One of the biggest battles in the search for business is getting your website found on the internet – Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay per Click (PPC). You may be thinking that this is another article about SEO and if you were you will be forgiven for thinking this, but it’s not at all…

SEO is a vital part of your online business, but it is not where it ends! Let me explain further…

People only buy when they:

1. Know your company;
2. Like what they see, and;
3. Trust you or your company.

So once you have spent your money attracting people to your website, you now need to direct your attention to converting those prospects into paying customers by working on the above list, so how do you do this?

One way to get them to know your company or the products you sell is to offer free or very low cost options, so they can either try before they buy or not have to spend too much to find out if your service works. With thousands of scams and get rich quick schemes out there, people are quite rightly very cautious when buying from an unknown website on the Internet, so you need to help them break down that brick wall that stands between them and you or at least begin to remove some of those bricks from that wall.

It takes multiples of marketing cash to convert a prospect into a customer compared to the amount it takes to convert an existing customer into a returning customer. This is why it is important to get your visitors to experience your products so they not only get to know the products, but also how your business operates. Doing it this way will make the purchase decisions much easier and any initial objections they may have had will begin to disappear – brick by brick!

It will be a stage by stage process from your free or cheaper products through to your more expensive products. Obviously, not all customers can afford the more expensive items and possible will not even need or want them, but where they do it is important for them to know and trust you before they purchase.

If you imagine a funnel and you are feeding prospective customers into the top along with your spend on SEO and PPC etc, with the hope that you get trusting and satisfied customers out at the bottom along with the cash they spend on your products and services. You will need to attract a huge number of potential customers in at the top end, to gradually develop their trust in you and your products and services so that they end up coming out at the bottom of the funnel spending cash with you.

When you have enough happy customers ask for testimonials, as these are extremely powerful in helping to convert other potential customer into a paying customer!

Other free offerings in addition to your existing products include: Ezines; E-books, Webinars and special reports, with the idea being to entice your prospects along with giving them confidence in what you do. You could also try to produce an audio or video for your customers to watch online or to download for free so they can see that you are an ‘actual person’ or that actual people exist in your business.

Videos are a great way to introduce you and to explain your products or services to prospective customers. These videos also provide an opportunity for you to demonstrate your expertise in your field. Also, don’t forget that for a prospects to receive your free products or services, they will have to provide you with their contact details, name and email address for example, so that you can contact them again and again – but don’t pester people unnecessarily!

It is important to recognise that people are different and as a result people will have different preferences as to how they would prefer to receive information. This preference might be to have a free version of your product to download or for them to read a free report. Other prospects might prefer to listen to the same material as an audio track or to watch a video presentation, all of which should be downloadable so that they can listen or watch them in their own time.

Once your prospects have experienced your expertise and have sampled your products and start to know, like, and trust you, they are more likely to open their wallets and spend more money on your services and products.

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I have learnt that getting a high PR rank on Google is not the be all and end all for SEO and web traffic.

I used to think that chasing a higher Google PR rank was what it was all about and that this in itself would lead to more visitors and therefore more online sales… but I have found that this is certainly not the case.

I have recently started to learn more and more that if you have a quality website with quality pages and good content, which have been optimised for the right search term, then these will rank highly on the search pages, including Google, even if Google has ranked your page with a PR as low as zero!

Also, I have recently come across websites that have a high Google PR rank and yet they have a low Alexa rank (for those that don’t know Alexa, they count traffic to your website and rank your website according to traffic volume, with the aim being to get as low a “Alexa Number” as possible and preferably in the 100,000 and below range), meaning that you are receiving a high volume of search engine traffic. I recently saw a website with a Google PR5 and an Alexa rank of over 5 million, which just goes to show that PR does not equate to traffic, which in turn does not translate into customers and ultimately cash.

To achieve high traffic volumes you need to get links to your site from other “High traffic volume sites” and get good rankings on “Good” search terms for your products and services. One way to get higher rankings on the search engines for your chosen search terms is to optimise your web pages using Internet Business Promoter (IBP).