Twice this year I got the call too late. Two online businesses were in their final death throes. Their owners begged me for emergency help with sinking conversion rates. Both believed that I could find what was “broken,” repair it with some magic usability tape, traffic would flow again and sales would return. Though I could provide plenty of recommendations, many of them easy fixes, it would have taken time to implement them and get measurable results. These owners had under a month left to survive. I wished they’d found me sooner.

I’m not a numbers person. To me, the numbers either go up or down. The arrows go up or down. Some people are really good at spouting off conversions stats and I’ll listen, but all I really want to know is if the arrow is going up or down and if the numbers have a negative sign in front of them. No matter how many hours I spend staring at Google Analytics pages, I feel challenged when I see any sign of a slump. Even worse is when the traffic arrow is going up and up, while conversions are in the negative range. This is the danger zone.

I approach conversion repairs from three areas: usability, search engine optimization and information architecture. A fourth area, social marketing, is worth including in cases where conversation marketing is part of the business plan. Each group contains hundreds of conversion oriented heuristics and can be broken down in sub-groupings such as usability/persuasive design/forms user interface. To build it out would end up becoming a book, so I thought I would put together some solutions that I’ve seen work quickly or are typically simple to implement.

Usability/UX

A few critical elements items should appear in the top third of your home page, because the page fold moves nowadays with different monitors and resolutions.

Company name. Some homepages play head games with who they really are and where they’re really from. Trust and credibility are key to conversion rates. If your company name differs from the logo, get it up top and not in the footer.

Why choose us. State why your site visitor should choose your service or product. (You have about 3 seconds to convince them to stay on the page.)

Why we’re better for you. Clearly state your product niche or service and in your content indicate you know who your visitor is and how you can meet their needs. I’m always amazed at how many sites ignore this.

How to start. Place your lead call to action task in this space. It can be a button (“download free trial”) or a short form (“get started now”). Avoid forcing anyone to scroll to complete the top user task.

Here’s how to buy. Start a conversion funnel here. Some visitors will have been to your site earlier. They want to get past the formalities and start a task.

Other things to consider:

Ads. Why are your pages crawling with ads for other web sites?

In cases where traffic is up but conversions sink, it’s time to look at the user interface. Is it confusing to follow? Are there distractions? Are there too many links? Is there too much to do? This is the area where I find the most problems. Your slumping conversions may be tied to a poorly designed web site.

Color contrasts. I find issues on nearly every web site I audit. Related: Choosing the wrong colors. Some web sites are too tense, or intense. If you make visitors feel anxious or frustrated, they will leave.

Forms are another key abandonment trigger. Registration forms have too many steps and are prone to functional errors. Shopping carts are poorly designed or don’t work properly in all browsers. Sales lead forms require personal information and a sample of your blood before they’ll work (I love the requirement for a FAX number. The other one is requiring a Mr./Mrs./Ms/Dr./etc. just to make simple contact). Limit required fields because if someone can’t fill in that field, the form will throw an error. Conversion lost.

If you offer customer service, make this information clearly visible. Make your toll free phone number easy to locate and read. Indicate office or call-in hours. Create a customer service page that offers assistance by answering commonly asked questions. Rather than scattering this information willy nilly about the site, gather it up into one page. Every customer that has to hunt for answers or help is a conversion risk.

Add user instructions during every task. Missing user assistance is another very common conversion killer.

Rescue conversions by adding a way for visitors to contact you when something doesn’t work. For example, I went to buy a popular product online the other day. Their cart kept refusing the company credit card. No matter how times I re-entered the information (the form never indicated how to enter a credit card number), it kept saying the card couldn’t be processed. No valid reason was offered. I left the site. and they lost that sale. The next day, upon verifying the credit card was valid, I realized my problem was that I was using Chrome. When I attempted to purchase the product with the same card in IE8, it went right through. Not every potential customer will think to switch browsers to make a purchase work.

Every form, application or shopping cart should have a link to a feedback form so that visitors can let you know why they couldn’t complete a transaction. This one fix alone could make a huge difference in sales,and your overall customer satisfaction reputation.

SEO considerations

Create a text tagline containing your site’s unique selling proposition with one or two top keywords in it. This verifies in an instant that a search query has found a good match and the user will remain on the page.

Opening page content should back up and clarify with more detail what the meta description presented in search results. If your meta description is written in a way that creates incentive to click, be sure to fulfill that desire.

