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www.SmallBizInternetMarketing.com.au 1 WEBPAGE DESIGN AND USABILITY It’s not an eff’n brochure. Pete: In this session, I want to talk about website design, usability and your site from a conversion perspective. The essence of the whole presentation is, so many people have a website out there and they just usually treat it as a brochure, they don’t treat it as a sales person. To me, your website is a lead-generation tool and it’s a sales person. And you have to treat it as such, you have to manage it as such and you have to work with it as such. Why have a website? What I want to talk about is, why have a website? There are fundamentally only two reasons you’d want to have a website, well there are three, but there are only two reasons that I think you should have a website for. Firstly, it is to make sales directly online. This is actually on an e-commerce site. It’s basically a digital sales person. So it’s there for no extra reason than to actually get people to take out their credit cards in front of their laptops and give you money. The second reason for having a website is to make the phone ring, to get people out of their chair and walk into your office. So many people have websites that are all about ego, it’s all about themselves. It’s not. You’ve got to make it have calls to action and get people to come and interact with your business. 1 page = 1 purpose The big thing which is going to be another message for the whole session today is that one page, one purpose. Every single page on your website should have a purpose and have an outcome. You should work out what that page is designed to do and make sure that it does it.

Understanding Website Design And Usability

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This transcript is the second session from the Small Business Internet Marketing. This focuses in understanding the importance of website design and usability. To learn more and watch the other workshop sessions, visit http://www.melbourneseoservices.com/seo-products/small-business-internet-marketing/

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WEBPAGE DESIGN AND USABILITY

It’s not an eff’n brochure.

Pete: In this session, I want to talk about website design, usability and your site from a

conversion perspective. The essence of the whole presentation is, so many people have a

website out there and they just usually treat it as a brochure, they don’t treat it as a sales

person. To me, your website is a lead-generation tool and it’s a sales person. And you have

to treat it as such, you have to manage it as such and you have to work with it as such.

Why have a website?

What I want to talk about is, why have a

website? There are fundamentally only two

reasons you’d want to have a website, well

there are three, but there are only two

reasons that I think you should have a

website for. Firstly, it is to make sales directly

online. This is actually on an e-commerce site.

It’s basically a digital sales person. So it’s there for no extra reason than to actually get

people to take out their credit cards in front of their laptops and give you money.

The second reason for having a website is to make the phone ring, to get people out of their

chair and walk into your office. So many people have websites that are all about ego, it’s all

about themselves. It’s not. You’ve got to make it have calls to action and get people to

come and interact with your business.

1 page = 1 purpose

The big thing which is going to be another

message for the whole session today is that

one page, one purpose. Every single page on

your website should have a purpose and have

an outcome. You should work out what that

page is designed to do and make sure that it

does it.

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The About Us page is designed to give credibility, make it give credibility and nothing else.

Don’t confuse people. Don’t have a webpage that has nine different outcomes. It’s going

to confuse people and they will not take action.

A confused person doesn’t take action. That applies to any sort of marketing, be it online or

direct mail, or even any sales process, on the phone or live. A confused person doesn’t take

action. So make sure every page has a purpose.

1 page = 1 keyword

As Dave said, every page has to have a

keyword focus. From a website perspective,

let’s say you run a bike store.

You want to have a page about Trek bikes.

You want to have a page about another brand

of bikes, Cannondale bikes. It’s all about having one page, one keyword. So not only does it

work from a conversion perspective, it works from an SEO perspective as well.

Google is the same. Google is exactly like your customer. It will get confused if you try to

do more than one thing for the webpage. If you’re trying to target more than one keyword,

just like the person reading it, Google is going to get confused and do nothing with your

site.

Help them pick up the phone

My biggest soapbox pet peeve is phone

numbers on websites. To me, a website is

designed to get the phone to ring.

Last Friday – not yesterday but the Friday

before – in our office, one of the girls, her

battery died on her car. She was not a member

of RACV, so six o’clock at night on a Friday night, wet and rainy here in Melbourne, she had

to try and get a battery into her car. So someone in the office said Holler For a Marshall,

from the company that does that. We jumped on their website and their business model is,

call us when you’re in an emergency. We will come and give you a battery.

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Their phone number is on their Contact Us page, at the bottom, in size 10 font. It’s just

ridiculous. The biggest thing is make your phone number prominent first and foremost. When

it comes to phone numbers, one thing I try to do with all our marketing in our business is,

it’s got to be measurable and manageable and it’s got to actually answer for itself. So one

thing we do is every piece of marketing we have has its own unique phone number.

