One of the most important but often overlooked parts of any SEO campaign is landing page optimization. This is the process of making sure that your landing pages – i.e. your home page and other key pages on your site – are designed for SEO success as well as to convert visitors to customers. You can see why this is so important – after all, what is the point of getting customers to your home page if they are going to leave your site before they buy anything?

Even though it’s apparent that increasing your landing page conversion rate is critical to the success of your site, not everyone knows how to do this. To help you out, we’ve compiled five easy steps to help turn curious site visitors into happy customers:

Customer Validation: Potential customers want to see that people just like them have had positive experiences with your products or services. You can let your past sales work for you by aggressively seeking testimonials from your customers and posting them prominently on your website.

Make Customers Feel They Are Missing Out: The “herd mentality” is a real thing when it comes to online marketing. Customers are more likely to purchase your product if they feel like other people are doing the same thing. Call if safety in numbers or not wanting to miss out on the next big thing. You can play to this by showing how many people have recently purchased or tried out your product or offering.

Customize Your Pitch: Customers want to feel like they are special and not just one of the many people receiving a sales pitch. There are many ways that you can customize your sales pitch to reach out to customers on an individual basis. You can use software to insert a person’s name or hometown, or send a different pitch to male or female customers.

Keep Access Limited:  What’s the best way to get people curious about something? Keep it hidden from them. You can do this with your online content as a way to get customers interested in what you are offering. Give them a little taste of some interesting content but ask them to send their email address to you in order to read the rest.

Speed Matters: Don’t overlook the speed of your website. If your website is slow to load, potential customers might give up and go to a different site.

Why has local business marketing become such a driving force in search engine optimization? One of the big reasons is the rise of smartphones and tablets. People no longer have to print out information about a business or look things up in a phone book. Addresses, phone numbers, website and customer reviews are all available in a convenient, handheld format. When you include the rise of Twitter and Facebook and the resulting wave of social media marketing, it’s easy to see why local SEO is so critical to a site’s success.

If you have a local business and are looking to increase your visibility, local search engine marketing is one great way to do it. Several companies offer local search engine marketing and can handle every aspect, from getting your business listed with the appropriate local online directories to building your website. However, you can also do many the steps yourself. Here are a few things you should definitely consider doing immediately if you are doing your own local search engine marketing:

Perform basic SEO: Simply put, you can’t have local SEO unless you have your traditional SEO house in order. This means having a well-constructed, informative website with plenty of useful content and intelligently linked keywords. You’ll want to strengthen this with other SEO practices such as purchasing in-bound links.

Create and update your business listings: As a small business, you need to make sure that your company is listed with all of the standard business listing sites. One of the first steps in this is to make sure that you have a Dun & Bradstreet number. Another step is to update your contact information with InfoUSA. Once you have done this, the information will gradually start feeding to places like the Yellow Pages and other online business directories.

Claim your online presence: This means going out to sites like Google+, Bing, Yahoo and Yelp and taking control of your company’s pages. You’ll want to make sure that the name, address and phone number are consistent and match what is on your website. Add photos and descriptions and encourage your customers to add positive reviews.

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.

Google has recently updated its newest algorithm. This has left many SEO companies and online marketers scrambling to determine how to best comply with Google Penguin requirements. However, attempting to pin down specifics about a Penguin update and craft content to fit might be missing the bigger point of effective search engine optimization: it’s about proper on-site SEO practices along with content.

So what are some of the steps that you can take to assure that your on-site SEO meets the best practices for Google?

Check for malware: You don’t engage in black-hat SEO, but if you have malware or someone running a rogue site through your site, the damage could be just as severe for your SEO reputation with Google.

Write short titles and description: Don’t have them go on too long or repeat information. Keep them short and don’t over-optimize tags.

Check your anchor text: Much like with title tags and descriptions, you want to avoid overusing your keywords or optimizing them too often.

Axe spammy user content: Comments on blogs posts are a good thing for organic search engine optimization; however, Google is now punishing sites that allow spam postings on sections of their site such as blog comment sections.

Increase page speed: A fast-loading site makes Google work faster; therefore, page speed optimization makes Google happy and it appears to improve a website’s SEO.

Cut useless optimization: Don’t bother over-optimization sections like headers and footers with the hope that “more is merrier.” It won’t help your ranking and in fact will likely lead to penalties.

Review your links: Penguin 2.0 has reduced the threshold of what they consider too many “spammy” inbound links on a site from 80 percent to 50 percent.

Check internal cross links: It’s easy to have links on one of your sites go to another site you own or partner with; check your links so you don’t get punished by Google.

Be smart with your alt image attributes: Put more of your content marketing services into alt image attributes than you are now: Google can give it as much weight as actual text.

Don’t overload ads: Having too many ads on your site – especially high – is frowned on by Google.

Add 301 redirects: Links that lead to dead ends tell Google that your site is not properly maintained.

Review crawl rates: Make sure that Google spiders are able to follow your site correctly.

President Obama has declared June 16-22 as “Small Business Week” in America. It’s a way to recognize the small businesses that drive the American economy. This isn’t the first Small Business Week – it goes back to 1963 – but this one is particularly important because of the impact the recent economic downturn has had on small businesses. In the current economy, small businesses need to use every tool necessary to stay ahead of larger competitors.

