Fast results need fast changes

Our battle plan for when a new client comes on board can be affected by a variety of factors when it comes to seeing the results of changes. From access to the site, or client speed of response, to how customers perceive user experience changes can all have an effect. Time really is money when it comes to making changes, so the quicker you can implement suggestions the better.

What I learned

• Plans and expectations don’t always marry
• You don’t know how Google or users will view changes
• Remove any choke points
• Ensure you can handle increased demand
• Fast implementation speeds up results

Transcript

Hey, welcome back Rankers. I just want to show you another client who’s just come on board. Been with use now for almost two months. I’m showing you this because it’s a story that we have with a lot of these clients when they’re coming on board. It’s like we can say, look, we can do all these things and this is what we expect. We don’t know how quickly your site will respond or how the users or your customers will respond to those changes and Google and everyone else and how they’ll respond to the changes. So you sort of take it step by step and the first month this client did … we came on board and I think at the end of June she had done $16,000. Once again it’s a start-up business. It’s been going maybe six to eight months, so we don’t know how much growth it has.

We have got no idea. All we’ve done is come in and said, “Look, this is what’s stopping people buying. Let’s fix all those things first and then we’ll see where we are.” So we’ve been doing a bit of that. There’s still a lot to do and you can see there that the Google paid traffic is up 28% but there’s only been an extra $200 dollars spent there. So it’s not like it’s a huge change to that. What has happened is a lot of the things on the site have made it easier for people to buy. And so they’re buying more easily now. Organic is up and 21% in revenue as well. So paid is taking a lot of that now. And you can see there she’s getting a lot from Facebook as well. But in that first six to eight weeks, that’s a really good start.

You know, because basically she’s nearly … well, she’s nearly doubled what she did or she has doubled …. oh not quite. So you know, that’s the growth pattern that we like to see. So this is a smaller client. I’ve got some bigger numbers we’ll be showing you soon as well from larger clients. And we’re sort of reluctant sometimes to take these ones on board because we don’t know whether you’re going to be able to handle maybe the, you know, the number of things, the getting the work done in a timely fashion if we’re not doing it and if you have to do it. Or if we have to wait for you to approve something. So all of these things, they’re extra demands on a small business owner. So typically something this size you go, well, hopefully it’ll be okay, but it’s going to depend on how much you can help us respond to things and give us access and all of these sorts of things.

So she’s obviously been great at it. So what we then do is just get down and do our job. Because every time you make these changes, whether it be SEO, whether it be ads, whether it be user experience, you require a certain amount of sessions afterwards to know what the result was from your change. And unless it’s purely a cosmetic change that you don’t really care what the result was, I don’t know why you’d think that, but every change needs to have a certain amount of sessions so you can get a measure or get a feel of how that change impacted the users sales and just the site generally.

So the quicker that the owner of the site can respond to things and getting these things done, the faster you get things done and see they fail or pass or whatever and you move onto the next thing. So … and that’s what’s happened in here. So we’ve done a normal walkthrough of what we do when we’ve rolled some of the things out. Certainly not all of them. But that sort of growth is heartening to see in a small business because that’s had a very large impact on their lives and they’re quite busy. And that’s it for this week’s show and we’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.

Jim

Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.