Pre Sales Funnel Optimisation – What is it?

A typical sales/leads funnel is defined as starting from a website landing page. The driving concept behind a sales/leads funnel is having a clearly defined flow of traffic your website aims to drive users through. At each stage of the funnel you will typically see visitors drop out of the sales funnel and away from the final destination you are trying to drive them through. Sales funnel optimisation is using various tools (typically split tests and heatmaps) to minimise the “leakage” (bad word I know) along the path to your conversion page (where a lead is generated or a sale made).

What is commonly neglected is that through organic search many potential clients “leak” out of the funnel before they even get to your site. That is, a link to your website is shown to a potential website visitor, but often never clicked on. Of course the actual ranking of the google listing is hugely pertinent to the click through rate, however how compelling the actual page title and google snippet are also plays a major part.

For the sake of definitions, pre sales funnel optimisation is the process of optimising your organic google listings to maximise your click through rate. This article will outline a process to work on that.

How to increase your Click Through Rate

Below are some best practices that have been proven to increase organic search click through rates.

Configure your SERPS with rich snippet data

There have been numerous case studies showing that including rich snippet data in your SERPS (search engine results page) has a hugely positive impact on click through rates (not to mention actual position). Search Engine Land have written an excellent article on rich snippets and their effect on CTR.

Write compelling title and meta description tags

Your page titles should be written to include your primary target keyword phrases for the page in question and you need to be careful when you make changes to a page that ranks well for your target search phrases for that specific page. Meta descriptions however have a lot more leeway for experimentation. Hub Spot have written an article that we feel covers off best practice for your meta descriptions very well. Another excellent article on writing meta descriptions comes from Splash copywriters in the UK.

Test and Refine

Using our recommended measurement system below, you will be able to try out different meta descriptions and title combinations to see what provides the best click through rate. Start with your most important traffic driving landing pages to start and then work your way down.

Pre Sales Funnel Optimisation – How to Measure Effectiveness

Unfortunately it has been years since Google Analytics has provided organic keyword reporting and intelligence. However, thankfully the Google Search Console (Google Webmaster Tools) does. In fact it provides it in spades with average keyword position, number of impressions, total clicks and the click through rate (CTR).

The screen shot below (with keywords blanked out for privacy reasons) displays reporting on the above metrics. You can also filter by countries, pages and devices.

This reporting provides us with the tools to measure whether changes we have made to the page title, meta description and any rich snippet additions have provided an increase (or indeed a decrease) in our click through rates on our google organic search listings.

CAVEAT: Of course any changes in rank for each each keyword can have a huge effect on the click through rates and most certainly need to be taken into account.

Summary

The pre sales funnel for organic search is an often neglected optimisation area, but has the potential to provide a substantial increase in targeted organic traffic to your website. We hope the article above has provided you with some easy to take steps to improve this area of your sales funnel. Please do not hesitate to contact us should you have any questions.