You’ve hit the tipping point on all you do and now your website traffic is continuing to rise, in fact you’ve never had so many visitors to your website before, but your conversions have not grown at the same rate, what can you do?
First, it is great to be successful and have a high traffic site, but if you are not converting your readers into buyers you may want to consider a new strategy to specifically market to the reader-freeloaders on your website. Much of what you will select to do will be based on your specific sales goals.
If you are a local seller and your traffic has grown, but when you look in Google Analytics most of your traffic is outside of your service area, I would enjoy the numbers and know that Google will eventually award you with improved organic placement. However, I would put your out of area readers to work for your benefit by actively asking them to Google +1 your pages or like you on Facebook. You’ll then be able to get SEO juice off of the traffic that will never convert to a sale for you.
If you sell nationally or service locally but also sell products nationally, I would take a careful look at your traffic and the pages where you think you have freeloaders. On those pages you will need to evaluate if you should follow my advice on Google +1 and Facebook or if the pages are good areas for you to advertise the products you sell nationally.
If they are a good fit with product sales, then start by creating your own banners, buttons, and links to your store to promote your own products. If you are going to provide great informational content, you should work to have the readers who like what you say move into your store to buy, Google +1 you, like you on Facebook, or be added to your email subscriber list. Which direction you take or multiple directions will depend on the information specific to your site. The key is to put the traffic to work for you! Don’t just invest your time and money into a well trafficked website, move your readers to action that will benefit your long term approach and goals.
I found this terrific article and wanted to share it with you. It is “10 Reasons Your Site’s Search Engine Ranking Dropped”
by Paul M Ventura on SitePro News. You can read the full article by clicking the article title above. Paul shows some terrific insight into why your site may have dropped organic placement on Google in light of some of Google’s recent algorithm changes.
In a nutshell here are his reasons interspersed with some of my own comments:
The Google Honeymoon Ended I’ve seen this before, new sites start out strong and then after about four weeks fall to their more realistic organic placement on Google. If you evaluate the site in the first several weeks that the site has been added to the index you may be placed well, but check again in about 8 to 10 weeks for more realistic expectations on where your site will normally reside so you can start improvements.
Google Sandbox Effect Started This isn’t talked about much, but I have seen in highly competitive industries such as real estate site’s not even get listed in the Google index until other sites have started to link to it. They can sit in the sandbox all alone for as long as six months
while Google evaluates where they belong organically. A good plan is to do article writing for links during this period to start building links. Another recommendation is to do press releases during this period to start building legitimate links as well.
Algorithm Updates/Link Juice Lost With the Panda/Farmer update having penalized many article syndication sites, I feel that Paul has some good insight here in that your site may have had links from these sites that were penalized and so your site dropped in placement as well.
Malware Don’t think you have it? Well if you have a WordPress blog on-domain, you’d better be monitoring. Why wait until Google has you banned or blocked in the organic results. It is better to proactively scan your site and WordPress files on a regular basis. I was even hacked and never had been before. It can happen to the best of us with serious consequences.
Server Issues Has your site been down? We have several clients where they are hosted on small no name companies and on their Google
Webmaster Control Panel the robot is constantly reporting it cannot find or access files. Move to a new host when possible if you are seeing this problem.
Robot.txt File Problems Webmasters can get carried away with permissions to the Google spider. I’ve seen two situations where the webmaster inadvertently disallowed access in this important file that all search engine indexing spiders access before they spider your website. Make sure you have the correct permissions and block only the files you need to block.
Penalization Did your last SEO firm or webmaster use “black hat” techniques, hidden links, and keyword stuffing to get you organic
placement before? How about keyword dense text the same color as your page background? Think you are clean? Think again. I saw hidden text on a large attorney website that had been installed by their website designer to scam the
system. Don’t get your website penalized by these tactics. Google will not be mocked.
Broken Links Check and check again. For blogs you can use a plugin. For other sites use Dreamweaver to scan for broken links.
Duplicate Content I install on my site meta tags that show me to be the content owner. Make sure when you add new content pages that
you tag yourself in the code as the owner. Google is getting pretty smart on this one, but there are still scrapper sites that may grab your content. When I find them I send a cease and desist notice to the webmaster and if they don’t remove my content I report them and the page to Google’s spam department and if I get really made to their web host with a take down notice. Don’t make yourself crazy over this, but it is a good idea to check your top trafficked pages with online scanning tools. I use Copyscape and Dustball for this.
The Google Dance Grab your partner right? No, the Google Dance is a phenomena where your search results will fluctuate wildly the first week and sometime two weeks after Google does a big algorithm update. Hang on and don’t freak out the first time you check your placement. Check again in one week and then in a second before you start remediation just to make sure you
aren’t dancing with Google. If you are your site will pop back up at the end of the dance. Maybe not in the exact position, but nearly where you were before.
I think Paul nailed the ten topics in the article, the comments on each topic are mine garnered from years of experience.
Google+ has grown at monstrous rates this past month, but new users have also started to finally drop off; leaving Google+ with substantially fewer users than Facebook. In an effort to enhance the user experience Google+ added games to their interface.
