Web Site Conversion Rates

This is probably the single biggest statistic for any website that is for a business. It is the final measurable metric that shows how much of your traffic turned into purchases, sign ups, bookings and orders etc. It’s important not to confuse this data with business turnover and other types of web hits that we have previously discussed.
In it’s purest form your conversion rate is where Google analytics follows a user session to the point where they can’t go any further. To calculate simply take the number of conversions and dividing that by the number of total ad clicks to your site. For E-Commerce sites this is easily measurable by placing something in your cart and paying for it. For other sites it’s gaining sign ups or registrations. For others its users downloading trial software etc, but for most other SMB’s its going to be making an appointment.
This last step can easily get unmeasurable as a lot of site owners don’t have automated sites where appointments and services can be booked without human interaction, or they simply don’t have an off the shelf service. What happens at this point is that users will normally call. They can still contact you via email or social but not necessarily from your own site buttons or links.
All these and other reasons make measuring conversion rates with Google analytics (and other calculations) quite difficult. Its still possible to get a worthwhile metric though, normally you will have to measure this manually by looking at traffic increases, sessions that were long but didn’t trigger one of the ways mentioned above, then look at your overall turnover that month. Either way, it’s the most important statistic of your site and should be known by site owners.

So what is the average conversion rate for a website?

You may be surprised to find it’s a lot lower than you might think. Across various large industry sectors, the average landing page (commonly the homepage) conversion rate was 2.35%, but the top 25% are converting at 5.31% or higher with the top 10% have conversion rates of 11.45% or higher (as of 2014). For instance Amazon’s conversion rate as of 2015 was 13% which is still 4 times higher than the national average (for Prime members its a staggering 74%!!!). Rates vary from industry to industry but most SMB’s should be looking at between 2% – 4% and not get misled by stellar companies like Amazon. So what if your rate is lower than 2%?

The main reasons for a low conversion rate

Normally the reasons for a low rate are an ugly, outdated and confusing site. There can be other big factors like your site doesn’t work on mobile devices and things like pop ups, slow page load times, no overall marketing strategy or method can drastically reduce your conversion rate. Finally an obvious killer is pricing.
The good news is that all these factors can in most cases easily be fixed or improved. The first set easily has the biggest effect so lets look at those. Ugly sites just don’t appeal to users the same way as ugly, dirty and outdated shops don’t make us want to come in. If your site is confusing and the “call to action” isn’t clear (the ongoing message in each step of “click here to buy” etc) then users attention spans get stretched as it’s all too easy to go to another site and potentially complete the whole process quicker from scratch.
Missing information can also sometimes be a killer, just having your contact details easily visible on all pages all the of the time can be a factor. Making them clickable, especially on mobile devices) means that users have the option of calling you instead of using the site. Nearly all business owners would say that their conversions are higher when they speak to someone, normally above 75% so getting the phone to ring is an obvious win.
All in all there are many detailed factors and if your rate is low it might also be a combination of the above elements. A good SEO or digital marketing company should be able to find and solve this issue quite easily.

How to improve it with Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

There are easy basic optimisations like line spacing, button placement, font colours, etc that are simple to implement but should really be the basic minimals for modern sites, but it’s surprising how many SMB’s who haven’t been working on their sites don’t have these simple strategies in place.
This can yield instant increases in your conversion rate, especially when your traffic is low.
For true CRO, larger sites may employ split testing (A/B testing) a page against itself and still see one copy of the same page performs better. This is normally time consuming and expensive so only worthwhile if your traffic is high and your site is big with many landing pages.
It’s worth noting that doubling your conversion rate is far easier than doubling your traffic. Any SEO company will tell you that increasing your traffic means gaining much higher rankings (normally into the top 3 positions for high search volume key terms) and or having more terms ranking. Whereas lifting your conversion rate is normally instant, and inherently less costly.
Overall its obvious that this should be monitored regularly and seasonal shifts as well as new competition have to be factored, but not knowing your conversion rate at all is the most expensive mistake you can make.

How do I know how well my website is working for me and my business?

This is the most important question when it comes to being an online business. Many SMB’s unfortunately ask this question when in reality it should be known and constantly monitored. It’s also easy to find out and you can measure year by year performance very quickly to equate to your turnover and valuate your marketing / SEO budget.

