Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [117]
An example of a crossover term like this is nested tables. In my coding days, this was a term we used to explain tables coded inside of tables in order to lay out pages for the Web. They are also an accessibility nightmare! However, when my wife heard me talking with another coder about nested tables, she thought I was talking about furniture. Figure 11-4 shows why. A quick Google search for nested tables brings up content on both applications of the term.
Figure 11-4: Google results for nested tables, which shows two very different results
These terms are quickly found comparing your search rankings to your analytics. By looking at the search results, you may find that a word or two specific to your business is also a crossover term. In addition to your ranking reports, reviewing your referral terms in your analytics will help you identify specific phrases and pages that may be causing confusion.
Perform a search in the search engines, using your top referring term in your analytics, and see what websites appear in the rankings. Browse through the sites in the results to see whether there are any sites that are also using your industry term but may not be related.
Tuesday: Make It Attractive
Just having a conversion point in a logical place isn’t enough. Just having the Subscribe button available doesn’t mean people will give it a second glance. Just because you offer a newsletter isn’t reason enough for someone to be interested. Instead, you actually have to sell the action. That’s right, persuasion doesn’t stop with the content, and you actually need to sell the conversion tasks on your site as being attractive options.
Benefits beat instructions, and here are some examples to show how you can better position your conversion points to increase business.
What’s in It for Me?
Recreation.gov will not let you book a national park camping trip unless you register for a membership on the website (Figure 11-5). However, there is nothing on the registration page that tells the site visitor about this requirement. It is the equivalent of being told “because I said so,” rather than asking politely and providing substantive reasons for the request.
Figure 11-5: Recreation.gov requires membership but doesn’t tell you why.
One of the biggest reasons for a lack of registrations is that visitors mainly receive instructions to subscribe rather than benefits. Companies forget that they still have to sell that subscription, and if it isn’t attractive, no one will want it. When faced with a request to subscribe, register, or any other type of action, users either ignore it or wonder “What’s in it for me?” If the site does not answer that question, then there will be no action.
As another example, an article page on MySolutionSpot.com (Figure 11-6), a subscription option is presented to the visitor. However, no reason is listed or presented as to why the visitor should even consider registration. There are no benefits, actions, or accompanying reasons that will help the visitor make a decision to even consider the registration.
Figure 11-6: There is no reason or invitation provided for the MySolutionSpot subscription.
In contrast, the historic city of Deadwood, South Dakota, offers visitors an attractive message that helps persuade them to action. Instead of simply placing a graphic requesting visitors to subscribe or request vacation information, the graphic is accompanied by a simple explanation that is focused on the searcher’s needs: information, updates, planning, and events (Figure 11-7). By focusing the message of the benefits to the visitor, the subscription and lead form become a friendly means to accomplishing the task. (See Thursday’s discussion under “Check the Length of Forms” for more on lead forms.)
Figure 11-7: City of Deadwood: benefits are explained as both email updates and the visitor guide.
As you can see, sometimes even a very simple sentence with a few visitor benefits may be all it takes