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Just how good is your website at influencing and converting your many visitors? Unfortunately it’s not good enough anymore to just rely on a great looking website or having the lowest prices - you need to understand your visitors mind and influence it to the best of your ability. But how can you learn how to do that without taking a class in psychology?

One of the best ways to do this is to learn from the  principles of a true expert - Dr Robert Cialdini. He wrote an outstanding book called ‘Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion that reveals six weapons of influence that can be used to great affect, even in the online world. The basic premise of his book is that in our increasingly complex and pressured world, we often make decisions by falling back on his six instinctive patterns - and that many smart marketers and sales people make use of these patterns to influence and convince their potential customers with great results.

Therefore, I thought I would tranlsate Robert Cialdini’s six great principles to the online world with some examples, hopefully helping you understand how you can influence your website visitors better, thus converting more of them and keeping them coming back for more (without them even realizing how you are influencing them so well!)

Let’s get started - here are his six ‘weapons of influence’ adapted by me so you can take advantage of these on your websites: Continue Reading »

I’m excited to do my first blog post in a while - it’s certainly been too long! I’ve been busier than ever, particularly with trying to help write the 2nd edition of Tim Ash’s Landing Page Optimization book! After going to eMetrics a few weeks ago and seeing some great new tools, I thought I would do a quick review and roundup of some newer tools that will help you to optimize and improve your website. So without further ado…

- Loop11.com  This tool is website usability testing on steroids, and allows you to determine your website visitor’s user satisfaction by asking them questions and getting them to complete tasks - essential to understand when trying optimize your website. Basically, you set up tasks for key goals on your website, and invite your visitors (via popup or email) to participate and try and complete them. An example task might be ’Find the key benefits of using our premium product’. You can then review task completion reports and come to a better understanding of task completion rate - and fix any problematic tasks users find.

Its pretty cheap too - just $350 per test and is much cheaper than traditional usability testing. And for an even more feature-rich tool in a similar vein, try using UserZoom.com which is even better, like allowing for getting written responses to tasks, but it is more expensive though.

- CodeBaby.com Nope, this has nothing to do with website development - its actually a fantastic tool for creating an interactive online spokesperson to help your website visitors find what they are looking for. This technology has been around in basic form for a few years now, but this is the best implementation I have ever seen. It allows you to customize the conversation script and its related links on each page of your website to really fine tune the help the CodeBaby offers for your website visitors. I particularly like how you can add call to action buttons for your key website goals right below your online spokesperson, so that it gives your visitors something to click on (and means users don’t even need their sound on to interact). A very clever tool indeed, and will no doubt help increase your conversion rates.

- CrossBrowserTesting.com Do you know what your website looks like on all the different combinations of browsers, different screen (resolution) sizes and different operating systems? Probably not, because the number of combinations you would have to test are mind boggling, and chances are your website might be broken in a common combination that you haven’t looked at before, thus decreasing your conversion rates without you knowing. This tool automates this checking process, and allows you to easily see if your site looks weird or breaks on different combinations, for example Mac users using FireFox 2.5 on a screen size of 1680X1200. Very cheap, at just $20 for the basic monthly plan, and is a great tool to help optimize your website performance for your visitors.

- AttentionWizard.com You only get a vital few seconds to try and engage your website visitors when they first arrive on your website. But how can you be sure their eyes  are focusing on what you want them to focus on? For example, are one of your images too distracing, or is your call to action button too small? This great new tool allows you to get a much better understanding of your visitors eye flow and what they are drawn to, and therefore discover possible issues with your website and its landing pages. It uses a proprietary eye pattern algorithm and works on live websites and even design mockups - you just upload the screenshot and it gives you an instant prediction. The best thing is that you can upload one screenshot free per day, and its pretty cheap to upload more per day ($10-25 per screenshot). Definitely money very well spent to help understand and improve your website.

