"Michael, I just don't know what to do. We are not getting sales, nobody is signing up, we are not making any money. What is going wrong?"

They start thinking about search engines, more marketing and expensive advertising. When what they SHOULD be doing is taking a step back and saying;

"Why aren't people who are already finding my website doing what it is I want them to do?"

If you can get to bottom of that problem you might not even need to get more people to your website. If you can convert a high percentage of visitors that are already finding you into sales you won't need to devote as much time and money to marketing your site in first place. So let's talk about some quickfire ways you can improve your conversion rate.

**This Visitor Will Self-Destruct in 5 Seconds..

You have probably heard a lot of figures and average seems to be about 4 - 5 seconds: time you have from when somebody lands on your home page to actually convince them to remain on your site.

You don't have long - after 5 seconds if people don't see what they want to see they will disappear - forever. What happens is when I come to your site - I am looking to get a series of questions I have in my mind answered as quickly as possible.

For example, I want to know;

- Why you are different to your competitors, maybe where you ship to, how many products do you have on your site? - What sets you apart from everyone else in your region or in your industry? - What do your customers say about you? - Do you have any testimonials? - Do you have any press coverage? - Do you have any accreditations? - What makes your product so special? - What do you actually provide on this website?

I want to know all of these things in about five or six seconds.

Now it is not easy, nobody is saying that it is easy, but you do need to get over these benefits as soon as you can on your homepage. One of ways you can start to do this is to actually bullet points of information.

**Be Ruthless With The Pages on Your Website

Take a look at your web site and pare down everything that you think is not essential. Try to take a step back, put yourself in shoes of customer, look at your website and look at every element and say;

"If I removed that - would my web site be any worse?"

As a customer would that make experience any worse, would that give customer less information?

It is quite a scary thing to do. I have been down this road myself. When you start to do this it turns around your whole perspective on what your website is actually trying to do. I have landed on some websites, as I'm sure you have, that have opening line;

#1 Without doubt biggest mistake a newbie to Adwords makes is compiling a long list of less than targeted keywords and whacking (technical term) them into a single ad-group.

#2 Using broad match only

#3 The unholiest of trinity – not tracking results.

#1 The Single Adgroup --------------------- Although at first it may seem tempting – collecting all your keywords and lumping them into a single ad-group for ‘ease of administration’ is not a good idea for a multitude of reasons.

First off, let’s say you have managed to find 1000 keywords for your campaign and you pop them all into a single ad-group. Yes, you get a single point of administration (or more accurately a single point of failure) but look at what you miss:

• The ability to group tightly cohesive keywords (which are mindset of your prospects) and construct targeted adverts which are more likely to gain a click through to your site.

• The ability to have specific landing pages on your site for specific customer psychographics. This alone will greatly increase your chances of getting a prospect respond to your call to action – be it an email address capture or a sale.

• The ability to keep tight control over budget of your ‘best’ keywords (where best are high traffic/high conversion). Sure you can adjust individual CPC’s within an ad-group, but granularity and control is not there and problems inherent with grouping too many loosely assembled keywords will ensure your efforts are thwarted and money wasted.

Have you ever had your account slowed? It’s a pain for sure but more keywords you have administered in a less than disciplined way, more of your keywords will be put on hold/in-trial and/or disabled.

Remember Google rewards good advertising performance and looks at all advertiser histories & your advertising history when determining how well you are doing.

Adwords is not a fire and forget medium (unless you have a very niche market with very little competition – but days of such markets are numbered).

Active campaign management is required to ensure you have not just a return of your investment but a positive return ON your investment.

#2 Using Broad Match -------------------- Consider keyword ‘widget’.

How many ways can you search for this keyword? In theory there are infinite number of searches that can be conducted but in practice there are considerably fewer thankfully.

However, how should you specify your matching options within Adwords?

Option 1: Broad Match This specifies keyword in an unadorned fashion within your list like so: Blue widget

What this means is that should somebody search for keywords: Blue widget Red blue widget Widget blue Widget who searches for these things blue? Don’t need blue widget

Then, your advert would show for all of these. This is all very well when broad match (I’ll not talk about expanded match searching for fear of confusion!) shows your advert for terms relevant to you. But…

For every term relevant to your market there could be 10, 100 or 1000 others which are not (which is why when you utilise broad matching you should use negative keywords exhaustively).