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Don’t Just Scroll Through, Do Something: Conversion Rate Optimization and How To Increase Client Interaction

Don’t Just Scroll Through, Do Something: Conversion Rate Optimization and How To Increase Client Interaction

So, you’ve optimized your website, and you’re finally showing up in search results. Clients are finding you organically via Google, and your traffic is up almost every month. It’s great, right?

Sure, it’s great. In fact, it’s awesome that your website is more visible and that your target clientele is finding you. But now what? Sure, traffic is great, but if client’s aren’t booking, then what’s the point, right?

I know, I know. There’s a lot of information out there on how to get clients TO your website, which is what search engine optimization (SEO) is all about. However, once potential clients have gotten to your website, how do we get them to interact with it?

That’s where conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes in.  According to Moz, conversion rate optimization “is the systematic process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action — be that filling out a form, becoming customers, or otherwise.” In more practical terms, it’s essentially taking a potential client by the hand and guiding them down a path that gets them to do what you want them to do.

And no—I’m not just talking about booking.

You know as well as I do that in order to book, potential clients need to first trust you, your brand, and your staying power. We’ve all read some sort of statistics regarding advertisements, and how it can take a potential client upwards of seven times simply seeing an ad before clicking on it and deciding to book. So really, CRO only works if you have other marketing ideas and strategies outside of simply existing on the internet and being desirable. Having a marketing strategy with multiple points of “sale” makes the “conversion” portion of “CRO” happen.

So, what’s a conversion?

A conversion is simply a general term for a visitor completing a goal that your website has. Websites can have multiple goals:

  • Signing up for a mailing list
  • Reading a blog post
  • Filling out a booking form
  • Signing up for other paywalled accounts you may have, like OnlyFans
  • Calling you on NiteFlirt/texting you on SextPanther
  • Emailing you to ask a question or pre-screen

So, what’s a conversion rate and how do we calculate it?

Your site’s conversion rate is the number of times a user completes a goal divided by the total traffic to your site. Note that depending on the site, a user may or may not be able to convert each time they visit a site. You can only sign up for a mailing list once, and most people don’t fill out your booking form again once they’ve become a client.

To keep it simple, let’s imagine we own a lingerie website called Leggy Ladies. Someone who visits this website could purchase something (a conversion) each time they go to the website. If someone visits the website three times, that’s three opportunities to get them to convert.

 

A potential buyer visits Leggy Ladies three times:

  • First experience was getting a feel for the website and its products, and perhaps finding something they liked.
  • Second experience, the potential buyer buys some stockings. That’s a conversion!
  • Third experience, the buyer comes back to buy another set of stockings and a bra and panty set. Another conversion! Note that just because someone buys more than one thing, it’s still one conversion because it’s one unique order.

This buyer converted two out of the three times they visited the website. Two divided by three is .66666666666, so our conversion rate would be approximately 67% for this one single user.

If Leggy Ladies wanted to figure out this rate for its whole site, you’d divide the number of unique orders by the total number of sessions. If Leggy Ladies has 500 unique orders and 5000 visitors, their conversion rate would be 10%.

BUT ERIN. This example doesn’t apply to me at all, since essentially I can only make the initial sale (scoring a booking via my website) once.

Oh, don’t you fret! Here’s how we calculate CRO that’s more meaningful for our particular industry.

Let’s take the path of a potential client and see how that works for CRO:

  • Potential client comes to your website to check you out, look around, and see what you’re about. He doesn’t fill out your booking form, and leaves. This is obviously not a conversion.
  • The same client returns and decides to fill out your booking form. Conversion! Now, it’s THE ACT OF THE CLIENT FILLING OUT THE FORM that makes the conversion—however, we will assume that this is a good form/bookable client.
  • The same client returns after filling out your booking form/seeing you to read your blog posts, see your updated photos, and the like.

