What is Page Optimization?

Page optimization is the the process by which a certain page or channel of pages is redesigned and reformatted to achieve the most effective results possible. A small change such as a picture, font, or color may be seemingly subtle, yet it may have a dramatic impact on conversion rates. When you have thousands of visitors spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, it isn’t difficult to figure out how large an impact on profitability even a 3-5% improvement can make.

But you don’t own eBay. You have a small or mid-sized business. Maybe you only get 1000 visitors a day. Maybe you get 100. Maybe you get 10. It doesn’t matter. For the vast majority of businesses, it’s going to be beneficial to engage in page testing and conversion optimization.

Page Optimization: Big Differences from Small Percentages

There are two basic ways to increase revenue: increase the number of customers, or increase the revenue per customer. It’s important for e-commerce sites to engage in both. The internet is their business, so maximizing those percentages is integral. But what if you don’t do much selling online?

Maybe you own a specialty store with one or a few locations. Maybe you are a contractor bidding on projects for various potential clients. The number of customers you have may be fewer, but they make up a larger portion of your revenue. This means converting is still extremely important. Getting 50 customers in your store instead of 40 or quoting 8 contracting projects instead of 6 could be huge to the success of your business.

First, what is a conversion?

Much of the online world calls a conversion a sale. A visitor converts into a customer after making a purchase. It can mean signing up for a newsletter, forum, etc, based on your call to action. But conversions don’t need to be that sophisticated. For many small businesses websites, a conversion is simply initiating contact. Whether it’s a phone call, e-mail, or real conversation, this initial contact is the action you want potential clients to take.

Why you need Page Optimization even though you get 10 visitors per day.

You’re a contractor or small business owner. You’ve got a website. Maybe once in a while you get a lead, but mainly you use it to look professional and so people can find your contact information online. But, you only get 10 visitors a day. Why would you invest in page optimization? So what if it makes the site a little easier to get around?

Let’s say your site gets 10 visitors per day. You optimize your pages, and your conversion rate increases from 2 contacts to 3 contacts per day. Maybe even from 2 contacts to 3 contacts per week! Sure, this may not seem like a lot at first glance… but…

2 contacts per week x 25% conversion x $500 profit/job = $250/week
3 contacts per week x 25% conversion x $500 profit/job = $375/week

So, if optimizing your page to increase the number of contacts you receive from 2 to 3 per week can get you $125/week, that’s probably a pretty valuable service. And that’s assuming a relatively small project size and conversion. Imagine how fast a page optimization investment would pay off even for a small contracting company!

You don’t need to be selling $500 projects to make this work either. Our case study below sells $25-35 classes:

Case Study

We have been working with a small company that didn’t previously get much traffic. Maybe a couple people called after finding them online in the past year. After redesigning to help with search engine optimization, usability, and doing some page optimization, they immediately started seeing online registrations. So far, 8 in the last 30 days. These registrations are worth about $30/each, so in just one month they’ve brought in an extra $240 they likely wouldn’t have otherwise received.

Their market is very limited. The cost of their service is low. They average less than 10 visitors a day. And yet, it’s hard to deny their investment was worth it. How much would you pay for $200/month in extra revenue?

Our Process

If you decide you’d like to do some page optimization, we will take a look at the key path visitors take when surfing your website and start with the “weakest link” when it comes to making a conversion. We’ll design 2-3 versions of pages you want to optimize, and test their results against each other. After enough testing, analytics data will reveal which version of your page is performing the best.  The best performer would then become your permanent page.

Then, until satisfied, the process starts over again. We take the best performing page, alter it, and start optimizing again. It’s about continuous improvement.

Get Started

Before you get started optimizing your pages, it’s important to figure out what response you are trying to maximize.  Figure out how you want visitors to travel throughout your site, then design your testing to make this navigation more fluent, intuitive, or attractive.  If you’re interested in working with us, you can find more information at out optimization page, or you can contact us to request a report or have a discussion about turning your website into a conversion machine.

Michael LaLonde

Mike is the marketing director and business development manager at Londes Creative Digital Marketing.  With a degree in Economics, an MBA, and over 10 years of online business experience, Mike blends creative marketing solutions and analytical data to drive traffic and increase results.

Deciding on how to craft the message is an entirely different discussion. View our E-Mail Marketing Page for some basic information on these important aspects such as getting past SPAM filters, what makes a good subject line, and how to create effective calls of action (possibly future blog topics as well). Today, I focus on how to measure effectiveness and how to optimize to increase response, in what I’m calling the 4 funnels of the e-mail marketing process.

