Ever wonder what an “organic” (unpaid) search engine click might really be worth to you? For that matter, ever wonder how many clicks you might gain by moving from the #5 spot to the #1 spot on a Google search engine result page (SERP)?

Where Our Numbers Come From

In 2006 AOL released more than 30 million search queries originating from more than 600,000 AOL search users. Because AOL didn’t scrub personally identifying information from this data, it has come to be known as a data leak – but it was always meant as a study of online user behavior.

The Value of Page One

AOL’s data (snapshot on right) showed that 89% of all clicks were directed towards the first page of results:

• 42.1% followed the first link
• 11.9% followed the second
• 8.5% followed the third
• and so on…

At the time most SERP pages only showed organic results. Modern search rankings have to compete with advertisements, promoted listings, map results, and related images – but the overall distribution seems to hold over the organic search elements.

What Can You Do With Distribution Data?

By using the search ranking data alongside keyword search volume data you can determine:

• How many clicks you stand to receive by achieving Top 10 SERP positioning for a particular keyword.
• How many clicks you can expect to gain or lose by moving up and down the SERP.

“Shopping” - An Example

Let’s consider the word “shopping” (already included in the graphic above). I recommend using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. It is not the best Keyword Evaluation tool on the market, but it is free and easy to use – and you can export your data to Excel for easy manipulation.

In the month of April (2012), the word “shopping” had:

• 55,600,000 Global Searches
• 13,600,000 Local Searches

Local Searches is always customized to your country – in our case the United States. We don’t have much of a global footprint, so we’ll stick to Local Searches for the rest of this example.

As we said earlier, Pay-Per-Click ads, videos, and images will poach some of this traffic. Let’s just knock 25% off the top to account for this traffic loss. That leaves us with approximately:

• 10,000,000 Local Searches

Based on the distribution averages above, you might expect the following click-through results for each of the Top 10 search engine result positions:

• Position #1: 4,213,000 clicks
• Position #2: 1,190,000 clicks
• Position #3: 850,000 clicks
• Position #4: 606,000 clicks
• Position #5: 492,000 clicks
• Position #6: 405,000 clicks
• Position #7: 341,000 clicks
• Position #8: 301,000 clicks
• Position #9: 285,000 clicks
• Position #10: 299,000 clicks

What Is a Click Worth To You?

The value of a website click will depend greatly on your conversion rate and the size of an average sale. Setting Goals in Google Analytics can help you figure out the first and your sales statistics can provide the second.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that you have a 2% website conversion rate, an average sale of $250, and rank #5 for the search term “shopping.”

At the #5 ranking, you should be pulling in 492,000 local clicks – which at 2% conversion would equal 9,840 sales. Multiply that by $250 a sale and that search term alone would be pulling in $2,460,000 a month.

Move from #5 to #2 will increase your organic traffic by 698,000 local clicks. Assuming that your conversion rate holds, that’s a jump of 13,960 sales or $3,490,000 each month… on top of the $2,460,000 you would already pull in.

Now, most of us won’t be landing on the first page of the “shopping” results – but even something like “San Francisco chocolate” (with 8,100 local searches a month) can pull in a reasonable return all on its own.

Running Your Own Numbers

You can use the following formula to help you estimate how much in sales a particular search term will generate for your business:

Search Volume (from Google AdWords Keyword Tool)
* 0.75 (to account for traffic lost to PPC and other SERP clutter)
* Organic click-share (from AOL data)
* Conversion Rate (calculable from Google Analytics combined with internal sales figures)
* Average Sale
—————————
Search Term Value

Once you have these figures at your fingertips, you can figure out how much it is actually worth to your company to advance specific search terms.

References and Resources

• Red Cardinal: Want to Know How Many Clicks The #1 Google Position Gets?
• AdWords Keyword Tool
• Google Analytics
• Analytics Help: How do I set up goals and funnels?
• For Another Approach try this article at SEO Book

Men buy, women shop! Facts vs. relationship!

He wants concise factual answers to his questions.

She wants interaction and eye contact.

For a man, no means, you haven’t given him enough information, stick with the facts! Ask what is missing for him and give it to him!