How is this done? Well they’re called “Google Search Console” and “Google Analytics”. SC was formerly known as “Webmaster Tools” (or GWMT, GWT) and is a free service provided by Google to control your sites broad search settings. “Analytics” gives data on how it is performing by measuring traffic and users in huge detail if needed.

Google’s amazing free tools allows a broad range of users (site owners, marketing professional, SEOs, Software Developers and App Designers).

It can do many many things not only to help your results but also to measure your sites performance. They are constantly evolving, Analytics can provide some incredibly deep data analysis for large corporate sites who have their own in house teams to analyse what they are doing and trying to achieve and SC can make sure your search settings are optimised for Google’s indexing requirements (submitting a site map, fixing errors and check a robots.txt file).

How do I get these services and how can I use them?

Getting them is relatively easy, an analytics tracking code must be inserted into the site (normally when it was created) and this allows Google to track data from that point onwards. Your web master can tell if you have one and there are some ways to check. If you have never had one you can’t see back in time, only from when you had it on your site. This can be implemented in a matter of minutes and unless you did’t want it, it really should have been done mandatorily by your site creator.

SC is also simple, creating an account and adding your site to it via the verification process which ensures only the right people have access to your info, after all your sites data is personal and can be very valuable to competitors and their marketers.

For most SMB’s though it comes down to two main KPI’s (key performance indicators) which are supplied by Analytics: Traffic and Bounce Rate. These may or may not seem obvious so let’s take a closer look:

Traffic:

Traffic or web site hits is the amount of users visiting your site.  The most important one is the overall amount normally viewed by month. This allows you to see increases and decreases so if you have an active SEO campaign you can see whether it is working or not.

There are 6 main types of traffic, and these are important especially regarding your SEO campaign:

1. Direct: Users who type your URL (domain name) into a Search Engine, i.e. users who already know who you are
2. Social: Users navigating from your presence on sites like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram etc
3. Email: Users who have followed a link from your email marketing campaign
4. Paid: Users who clicked on a PPC link like AdWords, Banner Ads and Pop Ups etc
5. Referral: Users who have actually clicked on a link from another site that has influence (the type of backlink you want), this includes directories
6. Organic: Users who have found you via a search query with key words

Your traffic can be measured in not only numbers, but over defined periods, how the users found you, where they are in the world, what time of day but also into device type like desktop, mobile, operating system etc meaning you can measure performance accurately spotting trends and targeting your market. It should be obvious that the whole point of an SEO campaign is to generate more “organic” traffic, as this is new users who have almost certainly never seen you before.

Bounce Rate:

This easily misunderstood stat measures a single page session on your site and is measured as a percentage and divided against all sessions. That means a user found your page and didn’t trigger anything else measurable before they left (like going to another page). It doesn’t have anything to do with the time spent on that page (which is commonly explained by marketers and SEO companies). All single page sessions are calculated as 0 seconds. Unfortunately this means that a high bounce rate like 75% isn’t necessarily a bad thing as users may find all they need on your homepage and call you etc. For shopping cart sites it’s an absolute killer and means users are leaving and not buying.

Averagely bounce rates are about 25% to 40% depending on your industry and higher is generally bad but not always. Analytics can delve deeper than you can possibly imagine measuring a users entire session with page times and clicks all tracked.

Measurable Marketing

It’s clear that even these two metrics can be interpreted many different ways and that SC and Analytics are powerful tools that can provide customised graphical reports for analysis. Knowing your basic metrics is important especially if your site has a reason to have traffic by being a business, after all, what is the point of having, being precious or worrying about your site when no one is seeing it or using it? Knowing these main stats will help you make important decisions, especially when it comes to SEO. Your online marketing team should help you with this, but knowing your main 2 stats should be something all business site owners know. They also help with calculating your ROI and conversion rate optimisation (or CRO) which we will look at shortly.

What are Links or Backlinks and how do they help my SEO and Google rankings?

Most site owners will have heard of links and how important they are but not necessarily fully understand what they are or how they work. There are different types of link and each one will have its own individual merits based on many factors making them all unique, even though two may seem identical.

When links are discussed by SEOs they are mainly referring to offsite links (popularity) pointing back towards your site, but there are also internal links within your site’s own pages and these are not back – links, as they do not link back (you see!).

How many links should I have to rank well in Google for my best keyphrases?