- UserTesting.com This great tool is another essential for gaining true visitor insight and finding possible issues with your website. Similar to Loop11 and UserZoom in the sense that you create tasks for your visitors to try and complete, but this goes a great step further. It actually allows you to cherry pick your website testers based on their demographics or website habits, and records their interaction with your website and their attempts at completing your website key tasks - mouse clicks, voice commentary and all. It’s also very cheap - if you get a minimum of three users to test, prices are as low as $29 per user. Go ahead and spend $90 bucks on this tool to get 3 great videos of user’s interactions with your website, and their task completion experiences - its truly eye opening and will be one of the best $90 you ever spent on your website to help improve it.

Hopefully you discovered a few tools that you hadn’t heard of before - ideally your site should be making use of all these tools to make the biggest impact regarding your website optimization efforts. Oh, and I promise not to leave it so long before writing a new blog post!

Many of you are asking me for website optimization tips to help improve your website. Yet I know how busy everyone is. And I know everyone wants to scan things and doesn’t want to read a lot at once. And everyone wants simple nuggets that you can take action on.

So what’s the best way for me to give quick short tips to everyone that will help you optimize and improve your website? Via Twitter! So, starting tomorrow (26th Feb) I am going to be giving quick website optimization nuggets & insights everyday via my Twitter for the next 30 days (and maybe longer). All for free!

All you need to do to get these daily tips is to follow me on Twitter (#richpage). I will also periodically update this post with the actual tips that I am sending out, and these will form a big long list of quick website optimization nuggets. Hope you all find these very useful!

Here are my latest daily website optimization tips:

Tip: On your homepage, limit the amount of competing calls to action. Pick your 3 most important. Anymore and you will confuse your visitor.

Tip: In your analytics tool, find your top 10 organic search entry pages. Optimize these pages: great traffic & bang for optimization buck.

Tip: Create & prominently show your website’s unique value propositon - i.e. why should your visitor use your site instead of competitors.

Tip: Don’t presume you know what your site visitors are clicking on. Use heat maps & click maps on your pages: results can be surprising.

Tip: Slow loading pages are a conversion rate killer. Run Yahoo’s great ‘YSlow’ tool to determine what is slow on your site and then fix.

Tip: Engage your visitors better by showing different messaging for new & repeat visitors, like on my blog. Great tool: http://bit.ly/j4e3

Tip: Don’t make your visitors have to think what is clickable. Use blue for link colors or underline, don’t just rely on hover underline.

Tip: Test removing the leaderboard banner from your homepage only. This will likely get more visitors clicking through & reduce bounce rate.

Tip: Usability testing is a must, but doesn’t have to be expensive. Get good feedback using usertesting.com from 3 users, just $29 each.

Tip: Use campaign tracking codes (even on tweets) to measure your acquistion sources success & impact on conversions http://bit.ly/Kcrju

I’m excited to announce that I’m going to be a co-author for a great website optimization book - its the 2nd edition of Tim Ash’s great ‘Landing Page Optimization’ book!

Tim contacted me last month to see if I was interested in helping him out updating and writing new chapters for the second edition of his book - the first edition of the book sold so well (over 20,000 copies) that his publisher wanted him to do a 2nd edition done already.

I naturally  jumped at the chance to work with such a passionate website optimizer, and have already begun work on the book. The second edition is going to be updated and improved, and will feature much more new content relating to the optimization non-ecommerce websites, and also all the latest testing strategies and tips.  Tim has also just chosen another co-author to help us wordsmith and update some of the content - Maura Ginty, who has a great background in web content and editorial strategy.

For those of you unfamiliar with the first edition of ’Landing Page Optimization’ book, it received rave reviews when it was first published in early 2008. It’s an essential guide for anyone (particularly online marketing folks) looking to understand how to improve the conversion rates of their websites and landing pages, and is full of great advice and tips for effective website testing. Tim is also CEO and president of SiteTuners.com who specialize in landing page optimization and testing services.

