationship between you and the prospect, as the gap between the prospect and the sale will currently be too large. Outline your intentions in order to raise their levels of interest. Highlight the big benefits, then introduce a compelling offer backed up with relevant case studies.
Each email should refer to articles on your website that help to build trust and reduce anxiety. You can link the articles together by classifying them with the same theme. That way, when an article is displayed, the other articles will appear in the related links.
Use the Gricean Maxims to decide the enphasis of your intentions:
Include a scenario where there is a need for your product or service. Show them where it meets their needs.
Refer your reader to a persuasive article on your website that responds to their anticipated 'What's in it for me?' or 'Will it work for me?' type questions.
Outline the big benefits compared to similar solutions. Include supporting material where appropriate. Refer your reader to a different persuasive article on your website that responds to their anticipated 'What's in it for me?' or 'Will it work for me?' type questions.
Refer your reader to an persuasive article on your website that responds to their anticipated 'Why choose you?' type questions.
Make sure you stay focused on the major benefits and add a strong call to action. If the auto-responder is focused on a product, consider outlining a complimentary product. If there are any shipping charges, explain how shipping works and any tracking if available.
Refer your reader to an article on your website that outlines the product or service in question.
Provide as many ways of getting them to contact you to make it as easy as possible for them. It will also be useful to provide the popular questions with your associated answers at this point.
This is also where you provide one last reminder of the offer. This will be the final email in the auto-responder sequence.
If they don’t take this up, then the auto-responder will finish.
Instead of a promise, introduce the product or service by expressing the major benefits.
Provide further benefits by explaining what the product or service does for them. Close the email with a strong call to action and instruct them to make a purchase.
This 45 minute call will cover the following areas:
The complete workshop programme includes Marketing Analysis, Content Marketing, Information Architecture, Improving Communication and Measuring Success. These workshops can be arranged as 45 minute telephone / Zoom calls to be held once a week (a time and day that fits). Those companies who wish to take this further can arrange one-2-one training or join an existing workshop group held on Wednesdays or Thursdays.
When your prospect is looking for information to help them make a decision, they will be attracted to valuable impartial information. By offering this information as a stream of emails, it will become collectable, and referred back to at a later stage.
Use the principles of information architecture to control the flow of information. The information you are providing will be based on one of your 'quality issues'; you are providing information to improve this quality issue in the prospect/customer.
Each email should refer to articles on your website that help to build trust and reduce anxiety. You can link the articles together by classifying them with the same theme. That way, when an article is displayed, the other articles will appear in the related links.
Raise their expectations by describing your intentions in detail. Use the Gricean Maxims to decide the enphasis of your intentions:
Refer your reader to an impartial article on your website that responds to their anticipated 'Can you solve my problem?' type questions.
Refer your reader to an impartial article on your website that responds to their anticipated 'Will it work for me?' type questions.
Refer your reader to an impartial article on your website that responds to their anticipated 'What's in it for me?' type questions.
Refer your reader to an impartial article on your website that responds to their anticipated 'Why choose you?' type questions.
Provide as many ways of getting them to contact you to make it as easy as possible for them. It will also be useful to provide the popular questions with your associated answers at this point.
Refer your reader to a case study on your website that responds to an example of a typical environment that concerns the chosen quality issue.
Provide them with links to further information and invite them to sign up for specific product information. Make sure they are aware that if they don’t take this up, then the auto-responder will finish.
Refer your reader to an impartial article on your website that responds to their anticipated 'What's next?' type questions.
Include an information 'how to' headline to raise interest in the reader.
Outline your intentions and your motives behind the information you are giving away.
Demonstrate how this information is useful to them.
Close the email with a strong call to action and instruct them to visit your website for more details.
This 45 minute call will cover the following areas:
The complete workshop programme includes Marketing Analysis, Content Marketing, Information Architecture, Improving Communication and Measuring Success. These workshops can be arranged as 45 minute telephone / Zoom calls to be held once a week (a time and day that fits). Those companies who wish to take this further can arrange one-2-one training or join an existing workshop group held on Wednesdays or Thursdays.
Using a tool to automate the process of responding to enquiries will enable to you deal with enquiries much more professionally, improve your sales conversion rate and ultimately save you hours of work.
The scenario here is that the prospect is very new to your business, and is not familiar with your products and services, and the terminology you use. To help them understand what you are about, instead of attempting a hard sell, you provide a free download or offer coupled with valuable impartial information.
The scenario here is that the prospect has a need, but is unsure of the solution. They will be comparing your products and services with your competition. To help them differentiate you from your competition, outline your intentions from the start - your motives - and raise their interest by outlining the features and benefits.
The scenario is that the prospect is ready to buy, but has reservations. They have probably already made the emotional decision to buy, and simply looking for a logical reason to back this up. To help them take that final step, get to the point and stay focused on the sale. Establish the need and outline the big benefits.
Insert the auto-responder opt-in form on your site. Within eye site of this form, provide information about the importance of subscribing to your list. Add value to your list by giving them a compelling reasons to subscribe. If you are providing some free information as part of the offer of subscribing, make it clear that the download link will be provided in the email they receive after confirming their subscription.
On your thank you page (or redirect page) they are taken to after they fill out the form you need to provide information on verifying. Verified opt-in allows you to ensure that the person subscribing did so with his or her own email address and didn't provide a fake or malicious email.
Let the visitor know that they should check their email inbox. Tell them what the subject line of the email says so they know what to look for. Convey that they must click on the link inside to verify and receive the download link to your free information.
In the auto-responder they receive after verifying, give them the link to your free information. Since they are now subscribed to your list and have confirmed that the address they provided is valid, you can effectively follow up providing more information about using your products or services, training tips, and further benefits or features earned by becoming a customer.
This 45 minute call will cover the following areas:
The complete workshop programme includes Marketing Analysis, Content Marketing, Information Architecture, Improving Communication and Measuring Success. These workshops can be arranged as 45 minute telephone / Zoom calls to be held once a week (a time and day that fits). Those companies who wish to take this further can arrange one-2-one training or join an existing workshop group held on Wednesdays or Thursdays.
