CROSS-LINK IT - For Better Sales and Leads

Cross-Linking Webpages Helps Customer and Search Engine Navigation.
Don't Maroon Your Customers!

Marooned in a Great Unknown Website!

Millions of dollars in potential sales and leads are lost on a daily basis thanks to poor or badly designed website navigation. In B-to-B web sales, this is especially important. Customers will only sacrifice so much time and effort to find a product or service.

Once frustrated, customers attempt to back-browse (back-browsing actions often result from a failure in navigation design) and/or try the internal search engine (fingers crossed). Faced with failure and frustration, the prospective customer then evacuates the website completely and goes to Google or directly to a competitor's website. A sale is lost because the customer couldn't quickly and efficiently find what they were looking for.

Cross-Linking relevant pages help customers find the product or service they want. It will help them find related products and services. It will make their experience easier and more efficient. Cross-Linking works, if used in a logical way.

A usability goal of any website should be "Don't Make Me Think" when customers navigate to find information. Along with top and side level navigation menus, cross linking can help a customer drill down, and drill down fast.

Example of effective and efficient cross-linking:

Cross Linking Helps People and Search Engines Find Your Stuff!

Related product links are listed on related product webpages. To pull related items together into a relevant cluster of webpages, web marketers must know the product lines and their customers. If web teams don't know the market in detail, they better learn. By working with sales teams, technical service staff, and customers web teams can better capture the niche product or service universe as your customer sees it.

Example of poor cross-linking, the Dead End Webpage:

This Dead End Webpage Customer Navigation Experience isn't going to end well!

Don't Maroon your customers. In this case, if a customer wanted a different size, style, or color they will leave your site. No options were given to see related products. What's more frustrating than to land on a webpage and not have useful navigation options to continue searching? Not much. If a landing page doesn't have what the customer wanted and the website offers no related options thanks to poor navigation and poor cross-linking, the chances are very high that visitor will leave your website and try searching again on a competitor's.

So much of successful website navigation is based upon common-sense. The key to success is understanding how your customer looks at your universe of products and services, and design your website to reflect that understanding. Cross-Links are knowledge bridges for customers and search engines, and a vital part of a good navigation system. Cross-Link for success!

A to Z Lists on Websites Really Work

A to Z Lists on Websites Really Work

A-to-Z lists help visitors and search engine bots find what they need in large, complex websites.

Recently I worked on a website development project in Bogotá, Colombia as part of an Americas multinational and multilingual team. We were tasked with training, building and launching multiple company country websites en Español. The Latin America websites project was a great success and worthy of a 'case study' review. I'll share this success in a future blog article, for another day.

But first, I have an important list I want to share with you.... an A-to-Z list.

In Bogotá during some intense training on CMS, content optimization, SEO, visitor usability, and navigation tactics, a eureka moment appeared when we could demonstrate for the new web content-masters the formidable benefits of relevant A-Z lists of linked services and products in a complex website.

It is worth praising, yet again, the virtues of including A-to-Z internal content link lists on your website. A-to-Z list advantages were first brought up in this blog back in 2009, with Back to the Future with Static A-Z Directories.

Like a city map, A-to-Z lists benefit
 visitors as effective road maps
  in large, complex websites.

A-to-Z listings are mini-directories, tables of contents, and indexes. They are also, in effect, mini-site-maps which make finding pages in large websites easier and more logical for humans (customers) and search-engine bots. They do not replace or challenge internal search engines, they complement them.

Make a logical A-to-Z list of webpages focused on similar or identical core markets, products, or service niches, list them A-to-Z (include A-Z subcategories if needed), then link each of them to their source webpage. Add a link to your new A-to-Z page in your appropriate higher-level indexes or navigation menus, as appropriate. Then wait... interesting things, wonderful things, will happen to your website over time.

Do A-Z lists work? From years of pouring over website analytics for multiple long-running websites, data clearly show the advantages of A-Z lists. Here is what I've seen, over and over again:

The main advantage of A-Z lists on Websites is high quality customer involvement. The large majority of visitors to A-Z lists are already in your website searching for answers, solutions, and products. A-Z lists are a popular search method for this activity. A-Z pages are for quality visitors, who are engaged enough to dive in and search for information and services in a logical and linear manner.

Below is top-level analytics data showing visitor activities for one service niche A-to-Z webpage, tracked for five months:

2,600 visits
2,050 unique visits
Landing page entrances:	1.0%
From previous pages in website:	99.0%
To next pages in website:	81.0%
Exits:	19.0%

The exit rate is significantly lower than the website average. Visitors find superior value and utility in the webpage. Landing page entrance rates for other A-Z pages can be higher, this particular example was at the lower range.           

When looking at navigation data in detail, visitors to these pages come from a diverse (but similar 'theme') list of internal webpages. The visitors research and review their options, and then fan out to new webpages in the website which spike their interest. Just like the intelligent behavior shown when people look at table of contents in books, indexes, and other alpha-beta listed data resources. A-Z lists have real, tangible utility.

However, depending upon depth and length, A-Z lists are not set-up for search engine optimization. As SEO landing pages, A-Z pages are usually poor performers, as the very essence of A-to-Z listing means displaying diffuse and dilute keyword phrases. Having dedicated niche webpages for SEO are absolutely required.

But for helping guide visitors and prospective clients to the B-to-B services they want and seek, A-Z list pages serve an important usability role, giving users an alternative way to find the data they want while complementing internal search engines.

The advantages of A-Z service niche directory lists are as manifestly beneficial today as when I first discussed them in 2009.

