SEO and Conversion Optimization

Editor's Notes

1. Today we’ll cover why we have jobs (i.e.- internet), how we keep our jobs (i.e. the need for digital strategies), and how our clients keep their customers happy.
2. How many of you have used the internet to buy something in the last week, month or year?
3. You aren’t alone – back in 2014, over 61% of global internet users researched products online, and 44% of online shoppers begin by using a search engine. These percentages have also grown since these stats were reported and continue to grow and change as we speak.
4. Nowadays, we also have to consider not just how people are searching, but from where – not just PCs anymore. People have the ability to search anywhere, anytime, for whatever reason they want. These numbers aren’t surprising since we live in a new multi-screen world. We’re connected to the internet almost always, whether it’s through mobile device, tablets, computers or television. This growth in cross-platform consumption provides a challenge for marketers – how do we reach consumers through a variety of touchpoints, and at the same time?
5. With the rise in the number of people accessing and utilizing the internet we’ve seen a shift in how people shop online. Revenue has substantially increased for many online shopping verticals, with clothing generating the highest revelue, followed by electronics and groceries So why are consumer’s spending and shopping habits shifting more towards online shopping? Some reasons, but not all, include the facts that Brick and Mortar stores are overcrowded, the convenience of shopping for anywhere, anytime, being able to price compare, more choices
6. With just these few facts in mind, we want to show you how we at Perficient approach ecommerce businesses through our digital strategies.
7. We’ve broken it down into three phases – Acquisition, Engagement and Retention How will people find you? Why should they convert? Why should they come back?
8. These phases in the ecommerce puzzle require a variety of strategies and tactics in order to be successful and many companies out there are doing just that.
9. Anyone heard of this little company? Founded in 1995 By 2013, estimated 237 million active customer accounts with a total revenue of $74.5B USD
10. Amazon’s digital strategy follows the acquire, engage and retain model as previously stated. In terms of acquisition, they… (read slide) Traditional, digital and guerilla marketing
11. For engagement, which is again how do we provide users with an excellent experience on the site which encourages them to convert, they…(read)
12. And finally, their retention strategy includes programs and perks such as So with that, we’re going to take a deep dive into the three steps. With that I’ll hand it over to Renee to talk to you about Acquisition and more specifically, SEO.
13. Acquisition: The first step to developing your digital strategy is figuring out how you are going to get traffic and from which digital verticals or channels. We call this bucket Acquisition and it includes involving any combination or mix of the following channels: SEO -- or organic search which we will focus on today since by now you’ve learned from this class that organic search makes up the largest portion of users and when done properly, is one least expensive channels to invest in PPC -- or paid search is text-based form of paid advertising Display -- image-based form of paid advertising Affiliate -- performance-based form of paid advertising Email Social
14. 75% of you are using Google as a search engine to find information and buy things The results of that information is going to be listed in a variety of different formats but can mainly be categorized as either paid or organic listings Let’s take an example to illustrate this: I love to embarrass my dog, so i’m planning on dressing her up this year as an adorable bumble bee for Halloween. Like many of you do, I begin my search with Google by typing in “dog bumble bee costume” and pressing enter.
15. At the very top of the search engine results page or SERP, I see horizontal and vertical listings that feature none other than adorable pictures of dogs as bumble bees or what i like to call, “dumble bees”. All of these are examples of paid ads which appear there through the PPC or “pay-per-click” marketing channels. From Google, you are using Google AdWords as an advertising platform to manage your ad campaigns and bids.
16. After all those paid results, i see additional listings with images, blue links, and short ad-like descriptions. These are examples of organic listings which are optimized through SEO or search engine optimization. They are free to show up but ordered based on how much Google likes you. The higher up to the top, the more clicks you will most likely receive.
17. But what about these? Raise your hand again if you’ve seen something like this recently What are they and how did they get there? All of these are still considered organic listings. They are relatively new type of listing called a quick answer or featured snippet and appear above traditional organic listings. Google is becoming an “answer engine”
18. Starting off with the basics, in order to get those clicks from the organic or free results, you need to know SEO or search engine optimization which can be simply defined as: Improving website visibility from search engine rankings by optimizing pages for the different ranking factors.
