25 Google Website Optimizer Tips For Better Product Pages

Increasing e-commerce conversion rates is challenging. With thousands of possible pages, where should you start optimizing? Even if you can answer that question by picking a small set of pages to start with, what changes should you make?

The following tips will be focused on product page testing, but we will first set the stage with few setup items:

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1. Segmenting your visitors. Nothing is more powerful than segmenting your visitors and examining the different trends these visitors follow on your site. At a minimum, you should segment visitors by source of traffic, keyword, type of visit (new vs. returning) and country.

2. Segmentation with Google Website Optimizer = Testing on Steroids! Not all customers are created equal, nor should you deal with all customers equally. Testing different versions of your page or funnel is powerful. Testing different versions based on the type of visitors is even more powerful. There are different ways of doing this, but we recommend starting with BTBuckets  or with these instructions .

3. Setup your funnels. Funnels tell you what pages are causing visitors to exit the site. At a minimum, we recommend you setup the following funnels:

• Home page to cart page funnel
• General checkout process funnel including the cart page
• General checkout process funnel excluding the cart page
• Checkout process funnel for different payment types including the cart page
• Checkout process funnel for different payment types excluding the cart page

4. Funnels & visitors. Beyond setting up funnels is segmenting your traffic and examining how it moves in funnels. But how do you do that in Google Analytics? We will let you in on a small secret:

• Setup the different funnels in Google Analytics
• Setup different profiles to represent the different segments
• Now, you can examine each of the funnels for the different profiles

5. Returning visitors vs. new visitors. Comparing different segments of visitors can be confusing. You should expect visitors from organic search to interact differently with your site compared to visitors from paid search. We find that segmenting new visitors versus returning visitors can reveal major design problems in the site. Generally returning visitors will take longer on a site, view more pages, and have lower exit and bounce rates. If that is not the case, then you might have major design issues to deal with.

6. Product pages: A micro conversion. We like to run the product pages tests twice with different conversion goals:

• Micro conversion goal: When a visitor adds an item to the cart, we count that as a micro conversion.
• Macro conversion: When the visitor completes an order, we count a macro conversion.

7. Product pages: the image. Yes, you heard it before. An image is worth a thousand words. However, product images do require an investment, so test the correct solution for your website. Each of the options below will require considerable time, software, and resource commitment. So, test with 5 to 10 products before choosing the right solution for your website.

8. Product pages: Image of product in use. Test with showing the product in use vs. images with solid backgrounds. While in many cases showing the product in use helps the visitors see themselves use the particular product, this is not the case for all products. Apparel websites seem to benefit from this feature. Electronics or book websites, not so much!

9. Product pages: Location of the image. Where should you place the product image? Common wisdom is to place product images on right side of product pages. But common wisdom fails to predict how visitors will act on your website. So test placing the image on left versus the right and see which converts better.

10. Product pages: Product zooming. If you have the software installed on your website, then allowing visitors to zoom in and examine the product closely is an excellent feature to add.

11. Product pages: Multiple product images. Finally, consider having multiple images of the product. We usually recommend having 3-4 images per product to start with. But a word of caution here: hire a professional photographer for these images. Having several low quality images versus a single high quality image is something worth thinking about.

12. Product pages: your product descriptions. Most e-commerce stores take the product description from the manufacturer and place it on the site. So, you will find the same description on competing e-commerce stores. Pick your top 10 best selling products and:

• Test the impact of having the standard manufacturer's description versus custom copy your team creates. What impact does this have on the micro conversion (visitors adding items to their cart)?
• Test different versions of the custom copy you create: Not all copy created equal. You might want to test technical copy versus non-technical. Consider the different market segments and what words will have the most impact on them.

13. Product pages: Reviews. Reviews are great for increasing conversions. There are many studies that show product reviews are responsible for up to 30% uplift in conversions. However, if you are just starting out, allow customers to add reviews but do not display them right away. Wait for a product to collect enough reviews before sharing them with your visitors. Consider using services such ProductWiki  to add images on your site.