Some of the games they have added are popular games of which many are also available in the Google Chrome app store as well. One of the highest profile and most recognized names is Angry Birds. Some of the other games now available to play online at Google+ are:
City of Wonder which looks like Facebook’s Gardens of Time (I love this game
and I never play games.)
Angry Birds
Monster World
Dragons of Atlantis
Sudoku Puzzles
Zynga Poker
Zombie Lane
Wild Ones
Flood-It
Dragon Age Legends
Bubble Island
Crime City
Edgeworld
Collapse! Blast
Bejewelled Blitz Beta
Diamond Dash
In this online world where stickiness (how long visitors stay and interact) really matters to your member growth, online buzz, and ad selling opportunities, adding games is a very smart idea at this point.
To remain current and grab market share of the social networking phenomena, Google has rolled out as a beta test Google+, which is touted to be Twitter and Facebook all rolled into one application. So will it be a Facebook Killer or just another failed attempt by Google to get into the social game?
Google+ Screen Shot
What exactly is Google+
More than the +1 button, Google+ is a new online social networking application. Reviews so far have been good, but not everyone has seen it yet. I received my invitation in the middle of July and am heavily testing the application. For now, only a few users are in the game, but the press so far has been tentative based on Google’s other tries in social media.
With Google+ you are able to friend anyone, like on Twitter, and read their updates without getting an approval to friend someone as you may have to do on Facebook. Users will have to group followers into circles. Permissions can be given to your own personal circles to allow certain types of updates or posts to be seen selectively by the people you desire.
Google has banned businesses so far and is only allowing individual users access. Additionally no third party tools for post scheduling have been allowed API access to the platform.
Here are a few of the key features you will find in Google+:
Hangouts – allow up to ten people to video conference together or share live video feeds. Facebook only allows you to see one person at a time with their video application that is using the Skype backbone. Google+ seems to be adding in the “fun” factor with this but will it really be used?
Huddle – connects all your friends via desktop, SMS, iPhones, and Androids. It is a group messaging application that allows you to connect with the circles you select. Want to meet everyone for drinks after work? Do a quick huddle and get your friends connected at your favorite spot.
Sparks – are topics which are a Google determined compilation of sites on a topic you select such as sports, technology, or other keyword. Google calls this a “sharing engine”. There is no way to add a specific feed to follow or link, so Sparks is not really a XML feed aggregator. For now you have to read what Google supplies in that topic without a way to customize the sites you want to see in that topic. This has the biggest potential for website owners to get inbound traffic as if your site is picked up in a Sparks link you could drive literally thousands of visitors to your site to read an interesting article, blog post, or web page.
The Google+1 button is like the Facebook Like button. Clicking the button allows you to vote up in the organic search results things you like as well as to tag a like, website, and even AdWords ads and share them with your friends or Google+ Circles.
What is the feedback so far on Google+?
So far the feedback from pros using it has been good. The comments have ranged far and wide:
“As of Thursday [7/14/11], he writes, Google+ was 66.4 percent male and 33.6 percent female, according to his sampling.” More…
“What he proceeds to show me is a product that in many ways is so well designed that it doesn’t really even look like a Google product. ” More…
“A big feature of Google+ is the toolbar that exists across the top of all Google sites (yes, the aforementioned black one). Once your Circles are set, sharing with any of them from any Google site is simple thanks to this toolbar.” More…
Now Google has built “it” will people come?
That will be the real key once more people start to get access to Google+. Can users be convinced to leave Facebook and move their connection and activities to Google+? And Google is really banking on that action.
My feeling is that once people like something hate to change, and people like Facebook. If all your friends don’t move to Google+ you would still have to manage both applications which would be very problematic and potentially leading to a failure for Google.
Ease of use will also be key. If it is hard to connect or hard to keep your information private Google+ will go the way of Google Buzz and Orkut. I think that the big carrot to move to Google+ for business people and website owners will be that they will be able to capture SEO/organic juice from the Google+1 activity which will be integrated into Google.com. I am not sure that mainstream America will embrace Google+. Facebook is comfortable, easy and able to be locked down for privacy. Although Google+ looks cool, and there’s lots of buzz about the product, if your friends aren’t there you won’t be there either!
Another late breaking note is that Google+ has now banned business profiles which I feel is a very big mistake, but they are not asking my advice – at this point. 🙂
In conclusion, it is from my own view point, that it is simply too soon to say if Google+ is a Facebook killer. From the press and previews it appears that Google has really worked outside the box to try to shape the future of social media with their new Google+ application. Google’s got a lot riding on the success of the application too, as they really need a win to retain relevancy in the search market that is becoming more personalized and keep their dominance in online advertising which they deliver on their properties. If Google+ is received well expect aggressive competition to happen with Facebook for users.
Get in the queue for an invitation.
If you think you want to be an early tester and possible advocate for Google+, here’s the link to sign up to get an early invitation. Or, you can just contact me with your GMail or Google account user name and I will send you an invitation now. My personal reaction so far is that Google+ is fun, kind of like Facebook, but more link and information driven for now than Facebook.
