NetNews our ONLINE NEWSLETTER (NetNews November 2006)

Developments in web marketing, site design, and web services

The Online Newsletter from Net Commerce Solutions

For most businesses, the initial focus is strongly on getting a high ranking in the search engines plus, for example, Pay Per Click advertising for immediate visibility and traffic flows.

However, what matters then is that you get the enquiries and sales you need to give you a good return from your site.

Hence we have covered in (1) below the key question of improving your web site sales conversion. Like most web management, it is mainly a question of good, continuing process, rather than radical actions.

1. NET ISSUES

Important issues that could impact on your website approach:

Need to Improve Your Web Site Sales Conversion?

Your stunning new web site is receiving lots of traffic but you aren’t receiving many enquiries or orders. If this is the case, I hope the following tips are useful:

Validate the site technically

It may have been checked before publication but check it out again:

Can you see all the site in the major browsers or are important pages garbled or cut off?
Does it work well in the main screen resolutions? - Do all the key links work?

Find out what your visitors have been doing

Check your site visitor statistics – what do they tell you?
Which pages are your visitors landing on?
How long are they staying? Do they bounce off the first page or are they looking at several? Which pages do they leave from? Which pages are viewed most/least?

Check what first impression your site makes on visitors

Imagine you are a first time visitor to your site. What impression do you get from the site – especially in comparison with your main competitors?
What do other people say? Get other people – colleagues, acquaintances to look at the site and possibly even try to buy something.
Ask your customers (those who have bought or enquired from the site) what they thought of their experience. What was easy / what was difficult, confusing or off-putting?
Ask for feedback from other users. If necessary, offer a small reward (free sample, download, T shirt etc) to encourage this.

Check you are displaying all the ‘credibility’ / ’comfort’ material you can

Your physical address and contact details
Professional affiliations, certificates, warranties, guarantees; testimonials
Terms and conditions / delivery details (for e-commerce sites)
Provide telephone and email contacts for enquiries – and respond quickly to them

Test – everything and monitor the results

Change and experiment with anything and everything and check if it has improved your web site sales conversion for a set time period – it could be a day, week or a month for example. Be ruthless, never assume:

Page headings, page design, colours
Your copy – is it stodgy or is it easy to read and does it sell?
Navigation, consistency and ease of use

To read the full article on our site just click here

2. NET HAPPENINGS

News, themes and trends from the Internet – home and abroad

Technology enablers still developing strongly…………….…………..……………

Text messaging - 32 billion text messages were sent in 2005. In Q1 06 this increased further to reach a record monthly total of 3.16 billion for March.(mda-org)

Broadband – 3m broadband connections were installed in UK in 2005 – only 5 countries worldwide now have more broadband lines than UK - China, US, Japan, Germany and France.

Mobile web use – close to 20% of mobile phone users now use their mobile phone to access the web, i.e. around 12.3m people per day access the web in this way during H1 2006 (Text.it)

Web Usage – 16-24 year olds now increasingly substitute the internet for television – on average they now watch TV for one hour less per day than the average person – social network sites, e.g. Bebe, are a major factor in this.

Online Shopping Update - UK figures showing strong growth……………….….

UK internet shoppers will be Europe’s second biggest online by 2011. (nma.uk.uk) – 66% of Britons are predicted to join the online shopping population over the next five years. By 2011, 32m UK consumers will be shopping online.
UK Retail spend reached £8bn in 2005, and will total £21.5bn pa by 2010. (Verdict) – some 19m people bought goods and services online in UK in the second half of 2005.

Internet Promotion – continued shift away from traditional media…………...

Advertising - Online advertising spend grew at 63% in 2005 – internet advertising now runs at three times that of radio, and is already in excess of one third of television. (nma.co.uk)
E-mail marketing – email marketing will overtake Direct Marketing in the UK by the end of 2006 – in the UK last year 4.3bn marketing emails were sent compared with 5bn direct mailers. (dma.org)
However, it is estimated that there will be over 6bn marketing emails in 2006.

(Net Commerce Solutions has extensive email management and promotion experience - please click here for further details of our service)

3. NET TIPS

Some hints you could consider

Avoid unnecessary barriers - make sure your developer doesn’t do anything to prevent you attracting visitors to the new site – e.g. make sure he doesn’t:

make extensive use of Flash (this hampers search engine spiders in accessing your site to index it)
encapsulate your site text in image format (see the note below)
put your text content within frames (this could prevent search engine spiders reading your text and therefore indexing it)

Be legible to the search engines – we find new clients whose text on their existing pages is encapsulated in an image format. It looks very much like normal text, but is actually just a picture – the search engines cannot read or classify a word or syllable from it, and cannot serve up the site in response to user searches!

4. NCS FOCUS

News and services from NCS that might help

Link building – this remains the key to a good ranking, i.e. gaining good quality links, preferably non-reciprocal. The links should really be from sites with a higher page rank than your own – we now use tools to enable us to find sites, which are relevant and have the page rank needed. Just click here if you think we could help you in developing your link popularity further.

Banner–based links – you have probably already noticed, when searching for good directories, that often a high position in their site needs a banner entry from you – these are not expensive, and are very useful in link building – just click here if you would like us to develop a banner for you, or need guidance on their parameters.

5. NET NOTHINGS

You probably already know that:

Freshbot and Deepbot are not fish species- they are two search engine spiders used by Google. Freshbot looks for fresh content on sites – part of Google strategy of ranking more highly those sites which add new content.

Deepbot crawls sites deeply via the links structure to capture and the structure of the site for Google’s cache.

Heat maps are not about the weather – they are guidance from Google on the best place on a web page to put your Adsense ad – i.e. where they will have the greatest impact for site visitors.

Eyes go left – i.e. when someone clicks your site, they don’t focus on the centre of the screen - eye tracking studies have shown they start on the top left, pause, then work rightwards – only then do they look lower down the screen. Message clearly is to use the top and left of the screen strongly.

Dave Abernethy,
Managing Director,
Net Commerce Solutions Ltd

Tel: (+44) (0) 870 246 7642

info@net-commerce-solutions.co.uk Web site: www.net-commerce-solutions.co.uk

Registered in England and Wales. Company number 4052885: 6 Bramble Close, Harpenden, Hertfordshire, AL5 4AN