We have over 140 phone numbers coming through our office. I guess we’re a telco

company, so it’s not overly cost-prohibitive. For $20 a month, you can get a 1800 number

that you put just on your website. When you get your bill every month for that phone, you

will see how many calls that website generated. It’s all about tracking.

So not only has it got to have a phone number to help people call and be prominent. You

want to be able to track this material. We actually have a different phone number appear

on our site if someone comes through AdWords, different to those that come through

natural traffic. If someone comes back to our website for a second time, it’s a different

phone number again because they’re not a first time visitor.

Question: I’ve been considering getting a 1300 or 1800 number because I currently use my mobile number which is working fine for me, people do ring it. Do you have any

research on how much difference it makes having that type of number?

Absolutely. We’ve done a lot of testing with that sort of thing. It comes down to 1800

numbers and 1300 numbers are there for a reason, because they work. You just find that

people will want to deal with professionals, as Dave was saying earlier, they want to deal

with someone who is professional, who’s an expert in their niche. A 1800 number says a lot

more than a mobile phone number. Mobile phone, to me personally, says small, one-man

band; 1800 number says company.

What you can do is have three or four 1800 numbers, one for your website, one for your

business card or whatever it might be. They can all answer at the same number. You only

need one phone line coming into your office. All the 1800 number is basically a redirect.

When someone calls the 1800 number, it just redirects the call through to your normal

phone number. You can redirect it to a mobile phone. But at least that way you can

actually track it separately and it’s a big thing.

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We just did some direct mail that is going out on Monday. We did the split testing of four

different DL fliers, each one had its own unique phone number. We can see which one

actually works. There is no point in doing work if you’re not actually measuring it. That’s in

everything Yellow Pages. I have mandate that we do not spend a cent unless we can track

if that cent made a profit. Don’t just throw money out there and hope one of them is going

to stick. Which one sticks?

It’s about them, not you

There is that old advertising saying that, I know that

half my advertising works and the other half

doesn’t. I just don’t know which half. You want to

test this sort of thing. It’s important, not only to

have phone numbers on your site, but to actually

make them prominent. The biggest thing is it’s

about them, not you.

Question: I’ve got a client who has a specific 1800 number with their company name in it and they’re really pushing the branding on that, and they really want that. So they’ve got a couple of sites going at the moment and that one number is on everything. What would

you recommend that I do to track that for them?

Do people want to do business with them because of their phone number? The answer is

no. I’ve had this at the office at the moment. We’ve just bought into another company.

We’ve taken on a couple of, not clients, but business partners in completely different

niches. One has a 1300 business name and is adamant about having the phone number on

everything. But people aren’t doing business with that company because of their phone

number. People are doing business with them because of the value proposition, because

of the solutions they are going to get. So it’s just a matter of educating them that we can

do that, but you’ll just be throwing money and not knowing which money sticks.

We’ve tested it and the conversion rate on the site doesn’t change basically because of

what phone number appears. It does compare to a 1800 number and the mobile number

but 1800 blah-blah-blah versus 1800 yah-yah-yah makes no difference at all. It’s important

from a tracking perspective. So it’s just an education thing. People love their product and

the biggest thing that I try and talk to people about is, it’s not about the product. I’ve

actually got a book coming out later this year entitled ‘It’s Not About the Product,’ because

it’s not. It’s about the actual marketing communication.

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People start a business and they get so in love with the tools and the solutions and the

actual product themselves, they forget that there are actually people are out there that

they need talk to. So it’s not about the phone number, it’s not about the 1800 number.

Who cares about that? That’s great for radio advertising.

The only reason I like the 1300-word is for radio because it is easy to remember. That’s the

reason they were developed in the States in the ‘60s, for ease of remembering, not for

anything else. 1800-FLOWERS you remember that because you hear about it on the radio

and things like that. But for most businesses, is it something that people need to

remember, or is it one of those things that you see it and you interact with it and you’re

gone? It comes down to the product. If it’s flowers, yes, I need to order some flowers, it’s

my girlfriend’s birthday. I’ve got to call and do it. So to remember that 1800 number is

good. But for telco, no one really cares. No one’s going to remember 1800-infinity again,

that’s irrelevant. It’s on the website to make that interaction.

