You may think you have the best looking and funkiest website on the planet but did you realise that the design of your site may actually be preventing you from making sales? It’s been a widely (and wrongly) held belief that a well designed website with lovely graphics will attract more sales on it’s own. Whilst this “may” work for a very tiny number of websites the facts are that fancy design is well down the list when visitors first look at your pages.

Web users know what they want – so don’t make it hard for them!

Web users have evolved. They’re less impressed by fancy design and more concerned with what they want. They’re spoilt for choice and will typically only spend 4-10 seconds evaluating your front page before deciding to stay and read on or puke and go check a competitor. Obviously you want them to stay and buy so we need to find out what’s causing them to leave – cue the heatmap.

What are heatmaps?

Heatmaps are invisible click counters that measure where your visitors click on your web page. Whenever a visitor clicks on your web page the heatmap records where they clicked and stores this for you to view later. If many visitors click on a certain link then the colour of these clicks are displayed as “hotspots” hence the term heat maps.

In online marketing heatmaps are used to obtain vital inofrmation about where visitors are clicking on and equally what they are NOT clicking. From this we can make improvements to the website and subsequently make more sales.

The heatmap image below shows hotspots generated from visitor clicks. These are popular so we need to keep these. The areas where there are little or no clicks are wasting valuable space and should be replaced by other better links.

So why would you deploy a heat map?

Heatmaps can provide you vital information on how visitors are reacting with your website. The click hotspots that are generated tell you that these are areas that visitors are interested in whereas the areas with very few clicks are not. From the heat map you can then adjust your website to move these non performing areas to a lower part of the page and replace them with your important calls to action such as a buy now or register now link.

Keep your best performers in sight

We know from hundreds of heatmaps that up to 95% of all clicks occur in the area before visitors have to scroll – this is called the “fold”. More importantly however – this means that 95% of your visitors will never scroll if what they want is not on the page! So do you really want to hide that buy now button at the foot of your web page?

How a heatmap improved our client’s sales.

Look at the Google analytics snapshot from one of our client’s websites. Their website was already doing quite well but we knew we get some extra sales so we deployed a heatmap to see where they were clicking. After a couple of weeks we noticed very definite hotspots and very definite cold spots. We removed these coldspot links and replaced them with warmer links from other areas of the site. The result was that traffic increased, bounce rate dropped, visitors were staying on pages longer, sales improved and the client was happier*.

* We can provide details of this case study on request if you are interested in conducting a heatmap study for your site. Please contact us for more information.

Image below shows clear performance increases accross the board after changing the layout of the site to increase sales. The red dot signifies the change in design. Note the graphs show increases (good) for time on site, pages per visit and a decrease in bounce rate (also good).

We

SEO Edinburgh - results for Wynn Consulting

The search engine optimisation SEO of Edinburgh company Wynn Consulting are showing marvelous results on Google. We have optimised the site for key phrases relating to Government consulting searches.

Wynn Consulting rank on page 1 position of Google for their major key phrase “public authority consulting”.

The terms were carefully researched, selected then tested against other search phrases. We implemented multivariate testing for several months combined with heat maps to determine the best phrase combinations to attract searches from key “recruiter” personel withing local and government authorities.

From the results of our page testing we have seen the quality of visitor increase. Average site visit times increased markedly indicating the right type of visitor was reading the services. Bounce rates were reduced dramatically and the site is now ranking extremely well for key search phrases. This has seen a marked improvement in quality traffic and enquiries.

From heatmaps and testing we determined the best website optimisation so that users would be drawn to key areas of the site, or focus on press releases.

As part of the SEO we gave user training so that we could hand over the monthly updating to the client to make their own onpage optimisation adjustments inhouse.

SEO Edinburgh , keyword analysis and onpage search engine optimistion.

• Onpage optimisation
• Link building
• Social media marketing
• Google product (froogle) marketing & optimisation

Improvements seen since campaign start:

• NEW TRAFFIC:
  58% increase – excellent improvement
• INCOMING TRAFFIC:
  Search engines – 48% – up by 42% – excellent increase
  Direct traffic – 45% – aiming to reduce this to around 10%
  Referring traffic – 6.5% – up by 6.5%
  [Previously 96% of visits came from direct traffic which was very poor. ]
• BOUNCE RATE:
  10.04% down from 18.9%
  Bounce rate is the number of visitors who leave your site after arriving on any landing page.
  A lower bounce rate percentage is better.
• AVERAGE TIME ON SITE PAGES:
  5mins 31 secs
  This is excellent improvement and correlates with low bounce rates. Page view times are encouraging on the product pages implying that visitors are reading product information.

