Many marketers know that search engine marketing is among one of the best methods to get visitors to their websites. It's a profitable way to reach new subscribers and new customers.

But getting search engine traffic is only one of the first steps to the doorway of incoming success. While getting top search engine rankings will open the floodgates of targeted traffic, all this traffic is useless if your website visitors don't take any action be it a subscription to your newsletter, a purchase of your products or your affiliate products or any other action.

To capitalize on your search engine traffic, you need to be able to convert those visits into at least one action. Of course, not all your visitors will do anything on your website apart reading any valuable content you might have or download any free stuff. This is also a good way to get repeat visitors which can lead to an action in the future.

Now is the time to concentrate on your website conversion strategies which will be very crucial for success. In fact this is the second most important aspect of Internet marketing after getting the initial traffic.

The formula is as follows:

=> Targeted Traffic: Good Conversion: Sales/Leads/Subscribers

Here are 2 powerful ways to capitalize on your search engine traffic:

(1) Your Website Design Layout

Website design which does not seem that important is extremely crucial to get success on the Internet.

Consider this, you visit a site which is very unprofessional with flashing graphics, poor navigation, slow loading time, getting you confused and gives you a feeling of mistrust.
Your only action would be to click on the "Close" button at the top of your browser. Now this site has already lost a potential customer or subscriber.

Or you visit a professional site this time, but you don't really know what to do on the site. The reason is that the person who has designed the site has not taken into consideration the visitors like what he or she wants them to do once they arrive on their homepage or any other pages. Each page on your site must have an objective.

So one of the things that you need to do is to ensure that your site is as professional as can be ie has a friendly navigation menu, fast loading and avoid unnecessary graphics where possible.

The other thing is you need to know beforehand what you want your visitors to do once they arrive on your professional site. When the traffic comes, the best strategy now is to tweak your conversion and make testing often to see what works better for you.

If you run a newsletter, you can place a subscription box on the upper left or upper right corner of your site or if you have some products to sell, you can display one or two on
another space. So when your visitors come to your site, either they subscribe or buy one of your products. When any one of these actions is taken, your site is doing its job.

(2) Your Sales Page or Pre-sell Page

If you have affiliate products that you're promoting, the best thing is to pre-sell those visitors, hence you have more chances in making sales. It's like a personal endorsement.

If you have your own products, make use of the following:

(a) A powerful headline which catches attention and entices the visitors to read more, meaning more chances in making sales. Use quotes in your headline. They have been proven to make it more effective.

A headline like "Discover 3 Hidden Steps That You can Quickly & Easily Use to Start A Profitable Internet Business In Less Than 48 Hours" is an example of a catchy headline which can make the visitor stop dead in their tracks.

(b) Bullets to emphasize benefits of your product not features. Benefits sell. People want to know how your product can benefit them.

(c) Real testimonials from other satisfied customers. Sometimes you can get unsolicited testimonials which is good but when you don't, a good way to get testimonials is to offer your product for FREE to experts so that they can review it and send you their feedback.

(d) A professional banner which reflects your product and any benefit that your product conveys.

(e) The use of other colors apart black. The color red catches attention, green makes you think of money, blue soothes the mind.

(f) Use sub headlines to break your mini-site sales copy into chunks of information to make it well organized and more readable.

(g) Use power words to make your sales copy more effective. Words like discover, exclusive, proven, secrets, guaranteed, limited-time, results-fast, quickly, easily etc...are simple little words that can have a dramatic influence on your sales.

(h) Give bonuses or discounts for a limited-time. Put the price of the bonuses and offer genuine discounts.

(i) Use a Post Scriptum(P.S) - This is used at the end of your sales letter to re-state the product benefits and what will happen if these people don't order today or how your product will make their lives better.

(j) Be brave and put your own picture on your site. This seems to be rather banal but putting your photo on your site makes you more credible. Remember trust is important when doing business on the Internet. People like to know they are dealing with a real person instead of a machine.

(k) Use a clear call-to-action eg "Click here now", "Click here now to take advantage of this limited-time offer" or "Click here now to get your discounted copy". This is very important. Don't expect your visitors to take action by themselves. If you have done everything right and forget about including a strong call-to-action, don't be surprised if you see your conversion drop.

The AIDA principle

(1) Attention
(2) Interest
(3) Desire
(4) Action

should be implemented in any sales copy.

(l) State that all purchases are done securely on your site, hence inspiring trust. Include a picture of credit cards.

(m) Offer a guarantee and use a guarantee icon.

(n) Allow people to contact you by providing your personal details.

Working on your website conversion is fundamental to the success of your Internet business. Traffic without any type of action is worthless and when your conversion improves, you'll probably get more results with the same number of traffic numbers simply because you know how to convert better.

So now, you have no excuse not to get more positive results with your search engine traffic.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jean Lam is the author of the highly acclaimed eBook "Top Search Engine Ranking Secrets in Google Revealed", a concise, step-by-step guide to high search engine ranking for the beginner to intermediate level webmaster - available now at http://www.top-ranking-strategies.com