There can only be two real reasons to owning a website, selling or sharing. Obviously this is quite a bold statement to make, but hear me out. Information banks like Wikipedia, social media sites, music sites like GrooveShark and even some personal websites all share their knowledge or services to other sites, many in the hope that users will pass this knowledge on and thus drive visits to said site.

On the other end of the spectrum we have shopping sites, such Ebay or Play.com, and professional sites that offer a premium paid service or product. Both these types of sites survive and indeed thrive on people visiting and interacting with their content. With this in mind, it should be clear that doing all you can to maximise conversions through your website is a very important tactic to carry out. This is essentially the bottom line of conversion rate optimisation (CRO); testing various designs and features on individual pages to discover the ideal structure for optimised conversions.

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Mobile marketing was all the rage last year, with the launch of both the Samsung galaxy S3 and the iPhone 5, and the sudden affordability of quality smartphones, it could be said that 2012 belonged to mobile. But it doesn’t end there; marketers are still constantly finding new ways to utilise mobiles as a media platform. We now have are very own portable marketing media source stored in our pockets (or handbags).

But just as it always is in the tech market, as soon as you begin to even slightly understand one thing, a new innovation comes storming out the gates; and although tablets aren’t necessarily particularly new, they have been quietly increasing in popularity. Gone are the days where tablets were a futuristic novelty that you could show off to friends, as the Christmas sales figures are in, and the adoption rate of tablets across the world has soared.

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Landing pages are an incredibly important part of your marketing strategy; they can help funnel sales through offering your visitors a taste of your business. Your landing page is the first thing people will see when they click through from your marketing campaigns, and thus it should be set up to inform your visitors exactly what it is you do and promote yourself or your product successfully. These pages are just as important as your site itself, so you should spend as much time building the best quality page as you do your main website. The whole point of having a landing page is to increase visitor conversion, whether it be through signing up to your mailing list or registering interest in a product or service, your page is there to entice people in; so putting focus and effort into making it look good and easy to read is vital.

There as many motives behind having a landing page as there are landing page designs; whichever style you choose though the page should meet its objectives fully. It should communicate your companies brand values positively, whilst also working towards establishing successful communication channels and generating leads from your visitors by having them enter their details. If your landing page is not working for you, and you’re not seeing the results you expected, there are several steps you can take to ensure that your page is optimised to get the best results.

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Slow loading websites are the bane of web users worldwide. People are looking for quick, accessible information, hopping from site to site whether they’re browsing out and about or in the comfort of their home. People no longer have the time or the patience for slow loading sites. We’re long past the days when everyone had dial-up, so why do some sites make your super-fast broadband appear as sluggish as its old-school alternative?

There are as many factors that can make a site run slow as there are elements to the site itself. From bad code to big pictures, there is a lot to consider if you want to keep your site running quickly and smoothly. Finding and fixing the problems can be a lengthy process; indeed it can almost seem like more hassle than it’s worth, but trust me it’s definitely worth it if you want to retain visitors. Luckily for site owners everywhere, there are plenty of tools online to help us keep our sites swift and our visitors happy.

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If you’ve put a lot of time and effort into building a beautiful website, then the last thing you want is for it to appear differently on every browser. There are all kinds of browsers out there and every single one has its own unique characteristics. From the more open Opera to the classic Internet Explorer, a browser can be as personal as the computer itself. Your site should be optimised and ready to present itself properly for whichever browser people are using.

If you’re building a site that’s browser specific, stop it. You can’t rely on all the other browsers to interpret your site properly if you’ve just built the site with one browser in mind. If your site doesn’t look right, or doesn’t work properly when opened within a certain browser then users may get put off. Remember that you are building a site for everyone to view and not just for you personally. Whatever your browser preference, make sure you check it on others as well.

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When we talk about Digital Marketing, ‘user experience’ and ‘SEO’ are two words that aren’t commonly used together in the same sentence. However, there is reason to believe that this has been the missed trick all along, especially now given Google’s most recent algorithm updates.

The art of SEO has always been to drive traffic to a website. When it comes to converting that traffic into sales, well that’s always been for copywriting and conversion rate optimisation (CRO) to worry about. However, times are beginning to change, and the user should be at the heart of any SEO decision you make.

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SEO can be a long process and in most cases you won’t see a dramatic increase in traffic and conversions overnight. You need to be patient when building your rankings and implementing the correct SEO techniques. However, what if you are bringing in traffic, but failing to convert this into sales? If this is the case, you should look at one key area – your landing pages.

When it comes to SEO, all of your pages, or at least the ones you’re looking to optimise are landing pages. SEO drives traffic to your site but if your landing pages are not optimised, it becomes harder to get your users or customers to convert, whether that’s to get someone to complete an application form, a contact form or better yet, to buy your products and services.

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Search engine marketing isn’t just about effective SEO. Sure, this plays a pretty significant role in the grand scheme of things; raising your profile within the search results and driving additional organic traffic to your site. However, all of your efforts will be in vain if you don’t have a fully optimised site to convert all that extra traffic.

For any website, ensuring you know that the traffic landing on your site is best placed to convert will certainly help improve your sales figures, and more importantly the ROI from your SEM campaigns. In light of this, conversion rate optimisation is something that can help your website turn that traffic into conversions, leads, and ultimately sales. Here are some top tips for conversion rate optimisation:
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