As can be seen from the Google Analytics screen capture there is a definite trend increase in traffic sine we took over the optimisation. Page views and vists are following similar trends indicating that visitors are finding the site sticky. The Pie chart was previously all green which was very bad meaning all traffic was direct. This has shown a marked swing in favour of search engine traffic filtering through the organic results.

Rather than write about projects after they have been completed we have deceided to write about this one as it happens so that you can see the progess of a website having no search engine presence to (hopefully) being ranked at the top of the search engines.

The Silver Experience offer affordable, stylish and collectable handcrafted pieces through a distribution channel as well as online. Unfortunately they do not rank at all on the search engines and with Chritsmas approaching it is a time when sales account for a huge proportion of their turnover.

When we were approached by the company the mandate was to get their ecommerce website listed on the search engines as quickly as possible in order to capitalise on the christmas market – the most luctrative time of year for online jewellery sales.

We produced a plan that involves the onpage SEO, the website optimisation to improve click through to conversion and also a social media marketing campaign. Added to this we have created a blog that the company will use to provide interesting articles on company news, jewellery making, fair trade issues whilst providing good links and a place for their customers to comment on their pieces.

Watch this space!

We were asked to develop an animated CD-ROM that would be easily understood by young children and parents alike. The development of the application took over 9 months of research involving working together with various educational authorities, children and parents to gain a firmer understanding of how the information should be conveyed to such an impressionable audience. The result is a CD-ROM which is now used as the benchmark in computer based education throughout many Schools in Scotland and a number of Police Forces throughout the UK.

The CD consists of two movies – one designed for parents to learn about how to best discuss with their children, the issues of drug taking. The other – designed for children, describes the facts about drugs, what they do and how they affect you. This section retains the look and feel that it was produced by children for children.

This is perhaps our finest non web-based work and to date we still receive comments on how children are “spellbound” by the animation yet engrossed by the wealth of information.

The CD gives information on a large variety of drugs such as Heroin, Cocaine, Ecstasy, Amphetamines etc. It also gives valuable advice on CPR in the event of an emergency and where to go for confidential help.

To say this was a huge task would be an understatement – the client had resorts covering the whole European ski area and a large number of North American resorts.

On inspection of their existing site, it was clear that they had no means of updating holidays or accommodation details, therefore we had to treat the project as a complete new build.

We developed a backend content management system so that the clients could start updating availability charts and adjusting dates and prices shown on the site.

Our content management system allowed the Skiactivity staff to update special offers, availability and accommodation specifications using a backend browser based administration system.

The 2001/2002 season saw a major change in the site’s progress with the number of visitors to the site going from a few thousand to over 16,000 unique visitors within a few weeks.

The site took around eight weeks to build incorporating 240 properties with holiday combinations approaching several thousand.

Breeze Media delivered a solution which prevented a loss in online bookings.

Outside matchdays they have first class conference, meetings, trade show and venue hire facilities. McDiarmid Park is also home to some major outdoor events and amongst many they host such events as the annual convention of Jehovahs Witnesses and some major rugby tournaments.

We were asked following the success of the club’s website to design a classy presentation that would reflect the quality of the facilities on offer but also to deliver a strong selling message.

We designed an interactive presentation, a self running projector and an interactive cd-business card all using a similar theme. The self running projector was on display at the annual chambers of commerce exhibition in Perth where the feedback was excellent.

If you would like us to quote on a similar presentation for your company then please contact us.

We built this site to develop a complex content management system with a view to using the structure for commercial applications.

The competition is open to anyone who has website providing it is well designed and free from offensive content.

We did both the web design and produced the content management system for the site for the Edinburgh office.

The system enables Deloitte & Touche clients to contribute information on a range of projects. The data can then be analysed by Deloitte & Touche consultants and used to provide concise report data for client reports.

The survey system is operated on an invitation only basis where employees, directors or principals of the project company can input their views. The system can be used in an anonymous or registered user environment.

Recently, the website was available at the Edinburgh Royal Highland show where visitors to the show were asked to partake in the survey and give views on a range of topics..

Our brief was straight to the point – build an interactive presentation that would “blow them away”…and we did. It was described by a number of the attendees as being the best they’d ever seen!

The presentation itself was developed in both Director and Flash and incorporated many high end features such as high impact 3D imagery, vector based animations, voiceovers, timed audio visuals and fast paced “lead-in” intros.

Each guest speaker was introduced with his/her animation and sound track, timed to allow them time to walk onto the stage..

Above all the presentation was fully interactive and controlled by the main speaker.

Mission accomplished!