The next part of our SEO Liverpool series on changing the PPC mindset to Pay-Per-Conversation.
When you think about online marketing strategy, you think of PPC and organic. I don’t think PPC should stand for pay per click, it should stand for pay per conversation. The purpose is not the clicks, but rather the goal is to turn them into business. We are also going to change SEO to searcher experience optimization, rather than search engine optimisation so the searcher has the best experience leading them to convert.
What matters in terms of getting the sales is communication. The biggest challenge is that most of people’s budgets are focused on just driving traffic – not doing anything except for getting people to the site.
There is a huge discrepancy of driving traffic vs. analytics, testing, etc. the budgets are almost none, so people are not getting the returns they are expecting. Think about your typical customer. I think of them as toddlers with money. What do toddlers always ask… why? Your customer does not have as much patience. We need to address the issue of why conversations are failing. It’s because users don’t have confidence. So getting through trust is a big thing. The second thing is relevance. People will look for something very distinct – if we don’t give it to them the second they want it, they leave the site.
10% of traffic drops off after the first click to your site. OK, that’s untargeted. But say 55% drop off after the second click! Something is wrong – the user got distracted, lost confidence, lost relevance, lost the scent. This has not changed since the early to mid 1990’s! So we must focus on scent. Nielsen has said that people are so goal oriented that they ignore everything except what they are looking for – so that’s what costs you money.
Example: “pink roses” – the first site landing page shows red roses! So the searcher leaves. The second and third ones – also no pink roses! So I finally go to the fourth ad – and there are finally pink roses. So the first 3 out of 4 failed. People are missing the basic point of conversions. They are missing the landing pages. Over half of customers leave a site because the site does not provide enough information. It’s because we are not continuing the conversation, and just burning the money.
Marketing is about understanding people’s needs. So we must re-think the conversation, the path of conversion. Different people come in with different needs. Our job is to figure out what needs to be in that conversation in the moment they come to you. Start thinking about optimisation in a conversion point of view.