What I thought I’d do, rather than sit here and talk at you with different website material,

I’d pull up some websites either yours. If you are willing to put your hand up and put your

website up there, we’ll pull it apart. Or you can jump onto your competitors’ sites and

actually look around at what they’re doing well and what they’re doing badly, and actually

pull it apart. It will be a bit more fun and a bit more interactive than me just talking for half

an hour.

Hot seats Your sites or competitors.’

Alright, let’s go and I want everyone else to put in their two cents in as well, not just myself.

Integrated Consulting Solutions

What’s the site, iconsultingsolutions.com.au? I had a

look at this last night as well.

Now, I’ll ask you a question in a second. So Integrated

Consulting Solutions ‘is a management services

company that helps organizations develop, audit and

maintain management systems, achieve certifications, international standards, manage risk,

improve business efficiency and drive customer satisfaction.’ What on earth does that

mean? That makes no sense to me at all.

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Answer: What it means is that we set up management systems for companies, like

occupational health and safety, quality, environmental and we help them pass the test for

certification.

Pete: Pass the test, improve work efficiency, and not get fined. I’m trying to my head

around what you actually do.

Answer: Yes, well they have to get an international certificate to prove that they’ve got a

particular type of management system and we help them pass that test.

Pete: Who is the type of person to make the first enquiry to you guys? Who’s the avatar?

Answer: The CEO of the organization and generally he’s under pressure because one of his

customers wants him to have that particular international certificate fast.

Pete: So you help them get certified so they get the contract quicker?

Answer: Yes.

Pete: Say that, because that to me, I’m a CEO of a multimillion-dollar company and that

means nothing to me. I guess it’s different because it’s not my niche but the first thing to

me, I just read that and said, what on earth do you do?

Look, from a couple of perspectives, there’s a thing called the fold line. Has anyone heard

what the fold line is? It comes from the newspaper days that when you see a newspaper

folded in half, the things that people actually see when they first saw the newspaper on

the stand, was above the fold. It was the top half of the newspaper. It was very important

to have your headlines and if you were in advertising, to have your advertisement above

the fold so people saw it more.

The same thing goes for the website. The fold line is basically considered the line where

the browser stops. So it’s important to have your biggest messages above that fold line. So

you’ve got this huge space here. Half of the website above the fold is taken up by this big

image that says ‘We Build on Your Strengths,’ which personally to me isn’t a sales

proposition. It’s not a headline that converts. It’s not a communication tool. So I would

reduce that quite a bit, make it smaller, cut it in half, do something where it’s not so much

above the fold.

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The other thing which I talked about is, you want people to call you up as a first instance.

People aren’t going to call you up or visit you at a PO Box. You’ve got PO Box, PO Box

address, your phone number and your fax number. I would think that no one really wants

your PO Box unless they’re already doing business with you. No one is going to send you

mail saying, hi, I want to do business with you. Can you please call me on this number? No

one is going to send you a postcard.

That’s not relevant. They’re going to pick up the phone and call you. So put that big 1800

number that we spoke about there, ‘for a free half hour consultation’ or some sort of value

proposition. ‘Call us on this number,’ that’s going to get them to pick up the phone. That’s

what they want.

People are going to search for ISO consulting or whatever sort of service terms they are,

whatever sort of keywords you come up with, because they want to do business. They

want to talk to you. So make it easy for them to talk to you and put that big phone number

up there.

Even just do a video, which Dave will talk about later. You can sit there and say, hi, I do this,

I do that. We can help you with this. You’ve got that contract you’re trying to get but you

need to get the certification. We’ll help you get it really quickly so you can get that job. Call

us now.

Question: That’s actually a really good point because one of the hard things is to explain what we do and a video would show it a lot better than a paragraph of text.

Pete: Dave, I’m sure Dave has got some points in this. He had a look at this as well. You’ve

got to work out what people want when they’re coming to your site. What’s the value

proposition, that avatar, that person actually wants to experience and give it to them

straightaway. The fold line is a big thing on this site. The phone number is another big

thing. And speak in English.

One of the things that really works well from our telco perspective is that our competition

are technicians. I still have no idea how to install a phone system, neither do my business

partners. I don’t want to know and I don’t care. I know the solutions, and I know the

benefits people are going to get and what the system can do. But I don’t know technical

and our competitors do, and they talk technical.

