‘Wine and Dine’ Your Prospects to Convert Them

A recent article on conversions compared the process to trying to establish a relationship with someone. This metaphor is a clever way to look at converting potential clients, with the main point being that conversation should be the driving force throughout the process. There is no one point of conversion; instead, nurture your leads in multiple ways on their journey to becoming loyal customers.

Start With a Corny Pick-up Line

When trying to get someone’s attention in a bar, people often resort to using pick-up lines. They need to distinguish themselves somehow from the others and, while often cheesy, these lines usually get attention. The conversion equivalent, then, is crafting a creative, compelling headline that will make your site stand out from amongst the crowd on the SERPs. Try writing something that is a pun or a play on words—sure, it might make someone groan, but it WILL make them more apt to click on it!

Dazzle Them With Your Witty Conversational Skills

In the bar, once the woman falls for the man’s line, he now has to back it up by engaging in a riveting conversation that will keep the lady’s attention. At this point, body language comes into play, so there are a lot of things going on. What this means for conversions is that once you’ve lured someone onto your site with an irresistible headline, you have to keep the conversation going by delivering them the information you promised in the SERPs. Don’t just rely on text alone; much like body language enhances conversations, inserting appropriate images will make your text pack a punch. Just make sure that your content and images pertain to your initial headline and don’t go in a different direction than you indicated. Just like no lady likes to be led astray by a lounge lizard, don’t make your prospects feel duped by a bait and switch!

Don’t Beat Around the Bush

Once the bar guy gets to talk to the girl and things are going well, what should he do? If she seems interested, he should at some point directly ask her for her phone number and maybe a dinner out. If he doesn’t clearly make his intentions known, there could be a miscommunication and a missed opportunity for a real love connection. Similarly, once you have gotten a prospect to your page and you have offered them compelling, relevant content, it’s time to seal the deal by making it crystal clear what the next step is. Make sure your call to action, whether it is to buy a product or sign up for a newsletter, very apparent so there can be no doubt in the prospect’s mind what comes next. Keep the conversation going by providing step-by-step guidance so they don’t get confused and abandon your site.

Yes, the metaphor is kind of silly, but contains many useful parallels to how you should go about winning over leads--don’t rush the process and always be available and helpful. Your prospects will discover that they just can’t live without you!

For more ideas on how to gain conversions, check out FindYourSearch.com’s article over at Posterous.

SEO and Usability — What’s More Important?

We’ve all heard the old question, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” When it comes to creating a successful website, it’s easy to get bogged down by a similar issue; specifically, is it more important to create an amazing-looking website that dazzles visitors and is easy to navigate or is implementing SEO the most valuable use of time? If you want your website to be a success, it’s necessary to find the ideal balance between these two very different elements so your site is findable and engages visitors and converts them to buyers (or, whatever else it is you’re trying to accomplish with your website).

Another old adage comes to mind surrounding the SEO vs. usability debate: “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” In other words, you could have the greatest website in the world, but if no one is able to find it, it may as well not exist. Therefore, it is very important to optimize your site with the use of keywords, links and quality content so it can be easily found when someone performs a search.

While there’s no denying the importance of getting your site to rank at the top of search results, it’s essential to make sure once users find your site, they will want to stay there. Having a well-structured, easy-to-navigate site is crucial in being able to convert visitors into consumers of your brand or product. Now that you have people in the forest to hear the tree fall, so to speak, you have to make sure your website will make them want to stick around.

Even though it can be a delicate balancing act to get SEO and usability to work well together, by following a few tips, you will get started down the right path. For one thing, these two components of your site should be weighed equally from the very beginning of the creation of your website. At the outset, if your SEO and design teams are considered equally important and work well together, you will be saving yourself from a lot of problems down the road. Also, at certain times, SEO will need to take top priority over usability and vice versa, so the ability to recognize this fact and make adjustments as time goes by will be key to your continued success. It takes careful planning to please both your human visitors and search engine spiders and with some experimentation, you will be able to accomplish this goal!