Get More Clients Using Google Analytics: "Bridging the Gap"

I spent some time yesterday with a client helping her improve the conversions on her training/coaching website using google analytics. You can use the same process for yourself.

We’ve done some SEO work on the site and it’s now showing up in the top 3 on google UK for her target keyphrases. The sites above hers in the rankings are all government or education sites and difficult to dislodge – so the main gains for her will either be to get ranked for more keyphrases, or – as we worked on yesterday – to convert more visitors to clients.

Our first step was to look at the existing traffic to see what was generating the most hits on the site.

Almost all her traffic comes from search engines, and looking at the keywords we identified the top keywords driving visitor numbers. There were two basic keyphrases with a couple of variants of each. She’s in the number 1 position in google UK for both keywords thanks to the SEO work we did.

Both the keywords are “commercial” phrases – they’re the sorts of keywords people would use if they were looking for solutions or help in those areas (many of the other keywords she gets traffic for aren’t – they’re often from students doing research in those areas). And she has pre-developed training courses in those areas which could be of interest to visitors.

Here’s the problem though: when we listed the landing pages that visitors were coming to from those searches, for both keywords they were articles on the topics. That’s great – and it’s likely to happen if, like she is, you use articles and blog posts as a traffic magnet.

However, even though she had training courses available for the topics the articles related to – she didn’t have any pages on her sites describing those training courses. Nor did the articles mention her training courses or contain any links to her training course pages.

So quite naturally, the vast majority of visitors to those pages read them (the average time on site was high). Some even looked at the available training courses. But none of them contacted her to ask about training.

The improvements we made were simple:

1. Create seperate pages describing the training courses related to the topics generating the traffic (and in particular, the benefits of the courses and what participants would get from them)

2. Create a call to action in the articles to click through to read details of the courses.

Simple stuff. But it can have a huge impact on conversions.

And it’s all driven by analytics. You need to “bridge the gap” between what they come searching for and your services. You can’t rely on them scouring your website to find the relevant services – you must make sure that there are easy and prominent links from the places where they arrive (using analytics to find these) and the place where you want them to be.

Tags: conversions, google analytics