Since our client here can’t technically convert meaningfully more than once, we measure conversion rate by the number of unique users, not unique sessions. So in the case above, we have one unique user who filled out your booking form, which means we have a 100% conversion rate for your booking form. To expound on that, if you had twenty unique booking forms filled out and two hundred unique visitors, you’d have a 10% conversion rate.

The Benefits of CRO

I know. I know what you’re thinking. This is all a lot, and you’re not really sure why this is important to your website or web presence. You’re wondering why you should care about this and if it’s important or of any kind of benefit.

Let me tell you why this actually is beneficial to you, your website, and your business.

CRO enhances insight into your target market by finding the RIGHT clients for your business and eliminating the wrong ones.

CRO strategies allow you to find the exact language that speaks to your target market. Sure, more traffic to your website is great, but not if the people visiting aren’t converting.

CRO improves your potential clients’ experience with your website.

When your clients feel intelligent and confident using your website, they tend to stay longer and come back more frequently. CRO identifies what actually works for potential clients on your site. When you eliminate what doesn’t work and expand what does, you create a better experience for potential clients starting at your website. If your website experience is great, an experience with you must be too, right?

CRO enhances trust between you and your potential client.

Lots needs to happen in order for a potential client to share the information many of us require on our booking forms; clients need to trust you and your website. Your website is an avatar for you. As such, your website should be able to easily communicate important information to your potential client in the quickest and easiest way possible. CRO identifies these paths of least resistance. Clients who don’t identify with your content and can’t easily find important information will often write off websites (and therefore, you) as being unprofessional.

SO HOW DO I DO THIS?!

CRO is a data-driven process that’s based on concrete evidence; it’s not a guessing game in the least. You have to know who you’re optimizing your site for,  where within your website you need to optimize, and what within your website needs to be optimized.

I’m not going to lie. This is where shit gets intense. Figuring out CRO isn’t something that happens with the snap of a finger, and it’s far more complicated than SEO. The results, however, are worth the time and effort.

Gathering data can happen in two ways—either via gathering numbers in a structured manner, which is called quantitative data analysis, or via asking people questions about their behavior, which is called qualitative data analysis. You can’t just use one or the other. Quantitative data analysis identifies which people you should be asking your questions to. It does you no good to ask people who aren’t your potential clients questions about their user experience, after all.

You’ll need a way in which to gather information for the quantitative portion of your study, and  Google Analytics is the most commonly used tool for this particular job. It’s free, and relatively easy to set up, and if you’re doing SEO at all, you might already have an account set up.

Google Analytics can tell you a whole lot of really important information. It can tell you:

  • Where people enter your site (it’s not always the home page)
  • What pages and features they interact with the most
  • How the got to your site (did they get to you via twitter, organic search, or an ad)
  • What devices and browsers people are using
  • Where your audience is physically located
  • Where users leave your website

This information will help you identify where you need to focus your efforts. You’ll see the fastest and largest improvements by focusing on pages that clients value the most.

The qualitative analysis part is a bit trickier, simply because the data that’s most important comes from your ideal clients, and your ideal clients, ideally, have booked you. Your ideal client might not have booked you yet, though, so there are other ways to capture information there.

The easiest way to do this is via on-site surveys and asking your in-person clients questions on the sly. You can use Hotjar to help out with the survey portion; make a free account and survey away!

The in-person questions are always a little trickier, but I’ll often ask more amorphous questions like:

“What drew you to me?”

“Was there a deciding factor in wanting to meet me?”

Listen to how they respond when they talk about these things. What words to they use to describe you and your website? Sometimes they’ll even drop hints about why your website/writing/etc was compelling and better than other writing they’d read in the past.

Personally, almost all of my clients make comments concerning the usability of my website, my writing style, and my blog posts. When I need more info, I honestly just ask! Most of my clients are also business owners and understand the need for solid data.

Make sure to keep up with the blog for the next segment- tools for CRO!

