Social Media for Ranking

Top retailers will tell you that Social Media isn’t very good for generating traffic direct from the links that you put in your Twitter feeds, Facebook pages or Pinterest boards; but what it is good for is providing the big search engines with suggestions on your engagement with the social sphere.

If you post lots and people engage with you more than others in your market, then that alone is a good indicator that your pages might need to rank higher than your competitors. That is the REAL value of social media to businesses today.

Your Search Engine Profile

SEO (Optimising your site for search engines) is a balancing act and its becoming much clearer to more and more SEO professionals that this balancing act can be a very delicate one when looking at activities needed to help a webpage move up the rankings; and these activities go towards developing a Search Engine Profile for a particular page or site.

There are numerous factors that you can spend your time on, some of the more basic ones being:

On Site Factors
  • Is the HTML coding clean and correct?
  • Can search engines easily see all of your webpages within a couple of ’clicks’?
  • Is your navigational structure working in favour of visitors and search engines?
  • Are all your internal pages linked to from other internal pages?
  • Do you have a good robot.txt file on your site?
  • Etc etc
Off Site Factors
  • Are you Followed and Liked on key social media channels?
  • Is your site mentioned often on social channels?
  • Do you have a good number of backlinks to your site?
  • Are ALL backlinks of a good quality?

Do too much of one element and not enough of another (i.e. too much time with social media without building fresh new content on your site) and you’ll find it difficult to rank well, you need a good blend of a number of different factors (social, on site elements and quality link building etc).

But to what degree you do each of these (your Search Engine Profile) differs from sector to sector and website to website, the important element is to work out what your key competitors are doing and what their likely Search Engine Profile is, then attempt to get somewhere close to that.

It is unfortunately a long, manual job, but it’s a job worth doing and will pay you dividends in the long term.

Optimise your LinkedIn pages

Whether it’s your person page and you want the next great job offer, or it’s your company page, a well optimise page will do you a world of good.

Think Visually
Use bold images to provide a real world glimpse into you or your business.

Think Digitally
Whatever you say, keep it brief. Remember that online, attention span is shorter.

Think Video
Showcase with real stories or examples to engage members more deeply.

Think Customised
Adapt your content to viewers based on their LinkedIn profiles. Target based on geography, job title, industry that you want to attract etc.

Lost rankings due to Hummingbird?

Impossible. Googles major overhaul of their algo that was recently announced, but unlike their previous Penguin and Panda updates, Hummingbird is not a penalty-based update (i.e. aimed at cleaning their SERPs from low-quality content), instead their changes is in response to the way that we are starting to query their search database.  Google now better understands the meaning behind our searches rather than understanding the ‘search terms’ that we might actually use. 

This is needed as more of us generate conversational queries, these are longer more complex questions and are growing as we use mobile and in particular voice searches more. 

If for example you are using a mobile device and you talk about Starbucks then Google knows that there is a good chance that you want the location of your nearest coffee shop, so it is more likely to serve the stores location results to you rather than information about the chain – Google is starting to better understand context

So a quick tip to help Google provide better search results would be to understand what your users might actually be asking of your products or solutions and use those keyphrases in your pages; questions like “how do I ….”, “where can I ….”, “what is the ….” etc etc This will help future proof your rankings. 

So Hummingbird didn't hit my rankings! 

You haven’t been hit by Hummingbird but your rankings have been hit (as many have), what is the reason?

Just prior to Hummingbird, Google did release a number of updates to Penguin and Panda, and it is highly likely that one of these has hit your site. 

Let’s consider what Google wants to achieve for its users. It wants to be able to provide the best search results. How will it know when it has achieved this? 
Quite simply is a search user visits and interacts with a page that was served in search results, then Google can pretty much accept that its ranking for that particular page must have been right. 

But what indicators can Google take that a visitor is happy with the page that they found? Well in really simple terms, ANY interaction with a site is likely to equate to longer time on the page (and site), this means longer average time on page AND lower bounce rates. 

So I would look at the pages on your site that have the highest & exit and check their bounce rate and average visit duration; if they look wrong, then that would be a good indicator for me as to why Google has slapped you in their SERPs. 

If visitors are leaving your site quickly, why would that be? What are they expecting to see that they are not? What information is missing? What expectation isn’t being satisfied? Fix these page problems and your rankings will slowly improve. 

Now I realise that this isn’t a perfect science. IF like many site you have contact details for example on all pages and that’s all the visitor wants then you will tend to get a higher than average bounce rate and a lower than average duration time, but the figures must stack up in Googles mind.

What’s the Purpose of Business Development?

You have a business with a great marketing plan, an absolutely brilliant brand image, you’re growing brand equity, have a constant supply of successful campaigns going out, through social media channels you are increasing your Fans, Followers, Pins etc and engaging with your market.

Are you booking the right kind of (profitable) work with the clients you pursued, or are you a hapless bystander who took whatever projects (and price) that came your way?

So what’s next, how do you take your business to the next level?

Answering these questions is where business development comes in.

Business Development Role

A supreme understanding of all media (both online and offline) is just the start, the key role of business development is to understand to the nth degree customer relationships, how to build brand advocates, and how to cultivate strong brand equity through customer service.

Business development must involves an evaluation of customer feedback and some form of sentiment analysis to determine if current the marketing strategies and tactical outputs are indeed as effective as originally planned.

Only by working through this analysis can it be determined if there are any missed opportunities or refinement to existing strategies or campaigns.

Where Businesses Fail

We are all seen businesses and business owners start off with the very best of intentions. They go big (often punching above their weight), as they should, they employ the perfect marketing strategies designed to target their perfect audience (and customers), and slowly they start to build their brand equity. However, if their marketing plan is not evaluated and re-evaluated how can they be sure that their plan is continuing to be effective (or are they simply wasting time, money and energy!).

As technology changes, trends change, and the target audience responds differently to marketing messages, so much the marketing plan needs to change. Consider the following questions when re-evaluating marketing plan:
  • Have the core demographic changed?
  • Is there any new technology been employed by the market? (apps, mobile devices, web platforms, media etc) 
  • Have the trends changed? How have changing trends altered your audience’s behaviour or attention?
  • Are you still making the best of your company’s available resources? 
  • Have there been any legal, political, social or major economic changes since the marketing strategy was devised?
  • Is every aspect of the business on track with the marketing plan? Is every department remaining consistent? 
  • Is every aspect of your marketing and advertising still remaining true to your brand message?

