OneSearch

I just came across a great article about landing page optimization and some rules to follow when trying to optimize your landing pages. These are great things to keep in mind while optimizing and if you follow these rules, you should see an increase in the number of conversions you receive. This article discusses seven things to keep in mind—seven “rules” if you will. There are obviously many more than seven things to do when looking at what matters and what’s important on your landing page, but this is a great start. These basic elements have been used consistently in landing page optimization and have shown great results.

1. Your headline should be very clear and direct.
The headline is the first thing your user will see once getting to your landing page. You never get a second chance to make a first impression, right? Same holds true in the online world. Your headline should be a simple statement of what your user is trying to accomplish. The goal is to get the user to understand that the rest of the content on that page is in line with completing their desired goal.

2. Whitespace has a high value.
Your user isn’t going to read all of the text on your web page. They are going to scan the text and take away only certain elements that they need to decide whether or not the page is relevant to what they are looking for. Having a clean use of space allows them to scan and absorb the key messages.

3. Your Value Proposition Should be Delivered Quickly and Directly.
If your user cannot easily and quickly understand what your product or service is and the benefits of them, they will quickly bounce from your site. Your value proposition should state why would they want to buy from you over any of your competitors. Keep them limited to three or four bullet points and don’t mince words. Be direct and to the point.

4. Have a Persuasive Message Directly Above the Call to Action.
This is your chance to persuade your user into buying your product or service. Your landing page is sort of like an online salesman. You want to make sure you have one final strong persuasive message above the call to action.

5. Large Red Buttons Help.
It’s been found that red buttons can by themselves raise your conversion rate. Green also works, but if there is a color that wins, it’s red. Size matter, too. You want to make sure your users notice where the button is when they land on your page.

6. Your Call to Action Copy Matters.
It’s been found that some call to actions can be harmful to your conversion rate. Words like “Buy,” “Subscribe,” or “Add to Cart” seem to sometimes scare users into committing when they aren’t yet ready to. This can produce lower conversion rates. Try using softer calls to action like “Try it Now.” “Try it” infers a “risk free” trial, so it actually ends up improving conversions by getting more users into the funnel.

7. Trust and Security Icons are Incredibly Persuasive
Brand, trust and security icons as well as testimonials deliver confidence messages that can have a tremendous impact on conversion. Users on even the largest web sites are influenced by seeing these images and messages on a web site. Having logos like eTrust, HackerFree, and Better Business Bureau really help to improve your conversion rates.

Great things to keep in mind when trying to optimize your landing pages!

This has been a question that many business owners have been struggling with—should they allow their employees to be using social media outlets at work? While your first reaction may be to not allow it, there are certainly many potential benefits to allowing it.

A recent survey done by FaceTime Communications which asked over 500 of their employees about the social media habits at work found that 79% of their workers used LinkedIn, Facebook, or YouTube while at work.

The reasons they gave for using it? 54% said professional networking, 52% said they were doing research, and another 52% stated they were using it to learn about their colleagues.

82% stated that they use social media for personal reasons, and 51% of their workers stated that they use social networks at least once a day while at work.

The benefits of allowing social media in the workplace:
• Good way to network with other professionals
• Cost-effective way to try and make a name for yourself in your specific business
• Brand Awareness—the more you are networking within communities such as YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, the more your brand is being exposed to other people. This can help keep your brand fresh and relevant in the minds of users in these communities

The cons of allowing social media in the workplace:
• It can lead to a decrease in productivity at work
• Can business owners afford to have their employees spend hours on networking that may not ever deliver any measurable results?
• Hard to determine on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn if the user is actually promoting their company or themselves.
• Can pose a security threat to your company

So, you see, there are many different factors that come into play here when figuring out whether or not social media should have a place at the office. Who is using it? What impact will it have? Which social networking sites are being used? Different sites offer different elements that might be more useful to your particular business.
Much to think about!

What it comes down to is each business owner or manager deciding about what they are trying to achieve. If this can be achieved using social media outlets, they have to determine if it’s worth it to them in terms of money and time. It’s not going to be a perfect fit for all companies. It will take time and effort to get really good results, so is it worth it for them?

Bruce Clay, the president of Bruce Clay, Inc. was recently at PubCon in Las Vegas where he spoke at a session entitled “Top-Shelf Organic SEO.” In this session, he discussed the future of SEO as search engines evolve into more modern ranking methods through more personalized search results.

Bruce Clay claimed that “ranking is dead” because different people who search for the same term will end up with different search results based on their prior search history.

His specific example was three different people searching for “java.” One person may be looking for programming, one is looking for coffee, and one is looking for travel information. In theory, personal search will know that and provide results accordingly.