Well, there is no one single answer to this as all sites are different, but one thing we do know is that it isn’t just about overall quantity. Some sites rank well with just a few hundred links next to sites with thousands. There are many factors involved and whilst the amount you have is important as it shows activity and age, the most important factor is quality. This alone generates many questions in an ongoing online debate on this subject which has no real ultimate answer. However there are some simple basic rules of thumb. As discussed previously regarding being punished by aggressive black hat spammy link building, the opposite positive thing to do is also true and will help your site and it’s rankings. Constant ongoing link building in a natural way that is varied will never get you punished and slowly over time increase your rankings and traffic. Simply don’t do the same thing over and over again.

Are there different types of links?

Broadly speaking there are a few main categories of link types but all of them can be split into 2 simple categories by Google which are “earned” and “acquired”. The difference here is paid for links and ones that happened naturally on their own. There is obviously a middle ground where you can encourage or suggest people or sites write about you though. The point here is that Google is very good at spotting paid for links and punishing them, and spotting natural links and rewarding them.

The most common link types can be broadly broken down into coming from these types of sites:

Directories / Citations

Editorial / News

Blog Comments / Forums

Blog Posts / Articles

Images / Infographics

Do they all have the same power?

The short answer is no, but as ever it’s a lot more complicated than that. The biggest factor on your links is quality, and by that we mean what sites they are coming from. A link from the BBC is obviously going to be enormously powerful, but there are other factors too. The page the link is on, the traffic that page gets, the number of other links coming from that page, the amount of words and their overall subject and where the link is on the page and what form it takes. A good example would be a site that gets genuine traffic, is all about one subject, is on a page that gets visited and is old, has almost no other links coming from that page and has your link in the middle of all that unique content with anchor text. What is anchor text? Well these are the word(s) that are normally highlighted that when clicked take you to your site. Often you will just see the raw URL link which means it has no anchor text, but you can place that inside any words on a web page and it can be told to be indexed or ignored by search engines. Overall one link from the BBC could be as powerful as 1000 links from various other low quality websites, but bear in mind that almost everyone has some poor quality links. It’s just a case of the balance and whether or not Google will deem them harmful.

For example:

Here is a natural example of keywords matching the anchor text:

“ . . . now you know a bit more about links see how they can help your SEO results and rankings.”

Here is an unnatural way of matching a keyphrase to anchor text:

“ . . . now you know a bit more about links see how the best SEO company in Pattaya can help.”

Whilst the latter is not completely bad in isolation, it’s best to vary it and not keep trying to force the same keywords or exact key phrase matches into your content. You will undoubtedly have obvious ones like click here and visit website which is fine. The point is to make them varied and all of your links should be coming from various realistic sources and sites that aren’t built for black hat manipulation of Google.

Has my website been punished by Google and what can I do?

There is lots of talk mainly by SEO companies about punishments and the threat of possibly being punished by Google for various reasons (like working with another company, doing the SEO yourself etc). In reality, getting punished is quite rare and there are only 2 ways of doing so.

Ranking Punishment

The first is an algorithmical punishment. This simply means that you will suddenly drop in the rankings quite massively over a short period of time (normally in less than 24 hours). If you were ranking strongly to begin with this can lead to a massive slump in traffic and hence new business. The only way of knowing is to be keeping an eye on your rankings and knowing what your key terms are. This punishment is simply Google saying “this is where you should actually be” after it has uncovered an amount of black hat activity (normally bad or high quantity link building). Previous to the start of 2016 Google used to round up all the bad links it spotted and then punish all the offenders overnight about once a year. Since 2016 it has now been punishing links (and content) live, so just as there was a benefit to link building immediately, there is now the equal harm.

Penalty Notice

The second scenario is less common and it’s worse as your entire site can be de-indexed. Basically it won’t even be found in Google for anything. Your site still works but you won’t be able to get to it from Google. Not just for key terms but for the domain name etc. This takes some seriously bad behaviour on an epic scale and you will have been notified with a penalty notice in your Search Console (formerly Web Master Tools). This email will tell you that you have been de-indexed but probably won’t say why specifically. It can be that your site was hacked or has a virus but it’s most common that you have been misbehaving.

