The purpose of performing a successful PPC campaign is to get clickthroughs — and a lot of them. In many cases, a person will execute a PPC campaign and immediately see very high clickthrough rates only to see the clickthroughs drop significantly after a few months. Unless they are carefully paying attention to their clickthroughs, a campaign can completely bottom out before they realize that it isn’t working anymore.

In most cases the campaign didn’t stop getting clickthroughs because something went wrong — it stopped getting clickthroughs because all PPC campaigns stop getting clickthroughs after a certain period of time. The longer you run the same PPC campaign on the same sites, the more likely you are to see diminishing returns — sometimes happening very rapidly.

In order to plan for successful PPC campaigns, you have to understand that the effectiveness of campaigns will decay over time. This happens for several reasons:

The Novelty Factor

Readers have never seen a PPC campaign when it first launches, which means that the graphics, text and calls to action are fresh. They might click on it out of novelty or because they are intrigued by the content of the ad. But if they’ve seen the ad and clicked through once, there’s little reason for them to click through again. The longer you keep your same ad campaign on the same site, the faster your clickthroughs decline.

The Copycat Factor

If you have a successful PPC campaign, it’s not just your customers who will notice. Your competitors are tracking your ad successes (just like you should be doing with them) and will see what elements of your PPC campaign are attracting customers to click on your ads. Once this happens, there is nothing to stop them from integrating similar elements into their PPC campaigns to attempt to also get positive results. Unless you keep your PPC content and presentation fresh, it will quickly get lost in a sea of copycats.

The Qualified Customer Factor

In order to have a truly successful PPC campaign, you need to make sure that you are reaching the right customers. If you have a successful campaign, this means that qualified customers are reading your ads and clicking through to find out more information. But this also means that the qualified customers will have quickly already clicked through your ads, leaving just low-level and unqualified customers as the only people who haven’t clicked on your campaign.

The solution to this problem is to consistently monitor your PPC campaigns and be ready to either keep the content fresh or advertise in new avenues after a certain period of time. Doing A/B testing will go a long way in helping to determine if your PPC ads are still working or if you need to change things up.

Website visitors react to what they see in very predictable ways. Study after study has shown that how a person encounters a website will have a significant impact on how they react to it. Even with the exact same content, one website layout can increase the chances of conversions while another can make the site more vulnerable to high bounce rates.

A good rule of thumb to follow throughout your entire website layout and design work is to focus on what you want people to do on the page. A big part of conversion rate optimization is to understand the purpose of the page and getting people to have a laser-like focus on the page elements that will push them to do the task you want them to do. Whether it’s signing up for more information or making a purpose, every element on the page should drive a visitor to do just that.

So how do you do this? Here are just a few of the ways that you can increase your likelihood for conversion rate success:

Limit Choices: Too many choices can leave website visitors paralyzed by options, so they wind up doing nothing. Instead of giving visitors multiple different forms to fill out, limit them to one choice. Instead of having all of the different social media sites listed with sharing buttons, limit the page to the few sites that make the most sense for your customers.

Top to Bottom, Left to Right: People read websites like they read newspapers. This means they expect the most important information to be “above the fold”, i.e. above the first half of the page. They also are used to reading left-to-right, which means that you want to make sure that valuable information is on the left side of the page. Keep calls to action and other secondary content on the bottom half of the page. If a person scrolls to this part of the page, chances are that they are ready to take the next step.

Headline Sizes Matter: People are attracted to big, bold headlines that spread across the screen from the top of the page. Design your site so the most important information is encapsulated within a headline at the top of each page.

Use Images: Especially of people. Studies have shown that website visitors react particularly strongly when they see pictures of people on a website.

Think About Usability: If a person can’t navigate your website, they’ll click away rather quickly. Avoid this by utilizing a clean layout with a solid color contrast, plenty of white space and an avoidance of overstuffing the pages with too much clutter.

Keep Ads and Sidebars Away From Main Content: Whether you are selling ad space on your site or have internal links to other pages on your site, you want to keep these elements apart from your main content. Have a clear delineation between the main content and any sidebar content that might pull people away from your main message.