The Purpose of Business Development

As already mentioned, Business Development should understand completely customer relationships and how the market and customer behaviour changes, how the interations you have within your business alter those customer relationships.

With this knowledge, business development teams are able to refine marketing plans and improve your overall business plan.

They should be in a position to be able to:

  • Identify gaps within your marketing strategy
  • Recognise unused internal resources and missed opportunities
  • Cultivate and grow current customer/partner relationships
  • Attract new customers and partners
  • Brand advocates
The more you can let ‘business development’ into the marketing planning process, the more you can tie activity to desired results, the more leverage you have in driving client development behaviour.

TOP 5 Important Rules in Website Design

When it comes to designing your website, extra attention should be paid to every tiny detail to make sure it performs the best that it can do in serving its purpose. Here are five vitally important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

Rule 1: Do not use splash pages
A splash page is the first page that you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter", and that's it!  They are just pretty doors with no real substance.  All websites have one purpose and that's to get people in looking at your content - don't make your visitors come to a door first and don't give your visitors have a reason to click on the "Back" button!
Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

Rule 2: Have a simple and clear navigation
You MUST provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child would know how to use your site.
Definitely stay away from complicated Flash based menus or complex multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

Rule 3: Have a clear indication of where the user is
When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to ensure that they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site with the utmost of ease. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion usually leads to "abandon ship"!

Rule 4: Avoid using audio on your site
If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine, better still if you like the idea of using audio place a 'Play Music' option/link/button somewhere prominent so that they can play it of they want to.  Similarly with video, there is nothing more annoying that video starting before I've clicked the 'Play' button!.

Rule 5: Do not use excessive banner advertisements
Some form of advertising is perfectly fine and is acceptable to most browsers and visitors; anyway, most net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate.
A different approach would be to provide easy access to your most valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.






Advertise, Don't Spam

There is a really fine line between advertising and spam and unfortunately many business owners and new marketeers do not understand the difference between the two.
This is really important because while a clever, well designed and executed internet marketing campaign can help to attract new business and keep existing customers loyal, spam is highly likely to alienate both new customers and existing customers alike, resulting in damage to your profit margin.

During this post will take a good look at just three basic online marketing strategies such as email campaign, banner ads and message board posts and describe how each can quickly cross this fine line from great advertising to spam.

Email Campaigns
These can also be very useful tools to internet marketers, but again, they must be done correctly.
These campaigns may involve sending periodic e-newsletters filled with information as well as advertisements, short, informative email courses or emails offering discounts on products and services.
Loyal customers who opt into your email list (and you MUST get opt-in addresses to ensure the success of your campaigns) will likely not view these emails as spam as they may know your business or have dealt with you in the past, and therefore may purchase additional products and services from your business as a result of this marketing strategy or at the very least you will remain 'front of mind' when they decide they need to purchase solutions that you offer. Additionally, potential customers who have specifically requested additional information on your products and services will also find this type of marketing to be useful.

However, email recipients who did not request information are likely to view your emails as spam and unlikely to result in a sale or goodwill, further more if the recipients of spam email decide to take action against you then you could find a fine coming your way.
Harvesting email addresses in a deceptive manner and using these addresses to send out mass emails will likely always be considered to be spam.

It's also worth noting that sending an email to someone you did business with too long ago may be inappropriate too; so remove anyone on your list who you haven't have any dealings or contact within the past 2 years.

Banner Ads
These were once one of the most popular strategies accompany an internet marketing plan, and they still have their place in modern online marketing tactics.
These ads are usually the ones that appear at the top of websites and they tend to take up the full width of the site; its is from this appearance that they earned the name banner ads but actually banner ads can refer to a variety of different sizes and shapes which appear in an array of different locations on a website.

In many cases the business owner purchases advertising space on these websites but the banner ad could also be placed as part of an exchange or an affiliate marketing campaign. Exchanges are situations in which one business owner or marketeer is granted permission to place a banner ad on someones website, in exchange for this other business owner is allowed to post a banner ad on his site.
These are great agreements and are usually made made between individual business owners with complementary businesses or as part of exchanges facilitated by a third party. In the case of affiliate marketing, an affiliate posts and advertisement for your business in exchange for compensation when the banner ad produces a desired effect such as generating website traffic or generating a sale. The terms of these agreements are determined beforehand and are generally based on a scale of pay per impression, pay per click or pay per sale or lead.

Now that you understand what banner ads are, it is also important to understand how they can be easily overused and appear to be 'spammy'.
Expertly placing your banner ad on a few websites which are highly likely to attract an audience similar to your target audience is very smart marketing, placing your banner ad on any website which will display the ad regardless of the target audience can be construed as spam. Internet browsers who feel as though your banner ads are everywhere could take an instance disliking to your business and may become extremely unlikely to purchase products or services from you as a result of your banner ads.

Message Boards
Finally, message boards provide an excellent opportunity for business owners to obtain some free advertising where it will be noticed by members of the target audience.
If the products and services you offer appeal to a specific niche, it is worthwhile to join message boards and online forums related to your industry of choice.

Here you will find a large population of internet users who may have an interest in your products. You might consider including a link to your business in your signature or posting the link when it is applicable to the conversation. However, care should be taken to carefully review the message board guidelines to ensure you are not doing anything inappropriate. This is smart marketing. Conversely, replying to every message with a link to your website when it is not relevant to the conversation is likely to be construed as spam by other members. Once they begin to view your posts as spam, they are not likely to visit your website via the links you post.

Some forums attach various rules to their posting guidelines (i.e. you can only post a link after a certain amount of time or after you post a certain number of helpful posts for example).