Add a text version of your leading call to action prompt. So that special-needs users can complete a task, be sure there are alternative workarounds for JavaScript, image links and online forms.

Maintain fresh content. Sometimes a conversion is lost because there’s no sign that anyone’s home.

Avoid missed opportunities. Believe it or not, 404 not-found pages can be huge opportunities that many squander. It may be a long shot but some people come up with creative, compelling reasons to continue with the main site when directed to something promising.

Write page topic focused content. You can tell when a site owner is overly enthusiastic about what they have to offer. An overwhelmed visitor becomes frustrated and is more likely to leave for the organized competitor.

Create robust product descriptions. Avoid the lone image with a “click to learn more” link. I can just picture search engines and people just dying to do that. Every product deserves a keyword rich teaser description with a clear reason provided to learn more or take an action such as adding a product to the shopping cart.

Landing pages are often done so poorly they’re the kiss of death in conversion funnels. When attached to a PPC campaign it gets worse. Be sure that an ad landing page matches the topic the ad claimed it would be. Never mislead site visitors.

Information architecture

Build global navigation that offers directions to groupings of pages (hubs). Base their line up order on what you know about your target user. Navigation should be designed to meet their top needs and interests. This means “About Us” might be best moved into the last link.

All navigation labels must describe a category in terms your customers use (machine parts and products fall into this rabbit hole).

Don’t put every product category in the top level. Guide visitors into drilling down into your deeper pages with logical taxonomies (item groupings and familiar terms).

Don’t lose anyone! Breadcrumb navigation offers visitors a sense of place and guides them forward or backwards. Getting lost on a web site is a key reason for page abandonment.

Avoid orphan landing pages. It’s like sending the worker ants out to find food and then moving the ant hill so they can’t get back. Cohesive information architecture is easier to track so that you can watch how someone moves from page to page on your site. You want to be able to monitor visitor movement. That’s easier to do when visitors come in through the front door.

I’ve seen the smallest details produce an instant increase in conversions. I recommend fixing the low hanging fruit first. Things like navigation and making a page easier to read fall into that area. Increasing font sizes for easier reading is another. Conversions are something that your site visitors participate in. If someone is unable to read your sales lead form, or choose the right path to find an item they wish to buy, that’s a lost conversion.

Everything I’ve suggested can be implemented quickly and without much fuss. By implementing the practical recommendations above, I’ve heard countless happy success stories. When the arrows and numbers start to move up, there’s excitement and incentive to keep at it.

One final note. If you wonder about making a change to a page design or moving a call to action prompt to a different location, try split testing first. Set up a test site and experiment. If you have a functional piece like a shopping cart or proprietary application, make sure it’s tested for functionality on all browsers and that error message testing is performed. Conversions that are tied to unfinished tasks can be repaired.

Ad network Chitika has published interesting findings from an examination of a whole lot of search-driven ad impressions. Specifically, “Chitika looked at a sample of 41,103,403 impressions of search traffic coming into their network between June 13 – June 19.”

The company found that 26 percent of (organic) search-driven traffic was the result of “three-word searches.” Here’s the full breakdown of organic search volume by query length:

1. Three words: 26 percent
2. Two words: 19 percent
3. Four words: 17 percent
4. One word 14 percent

Chitika added that “any query beyond five words will see dramatically lower traffic.”

Yet the effect is different for paid clicks. Chitika said, “The highest ad click rates were for queries of 5, 6 and 4 words.” This validates the conventional wisdom about longer-tail queries being more qualified. However clicks appear to drop off after about five words.

The study doesn’t parse queries into commercial and non-commercial categories unfortunately.

Improving website performance is hard work, and SEO alone will not get the job done. The following analysis of human search behavior is the first step in developing a world-class website strategy. Top performing websites have most of these traits in common:

• They understand in detail human search behavior.
• They have strategically invested in information architecture.
• They have a commitment to develop and deploy high-quality content on a scheduled basis.
• They understand the role quality visual design (UI) plays in successful user experiences.
• They believe in human factors, and conduct usability tests.
• They don’t let technology impact products and services in a negative way (gratuitous use of web 2.0 gimmicks).
• They have high engineering standards, and validate their code before shipping.
• They understand that SEO page markup has to be based upon quality content, not gimmicks.
• They understand technically how crawlers and search technologies impact content find-ability.
• They understand that a first-page search engine ranking has more to do with high-quality content, and a superior user experience.