You don’t have to be an expert to know more about where your own website’s SEO stacks up against your competition. There are plenty of free and easy tools in place to help you determine where you stand from an SEO standpoint and what areas you can improve upon. This is great whether you want to do your own SEO or need to be more educated before hiring and working with an SEO firm.

We’ve come up with some ways that you can do your own SEO research and get a better sense of where your website (or the website of a competitor) stands:

Check Your Domain Authority (DA) Ranking. This is a number that shows how “authoritative” your site is, and how much credibility search engines give it. Your DA is determined by factors such as its age, link backs and overall SEO ranking. You can check this by going to Open Site Explorer (https://www.opensiteexplorer.org/). A DA of more than 40 is considered to be good.

Test Your Site Load Time. Google punishes sites that take too long to load. This can be because it has too many slow-loading site elements or isn’t optimized correctly. Check your site’s loading time at Pingdom (https://www.pingdom.com/).

Determine If You Have a Working Sitemap. Search engines such as Google want to see a well-organized website and a sitemap is proof that your site is easily indexable. You can see if you have a sitemap by typing your website’s domain name followed by “sitemap.xml” into a Google search.

Find Out If You Have a Robots.Txt File. If a robot.txt file has major disallows, it can keep search engines from indexing your site. Type in your website name with /robots.txt at the end and see what comes up.

Evaluate Your Meta Content: Open up your website’s source code in your browser and search for the relevant meta content that might be within. Google no longer uses meta keywords, so this isn’t important, but you’ll want to do a search for meta tags and meta descriptions to make sure that they are being used for each page. You’ll also want to make sure that you are using your header tags correctly.

Find Onsite Content: This is more important when you are reviewing your competitors’ sites. Find links to “blogs” or “articles” on their website. If you can’t find any, do a search for their URL with the word “blog” included. You’ll also want to see how frequently and recently they are updating their content.

Search for Longtail Keywords: You can enter crucial longtail keyword phrases that you want to rank for into Google to see where your pages come up. If they aren’t on the front page, you’ll want to work harder to get them up there.

eVisible understands how to help small businesses gain online attention in competitive markets. Our local business online marketing services leverage multiple components so we can create a total strategy that’s right for your situation. From planning to execution and reporting, we’re prepared to guide you through every step of the SEO process.

We also understand that you might want to do SEO work on your own, which is why we offer free and premium eVisible online marketing tools that you can use to audit your own website or get information that is valuable in helping you work with an outside SEO agency. Tools such as the free sitemap submission or the premium high PageRank blog posting will make sure that you get the most out of your SEO.

One of the easiest ways to make more money from your online business is to improve the flow of your eCommerce checkout system. You need to make it as easy as possible for people who are browsing for products on your site to make a purchase. There are many ways to improve this flow rate, but even a slight improvement in conversion rate optimization can lead to a significant increase in profits.

The specifics of how to improve your conversion rate will be unique to your website. You’ll need to do conversion testing and reporting to fully understand what it means for your site. But what motivates a person to decide to make a purchase from a website is universal. Roughly stated, a person makes a purchase because they are motivated to buy a product, have the immediate ability to make a purchase and have been “triggered” to buy.

Getting people motivated and triggered to make a purchase can be as simple as sending out an email and having them click through to your product page. But it takes professional website development in order to give a customer the easiest path to purchase. One secret is to make sure that a customer gets an item into their shopping cart as quickly as possible. This gets them out of the mindset of “just browsing” since they are now officially “shopping.”

It’s important to make it as easy as possible for a person to add something to their shopping cart. The purchase button should be as big and obvious as possible. Once a person adds something to the shopping cart, it should be clear that they have something in the cart. And you need to make sure that the customer can see how to go to the shopping cart to enter in their payment information and complete the purchase at any time.

