Let's be web optimistic
If you feel like some good news, there's plenty around. A quick spin around the news sites will give you lots of reasons to be cheerful. 15 million web surfers earn more than $100,000 per year. Nectar has attracted 1.8 million visitors in its first month. Online sales in the UK have risen by more than 42%, a testament to the power of retail therapy. Internet banking and travel are booming. Lastminute, Egg and Amazon are profitable.
Web optimism is back. But it's a more pragmatic positivity than that of a few years ago, when fresh faced dot coms could raise millions on the strength of a good idea and nobody asked awkward questions about return on investment until it was too late.
How things have changed. Back then, the mark of a successful dot com was a Flash animation of a pair of rotating trainers. Today, it's a sustainable business model. Back then it was offices in Docklands and Audi TTs for the junior executives, today it's a marketing strategy that wins customers, not just awards.
In other words, what separates the Internet's winners from the losers has been the realisation that business is business. If people won't return to a shop with surly service and broken tills, they won't think much of a slow-to-load web site with missing links and unreliable delivery, however funky the music. Nobody will spend hours waiting for a sales assistant to serve them, any more than they'll trawl through a site to find the content they were promised on that banner they clicked.
Just as in the real world, a web site needs to be easy to find, quick to load, intuitive to use, with content that matches the target audience's expectations and a smooth and seamless clickstream from welcome to checkout. The four cornerstones of business success: visibility, functionality, loyalty and economy are just as relevant on the Web as they are on the high street.
Consider the most sophisticated retail enterprises on the planet - the supermarkets. They realised the value of these four cornerstones a long time ago - with phenomenal results. In planning the size and location of their new stores, the supermarkets will use a complex matrix of local demographics, transport networks, competitor activity and a host of other factors. Visibility is key.
Functionality is, likewise, a necessity rather than a luxury. For example, the layout of the store itself will be scientifically designed, with products precisely placed to maximise store traffic and profitability. Customer loyalty is created - and customer relationship management facilitated - by reward cards which deliver vital data on spending behaviour and ensure the optimum targeting of communications and special offers. For economy, the supermarkets know exactly how to maximise the volume and value of transactions. It's no accident that essential items such as bread are at the back of the store or impulse purchases near the tills. At the same time, running costs - from logistics to salaries - are pared to a minimum.
This won't be news to the most successful dot coms. They've known about web optimisation, the science of helping a web business work harder, faster and smarter, for a long time now. Pioneered by Weboptimiser since 1996, web optimisation goes way beyond its roots in search engine positioning to embrace those four cornerstones of Internet success:
- Visibility - building a high online profile to attract visitors
- Functionality - enhancing the user experience
- Loyalty - ensuring return visits
- Economy - reducing costs and increasing revenue
An optimised web site, therefore has excellent visibility - it's easy to find. It enjoys a high position on the top search engines, under the most appropriate search terms and as a result receives a regular supply of qualified visitors. Advertising or promotions on the site such as banners and buttons get a good response. An optimised site receives new traffic from other sources too, from advertising and viral marketing campaigns and via links from affiliated sites, as well as visitors who have been recommended to the site.
In terms of functionality, an optimised site is fast-loading, intuitive, interactive and easy to use. Its navigation makes sense, all links and on-site features are fully operational and all processes, from email contact to online polls, are designed with the user in mind.
To encourage loyalty, the site not only has the specific content that the visitor is looking for, but offers plenty of reasons to come back or recommend the site to a friend. The site offers a warm welcome, both to first time and regular visitors and has a real sense of community.
For economy, the site has low overheads, particularly customer acquisition costs at a fraction of those traditionally delivered by traditional online marketing campaigns. Because the site offers the products and services its visitors are looking for and transactions are fast and easy to complete, revenues are higher. It might even be profitableÉ
So how can a web site optimise itself, and as a result, be more optimistic? Essentially, optimisation comprises three activities:
Research - information and analysis to understand your online positioning, performance and potential.
Acquisition - visibility-boosting tactics to deliver qualified traffic. Retention - communication programmes to turn visitors into members and customers into communities.