Oh, and for this kind of stuff you’ll need an analytics program.  Google Analytics will work for most people (sans open rates), but if you are running a high-traffic e-Commerce site you’ll want to move towards Omniture, Webtrends, or some other paid service with higher functionality.

Sample E-Mail Spreadsheet (click to enlarge)

The 4 Funnels of E-Mail Marketing:

• Delivery Funnel
• Open Funnel
• Page Funnel
• Conversion Funnel

1. The Delivery Funnel

The Delivery Funnel is essentially the quality of your mailing list and your ability to get through SPAM filters (this part isn’t really measurable). This is the easiest part of the funnel to get through, so you should be as close to 100% as possible.

Out of Office Rate: Don’t send messages on Mondays or Fridays (especially B2B e-mails). People are more likely to take long weekends. Stay as far away from holidays as well, as people are more likely to extend vacations around that time as well.

Unsubscribe Rate: First of all, if someone unsubscribes from your mailing list, take them off of it. Even if you’ve purchased a mailing list and/or are sending unsolicited e-mails in the first place, it’s basic e-mail ethics to respect user wishes. Second, make sure the e-mails are relevant. Someone unsubscribing essentially means they are upset at receiving your e-mails, and it probably would have been better if they hadn’t even gotten it in the first place.

Undeliverable Rate: Prune these from your database after every E-Blast. Hopefully, it’s done automatically for you (same goes for Unsubscribes). Don’t flood your server with unnecessary bounce-backs.

2. Open Funnel

We use tons of charts to organize and compare data.

This funnel includes getting the user to open the e-mail and click on something inside it. Generally, this is the desired response as an e-marketer. Getting your readers’ attention and convincing them to initially act on it may be the most difficult part of the entire process.

Open Rate: You may think that Open Rate is entirely based on the subject line of your message. While that’s an extremely important part, it isn’t the only one. Crafting a catchy subject is great, but you’ll also want to consider when you’re sending the e-mail. Are your customers more apt to open e-mails on Tuesday or Thursday? At 10:00am or 2:00pm? These are questions that testing and analytics can help answer.

Click Rate: Now that they opened the e-mail, your copy has to be intriguing enough to inspire a click for more information. Of course, rich text and HTML e-mails continue to increase in popularity and have been shown to result in higher click-thru rates. Testing different setups, copy, and call to actions is important in increasing click rates.

3. Page Funnel

It may seem like the e-blast work is over. Your customer received the e-mail, opened it, and clicked through to your website. Success!? Not quite. There’s no money in your pocket yet. So, page optimization and landing page monitoring plays an important role in e-mail marketing. The Page Funnel is getting customers from a landing page and into the conversion process.

Landing Page Bounce Rate: How many visitors only look at the landing page after clicking before exiting? Optimize your landing page to engage customers interest and push them further in the purchasing process.

Landing Page Time on Page: Is your landing page full of a lot of information? Does your website have a longer sales cycle where an immediate purchase seems unlikely? Time on Site could be a better metric in these cases, as it measures how long visitors were engaged with the information you are providing.

Navigation Steps: Your landing page should be funneling visitors towards a distinct conversion. It could be 1 step or it could be 10 steps. You’ll want to monitor customer navigation along the entire way. Figure out where customers are abandoning the conversion process and improve those pages to facilitate higher rates. If visitors have made it this far, you don’t want them turning around now.

4. Conversion Funnel

This is why you send e-mails in the first place – to make that final conversion. For a lot of e-commerce sites, that means a sale (2% of visitors is the standard rate – plus you can go even farther with analytics to look at purchase amounts and other metrics). It could just mean signing up for an online seminar, registering on your website, or printing off a coupon. Whatever it is, this is the end goal. Monitor the number of conversions and use this number to optimize and calculate the effectiveness of your E-Blast campaign.

Going Further with Optimization and ROI Calculation

As discussed, using several different versions anywhere along the way will help you to create more effective marketing campaigns.  Whether it’s testing different subjects, messages, landing pages, etc., compare the conversion rates to find out what works best for your target market.  We create charts and optimize based on anything from time of day the E-Blast was sent to using different buttons on a landing page.  The key is to keep testing.

