What's my next move

15 May 12 9:12 am

Now that you have your site up and your keywords ranking. I thin you should pay attention on your keywords and your analytics. These can help tell you why exactly you are not making sales. Continue with your backlinking work, but it doesn't have to be as rigorous as before. Your focus now should be driving more and more traffic to your site and convert those to sales.

I noticed you do not have a link of your website in your forum signature. I suggest you do add that so in case any of us needs to look at your site to give you feedback, we can. Putting your site's link in your forum signature is a way of promoting your site too.

Hope that helps. Have a g0od day!

15 May 12 6:14 pm

Don't worry about getting links outside for your niche. A site like this isn't going to hurt you. Reducing your article length is a bad idea. Adding pictures might help with traffic but not with conversions.

I suspect the travel niche has a very low conversion rate in general. Lots of lookers, few buyers.

Like someone else mentioned, you MUST start a list. Google traffic is great and all but you need to filter out the people just looking for information from the people really interested and looking to buy. In my opinion your site is good enough in the SERPs, leave off of your SEO efforts for a while or just stay the course if it isn't too much work.

You've brought them to water, now you got to get them to drink. Switch focus and spend all of your time building conversions and getting subscribers.

Start testing different page layouts, different text, different button colors, anything that improves your conversion rate. Google/Facebook ads are a great way to test this. Build two almost identical pages with one little change, a blue button vs a red one and see which converts better. Split test tell your eyes bleed.

Every single page needs to have multiple areas where people can subscribe and links to your products. Widen the funnel and grow as many links to your money pages as possible.

Have you tried advertising and other paid traffic methods yet? No idea what you are selling but there may be better options than Google search traffic for finding customers.

17 May 12 7:11 am

Mark,

You may be surprised what a change in color might do for you. My brother James had a dating site that was getting really high bounce rates and he couldn't figure out why. I took one look at his page and told him that the background color he was using was probably scaring people away. He was using a color that can be good in the physical world, but on the screen can sometimes come across as bright and glaring. I suggested changing to a less glaring color, and his bounce rate dramatically improved.

I know my example was with background color, but the same principles apply. Like everything else, test, test, test! A simple change (even just a few shades difference) might make more of an impact than you may think.

17 May 12 3:00 pm

Congrats on setting up your site with an easy template (or style sheet, or however you make site-wide changes easily), Mark.

Sounds like a good use of Google's free Split Tester (Google Website Optimizer). When the effect on your bottom line is not obvious it's a lot better to test than to guess.

Problem I have with split tests is that they require a lot of traffic, or can take months. Sometimes I use a "sale proxy". That is, something people will click on that indicates high interest, but not an outright sale. The idea being that these "sales proxies" happen a lot more often than a sale, when traffic is low.

As I've said here before, when a site is new and you need A/B Split Testing the most is when it takes the longest - bit of a shame that.

Cheers!
_jim coe