If you are a small business owner, one of the ways you can do this is to leverage the Internet. Small business Internet marketing can help your small business reach customers throughout the world. However, if you are in a competitive market, you’ll need help to make sure that people can find your website. eVisible specializes in helping small businesses gain visibility online by using a variety of proven of tactics including:

SEO: Getting your website to rank highly for specific keywords is about more than just luck. You need to research which keywords will be the most effective to target and have a dedicated game plan for how to increase your page rankings. By doing search engine optimization correctly, your site can rank higher than larger competitors and get more clicks from curious customers.

Social Media: Establishing a strong social media presence is a highly effective online marketing tool for small businesses. By leveraging outlets such as Facebook and Twitter, you can make a personal connection with potential customers that makes you stand out from larger competitors. A strong social media campaign lets happy customers spread the word about your company to their friends, one of the most powerful forms of marketing.

Directory Submissions: Local directory submissions help to ensure that potential customers have all the information they need to choose your business for their needs. Customers want to know as much as they can about any small business, including positive reviews, pictures and contact information.

eVisible wants to help take your small business to the next level. Find out more about our small business services <https://www.evisible.co/small-business-solutions/> and contact us today for a free consultation.

Reaching customers using smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices is valuable for any website. Mobile customers are often looking for products in a hurry and are ready to make a purchase. To respond to the needs of mobile web users, many websites have “mobile” versions of their website that are text-heavy and meant to load quickly on web browsers. While this help improve loading times and the customer experience, it also makes it difficult to optimize a page to increase conversion rates.

One solution to this problem is creating a responsive design. This involves the implementation of a flexible code structure that allows the design elements to adapt to the parameters of a mobile device. How the on-screen elements are presented to the reader will depend on the type of which type of device the person is using. A smart website conversion for mobile devices using responsive design also incorporates elements that work well on smaller screens (such as video and audio) and eliminating elements that will distract people reading the page on a phone or tablet.

What are some of the elements that you might want to consider during a conversion to a mobile site using responsive design?

Minimalism is a key element to mobile webpage design. Create a scrollable slideshow of product images instead of having them all appear on the screen. Smaller thumbnails are great for touchscreens.

Enhance the call to action by making it a prominent part of the display. Create a large button or banner that is easy to find and clearly states what the call to action on the page is. Doing this avoids customers not being able to click through to the sales point on your site.

Make pricing clear and don’t force people to search through the site to find it. Because of the small size of the screen, customers might get frustrated and leave your webpage if they can’t find the pricing information they need. This includes sales offers and deals such as free shipping on products.

Highlight reviews and ratings to give customers a sense of confidence before purchasing one of your products.

Make content expandable with one-touch rather than forcing people to click on tabs with small text in order to find out more information about your products.

Starting an SEO campaign from scratch can seem like a daunting task. This is especially true in the “new world” of search engine rankings. Algorithm changes such as Google’s Panda and Penguin have changed many of the basic SEO fundamentals. It’s no longer acceptable to create as much content as possible – no matter the quality – or use manipulative links to get clicks. Search engines such as Google are looking for high-quality content and links that get people to stay on a site – and that’s only part of the equation.

If you are launching your SEO campaign, the best bet is to work with professional search engine marketing specialist such as eVisible that can craft an effective campaign and implement the tactics. However, there are many steps that you can take yourself to get your SEO campaign off the ground. Here are five steps that any small business internet marketing professional can do to get immediate SEO traction:

Start a Pay Per Click campaign. While you will want to do keyword research to give you guidance on which keywords to target, you can also do your own testing on a small scale. By investing in small test runs of ads using different keywords, you can see which ones generate clicks and which ones generate more sales – which is always the most important thing.

Build links. You can do this by researching the web pages which have links that are ranking near the top of Internet searches for your targeted keyword. By creating and using a simple email template, you can easily and quickly reach out to hundreds of website owners and start building high-quality links.

Create a Facebook fan page. Facebook fan pages are about more than just increasing your social media presence. They are also an effective tool for SEO purposes in their own right. After all, many Facebook fan pages will come up within the first page of Google and other search engine results.

Get active on Twitter. Just like a Facebook fan page, official Twitter accounts also can rank very highly on Internet searches. And like with Facebook, it’s important to make your Twitter profile as active, complete and dynamic as possible to send the right social signals.

Write great content. If you are an expert in your industry, you can use this knowledge to boost your SEO by writing powerful content. Think about how you can address problems your customers might have and how you can write to grab their attention.

Organic search results are one of the most powerful tools in online marketing. But even if your search engine optimization leads to your results being at the top of the Google rankings, users might overlook them if the listing doesn’t grab their attention. Here are seven ways to improve your rates of SERP conversion for organic listings.

1. Title tags and meta tags are what tell users what to expect when they click on a link. Spend time on developing these with your audience in mind.

2. Brand awareness encourages people to click on a link. Offsite promotional tools can be a factor in increasing the number of clicks on your links.

3. Rich snippets such as ratings, reviews, photos and videos attract immediate attention. Make sure you are using the tools Google supplies to markup your content.

4. Authorship of content looks great in the eyes of Google. Along with a bio, consider linking stories to an author’s Google Plus account.

5. Multimedia elements such as videos and images are powerful ways to improve SERP conversion. Make sure you properly tag, caption, organize and promote your multimedia content.

6. Core optimization is at the heart of any search engine optimization campaign. This extends beyond linking your keywords and performing code tag optimization. You need to make sure that your entire site is optimized so that Google and other search engines can easily find and index your content. eVisible can help you to review your site architecture, internal linking and more to make your site ready for indexing.

7. Review your SERP results and tweak your content frequently. Old content is stale content. Using technology to track the performance of your SEO content can give you clues on how to improve your SERP conversion rates.