Search Marketing Sage

For those of you who follow my blog posts, LinkedIn, or Facebook, you may notice I’ve been a bit on a reading kick lately — more than usual. I’m focusing mostly on books that can help us improve post-click marketing — to help our clients realize increased ROI from their search efforts.

I just finished the book Call to Action by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, founders of FutureNow and authors of the GrokDotCom blog.

The book is definitely a must-read for website owners who are new to PPC and SEO, or even just website design in general, and helpful when redesigning a website. However, most seasoned online marketers should be familiar with most of the approaches in the book. For instance, the Eisenbergs reference the process a redesign should take as well as tools for analysis. I’m also not sure I put too much trust in the idea of “personas” on your website as much as I do specific keyword messaging. I also wish they had more graphics of examples of what works and what does not.

Although I think that the premise of the book holds true, and it’s one that many website owners are only now beginning to realize more than ever before: “My website needs to be a conversion tool.” I particularly enjoyed the Eisenbergs’ quote in the book:

“Trying to increase sales simply by driving more traffic to a web site with poor customer conversion rate is like trying to keep a leaky bucket (your sales funnel, your web site) full by adding more water instead of plugging the holes. Instead, you need to work on keeping more of your visitors from leaking out of your process on the way to the close of the sale.”

That’s why we’ve decided to begin more focus on post-click marketing to complement our search engine marketing offerings. I’ve found over the years as a search marketer that clients often think that they need more traffic — that will solve the problem! So they turn to search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising to drive that traffic. But without the proper support post-click, more traffic may not equate to more leads or sales, which is truly the goal of most clients. Through landing pages and improved website conversion and using multivariate testing, conversion can be improved from not only search marketing efforts but all forms of advertising.

Next book up: Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine and Conversion Rate Secrets by Andrew King.