You should keep all these factors in mind when developing your website strategy. However, here I will only focus upon item number one, which is how do you figure out what your customers are doing when they are looking for your services.

Search behavior analysis

Choosing keyword phrases randomly, based upon volume or Google’s suggestion can lead to success, but you never really know until you try the phrases out. This costs time and money. A better way to insure success is to take a step back, and look at the total search experience as it is reflected in an AdWords data set. This means manually reviewing each keyword phrase, and classifying it to one of several behavioral categories—usually less than ten.

A quick look at the keyword phrase “home improvement” shows that nearly 10 million people a month search for home improvement products, services and information. When you examine the data to see what is going on topically you can identify nine categories of distinct search behavior. They are looking for:

1. Home improvement products: 1,477,100
2. Home improvement by specific project: 1,039,700
3. Home improvement by quality and value: 274,860
4. Home improvement company by Name: 208,890
5. Home improvement companies in general: 199,040
6. Home improvement TV / Media: 60,420
7. Home improvement advice, blogs & reviews: 88,000
8. Home improvement projects in general: 46,490
9. Home improvement financing: 6,900

Let’s look at each of these categories more closely.

Home improvement products

The largest category (1.48M) is informational in nature. In these searches the user is looking for product and information using vague terminology. They use just four secondary terms to modify the primary keyword phrase. In order of importance (volume) the terms are:

1. Tools
2. Hardware
3. Products
4. Appliances

Home improvement by specific project

The second largest category (1.04M) is users looking for information so that they can learn about or transact for services for a very specific project. There are ten secondary project related terms in this group, with the top four accounting for the lion-share of the traffic. In order of importance by volume:

1. Bathrooms
2. Flooring
3. Plumbing
4. Kitchens

The remaining six project related terms account for about 5% of this categories traffic.

5. Tile

6. Mobile home

7. Roofing

8. Drywall

9. Siding

10. Basement

Looking for products and services by quality and value

The third largest category (275K) is users who are concerned with quality and value. Hands down they are more concerned with quality than they are with value. The important observation about this category is that the lexicon of terms being used is small, and they should play a role in ad copy and page markup. The secondary terms in order of importance are:

1. Quality
2. Discount
3. Best
4. Value
5. Reliable
6. Affordable

Looking for a company

The fourth and fifth largest categories (209K and 199K respectively) are users looking for a company by name, or looking for a list of companies. Users searching for a specific company by name is the larger category. A review of all the company names show that these firms fall into two major categories:

1. Home improvement stores selling products
2. Home improvement contractors

When users does not yet have a specific company in mind they search for company related information using more ambiguous secondary terms such as:

• Stores
• Contractors
• Construction
• Centers
• Companies
• Services
• Design
• Websites

The Home Improvement TV series

This is the fly in the ointment. The sixth largest category (165K) is users searching for information about the Home Improvement TV series. This category needs to be understood so that the dominant secondary terms can be identified for exclusion from web page ad copy. The dominant secondary terms in this category are:

1. TV
2. Season
3. Video
4. Tim
5. Series
6. DVD
7. Cast
8. Set

The important issue here is that a company who develops and markets “how to” videos and DVD’s for the DIY community will likely get traffic that they are not really interested in.

Informational searches

The seventh category (88K) reflects users early in the search cycle. They are in research mode, and are looking for ideas and information. These terms represent rich content opportunities. The dominant secondary terms in order of importance are:

1. Ideas
2. DIY
3. Advice
4. How to
5. Guide
6. Reviews
7. Green

General home improvement projects

The eighth category accounts for 46K search a month. These searches are informational in nature, somewhat vague and cluster around three broad terms that have several meanings:

1. Remodeling
2. Repairs
3. Projects

Transactional queries

The final category (6.9K) is transactional in nature. There is very little traffic but it is valuable traffic because searchers are looking for ways to finance their home improvement projects. The top terms are:

1. Money
2. Finance

Observations about queries

It’s useful to remember that 71% of all consumer search terms are nouns, and 7% of search terms are adjectives. This means that nearly 80% of all queries are noun-noun or adjective-noun phrases. This is important when considering your SEO page markup and page copy strategy. Since verbs, for example account for only 2.4% of all search terms, you would not sweat bullets over their usage in your website. The linguistic profile for human search term usage is:

