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Internet Marketing by Switchplane
Helping you generate more profit from your website

Internet marketing is not just about generating traffic. It is crucial to concentrate on turning that traffic into customers. By improving search engine performance and increasing the usability of your site, Switchplane can help you generate more business and be more profitable.

What can internet marketing do for me?

It can increase your sales and improve profitability. Getting business on the internet relies on a simple formula:

Business = Traffic x Conversion Rate

Traffic is the number of people visiting your site, and conversion rate is the percentage of visitors performing some useful action, e.g. emailing you, requesting a brochure, subscribing to your newsletter, buying a product.

If you have low traffic and a poor conversion rate, you need to review your internet marketing as you are losing business to your competitors.

How does Switchplane approach internet marketing?

We concentrate on increasing conversion rate to a reasonable level, and then traffic generation techniques are applied. We use a three step process:

Step 1: Eliminate Common Mistakes and Setup Tracking

The first step is to perform an initial review to highlight common mistakes and to install tracking on your website. Eliminating common mistakes improves search engine performance (more traffic) and usability (higher conversion rate) giving a very cost effective boost to your businesses and laying a suitable foundation on which to improve. Installing tracking ensures that the current position is understood so that progress can be monitored.

Step 2: Set Goals and Develop Action Plan

We work with you to set targets. These targets should always be in terms of new leads and sales, not in terms of traffic. This ensures that the focus is on achieving results which really contribute to your profit.

Once the targets are in place, we provide recommendations on how to go about achieving them.

Step 3: Implementation and Review Progress

Part of the action plan is to agree an order of priority. We work through each recommendation in turn, monitoring results to ensure that we meet the targets.

What will the initial website review tell me?

The initial review appraises over 50 different areas of your website, explains why each is important, and gives recommendations on how any problems can be rectified.

Why fix common problems before generating traffic?

Generating traffic is an ongoing expense, whereas most problems highlighted by the initial website review are solved by a one-off change. Consider a small site that currently has 100 visitors per month and 0.5% conversion rate. The table shows the effect of increasing either the traffic or the conversion rate:

Comparison of increasing traffic vs improving conversion rate
Increase Result Approximate Cost
Visitors to 800 per month 4 conversions per month £400 - £2000 per month
Conversion rate to 4% 4 conversions per month £250 - £1000

In the table above, the approximate cost of generating traffic is based on typical Google AdWords campaigns which usually have a cost per click of between £0.50 and £2.50. Costs depend on the competitiveness of your market and the typical margin in your industry.

The approximate cost of increasing the conversion rate is based on the cost of our review service and the typical cost of further changes made.

How does the tracking work?

We use Google Analytics for our website performance tracking. You simply insert a small piece of tracking code onto each page of your site and Google records data about each visitor, such time spent on the site, conversion rate, bounce rates, repeat visitors, sources of traffic etc. We can install Google Analytics on your behalf but the cost depends on your website's architecture. Once setup, the service is free and you may access all the reports via Google’s website.

How do you generate website traffic?

There are a number of online and offline methods. The most obvious method is paying a search engine to send you traffic, for example, Google Adwords. Others include starting an email newsletter and ensuring your web address is on all of your marketing literature.

How does Google Adwords work?

You choose keywords and write an advert. When a user searches for your keyword, your advert may be shown (depending on a very complicated ranking mechanism). If the user clicks your advert, you pay a fee to Google. This is referred to in the industry as a "pay-per-click" campaign.

Google Adwords can generate a lot of traffic very quickly, but unless you know what you are doing, it is very easy to waste money by generating the wrong type of traffic. Switchplane has the knowledge to ensure that your advertising budget is used as cost-effectively as possible.

What about Search Engine Optimisation?

SEO refers to increasing your search engine ranking to generate more traffic. It is not a silver bullet and requires long term effort - beware of anyone offering guaranteed positions or fast search engine rankings. Some companies use unethical techniques to generate a high ranking for a short period and this generally results in your website being banned from the search engines.

Done properly, SEO consists of ensuring standards compliance, following usability best practice, writing good copy, and running link exchange programs.

How do you improve conversion rates?

Again, there are many ways of improving conversion, but they all rely on understanding how users behave on the internet. The most important thing you can do is to not annoy the user. This is why the initial review is so important – if you annoy the user, they will just leave. Eliminating common problems is an easy way to remove sources of annoyance.

Other techniques include ensuring that each step towards converting the user is focused 100% on meeting the user’s need. For example, ensuring that any adverts pre-qualify the user and lead them to a page that is directly relevant to their goal.

How does this fit in with my other marketing?

When developing your action plan, we will consider the rest of your marketing activities. For example:

  • A traffic generation measure might involve sending a letter to all your existing customers saying that you've relaunched the website
  • A conversion improvement might be to ensure that any special offers you are promoting in offline adverts are prominent on the home page

How much does the internet marketing service cost?

The initial review typically costs about £250+VAT for a small website. We also offer a free "taster" review which covers 5 potential problem areas. This allows you to try out the service without committing to a fee.

Development work is charged at our standard ad-hoc rate, and a discounted rate is available for larger projects.