For a woman, no really means no, so have a plan B ready and practice your patience skills; follow up becomes everything! Figure out what is missing and trust her.

For all my feminists and gays out there – this also isn’t about loosing any of the ground we’ve gained, we all deserve to be paid equally and have the same human rights, but when it comes to sex, we aren’t the same, we are not equal. Acknowledging it, is a far more powerful place from which to come. Women have different needs and desires than men. It’s time to know them and use them to your advantage.

Do you want to know the #1 issue for men and women when buying?

Women- lack of sales help when needed
Men- close parking

That’s a huge spectrum!

Female clients prefer that you listen with 100% attention when selling to them. Women will pick up on your emotions much quicker, so no false compliments guys and don’t patronize.

On the other hand, a woman can give all sorts of compliments to a man and he’ll just love it. It doesn’t matter whether you mean it or not because he can’t tell the difference. This is why some guys think the stripper is really in love with them.

Segue to the sale

The key point to bring to the forefront when selling is, be respectful. Meet them wherever they are:

• If she says, she doesn’t have the money- then she doesn’t see the value, you have not evidenced what is missing for her, go back and ask: why aren’t you buying this product, what is missing for you? Surprisingly few sales people ask this question, yet it is the one they want to know the most, what would make you buy this product?

Mercedes example: if I had a brand new Mercedes out front and told you it was yours for $5, you would see the value! If you didn’t have $5, you would borrow 50 cents from everyone around you to come up with it, the value is evident. Present your product or service’s value clearly, because it is never about the money.

• If she doubts your product - she need more facts, and client testimonials of success.
• If they doubt your company – give them references and reassurance, don’t wait to be asked, make it as easy as possible for them to do business with you.
• And, lastly, let the clients sell themselves! If they aren’t ready to buy – follow through is everything. Remember, 80% of sales are made on the fifth to twelfth contact! *

The science behind it

Renowned Mars Venus author, John Gray, outlines the sales differences between men and women beautifully, in Venus on Fire, Mars on Ice.

“The larger bridge connecting the left and right hemispheres in women’s brains means women can process more information and do it more quickly than can their male counterparts. While men focus intently on one task at a time, women are fractal thinkers and frequently multitask. Understand how to apply that information to sales: successful sales efforts to men require presenting facts and getting to the point quickly, while successful sales to women include time to talk, identify common interests, relate to personal issues; in essence, to bond first, prior to beginning any sales effort.”

Female Preferences:

• Female prospects after an initial proposal may place an order and be more talkative after they’ve had a few days to think about it.
• During the early stages of a relationship with a new client, a female client is more likely to hold your feet to the fire on your statement that you have made a “casual commitment” to them.
• Female clients prefer that you listen with 100% attention when selling to them.
• Pausing before presenting your solution (even if you already have a solution) is more socially acceptable to female clients, because they want to be a part of coming up with the solution and do not want the solution rushed.
• Female clients prefer to know how the product will meet their needs when buying.
• When a female client or coworker is stressed about a problem she is more likely to walk around talking to coworkers rather than shutting the door and working out the problem.
• Boasting or self-promoting to female clients can turn them off to a sale.

Male Preferences:

• Male prospects make quicker decisions after receiving a sales proposal.
• Male clients prefer to know your credentials and dwell on them before making a sale.
• After the sales proposal has been made, if the offer is higher than what he expected to pay for your goods or services, male prospects are more likely to be quieter during this meeting.
• Male prospects tend to favor being shown appreciation rather than respect when selling a service or product.
• When making your point make sure you are clear in your message to male clients.
• Male clients prefer quick solutions to a problem.
• Male clients prefer people to be brief and come to the point quickly when making a sale.
• Male clients need the most space to think alone after a proposal submission has been made.”

Men buy, women shop! Facts vs. relationship!

She wants interaction and eye contact.
He wants concise factual answers to his questions.

Use sex to sell!

Whatever the reasons are, you have some key decisions to make:

• Which web development firm will you hire?
• What should the new website look and function like?
• How much budget and time should you invest?

Most importantly… how do you ensure you hire the right firm and finish the project on time and on budget? How do you ensure you make the right decisions along the way throughout the development process? How do you ensure your website is more than an online brochure so it can help increase profits or decrease costs?

