Did You Forget Something?

So you've invested more time than you ever believed possible on your website and in optimizing the pages for the search engines. Having sacrificed weekends, holidays and yes even forgetting about your anniversary to ensure that your site ranks in the Top 10, you have paid your dues and are ready to handle all of the new sales which are most certainly forthcoming.

Eagerly, you monitor your site's progress as it slowly makes its way up the rankings. Day after day, you run searches on Google, Yahoo, MSN and several other major engines to locate your site. Some days you notice a little movement of your site within the rankings, while other days your rankings remain stagnant. But over time you gradually achieve higher and higher rankings until one day it happens. There you are - in the Top 10. Congratulations, you've made it. You are now a member of the search engine elite.

• So why aren't you making any more sales?

Day in and day out you watch increased traffic moving in and out of your website, but you are receiving no more orders or contacts than you did before. When many site owners reach this road-block they are faced with accepting the fact that they must go back and further optimize their site for the engines. The truth be known...

• It is the content, look and feel of their site which is preventing visitors from becoming buyers.

The X Factor is an illusive concept which describes the condition of your website. The sad truth behind many SEO Marketing Campaigns is that companies will spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars to ensure that their site ranks in the top 10 on the major search engines. Once their site achieves this coveted status, all expectations move in the direction of an increase in sales and new customer contacts directly from the website. On the surface this would seem to be a logical expectation. What they fail to take into consideration is the website's "X Factor".

The SEO X-Factor

The X Factor is the ability of your website to actually entice visitors into becoming paying customers, or to at the very least move them in a direction of wanting to contact you for more information. Once a visitor leaves, there is a good chance they will not be coming back. Does your site have what it takes to be competitive?

The X Factor encompasses a concept that dictates whether or not your website has what it takes to compete online. It is based on the presence of certain content elements, layout, overall condition and appearance of your website in addition to your ability to appeal to your customers. In the following sections we will discuss several topics and will place an emphasis on the fact that you, as the website owner, are not qualified to judge your own website. Even after years of toiling with these topics, I personally cannot answer these questions when it comes to my own websites, as I am too closely involved in the processes and outcomes involved in their development and therefore cannot take an objective viewpoint. Even if your site was designed for you, you still had a hand in the process, even if the only part you played was to write the check. Spending money on something will often favorably influence your opinion of that certain something; in this case, your website.

Content
Does your website flow easily as someone scans the pages for information? Does this flow guide the visitor in the direction of becoming a paying customer? You might think so, but do others? Have you checked? Have you asked people who are not your friends, your relatives, or your Cousin Ned to look at your site and give you an honest appraisal of its ability to sell?

You can start here with the basics; does your site have what it takes to keep visitors there longer than 5 or 10 seconds? Many experienced web surfers and accomplished online shoppers fall into the category of Engine Jumpers, folks who will give your site a 2-to-5 second window to impress them into staying. You'd be surprised how many sites cannot even achieve this small feat. Most site owners have not had their site evaluated by an outside group, as they believe their site has everything it needs to compete. But do they truly know what "everything" really is?

Layout and Appearance
Was your site designed to anticipate common web-surfing behaviors? Have you included the right surfing elements in the right places to help visitors move easily through your site? Had you ever even considered such a concept before? There are folks, like myself, who do an enormous amount of shopping online. When I hit a shopping website that I've never seen before there are several surfing and navigational elements that I naturally seek on these sites. I want to see a clear listing of their products or product categories, and I want to see this listing available to me in the first-screen-full of information delivered to me as I arrive at the site. I want to see "Contact Us". Any company that is asking for my money, but hides behind their website is no company with whom I will be doing business. I want to see their shipping and privacy policies, as there are many sites online who do share personal contact information with third party marketing vendors. Does your site have all of the right elements ... in all the right places?

Building Trust
Building trust is the act of presenting your company to potential customers in such a way as to immediately gain their interest and to carefully move them towards making a buying decision. Many sites lack the Elements of Trust required to get that initial hook into its visitors.

Visitors to your site will make an immediate judgment about your business and about whether they would be willing to purchase from you. They will quickly decide whether or not to trust you. Such decisions might be made due to the appearance of your site, while others because of a poor returns or privacy policy. Do you know what effect your site has on others? Does your site have what it takes to turn visitors into paying customers?

Removing the "Me Factor" From Your Website
The psychology of buying is one where your customers come to you wondering what it is that you can do for them. Can you offer great prices on great products? How do your prices compare to your competition? Will you save me money? Shoppers are interested in the benefits of doing business with you; the benefits to themselves, and not so much the benefits granted to you - the website owner. In time, they may become fully interested in your company and/or yourself on a deeper level, but initially, customers want to know what you can do for them ... and they want to know NOW!

Many site owners believe that by placing a large block of information about themselves at the top of their home page they will move visitors in the direction of becoming paying customers. Except in extremely rare situations, nothing could be further from the truth. You have only a few seconds and a limited amount of computer screen space to hook someone and move them from being a visitor into becoming a shopper. Have you included the right information at the top of your home page?

