Continuing from the first radio segment with Small Business Samaritans radio program, Nathan focuses on topics such as conversion, keyword research, and why they are so important.

Topics

• 3 Most Important Things for a Website (Review)
• Conversion
• SEO Keyword Research

Listen to the segment starting at 0:40:

Transcript

Phillip: Today we have in the studio with us, Nathan Taitt, who is owner of Blueprint. Nathan is a web developer, an expert in helping small businesses get their information out on the web. Not just get there, but also make their websites work for them. Hi, Nathan.

Nathan: Hey, good morning, Phillip. How are you doing?

Phillip: Welcome again to Small Business Samaritans star program. Nathan in our last disscussion we talked about the three key things that a website ought to do. Could you review that with our audience again?

Nathan: Yes, absolutely. There are three, I would say probably the most important things for a website. Number one is that it needs to be beautiful. I think a lot of people understand that, but the importance of beauty is that you really build immediate trust with a visitor, so that they can then do number two, and that is a website that is built to convert. I think that this is one of the most overlooked items. A lot of times people think that if a site is beautiful it will convert, but that really is not the case, and so I think a focus on conversion is very important, and then number three is once you get a beautiful website that converts you got to figure out how to drive traffic. Beauty, conversion, and traffic are kind of the three pillars of what I would call a great website.

Phillip: Nathan, could you take a moment and further explain what conversion means?

Nathan: Yeah, absolutely, so again, when people build a website typically they are thinking about how beautiful is it? Are people going to be impressed? Is this basically a fancy business card, but what really needs to be thought about is: What do I want the visitors to do? What is my exact, precise point of conversion? Do I want people to call my office? Do I want people to buy a product? Do I want them to buy a product and then add on another product? And so really defining what that sales cycle is, that kind of buying funnel, and then letting the design really serve the process of conversion. Understanding conversion is just knowing exactly what you want your website to do and then making sure that it is designed and coded to do just that.

Phillip: Nathan, tell us something about they keyword concept?

Nathan: We are an SEO company, so we get that question all the time. Can you get my site to rank on the first page of google? And it kind of makes us laugh a little bit, because it depends on for what keyword.

One of my favorite examples of difficult keyword research is if you were doing SEO for the Hilton Hotel in Paris, France. It’s one of my favorite analogies and it’s really great, because you know you would think they would want to rank for a word like the “Paris Hilton”, but of course, that is a famous internationally known celebrity, Paris Hilton, and so that is a great example of where you need to step back, look back at your keyword, and then think about the searcher.

A lot of people come to us and say this is the word I want to rank on the first page on google, but what we know with some analytics is that keyword doesn’t have any search volume, nobody’s looking for that, or perhaps just the opposite there’s millions of people looking for it, and you won’t get any conversion.

Just last month, we had somebody call us and say they want to rank number one for the keyword “dogs”, which is wikipedia is going to rank number one for dogs. What they really wanted to rank for was “dog training services in Atlanta”, so understanding what keywords are going to convert is so important.

That really just takes whether it’s a company with experts, or you just sitting down with a business partner and saying, “Okay, what keywords do you want to target on each page? And then, kind of play devil’s advocate. You know, “What are people thinking when they search for that?” Because a lot of times, we have our own favorite keywords, and it may be that those actually don’t convert that those are not the right decision, so just being strategic.

Spend a lot of time in your keyword planning, play the devil’s advocate, what might be someone searching that is not your service when they look for those. So I think keyword analysis and implementation is very, very important.

Phillip: We’ve been talking to Nathan Taitt, owner of Blueprint. Nathan could you give us your phone number?

Nathan: Yeah, it is (770) 990-2888.

Phillip: Well, check back with us next week, because we’re going to continue this conversation and really talk about the importance of conversion and websites.

By: Kara