Stuntdubl Business Search Marketing Consulting

7thpixel.com saw the light. “Practicing SEM without addressing usability issues is like buying ad space during the Super Bowl and then turning the lights off. It’s hard to do business when your customers can’t find what you’re selling,” says company President, Gregg Banse. “lorax” from webmasterworld - from usabilityeffect.com article below by Kim Krause-Berg

There are three important phases in the customer cycle that bear mentioning.
1. Attraction
2. Conversion
3. Retention

As SEO’s, we tend to focus on the first phase because to us it is fun or easy or whatever. Retention and CRM is a different topic for a differnent day. An increase in conversion rates can have an incredible impact on the bottom line of a business. It’s fairly common sense, but it’s sometimes difficult to place adequate systems for conversion tracking and analysis. There are tools out there that oftentimes seem a bit pricey, but when their potential is realized pay for themselves many times over.

Personally, I’m a big fan of Clicktracks analytics because of the ease of use associated with the mountains of information a website owner can pull from it. I actually just upgraded to Clicktracks optimizer and am incredibly happy with it. Had I not upgraded, the licensing would have been $1200 for an unlimited domain 3-user license. Now this kinda sucks for a small business as an up-front fee, but the information that I can pull from it is phenomenal and pays for the licensing fee many, many times over. I like free webalizer for baseline statistics and growth trending too, but CT is just in a whole different ballpark. The new “what’s changed” report for trending is an excellent addition with some fantastic tools for tracking and establishing trend patterns.

Here are some of my favorite conversion articles from my bookmark archives:

• ISEDB Article on Improving Conversion
• Why Search Engine Marketing has a Passion for Web Usability - Kim Krause-Berg
• 10 Mind Altering Words That Make People Buy

WMW Threads

• A Badly Written Title Tag Can Sink Your Site…without you even knowing
• Increasing Your Conversion Rate Part I and part II
• Test Your Calls to Action
• Examine Your Sales Process
• Doubling Your Conversion Rate
• Improving Conversion Rates for Affiliates
• I’ve Got a Terrible Conversion Rate…What Should I Do?
• 20 Tips to Minimizing Shopping Cart Abandonment
  - **WMW Supporters Forum

• Examining User Expectations for the Location of
  Common E-Commerce Web Objects
• Eyetrack III - Consumer Behavior News in the Age of Multimedia - Some excellent studies here.

I’m sure you’re aware that conversion is important to now go out and do something about it!

Where’s the banana?”
Seth Godin - “The Big Red Fez”