It seems like it’s getting tougher and tougher to get your industrial website to rank in organic search. The number of online competitors is growing and it’s getting harder to keep that #1 position for your most effective keyword. And now, the search engines are pushing your results under the fold with shopping, maps, images, and other universal search results. Then, add the fact that Google is putting more and more emphasis on personalized search, showing different results to different searchers. Well, it’s almost enough to make you throw in the SEO towel.

Even though it’s getting harder to rank, that doesn’t mean you should give up. Rather, just make the very most out of every visit to your website. That means you have to go beyond just looking at rankings and optimize your site not just for search engines, but also for conversions. Your site could be getting the bulk of its traffic from long tail searches – and often, these visitors are more apt to convert. How many visitors fill out your form, request a quote, or buy from your industrial website? How many phone leads started on your website?

In order to make the most out of your website traffic, you need to look at your landing pages and their bounce rates. Bounce rate is the percent of visitors who land on a page and then leave, or bounce, before looking at another page. An article by Carrie Hill sheds some light on how to eliminate 75% of the issues causing bounces on your pages in 2 easy steps.

Eye Tracking Tools
Use eye tracking tools that can provide heat maps of what visitors see on your site. I tested out www.attentionwizard.com, a site that generates a heat map based on algorithms for the images you upload. Their “lite” (aka free) version allows you to get one free heat map per day. I tried it on our very own Ecreativeworks site and it was eye-opening, to say the least. (And it makes me think we’ve got some landing page work to do for our own site.)

Conversion Obstacles
Look at your landing pages to address any obvious obstacles to converting. For example, if your call to action (contact us, buy now, add to cart, add to quote, etc.) is hidden below the fold in a paragraph of text, it may not give you the conversion rate you’d like to see. Here is an expanded list of questions to ask of your landing pages:
Does the landing page match the keywords visitors typed into the search engines to find your site? Are those keywords clearly above the fold?

What is your call to action? Is it clear to visitors or do you have so many calls to action that they can’t decide what to do next?

How is the copy on your site written? Is it organized with bulleted lists, easy to scan headings and small chunks of text?

Do you have spelling or grammatical errors that can lead to a poor impression of your company?

Does your site give all the necessary information your customers need to buy or request a quote – or are you leaving them with the wrong impression?

Is your phone number clearly located on EVERY page of your site so potential customers can easily call you? (Especially important for industrial websites.)

Do you have images or videos that showcase your products or services?

By taking care of your landing pages, you can increase the impact of your organic search engine optimization efforts and move beyond rankings.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Advanced SEO Concepts, General, Google & Other Search Engines, Industrial SEO, Usability & Conversions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.