The Ultimate Twitter Starters Guide

Setting up and getting started:
  • Choose a short username so that users can easily retweet your posts easily without running out of 140 characters
  • Ensure that you have completed your profile fully
  • Write a short description of yourself and your business 
  • Include a link to your website in your description
  • You have added a clear picture of yourself/logo
  • You have connected your Facebook profile to your Twitter profile so that you can also post tweets to your Facebook page automatically
  • Ensure that you can choose which notifications you want to get by email so that you never lose any opportunity for engagement
  • You know that you can get a Twitter app for your smartphone and tablet so you can tweet on the go
  • You are aware that you can change your profile theme so that it is more appealing to your audience
  • You are aware that you can create and manage widgets from your settings menu

Tweeting:
  • You are aware that a tweet can only be 140 characters or 130 characters if you include a link
  • You know that you can use tools to shrink the URLs you want to include in your tweets
  • You are aware that it’s better to keep your tweets shorter than 130 characters so that other users can retweet them and not lose any valuable information


You know what hashtags are:

  • You are aware that you have a list of trending topics and hashtags on the left hand side of your Twitter home page
  • You are using one or two hashtags for each of your tweets
  • You are using trending hashtags in order to raise engagement and get more followers
  • You are aware that you can promote a tweet so that more people can see it
  • You know that you can add photos and images on your tweets, not just text posts
  • You are aware that if you ask in your tweets for people to “retweet” and you don’t shorten it to RT then you have a better chance of getting retweets
  • You are asking questions and answering other peoples’ questions in order to raise engagement
  • You are aware that you can use tools to schedule tweets for when you are busy (try Hootsuite or Socialoomph)

You know what a direct message is:

  • You know that you can only send direct messages to people that you are following and that are following you back
  • You are aware that you can schedule direct messages to send to all of your new followers via Socialoomph
  • You know that you have to tweet often as your followers’ home pages or constantly changing 
BUT
  • You are not sending too many tweets at the same time so as not to flood your Followers streams
  • You have checked your analytics and You know when your audience is most active on Twitter and that is when you tweet the most

Following and Followers:

  • You are aware that it’s better to have less, but more engaged followers than thousands of uninterested followers
  • You are following people that are part of your target audience
  • You are aware that you can use tools to bulk unfollow people who are inactive or are not following you back
  • You are constantly interacting with your followers:
    • Retweeting their posts
    • Answering their questions
    • Thanking them for retweeting or sharing your tweets and posts
    • Favoriting their tweets
BUT

  • You are no sending out too many sales messages


Tools:


  • You have searched Google and you are aware that there is a plethora of tools that you can use to:
  • Manage several Twitter profiles and other social media profiles from the same dashboard
  • Schedule tweets and DMs
  • Schedule recurring tweets
  • Shrink URLs
  • Get your Twitter analytics so that you can tweet better


And:

  • You are committed to mastering the art of Twitter engagement – and growing your business!

Pay By Results SEO (Risk and Reward)

I've done a lot of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for a lot of businesses in the past, but I rarely know the specific ins and outs of the business that I do the SEO for; I obviously understand the basics – I understand what they are selling and how they prefer to sell it, I understand the market they want to sell into and more importantly I spend time trying to understand the market, but I often don’t know the ins and outs of how they run their business.

The point is I don’t need to know, I only need to know how to get the best from their website, and determine how best to get traffic (the right traffic) to their site; it’s the owner of the businesses role to understand their business end to end; and that’s why businesses sometimes need SEO ‘experts’ (I would never personally class myself as an expert!).

We take away the stress of getting pages to the top search engine rankings; we do the strategic thinking, we look at and determine the best keywords (often in partnership with the business), we then go out to other sites on the world wide web and try to get links back to the clients site (the best way to improve search engine ranking btw).

So when people say, “You don’t need an SEO expert or consultant” – I sometimes think they are wrong; sometimes businesses do need help in this area.

One area where I do agree with these people is that often, these SEO companies are just after your money, they aren't bothered about your ranking – they just want you to pay them a monthly or one-off fee and that’s it.

What businesses do need is an SEO person that understands that they are putting a lot of faith and trust in their site and their brand, and that they do not want to may a lot for no/little results. Payment should only be made if you get A, B, and C pages on the first page of Google (top 10 results) for X, Y and Z keywords. That SEO person is me.

I will only charge you if I get the results that you want. Contact me for more information andrew@andrewscaife.com





Link Building is NOT Dead!

I recently read a short blog post about how Link Build is supposed to be dead (in fact illegal!), but that Google's Eric Enge it's been suggested that "webmasters to change their thinking about how they build links", in fact it was suggested that "[webmasters] need to reverse their process and should really think first about compelling content."

Hang on!  This is exactly what real link building has been about since day one, any webmaster or SEO bod worth their salt will first ensure that the target website is fit for purpose, it stands to reason.

Whilst I recognise that this is a really simplistic explanation of the process, but lets imagine that you have a really poor website design with poor content but my sheer dumb look or black hat techniques you manage to get more links that everyone else for your chose keywords/keyphrases; get to the top of Google SERPs anyone that clicks through to your page is going to be mightily disappointed and push that back button! 

So stop thinking first about getting those links, and instead build a great site with fab content that will make people want to visit you in the first place!

PPC: bid for the right position

 This tip isn't the most obvious for lots of Google AdWords users so I thought I would pass it on as it could a) save you money, b) get you an improved CTR and c) get an improved conversion rate.

Let me start my saying that most new AdWords users start off with a single bidding strategy for AdWords and that strategy pretty much stays with them forever, it’s a good strategy, it’s easy to measure and it does bring with it some success, but it’s flawed!

Adwords offers fairly simple system where the amount you bid, combined with your Quality Score (a figure calculated by Google), equates to what AdWords position on Google your ad will end up with (a position from one to ten)

As a reminder, here the Adwords (Sponsored) ads are highlighted in red; I've also highlighted in red the ad position number.





This strategy that new AdWords users deploy is that they want position 1, it’s the highest position and is therefore the best position to be in right!  It’s the topmost position, so will be seen first as users scan the search engine results, it must be a winning strategy! Wrong (well sometimes it’s the wrong strategy to adopt).

A general rule of thumb and the one that should sound alarm bells is that the users of Google have become blind to the top ads, rather like we all have with banner ads (the ad images that appear at the top of web pages), we all tend to ignore those now.

What you need to do is look at your AdWords stats to determine which ad position you tend to get the most clicks and again as a rule of thumb the lower the average position the cheaper your clicks will be.

Take my latest gig as an example, we were paying more and more for top position ads and we got into a price war with our competitors, so it was getting expensive; no-one really knew what ad position was best for us, but a quick analysis showed that we got more clicks and an improved conversion rate when our ad was around position 3. 
Armed with this little bit of knowledge I did a simple test, I reduced the Max CPC bids where we had an average position better than 3 and increased the Max CPC where we were below position 3. (The plan was to bid for position 3 in all case).