19. How search engines work….scratch that…how Google works because that’s the one that matters. Part 1 / 3 Crawling and indexing It all starts with the web which is full of pages Google finds those pages by crawling links and following them to find more pages Then they categorize each page by looking at cues on the page like its content to understand what each page is about And keep track of it all in something called “the index” which is over 100 million gigabytes Google’s index is kind of like a library when you think of it Part 2 / 3 Algorithms Google engineers develop super complex programs and formulas to decide which page should rank higher over another Algorithms give weight to different elements to understand what you are looking for And pull pages they’ve already crawled and put in the index Using 200+ factors, Google ranks the results (we’ll get into some of the major ones next) Like we showed you in the beginning these results can look very different based on the device you use Part 3 / 3 Fighting Spam Google is a lot stricter and harsher on spam than other search engines. If you try and use spam techniques like scraping content from other websites, keyword stuffing, or have unnatural links, Google will not rank your page and even give you a penalty that basically means until you clean up your site, we will not rank you. And that’s how search works! Although you see a simple page of results, behind the scenes is actually a super complex system that’s constantly being tested to support billions of searches.
20. Ranking factors: In general, each ranking factor can be bucketed into three main categories: off-page which by far is weighted the most and the hardest to optimize, on-page, and content Now of course Google is not going to go off and tell you all the ranking factors or no one would need SEO (or to spend money in AdWords har, har) The ranking factors we’ll cover are based off of best practices and correlation studies which give us hints of what pages that rank high up all seem to have in common Keep in mind that even if you optimize for ranking factors, it won’t work if your website isn’t configured to be SEO-friendly from the technical perspective
21. What do you want to show up for? Things you do on your site. What is this page about?
22. 2 main on-page elements that appear on the Search Result itself: title tag and meta description Out of all the things you can do on your website, having an optimized title tag on all of your pages you want to rank is considered the most powerful Use it to briefly and accurately describe the topic of the page You will see title tags from the SERP, the browser, and sometimes even in social media when sharing page URLs You will see title tags from the SERP, the browser tab, and sometimes even in social media when sharing page URLs These should be short, clear, and descriptive
23. When it comes to search rankings, the importance of good quality, relevant content cannot be understated. At the end of the day, a search engine is a COMPUTER that is trying to process and parse human natural languages. Write content for your users and use semantics, synonyms, and related terms to help computers understand the meaning of the query. The average word count for the top 10 is 1285 words Don’t just write more. Use information about the structure and context of topics to optimize your content.
24. Brand awareness and relevant content generate backlinks. Try to position your domain as a brand with good content. • From a statistical viewpoint, backlinks are still a factor that correlates with high rankings. The correlations between the respective individual link ranking factors are correspondingly high, but are decreasing. • According to our analysis, the relevance of links will decline in favor of other factors in future. • Even now links should be viewed in the same way as social signals – as a ranking signal, but also to some degree more a consequence of good rankings instead of their cause.
25. Brand awareness and relevant content generate backlinks. Try to position your domain as a brand with good content. • From a statistical viewpoint, backlinks are still a factor that correlates with high rankings. The correlations between the respective individual link ranking factors are correspondingly high, but are decreasing. • According to our analysis, the relevance of links will decline in favor of other factors in future. • Even now links should be viewed in the same way as social signals – as a ranking signal, but also to some degree more a consequence of good rankings instead of their cause.
26. Diversity is key
27. Social signals are factors that correlate strongly to better rankings. The question of how social signals directly affect rankings remains. As noted in our analysis, higher-ranked URLs have more social cues such as Likes, Tweets and +1s than those sites further down the ranks, but Google has continually emphasized that it is not using social signals as a direct ranking factor. In addition, a high number of social signals implies that the site is a brand or that it regularly adds new content. Last but not least, social signals definitely play a role in direct traffic, brand awareness, and the overall online performance of a domain. In general, good content performs better on social networks - and search engines want to recognize and display good, relevant and up-to-date content. Still, the question about the real impact of social signals on rankings remains. Most likely, social signals are one of several signals to show search engines where and what new and relevant content is.