From a web design standpoint, you also need to consider what happens when a customer gets ready to make a purchase. One consideration is whether or not you require customers to register before buying anything. As a general rule, forcing customers to register creates a barrier that could very easily lead to them not making a purchase. You’ll also want to make sure that you don’t ask for credit card information until the last step in the process. Get all of the shipping and personal information first so that the credit card information is easy to get.

These are just a few of the things that you’ll want to do when you think about your eCommerce set-up. eVisible can help you design an eCommerce system that is right for your industry and business.

It’s a website owner’s nightmare: your page ranking suddenly drops without warning. There’s a good chance that you’ve been penalized by Google for something on your website. It might be a new SEO tactic or something you didn’t know existed in your code. Likely, it’s related to search engine algorithm changes (such as the Panda and Penguin algorithms), which are designed to increase the quality of Google’s search results.

Recovering from penalties can take time, but it can happen. Here are a few steps to take if you’ve been hit with a penalty from Google:

Link Penalties

Google has made a point of punish websites that attempt to influence their site’s ranking or PageRank by “manipulating” incoming or outgoing links. But while finding “bad links” can seem simple, Google will also penalize sites for other, more seemingly innocuous actions.

For example, your site might be penalized if you are listed in too many directories that are considered to be “low quality.” Google might also punish your site if you are making guest posts on low-quality sites that are unrelated to your industry or use links back to your site excessively in guest blog posts. The simplest way to fix this problem is to remove the offending links. You can choose a sample of links from different directories to try to determine where your bad links are coming from.

Panda-Related Penalties

Panda is designed to root out poor quality links that were previously achieving high rankings because of reasons not related to their quality. Before you post any content, ask yourself if it answers an important question in a way that isn’t already covered online. If the answer is no, Google will likely treat your content as spam.

You also might have “doorway” links on your site with minimal text that are there to entice people to purchase products. If these pages are necessary, use 301 redirects or noindex tags to avoid Google penalties.

Manual Penalties

Google will also institute manual penalties for unethical on-site practices such as cloaking, shady redirects, hidden text and keyword-stuffed pages. Chances are that you know if you are doing this practices and you can rewrite content or code to fix the problem.

If you are looking at launching a corporate blog for SEO purposes, you likely understand that the quality of the writing is critical to its success. You need to move beyond bland SEO copywriting and create content that is unique, educational and helps readers understand the industry that your business is in. But having a successful corporate blog is about more than just the content. Much of your blog’s success will depend on the four steps you take before you write a single word of copy.

Branding: You want your blog to be memorable so that people come back to it. Along with creating compelling content, you can do this with the branding of your blog. Come up with a creative name that goes beyond COMPANY NAME Blog. Create a logo that is fun and will tell readers what to expect from your blog. Use color schemes in the design that are eye-catching (and match your corporate branding if you do this). You can often do this while choosing the theme of your blog if you are using a popular blogging service such as WordPress.

Develop a Content Strategy: Depending on your line of business, you might be overwhelmed with potential blog post ideas or trying to figure out how to create content on a regular basis. Having a content strategy in place from the beginning will help you determine the right topics to pursue with your writing. Do research on the content already on your site to see what topics, keywords or types of content is most popular with your visitors. You can use this as a guide to help you determine where to focus your blog writing energy.

Build Social Media Hooks Into Your Blog: If you want your blog posts to spread and potentially “go viral,” you need to give readers a way to share them. Making it easy for readers to share links to your blog posts via social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook and Reddit is a must. Make sure that every post ends with a way for people to share your story with one click – there are several services you can use to automatically generate this at the end of each post. It’s also important to give readers a way to subscribe to your blog so they automatically receive new blog posts.

Set the Tone of Your Blog: As much of the success of your blog will come down to how you say something versus what exactly you are saying. The tone of your blog should match the expectations of your readers. If your company is a retail business selling fun items, you can have a quirky, humorous tone that will get people to laugh. Blogs that are aimed toward a more technical audience will need to be drier and be straightforward. No matter what your tone is, the blog needs to provide useful and educational information about your products and your industry.