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For this 24-year-old receptionist/accounting officer working in an accounting firm who

actually wants to get a phone system, she doesn’t know either. She barely knows

accounting, let alone phone systems. So we talk to her and we talk about it in English. We

will help you get your phone system quick fast, effectively which can give you these

benefits. It’s not about the technical terms. It’s not about ISDN2s and onramps and all that

other technical jargon.

So personally to me, and this is again, I don’t know your clients, I’m just talking from my

perspective is ISO 19001 and HACCP, to me, that means nothing. If it means something to

the people, then obviously leave it on there. Also, you have clients: Port of Melbourne

Corporation, Belmatic Industries. If your clients know these companies, put their logos on

there rather than putting small text. Actually put your clients’ logos down the side.

Put some testimonials on there to actually say on the home page, Port Melbourne

Corporation. We were able to land a $100,000 deal in two weeks because they got your

certification. Put real-world testimonials on the home page with their logo and so on which

people actually recognize. That is a huge conversion thing.

At the end of the day, it’s another piece of direct response marketing. So the same

principles that you can get by picking up any direct response marketing book still apply

online, it is just a different medium. People think the web is different. It’s no different. It is

just a direct response medium. That’s what we try to do with everything and that’s what

hopefully you’ll get from today, is it’s all about direct response and that’s what we want to

do. Do you want to jump onto another person’s site? We can do a competitor.

Oracle Traders

Let’s go to oracletraders.com.au. What do you do? Give

me a lowdown.

Craig: We do share market-related software, data

services and education. It’s very new. My partner and I

have been in the industry a long time but the site is new. We’ve only been up and running

for three or four months. We have differing ideas and hearing you guys saying you need a

minimum of 300 words, we obviously don’t have that. Out idea was to try to keep it

looking nice and clean and professional, et cetera. But I’m interested to hear what you guys

think.

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Pete: What’s biting better at this time of year, salmon or perch? Can I buy a reel from you

as well? The first thing I see is fishing. The first thing I see on that site, I’m looking at fishing.

I can buy a fishing rod. You can give me some trout tips.

Craig: The idea of the web design guy who did it was to make that person be an average

person, someone you could relate to. But I agree, there is not enough share market-related

thing that’s going to hit you straightaway except for that chart. There is a chart during the

day when the markets are open, but that’s all. That’s all you get.

Pete: The guy was on the money with having a person on the site. That makes a huge

difference. On all the sites we have, and I can show you some of our sites later, people and

so on, but our headset website, it’s a person with a headset. It’s a middle-aged female on a

headset because that is our target market and that’s who tends to buy most of our

headsets. You want a guy who looks like an average bloke but probably in front of a

computer or a share chart. Then they can see shares but someone at the same time. Here it

looks like, I’m going to go fishing. That’s just my personal thing.

Another thing is ‘Hello and welcome to Oracle Traders.’ People realize they’re there. They

know they’re on the website. Saying hello and welcome, it’s nice to have but really I’d get

rid of all that sort of thing. You’d be better off replacing that with ‘Dealing with Oracle

Traders will get you 5% return in the market in 30 days guaranteed,’ whatever value

proposition you’ve got and put that out there. Saying welcome is not a great thing. You

want to hit them over the head with a value proposition.

Question: This is just a general question about sites themselves. The real estate that the header uses up, when you’re talking about above the fold, with no header of course everything moves up. It’s that blue band across the top or the other one had a band across the top and most websites do. Is the header important? Obviously you’ve got

to get your name there.

Pete: A header works well. It comes down to get the brand in position. For example in

Flight Centre, people know the Flight Centre brand. So having the Flight Centre logo front

and centre, people relate to that. Do people know Oracle Traders logo at this point in time?

Craig: No, but we’re trying to build that brand out there.

Pete: What I would do, I would make this menu smaller and actually put it on the same

level as the actual logo so you get that little bit of extra space. Do you want people to call

you? What is the objective of this page? What is the outcome you want?

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Craig: Yes, we want people to call us. We have a landing page. We basically sell a product

that is very well known in this market and we’re one of two distributors in Australia for that

product. It’s highly searched for, et cetera. The software is called MetaStock. We have got

metastockaustralia.com.au. But that’s the top product there. That’s really what we are. All

the other things we’ve built as add-ons to that product.

Pete: Is it in an ecommerce store? Do you have to buy online? Or do you want them to call

you first?

Craig: Either or is fine. We’re happy to come in the morning and process orders, that’s great.

But generally speaking, people want to talk to somebody first.

