Online Lead Generation – Now, you may not consider 123 Online Submissions for a complimentary lawncare evaluation and quotation an awful lot. However, when you consider the lawn care market size on Google.ie (Google have a 90% market share in Ireland), ‘Lawncare’ is searched 90 a month on Google Search, ‘Lawn Care Ireland’, 30 searches, ‘Lawn Care Companies’, 10 searches. On average, 130 Google searches for Lawn Care services in Ireland.
So, Greenfeet Lawn Care are achieving 36% of the potential Google Search Leads, not bad at all when you consider the Greenfeet team have a close rate after quotation of about 90%……..
Greenfeet do other marketing activities such as trade shows, email marketing and they do spend about 5 euro per day on Google Adwords. But as we all know, close rates for organic search position is far higher than paid search.
Digital Strategy can be as simple as taking small patient sequential steps! Sounds simple, right??!! Well, these are the steps we undertook for www.Greenfeet.ie and things we should address in the future.
Firstly, we undertook an extensive keyword analyses, to establish exactly what people were searching relating to lawncare in Ireland on Google (Google have a significant market share in Ireland, see this link for ‘search engine market share’ information).
Once the keyword research was undertaken, we assigned the website primary links (the future website architecture), keywords. As in the About Us page was earmarked for the keyword: Lawn Care, two words. The reason for assigning this keyword to the About Us page was due to the fact that when we consider the text within the page, the text/language would flow easily (more on this subject later).
The Lawn Services link we assigned the keyword Lawn Services which was a perfect match. Some pages you should not assign a keyword to, should as the Privacy Policy, Sitemap or Contact Us pages. Naturally inserting an assigned keyword into these types of pages can be difficult, and you will find ranking for these pages without keyword density will be difficult (depending on the local competition for that search string).
The initial Greenfeet.ie website as you can see below was very ‘dated’ looking and had a cheap ‘special offer’ feel about it. There was a strong call to action above the fold, however, there was too much scrolling down on the homepage. The social proofing reference from Niall Quinn was also below the fold, the company Shop, Cart and My Account took up three links on the top menu for no reason at all.
When designing a website, it’s important to consider how users interact with a website, where do people usually position their eyes and then click their mouse or pads? You must consider the F-Heatmap when positioning key messages, thus it’s important to get the key message above the fold. Also, it’s worth noting, on many websites the second most trafficked page is the About Us page. People want to vet who you really are before they place an order on your website, so, you must have a strong About Us page and/or preferably try and incorporate influence and trust on the homepage. This may also reduce your bounce rate, which will assist with SEO factoring and should increase sales and leads.
Anybody can throw up a website now with the help of WordPress, Wix and others. Most of these off the shelf websites are standard, dull and boring designs. The user usually has to scroll down the page an awful lot and manipulating the template design is difficult. Avoid off the shelf websites and design a website that makes you stand out, is truly customisable to your business (this is where the design team must understand your business and your goals) and allows you to incorporate influence, trust, lead generation and ultimately sales. We will discuss this issue in greater depth within another blog post and we haven’t even touched on Malware and the potential security risks associated with off the shelf websites……
By default, the site should be mobile friendly and coded in HTML5 – two very important and future relevant SEO factors.
You’ve probably seem famous actors or sports stars promoting brands, such as George Clooney and Coffee!! Well, it’s a form of social proofing and authority (Psychologist Robert Cialdini, his work is well worth a read), websites use methods like references, videos and photos from celebrities. They might include an image of established media agencies where their work has been mentioned, awards, or a list of blue chip or government corporate logos on the homepage (that are customers in some shape or another!). You’ve probably seem a few examples over the years!
Use ‘Before & After Photos’ of any work, give your prospects a vision and build more credibility. Get customer testimonials from your clients (make sure you include and upload their location in the reference, great for localised SEO and ask them to review you on Google Plus (especially Google Plus) and other social media outlets).]
Tip: You can attach your review stats on your Google AdWords campaigns……taking more space on the screen and again building more confidence.
Once you have a strong idea of the design and influence factors above, sketch out a rough homepage for your website.
If you are redesigning an old website then you must reword every page based on the search string you have assigned to each page. You have to tell Google that ‘I want you to rank this page for this search string’, Google your customers will want to see this content…..Remember Google have customers and if they don’t serve their customers with the information they need, their customer may start using an alternative search engine.
Each page should be no less than three hundred words and the keyword frequency should be between 3 and 7%. We have a handy Keyword Density Checker here, including tips and shortly we will have a blog post live regarding ‘On Page SEO’, how a page should look and code for the search engines.
We have discussed three strong tips for your site, that don’t involve code or programming, you must get the basics right from the off before you start to get involved with coding your site. The fundamentals must be right and apologies for repeating this point!
Follow the above and you will have made an excellent start…….
These are the fundamentals that we applied to Greenfeet.ie and they are receiving almost 125 completed sales forms over two months. Keep an eye on our Digital Sales blog or sign up to our email newsletter and we will shortly expand on the other initiatives we took in order to deliver real growth and lead generation for www.greenfeet.ie
If you are a company that wants to build or generate online sales……do the necessary……contact the Digital Sales team direct send us a mail at: info@digitalsales.ie, see our contact us page for our office locations.
Please feel free to add to the conversation below, challenge what the team at Digital Sales are saying……we welcome it and any tips that can add to our own knowledge base. See the comments field below.
Diarmuid Haughian – Business Development Director – Digital Sales
Dip. International Selling, Cert. Digital Marketing, MSc. BITS, MA Career Guidance