So needless to say, I’m very honored to be helping write this new book, and am very excited! We are also going to be making use of Twitter to ‘crowd-source’ this book, by asking our followers about their website optimization opinions, and best and worst website examples. So follow and stay tuned to Tim Ash’s Twitter and my Twitter for the latest on how you can get involved in the creation of this new book!

SEO. You have to love it - trying to outrank your competitors for top keywords. But lets face it. It’s morphing and changing by the week. Not only are search engine algorithms becoming increasingly complex and hard to consistently rank for, but SEO competition has reached near-breaking point and is harder to compete than ever before. And if you ask me, this all paints an ugly future for SEO specialists and firms, who are soon likely to begin struggling to effectively search engine optimize websites - and thus potentially a future without SEO as we know it today.

Here are the main reasons why I think we are going to have an SEO apocalypse sooner than most people might think…

1 - Increased personalization usage in search results. This has already started to happen - try searching for something when you are logged in to Google. You will often have different search results now, based on what you have search for before - and often different to other logged in users search results too. And Google are going to continue to increase the level of search results personalization, as a way of improving user satisfaction and to differentiate themselves from other search engines like Bing, who don’t have anywhere near as much user search data to be able to offer this. This will therefore mean increased fragmentation when it comes to trying to rank well for keywords - and will give SEO firms less power and influence, and more power to the actual search engine users.  

2 - Increased focus on bounce rate and website user engagement to determine search rankings. Very much like how search quality in Google Adwords works currently, I predict that pretty soon this is also going to start applying to regular organic search rankings. In other words, if you are getting lots of clicks on your search engine ranking, but many people are leaving your website immediately upon arrival because of a bad site (users not finding what they want or poor navigation etc), Google will learn this over time and lower the ranking of your site. Google will therefore effectively promote the rankings of the sites who offer a better user experience.

3- Google introducing site result filtering preferences. Don’t like results appearing from About.com or Yahoo Answers in your Google rankings? In the future I guarantee you will be able to easily set preferences in Google to not serve results from that site, or any other sites you don’t like. And unfortunately the site you may be trying to perform SEO on may be removed from a user’s search engine results by this new feature - potentially for reasons outside of your control as an SEO expert. What happens if a user removes your site from their results because they had a bad customer experience or your product prices were too expensive? You get penalized in the search engines by the user, and there will be nothing SEO experts would be able to do about it. I predict this feature will happen pretty soon… I even mocked up below how it might look in the Google preferences section:

4 - Increased search engine focus on real-time search engine results. This one has already started, albeit in a botched way - Google have begun to understand the importance that users are now much more time sensitive in their need for information by introducing Twitter search results. Even though in my opinion they failed at this first attempt (often with highly irrelevant results), they will get this right, expand usage of this, and will no doubt start to give even more ranking boosts to sites with content that has become updated within the minute (rather than with a day or so as it seems like it is today). This will make it even more complex to rank well for keywords, with increased importance placed on non-traditional websites for information like Twitter and Facebook. Which leads me to my next point…

5 - Increased usage of non-traditional websites to find information online. Twitter and Facebook are smart. They want to gather real time information on their hundreds of thousands of members, and ultimately make it searchable, and thus become even more indispensible for people to use - thus increasing pageviews and ad revenue. Yes, Facebook and Twitter really are just new Googles in disguise. Only just last month, while out in Hollywood, the traffic was even worse than usual. Where did I think to search for reasons why the traffic was so bad? Twitter - I typed in ‘bad hollywood traffic’ into Twitter search, and sure enough found the answer within seconds - it was because of a Christmas parade. I didn’t even think to search Google because their data isn’t real time enough, and they don’t have armies of people experiencing life in order to tap into like Twitter and Facebook have. And mark my words, pretty soon you will start to see Facebook get into the search field - subtly at first. And then watch out Google. And performing SEO on Facebook and people’s wall updates? That’s going to be VERY tough.