These reduction in bid strategy meant that our ad was less likely to be shown; but where the ad was shown we would be closer to the natural search links, therefore be seen as more relevant, hopefully resulting in an improved CTR and conversion rate.

In just two weeks impressions dropped 18%, clicks dropped 15%, but CTR went up 5% and conversions increased a whopping 17%.  I’m now paying 30% less for AdWords here but gaining on my better conversions.

Don’t get me wrong, years ago when I started using Google AdWords I bid for the position 1 and did everything in my power to maintain it, it worked for me, it brought in business, but little did I know that I could have reduced my costs and brought in more business!

Remember, calculate where you best ad position is and bid for this ideal position, which isn't always the top one! 

Good luck


What can your website learn from Social Media?

Social Media is the internet success story, we all engage with it in some way shape or form, we love the social channels that we have signed up to, they keep us coming back several times a day; but what exactly attracts us to these sites, and what can we learn from them that we can implement in our own websites to keep visitors engaged and coming back for more?

Most social media sites have the same six attributed that make them successful:

They are Fulfilling – in that visitors can easy discover when they can and get immediate delivery of information and actions. Does your website allow visitors to get to what's important to them quickly and understand what they can/should do on your pages?

They are a Rich source of information – all sources of information at your fingertips, no digging around for what's important.  How does your website stack up? Do you supply rich data? Can visitors see content, price, availability, images, reviews, comments etc all on one page?

They are very Open - very easy to easy to sign up and start their fulfillment process; how is your sign up process? Can users sign up with with an email address and password or do you want their life story first?

Participation is welcomed - not only welcomed but it is positively encouraged in many ways - reviews, comments, ratings etc  Does your site see this level of engagement, so you make users feel that they can contribute and that their contributions are worthwhile?

Remixing the data - many social sites mix up their data a little, so in Twitter for example I can easy find other tweets that the people I follow find interesting.  It's yet another example of how social channels are providing a rich stream of relevant data even if it is pulled from different sources.  Do you supply just the data that you can on your site or are you mixing it up a little?  How about providing news from different news channels for example!

Personalised experience – these social sites are learning from individuals interactions and use that to suggest other things that you might be interested in; they know you are logged in, what you have done in the past and what you might like to do in the future - does your site touch any of that?


I'm not suggesting that your website does all of this - but learn from the social media sites that you use and ask yourself if you can take some of the great elements that you love and put them on your site.

Search Remains First, Social Second For How People Find Websites

In an interesting report by Forrester Research they highlight that the majority of consumers still find websites through natural search (Google, Bing etc) rather than through Social Media (Twitter, Facebook etc); which to those of us that have been around search, SEO and Social Media for more years than we often care to remember doesn't surprise us.

Even the larger Retail businesses who originally set out to capture lots of web traffic from social media have given up on it and instead use social to influence their search engine rankings and thus bring in more traffic through natural search.

Remember that Google loves it when consumers love your brand, in their eyes, if consumers really love your brand then thy probably want to see your in the results when they try searching for you. 
Social channels is a excellent place for Google to try to understand how much love the market has for you, so if you engage with your social media Followers and Friends, Google will pickup this signal and improve your search rankings.



Panda and Penguin updates from Google


Lets first of all remember that Google simply loves sites that users love, they want us all to create sites that people love to share with their friends, post of social media sites, bookmark and come back to time and time again, so over the coming months Google is planning a number of updates to it Panda and Penguin algorithm updates to help then serve up great sites.

Panda was introduced in 2011 to weed out sites that have a low quality content (scraped or stolen from other sites or just not useful enough); Penguin was rolled out in 2012 to weed out sites that got links from dubious sources (usually link farms, low quality sites/forums/blogs etc).

Panda

Looks like Google is trying to soften the edges of what they class a poor quality site, certainly some sites with little content (mainly because volumes of copy are not necessary) did get hit by Panda, but in the near future Google will be using some new Authority signals to address this.

These changes to the Authority signals routine should improve the ranking for smaller sites that have a single theme, and has a decent number of good authoritative links.  Better for the smaller sites than the big boys.

Penguin

Google learnt a lot from the original Penguin updates and they did manage to find and destroy a lot of spammy sites that did well in rankings because they got their links from link farms and other low quality sites; they now have a deeper understanding of this murky areas of SEO; so with this extra knowledge they are updating their link analysis algorithm to capture more spammy linked sites.

They will also look to reduce the cluster of results from a single domain on page one of their SERPs.

All in all it looks like some good changes for webmasters that just want to create a decent site for their visitors and are not interested in gaming Google.

Optimising Your AdWord Ads


I’m not going to teach you to suck eggs, but let’s get some basics out of the way.

You have the following to play with:

Headline25 characters
Description Line 135 characters
Description Line 235 characters
Display URL35 characters
Destination URL1024 characters

Headline

This is the most important part of your text ad. It should feature a top keyword in you ad group to show clear relevance to the users search query.  Consider using the dynamic keyword insertion feature for an even stronger relevance.


Description Lines 1 and 2

This is your opportunity to better describe your offering and compel the searcher to the action you want them to take next.  Use these lines to describe the value proposition of what you are offering.  Be sure to include keywords and a strong call to action – tell everyone why they should click on your ad, create a sense of urgency.


Display URL

The Display URL should include a top keyword if at all possible (i.e. www.company.com/top-keyword) to further engage with user and to indicate that your site is highly relevant to their search.  This will improve your click through rate (CTR).


Destination URL

The Destination URL is the actual landing page that users will reach if they click on your ad.  Any offer that you make in your ad should be easily visible on the landing page so that the page becomes more relevant to the ad and in turn helps to maximise your Quality Score.

10 Common Business Website Mistakes

I've managed many different website projects and now feel that it's time to show the 10 most common business website mistakes out there.

1.  Using A Brochure Design

Numerous businesses basically take their print brochure and turn it into a website.  A website isn't a print medium; websites and printed material are used differently by their audiences, the interaction with the reader is completely different for both, and hence the designs and user experience need to be completely different.


2. Not Having A Strong Call To Action

What do you want visitors to your website to do?  Fill in a form?  Visit a download page? Call you? Focus on what the primary action is that you want your website visitor to take and ensure that the action is obvious.  Use buttons that are a different colour to anything else on the site to draw their attention.  Use a subtle shaded background to draw their attention to particular pieces of information or calls to action that you want them to take etc.