14. Product pages: add to cart buttons. Yes, they do impact conversion. And there are many things you can test with these:

• Test the location of the add to cart button
• Test different designs of the add to cart button
• Test the wording on the add to cart buttons

15. Product pages: don’t overdo it! What do you think of this?

Too many CTAs (call to actions) can stop a visitor in their tracks.

16. Product pages: cross-sells and upsells. We know that you want to sell more of your products. Cross-sells and upsells can help you do that, but they also can distract the visitors. So, test the placement of cross-sells and upsells on your product pages. Should they go in the left navigation or somewhere in the middle section of the product pages?

17. Product pages: pricing. Most of your visitors will do some sort of comparison shopping. So, test different prices and see what impact that will have on your conversion rates. We had a client who reported a 135% increase in conversion rate by lowering product prices by 10%. We do not like to focus on pricing as a mechanism to increase conversion rates but sometimes it works really well.

18. Poor man testing: pricing & Google Website Optimizer. It is usually difficult to switch back and forth between different pricing for items, but here is a general framework to help you:

• Most ecommerce packages provide a way to maintain a single price for a product. Plan on a strategy for testing multiple prices:
• Price A is the original price
• Price B is the original price x 1.10 (10% increase)
• Price C is the original price x 0.90 (10% decrease)
• Price A (original is already saved in your database). You can either maintain Price B, C in the database or have application logic to switch between the different prices for a single item.
• One option to implement this is to have all prices available on the page and use GWO to display one price and hide the other two prices. Another option will be to use GWO to pass a variable value to be used in a formula to change the price.
• Implementing this should take less than a day and will provide a mechanism to test prices in Google Website Optimizer.

19. Product pages: stock availability. This is a no brainer. No customer likes to add an item to their cart only to discover later that the item is out of stock. So, tie your front end e-commerce store to your inventory system. If that is too much, then consider a daily update.

• Bad: No product availability on your site
• Good: Always display product availability
• Excellent: Display messages to encourage customers to buy a product if you have limited stock available (Only 5 left in stock -- order soon.)

20. When can I have it? Tell visitors when the product will be in their hands. Do not tell visitors the items will arrive 3 to 10 days. That will simply kill your conversion and if it does not, it will irritate visitors.

21. Product pages: Feature list.

The first level of attracting customers is features. Features are the facts about a given product. Features of an outdoor grill might include:

• Electric
• Grease tray
• Non-stick cooking surface
• Temperature control
• 300 square inches of cooking space
• Attached working surface

22. Product pages: The benefit list. Benefits start you on the road to closing a sale. The benefits of the above outdoor grill include:

• Convenience
• Electric
• Non-stick cooking surface
• Attached working surface
• Easy to Use:
  • Electric
  • Non-stick cooking surface
  • Temperature control
  • Attached working surface
• Saves Money
• Electric
• Temperature control

23. Product pages - People buy benefits, they do not buy features. What results do your customers want from your barbeque? They want a grill that offers:

• Tasty, Healthy Food Every time
• Temperature control
• Grease tray
• Perfect for Easy Entertaining
• 300 square inches of cooking space
• Attached working area
• Easy to clean
• A Double Bonus: Environmentally Friendly While Saving You Money!
• Electric versus charcoal emissions
• Do not have to buy charcoal for the life of the grill

24. Bundled pricing. Consider bundling shipping costs with product items so visitors will not have to worry about paying for shipping costs. If the shipping costs are too complicated to understand or might be on the high side, we recommend testing bundling them with the product price.

25. Free shipping is a great way to increase sales. We have many clients who offer free shipping on orders above a certain size and usually see a nice uplift in both conversions and average order value by doing so.