6 - As a resulft of the above issues, SEO will become even harder, and thus even more  competitive and cut throat. And this is already beginning to occur with search engine rankings - increasingly, you not only have to excel in SEO for your websites, but you also have to monitor and track what your competitors are doing. For example, it’s no longer as important to be #1 in Google if you can become #2 with a better link bait result title that is more compelling for the visitor to click on. Therefore, it will its getting much harder to perform effective traditional SEO because of increasingly sophisticated non-regular SEO techniques like this.

So there we have it. And don’t get me wrong. I’m not writing this because I am trying to brainwash you to try a different type of non-SEO website optimization that I preach and offer services for on this site. I love SEO, I just don’t see a particularly rosy future for it. And when other mediums like TV-based internet finally become mainstream (already starting to finally become a reality) its going to spell big trouble for the SEO industry.

Your thoughts? I would love to hear everyone’s opinion on the future of SEO - post below!

Wow - 2009 - another year went by so fast again! There were many great website optimization blog posts last year from some great experts around the web, so I thought I would put together a list of my favorite website optimization posts from 2009 that you should all read to help improve your website in 2010! So let’s get started… Continue Reading »

I am happy to say that after launching my first website optimization service three months ago, I have received great feedback and have some very happy clients.

In particular, many people asked me for additional in-depth help to improve their website. As a result of this, I am pleased to announce my new premium website optimization service which is specifically designed for those looking for a more in-depth analysis for helping improve and optimize their website.

With this premium service I go a step further than my basic optimization service by actually analyzing your website traffic metrics in your analytics tool to find insights to help optimize your website, and also include a 30-minute phone consultation to discuss my findings with you. Here are the full details on this new service: Continue Reading »

There is a new type of website that is one of the fastest growing on the internet - service industry based websites. They are popping up everywhere - whether it be sites for lawyers, realtors, dentists, maids, doctors, plumbers, electricians, or even pet groomers - more and more of these ‘offline’ businesses are building websites and going ‘online’ to try and beat their local ‘offline’ competition.

But unfortunately many of these service websites are just glorified online brochures and make many mistakes when it comes to having a well optimized website that satisfies and converts its visitors into sales or leads. So I thought I would put together some tips to help improve these very popular and upcoming type of service websites… Continue Reading »

You have probably heard about those cool web tools that show you heat maps and exactly where your website visitors have clicked or hovered on your pages. Examples of these types of websites include CrazyEgg and Clicktale. And they do help to provide some great insights to help improve websites. But they really are no substitute for proper usability testing, but unfortunately usability lab testing can often be expensive.

Luckily, our friends over at SiteTuners.com are about to launch a great new free tool that bridges this website testing gap, and also ‘ups the website testing stakes’ with a tool that actually predicts your visitors click and eye flow, all without even needing a live website!

Their new tool, currently in free private beta, is called AttentionWizard and actually predicts what your visitors will pay attention to and what they are likely to ignore. Its going to be very simple - you simply submit a screenshot of the page you want evaluated and it makes instant predictions based on advanced artificial intelligence algorithms.  This tool will be VERY useful for helping to identify problematic areas of landing pages and to help increase converstion rates. There will be a free version, and also a paid premium version with extra features.

Here is a screenshot of Attention Wizard in action on the old SiteTuners.com homepage. Looks pretty amazing right?

I know I am very excited to test out this game changing website optimization tool! If you are interested in more details I suggest you sign up for the updates or the private beta . Hopefully this will be launched by the end of the year!

Website testing is definitely a buzz word in the internet world - and rightly so - its a key part of any successful website optimization and improvement effort.  However, I find the problem is that many website testing discussions focus on the more obvious things to test, like headlines, calls to actions  or images, and don’t offer many other unusual testing ideas. And often its more unique testing ideas give you the biggest bang for your testing buck.

Therefore, I decided to create a list of more unusual things that you could test to try and help improve your website - depending on the type of website you have of course. Just like coming up with the unusual test of what would happen when you combined Diet Coke and Mentos… unexpected, but pretty impactful! So lets get started with the test ideas… Continue Reading »