Testing 5 Different E-Blast Funnels

Let’s say you tested 5 different combinations of funnels and came up with these results?  You can easily calculate ROI for each campaign by dividing by costs.  Which model do you think you’ll use as a starting point for your next project?

Let’s hope you chose (4) (assuming costs are constant).  That’s about a 76% profit increase over the average of the 5 campaigns.  When you can increase responses that much (which I assure you is very possible), it’s crazy not to optimize.

For more information on Londes Creative Digital Marketing services, please check out the E-Mail Marketing Page and Optimization Page for more information specifically pertaining to this topic.

Since it’s such a large business, there are plenty of “SEO Experts” out there learning what algorithms major search engines are currently using, and how to exploit it to their advantage. From a business standpoint, this has made a lot of sense. But, the landscape is changing. Search Engines are good at what they do, they’ve got money, and they’re constantly improving.

It’s time to stop trying to beat search engines at their own game. We need to take a step back and really look at who we are marketing to and what is really important.

Search Engines Want to Provide Visitors With Useful Results

If you want to understand how to get a high ranking over the long-term, you need to understand how the rankings are determined. Most SEO people stress WHAT to do, not WHY to do it. The issue is what to do changes. It changes because, ultimately, search engines are focused on providing the best results possible for searchers. This is what SEO professionals should be focusing on. If you focus on loopholes in algorithms to achieve higher results, those results will only be temporary. The search engine market is very competitive; they will “fix” it.

Don’t Look Like the Best; Be the Best

In order to sustain a competitive advantage, you don’t want to trick search engines into thinking you are the most relevant search result. You want to BE the most relevant search result. Unfortunately, this isn’t fast. It isn’t easy. Making a commitment to providing useful and original content takes time, money, and expertise, but those are exactly the results that should be on the top of search engines. If you are serious about utilizing search engines to enhance the popularity of your web presence, you need to make a commitment to being a place that searches are happy they were sent to.

Wait, What? Searches Should Want to Come to My Site?

It’s amazing to me how basic this concept is, yet it isn’t something often valued prominently in the SEO business. The idea is the search results provide useful information, and your website is supposed to be exactly what the user was searching for.

Several months ago I interviewed with a company for an SEO position, as I knew I could help after looking at their situation. The owner surprised me with his “expertise” on cloaking, black hat methods, and keyword stuffing. I removed myself from consideration, and now he’s not ranked #1 anymore; he’s on the 2nd page. Still proud? The keyword stuffing was most annoying (the website is still like that). No visitor would ever want to read that.

If you concentrate on making your website what visitors are searching for, the rest will follow. Of course, it’s also very important to accurately communicate the content and value of your website to the search engines (indexing is vital). That value is produced by the quality of the information on your website. Putting yourself in the position of a search engine user, do *you* want to go to your website after searching on a particular subject? If your answer is “not really,” then you need to develop the user experience on your website before you worry about search engines.

Impress Visitors First, Search Engines Second

What’s the sense of getting visitors to your website if they’re just going to leave quickly? Concentrate on making your website easy to navigate, intuitive, and content-rich. Interactivity is an added bonus (that is becoming increasing important). Even by current standards, this is a better long-term approach. These variables, executed correctly, lead to higher visitor conversion rates, and wide-spread mentions of your website (link building). Always remember the code must be easily interpreted and indexed by the search engine crawlers.

This isn’t a war of man against machine; it’s a romance of man and visitor. If your visitors love you, sooner or later search engines will make sure even more visitors love you. I’m leaning towards sooner.

Stop Chasing. Start Optimizing.

If you want your SEO efforts to provide long-term results (not to mention your website providing long-term results), it’s time to stop chasing search engine algorithms and start optimizing for visitors. Don’t get me wrong: SEO will never go away or become unimportant. But, instead of it being a business of cheating the system a little, it will become a business of accurately communicating the value of a website. Effective SEO will send visitors legitimately interested in your website and products to you. Optimize your website to address user satisfaction and experience first, then crawlers.

Don’t Select an SEO Provider Promising Quick Results. Pick One That Will Develop Your Online Presence.

SEO companies that promise quick results by doing a one-time promotion may help you in the very-short term, but it will be neutral, or even hurt you, in the long-term. Find a professional serious about communicating the value of your business to visitors and search engines alike. Cheaters never prosper. Developers that value content and usability do.

Take a look at our Search Engine Optimization service today, and contact us for details on how we can help you execute an effective optimization plan.

Mike LaLonde