The New Web Business Guide Introduction can be found here.
We have a lot of ground to cover when we talk about website promotion. You have your business plan, your domain name, your hosting, and you have your website up and running and already optimized for the search engines with great content.
Testing Your Website Before You Spend A Lot Of Money To Promote It
I want to stress that before you go beyond this point, you should have already done the onsite seo and added great content that is ready to close deals or make sales or get people to sign up.
Before you do anything, you need a google analytics account. Get the google analytics code and put it into all of your web pages.
Then you need to set up a google adwords account. (Later in the new web business guide we will talk about how to use PPC to push traffic to your website for the long term, but for now we just need to test your website.)
Get the conversion code and put it into a page called thanks.html or thankyou.html or whatever. Make sure that only people who subscribe, buy, or sign up or whatever gets to see that page.
In other words, if you have them fill out a form, code it so that they get a thank you page. This page is where the google conversion code goes. That way only people who signed up or purchased something get counted as conversions.
Use the google keywords tool to put in the top key phrases you want to target. Ignore obscure or long tail phrases for now. We are not setting up your google adwords for long term. Again, this is just for testing. Using the top most competitive key phrases that people type in when trying to find what you have to offer will give us the best traffic to test.
Set your campaign budget. We are only going to run the test for one week, so invest $140 in your adwords test campaign. That’s $20 per day. Make sure you put $20 in the daily budget space in account settings.
Make sure you uncheck anything that puts you into the content network. It’s in your account settings. You may have to upgrade your adwords account from basic to do so. Lately google puts everyone in the content network who sets up a basic adwords plan whether they want it or not. For the purposes of testing, we want to test just search engine traffic alone.
Now select all of your keywords and hit edit keyword settings. Choose the proper landing page for each keyword and enter the url to that page. Landing people on the right page is a big part of improving your conversions.
Example; You sell cellphones and accessories. You built a page about motorola cellphones, a page about nokia cellphones, and one about nokia cellphone accessories. I know you would build more, but this is a short example.
You would want people who type in “motorola cellphones” to land on the page for that, the people who type in “nokia cellphones” tom land on the page with those on it, etc.
Once you have done that, set your default bid on all of those phrases to $5 per click. No, you do not want to pay $5 per click in a PPC campaign if it can be avoided, but remember, this is a test.
Also remember that just because you bid $5 per click does not mean you will pay $5 per click. You will only be charged the amount per click that makes you the top bidder, unless the top bidder is over $5 per click. For many key phrases, this is not the case, but there are competitive phrases that go even higher than that. Cellphones might be very competitive while hot sauce isn’t.
Create one good ad that describes what you sell. In a normal campaign, we would be testing each landing page with it’s own campaign and several ads to see how well each converts. This is just a general test to see how people react to your new website, so for the purposes of this test, just one ad will do.
Now turn on your google adwords campaign. You may only get a few clicks due to the $20 per day budget and the high per click bid. It’s okay. It will be enough to give us a quick general analysis of your new website. it will not be a definitive test as to how well you will do with google adwords because this test is very very limited in it’s approach.
When the week is done, turn off your google adwords campaign. Don’t delete that campaign altogether. You may want to test again. Go into your account settings and make sure it is paused.
Analyzing the results of the test
How many times was your ad shown (impressions) VS how many clickthrus you got. This tells you if your ad was any good. Again we were not creating several ads and testing them all as in a real PPC campaign, so this will just tell you if the first ad you wrote got very many people to click on it. Good information to have for later.
Cost per click or CPC VS Average Position. This should give you a good idea of what you would have to spend to run PPC on those keywords, the level of competition there is for them, and what others are bidding on those keywords. Again, good information to have for later.
Clickthrus VS Conversions. The meat and potatos of an adwords campaign. This is where you compare how many people clicked through to visit your landing pages against how many actually filled out the form, subscribed, or purchased something and got to the thank you or conversion page.
Do not be depressed if you got 0 conversions. You probably have not sent enough traffic to your pages to get a true conversion test because of the limits we placed on the campaign. If you did get conversions, then great! That helps a lot. But again, it does not prove your pages will always convert at the rate this test tells us you did in the long term. So don’t run out and increase your adwords budget just because you made a sale or two during this test.
Now go to your google analytics account. This will tell you a lot more for the purposes of this limited test.
Look at your bounceback rate. This is one of the most important things I would be looking for in the test. If more than 80% of the people that clicked through to your website are bouncing back to the search engine to get another result, then the page they landed on was not what they were looking for or you have not made that page interesting enough to keep them there for even a few seconds.
That means that 80% of the users typed in “nokia cellphone accessories” and did not think your page that sells those was what they were looking for. They figured that out in just a few seconds. That would be a bad sign and it means that you need to look at the top of that page and your first words on that page to see why they did not want to look at what you had to offer.
Then look at how many people spent 5 minutes or more on the page. Compare that number to how many sales you made. That tells you people did find your page relevant, but decided not to buy anything. That can be because of price or the way you close the sale.
There are other analytics to look over in google analytics. Look at all of it. Learn the behavior of the visitors who came to your website during testing. Remember that these were targeted visitors so you have the best results you are going to get. Organic listings bring you targeted traffic but not quite as good as ppc traffic so your conversion rate will be a little lower with the organic traffic in many cases.
Use the analytics to improve things that need to be improved. One page may have performed much better than other pages. Use it as a model and tweak the other pages using that info.
You may want to run the test all over again after making some changes. In many cases, this is a good idea, especially if you think you performed poorly.
TESTING, TESTING, TESTING. There is nothing wrong with doing a lot of testing before you promote your website. It will likely save you a lot of money in the long run.
Think of the text on your website as a sales pitch. Any sales organization will tell you that they write a pitch, test it, tweak it, rewrite it, test it, edit it, constantly until they know they have a great sales pitch. It’s no different with your website. You need to know you are ready to convert sales if you want to make a profit on what you spend to promote your website.
We will get into how to promote your website in the next part of this chapter. I just wanted to make sure that you do some testing before you spend a lot of money.
We can do this testing for you. Call 786-317-8774 or email info@seoserviceprovider.com for more information.
» New Web Business Guide Chapter 8 – Website Promotion – Testing 123 – SEO Service Provider
Before you advance towards investing in heavy promotions, it would be best to make sure that your site is stable and ready to get off the ground. This is to avoid any complications along the way since treating it as a business, you can treat it as havi…
New Web Business Guide Chapter 8 – Website Promotion – Testing 123
Before you start unleashing your new site, it would be best to check your site for bugs or some errors. It is better to find these out before your site goes full blast.