Common causes for rankings to drop and sites being punished

The are a few common causes for rankings to drop. One being that your site has been hacked into and used for spammy purposes (having lots of outbound porn or gambling links for example). You will normally be oblivious to this and Google will inform you in it’s message somewhat that action needs to be taken. The other most frequent cause is a large amount black hat SEO activity which most commonly means spammy links (lot’s of them) or bad quality content pages being added (lot’s of these too). Both these things will look suspicious and low quality (spammy) to Google and you can get punished. Links are the more common thing to get punished for as these can be done en masse by low quality SEO companies and are less noticeable by site owners. Bad content needs more time by a webmaster to be added to your site and is more instantly noticeable. Often this content is “spun”, meaning it was taken from original content and re written by machine to essentially create another version the original to make a site larger. This almost never reads well and Google will notice especially if done aggressively.

What to do if my rankings have disappeared

Both these scenarios are completely rectifiable but will take time and some skill, commodities most business owners don’t have much of if their primary revenue stream has been removed.

If you have had a penalty notice then there are steps to follow back through Googles Search Console (GSC, formerly Web Master Tools or WMT’s) to have your site re-examined by Google once the virus or huge amount of spam has been removed (normally by re installing a recent back up of your site) and if it passes then this test then your rankings should be fully restored very quickly with little or no change.

Bad content can be re written, or if there is a lot it can be removed permanently. Links are hard to remove manually and it really does take an awful lot to get punished heavily in a short amount of time, but you can use Google’s disavow tool. This needs to be done by an experienced SEO company as this can be a very risky thing to do. You are basically doing Google’s job for it by telling it what you only think are bad links. Google will then examine these more closely and remove their negative impact if you are correct, but it will also examine the whole site these links come from, all other sites on the same IP address, and all other links on that site leading to more punishments. This is a complex topic and it’s fair to say that most SEO companies would never recommend their users using the disavow tool on their own or without their input. Recovering from a Google ranking drop is almost as complex as gaining the rankings themselves so you should nearly always involve the help of a professional SEO company but it is entirely possible and never permanent.

How to find the right SEO company for you and your business

Due to all the misunderstandings of what SEO actually is, and the bad reputation a lot of black hat SEO companies have generated for the industry, it’s not surprising that many small business owners shy away from having a professional SEO company get them some results. This is perfectly understandable, after all, you’re paying for something you can’t really see, from a company that is quite possibly not in your country, for something that takes time to work and done by people you may never meet! Thats if it works at all. But taking time to understand what it is and what it can do, talking to the right company who takes the time to understand your company and your aims can transform your business. SEO is truly a measurable form of marketing (actually one of the few), so working with a company who shows progress, reports on what they are doing will give you a strong ROI in the long term.

You should start by knowing if SEO can work for you. Whilst this sounds a little contradictory there are a few rare situations where it might not. Results are always achievable, but you have to be realistic in what you can do with your budget. If you want to compete for a hugely searched key phrase that has lots of competition and your site is brand new with little budget for SEO then you are going to struggle. The other main reason why SEO wouldn’t be the best option is if you have been punished either a sudden big drop in rankings or de-indexed and removed from Google completely.

Knowing what to ask and be asked when talking to SEO companies

Your SEO company should have an initial consultation, and by asking the right questions about your site and your business, they should be able to give you a good idea of cost, time and expected results. If they start talking technical jargon at you, don’t ask you any pertinent questions and start quoting prices then you should be very wary.

A good SEO company should talk to you in a clear and easily understandable way, not promise miracles, have evidence of results and preferably not working for your competitors. Essentially there is going to be a lot of trust due to the reasons stated earlier. A lot of site owners like to go local and meet up, specifically to fill that need of trust. But the most local SEO company isn’t necessarily the one with the best results or that is right for you. Normally a referral will help as that is how the best business is always done as you will trust the person giving it.

In this current digital world where you can work with people all over the globe where do you start if not local? The truth is most people don’t search, they are nearly always cold called and will choose from that or they will ask their friends. Simply “googling” best SEO company may or may not get you speaking to the right SEO company.

 

There are also good questions that you can ask them too, like what current examples do they have of their work? Do they and references you can speak to? Do you report on all your work? Are they working with your competitors? All these factors combined should give you a good idea of the quality of the company you are dealing with.

Other factors in choosing an SEO agency

Cost also isn’t necessarily a major factor. If you have been quoted a cheaper price you have been quoted different work. You’re not buying the same SEO from any individual company like you are buying groceries. At the end of the day you have to use some logic, common sense and a bit of gut instinct like you do with any other business decision and use the points we have made above.

Be very cautious of companies offering “pay on results”: would you operate your business this way? It only incentivises bad practice and black hat techniques. Also there is no such thing as an absolute guarantee, after all, is your SEO company in charge of Google?