|
Below, you'll find extensive information on leading
talk talk after the flood articles and products to help you on your way
to success.
Why Visitors From Search Engines Don't Buy..and What You Can Do
By Lisa Lake, Sat Dec 10th
Are you a believer? For years experts have told us you can't dobetter than get your site listed high on search engines. Get inthe top five listings and you will pull thousands of visitors,they say. Naturally, thousands of visitors should produce at leasthundreds of sales. Or, even on a bad day, you should get a fewsales. But search engines rarely deliver what we expect. In thisarticle I tell you why and show you simple ways to fix theproblem.
Strike one: Let me give you a recent example from my ownexperience. I got one of my sites listed high on Yahoo, thenumber one search engine. Friends told me you can expect a giantflood of visitors. Yup, if you consider twenty hits a week aflood, I guess I was all wet. Strike two: Next, I decided to purchase a high ranking on someof the top pay-per-click search engines. The bid rates were lowon NetFlip.com and my site had no problem ranking number one forseveral popular keywords my customers use most. Yikes! The hits poured in. I got 400 visitors a day. That's notthe thousands of visitors larger sites get daily, but 400 peoplesearching for a site like mine should contain at least a fewbuying customers. Not so. After several weeks of being the welcome mat forNetFlip's hordes, my site didn't sell a single thing. Could be acase of lackluster copy or a bad product. But an identical offerusing the exact same copy was selling like gangbusters on myother site. Strike three: Ok, so the smaller pay-per-click sites just don'tdeliver PAYING customers. Maybe they're all folks trying to earna penny to two by surfing from one site to the next, I don'tknow. I figured if you want the BIG results you have to get on the BIGsearch engines. GoTo has a deal where if you get in the topthree listings on their site, you'll be listed at the top of thepage on such major search engines at AltaVista and HotBot. By hook or crook, that kind of listing is as good as it gets.Expensive, but probably good. The plan produced a steady trickleof visitors. Once in a while one buys. The problem. Here's what I firmly believe is the problem withsearch engine traffic. People search for a site like yours andget a list of 10, 20, or 200 links. Even if they click to yoursite and like it, the visitor knows there are dozens morewaiting for them back on the search engine page. It's like going
to the giant Mall Of The Americas and findingeveryone of the hundreds of stores sells the same thing, onlysome have more items, or more selection, or cheaper prices. This involves a principle well known to the people who producecommercials for politicians. If your politician is the only oneon TV tonight, a lot of voters are going to believe what hesays. But if there is another politician on TV saying the exactopposite of what your politician is saying, nobody is going tobelieve either one of them. The opposing views cancel each otherout. On search engines, the opposing sites cancel each other out (oneof the reasons a lot of people get frustrated using them and,according to a recent New York Times report, fewer and fewerpeople are turning to search engines.) The solution. Recognize the limitations of search engines.You'll attract a lot more BUYING customers from the articles youwrite and send out, from the print or TV ad you run, the ezinead you place, or from the good word-of-mouth former customerssend around the Internet. In these situations, you are reaching people who may not know ofother sites like yours. They find your site, figure you are justwhat they have been looking for, and buy. They struggle with thecognitive dissonance (remember that term from Psychology class?)of having too many choices. You also don't want to give up completely on search engines.Figure that when a person finds your site, they aren't nearlyready to buy. For that, you have to give them more time. Youmust be there again and again to remind them about yourexpertise in the field and the great deals you offer. Do this with your own email list. Do everything possible to getthe search engine visitor to put her email address in yoursubscribe form so she can receive your clever tips or productupdates on a regular basis. If you've been advertising your business in a variety of waysfor many years, you have already discovered I'm not reinventingthe wheel here. Once we get past all the new visitors a freshadvertising method can bring, we start to focus on the QUALITIYof those visitors. Recognize the true quality of search engine traffic, then planto groom, convert, and train those visitors to be buyingcustomers.
About the author:Lisa Lake has created a list of top promotional methods on herhttp://MyAdBlaster.com Lisa also writes ad copy that sells forDrNunley's http://InternetWriters.com Reach her atmailto:lisa@myadblaster.com or 801-328-9006.
|