3.  Ignoring SEO

I must admit that I've been guilty of this myself, but it's important to get some of the basics right here.  Ensure that all your pages have the basic Meta Tags completed (specifically the TITLE and DESCRIPTION one as these could be used and displayed in search engine results.
Read my Real Basic SEO Tips for more information.

4.  Paying for Design and Not Copy

Too many businesses will pay a heap of money for a great design then ruin the finished product by inserting all of their old, lousy content into the site.  If you are willing to pay for a designer then you are willing to pay for a good copywriter!  Even if you can't afford much and can't afford to rewrite all of your pages then just search Google for "Cheap Copywriters" - remember to get a few quotes before you pick one!

5.  Failing To Define Who They Are

Your brand is important to you and your business; without it you are nothing.
I guess you know what your brand stands for, so here is a quick test for you.  Visit your website and see if you can see evidence of your brand promise or value proposition within THREE seconds!  If you can't then I'm sure your visitors can't either!

6.  Contact Forms

People really hate filling these out and many website just have them to ask for [name], [email address] and [comments]!  What's the use?  Just provide an email address and your prospect will supply you all this without asking and without they having to complete a silly form!

7.  About Us

Much of what a website should be about is providing some element or trust and confidence in your business and brand ... so why do so many sites miss out lots of information about themselves in the "About Us" section of their sites.  As these are one of the most visited pages on your site then this is one great chance to sell yourself and your achievements.

8.  Using Flash Intros

Don't do it, no-one likes them and they add absolutely no value to your website at all!  They are just very annoying.

9.  No Goal

Some business owners make their sites an extension of their business cards and as such their sites lack a direct goal.  Every website should have a purpose whether it's to generate a lead, generate a sale, build brand exposure or give more information. Homepages should be making visitors click though to a great landing page that will convert.

10.  Ignoring Social Sharing

Whether you simply have your Twitter account in good view or allow visitors to share the page they are on through their own social networks, you need  to include them.  More and more of us are engaging with social networks and we are happy to promote great content through them.

Google AdWords Quality Score


Google uses an algorithm to decide an ads Quality Score, the higher your Quality Score the more your ad will be shown and the cheaper each click will be!

Whilst the exact working out of the scoring system is a big Google secret we can confidently say that the main elements that decide the Quality Score are - Ad Click Through Rate (CTR), Relevancy of the text used in the ad and the relevancy/quality of the landing page.

It’s estimated that the importance of these are:

Ad CTR = 65 percent
Relevancy of ad text = 20 percent
Relevancy of the landing page = 10 percent
Other = 5 percent

It seems clear therefore that the best thing you can do to get more AdWords clicks to your site and pay less doing it is to improve your ad copy; doing this will definitely improve the CTR and improve your Quality Score in doing so!

I’ll take more about how to improve your AdWord Ad copy later.  Keep watching.

Eight Hour Marketing Plan™

Develop a basic Marketing Plan in only 8 hours with the 8 Hour Marketing Plan™
I first published my eight hour marketing plan in 2000 when I worked with a number of online businesses to try to get them to understand how easy it was to develop a simple plan.  This is a little out of date now and I will get around to updating it at some time; but I thought it was worth publishing anyway.

Hour 1 - Information gathering about your business

Get yourself a large box. Gather as much information as you can in one hour. This may not seem like long, but believe me after one hour you will be glad to stop ... and surprised at how much information you have gathered!.
Do not stop to read any of it ... this is the gathering phase. You may enlist others to help you in this or any other phase, but keep them within the same one hour restriction.

Your gathering should include all of your past advertising and marketing materials. Include items such as letterheads, envelopes, business cards, direct-mail pieces, magazine ads, Yellow Pages ads, invoices, statements, counter cards, sales samples, packaging materials, press releases, PR stories, promo items, print outs of web pages and anything else used to market your company.

Next, add sales statistical information available about your company. Place sales reports from the past three years in the box. Look for breakout information such as sales by year, month, product line, customer and geographical area. Place any target information or sales rep information in the box. When your time is up, stop. If you happen to run across something else, drop it in the box, but don't spend any more time on this. The secret is to keep to the time limit.


Hour 2 - Information gathering about your customers and competitors

Use a second box to gather information about your customers and your competitors, but again, do so within a one-hour time frame. Put in the box copies of your customer/client lists, details about your top customers, mailing lists, etc. If you have time, talk to your best customers and ask them why they do business with you.

Competitor information can be easily gleaned from several sources (web sites, in-house material etc).
Find copies of their magazine ads. Focus on the information that is readily available.


Hour 3 - Preparation

This third block should be used to compile the documents you have gathered into meaningful information. Again, give yourself one hours of uninterrupted time and, this time, you may want to consider getting away from your office or normal place of work.
Spread out all of the contents of your first box onto a table. With a note pad handy, start by looking at the sales numbers. Take a few moments to jot down the answers to these questions, as well as others you may have:
  • Who are your biggest clients?
  • What do they buy from you?
  • What months are the most successful for you?
  • What is your best product line?
  • What are your sales trends?
Next, look at all of your marketing materials. Spread them out on the table. Think about each piece, as well as the entire collection. Obviously, you could spend a whole day critiquing your sales numbers and your marketing items. But by keeping the exercise to just one hour (remember you can build on this work later), you will better focus your attention. Here are some questions for this part of the exercise:

  • What do your marketing pieces say about you?
  • Is there a consistency to your approach?
  • To whom are you speaking?
  • Do the pieces tell the message you want told?
  • How do your message increase sales?
  • What relationship does your marketing team have with your sales team?
As you're making these notes, take one sheet of paper and designate it the "ideas page". As an idea comes into your mind ... no matter how crazy ... write it down.


Hour 4 - More Preparation

Now, put the sales numbers and the marketing materials aside.

Take the information and materials about your clients and your competitors and place them on the table. Select your three strongest competitors and your 10 best customers.

Spend a few minutes (3-4) thinking about each of them. Then ask yourself the following questions:

  • Why do your best 10 customers choose you instead of your competitors?
  • Do your competitors spend all their money with you or some with your competitors too?
  • Do you offer your customers anything unique?
  • Why are these competitors good? (if they are!)

This is the critical step in this process. An hours sounds like a long time on this, but it isn't!.
Once you have finished, put everything back in the boxes and stop (remember the time limit).

