We’d like to draw your attention to a tried and tested model that’s still extremely relevant to SEO success, especially for e-commerce websites. It’s called the AIDA model, and it could explain why your organic search positions are not translating into sales fast enough.
AIDA is an acronym used by marketing types to describe the chain of events leading up to a purchase. The acronym was first used by E. St Elmo Lewis in 1898, he created a ‘funnel’ to show the various stages of a sales process demonstrating that a percentage of prospects are lost at each stage.
A is for Awareness
The first part of the sales process is to attract the customer and to make them aware of your brand, products or services. By optimising your websites pages individually with product specific keywords, your products and services will appear in a wider range of search engine results ensuring that relevant prospects can find your website.
When the prospect clicks through to your website, it is vital that your website makes a good first impression. Make sure that your website loads quickly, presents a professional image and is easy to use. Most visitors to a website have a question in mind or a product that they are looking for. Make it clear what you’re offering and tell them how they can get it quickly and easily!
I is for Interest
Once you’ve got their attention, you want to make sure that you gain their interest by demonstrating and focusing on the advantages & benefits of choosing your products or services over those of your competitors. Ways that you can gain interest are by highlighting special pricing, showing linked products and recommending relevant products. Anything you can do to make the process easier and to assist the customer will allow you to keep their interest for longer.
D is for Desire
By providing as much information as possible about the products and services you provide, showing reviews from other customers that have purchased the product and found it useful, or by creating a sense of urgency by showing an offer valid until date, you can help to convince customers that they want and desire the product or service and that it will satisfy their needs.
A is for Action
The most important part of the whole process is getting your customers to take action and to purchase your products or services. Having a well laid out website with lots of product information and cross selling are great for getting customers to this point. Now you need to make sure they can easily locate the shopping cart (add a link to every page!) and once they have, give them the choice between registering and guest checkout. Finally, make the payment process as simple as possible, cutting it all down to a single page if possible.
You will probably find that AIDA can be applied to almost any type of business or even a personal website. It doesn’t necessarily give you an instant solution, but it’s a fantastic way of thinking about how to take your visitors from the pages of Google’s search results all the way through to becoming your next happy customer. If you are in the process of identifying where your conversion problem lies, or you need help implementing some improvements to your website, get in touch with us now to discuss how we can help.