According to Gartner research, one third of development projects exceed budgets and schedules by almost 100 percent in many small and midsize businesses. How can you ensure this doesn’t happen to you?

We at mb/i have been developing websites for over 12 years and we constantly see the warning signs early in our sales process. At its core, the problem stems from clients wanting an estimate before knowing what the website should do. It’s like asking a general contractor for an estimate without giving him the architect’s blueprints. The only way this
can be done is inaccurately.

We lose projects by coming in higher than our competition only to learn the client ended up paying more than what we asked for in the first place—one change order at a time.

We lose projects by asking too many questions at the beginning only to learn the client had to backtrack the project several times due to lack of complete specifications, going over budget and missing the launch date.

We lose projects by worrying about future needs only to learn the client—even though happy at the first launch of the site—is now sadly aware that their site was not built on a solid foundation and is not scalable. New functionality needed can’t be easily added.

All of these issues are avoidable with the proper planning. But you need to realize and accept that the proper planning is indeed needed. The first step is not to get an estimate; the first step is to define the project. Without such definition the estimate can’t be accurate. Stay away from the developers who will give you a number without asking questions. If they don’t understand your business, how will they make recommendations that make sense for you? If they don’t understand your sales process, how will they put in place the right calls to actions on the site? If they don’t know where you plan to be in the future, how can they build a scalable solution?

Convinced you need to plan first? Great… so who does the planning? Another warning flag we see is clients wanting to do this planning by themselves and calling the web developer only to execute.

• Are you on top of the latest web design trends and usability guidelines?
• Do you know how to organize a site to maximize engagement and conversion?
• Are you the best qualified to decide which technologies should be used?

Unless you’re in the business, the answer to these questions will be “no”. Know what you don’t know and involve the web developer from the beginning. A great part of what you’re paying for is their expertise in building effective websites. Put them to use. We were amused by an article in the Wall Street Journal that recommended business owners build their own websites. The first step was to choose a hosting account: Windows or Linux. Would you know how to answer that question?

The right web developers will have a proven process for planning your website. They will know the right questions to ask and in what order. They will know how to facilitate meetings and digest conflicting information from different stakeholders in your company. They will know how to lay out a plan that ensures the right results the first time around.

Download the mb/i white paper, “Discovery, Building Your Website Right the First Time,” which includes a step-by-step description of the mb/i discovery process.

Is your website a 12-lane highway, or an abandoned country road?

If you don’t know what your web traffic is like, it’s time to find out. There are a number of web traffic analysis suites out there, but our expertise is with Google Analytics.

Visitor Flow: Your regular traffic update

Google Analytics is full of useful charts and data, but if you want a visual overview that will show you how people actually move through your site, you want the Visitor Flow.

You can find the Visitor Flow after you open up your website stats inside of Google Analytics. It is in the left-hand navigation, at the bottom of the Audience section.

Side-by-side: What does your traffic look like?

I have included a side-by-side view of two traffic flows above.  The one on the left is a healthy website which has successfully segmented it’s audience and provides them with useful resources.  The one on the right is a website that relies upon its blog to draw in business, but provides no channels to drive that traffic towards the resources on the main site.

Signs you have a healthy website:

• Most new traffic lands on one of a few pages designed to function as landing pages.
• From the landing pages visitors divide by audience segment.
• Each audience segment follows a clear progression distinct from the other segments.
• Traffic loss remains low at every interaction with the site.

E-commerce sites have one additional concern.  At least one of the audience segments needs to reach the shopping cart (and eventually the thank-you page).

By contrast, a weaker website has no clear landing pages - and traffic will scatter every which way, or drop entirely off the site in one or two links.

Making sense of your Visitor Flow

YOU control the first column of your Visitor Flow. Google Analytics has segmenting options for any kind of business.

• by Country for companies with international reach
• by Region for companies with nationwide reach
• by City for local businesses
• by Keyword to track ROI of SEO campaigns
• … and many more

The second column of the Visitor Flow shows the “starting page” or “landing page” of your visitors. The paths to the left show where the traffic comes from, the paths to the right show where on your site the traffic goes. The red bands indicate traffic that leaves your site.

