Weekly SEO news: 16 November 2010
Welcome to the latest issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter.

It can be difficult to convince your website visitors to buy from you. Your visitors have to trust you before they buy. There are four easy things that you can do tomake your website more trustworthy.

In the news: Google releases Instant Preview and Google Hotpot, Google improves Flash indexing, the click-through-rate for ads increases and more.

Table of contents:

We hope that you enjoy this newsletter and that it helps you to get more out of your website. Please pass this newsletter on to your friends.

Best regards,
Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. Four things that you can do to get more sales

If your website does not look trustworthy, you won't get many sales even if your website gets a lot of visitors. In addition to a professional website design and an easy to use order process, there are some easy things that you can do to convince your visitors that they can trust you:

1. Are you a real company?

It's amazing how many Internet businesses don't list their postal addresses. Do these businesses have something to hide?

If your customers don't know who you are and where you live they might refrain from doing business with you.

Example:

You can find our full contact information here. We link to that page at the bottom of every web page. In addition, our full postal address is listed in the footer of every web page. We do this to make sure that our visitors know who we are.

Our company is also a member of the local chamber of commerce and a contributing member of the OISV (Organization of Independent Software Vendors). You can see our tax number, our trade register number, etc.

To do:

If you're serious about your business show your visitors that you have nothing to hide. List your full contact information on your website.

2. Are you different from your competitors?

Why should someone buy from you and not from your competitors? Is there anything that distinguishes you from the rest?

Example:

We distinguish ourselves from other SEO software companies by using only ethical search engine optimization methods. Our products do not use any shady tactics that will get your website banned from search engines.

We want our visitors to know that they can trust our products and that they are safe to use. That's why we link to our code of ethics in the footer of every web page.

To do:

Show your website visitors how you're different and why they should use your products or services instead of your competitors'.

3. Have other people tested your products and services?

Web surfers don't like risk. If other people have tested your products and services then it's less risky for new customers to buy from you. Your website visitors want to be reassured that you're a serious business.

If your company or your product has received awards then show them to your visitors. If your current customers have something positive to say about your products or services, list these testimonials on your website.

To do:

Show your visitors how other people benefited from your products and services and what other people say about you.

4. Do you offer guarantees?

Web surfers don't like risks. That's why guarantees will help you to sell more.

Example:

It is 100% risk-free to test our products. We offer two guarantees to make it as safe as possible to buy our products:

  1. You can return our website promotion tool IBP within 30 days for any reason. Even if you tell us that the dog ate it, that's no problem. You will get your money back.

  2. IBP is a tool that helps you to get your website on Google's first result page for the keywords of your choice. If you use IBP as described in the manual and do not get a top 10 ranking, you will get your money back. This additional guarantee is valid for a full year!

To do:

Show your website visitors that you're 100% sure that your product or service really delivers. Give strong guarantees so that your website visitors can only win if they try your products.

It's important to have a trustworthy website if you want to sell something on the Internet. Show your visitors that your business is real and that they can trust you by using the tips above.

Back to table of contents - Visit Axandra.com

2. Search engine news and articles of the week

FlashGoogle improves Flash indexing

"we expanded our SWF indexing capabilities thanks to our continued collaboration with Adobe and a new library that is more robust and compatible with features supported by Flash Player 10.1. [...]

While we've made great progress indexing SWF content over the past few years, we're not done yet. We are continuing to work on our ability to index deep linking (content within a Flash technology based application that is linked to from the same application) as well as further improving indexing of SWF files executed through JavaScript."



Google launches Hotpot

"[Hotpot is] a local recommendation engine powered by you and your friends. With Hotpot, we're making local search results for places on Google more personal, relevant and trustworthy."



Google announces Instant Previews

"Instant Previews provides a graphic overview of a search result and highlights the most relevant sections, making finding the right page as quick and easy as flipping through a magazine. To use it, click once on the magnifying glass next to the title of any search result and a visual overview of the page will appear on the right."

Related: The 10 business implications of Google Instant Previews



Google PreviewHow to design for Google Instant Preview

"Use large branding as much as possible on the top of the page. This is to make people see and remember your brand even if they don't click the link. Make sure the site structure is as simple as possible as in smaller size it will look easier to navigate.

Use large colorful images above fold. Faces would work best. These will grab the attention and generate more clicks throughs."



Click-through rate jumps 11.4% after Google changes "Sponsored Links" to "Ads"

"Google's switch from 'Sponsored Links' to 'Ads' has not had a negative impact on advertiser performance. In fact, it may have had just the opposite effect – searchers have clicked on a higher percentage of ads since Google made the switch.

With all the recent changes Google has made to the results page, however, who knows if there's any real correlation between this latest modification and an 11.4% increase in CTR?"



Search engine newslets

  • Google sued over toolbar sending data while turned off.
  • comScore releases October 2010 U.S. online video rankings.
  • Google improves Product Search.
  • Google to enter fashion shopping territory with launch of Boutiques.com?
  • Google removes 3 advanced search options.
  • How [search engine] Baidu won China.
  • The long, sad story of Ask.com.

Back to table of contents - Visit Axandra.com

3. Success stories

Anders Heie"Within 6 months, we were on page one in all major search engines."

"Our company, KaDonk, makes a project viewer that allows users to open MS Project files. We launched our website, and our viewer without much to show for it.

At the beginning of the year, we bought IBP, and started optimizing our pages, tracking our rankings, and building our link-pool. Within 6 months, we were on page one in all major search engines, often in the top 3 position.

From getting 4-6 downloads per day, we now get several hundreds daily, and for this year we surpassed 330,000 downloads of our viewer. IBP allowed us to get our message out, and 'get found', which is exactly what is needed for a small startup company. IBP was one of the best investments we made."
Anders Heie, www.kadonk.com



IBP



Tell us how IBP helped your business and 270,000 readers will see YOUR website

Let us know how IBP has helped you to improve your website and we might publish your success story with a link to your website in this newsletter. The more detailed your story is, the better. Click here to tell us your story.

Back to table of contents - Visit Axandra.com

4. Previous articles

Back to table of contents - Visit Axandra.com

Do you have a minute?