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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the most difficult parts of a website optimization campaign is analytics. With many data points to choose from when looking at your landing page optimization campaign, it’s easy to overlook some of the most important elements. Here are six analytic points you need to pay attention to:

Entry Pages: A lot of emphasis is placed on home pages in website analytics. But landing pages and product pages are also critical to the success of your site. One of the best things to analyze on an entry page is the last action a person took before leaving. It might tell you what was frustrating on the site and caused them to quit.

Meeting Sales Goals: The main goal of almost any website optimization campaign is to increase landing page conversion and turn clicks into sales. But too many people get bogged down in the minute details of their web campaign and lose focus on tracking their sales performance. Most solid analytics tools have the ability to set and track eCommerce goals.

Web Form Stats: Your web forms are critical to your landing page conversion rate. Whether its customers asking for more information on your services or a shopping cart or payment page to complete a transaction, you need to know if customers are filling out forms once they get to the final step in the process.

Search Keywords: Finding the right keywords to focus your optimization efforts is a critical aspect of your SEO campaign. Before you do this, you’ll want to see how people are finding your site now. If the majority of customers found it by searching for your “brand name,” you aren’t doing enough to attract new customers. More generic keywords will be effective search keywords to optimize.

Traffic Sources: It’s easy to become so wrapped up in detailed web analytics and forget about one of the most basic pieces of data: where your web traffic is coming from. Determining if visitors are coming because of web searches, referrals or ad campaigns will help you understand which tactics can potentially have the best results.

Actual Website Traffic: Did you know that many website visits aren’t from real customers but from search engine robots and spiders that crawl Internet sites regularly? Most web visits that last 10 seconds or less are useless to you. Focus on lengthier visits to get a more accurate reflection of your web campaign.

Although some people are unfamiliar with A/B testing, it’s actually a very simple concept to grasp. It’s a frequent tool used in landing page optimization to test potential changes to your existing home page. In this version of landing page testing, visitors potentially see one of two pages: the current one or the new, experimental page. This gives you the ability to get real-world data in a short amount of time to determine which page works better and the strengths and weaknesses of various elements of your site.

Even people who understand what A/B testing is all about often don’t do it frequently enough. Often it’s something that is done when a website first launches or a business first undertakes a campaign of optimizing landing pages. However, what they don’t realize is that A/B testing can be a powerful tool throughout the life cycle of your website. In an article at Quick Sprout, Neil Patel recommends running an A/B test at least every one to two months for websites with more than 10,000 monthly visitors. Patel runs A/B testing twice a month for his business and claims that one out of every four test yields results that increase landing page conversion rates by 20 percent.

A/B testing isn’t just for elements on your website. You can also perform basic tests on the ads as part of your PPC advertising campaigns. Even if your Pay Per Click advertising campaigns are having success at the moment, this doesn’t mean that they are as successful as they could be. Trying out new elements in your campaign and comparing them to your existing elements can help you to understand what is working and what can work better. It doesn’t have to be a major overhaul – according to Patel, even some minor tweaks can provide major benefits to your Pay Per Click advertising conversion rates.

Here are three tips from Patel that you’ll want to consider during A/B testing:

People Love Free Things: Simply adding the word “free” to your advertising can have a huge impact on click-through rates. People are attracted to the concept of getting something for nothing and generally want to read more if something is offered to them for free. If you are already using “free” in your PPC ads, consider highlighting the word through colors, font or sizes.

Place a Value on Your Free Things: People also want to know just what a great bargain they are getting. If you can, make sure you place a dollar amount on the value of the free item or service you are “giving away” on your site.

People Also Love Videos: Many people will click on a video to learn the same information available in text form on a website. Simple videos can be cheap to produce with a provider of PPC advertising services but pay huge dividends.