With the current climate of Google’s new algorithm, I have had cause to reflect on a basic idea…. Seemingly long forgotten. Are you getting the sales you need from your existing visits? Or are you a “build it and they will come” person?

If you plan to increase your traffic to meet your sales needs and never worry about what you could be missing… Stop reading, this will bore you =-) However, if you want to build your qualified traffic and get the sales from them you need, then read on.

 

 

Conversions! Yes folks SALES! This is the point right?

So in light of all the indexing and rank changes, we sent our SEO clients a “Biggest Losers List“. The concept here is that these visits are lost sales, for some reason. Price? Usability? Information? Something is missing and the page cannot make the sale.

First off, lets find your top 5 biggest losers for the last 30 days. Login in to your Google Analytics account, hopefully it is set up properly to track conversion data. Unless you have moved things around from your lower dashboard click “View report” on the “Traffic Sources Overview” box. Then under the sources area, choose Google Organic for example.

In the gray bar, there is a dropdown set initially for keyword, drop this down to landing page. Now click the header link in the “Visits” column to sort them by visits, more visits at the top. Now click on your ecommerce tab.

We are looking for the pages with many visits and no conversions. I have one of my own sites open right now to provide some examples.

Loser Page #1 had 52 visits and no conversions.

Loser Page #2 had 29 visits and no conversions.

Loser Page #3 had 20 visits and no conversions.

Now, we can clearly see without going a step further there is something wrong here. In this shop, for example, the “per visit value” in the upper bar is $4.86….. So we know that for some reason these losing pages lost at least $490.86 in potential sales….. OUCH!

Now lets gather some more information. In the dropdown next to “Landing Page” select “Keyword” to add the column. This complicates things a bit, but sometimes, Google needs more information from you to send your pages qualified leads. If you find that one of your losers is getting a bunch of seeming unrelated search traffic, then it is a good bet that the text on the page is not clear enough to Google.

A good example of this is our pet store example, the 29 searches are for “bows in bulk”… which we sell, except they are dog grooming bows. So I will be updating this page so Google can deliver it for more proper search queries. This part is easy….

What if these losing pages have good, relevant searches?

In this case, we have to have a good old fashioned, come to Jesus look at the page. Is the price too high? Information unclear? Terrible images? Missing selections? Or just plain poorly organized even. Trust me when I say, you must train your eyes to shop like a consumer. In reality it doesn’t matter what you think or what your competitors do…. Matters that there is a problem with this page you need to solve.

These things can really be very small… Layout, color, button positions etc. So your best course of action is to have some friends look at it. The trick here is two fold. First, whatever you think about what they say doesn’t matter… You are not an average consumer. Listen to them, analyze what they have said and act on it. Secondly, don’t go changing a hundred things on the page…. Nothing you cannot measure can ever be successful. Take your list, make a few logical changes and watch it for 3 weeks…. Then measure your results and continue to implement the needed changes in small doses as well. Pretty soon this page will not be a loser anymore!

Need a hand? If you post your page link in a comment, with your own thoughts and the visits & conversions… I will be glad to have a look and make suggestions as I can =-)