Any page that appears in the second column of your Visitor Flow should be prepared to welcome and direct new visitors.

The third column marks a visitor’s first interaction with your site. This is the first time you can see where your visitors chose to go, rather than how they find your site.

As you progress to the right you will see how these visitors chose to navigate through the site. Pages with a clear path of progress have done a good job of speaking to one or more of you audiences, those with traffic that scatters in many directions may not have done quite so well.

Sounds Good - Can MB/I Do This For Me?

Current mb/i clients can request an evaluation of their Google Analytics through solutions@marissaberger.com - new visitors to the mb/i site are instead invited to make use of our 30-point site critique.

So, are you using your website as an opportunity to solve problems for prospective buyers, or is it a brochure all about you? Are you demonstrating in a clear, honest way how your company and its products and services can ease their pain?

A real website is now the most important tool in your arsenal!

If your website is not helping you generate and nurture leads, the way I see it, you have three options:

1) Build a new website,

2) redesign your existing website,

3) or upgrade your existing website.

Build a brand new website

Whether you are new in the industry or in the process of capturing market share, show that you are serious about what you do:

• No cookie cutter websites - use a custom design!
• Easy navigation is key
• CMS, Content Management System, so you can make your own updates!
• Forms online, secure and easy
• eCommerce, let them buy your products and services when they want!

Redesign

The nice part about a redesign is that much of the information we need to create effective content, already exists; so, we will:

• Create a new site map fully organized
• Upgrade to use a CMS, Content Management System
• Design new powerful graphics to match your preferred image
• And improve navigation, creating a truly effective website

Upgrade

The perfect option if you are happy with the look of your existing website but want to improve the ability to manage it on your own. Sometimes the only thing you need is the freedom to do something yourself. We can make that happen by:

• Installing a CMS on your website
• Giving you an extensive library of tools to enhance your site, easily
• Portfolio management
• Calendar and map modules
• Post classes and events with easy online registration
• Online forms easy and secure
• Press Releases, Blogs, and automatic archiving

You can’t update your website without your IT guy?

Your competition can.

Call me at 925.222.5624; I’m happy to help you choose the right option for your budget. Harness the power of your website to increase sales!

And make it a successful month!

Here are 10 tricks to help you ace your first attempt at making an online quiz.

1 Hook Your Audience

Explain how the quiz helps them & make it easy to get started

Taking a quiz requires an investment of both information and time; two of the most valuable coins in the online world. People need a reason to make this investment, but keep it short and sweet. Explain too much up front and you’ll lose a good chunk of your audience before they start.

2 Know The Score

Pick a scoring mechanism that compliments the quiz outcomes

There are several ways to evaluate on online quiz.

• Give immediate feedback, stalling forward progress until the right choice has been made.
• Make a tally of “correct” answers, possibly weighing some more heavily than others based on import.
• Treat each answer as a vote for one of a set of fixed results and reveal the winner at the end.
• Divide all possible results by axes and measure each axis separately. (This is particularly common in online personality tests).

Knowing what sort of results you want to give will help you pick out the best scoring mechanism. Rankings favor tallies, while personality and needs measures tend to require a multi-variable approach.

3 Share Results

For a quiz taker, the value of a quiz is in the feedback it offers

This may seem like a no-brainer, but when you offer an online quiz, be sure to share the results. Most people take quizzes in the hopes of learning something. You can offer an immediate response like the California Partnership for Long Term Care, or wait until the end and condense everything into a single results page like Javelin Strategy’s ID Safety quiz – but you must share something for your visitors to find value in the quiz.

4 Show Progress

An accurate measure of progress is key in keeping takers through the end of a quiz

As with everything else in business, setting reasonable expectations is key to delivering satisfaction. By including a progress bar, page count, or similar device, you give quiz takers an assurance that the quiz will come to an end, and you give them the ability to predict how long it will take to reach the end.

Without such a measure, a visitor may give up just two question before the end of your quiz and never realize how close they were to finishing.