When The X Factor Meets SEO Marketing

As an SEO marketer, I have been blessed with many moments where a client's website surfaces into the Top-10 on a major search engine for the first time. We have witnessed time and time again where such high rankings have not converted into any additional sales revenues for the client, but only additional traffic to their website. Often our hands are tied by the client, as they do not want us to change the general appearance of their website at all, even when it is clearly flawed. Why would you not want to change something that doesn't work? Yet, this happens time and time again.

We've done our job by tearing the site apart and properly preparing it to rank well on the engines while retaining the general look, feel and flow of the site. The problem is that the initial website which the client brought to us for optimizing lacked that all illusive X Factor required to generate sales.

As a starting point for your SEO marketing

• Find a design company that includes SEO with their design work
• Don't fall in love with your website - be willing to change it based on facts
• Keep your site up to date and add new content constantly
• Don't make it hard to find your products / services or prices

In the first screen of your home page ...

• Show your site navigation
  • Include your site navigation in the same place (top) on ALL pages of your site
• Make it very clear what you sell and for how much
  • Show your products / services and access to pricing near the top of your home page
• Don't show confusing slogans which must be decrypted
  • No one cares how clever you are
  • Be clear and do not hide behind clever words
  • State clearly what you do and what you can do for me!

We have seen site owners who come to us and request only minor SEO upgrades to their present site, as they simply love the site and do not want to have it changed. There is no such thing as "minor SEO". Clients don't want big changes because they "just" paid their web designer to complete their website, which unfortunately was poorly developed for good search engine rankings. This places an immediately barrier between their online business and its ability to succeed. Most web designers are not SEO marketers, and this leaves most site owners in a financial quandary.

To the extreme, we have had clients become quite upset that "we" (as SEO Marketers) were not able to do our job properly for them. They are certain that we are the ones to blame for a lack of increased sales. The truth be told, such clients were able to see huge increases in their site traffic over a very short period of time. It is the site which lacked the ability to sell anything to prospective customers. In short, this IS the X Factor.

All Websites Are NOT The Same There is this mysterious belief floating around out there that all websites are basically the same, and that visitors to your site don't really care what the site looks like or what they have to go through to find the information they seek. Some web designers, will develop these incredibly intricate navigation schemes which require users to jump through rings of fire and to bring their special decoder rings with them to find their way around your site. No one cares enough to stick around and figure out these confusing navigation schemes. And so potential customers will only be remembered in your traffic logs as another hit to your site which lasted for less than 15 seconds before returning to the search engine from whence they came.

Does your site "keep" and "retain" customers?

What You Can Do

Monitor Your Site Logs
If you are not running a visitor tracking logging program on your website, you should stop whatever you are doing and go get one installed right now! A good tracking software will enable you to monitor visitor trends on your website and to uncover potential marketing problems before it's too late.

Learn How to Interpret Your Site Logs
Some of the acid-tests we use to determine if a website suffers from X Factor related problems is to regularly review a section of the site logs which reveals the average length of time visitors are spending on the website in question. A good log program can even allow you to track visits through your site, allowing you to follow the average path that visitors take through your pages and how long they stay on each page. With this combination of information you can begin to uncover areas of the site which appear to be keeping the attention of your visitors, and others which are not. There are many correlations which can be made if you know how to properly interpret your site logs. But be careful! There are many very wrong interpretations which are often made by those who have not taken the time to really learn what all of that tracking information "really" means.

Available Resources, and Sound Advice

• Hire a professional web designer or layout professional to review your site and submit a report to you
• Don't take the word of any one person or one company
• Seek out the opinions of many
• Find newsgroups and forums where designers hang out and ask them to take a look at your site
• Be prepared to make changes to your site
• Develop a plan based around what you've learned before you start making changes
• Know your intended goal and focus on that intention
• Know who your target audience is and keep them in mind as you make changes to your site

How Do You Define The X-Factor?

We honestly don't know. It's different from site to site, and customer to customer. One visitor may praise your site for being really cool, while another quickly clicks away from your site as it simply doesn't appeal to them. There are certain elements that you can use to improve your chances of making additional sales, but you cannot appeal to everyone all of the time.

• Know your target audience - and create content directed towards them
  • Create content using concepts that appeal to your target audience
  • You can't please everyone -- so stop trying
• Include full site navigation in the First-Screen-Full of information that a visitors sees when they arrive at your home page
• Include a statement about what your site sells
  • Be clear and "actually" say what you do
  • Avoid clever phrases which require a decoder ring to decypher
• Show your prices!
  • Not all services allow for this - but if you can - proudly display your pricing structure
• Show your contact information - email / phone number ... etc.
• Include an "About Us" page
  • This is often the differentiating factor at the moment someone is about to make a buying decsion
  • Do not post your About Us information at the top of your home page
  • Include "About Us" as part of your main menu
• Make it clear how to purchase products or services from you!

Final Thought . . . Over the years we've assisted clients in opening up multiple versions of the same store using different domain names and different site themes. While each of their online shops sells basically the same products, or in some cases exactly the same products, they each look different and they each feature items in different ways. They each have a different appeal. The additional benefit to running more than one version of your online store or website, is that you will ultimately compete against yourself for top rankings on the search engines. That's a win-win situation.