1. Proper noun: 40.2%
2. Noun: 30.9%
3. Adjectives: 7.1%
4. URI: 5.9%
5. Preposition: 3.7%
6. Garbage strings: 2.5%
7. Verb: 2.4%
8. Punctuation: 1.4%
9. All other parts of speech: 5.9%

So, how does the “home improvement” data set look when considering the importance of adjectives, nouns and phrase word order? There are three things that can be observed about these consumer queries:

First, 66% of the queries have this noun-noun pattern: home improvement [noun]

Second, 23% of queries have a proper noun-noun pattern: [company name] home improvement

The remaining 11% of the queries have an adjective-noun pattern: [adjective] home improvement

There are a few examples that don’t fit this model—but, as a rule-of-thumb linguistic search behavior follows these three simple patterns that we see with the “home improvement” data set.

A search behavior model

The primary thrust of user searches in the home improvement category is for information about products and information about remodeling or repairing a part of the home. Searchers are also looking for ideas, advice and reviews—and are interested in doing some of the work themselves. Quality and affordability are very important, and is reflected in the search behavior.

The secondary focus is searching for companies that provide contracting services, and companies that sell hardware. And finally, there is an interest in financing these renovations.

Modeling a content strategy

Once a search behavior model is understood you can use this information to develop a content strategy. The following strategic content model reflects human behavior in the AdWords dataset. Many users tend to start their search sessions using ambiguous queries such as home improvement remodeling, or home improvement projects. They then move to specific keyword terms, using phrases such as home improvement contractors, Home Improvement Bathroom or home improvement DIY.

The use of the terms remodeling or repairing is practically the same in intended outcome—the searcher wants to improve a portion of his house. Customers are using two different phrases to frame a single concept. From an information architecture perspective you could use these two categories as funnels on custom landing pages depending upon what preferred phraseology is being used.

When you view all the categories from an organizational perspective they fall into the following groups: projects, information, products and companies. This dictates a very simple home page organizational strategy, with four major modules with projects and products playing the most dominant roles, with information and company directory in supporting roles. The following information architecture reflects user intent, and provides a one-stop strategy to provide users with what they are looking for.

Web page copy

When you strip away the primary keyword phrase (home improvement) and look at the top secondary terms by volume, you are left with a set of terms that suggest major SEO opportunities, with a very focused list of words that should be worked into the website’s ad copy.

The following list also provides you with a set of terms that people are using to find information about the Home Improvement TV show (red font). Most of these you do not have to worry about—but, if you had a “series of How To videos and DVD” for sale on your website, you may want to think about providing some “goodwill” value by providing links to the content these folks are interested in. Or you could just ignore this traffic (unless you are running an AdWords campaign, in which case you should consider including these as negative match keywords). These secondary terms, with the number of queries for each, includes:

• tools: 1,000,000
• bathroom: 550,000
• hardware: 450,000
• quality: 246,000
• flooring: 165,000
• plumbing: 165,000
• kitchen: 110,000
• loews: 81,700
• store: 73,600
• tv: 37,200
• set: 33,100
• tile: 33,100
• warehouse: 33,100
• contractor: 32,900
• construction: 27,100
• product: 20,500
• center: 19,200
• remodel: 18,820
• tim: 18,500
• american: 18,100
• repair: 18,100
• cast: 14,800
• companies: 13,500
• service: 13,500
• discount: 12,100
• other: 12,100
• best: 11,800
• dvd: 11,500
• complete: 9,900
• ideas: 9,900
• inc: 9,900
• online: 9,900
• series: 9,900
• wilson: 9,900
• design: 8,100
• diy: 8,100
• projects: 8,100
• video: 7,000
• appliances: 6,600
• city: 6,600
• guide: 6,600
• review: 6,500
• reviews: 6,500
• advice: 5,400
• green: 5,400
• how to: 5,400
• professional: 5,300
• websites: 5,190
• season 3: 4,500
• classic: 4,400

Summary

In this analysis you see that a complex set of reported data from AdWords searches around a single topic can be reduced to nine search behavior categories. In my experience, I’ve seen as few as six categories in some travel-related AdWords data sets, and as many as twelve in medical areas.

Resolving the keyword phrases for the top secondary terms provides your information architects with a focused short list of terms that provide SEO opportunities, and content module labeling opportunities. This list of terms also provides you with a preferred vocabulary for website ad copy.

This analysis of human search behavior provides a data-driven approach to developing and refining a content strategy that aligns your information architecture with user intent. If you give the users what they are searching for—they will find you.