5 Consider Question Order

Some quizzes need a fixed order; others are improved by variety

The nature of a quiz can help you determine its order, and whether or not that order should be fixed. For example, an online quiz intended to educate may want to use lessons learned from one question to play a role in answering another – or a sorting quiz may pick the best question to ask based on the answer to a previous question. In both of these cases, order matters.

But in a quiz where every question is co-equal, and no one question informs any other, order is less important – and shaking up the order is a good way to add a bit of dynamism to the process.

6 Craft Reasonable Answers

A poorly chosen set of answers can reveal the correct response for the wrong reasons

Humans are natural pattern finders. If three answers take one approach and one takes another, guess what most savvy test takers will pick?

Since you probably aren’t trying to test the skill of test-taking, here are some guidelines to keep in mind.

• Keep all your answers the same length
• Use the same grammatical structure for all answers
• Only include answers that are relevant to the subject at hand
• Avoid “all of the above” unless you intend to include it on all questions

If you’re interested in giving a quiz repeat value, consider coming up with “extra” correct and incorrect answers that fit these rules and randomize the options (a good example of this approach can be seen at free rice)

7 Show Your Expertise

Quality questions and thoughtful analysis build trust in your work

The online world works on trust. If your quiz looks amateurish, you’ll undermine that trust. If it’s exceptional, you’ll build upon it.

Use your quiz to show why you’re an expert. This can be done with knowledgeable questions targeted to your audience, insightful analysis that presents information in a new way, or even clever asides that give quiz takers new things to think about.

8 Link Your Site and Quiz

Connecting your quiz to your site lets you use one resource in support of the other

One of the ways you can show your expertise is to link your quiz and your website. A good quiz is concise, a good website offers information targeted to visitor needs.

By linking from your quiz to informational aspects of your site you can provide depth for those who want it while preserving the targeted nature of the quiz itself (for an example, answer any question on the ruready.org website). Better still, you can link results to relevant products and services as idsafety.net does.

In addition, quizzes are great fodder for calls to action because they can get visitors actively engaged with your content.

9 Offer Additional Insights

The more you share, the more quiz takers can get out of the experience

The online dating site OKCupid is known for maintaining a rotating user-generated quiz of several thousand questions. One of the most fascinating aspects of the site is the developer blog, where the OKCupid staff shows how seemingly disparate questions do relate.

While you probably don’t have the same depth of user generated data as OKCupid, you can still share the results of your quiz, letting quiz takers see how they measure up.

10 Make a Widget

A strong quiz built to run on other sites can become a new source of traffic

An exceptional quiz will offer value to you and to test takers even if it lives on another website. If your quiz is doing well, consider making a widget.

This will let you continue to draw traffic from your quiz while letting other people insert it into their own websites.

In a closing keynote I attended at an EMS conference the speaker, Steve Berry, BA, NREMT-P, talked through 3 things needed in the sale of any product or service. Not only do I agree, but also they make for an extraordinary company, one standing out and leading in their sector:

1. to be technically accurate- know your product or service and all its details
2. to shower your prospects with customer service- always
3. to leave them with a WOW-factor!

Being technically accurate is HUGE; make sure your sales reps know your products and services from every angle. Quiz them, train them, and make them know it, or get them off your team. Your sales reps are your front lines, they are the ones out there in the trenches, either making you proud, or not. Equip them with every detail they need to be technically accurate, every time!

Showering your prospects and existing customers with customer service is a leadership issue. It starts from the highest ranks. If you don’t have a customer service policy, make one. Define what it means to your company specifically, and then tolerate nothing less. Insist on, and expect, every person in your company, to shower each person they come in contact with, with extraordinary customer service.

The WOW factor is my favorite! Steve Berry told a story of an ambulance company in FL, which increased their sales instantly in a very large retirement community as a result of their WOW-factor. In the ambulance after medicating a woman injured in a car crash, the EMT was surprised she was still crying and asked where else it hurt. She said her quadriplegic husband had to have medication at 4pm and she was the only one who could give it to him; if he didn’t have it he could have a seizure and die. So after the EMT brought her to the emergency room, he went to her house and gave her husband his medication. WOW! You know she told everyone in the senior community!

What is your WOW-factor?
What makes you truly stand out from the competition?

Customer service is everything; serving is the new selling!