Pete: People normally hit logos first on a website to go to a home page.

Craig: If you’re on another page, I think you can go back. If you look at the Support tab for

example, there’s no content until you actually click on a link and this is probably a bad

thing. That’s all you get if you click on any one of those links, then you’ll get a whole list of

screen shots and bits and pieces and instructions and details. So I don’t know.

Pete: There are some other little things from a general perspective: the Home button

should be on the left hand side just from a user perspective and testing and so on. It’s

called the hot pocket, or the red triangle, or different names. When people look at a

website, it’s pretty much the top corner first. People expect the Home material to be on the

left-hand side. Just little things like that will make a big difference.

Things like login – if you want people to log into your site, put that username and

password on the Home page. Don’t make them click to have to log in. If you go to pages

like Google or eBay, or Facebook, to get to the Home page, let’s go to Facebook. Their

Home page there, there’s a big login at the top. So take that space next to the logo with

the login details. They can learn to do it. If people come back to the site regularly, make it

easy for them to do so.

From your perspective, I’d do log in here, big phone number and then your logo, those

little things from a conversion perspective. Also just really quickly, from an SEO perspective,

just to give you some context. Dave’s obviously going to do that video for you guys.

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The top of the page title, Oracle Traders – Empowering Investors is the page title. It is one

of the most powerful things you can have when it comes to telling people what your page

is about. I doubt people are Googling either Oracle Traders or Empowering Investors. You

want to make that MetaStock software from Oracle Traders. That way, you’ll rank for

MetaStock software. It’s those things that are really important to actually have. Forget

about your brand.

David: I might just add something there as well. I just wanted to talk in terms of the

biggest hurdle that people have to overcome when doing business with any business

online is believing what it is that you have to say. Whenever I look at a website, I always

think of how can I build that proof? How can I make someone come to this website and

feel like, hey, I can trust this. It looks like the real deal. So make sure that you’ve got the

good template.

Contact information is extremely important because you wouldn’t go to a website and do

business with someone because what happens if it goes wrong? You want to get in

contact with them. So you want to make sure that they’re the real deal. Have a physical

address as well. Things like testimonials, embed those in.

I’ve had some good experience in the whole MetaStock niche. Depending on what you’re

trying to position yourself as here, if you’re thinking, right, I want to be the go-to guy, the

reseller for MetaStock here in Australia. Think what it is that our user, if you go to our

avatar, what is it that they’d be looking at? I would go to MetaStock’s website, see what

MetaStock looks like and take some cues from there.

Pete: A couple of other small things for other people’s websites, sorry I’m going to pick on

you a bit more, Craig. You’ve got here, Click here for our most popular package. It’s a very

small button below the fold. Obviously, it will change on the resolution of the screen.

Craig: It’s not even a MetaStock offer. We’re targeting two different markets. MetaStock is

the brand name that we’re using to drive the traffic to the site hopefully. But there a lot of

people, I suppose, in that market. So we’ve got a separate little offering for, I guess, we call

it Mr. Plumber, for the mums and dads. Rather than paying $1,000 for the MetaStock

software and data, we’ve got an offer for $595 for another charting package, which is not

as good but will get 99% of people across the line without any problems.

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Pete: Say that on your Home page. If you want MetaStock, that’s available but it’s $1,000. If

you just want to get started and see if this investing thing works for you, there’s $500

investment. Obviously, you’d write it better than that but that’s your headline. That’s your

pitch on your Home page.

Even things like, get a free e-book offer. That’s great, but what is the e-book about? What

do I get? Sell the e-book. Probably if you did some testing, no one would be clicking that

red button. Free e-book to get you started, what does it actually get me started on? Does it

show me how to mow the lawns? Does it show me how to fish? Tell me how to catch fish

quicker? So there are a few changes you could make to your site and get the increase quite

quickly.

Craig: Great, thanks.

Pete: I want to keep moving because we’re running out of time. I want to jump in and

show you another couple of things just from a testing perspective of what can be done.

Dave and I can stand up here and we can pull sites apart with our own personal experience

and thoughts and so on, but it comes down to what it says and the users on your site.

Why split test?

Things like split testing: these websites are

identical except for the red and green button.

Having a red button increases conversions

by 21%. Twenty-one percent more people

who came to your site actually converted.

This is another split test here with some slight

changes, putting a photo of a girl there,

moving the map down, making a few

changes, changed the conversion rate of that

page by 6.1%.