 

 

 

Source;

http://websiteoptimizer.blogspot.com/2010/02/25-google-website-optimizer-tips-for.html

51 SEO points for OnPage Optimization

1. Place your keyword phrases at title tag. Title must be less than 65 characters.
2. Place the most important keyword phrase close the beginning of the page title.
3. Put some main keyword in keyword meta tag.
4. Write a good description for meta description tag, description must be unique to each page.
5. Keep Meta description short and meaningful write only 1 or 2 sentences in description.
6. Target the most important competitive keyword phrase at the home page.
7. Target one or two keywords phrases per page.
8. Use only one H1 header per page.
9. Place the most important keyword in H1 tag.
10. Use H2 and H3 for sub headers where required.
11. Use Bold / Italic / Underline for your keyword phrase for extra weight in contents.
12. Use bulleted lists to make content easier to read.
13. Use ALT tag for images, so that crawler can know about images.
14. Don’t use flash on your website because crawler can’t read flash.
15. Try to keep easier navigation of your website.
16. Use text based navigation.
17. Use CSS to creating navigation menu instead of JavaScript.
18. Use keyword phrases in file name, you can use hyphens (-) to separate the word in file names.
19. Create a valid robot.txt file.
20. Create a HTML site map for crawler and user.
21. Create a XML site map for Google crawler.
22. Add text links to others page in the footer of site.
23. Use keyword phrase in Anchor text.
24. Link the entire pages to each others.
25. Use keyword rich breadcrumb navigation to help search engines understand the structure of your site.
26. Add a feedback form and place a link to this form from all the pages.
27. Add bookmark button.
28. Add a subscription form at every page for increasing your mailing list.
29. Add RSS feed button so that user can subscribe easily.
30. Add Social Media sharing button.
31. Use images on every page but don’t forget to use ALT tag.
32. Use videos on your site which is related to your niche.
33. Write informative, fresh, unique, useful content on your site.
34. Write site content in between 300 to 500 words.
35. Keywords % must be 3 to 5%.
36. Don’t copy any content from other websites, fresh and unique content is the key of your success.
37. Add deep link to related articles.
38. Regular update your website with fresh content.
39. Use CSS to improve the look of your website.
40. Write your content for human not for robot.
41. Buy Country Level Domain name if your website is targeting local users.
42. Use a good keyword suggestion tools to finding good keywords phrases for your website.
43. Use 301 redirection to redirect http://www.domainname.com to http://domainname.com.
44. Try to buy local hosting server for your website if your site is targeting local people.
45. Use keywords rich URL instead of dynamic URL.
46. Break your article in paragraph if your article is long.
47. Add full contact address on contact page with direction map.
48. Validate XHTML and CSS at http://validator.w3.org/ .
49. Don’t use hidden text or hidden links.
50. Avoid graphic links, because text in the image can not be indexed by the spiders.
51. Don’t create multi page for with same contents.

Source:

http://techwebpro.com/51-seo-points-for-onpage-optimization.html

SEO vs social media optimization

There’s a never-ending debate as to which of these two is more important. Well, SEO is important because it attracts people to your blog or website, where you want them to land up. Similarly, if you have a well-optimized social media profile, there are chances of ranking high in the search engines. That’s because social media websites are themselves optimized and they help to bring a lot of incoming links to your site/blog.

However, social media may not take into account certain factors which search engines consider while making your content visible to others on the web. What I mean is, search engines do have algorithms based on which they’ll consider whether or not to rank your web page in a certain position. But with social media, you make your content visible to a wide range of web users. Here, the search engine algorithms have no role to play. However, the content quality should be high, as because you won’t have too many people spreading the word about it across social media networks.

So, the fact remains that both SEO and SMO contribute towards making people view your content more, thus driving in more traffic to your website/blog and helping you to convert them into regular visitors or leads. Whether you’ll give more emphasis on SEO or SMO depends on the goals you have, the kind of traffic you’re looking for and what you want the traffic to do for you. The key is to make the best use of both processes. In fact, it is possible to make both of them work for you as they have more similarities than differences.

http://www.speckygeek.com/seo-vs-social-media-optimization/