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For me, quality equals brand.  Anytime you capture a customer well enough to where they begin supporting your brand would be identified as a quality visit.  If you have a digital campaign offering a special incentive on your website (90% off) you will get a large amount of visitors.  The important thing is having the ability to sustain these visitors.  This particular campaign might generate 80% of your websites new visitors for the month, but are they sustainable?  Will they continue to support your brand?  A small percentage always will, as long as you continue to deliver some type of call to action on your site.  If you run that crazy 90% off promotion only once a year, you will only generate those visitors once a year.  Follow?  There is a bit of give and take when trying to generate quality website visitors.    However, in terms of increasing your brand awareness they are very important in making your digital presence grow.

Quantity, well equals volume.  Online you obviously want a large volume of visitors.  More visitors increase the chance of capturing a quality customer.  For example, let’s take a product launch or some type of online announcement.  Your company has just build a mobile version of their website and they now want to get the word out to their online footprint.  Essentially, their brand is well supported so the main purpose of the marketing is to announce the product launch.  Obviously, quantity is very important.  The larger the reach will increase your branding options.   In this instance, quantity might be more important over quality.  However, I know what you are thinking.  The organization would obviously want their customers to start using their mobile site.  So, the quality of the visit might be just as important as the quantity.  Quantity can come later, if the strategy is just to announce the mobile release.  For now, quantity means more eyes on your product.

These are two very small examples, but I hope it get’s your brain thinking about different scenarios.  Every organization needs to have strong brand recognition, at the same time have a high volume of customers.  In the digital realm, quality is key.  If no one is visiting your site, no one will recognize your brand.

There are so many different explanations and scenarios I can give when talking about conversions, but it will be a lot clearer to just stay simple.  Keep it simple stupid!  Lets look at an organization looking to gain more registered users through paid keyword advertising (pay-per-click).  Prior to setting up a campaign, it is important for the organization to determine at what cost per conversion will result in the highest return on investment.  Say the average customer spends $30 on your website. At the end of the month, your online marketing manager reports to you that for every $60 spent on pay-per-click yields one online sale; thus your online cost per conversion is $60.  If the average customer spends half that amount…well you do the math. In order for this companies online marketing to be profitable, it must have a lower cost per conversion.  There are several ways to lower a companies cost per conversion, but that is a later discussion.

So what do you do if you really don’t have a particular dollar value as a conversion benchmark?  What if you are not promoting an eCommerce website?  Defining value can be difficult when there really isn’t an actual dollar value.   Without a value, it will be important to set a goal.  Goal’s help identify improvement.  For example, an organization might want to focus on increasing their email subscription base.  Well, set a goal.  We want “x” number of email subscriptions by the end of this year.  If the average number of subscription conversions cost $$ each month, how much will it cost to reach that goal?  It’s simple budgeting.  Stay within your budget in order to reach your goal.  Utilizing the marketing budget as a substitution will serve the same purpose.   This can help track the conversion return as it pertains to increasing email subscriptions.  Simple.

Too many times, companies forget to keep a close eye on their conversion cost.  It the only way to truly identify proper online marketing return.  The key term here being goal.  If an organization doesn’t have an online marketing goal in mind, tracking conversion ROI will be very difficult.  Actually, it will be pointless.  I feel funny even bringing it up, but there are companies out there that do not practice this.  Numbers can be fun, especially when understood.

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1.  Start with a keyword strategy for your particular landing page.  What is the primary theme surrounding your landing page?  For example, if you our landing page is about eating healthy, your keyword strategy would be “eating healthy.”

2. Research keywords using your keyword strategy.  This step is crucial to the success of you’re your campaign.  Why?  In some cases the terms that are branded well in house are not the terms your potential customers would be searching for.  For example, your company has a new product that has been deemed a “greener” solution for the environment.  Green pest control.  Well that is fantastic so on your website you build a landing page that talks all about this new “green” product that is safe yet effective.  However, you then perform some keyword research and find out that “green” is not what customers are searching for.  They are searching the term “natural” pest control, which means they will never find you site.

3. Once a key phrase strategy is identified it is important to perform keyword research prior to developing site content.  There are a number of free keyword research tools on the web.  Click here and try Google’s free keyword research tool to help you get started.  For the sake of this conversation, I used Google’s Keyword research tool for the phrase “eat healthy” which resulted in over 100 key phrases searched.  The top five heavily search keyphrases identified were: “what is eating healthy”, “healthy eating”, “what is healthy eating”, “healthy eating”, “why healthy eating”, “about eating healthy.”  These are some of the phrases you want to incorporate into your landing page.  These could be the five headers on your page, meaning each one wrapped inside an <h> tag.  I’ll save tags for another day, but I think you get the gist.

4. Using your identified keyword phrases and or keywords, now you can write the content of your landing page.  The more these phrases come up in the body of your page, the more relevant and creditable search engines will identify your page.  A good rule of thumb is to write natural copy, focused on one subject, using singular, plural, similar (in meaning) and related (associated with) keywords.  Try not to jumble your page with too many topics.  Always keep in mind the keyword / key phrase strategy of your page.

5. Place primary keywords phrases and or keywords into:

• Page title tag
• Description tag
• Headlines
• Sub-headlines
• Internal outbound links (to other pages on your site)
• External outbound links (to other sites)
• Image names and alt tags
• Internal inbound links from related pages and your home page
• External inbound links from other sites

It doesn’t take much to improve the relevancy of your landing page and help build more credibility within the search engines.  What did I outline for you, five basic steps? If you apply these basic building blocks each time you create a landing page, your organic ranking within the search engines will improve.