Latest Post

When your website is effectively optimised for search engines and your rankings begin to increase, one of the first things you may notice is the increase in traffic to your website. In most cases (when your SEO has been carefully researched) this naturally leads to an increase in sales / enquiries.

But what if that’s not happening?

Unfortunately in some cases, a site can achieve great listings for a commonly searched keyphrase but this then won’t turn into conversions. There are two common reasons for this. Firstly the keyphrase being targeted may be too generic, meaning visitors aren’t targeted enough to go for a particular product (e.g. you might rank highly for DVDs but only sell comedy DVDs, meaning many customers don’t find what they’re looking for). Another possibility is that your site ranks highly for a non-commercial term, meaning the visitors to your website likely have no intention of buying anything online.

This idea relates well with other sources of traffic – a link on a high-traffic website, for example. It can be quite a common mistake where you advertise your website on another where their user-base is not related to your industry or are unlikely to be looking for products or services.

If you’ve checked your traffic sources and none of the reasons above appear to apply, it might be worth looking into any potential problems with your website, most importantly the usability of the site. Visitors to your site could be struggling to find their way to the product they want to buy from you, or navigate to an enquiry form.

Just Search offers usability reports where we specialise in identifying any potential problems on your website, and detail any changes to both navigation structure and overall layout which could help you truly maximise the profitability of your SEO campaign. If you would like more information about our usability reports, please contact us.

Rik
SEO Programmer

Google’s Conversion Optimiser is now out of beta stage. This service allows users to set a maximum cost per acquisition (CPA) for their Adwords account. Based on conversion history such as keyword, region, ad position etc Google will auto manage your CPC bids in the aim of getting the lowest average CPA. You have to have at least 200 conversions per month to register.

How good is the service?

What is not clear is whether Google will take into account user journeys. The CPA of generic keywords are almost always higher than on the brand terms. But many conversions on the brand terms may have started on more generic keywords. Will Google blindly bid lower bids on generic terms as it sees they have a higher CPA? Also consider that Google have focused solely on the CPA, when most clients overriding concern in the ROI. This is probably because this service is synchronising with the very basic Adwords tracking which only measures sales volume not sales revenue.

Why have Google introduced this?

In theory because they want more advertisers to make a success of their Adwords account so they continue to spend or increase spending on Google. Another theory could be that they are attempting to make it unnecessary for advertisers to use an SEM agency to handle their Adwords account? This is unlikely as you would need a fairly well organised Adwords account in the first place for the optimiser to be a success. However if uptake is big on this could Google bring in more bid management tools? Seeing as they own Doubleclick’s DART search platform (advance bid management software) it seems unlikely that they would give away something for free that previously people had to pay for. But then they did launch Google Analytics did n’t they.

Simon
Campaign Executive