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Another one here, couple of changes from

left to right, the right-hand side performed

better with a 65% bounce rate. What a

bounce rate is, when someone comes to

your site for the very first time, if they just

leave straightaway without going any further on your site, it’s called a bounce. They come

in and they leave. That pretty much means that your site wasn’t relevant to them. Most

people will click through a few links and play around on the site. So by putting that holiday

sale in there, it had a 65% better bounce rate. Sixty-five percent more people stayed on the

site basically.

How to split test?

There are a couple of ways to do this, by

Google Analytics and Google Website

Optimizer. We’re actually running out of

time. I was going to jump inside and play

around with this, which I might do if we’ve

got some time later today or I’ll do another

video and jump in and show you some things just to give you a quick overview of what is

possible. I recently relaunched the MCG material. I had some carpet left over and redid a

series of frames and that sort of thing. And as part of that launch, I drove traffic to this site

and got people to pre-register their interest in owning a piece of the MCG and built up a

list that I can market to.

Google Website Optimiser

There are basically three elements to this site that

I tested: headline, I recorded three different

videos and reworded this opt-in pitch here three

different ways.

Then inside Website Optimizer, a Google tool

which allows you to actually grab parts of your site and say this is the headline, this is the

video, this is the opt-in box, and actually segregate those sites and put in three different

combinations of each and say three different headlines, three different videos and three

different opt-in boxes.

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It will actually go to the site, just magically pick a combination and say, headline A, video A,

opt-in box A is combination 1,this headline A, video A, opt-in box B is combination 2 and

so on and so forth. It will give you an idea just how that affected it. There was one

combination, combination 7 at the bottom that had a conversion rate of 4.85%. Four point

eight five percent of people who came to that page with that particular combination opted

in. A different combination got a 10.5% opt-in rate, so a double conversion rate with a

different configuration of headline, video and opt-in box.

So if I just went and put my website up, and just by sheer luck or dumb luck or accident

and chose a certain combination, I lost half the traffic that came to my site that could have

been buyers. So you want to start testing this sort of thing. It’s pretty easy to do and I’ll run

through a separate video and send it to you guys separately, just how this sort of thing

works and what’s available. It’s really simple.

You don’t have to do it. You can find people in the Philippines to do it. You can get your

15-year-old nephew to do it for you. This is pretty easy to do, or tell your website guy to do

it. It’s really simple and it’s all free. Google will give you this for free. They’re trying to make

your site’s better so the users get a better experience when they come through your site.

Google Analytics

Also quickly, and I’ll go into more depth in a

later video which should be part of the DVD set

but won’t be obviously, I’ll e-mail it to you. That

is Google Analytics. Google actually has a tool

that you put some code on your website and it

tracks your users experience on your site. So

again, it’s not just you making blind decision saying, yes, I don’t really like pink anymore,

I’m going to change the site to orange. It’s doing it on real data.

To give you an idea of what sort of thing you can get out of Analytics, I’m just looking

again at that particular Own the G website for the month of April. We had just under 4,000

visitors on the site in that month. The average visitor looked at one and a half pages. This

website, as you see, really didn’t have much depth to it for a particular reason. There are a

couple of Contact Us pages and an About Us page at the bottom. But the aim is to get

people to look at the video and then give me their name and e-mail address so I can hit

them with marketing after the fact.

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You can do things through here. You can go into looking at content and Analytics will

show you of your website, which pages have the most views, to work out what pages get

the most views so you can look at and change and adjust your site navigation and the

content on your site to match what people are looking at.

You can look at the top landing pages. If you have a website with 1,800 pages or even 20

pages, what pages are people coming to first when they see your website? People don’t

always come into your website through the index page. Sometimes they come in through

your About Us page or a blog post.

If you’re ranking for dentist South Yarra and there’s a blog post, that’s the page that is

actually ranked in Google and that’s the page they’ll see first. So you might want to change

those pages based on this is a first-time viewer. You might find for a lot of sites, the index

page isn’t the most visited or the most viewed landing page. It shows you different ways

where people are coming from. You can go in here and see what are your top traffic areas.

For the MCG material, most people came directly through some marketing I was doing.

Other people came through Fox Sports, Facebook advertising which we’ll talk about later,

Google CPC which is the AdWords network. We didn’t get a lot of SEO things, but that

wasn’t the aim. You’ll get an idea of where people are coming from and you can optimize

and focus on that. You can manage only what you measure and these sorts of tools are

designed to do that.