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Why Landing Pages Matter

February 28, 2021 No Comments

Landing pages are awesome tools to drive engagement as stand-alone sites or in addition to your current website. Continue on to find out more!

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Websites SEO and Copywriting for Escorts.

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Introduction to Basic SEO Concepts for Escorts: Keywords, Content, Google Indexing, and Upload Speed

*This blog post is part of an ongoing series on how to use search engine optimization practices to rank your site better in google search results. It’s also based on the “SEO Crash Course sheet that’s been privately shared.*

Hi there! Chances are you’re here because you googled “SEO for escorts” or “web design for escorts.” You may also be here to learn more about the yayfosta hashtag and it’s implementation. Don’t fret- more posts about that will be on the way.

I’m writing this introduction to SEO for escorts because it’s apparent and clear that in order for the yayfosta hashtag to be used effectively, some education about basic SEO concepts needs to happen. We as escorts are losing advertising platforms, getting banned from platforms, and these platforms are losing functionality and don’t offer the same return on investment. Search engine optimization costs nothing, but does take time, so you your return on time investment might be rough to start with. But for those of us who can’t afford to hire an expert or simply want to DIY it, I’m here to help.

A little something about search engine optimization: it’s really like a black art, and try as they may, search engine optimization experts know quite a bit about how search engines (particularly Google) catalog sites, but the algorithm changes sometimes 2-3x daily. It can be kind of danuting to keep up. 

That being said, the topics outlined below should help you get a head start on getting your keywords, content, and google indexing together, and that stuff is the foundation for any further SEO you’ll do in the future.

Why SEO for Escorts often Fails:

Overall, there are several key issues as to why SEO for escorts can. The most common issues I see when doing website audits are these, and if you are writing your own content, you’re going to want to keep these things in mind:

Lack of SEO strategy

You have to have an SEO strategy. What are you trying to achieve with your SEO? Setbacks to achieving these goals include:

Thin content: Google wants to give users the most pertinent results to their searches. If your content isn’t better than the current first-page results for your chosen set of keywords, then you’ll need to adjust your content in order to get onto that coveted first page.

Image-based content: Search engines aren’t yet ready to understand images. Avoid adding text on your images, Google won’t be able to comprehend or index that content. This is why titles, attributes, and alt attributes for photos are so important on websites for our industry. Our websites are generally very image heavy, and not having your images in order can severely set back your ranking.

Poor on-page optimization:  Folks, markers like “header 1,” “header 2,” aren’t really for aesthetic purposed. Those markers are there to tell Google what part of your website it’s reading and how important that phrase/area is in the overall hierarchy of your website’s content. Using these incorrectly confuses Google. Also, your URL slugs (the part that comes after the main website domain name, ie (blackashconsulting.com/this-is-the-url-slug-area) need to make sense for the content covered on that page. Your slugs should also contain the keywords or keyword phrase you’re utilizing for that page, but more on keywords later.

Lack of keyword research: These are the words people actually type into the search bar when searching for things online, and this one is HUGE. What do you want your content to rank for? Ideally you should find keywords with low competition and decent volumes of traffic to optimize your pages for. The more specific your keywording, the better your ranking will be. But really, you need to THINK LIKE A CLIENT when choosing keywords and keyword phrases. 

People generally search geographically, so you’ll need to keep that in mind when listing keywords for yourself. For example, if you are a blonde in Atlanta, you’ll want to have “blonde Atlanta escort” as a keyword phrase in your SEO section and in the body of your website text. Here’s an in-text example: “if you’re looking for a blonde, stacked escort in Atlanta, you’ve come to the right place!”

To make keywords and SEO work, you have to think like a client. You have to actively go through the motions that a client would take in order to find you, and build your SEO plan around that. You can find the keywords that people are using to find you already as a place to start if you’re unsure of what keywords to use. You can do this by navigating to your google analytics account, clicking on “acquisition” in the left-side menu, clicking on “search console” and then clicking on “queries.” unfortunately, google no longer tells you a large percentage of your search queries, but this is most definitely a start.

