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.

If you are running PPC ads, you need to be performing A/B testing on a regular basis to ensure that your ads are performing as well as they should. A/B testing gives you a way to test different elements of an ad to see if changes improve or harm the clickthrough rate. Doing this is a critical step to keeping your ads fresh and improving your performance. In fact, when you hire a PPC management expert to help with your program, A/B testing is one of the first things that they will likely recommend.

A/B testing might seem complicated, but it’s something that anyone can accomplish. We’ve put together some easy steps to help you to do your own A/B testing and improve the performance of your PPC ad campaigns:

1. Determine the highest-performing ad from an ad group that generates a high amount of traffic for you. You’ll want to focus on ads that have already proven to be successful to see where they can be tweaked.

2. Put the original ad on hold and make a pair of duplicate copies of this ad. From there, make a pair of tweaks to perform the test you want to accomplish. This can mean changing the text from “all caps” to all lowercase, using different images or color elements.

3. Halt all of the other ads in your ad group so only the ads that you are running A/B testing on are live. Make sure to label these ads with their date and the changes made in AdWords.

4. Make sure you have “Optimize for Clicks” selected in AdWords to get the most accurate results.

5. Let the ads run for a lengthy period of time before you start to try and collect any conclusions. You’ll want to get several weeks’ worth of data and hundreds of ad impressions before you have a data sample size that is large enough from which to draw conclusions.

Many people understand that it’s important to include public relations efforts as part of your online marketing campaign. However, in order for this to be successful, it needs to be more than just hiring a firm for press release writing and distribution services and emailing a release out to a few media outlets. You need to have a clear strategy for your public relations efforts if you want them to augment your existing marketing efforts.

A lot of businesses make major mistakes with their public relations, whether they hire press release submission services or decide to do it themselves. Here are 10 things that you need to make sure you do if you are going to put out your own press release:

Don’t Underestimate the Power of PR for SEO: While a press release doesn’t have SEO value on its own, it can lead to online sites writing stories about your company or running the release whole — including your business’ link.

Make Your Release Newsworthy: A press release serves as a way to announce news to the media. You need to make sure that each press release contains information that a reporter or editor will think is relevant and interesting to their readers and not just promoting a business.

Keep Focus: You’ll be tempted to write about every interesting aspect of your business in your first press release. Resist this urge and keep focused on one story you want to tell and save the others for future releases.

Keep Control of Everything: From the words in the press release to the pictures used to accompany the release, you need to make sure that you have control of all aspects.

Find the Right Journalists: A press release isn’t very useful if no one can read it. You need reporters and editors to decide to run the release in order for people to read it, which means putting thought into who you are sending it to. Finding people who have written about your business or your competitors is a great start.

Follow Up: Once you’ve sent out a press release, call or email the reporter to see if they are interested. Even if they aren’t, you might strike up a conversation that leads to a different story.

Be Prepared for What’s Next: Have a gameplan for what happens if a reporter is interested in doing a story. Not being prepared can lead to lost media opportunities.

Structure Your Release Properly: This means having a great headline and a first paragraph that entices people to keep reading.

Write the Whole Story: Don’t make reporters — often short on time — have to do more work to get a press release “ready for publication.”

Anticipate Anything: You never know when a chance for an editorial PR link will come up.

There’s no such thing as a “one size fits all” SEO campaign. In much the same way that your business offers something different from your competitors, your search engine optimization efforts should also be individualized according to your unique needs. Delivering targeted SEO efforts for our clients is one of the things that set eVisible apart from our competitors and it’s something you should consider in everything you do with your website.

Much the same is true when it comes to developing the code and design elements on your website. You need to apply analytical thinking when it comes to how you create and deploy your website. Even experienced web developers can make mistakes that can impact the ability of their website to perform its best. Here are a few things that you should consider:

Start Small: Instead of launching your website with a huge set of features, start small with a clean, basic layout and design. You can always build it out as your business grows by choosing individual elements to add that have been carefully developed and beta tested.

Keep Your Code Flexible: While your platform doesn’t need to be completely scalable from the start, you also don’t want it to be so inflexible that making additions or changes in the future is impossible.

Make Your Code Easy to Deploy: Instead of trying to create a site based on the limitations of your code, work from the opposite direction and plan your features and try to come up with easily-implementable code that will get these features to happen.

Launch Your Website at the Right Time: Don’t rush your website to go live if the elements aren’t all in place. If customers come to your site and have problems with it, chances are they won’t be repeat customers.

Focus on the Customer: Think about how you can create a website that meets your customers’ needs. This should be more important than implementing any one piece of code.

Along with these code-based tips, there are other elements to remember as you start your business. eVisible – Internet Marketing Firm – can help you with this along with all other aspects of getting your company off the ground. A few things to consider include:

Focus on Big Picture Problems: Instead of developing a product or service that fills a niche need, try to make sure you have a model in place that will attract the largest amount of people possible.

Stay Involved…But Not Too Involved: No matter what your role is in the company, you need to know about every aspect of how the business is operating. At the same time, you need to let the experts that you hire or contract with take the lead in their areas of expertise.

Google strikes a careful balance between wanting to provide users a place to find the best information for free and being a platform for advertisers to reach potential customers. So while the search engine giant has been investing in initiatives such as Knowledge Graph, In-Depth Articles and Hummingbird, they’ve also been attempting to drive more people to click on their paid search results.

