Search Engine Optimization

This is a series that will consist of 6 parts and about 10-15 posts on how to build a website that sells.

A successful site is a site that brings a nice return to the bank. There are several components that make it bank worthy. Components can work separately and get site owners results, but when combined, they produce search visible, persuasive magic.

Best guys at this are FutureNow, authors of Persuasive Online Copywriting, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark and the inventors of the Persuasion Architecture. We’re the fans, so a lot of stuff will come from them in our next posts. Highly encourage you to subscribe to GrokDomCom blog, and to get their books.

Persuasion Architecture is what it is – an architecture. It’s complex, blueprint-like approach to websites, where every click possibility is measured before a line of code written and a single letter typed into a word processor. It requires time, research, resources and collaboration of people from different disciplines. Guys at FutureNow charge from $3000 for landing page optimization and from $70.000 for full architecture design and rigorous testing.

The GrokDotCom guys, in their book, talk about persuasion architecture applied to all marketing channels, including internet. Here, we want to describe the process in simpler terms, applied to websites exclusively.

You will need, above all – time and SEO. Time to learn and then implement(or manage) conversion optimization and SEO to get the traffic. If you don’t have SEO, you’ll need more time to learn it or a good SEO company. If you don’t have time, nor resources, well… good stuff isn’t free..

To make persuasion architecture easier, we decided to break it into more digestible chunks and call it conversion optimization. Not very unique, but no trademark infringement either. We’ll also list resources where you can get more, in-depth information and eventually learn all the pieces.

As a disclaimer: we’re not pros at this stuff, nor have ever executed the whole thing. This is rather a theoretic post to share(which is good anyway) information and organize everything in our heads. Writing can organize your own thoughts.

The Essential Pieces

Pieces may work separately, but a combination is destined to deliver results.

• Search Engine Marketing. Who you going to convert? SEM gets you the traffic(unless you manage to build a strong brand, but majority don’t, so we won’t touch it here)
• Research. Research into your field(if you’re fairly new), your customers, competition, social and more. Designed to arm you with knowledge and info.
• Planning. Planning of all the pieces that will be featured on a website, such as copy, content and tools.
• Copywriting. A good copy can sell more than an army of outbound telemarketers.
• Design/Usability. Design without usability in mind – is a bad design.
• Measurement/Testing. Is it working the way you want? If not what’s the problem? If yes, what can be better? Find out with testing.

Structured in the way we’re comfortable with. Depending on your approach, you can swap some of the phrases. For example, if you’re making a new site, it’s wise to apply research, planning and copywriting before SEM, but if you already have a site, why not SEO it first? Once the trust factor is there, its easier to implement changes, since Google trusts the site.

The whole process takes a lot of time. Depending on the number of people working on the project it may take from 1 month to 4 months.

Before we get started, we recommend reading these books:

• Waiting for Your Cat To Bark. Costs $10 bucks.
• Make Your Site Sell. A bit old, but a lot of essentials still hold their ground. Free.

It is also helpful to understand search, know a bit about copywriting, have some research skills and know a bit HTML and CSS(or know how to use Dreamweaver). All can be picked up on the way, as we’ll give appropriate resources in each section.

In the next post we discuss Search Engine Marketing…

We’ll be going back and linking new posts, to this original post / making some changes.