Beware of keyword loading. Google does dock you significantly in rankings if you do this. An example of this is listing keywords and keyword phrases in the footer of your website. Google Penguin is an active algorithm that goes through and penalizes websites that break google’s webmaster guidelines. You can learn more about that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Penguin

For help with keywords, check out the following: https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/

Bad competition assessment: How commonly used are your keywords? What’s your niche? Is there a lot of competition in your niche? If so, you’re going to have to spend a lot more on SEO.

Here’s a basic checklist to make sure your SEO is ready to go:

  • Sign up for Google Analytics and Google Search Console, then index and crawl your site: Google is nothing more than a super fancy search program, and if it isn’t told that your website is available to be searched for, Google won’t return it when someone searches for you or keywords pertaining to you. You have to send up a signal to Google so that it pays attention to your website- this is why it’s important to submit your sitemap through google webmaster tools and have google fetch and crawl your site and it’s aliases. When you submit your site index and and tell google to fetch and crawl your site, Google then catalogs your website based on keywords it finds, along with something else called structured data/schema markup (this will be covered in another post). Once someone queries a search that utilizes some or all of your keywords, Google shows your website in the results based on how well your website matches the search.

  • Make sure each page or blog entry on your website targets one primary, and 1-2 secondary keywords or keyword phrases.

  • Include the targeted keywords in your content: both in headings and text

  • Make sure the title tag and the meta-description contain the primary keyword

  • The URL of your page should display the primary keyword (e.g. www.mysite.com/my-keyword). IF YOU CHANGE YOUR URL SLUG YOU HAVE TO DO A PERMANENT 301 REDIRECT. Depending on your website format, there will be different ways to do this. Google your website platform + 301 redirect.

  • When possible, add the keywords in the alt text of your images

  • Make sure one of the images’ filename contains the primary keyword (e.g. my-keyword-image.png)

  • Double check that your pages are set to be indexed by Google.

Website Loading Speed and other Backend Tech

Slow website loading times can absolutely mess with your rankings. Here are ways to improve your uptime speeds:

  • Resize the images to the correct dimensions; you don’t need big images if they will be displayed in small size. Mobile officially outranks desktop/laptop for website access, so you need a mobile-optimized site.

  • Optimize your images for the web, use TinyPng

  • Broken links upset Google, so make sure you don’t have any. Use http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/ to find them.

  • Link between your pages when possible, this will make it easy for search engines to discover new content.

  • Create a sitemap for your website. Submit it to Google Search Console. Wix and Squarespace have this built in. For WordPress, you’ll need a plugin like Yoast or Google sitemaps.

  • Submit your site to be indexed by Google. It’s been estimated that it can take 4 days to 4 weeks for Google to index a site.

SEO Guides for WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace

Ultimately, content is the most important thing when it comes to dealing with SEO, so any website can be optimized.

The following article is specifically for Yoast, the SEO program that’s utilized in WordPress website builds. However, the principles are the same across website platforms.

https://yoast.com/wordpress-seo/

Squarespace has its own SEO section, and filling that out accordingly helps with your placement significantly. These articles are incredibly helpful if you are attempting to update SEO on a Squarespace site:

http://searchtides.com/squarespace-seo/

https://www.stylefactoryproductions.com/blog/squarespace-seo

Here are some guides to help you improve your SEO with Wix. You may also want to consider purchasing add-on services and integrating them into your site.

https://www.websitetooltester.com/en/blog/wix-seo/

Other Concepts to Enhance Rankings:

Blogging– while clients may or may not read your blog, Google certainly does, and will increase your rankings for having a regularly updated one. Google favors websites that are frequently updated, and blog posts count as website updates. Not to mention, you can use the in-body text of the blog as well as  tags and categories to sneak in keywords without keyword loading.

