Sam Niccolls discusses the ways to increase your conversions and thus your Return On Investment (ROI) by optimizing the pages on which your visitors, and thus potential clients land.

Perhaps in days past your most important page was your home page, however that is no longer the case as search engines bring traffic to those pages which are most relevant to your visitors.

Read more about these valuable 5 tips to improve your landing pages and keep in mind that these are not only for SEO, they can increase the performance and value of your website:

1. Reassuring Policies: Highlighting security features, guarantees, or refund policies can earn trust in your new visitors.
2. Testimonials: Knowing that other customers have enjoyed a pleasant experience with your company instills trust in new visitors.
3. No Credit Card Forms: Lure your visitors in before slapping them in the face with a credit card form.
4. Email Collection: Make email sign-ups easy so that you can keep in touch with visitors who are most likely to convert to customers.
5. Look At Bounce Rate By URL: Look at changes to your site which will have the most impact and therefore require the least amount of effort on your behalf.

It shows that tracking visitors to your website might be unreliable through several Twitter programs such as Tweetie. Some of these programs open links sent on Twitter through their own browsers, where Javascript is usually not enabled.

Since analytic software such as the very popular Google Analytics uses Javascript to track visitors to your website, visitors from programs such as Tweetie may give Google Analytics as well as other analytics programs the slip. At best these visitors will show up as direct visitors rather than being referred from a specific source and therefore it will be difficult to measure statistics such as Return On Investment (ROI) and conversion tracking.

This is something that needs to be kept in mind when analyzing data, and may explain discrpancies between various analytical software used to monitor the same domain.

In part 1 tim looks at creating conversions from visitors into customers and continues in part 2 to look at brand strength, resource investment, the total solution, risk reducers, and lastly validation and credibility.

Check out the previous stages of these articles:

1. Creating Landing Page Awareness
2. Creating Web Site Interest
3. Reaching Desirable Outcomes

• Make the visitor feel appreciated
• Make the visitor feel safe
• Understand that the visitor is in control

Tim Ash from Search Engine Watch continues his foray of articles on the AIDA conversion funnel with this article on “The Decision-Making Funnel, Stage 3: Desire, Part 1” and part 2 “The Decision-Making Funnel, Stage 3: Desire, Part 2“.

Tim looks at the steps a visitor will pass through when they are determining whether you have what they want. These steps are:

• Research
• Compare
• Get Details
• Customize

Check out the previous stages of these articles:

1. Creating Landing Page Awareness
2. Creating Web Site Interest

Tim Ash from Search Engine Watch explains how to arouse the interest of a visitor to your web site in this article entitled “The Decision-Making Funnel, Stage 2: Interest” which is a continuation from my previous post on “Creating Landing Page Awareness“.

Part 2 of this series of articles looks at self-selection and recognition where people can identify with a specific need that they have.

1. Awareness
2. Interest
3. Desire
4. Action

To read more on this process read his article on “Landing Pages and the Decision Making Process“.

In “The Decision-Making Funnel, Stage 1: Awareness“, Tim addresses the issues concerning awareness and attention. Specifically, Tim looks at:

• Permission Marketing
• The Rules of Web Awareness
• Banner Ads
• Entry Pop-Ups
• Exit Pop-Ups
• Home Page Awareness