28. Used to be partners, then not, then back again
29. Now that we have the users on our site, how do we get them to stay and how do we get them to complete the main goal – whether that’s buying something, downloading something or so forth? The engagement process includes any combination of the following channels: User Experience – consumer behaviors on the site Creative Design – the actual creative Content – what’s on the site Mobile – making sure the website is to par for a mobile device Analytics – the data created and collected from the site’s users Conversion - this is where my expertise comes in is with Conversion Optimization. So….
30. So, let’s start by breaking down Conversion Rate Optimization….What is a conversion?
31. Basically, a conversion is what happens when a user completes a desired action that has a direct or indirect impact on a business goal. For Amazon, it’s when they sell a product. For ESPN, it’s when someone views and article. We use these conversion to calculate conversion rate which is the ratio of users that completed a desired action out of all users that were presented with the option to take action. So for example, in Amazon’s case, the total number of people that bought any product divided by the number of total site visitors gives us the conversion rate. This is different from ecommerce conversion rate, which is total transactions divided by visits. So we know what a conversion is, and we know how conversion rate is calculated….so what exactly do I do every day?
32. I do Conversion Rate Optimization which is the process of turning potential customers into customers, and then those customers into repeat customers. We works towards increasing the number of people who complete a specific conversion goal on ecommerce websites. Sound complicated? While it can be, we work towards conversion goals by testing. We test for a number of reasons. One is to, in the big picture, save our clients money. Testing allows us to try out new layouts, colors, pictures, you name it without investing hundreds of thousands of dollars on complete sire redesigns. While our test results may lead to this down the road, we are confident that these changes will increase overall sales and revenue. There are different types of tests including multivariate tests – this is where we change multiple elements on a page and test against the original – and A/B tests. Today we’ll focus on A/B testing.
33. A/B testing, or split testing, is when two versions of web page, landing page, email, or anything else you’d like to test online, are compared to see which one performs better. We do this by showing two variations to the site’s traffic at the same time. Whichever variation, whether it’s the original or the variation, receives the highest conversion rate is declared the winner! To visualize this process a little better let’s take a hypothetical example.
34. Let’s say…I’m a bakery who does home deliveries – weddings, showers, birthdays, what have you. I currently have a picture of a cake on the main page of my website, but we want to test and see if having people in the image with our products will increase people ordering through our website. Case studies show that having pictures of people on websites can help build brand trustworthiness, which is where we got the idea from.
35. So, we create an A/B using one of our testing platforms and in the variation, replace the cake pictures with a baker + the cake. Through our platform we can split the incoming traffic to the site so 50% see the original and 50% see the variation. In terms of timing, all of our CRO tests run for a minimum of two weeks. One main reason is because consumers’ shopping patterns change throughout the week and we want to make sure we capture all the high and low time periods.  We also try to accommodate for as many external factors as possible, which could include email blasts or weekly promotions.  While the two week minimum is set for all tests, some experiments may take longer that to reach statistical significance.  It all depends on what page the test runs on, the average number of daily visitors to that page, the goal of the test, and many other factors. So, whether a test run for 2 weeks, a month or more we always wait until that test has reached statistical significance. Since we only collect data from a sample of the population, we want to make sure that the test results are based on actual changes in users’ behaviors, not just random chance.  Therefore, we set our significance level at 90 - 95%, leaving as little chance of error as possible.
36. For this hypothetical example, our test reach statistical significance in 2 weeks or more and we found that the Original actually had a higher conversion rate. From these results, we can infer that changing the picture to have a person in it won’t increase conversion rate and we shouldn’t implement it permanently.
37. Now, let’s look at a real example. How many of your have ever heard of or played Sim City?
38. A few years back, EA Sports released a new version of SimCity. But before it was available to play, they offered a pre-order option so people could have it on their computers when it was released. They added a banner to the top of their product page that they hoped would encourage more sales. Though this banner was prominently placed across the top of the page, EA wasn’t seeing an increase in pre-sales. So, they decided to run a test that removed the promotional banner, which would pull the call to action – the buy now button – higher up on the page. They hypothesized that by doing this, they would see an increase in pre-sales.
