Why SEO is just the first step... by Charlie Drummond

Picture this. You have a successful online store. Things are going well - all the money you have spent on online advertising has paid off - and both traffic and conversions are up. Your repeat traffic is steadily improving, and your email newsletter is performing well too - driving traffic to your promotions and key products or services.

You can sit back, relax and count the cash, right?

Wrong. Without knowing how your customers reached the point of conversion you don't know whether they are cursing their way to the checkout or just click-click-clicking their way to the credit card field. Furthermore, you don't know whether you are successfully exposing your customers to other products or services that they would have picked up on in that transaction.

Usability is understanding customer flow - the cognitive processes that each user goes through to select where to look, where to click - and when to give up and go and make a cup of tea. You can use tried and true guiding principles to help you design your website - but when your site is live, how can you tell what those users are up to? Website analytics.

Now, some of you may be following all of this, and some may be way ahead already - and that's really the divide that's out there - but if you aren't monitoring user flow and conversion within your site you aren't doing your job.

Imagine if customers couldn't navigate a physical shop - you'd soon spot where they were getting lost and try to arrange things so that they could naturally navigate through and find what they were looking for... Similarly if you built displays to expose them to key products, you would notice when they were performing poorly.

Using a web analytics page is exactly the same, and produces similar effects. Keeping an eye out produces happy shoppers who will return to buy again. However, all is not plain sailing. Web analytics figures can be a blur of percentages and meaningless measurements (bounce rates, exit and entry rates, etc) at first glance. However, FirstRate consultants can help you set up an analytics package in the first instance and, more importantly, determine what metrics are of value to you.

We can help you keep watch over your customer traffic, and spot any bottlenecks that may have gone unnoticed. We can help you to do multi-variant testing of landing pages or paid advertisement creative within your site, improve revenue and provide a better user experience. Because it is all related.

About The Author

Charlie Drummond is a Senior Strategist from First Rate - an internet marketing consultancy offering a complete, customised solution covering areas such as Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Advertising, Website Strategy, Email Advertising & Marketing, Ecommerce Functionality and Measurement Tracking.

http://www.firstrate.co.nz