Individual Needs

The first step in picking the best CRM is knowing what your business needs it to do.

• What problem(s) do you need a CRM solve?
• How many people will use the system?
• What business roles are you trying to integrate? Have you asked other users what their needs are?
• Does your business fall into a clear niche?

Customer contact tracking suffices for most solopreneurs.  Once you have a team some form of shared database becomes more important, specialist providers can help you with industry specific capabilities, and advanced functions can become invaluable if you have the staff to support them.

System Capabilities

Once you know what you need, look at what CRMs that meet those needs have to offer.

• Can you create your own process within the CRM?
• Can you integrate data from your existing software into the solution?
• How scalable is the solution? Can it support expected growth, or would you need to change to another system in a few years?
• Are there mechanisms in place to measure how well the system delivers on your goals?
• Is the interface easy for you and your colleagues to understand?

Once you’ve sketched out the kind of functionality you’ll need, leverage existing research to see what’s out there. The free 120-page CRM report at www.business-software.com opens with a spreadsheet detailing which functions are included in each of the 40 most popular systems.

Social CRM

Integrating a CRM with Social Media is very powerful, but also resource intensive for a small company.

• Do you have sufficient staff to maintain a regular social media presence?
• Will you be able to plan specific social media campaigns?
• Can you dedicate the resources to build a campaign around shared interests?
• Do you have an array of team members who can directly address specific customer concerns in the moment?
• Will your efforts be seen as an invasion of privacy by your customer base?

Social CRM can add a lot of depth to what you know about your customers as individuals and in aggregate, but it also requires a heavy commitment, both in terms of interaction and in time spent making sense of the newly available data. If you don’t have a large enough team to route FB posts or Tweets to relevant area specialists it can be more of a burden than a benefit.

Ease of Implementation

There is an advantage to using a system you can setup and troubleshoot at all hours, even if it has less overall functionality.

• Can you install and initiate the system yourself? Is support available if you encounter issues? 24-hours, or only at certain times?
• Do you need to use particular systems (like Linux or WindowsNT) to make the solution work? More importantly, does it conflict with any database that you already use?
• Can you reach the system from any computer on the internet (and do you need to do so)?
• Can you reach the system from a mobile phone (and do you need the full range of functions when you do)?

Vendor Strength

At the very least, you will lose customer support if your vendor folds – with some solutions you may also lose your data.

• How long as the company been in business, and how sound are their financials (if that information is public).
• What experience does the vendor have with your area of business?
• How many sectors does the vendor serve? If one takes a downturn, how well will the company weather the storm?
• How available is the vendor to help you get your system running/make changes to it as you grow?

Datamonitor developed a CRM decision matrix for government based on revenue growth, in-sector revenue, company size, addition of new customers, geographic reach, and whether or not the solution will continue to work without the vendor.

Sales in the 21st century are no longer about aggression and tenacity; they’re now about the customer and the fit. Today’s successful salespeople are a company’s front lines communicating the products and services you offer while listening to the needs of the customer, ultimately finding the fit that has the clients sell themselves. It’s not crazy; it’s brilliant!

You have heard me say the number one way to get more business is to ask for it.

But don’t just have anyone do the asking, you need sales experts fueled with listening skills, leadership and authenticity; they are the ones who will generate the results, the money!

The best sales people negotiate for 100% commission in lieu of salary. They welcome the challenge; they know what’s at stake and what it will take to hit their goal. They aren’t afraid of it, they take it on with enthusiasm and the increased results flow naturally from their effort. Sound like the sales reps on your team?

The 80/20 of Sales

Twenty percent of all salespeople make eighty percent of all sales, which means eighty percent of a sales force fights over the remaining 20 percent of business (Greenberg & Greenberg). In addition, a whopping 55 percent of salespeople have no ability to sell!

Harvard Says

A study done by the Harvard Business School found that top performing salespeople have these traits in common: do not take “no” personally; take 100 percent responsibility for results; possess empathy; have above average ambition, willpower and determination; are intensely goal-oriented; and can easily approach strangers.