Congratulations ... you are halfway through the process.


Hour 5-6 - The Outline

Get your notes (for this part you can refer to specific items in the boxes if needed).
Unlike the other sections, you need two hours of uninterrupted time to complete this next stage. Beginning with your notes, build a brief outline of where you are. To help in the process, I've put together the following questions; most questions should have between three and five answers:

  • What were your sales in the past three years?
  • What do you want your sales to be next year?
  • Why do your best customers do business with you?
  • Who are your main competitors?
  • Why do our customers do business with someone else?
  • If you lost 2% of your average sized customers, what revenues would you lose ?
  • How many customers are you losing each year?
  • What does your current marketing materials say about you?
  • What is the single best thing you do to market your business?


Hour 5-6 - The Outline

Remember you have two hours to complete this Outline stage, if you are asking the right type of questions, and really thinking about the answers, honest, truthful answers .. you need the two-hours.


Hour 7-8 - The Plan

This is another two-hours stage.

Use your notes and the items you have in the boxes to help with this final stage. You are now going to prepare the first draft of your marketing plan.

The idea is that you now have enough information and ideas to put together your marketing plan.  Don't worry if you find you cannot complete yours as shown here, just do what you can with the information you have, use your plan as a start of your activities and go from there.

What you have done will start as a guide for your day to day marketing activities, and you should be able to answer simple questions like; what do you want to say? why do you want to say it? to whom do you want to say it? where do you say it? wow do you want to say it? etc.

If you spend the Eight hours wisely, you will have a simple plan for marketing and the beginnings of the full marketing plan.


Hour 7-8 - The Plan

Remember that this is another two-hours stage.

What you have done will start as a guide for your day to day marketing activities, and you should be able to answer simple questions like; what do you want to say? why do you want to say it? to whom do you want to say it? where do you say it? wow do you want to say it? etc.

If you spend the Eight hours wisely, you will have a simple plan for marketing and the beginnings of the full marketing plan.

Continue working on the plan on a day by day basis, NEVER let it gather dust, you really need to revise the plan at least every quarter to get the most from it, and next year, it may only take you one hour to completely revise for the new sales year!

Real Basic SEO Tips

10 very basic SEO tips for you today ....
  1. Understand what a user might type into a search engine to find your products/services - these are your keywords/keyphrases.
  2. ALWAYS use ALT & TITLE TAGS on everything - ensure that your keywords are in these tags.
  3. NEVER have a link that reads "click here" or "for more info" the link should read something like "For my tips on SEO click this link" - simply because you need to get a keyword in that link text.
  4. Use HTML Tags like H1, H2 etc - these are not only useful from a usability perspective but thet also help search engines prioritise and understand the information on your page.
  5. Use Google Webmaster Tools to help understand if Google has any problems with your site. Verify the website and install Google Analytics
  6. Add your website to as many search engine indexes as you can
  7. Backlinks are important but remember that a backlink from a large, respected website is worth hundreds of backlinks from unknown/low user websites.  So concentrate on popular sites for backlinks.
  8. Image names should be present and relevant "picture 1" means nothing, "Picture of the Batman leaping from car." will be indexed by search engines and is useful if anyone tries viewing your site using an audio reader.
  9. A sitemap is important for SEO - make sure you have one.
  10. Keywords and Meta Tags should be concise and unique on each page - concise means concise!  Limit yourself to no more that about 8-10 keywords

Elements of a Marketing Plan

I just wanted to publish this really quick Marketing Plan template for you all.

1. Executive Summary
Write 2-3 paragraphs that just explain the document that the reader is about to read. I would suggest that your write one paragraph on what business you are in, one on your target markets/customers and one on where the revenues are going to come from.

2. Situation Analysis
What business are you in maybe some high level figures (sales, market share etc). Anything on any specific threats or opportunities.

2.1. Market Summary
Where are your best sales generated from ? (what type of customers?, which products etc).

2.1.1. Market Demographics
An overview that profiles your best markets/customers (i.e. what sector are they in, how big are they etc).

2.1.2. Market Trends
Any trends spotted in your notes, and general market trends of forecasts noted.

2.1.3. SWOT Analysis
During your note taking, you will have noted your companies strengths and weaknesses, and also any opportunities and threats when you looked at your competitors.

2.1.4. Competitor Analysis
Any notes of interest about your competition, especially if you believe its why they are good at what they do.

2.2. SWOT Analysis
Write down your companies strengths and weaknesses and any External Opportunities and Threats that you have made a note of, you only need bullet points.

2.3. Competition
Do your competitors fall into certain categories?
Name your largest competitors, do you know what percentage of the market they have?

2.4. Services
What services do you offer your customers?
Again, bullet points are fine here, you just need basic information for now.

2.5. Keys to Success
Do you know what these are ? They usually center around:

  • Customer Satisfaction
  • Growth
  • Customer Retention
  • Operations Effectiveness
  • Products
  • People (your staff)

2.6. Critical Issues
Do you know what these are ? They maybe things like:

  • Customer Retention
  • High operating costs
  • Poor brand awareness
  • Poor market focus
  • Little marketing effort
  • People poorly trained and lack motivation

2.7. Historical Results
Jot down those old sales figures, note anything activity or product you were particularly successful at.

2.8. Micro-environment
You may not be able to fully answer this right now, but use the following headings later.

Consumer trends - what's generally happening in the market.
Economic changes - is the market spending? General business economy good or bad ?
Technology advancements - technology is advancing, are your products ? what are your customers expecting ?
Competitive activity - is competition increasing ? What sort of customers are they winning ?
Political and legal environment - is your business related to political changes ? This could include tax, legislation etc

3.0. Marketing Strategy
Based on what you know, you should have a good idea of what you need to do, this is your Marketing Strategy, write it down.

It could be based on revenues, operating costs, customers or market share

3.1. Mission
You might be in a position to suggest a Mission for the business.
There are a few basic elements that a good mission statement offers:
  • It identifies your organisation
  • It identifies your customers
  • It tells the world what you do

3.2. Marketing Objectives
How do you intend to achieve your stated strategy?

3.3. Financial Objectives
If you want to, you can set yourself some financial objectives. These really need to be worked out with the sales teams too.