Updating your website– The more you update your website, the better. Changing out photos, editing text, changing background colors, whatever. Update your website. Whenever you do major overhauls, you should re-index and re-crawl your website with Google so that it knows your site has been updated. Google will do this on its own, but doing it yourself is faster. Google is known for taking its sweet time with reindexing updated websites.

Linkbacks– Google LOVES linkbacks to other high-quality websites with external links as well. So make sure to link to your friends, any sites that link to you (like Eros, Slixa, Twitter, basically any site that has your web address on it) and make sure your friends link back to you as well. Lots of folks accomplish this through the use of a “friends” page, or through banners for ad sites.

Photo Descriptions: Adding descriptions to your photos,both in headers and in galleries (or anywhere on your site) will give Google additional information to crawl and also help with your site rankings.

That concludes the basics! Next I’ll be discussing structured data/schema markup and how you can use this to rank better.

Happy optimizing!

Erin

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#NayFOSTA, a Grassroots SEO Project

Escort Website Marketing and Design

FOSTA, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, may have originally began with it’s heart in the right place. I don’t think it’s far-fetched to say that we, as non-trafficked individuals, find it appalling and abhorrent that anyone would coerce anyone else into selling services they don’t want to sell. #nayfosta

We can all agree that people who are working in this industry against their own wills should be helped. They should be aided. And perhaps in conversations prior to the actual legislation finalization, this is what those lawmakers intended. #nayfosta

However, due to the vague language of FOSTA, there are very real and very dangerous impacts that those of us working of our own volition are dealing with. Those of us who rely and depend on this work to feed ourselves, house our families, pay our bills, and live life as best we can under capitalism. For those of us who make a willing living via sex work, FOSTA has been devastating. It’s made access to advertising platforms a nightmare, sent people who were safely working indoors back to the streets, and forced sex workers to make decisions that shouldn’t have to be made. 

Sex work is real work. Sex work is a profession. Sex work can even, for some, be a calling. 

What I’m asking here is no small feat. It will require work and effort on a part of the entire sex work community, both clients and providers alike. It will take work, but if we do this correctly, we have the potential to change the way we engage with one another online forever. This is not a catch-all solution; no solution is. But what this solution provides is the democratization of tech knowledge and search engine optimization theories that are accessible to other businesses and folks with know-how, and even accessible to us via social media. 

You hashtag Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr. Now it’s time to hashtag your website.

#NayFOSTA is a unique hashtag that no one has used yet. It’s not cataloged by any search engine, but it could be. Search engines catalog hashtags and return results on them for search queries.

We need to implement this system as a way to be seen. We can show that we support sex work as real work, as a real choice. FOSTA states that there’s no difference between someone working in the sex trade of their own volition, and one who’s trafficked. We know better.  People need to work, and this work would be made easier if we could facilitate easy connections between clients and providers. 

I’m asking you all to start hashtagging your websites with #NayFOSTA, preferably within a blog post. There will be other methodologies to do this too, mainly through website code and metadata, the systems of which I’ll explain as time goes on. By hashtagging your websites with #NayFOSTA, what you’re doing is including your website to be cataloged, by Google, for that hashtag.

If every escort in the world with a free or paid website did this, Google would become the biggest escort directory in the world. It would bypass advertising platforms. It would bypass any kind of advertising middle-man, and any website, be it free or paid, could utilize this hashtag.

Incorporating #NayFOSTA with other descriptor hashtags like #Chicago, #BBW, #Blonde, etcetera, would allow clients to further refine their searches and more easily find what they’re looking for.

This little bit of backend work, which I’m going to lead you through, will solve the main issue of what could have been a solid piece of legislation. #NayFOSTA will simultaneously support the anti-trafficking sentiments of the legislation, identify us as non-trafficked workers engaging in the market of our own volition, and make it so our clients can do the same.

I hope that you’ll join me in creating the movement for undertaking.