• Back to the Future with Static A-Z Directories
• CROSS-LINK IT - For Better Sales and Leads

Website Lead Generation Success: When it all comes together.

Engineering Website Lead Generation Success.

Want to experience the happy result of watching a surge of global B-to-B qualified leads spill out of the various webpages for which you are responsible... to get "one for the record books"? It is a great feeling.

The principles involved are few, but extremely important. Get them right, and you'll see excellent business leads coming out of the woodwork. Here are four principles I find useful and important for lead gen.

Intense focus on webpage content:
Is the content concise, precise, relevant? Is the content updated regularly? Are the right keywords being used for the right potential audience? Is there relevant professional 'eye candy' like images, graphics, videos, etc? Is there a strong call to action?

Search Engine Marketing:


Search Engine Optimization - SEO:
Organic SEO is vital to success. Pages must be found in order to be read. A great webpage, when not found by potential clients, is utterly useless. Is the page benchmarked against competitors in search? Are actions taken to improve content with an eye to raise search engine rankings and exploit long-tail niche targeting? Have additional language options been created when useful?

Paid Search (Adwords):
Paid Search is another important tool, lead generator and effective branding tactic. When Organic and Paid search are used in a coordinated fashion, quality lead generation benefits. Paid search can support organic search, validate your organic search rankings in the customer's mind, and fill in search engine result gaps when they occur. Using of negative search terms in paid search will help improve accuracy, conversion, and cost measurements.

Navigation and Links:
Diligent and intelligent cross-linking to other relevant webpages and blogs, with strong site and sectional navigation menus added and updated help keep potential clients from getting lost in a site. "Don't Make Me Think" is a great book, for this very reason if nothing else. Is Social Media being exploited?

Teamwork:
Having a talented, professional, reliable and innovative website management, design and webmaster team is mission critical. A well-designed website is like a fine symphony hall.... fantastic acoustics, great architecture.... just as a fine concert hall needs fine music to fulfill its destiny, so too, a good website needs good content to achieve ultimate SEO and lead generation success. Good content performs best on a good website. Get the formula wrong, and a mediocre website will produce mediocre to poor leads, no matter the quality of the content.

Discipline and Conviction:
What I have discussed are some general principles to help generate more, better, B-to-B leads. Discipline, inspiration, conviction and work-ethic are required to make lead gen success happen. Make SEO, Navigation, Benchmarking and Linkage optimization a daily habit and good things will happen.

What to do when those great quality leads start pouring in and they have to be classified, followed-up and tracked is another important topic for another day.

Back to the Future with Static A-Z Directories

Static A to Z Directories Work.

The Rosetta Stone was a Directory of Sorts.

Call me a "flat-page" reactionary, but, along with good Website Navigation, Cross-Linking, and an Internal Search Engine, I prefer looking at static A-Z directories to allow quicker navigation to relevant webpages.

A-Z listing offer a superior and more efficient experience compared to using flash-enhanced, clicky, interactive "Alpha Adventures" that do not allow broad A-Z scanning, and often result in frustrating dead-ends.

I'm not saying don't use interactive directories, but low-tech flat A-Z pages are very effective, from our experience. Use them both!

With a one-view flat A-Z directory, a visitor can quickly drill-down and find what they are looking for. Website visitors seem to prefer this approach, as these flat A-Z pages enjoy the lowest exit rates on the entire website and have strong traffic flow. In effect, for us, visitors have voted their preference with their mouses. Results were so good we scrapped our complex interactive flash option to find countries... it was not being used.

These mini A-Z pages also benefit us by acting as Site Maps for focused website services and locations sections. They increase link exposure for lower tier service pages, helping our organic search engine rankings. Often these A-Z pages are themselves ranking in top organic search results, based upon on their own merits. These are tremendous benefits for a B2B lead generation website.

As our large B2B website was rapidly growing in services and locations, the expanding complexity of the site demanded further classification, drill-down and navigation tools to help visitors find what they wanted, when they wanted it. We beefed up our website with a better search engine, but needed more. A-Z listings are of course long familiar, in print. I concluded that if this approach has thrived these hundreds of years and was still a durable, popular and common standard, it was good enough to try on the web.

Daring to go Retro, we built a collection of focused and hiearchical static .html A-Z Services and Locations webpages in key folders and sections of the website... with relevant listings linking to niche webpages focused on a particular service or location.

The idea of A-Z Listed Webpages is simple and effective:

An A-Z High Level Directory page for a "Wild Animals" Website for example, could include:

Top Level A-Z Directory:A

Aardvarks (linked to Aardvarks main webpage)

B

Badgers (linked to Badgers main webpage)

A person looking for Aardvarks can click on the Aardvark link. Once on the dedicated Aardvark section in the website.... another more focused Aardvark A-Z directory webpage helps the visitor further drill-down:

Second Level A-Z Directory:

A

Abyssinian Aardvarks (linked to Abyssinian Aardvarks webpage)

Albanian Aardvarks (linked to Albanian Aardvark webpage)

B

Bengal Aardvards (linked to Bengal Aardvarks webpage)

Bulgarian Aardvarks (linked to Bulgarian Aardvarks webpage)

... and so on. An Aardvark-searching visitor has reached Aardvark Nirvana in terms of information.

Low-tech, retro, flat, html A-Z directory pages have worked very well for us and more importantly, for our B2B website visitors.

A to Z Lists on Websites Really Work

CROSS-LINK IT - For Better Sales and Leads