Management Says

In a 2001 survey conducted by Jeffry Gitomer, author of The Sales Bible, 365 CEOs were asked what they thought were the key factors that separate high performing sales professionals from low-performing sales professionals; their top answers were: self-discipline, motivation, product knowledge, customer knowledge, and innate talent and personality. But the characteristics they indicated are not among those, which separate superior performers from inferior performers.

The Facts Say

The same Gitomer sales study found the following characteristics, if mastered by a salesperson, would make him rise above the rest and be in the 80% of top sellers:

• Unyielding belief in the company, the product and yourself
• Creativity to differentiate yourself from the competition
• Sense of humor that builds deep rapport
• Ability to promote yourself
• Ability to maintain price integrity
• Unyielding personal values and ethics
• Reliability and dependability
• Passion and desire to excel and be the best
• Exciting presentation skills
• Ability to generate profit and loyal customers
• Selling for the love of helping others get what they want rather than for the love of money
• Perpetual positive attitude and enthusiasm

Salespeople are recession proof. There will always be something to sell, so it’s important to keep your top performers happy and well incentivized, especially if they know their worth. But if you are settling for mediocre results from 80% of your sales team, consider which of them may be among the 55% with no ability to sell at all.

Do they offer reasons or results? Reasons why they aren’t hitting quota? Or results, despite the economic reality, making it happen!
The cream of the crop is out there waiting to be hired. Play a 21st century game, put the best there is on your front line and allow your clients to sell themselves!

The online world is no Field of Dreams. Building a website is not always sufficient to meet your business goals. You need some sort of analytics suite like Google Analytics to help you gauge your success.

Once you have a measure, you can start to manage your site – but you still need to know what to test. Here is a sampling of what we look for. If it doesn’t seem like you measure up, try changing something (the bigger the better) and see how your traffic changes.

Design

Does your site look industry appropriate? If your pages have a high bounce rate, “good enough” isn’t. Really look to see what your competitors are doing differently.

And while you’re at it, make sure you’re actually telling your site visitors how to convert (whatever that means for your business). If you don’t have a good call to action pointing the way, don’t be surprised when visitors can’t find it on their own.

Content

Google is all about relevancy, especially temporal relevancy. Just last month the search giant further refined its search engine so that it could better identify current content from old content. It’s not enough to say that you offer tax support; you need to get out there and let people know how you’re prepared to deal with the newest changes to the tax code (in terms they’ll understand).

Don’t do taxes? Don’t talk about them. People can land on any page of your website. Every page needs to sell your quality (even if it is with a soft touch). Is it clear what you do as a company? Do your pages reflect your values? I’m willing to bet that quality is one of them. Make sure this comes across in your images as well as your words.

Navigation

The navigation menu says as much about your company values as any “about” page. Do your categories reflect client needs and perspectives? Can someone get a good sampling of what kinds of products or services you offer just by looking at your navigation?

Social Media

Social Media isn’t just about “hip” or “in,” it’s about interacting, it’s about getting people to engage, and giving them a reason to talk about you (where others can see their words).

This also means that Social Media is not set and forget.

Do you have a visually stunning product? Try a free give away, anyone who reposts an image to their Facebook account by a certain date is automatically entered into the drawing – and make sure that there’s a way for people to track the image back to your website.

Then watch and see how many people share the image, and how many people come back to your site.

Ease of Use

The internet is a vast place. As much as we talk about unique business propositions in the business world, as far as most people are concerned, you’re not as unique as all that – especially if you put roadblocks in your visitors way.

Have a broken link? They’ll go to someone who doesn’t. Hide your contact information? Someone else won’t have made that mistake. A USP only matters if you haven’t already turned your potential clients away.

Technology

The tools at our disposal are constantly changing. Do something your competitors haven’t considered. If they’ve got static sites, add a video. If they have videos, try a game. Afraid that’ll undermine your professional image? Try a tasteful quiz (perhaps one that recommends relevant products). But whatever you do, remember to keep your audience in mind. It doesn’t matter how innovative you get, if you are trying to reach iPhone users, don’t build a function they can’t use.

Want mb/i to do it for you?

We aren’t SEO specialists, so we won’t run and monitor ongoing A/B tests for you, but if you submit your website for a critique, we can clue you in to some key areas for improvement.