The weird and wonderful world of website testing

Since it's still January, happy new web year!
I was thinking about posting SEO new year resolutions today, but I think a lot of other blogs have already done that in a very good way, so let's tackle another very important (and sometimes neglected) element of a good online marketing strategy; website testing and particularly split testing.

What is website testing?
Website testing can take many forms, such as usability testing, UI/UX (user interface, user experience), technical tests or content tests such as A/B testing and multivariate testing.
Testing is a way to ensure that everything on your website is as it should be and that visitors can find what they're looking for.
While it should be logical for any business to do regular tests, assumptions and views of business employees are very often relied upon instead of looking at visitors and potential customers' opinions and needs.

Why implement split testing?
In difficult economic times, ecommerce businesses need to make sure they get the best ROI (return on investment) from their marketing and overall spend, and it is therefore crucial to ensure the highest level of conversion on your website. Many sites experience bottlenecks in their sales funnel on specific pages and changes in content, calls to action and offers can often have a dramatic impact on conversions.

Which methods to use?
I've recently been more exposed to the different tools available for testing, so here is a quick overview of the 2 main content testing methods:

• A/B testing - with this method 2 pages are used concurrently and displayed to different users in equal numbers. The 2 pages are matched with a common conversion point (payment confirmation page, sign up page....) and conversion results are compared to decide which page is performing better than the other. This method is very useful when testing new designs as it will very quickly highlight what works best for your visitors.
• Multivariate testing - this is a more complex tool which allows businesses to dynamically change predefined elements of a page in order to test their performance against conversion points. The changeable elements are predefined and will be displayed according to specific rules until the best performing combination is identified.
  This method can be used to test content as well as graphic elements and can very often lead to dramatic improvements in conversions.

One thing to remember with these methods is that results will only be significant if you test the right pages, so identifying what to test plays a key part in the testing methodology.

Which tools to use?
There are a lot of tools available on the market, but if you're new to split testing, I'd advise to go with an agency at first to get a better understanding of how testing works, and how to set everything up.

For those of you who are more experienced, then Google Optimizer provides a very good structure to start testing as long as you have access to the html code of your website as testing requires the implementation of tracking tags within your site.
When looking at agencies, make sure to choose the right one for you as the most advanced solutions will be out of reach for most SMEs (from £100k +/year!). Some Google accredited providers will offer much more affordable testing services.

I am due to meet a few agencies to discuss split testing this week so I'll let you know what you can expect if you're considering testing yourself.
I think it's time to end this post and while I do realise that the content above only covers a small part of what can be tested on a website, I hope it helps you get a good overview of the basics.
Enjoy your Sunday.

How to deal with paid budget cuts

I've just realised that it's already been a month since my last post, I definitely need to make a better job of writing...but with xmas coming, not sure how this is gonna go...oh well, there are always new year's resolutions.

Alright, today's post is going to be about something that most marketers dealing with paid search campaigns will know, especially during a recession; budget cuts.
As you probably already know if you're running ppc campaigns with Google Adwords, Yahoo search marketing or Bing, changes in any elements of the campaigns can have a very big impact on results, so here are a few tips to make your reduced budgets go further:

• Whatever you do, do not pause your campaigns - Google especially likes consistency, so it is always best to avoid stopping campaigns as it could take you months to rebuild history and raise your quality score again. Even running a very minimal budget is better than stopping everything.
• Bid on brand terms - although many people may question the fact of bidding on your own name, results are very often showing that brand terms /keywords are some of the bets performing ones. And they are cheap, especially if you've trademarked your name, so go ahead and use your name. This will also help you display results in both paid and organic rankings for the same search, increasing customer confidence.
• Focus on top converting keywords - This is a bit of an obvious one, but if you lack budget, make sure you bid on keywords that have converted for you in the past (conversions being sales, sign ups or whatever other metric you use for performance).
• Look at visitors click path if available - I know this is not really easy to get, but if you can, find out which keywords your users have searched during their research. The keyword they converted from may not be the one they searched for the initial phase of their product research. Visitors may initially use a very generic keyword and as they learn about what they really want, they will tend to use more specific, long tail keywords. Knowing the click path will help you bid for these all important initial search terms.
• Optimise your landing pages - Again this should be standard practice, but make sure your campaigns are as optimised as possible, from keywords, to creatives to landing pages. The more relevant the search keyword is to your creative and your landing page, the higher your quality score will be. This in turn will have an impact on your ads rankings.
• Look at your competitors - look at what your competitors are bidding on and if need be, bid on their brand terms. Remember that you cannot use your competitors' brand in your creatives if they are trademarked, but nothing stops you from displaying a creative by bidding on their search terms.
• Use common sense - as in everything SEO related, use common sense when managing your paid campaigns, and as the market recovers, so will your budgets.

Enjoy your Sunday

Link building - revisited

Today's post is going to be about something I talked about before, link building.
After talking to a digital marketing agency in the past few weeks, I realised that while the basic principles of link building still apply, it was worth revisiting some of the elements that form a link building strategy.

Page rank still matters
Despite talks about Google dropping the page rank from its toolbar, regular updates are still being pushed, and it remains a very good tool to assess the quality of a website. So if you want to increase your link popularity, make sure you target sites with a high page rank and authority as it will definitely have an impact.
An analysis of the competitors of the PayPoint.net Online Payments website clearly displayed some very highly ranked sites, even though they were not necessarily relevant to the industry in question. So when looking at links, try getting some from top websites such as google, facebook, the bbc... This is obviously easier said than done, but it is well worth the effort. Most the these sites with high page rank will have blogs and forums where you can post and potentially add a link to your own site, so try it.

Website relevance
It is of course very important to target wesbites which are relevant to your business or somehow related to what you do, but it appears that Google's policy on relevance is somehow flawed as authority will sometimes play a more important role than relevance itself. Of course you should always aim to get links from a respected and relevant website, but sometimes PageRank alone can bring better results.

Anchor text
This rule hasn't changed recently, but I thought it was worth a quick reminder. When building links on websites, make sure to use anchor text rather that just your company name, logo or the traditional "click here". Choose the keywords you want to rank for and use them in the text of your links, and for even better results, link these keywords to specific pages of your site updated for them.

Where to get links from

• Your customers / partners
• Online directories
• Blogs / Forums
• Social media sites
• Articles submissions websites
• Link baiting (write link worthy articles and publish them on your website)
• Press releases
• Link exchange / reciprocal linking

This list is probably not exhaustive but it should form the basis of your link building strategy.

So for the best results, target websites relevant to your activity, with a high page rank and that will accept to put links containing your own keywords. As Aleksandr himself would put it, Simples! Enjoy your sunday.