The research stage involves asking questions. Who is your target audience? What are they looking for? How are you currently positioned and how many people are asking for your product or service? Who are your competitors and what are they up to? Is your site welcoming and easy to use? Which of your pages are the most popular and where are the 'quit spots'? What is the ratio of first-time, one-off and regular visitors?
The acquisition phase, to boost your visibility and bring you qualified visitors, primarily means search optimisation. Considering that around 90% of all web visitors arrive via the search engines it is well worth ensuring your site enjoys a strong presence. This could include re-designing your home site to ensure it meets the precise criteria of the search engines or, for even better results, creating a network of search term specific micro-sites and submitting them individually to each search engine. One of the world's best-loved and most successful automotive brands used a micro-site strategy from Weboptimiser for the launch of a new model and met its sales targets with ease for a fraction of the cost of a TV advertising campaign.
There is also a wealth of paid-for positioning options available, from auction-based competitive bidding programmes that award the best positions to the highest bidder to the Adwords system, that lets you advertise alongside the search engine listings whenever particular search terms are used.
Other online ways to attract new traffic include search term sensitive banner and button advertising, sponsorship and links with other relevant sites as well as viral techniques like recommend-a-friend.
The retention phase is essentially about creating loyalty amongst your visitor base, to encourage return visits and regular purchases and attract new features. Optimisation techniques could include facilities such as a registration system at the front end with a database at the back to gather, analyse and segment visitor data for permission-based (also known as opt-in) marketing communications. It is also straightforward to create community features on your site such as bulletin boards, or make repeat purchase incentives and special members' offers.
Enhancing the visitor experience is a fundamental part of retention. As well as the obvious steps of making sure that all on-site processes, interactive features and links are working, it is essential, firstly to ensure that the site's content accurately reflects what visitors are looking for and secondly that they are taken straight to that content.
To give an example of the first, when optimising a leading financial services company, Weboptimiser found that 17% of search engine users looking for a mortgage were mis-spelling the word as 'morgage'. As a result of this intelligence, the company was not only able to capture this traffic that would otherwise have been lost in the ether, but took a gentler, more educational approach to this visitor segment.
To give an example of the second, when optimising the vast and complex site of one of the world's largest computer hardware companies, Weboptimiser was able, with a micro-site strategy, to re-format the navigation of the site in order to deliver visitors straight to their requested content rather than taking them to the home page and expecting them to find their own way from there.
Of course, there are other ways to optimise a web business. Techniques such as spamdexing (multiple submission of the same site to the search engines) and cloaking (submitting one page to the search engine and another to the search engine user) which mislead the search engines into giving a site a higher listing than it really deserves are common practice in the twilight zone of the optimisation business. Pornography and gambling sites are typically two of the worst offenders.
But spamdexing and cloaking, while sometimes successful in the short term and often known by other, friendlier sounding names, such as 'ghosting' or 'doorway page' solutions, are a high risk strategy that no company which values its brand integrity should try. The search engines have publicly declared their commitment to stamping out these unfair and unethical practices and any site caught doing it will either be blacklisted or banned - a fatal blow to one's Internet visibility.
No, the only way to optimise sites for the search engines is to do things their way: to design, format, structure, register, submit and host each site according to each search engine's individual, ever-changing (and often idiosyncratic) criteria, standards and processes. There are no short cuts.
At the same time, Internet marketers are routinely offered illegally-harvested email addresses, which they would be ill-advised to buy unless they want to be publicly humiliated as a 'spammer'. There is only one way to avoid accusations of spamming and that's to ask people's permission to email them (opt-in) and give them a quick and easy way to unsubscribe (opt-out) from your mailing list should they wish. Neither should any web business trust an optimisation company that promises incredible results, or claims exclusive arrangements with the search engines, to buy a particularly desirable keyword, for example. There are no guarantees in this business and if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
So next time you read some good news about a web business and wonder how they did it, now you know.
David White
CEO
Weboptimiser Ltd
