A personal project
Posted in Design on: Thursday, January 27, 2005 by Paul Boag
I can’t believe it has been almost 3 months since my last post! I will be amazed if anybody is even aware of this blog anymore. Usual excuses I am afraid; moving house, family, Christmas, normal things. So what have I been up to while I have been away and what little tip bits have I picked up?
A personal project
I am ashamed to say that lately I have been spending almost as much time after work building web sites as I have during work hours. I have been working on a web site for my father (David Boag) who is a professional nature photographer.
His old site provided loads of information and was rich in photography but lacked focus. It had hardly any traffic and rarely, if ever generated leads.
With the new site we hoped to generate more traffic and convert more of that traffic into real leads. Below I outline a few quick tricks we used to achieve this. For now this is just a quick overview. Perhaps I will expand on these in future posts.
Tips and tricks for turning your web site into a more powerful sales tool
Target audience
Step one was to write a list of your potential target audiences. For my dad this included a variety of different audiences that tended to commission nature photographers. Because we had limited time and resources we decided to start with one target audience and also create a more generic site for the rest.
Landing pages
Once we had decided on our target audiences we created landing pages specific to them. The landing pages identified problems they faced and demonstrated how David could address those problems.
The generic entry point is www.naturalfocus.co.uk
The second is aimed specifically at Quarry owners who dad has worked with before helping them better communicate the conservation and environmental work they do: www.naturalfocus.co.uk/quarry/.
You will notice that although the homepages are different the rest of the site is fundamentally the same. I used cookies to remember which point people entered the site in order to ensure they saw the right type of images in the gallery and that when they clicked home they went back to the right page.
Call to action and sales
We wanted to ensure that the site was focused on getting the user to complete a single action. In this site that action was to contact David. The whole of the site was built around this aim. The copy was written in such a way as to demonstrate David’s understanding of his target audience and how he could help them with the challenges they faced. Each page had a clear call to action at the bottom and contained prominent contact information throughout.
Driving traffic in the short term
I wanted to get Dad results as soon as possible so the first thing I did once the site went live was set up a PPC campaign with Google. Because of the niche markets we had selected this didn’t need to cost the earth and instantly started driving traffic to his site. Combined with some message board seeding and requests for reciprocal links we managed to push his traffic from a couple of visitors a day to well over one hundred.
Driving traffic in the long term
The focus now is on finding link partners to help push Natural Focus up the search engine rankings. We have identified two primary keywords for our two landing pages "nature photographer" and "quarry". We have looked at who is currently number one and used them to identify potential link partners by looking at who links to them. We have also looked at their text and the amount these keywords are used and tweaked our own content accordingly. This is an ongoing process and one that we hope in time will bear fruits…watch this space.
One Comments
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I just want you to know, I am aware of your blog. I’ve always appreciated your input, and I know it can be difficult keeping up with these things, especially considering the busy life you have. But on a more serious note, we really do all need to make time for ourselves. Step outside into the night air and take a deep breath of the electric wonder of nitrogen and oxygen that flows all around us. Walk to the shed and open the door and sit in the quiet among the tools and stray grass clippings. While you sit there, imagine that you are in a hotel in a dark outer reach of the world and close your eyes and imagine that no matter what you do or where you go the world will figure out a way to figure out a way to cleanse itself and keep itself going on and on until the day comes when all the things that are happening will permenantly be in the past tense.