I’ll jump in and give you a good half hour video on all this sort of thing and send it to you

guys later. But I encourage you to think about it and actually use it in some of your work.

It’s testing it because it is not about you, it’s about the user. So let’s open it up to questions

and we can go from there.

Question: Just a quick question about where you put the code software into the html material.

Pete: Google for Website Optimizer walks you through the whole thing. If you go to the

Home page, it actually literally tells you exactly what to do. If I go to create a new

experiment, what I did before was a multi-variant, because there were multi-variants on

that page that I wanted to test at once. You go into there and it says choose the element,

your heading, image, description, three elements here, yes, I’ve completed the steps above.

I’ve worked out what they will be. It just asks you here, put in your experiment name. The

Home page is home.com/index.html and home.com/thanks for the Thank You page.

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You’ve got to work out what is the goal to work out what converts better. So for that

particular page, it is referred to as a squeeze page because I’m trying to squeeze all the

traffic into that opt in and there was a thank you page once people opted in, so that’s the

conversion page or the goal.

Once you go through there, which I’ll show you in the video that I will send out later, it

actually says, here’s the code you need to place, place it here. And it actually gives you

really clear examples, even to the point where it says, is it you who are actually going to be

doing this or your web developer. If you tick web developer, it’ll say, here’s a link for your

unique code that you can send to your developer to read and it tells them what to do. So

it’s really easy for yourself or someone else to do.

Question: If I don’t want to do this and my web developer doesn’t know how to do it, do you guys do this?

Pete: I don’t. I run a telco company. That’s part of what Dave does at Melbourne SEO

Services. Buy the DVDs and give it to your web developer as a present and say, do the

website for free. I’m going to give you some free education.

There are plenty of people out there that do. Find a web developer and ask them to talk

you through online marketing and see what they do and what they know. There are

companies like Dave’s and there are plenty of other people out there. This isn’t a pitch fest

just for Dave’s company but there are people out there who will do this for you and who

know this. Just tell them what you want. And if they don’t know how to do it, don’t hire

them. Say, this is what I want to do.

This is the purpose of this sort of thing, these workshops and these DVDs. It’s to give you

education, not so much that you do it yourself, but just be aware of what is happening so

you can manage it properly. So when you’re investing your money in a company to do it,

you actually know they’re doing the right thing. Tell them what you want and it’s all about

education.

Question: You mentioned multiple phone numbers. So do you think you should have more than one phone number on your website?

Pete: It depends how serious you are. If you’re spending six figures driving pay-per-click

advertising to your site, then you would. And if that’s primarily doing a lot of traffic, it all

comes down to how much time do you have to actually invest in this sort of thing and

where is that limit.

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What we’ve done is we do things like there’s a funnel on our website for just normal

people who find us through SEO traffic. Then the way we do our AdWords, is tag the

AdWords ads so that our website knows that people are coming from AdWords and show

the different phone number. So we get an understanding, if we’re spending this much

money on our AdWords campaign, which I’ll talk about later for those people who don’t

know AdWords, it’s getting us how many conversions? This paying for traffic is pointless if

it’s not converting. So I suggest you should do it if you want to make sure that you’re

measuring all the different conversion aspects.

Question: I have one phone number for a landing page for AdWords and one for the regular Home page.

Pete: It’s all about what you want to test. If you just want to find out if that’s working, how

do you find out if it’s working, and one way might be a phone number.

David: I think just to add on to that as well, when you do your testing, test things where

you’re sending enough traffic like Pete was saying. If you’re going to improve your click-

through rate by having a different phone number or whatever, think how much traffic am I

driving to that and how much could it, potentially. Assuming that everything goes well, it

might increase the conversion rate from 2% to 4%. But if it’s only getting 30 visitors a day,

is it worth doing that test?

Just chunk it down along the track as to what it could mean potentially, and assuming the

test went really well and you doubled your conversion rate, does it add enough to your

bottom line that it would be worth your time? There are so many things you can do. It’s

only once you start to drive significant volume.

Pete: The first thing is just to tick all the basic boxes to make sure your site has some basic

things: prominent phone number, good call to action, it actually communicates correctly

with the marketplace and the avatar who are looking at it. Get those things right first.

Testing is a should-do but it is secondary. Just get the site some basics on there first and

then worry about the testing and just some big things.