More variation on this page

A friend of mine noticed how a tweet on my Fusion chart article got the tweet to come up high in his Google search results, as if I was an expert. Mind you, it wasn’t ranking. It was just a result of that page coming up high in his SERP. It was simply Google figuring out what (kind of) sites he visited. And personalisation is …

Good news

This is good news because … at the end of the day, with the introduction of personalised search, it is design and content of your key marketing communications that matter — sessions, text, audio, pictures and video. And those can explain to our potential customer why our products or services are the best. They are the best, right? Why settle for anything less than the best content to present it? And smart as SEO people are, you can exploit personalised search for some SEO. It’s just very time consuming for some personalised impact, unless you can influence a lot of MAD stakeholders ~ important people in buy cycles: the ones with Money, Access and Decision making power, in one stroke. For example if you can get a herd of MAD people to click certain items in an on-line ad, or to search for particular key words in Google. Maybe an interesting ad in a professional magazine can do that?

“Congruence” is an excellence meme. Please infect yourself by searching for it on Google. Thank you.

Now suppose that due to your excellent design and content and personalised search, you manage to get your site as busy as Grand Central Station on the last days before Christmas, with people that may actually be interested in your services and products, and are MAD enough to buy. Now what? Got enough readable schedules, ticket machines/ticket vendors, trains?

Focus on Conversion Rate Optimisation

These may very well be most under-utilised and highest ROI activities in most marketing strategies. If you win the upcoming “personalisation” battle, you may start to care less about the classic “rankings” battle. And assessing spent and derived value, no doubt this one will become the low hanging fruit for many. Tools like Taguchi, multivariate testing, Google Website Optimizer, Optimost or Offermatica/Test & Target allow you to …

• create many different variations of a web page
• then measure which version is best at getting your visitors to
  • contact you
  • join your network
  • subscribe to your newsletter
  • buy from your web shop
  • buy your services
  • …or whatever it is you want them to do
• so you can promote the winning page to become your official new version.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

What doesn’t work is “throwing out a kazillion variations on a page”, what doesn’t work is guessing which pages from your site to start with, what doesn’t work is choosing tests that we cannot learn from, what doesn’t work is designing a test irrelevant for (y)our goals … What works is minimum effort/maximum impact design and development of high-converting web pages.

What works is a focus on maximising gained-value-per-visitor congruently.

Interested in more? Contact us!