My first day of work- The entrance into Fresh Egg is in the center of the office, so when you walk in you are the center of attention. Since I was changing rooms from the night before I had my backpack with all my clothes on my back, everyone looked at me kind of weird and then went right back to work. Tonight I am going to be staying on the northern end of Worthing in a Bed & Breakfast (B&B). It’s a nice little place, and I’ll have a great English breakfast every morning.
Adam Stafford (Managing Director) and Ammon Johns (Senior SEO Strategist) are both out of the office until Wed. So today I started working with Lee Colbran (SEO Director). We spent the first 1-2 hours going over things that I was comfortable with in SEO, this gave Lee a better idea of what level I am on. After that we began to look at a clients website: www.DressnImpress.com. Lee started to point out a few different things in the site that needed to be changed. After applying Lee’s so called Skin (SEO Skin- on page optimization of the site) the site should begin to see an immediate improvement with their sites rankings and conversions. The first thing we discussed about this site was the checkout process of the website. If you look at the image below you’ll see that the owner of the site is really pushing to sale Bench clothing.
The left side of the page has a navigational tool which highlights “bench clothing”. Up to this point the site had this same navigation all the way through to the checkout process. A major fact to point out here is that once the customers are in the checkout process they are not looking for more opportunities to buy. So it is wasted space putting Bench Clothing there. This space is better used by adding a customer charter:
In the checkout process customers need that reassurance of trust from your website; by adding the customer charter you are giving them that comfort. By adding this simple part to your checkout process Fresh Egg has had conversions increase by as much as 30%.
Additional methods of adding immediate benefits to your site:
– Meta Tag (Title & Description): In writing the title tag for your site it is important to write them with 2 things in mind. They need to be optimized for your main keywords in your site, but they also need to have a good enough copy written. When a customer finds your site within the top ten of the SERP’s, the copy that you have written in your title and description will get people to read them and follow the link to your site. It is best to find a happy medium and to not give up one or the other entirely.
– Footer Navigation Links: By adding a footer navigational section to the bottom of your page, you are re-enforcing the keywords of your site, and giving your users another navigation to flow through your site. Here is the example in DressnImpress:
**Tip- The last link in this navigation should be to your site map. When the spiders leave this site, they immediately find your links again. Also it is beneficial to make the last keyword on the page your main keyword. It doesn’t need to be a link, but when the spider reads the page it is the last thing it reads.
By adding the footer navigation it helps out the internal linking strategy of your site. This is a great way to gain internal links throughout your site, if your website has 800 pages, then that is 800 links pointing to where you want them to.