3.4. Target Market
What are your primary target markets?

3.5. Positioning
How do you intend to position yourself in the market.

I recommend using the following template ... "For [Customer Segment], our [Product/Service] is [Your USP's or SSP's]".

3.6. Strategy Pyramids
A Strategy Pyramid if correctly written will show in bullet form your proposed Short Term, Medium Term and Long Term strategies.

3.7. Marketing Mix
Write an overview of what (if anything) has worked well over previous years.

3.7.1. Services Marketing
An overview of the services you will be offering your customers.

3.7.2. Pricing Policy
What pricing policy will you adopt ?

Is it to charge less than your competitors ? Cost plus model ?

3.7.3. Promotion Policy
Provide an idea of the value of the budget you might adopt for marketing (if you really do not know at this stage, quote between 1.0 - 2.0% of revenues.

What type of media would you expect to use ?
  • TV
  • National Press
  • Regional Press
  • Trade Magazines
  • Advertorials
  • Exhibitions
  • Direct Marketing
  • Telemarketing
  • Business Gifts
  • Case Studies
  • Newsletters
  • Literature
  • Presentations
  • Sponsorship

3.7.4. Product Policy
Do you have any specific product policy in mind ? Any products sold well in previous years that need updating ? Any products not selling and need withdrawing ?

3.7.5. Distribution Policy
Will you be using a direct salesforce? Indirect salesforce, Internet ?

3.8. Market Research
Will you be conducting any market research ?
Are there any areas of the market you have little or no knowledge ?

4.0. Financials, Budgets, and Forecasts
Financial overview, include marketing budget, potential forecasts, and any assumptions you may have made.

4.1. Breakeven Analysis
If you have the time to quickly workout your breakeven point note it here.

4.2. Sales Forecast
What sales are you expecting for the year ?
If you can, break it out by month, product and sales area.

4.3. Marketing Budget
Have a quick think about the amounts of money you need to spend on marketing and start detailing it here, just use a 'rule of thumb' if you need to right now;

example:

Business Press ... 34%
Literature ... 10%
Exhibitions ... 14%
Direct Marketing ... 8%
PR ... 4%
Regional Newspapers ... 15%
National Newspapers ... 15%


4.3. Marketing Budget - Return on Investment
You know what you want to spend on marketing, you have made an assumption about the value of the sales, therefore you can work our your return on marketing spend.

5.0. Controls
What controls will you put in place?
Recap on your objectives, pull out some milestones, and sales goals..

5.1. Tactical Plan
Make a chart, marketing activity up the left hand side and quarters or months along the bottom. Suggest some headline activity that should be taking place.

5.2. Marketing Organisation
Quickly draw your marketing organisation, show where they feed into sales

5.3. Contingency Plan
Always plan for the worse, some things that can go wrong include:

Revenues EXCEED projection - can your after-sales team support the effort ? You may need to hire additional staff, and bring in more equipment.
Revenues MISS projection - you have to prepare for the possibility, you may have to redouble your marketing efforts (you MUST NOT decrease marketing spend ... things will then get worse!), you have to get your message out to the market clearer.

How to deal with negative comments on social media sites


If you are unlucky enough to find an extremely negative comment on one of your social media accounts (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc).  How should you deal with it?

Even if you have spotted it quickly, then the chances are that other have also seen it; in the case of Twitter, within moments of it been sent it could have been ReTweeted 100 or 1,000’s of times (and I bet that your competitors will jump at the chance to publicise it or capitalise on it in some way).
In any case, a negative comment from a customer or prospect is a negative comment and it needs to be dealt with fast.

Ultimately, Social Customer Service is all about immediately addressing your customers' concerns quickly.  Where possible you should immediately respond with a holding statement to let the complainant and anyone else that see’s the comment know that their concern has been acknowledged and that you are dealing with it.
If you haven’t got all the facts from the negative comment that has been posted then politely contact the complainant asking for more information on the problem.
You should plan to fully respond by the end of that business day, and absolutely no longer than 24 hours later.  Failure to deal with any problems effectively could mean that it goes viral very quickly!

External Links Should Open in New Tabs


It might be me, I might be old fashioned in my views on life, but I really think that web designers/developers are missing a trick with how they treat external links within their websites.

I guess going back a few years the majority of web users complained that when they clicked an external link from a particular website it opened a new window, and depending on how it opened it was at times confusing (I personally never used to mind it!); but the wonderful introduction of browser tabs this has all changed.

Instead of opening up new windows, you can now magically open links to external sites in new tabs. The big and important difference here is that browser tabs are easier for users to manage than browser windows.

I know that there is also an argument that if a visitor to your site clicks on an external link that this new link should be seen as part of a seamless customer journey and they should see this new site in their current browsing session …. Bunkum!

And surely when you open an external links in the same tab for a user and they want to continue their journey on the original site, you create back-button fatigue for them; this doesn't sound like a very good user experience! Does it?

I know this is a personal rant, but I feel that it’s an important one, I’m getting fed up of following links to external sites that interest me, for me to only need to fight my way back to the original site to follow my original journey.

And I know that I can Ctrl and click to force a new tabbed session, but that’s not the point, I bet only a small percentage of web users actually know that anyway.

Quite simply, links that take users to a different (external) website should open in new tabs. Links that take users to a different page on the same website should open in the same tab. This is the right and sensible approach to take.

LinkedIn - successful lead generation

If you have ever spoken to a B2B businesses about their online lead generation you'll find some discrepancy about how much business they get from LinkedIn, some seem to get absolutely loads of leads and traffic from this professional networking site where other get very little or none at all! If you want to be in the camp that get lots of leads, then follow these simple tips.

Create a company profile page

OK, it seems fairly logical, but still not that many smaller businesses actually have a company profile page on LinkedIn. Ensure that you complete your profile as much as possible and also ensure that all of your employees a) have a personal profile on LinkedIn and that their profile links to your company page.

Tip: Including keyword rich descriptions on your LinkedIn company page, product and services tabs . All of these elements are an essential part of the SEO approach and will help you get found from within LinkedIn's own search functionality and potentially from an external search engine too.

Promote the page 

You are still going to get businesses and individuals that find your business website first, if they do ensure that they easily find a link to your LinkedIn company profile page so that they can follow you. Only by building company followers will you add social proof and generate credibility to your company profile.

Status Updates

Having followers on LinkedIn is no use unless you engage with them; so ensure that you post regular status updates. Your followers will then see your updates and have the option to engage with you and amplify your messaging around their network.