Reworking your website to have a more SEO friendly design is a great way to boost your online business’ potential; it can also be intimidating, especially right before your new site goes live. Before you relaunch your site to the world, you need to go through a last-minute checklist to ensure that the launch will be a success. Here are 20 steps that you need to take when finalizing your professional website development:

Onsite Content:

1. Check that all of the content you’ve created – and the old content that you haven’t touched – is free of spelling errors, typos or other problems. Also make sure that the content is compelling for visitors.

2. Open your site in Google Chrome and press F12 and then open the “Network” tab to see your site’s speed and page sizes.

3. Test drive the forms on your site to make sure they work properly.

Web Development:

4. Verify that your site links are correct when they have transferred from the test site to your live site. If you have any 404 pages, develop a custom page with search to encourage visitors to go to other parts of your site. If pages are moved or have a new URL structure, make sure to use a 301 redirect.

5. Validate your W3C code and fix any errors you might have.

6. Add custom Favicons to your address bars or the tabs of users’ browsers to create a custom feel for your site.

7. Minify your site to compress the code and make it load faster.

Web Design

8. Cross-check your site on different browsers to ensure multi-browser compatibility.

9. Check that your display text is coming up when you hover over an image. You should also make sure that your images aren’t too large and that you don’t have issues with fonts not rendering correctly.

Search Engine Optimization

10. Make sure that all pages have title tags and meta tags.

11. Upload an accurate site map in both XML and HTML to make your site easier to navigate for users and search engines.

12. Have your Google Analytics package ready to go along with your Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. Also contact your ad rep if you have any PPC campaigns running to avoid a disruption.

13. Submit your site to the popular search engines to ensure they are indexed immediately.

14. Check to make sure that your SERP display is correct and your pages are displaying properly on search engine result pages.

15. Make sure that your social media buttons go to the right pages and allow people to “Like” the right parts of your site.

Network Administration:

16. Install site monitors to ensure visitors can get to your pages and use enhanced monitors for your key landing pages.

17. Run tests with load test software tools to simulate what will happen to your site in times of heavy traffic.

18. Have a backup system ready to go in case your site does crash.

19. Check password-protected pages to make sure people can’t get into them without the proper credentials.

20. If you have a secure certificate, check it to make sure it is valid on launch day.

Using SEO tactics to get customers to your website is great. After all, people need to find your site in order to use it. Companies know this – it’s why many spend significant amounts of time and resources on professional search engine marketing. However, getting people to visit your site is only part of the battle. If the content is weak or poorly written, or the layout is distracting and confusing, what is the point?

It’s easy for a web development consultant to spend so too much time worrying about SEO considerations and not enough thinking about customer usability; this often leads to websites that rank highly with search engines but have low conversion rates when it comes to translating web views into actual sales.

Don’t fall victim to this short-sighted approach to web development services. Instead, utilize these five tricks that will help boost your search engine rankings while also improving the interface and user experience for your customers:

Know Your Customer: There’s no such thing as the “typical” customer. But by doing some market research. you can understand what drives a potential customer in your category to make a purchasing decision. Remember that a website that works for one type of business might not be appropriate for another business.

Make Your Content Have a Point: The content on your website isn’t just there to fill space or serve as filler between optimized keywords. Think about the types of questions that you customers might have and design your text to clearly answer these questions.

Keep Graphics Simple and Clean: It’s easy to try and go overboard with graphics, colors and other design elements with laying out your website. After all, you want your site to be memorable and eye-catching. But in many cases, this means that your website will also be distracting and keep people from finding the links and information they need to make a purchasing decision.

Make Navigation Easy to Follow: One of the main reasons that people leave a website before making a purchase is because of poorly development site navigation. If they can’t easily find a link to the information they need, they’ll likely leave and try out a competitors’ site. Check your website design and make sure that customers can quickly get to the pages that lead to sales.

Track and Change: The work isn’t done when your website goes live. You need to track visitors, clickthrough rates and sales to determine what does and doesn’t work and make changes quickly if necessary.