39. What do you think happened. Who thinks the original with the banner won? Who thinks the variation without the banner.
40. To those who chose the variation, you’re correct. During the testing period EA Sports saw a 43% improvement purchases through the variation compared to the original. They concluded that people just wanted to pre-order the new Sim City and didn’t need an extra incentive to do so. By testing, EA Sports not only saved time, they also saved money by not over-promoting. Something else to note here is that there are no such things as “best practices” in CRO. In EA Sports case, there was a common belief that promotional banners drive more purchases. However, this wasn’t the case for them. In CRO, we challenge and test what have been defined as website “best practices”. This doesn’t make us very popular with other departments, especially user design who LIVES by industry best practices, but we continuing to prove to them that it’s alright to test and modify our client’s websites.
41. Now that we’ve looked at a few examples, we’ve seen how much of an impact conversion rate optimization can have on a website. So are we done after one test? Not even close.
42. We continually work towards growing our client’s conversion goals through a variety of ways. The first, and most important, it by testing, testing and testing. Just because one test showed a positive results doesn’t mean it’s the be all end all. There are always more improvements to make. We also work with the SEO and PPC departments to identify problems they might be encountering that could affect conversion. For example, if PPC is leading people to a specific landing page, but that landing page is converting well, we can run a test to change elements on the landing page that might better suite the incoming PPC traffic. But if we don’t get test ideas from PPC and SEO, how do we actually know what to test? Well, we relay on the data. Qualitative and quantitative data guide and drive our tests and while some Conversion Optimization Specialists like to test based on intuition, we look at what’s actually happening on the site. Have there been increases or decreases for specific data points? Are the trends during specific times of year? Was there out of thin air spike in transactions on one day? These are the questions we ask when we analyze.
43. To analyze quantitative and qualitative data we use a variety of tools – some free, some not so much. These tools help track and compile data about site’s visitors, their behaviors, business goals, technical performance, and more. Types of software Standard Page Tracking – GA and AA A/B and Multi-Variate Testing – Optimizely and AT Usability Testing – UserTesting.com Customer Experience Tracking – Clicktale, CrazyEgg, Mousestats While some of these tools are free, in order to use them you have to first implement a snippet of unique code onto the site. Then you’re ready to start collecting data.
44. Reporting software, on the other hand, dynamically connects to our Analytics systems and pull in data, allowing us to create interactive data visualizations. The only problem is - they cost a lot more money.
45. So we have all these tools, what do we actually report to the client? The short answer….it depends. Each report and dashboard is custom tailored to each client. Another factor we consider is who are these reports being presented to? For example, if the dashboard is being presented to a Marketing Manager, we might report on how the macro KPIs rather than each test’s results. Also, each client receives different data depending on what they’re testing. While SEO and PPC will report and similar metrics month over month to show progression, while we do report on overall ecommerce conversion rate, each test affects different metrics.
46. Retention plans are built on – what are the best strategies for this customer base to bring them back for more? Email, content marketing, retargeting ads, social and mobile
47. Here are some examples of retargeting emails – 15% off on my next visit to William Sonoma Retargeted ads on ABC – I’m sure you’ve seen these everywhere and thought, I just looked at that product, why is it following me?! Buy directly through the site or buy lists of sites through ad networks based on verticals Social ads – retargeted based on sites I’d been looking at
48. With that, we’d like to thank you for you time today. We hope you learned a little more about SEO and CRO compared to when you first walked in the door today. At this time we’d like open the floor to any questions you have about SEO, CRO, our jobs or how we got here today. *Internships
49. Brand awareness and relevant content generate backlinks. Try to position your domain as a brand with good content. • From a statistical viewpoint, backlinks are still a factor that correlates with high rankings. The correlations between the respective individual link ranking factors are correspondingly high, but are decreasing. • According to our analysis, the relevance of links will decline in favor of other factors in future. • Even now links should be viewed in the same way as social signals – as a ranking signal, but also to some degree more a consequence of good rankings instead of their cause.