Make It Up In Volume

While SES and most of the SEM industry is primarily focused on paid and organic search placements, there is increasing visibility to 'conversion' and the steps a site can take to generate more revenue from their visitors. There were two conversion sessions at SES, including one panel style and a 'clinic' where sites from audience members were critiqued and given suggestions for improvement.

The basic idea is simple - make it obvious what you want the user to do on each page and make it easy for them to do it (and hard to do things wrong). What the sessions demonstrated was that if you look at a web page and ask the question 'what does this page encourage the user to do?' you can quickly expose the kind of poor design and conflicted goals that muck up at probably 98% of all the pages on the internet.

The dynamic Brian Eisenberg of Future Now Inc was prominent in both. The sessions were full of both obscure and common sense advice. It was great to listen to Brian, and Micheal Sack of Inceptor, point out problem after problem on page after page. All I could think during the clinic session was that I could imagine people paying $100 each and lining up around the block to get 10 or 15 minutes of such impactful advice and feedback.

Frederick Markini, CEO iProspect was also clearly on the conversion bandwagon - pointing out in another session that it should be the #1 priority of marketers rather than #5 (by his count).

My guess is that a year from now, conversion and usability related issues will take up a much larger portion of shows like this one. Organic and paid search positions are important, but when 98% of your customers leave without buying anything, the biggest problem you have isn’t attracting more visitors.

Articles today at both Marketing Profs.com and SEO roundtable also touched on the topic of conversion marketing.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at March 9, 2004 12:42 PM