Search Clinic Blog news stories about online marketing

Dr Search- your search engine marketing efforts are no doubt doing a great job of getting visitors to your site, but turning these visitors into paying customers is a whole other story.

You need to ensure your website is in tip top shape to make it as easy as possible for visitors to purchase your products or services.

I recently stumbled upon a new blog “Conversation Marketing” which has a great article called “32 Tips to Make Online Customers Love You”.

I have pulled out some tips to share with you. Don’t worry; I have only included the top 8 tips here. If you would like to check out all the tips, top website tips- just click here.

1. Make sure your site loads in 3 to 4 seconds or less on a standard broadband connection. Your customers will thank you!
2. Use large type. Some of us aren’t as young as we used to be.
3. Make stuff easy to find. Clear product links, sensible categories and a good search engine on your site will all help.
4. Be secure. Your customers won’t thank you for security, but they’ll sure as heck curse you if you let someone make off with their credit card info.
5. Forget about cool. Just because you love the idea of a Flash based slide show using the best page turning techniques 2002 had to offer doesn’t mean your customers will.
6. Offer ways to stay connected. Let folks sign up for an email newsletter or subscribe to a latest news feed. Let them find you on Twitter. You’d be surprised how many folks appreciate that sort of thing.
7. Write scannable content. Use bullets and the like to break up the page. Have no more than 14 words on a line. Don’t make folks read 10 line paragraphs, because they won’t.
8. Have a friendly 404 page. Help customers find what they need, even if they did get your page URL wrong. Use a friendly 404 page, not the hideous default page that your server delivers.

Do you have your own tips to make your website attractive to new customers? The Search Clinic would love to hear them, please let us know.

Like buses, we now have two new search engines to consider. Last week I posted about the launch of Wolfram Alpha. Now low and behold we have the launch of Micorsoft's bing – The Decision Engine.

“Decision Engine?” You may wonder… well that’s how the marketing team down at Microsoft have decided to position the new search experience.

At the D7 conference, Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) debuted the new search engine to an expectant crowd. While the unveil was hardly a shock, the “decision engine” spin was what caught the attention of the audience.

The philosophy behind bing is summed up in this introduction snippet:

"The truth is you’ve evolved. It’s time search caught up. So we had an idea. Start over. And we did."

"We took a new approach to go beyond search to build what we call a decision engine. With a powerful set of intuitive tools on top of a world class search service, Bing will help you make smarter, faster decisions. We included features that deliver the best results, presented in a more organized way to simplify key tasks and help you make important decisions faster."

Bing will officially launch (which is expected to be 3rd June 2009) covering 4 decision areas:

* Shopping
* Travel
* Health
* Local Business Search

The launch of bing will come accompanied with a $80-$100 million advertising campaign which include TV, print and radio. In the same vein as Ask.com’s 2007 campaign, insiders suggest the campaign won't go after Google or Yahoo! directly, but rather question the state of current search in general.

While bing is still officially under wraps to the public, Microsoft have released several videos and documents to educate and build buzz on the discoverbing and decisionengine websites.

Here’s the product tour video, to wet your appetite about bing.

If you want to watch the other videos or get access to a range of bing related downloads (think toolbars, mobile versions, gadgets etc), head over to discoverbing.com

Once you’ve had a poke around, come back and share your thoughts. Do you think bing is the going to change search forever, or is it simply some clever Microsoft marketing hype?