Tip: Aim for at least two updates each week, this maximises your chance to get your status out across more of your network.

Create a Group

I also recommend that you engage with others in your target market by joining Groups that are of interest to them and contribute. BUT a more important strategy is create your own open Group. Lots of businesses still don’t understand the presence and the power of LinkedIn groups. Groups that contain lots of your potential customers/clients do not exist on Twitter, Facebook or anywhere else for that matter; Groups on LinkedIn are basically Communities of prospects for you.

My advice would be to start by making a niche Group; a software developer in Yorkshire for example might start a “Software developers in Yorkshire” group, start my inviting relevant individuals from your network to get and get the discussions started; you'll quickly find that you'll start to get lots more interested individuals to join in,

Once you have a successful Group then organise some events to get some face to face time with prospects.


There are many more ways you can get more business from social networks; if you need more customers or need help understanding how social media fits into your strategy then get in touch with me today.

Crawl, Walk, Run - a basic online marketing strategy.


Testing the water with digital marketing is incredibly important; at some time all digital marketers face a project where something is not working as it should be (i.e. traffic not converting on a website), but what is actually going wrong can sometime take a whilst to get to the bottom of and fix.

Crawl, Walk, Run is a phased methodology for controlling elements of the online marketing mix in careful bite-sized chunks so that problems are carefully and correctly fixed.

Crawl – look at options that you directly own; this phase overs the core website design and user interaction, and media that you own/control (i.e. Content, SEO, Social Media etc). Fixing these elements first is usually the most cost effective approach to take (even if you need to outsource some of it).

Walk – now it's time to turn your attention to media that you might have less control over or need to pay for or digital marketing tactics that need to have the basics right first, for this reason you should only enter this phase after you have a solid Crawl foundation.

Here you are looking at Pay Per Click (PPC), third party advertising, email marketing, blogging, banner advertising etc.

For the Walk phase you are looking for a minimum of a 5 times return on your investment, so for every £1000 you spend you need to see £5000 returned. 

Run – You'll know when you hit this phase as business will be really good for you, conversion rate will be over 10 percent, online you'll have a low <30 percent bounce rate.

Much of the activity around this Run phase is earned; by now as your business is doing well you so you might be already getting approached by third parties for comment or editorials, and valuable links to your website will be starting to come into you.

Certainly there is more marketing activity you could be undertaking for this Crawl, Walk, Run model, but hopefully this has given you an insight how what digital activities you should be undertaking and when you should be doing them!

Are you the Betamax of SEO!

Some things become old hat over time, one moment they have their day and they are good for you, the next, they are definitely bad for you and like the old Betamax videocassette, you really shouldn't be seen dead with them!

Some SEO tactics are now so old fashioned that they will soon start to cause your site problems if you continue use them.

Article Submissions – so very yesterday; there once was a time when submitting an article to a directory could bring you some decent traffic and also be great in the eyes of Google; but those days are now long gone, Google will penalising you for submitting content somewhere in the simple hope of providing a dodgy link back to your site.

Reciprocal Linking and Link Exchanges – a fantastic tactic to use at the turn of the millennium, many sites got lots of links from them and plenty of Google kudos with this tactic, not any more; search engines now detect these links easily and know that your site is simply after cheap, useless links and they won't thank you for it.  If you provide great content, other sites will naturally start linking to it!

Thin Content – providing scant copy on a page just to try to get a few more keywords on your site, is not only a very poor SEO habit (and always was), but also provides absolutely no value to your visitors whatsoever; if you employ this tactic then it is definitely time to move on (after all, we are in the 21st Century now). We already know that great content can drive great links.

Ignoring Design – once upon a time, design didn't matter, you had a site and by hook or by crook, visitors managed to find what they wanted and were somewhat happy! Those times have long gone my friend.

Picture a tatty shop on a typical High Street, dirty windows, paint peeling from the sign, inside the store isn't any better with products placed all over the place, poor internal signage means you can't find what you want and there is no shopkeeper to help you find what you want – chances are you wouldn't enter this shop in the first place, but if you did, I bet you wouldn't want to buy anything from it. 
This High Street shop is like a badly designed website; it's unlikely that anyone would enter a site like this in the first place, but if they did, I'm sure that they wouldn't stay around for long!

Don't settle for or ignore your website design. Your visitors won't!

Summary

Be the Betamax of SEO if you dare; if you do, I can guarantee that Google won't like your site, and if they don't like your site then they won't send anyone your way!

Convert website visitors to customers in 5 easy steps

We all want to attract visitors to our website, but more important that getting those visitors is the simple fact that once on your pages, you need to be able to convert them into customers, here are some very simple steps you can take to help in that goal.

Design to Delight - OK, I know, this one is obvious right!  Right, but you would be surprised how many website owners forget this one simple rule.  

Sites needs to be well laid out, wish simple, clear navigation (key navigation buttons should be either across the top or down the left hand side).  Use colours that are easy on the eyes and keep fonts simple, the words on the page should be easy to read.  Use images ONLY when they add to what you want to convey.  One or two column content layouts are fine, but always try to put the main content in a slightly wider column to help attract the eye.

Split Test – Google's Website Optimizer is now Google Content Experiments and brings with it the power of split testing to anyone with a website.  Essentially, this and similar tools allow you to test two possible website elements (this could be image, test or buttons etc), and will help you to see which version your visitors engage with the best.

So for example if you have two headlines and you didn't know which one to use then this simple A/B split testing would help you decide which your visitors thought was best.

Usability Testing - This covers a range of options from getting friends, family or colleagues to look at your website to recruiting a specialist agency to do it for you.

You can let them navigate your site freely noting problems and issues that they have with it or provide a list of actions that you want them to perform; tests done yourself are usually best when you can watch your subjects browsing as you can see all the small problems that they have that they might not later comment on.

Titillate your Titles - Did you see what I did there!  Titles on webpages, articles, news and blog posts provide you with a great opportunity to really grab your visitors attention.  If it's suitable for your brand then use a little humour in main titles; break down your content into chunks and start each section with a sub heading, this helps draw in visitors and also makes the piece easier for reading.

Lead them into that all important call to action.

Chat - Consider introducing a live chat feature on your site so if visitors get stuck or need to ask you a question then you are only one click away from an answer; the key is to keep them on your site at all times.