The result is that while organic search is still very important, much of the best real estate on Google’s search pages has been given to paid search results. You might think that this means you should consider focusing more — or all — of your efforts on paid search and abandon organic SEO. Think again. eVisible firmly believes that organic search results are very powerful and we make them a key component of the online marketing agency services we provide for businesses of any size.

The reality is while the real estate on a Google search result is shrinking for organic text links, there are additional opportunities for organic SEO elsewhere. Here are just a few of the many different search result items that are prominent on Google’s SERP and that help you to boost your visibility:

Knowledge Graph

This is Google’s attempt to bring together the major information on a search item in one place. It pulls information from Google+ along with from recognized information sites such as Wikipedia. Make sure the information on these sites are correct and verified along with adding it to the Freebase.com database.

Image Search Results

You can increase your chances for having an image of one of your products come up in a search by describing the image with keywords in the “alt text” attribute and saving the file with a relevant name. You should also create an image XML sitemap and ensure that a robots.txt isn’t blocking your image directory.

Reviews

You can make sure that reviews of your business — particularly popular reviews — come up in search results several ways, including using a mark-up tool and verifying it with Google’s Structured Testing Tool or using Google’s Data Highlighter.

Authorship

When an article you have written comes up in a Google search, you can have your image and bio also appear by verifying yourself as a Google+ contributor. This is done by linking your web page to your Google profile and then adding a link to the page on your “Contributor To” field in your profile.

In-Depth Articles

While the majority of in-depth articles that are featured in Google search results come from larger publishers, you can increase the odds of your article being highlighted by making sure your Google authorship is verified and making sure specific attributes such as headlines, alternative headlines, images, descriptions and more are marked up to be read by Google.

Video Clips

Having YouTube videos linked to your Google+ account gives you a chance for them to come up as snippets in searches. You can also self-host these videos and make sure that they have attributes like descriptions and titles properly filled in.

The start of the year is a great time to review your content marketing strategy. Whether your plans just need some simple tune-ups or you need to start doing content marketing, you can always benefit from a fresh approach. In the coming year, content will continue to be one of the driving forces of search engine optimization but how this content is delivered to readers and the correct type of content to create is always evolving.

With this in mind, here are four pieces of advice for your content marketing moving forward:

Have an Overriding Plan You Can Measure: Your content strategy needs to be part of your overall SEO and online marketing campaign and not just operate as its own entity. You can hire a provider of website content writing services to create killer content, but if it’s not helping you to drive visitors to your site or close sales, what is its purpose? You also need to make sure that you have metrics in place to see the patterns of your content’s readers and if the content is effective in spurring action.

Plan for Mobile Reading: A recent Pew Research study showed that 63 percent of all people with a cell phone use their device to go online. This represents a huge amount of people who are potentially reading your content on a phone along with other people using tablets and other non-phone mobile devices. Make sure you are using responsive design to ensure that the content works well on smaller screens.

Personalize Your Content: Whether you are drafting email newsletters, blog posts or guest articles on another site, it’s important that you make sure that readers feel like they are reading something unique and different. Speak directly to your audience and try to personalize your contact with them wherever you can. If you are the owner or CEO of your company, take the time to share your personality with your customers through your content. If readers feel a connection to you, they are more like to open emails and read your articles.

Make Your Content Informative and Useful: These have been two of the biggest buzzwords to come out of Google’s algorithm changes in recent years. While link building and higher search engine rankings might be a by-product of your content, you need to create this content in a way that provides readers with helpful information that is relevant to your industry. If you are working with an outside provider of content writing services, make sure they know your business well before they start writing on your behalf.

Before you send out a promotional or educational email to your customers, how much time do you spend on the headline? It’s probably not enough, as one recent email marketing survey showed that every word in the headline of your email can have a significant impact on if the recipient opens it. A leading email marketing company analyzed 24 billion emails delivered with 22,000 distinct words in the headline. The results showed that:

Personalization Is Important. Using a template or macro to automatically include the name of the recipient meant that it was far more likely that they would open the email. This was true for just using the first name or the last name, but the open rates were two to four times higher if both the first and last names were used.

Time Sensitivity Drives Open Rates. When emails used terms like “urgent,” “breaking” or “important” that implied a time sensitivity, open rates increased significantly.

Free Isn’t the Perfect Solution. Many email marketing experts assume that including the word “free” in any email will entice people to open. While it’s true to a small degree overall, in some industries such as travel and transportation, real estate and medical, using “free” actually reduced open rates. Interestingly, the word “freebie” appeared to be much more powerful than “free.”

Donation Requests Get Ignored. Words directly associated with charity such as “donation” or “fundraiser” caused open rates to fall dramatically. More ambiguous words such as “helping” also reduced open rates but only by a minor amount.

Announce Things to People But Don’t Remind People. When a headline “announced” something or “invited” someone to do something, open rates were high. They fell when the email “reminded” a person of something. It was even worse if the email threatened the reader with “cancellation.”

Word Pairs Matter. Some combinations of phrases, such as “Thank You,” made open rates go up. Other word pairs weren’t so powerful. Phrases such as “sign up” and “last chance” made open rates plummet.

Capitalization Can Help. One of the quirkiest findings of the research was that the capitalization of the email headline appears to have a correlation with open rates. Specifically, people were slightly more likely to open an email if all of the words in the headline were capitalized, but were slightly less likely to open an email if just one of the words was capitalized.