“We can’t search for any term and look at rankings because I can get different results than you for exactly the same query. So that’s going to change a lot,” he says. It doesn’t matter if you’re logged into Google or not. Bruce believes that Google personalized results will be coming out within the first quarter of next year.

Bruce Clay states that going forward from now on, SEOs are going to have to looking at measuring traffic, bounce rates, actions, and will have to look at analytics. Questions that need to be asked are:

- Did I get the conversion I was after?

- Did I really deliver on the promise of SEO?

He thinks that in the first six months of 2009, we will see a lot more that traffic is all that really matters and ranking is dead.
Bruce says, “If you’re not ready for it as an SEO, you’re gonna lose.”

The next day, Matt Cutts of Google responsed to Bruce Clay’s assertions.
Matt does not completely agree with Bruce that “ranking is dead” but he does say that he doesn’t think it is as important as it once was.

Cutts said, “I’m not sure I would say ranking is dead but it’s not as important as it used to be. The fact is the smart SEOs are not just necessarily looking at the rankings. They are looking at conversion, they are looking at their server log. It’s great if you’re ranking for a phrase but unless that leads to sales that doesn’t help you very much.”

“The challenge is not to pay so much attention to ranking, pay attention to traffic, pay attention to conversions and keep building good content and don’t worry about ‘can I show people that I rank number one for my trophy phrase.’”

“Universal is really useful and I think it will continue to expand and what that means in 2009 you can’t just think of yourself as an SEO,” said Cutts.

“SEOs are starting to embrace the fact that they are marketers. It’s a broader spectrum. You have to think about how you build buzz, how do you get loyal customers, how do you optimize your ROI. All those different things and that can include how do I make good videos, do I have a book, things like that.”

“Black Hat SEO is getting a little more malicious. In a world where Black Hat is moving towards really illegal things as an SEO you have to decide your risk tolerance and do I really want to try to compete with people who are doing illegal stuff or do I want to make a long term site that’s gonna stand the test of time.”

2009 should be an interesting year.

Google has changed how they compute Quality Score.

Here are the basic changes from an article that I read about it:

• Quality Score is no longer keyword static, but instead it will vary by user query, geotargeting, etc.

• The “inactive for search” distinction has now gone away. Now every ad that is not paused has the chance to be served, even if in practice low-quality score, low-bid ads never will have the chance

• The “minimum bid” metric has been replaced by the “First page bid” metric

This is what Google had to say about changing “minimum bid” to “first page bid”:

“We’re replacing minimum bids with a new, more meaningful metric: first page bids. First page bids are an estimate of the bid it would take for your ad to reach the first page of search results on Google web search. They’re based on the exact match version of the keyword, the ad’s Quality Score, and current advertiser competition on that keyword. Based on your feedback, we learned that knowing your minimum bid wasn’t always helpful in getting the ad placement you wanted, so we hope that first page bids will give you better guidance on how to achieve your advertising goals.”

Many advertisers will definitely find the first-page-bid (FPB) metric much more helpful than the minimum-bid metric. First Page Bid also helps to encourage positional bidding.

The outcome of all this means that first page bids will escalate the bidding wars—since there are more advertisers wanting the page location than there are page 1 slots available.

The impact is not a huge one, as most major advertisers who are competing on high-cost high-volume “head” keywords have a sense of the bidding landscape, and they also have a pretty good sense of the approximate cost of various ranges on the page. Increasing the emphasis on B2P will most likely drive some modest increases on prices for the “tail” term clicks, as scores of smaller advertisers turn to FPB for help and guidance.

The article states that focusing too much on your competitors leads to irrational bidding. We can’t assume that our competitors have the same goals or budgets as we do, and as PPC advertisers, we need to be aware of this. We can’t even assume that our competitors are bidding rationally in certain keyword verticals. Blindly following competitors’ bids can lead you off the cliff.

So, advertisers have a choice to face:

1. Bid your keywords to position—and let the economics work out how they will (“Staying on page one is quite expensive, and we’re losing money there”),
or

2. Bid your keywords to economics–and let the positions work out how they will (“We don’t want to lose money on keyword “X” and so we can’t afford to be listed on page one.”)

Interesting stuff to think about….

I have just finished reading a great article about the importance of title tags on your website’s home page. Making some small, simple improvements is a quick way to improve the site ranking for your local business.
The title tags are so important because it is the text within these tags that the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN use to determine what keywords are relevant to a page. Title tags are also on of the most commonly neglected parts of a site design. Having good title tags can get your site ranked at the top of the search results for people searching for you and your business, and having a bad one can leave you out in the cold!

The search engines have moved more towards showing preference to titles that match closer with what users are looking for, so having your title tag coincide with common query formats, you will most likely receive many more referrals from customers.

Simply putting the name of your local business in the title tag is not a good idea and can no doubt result in many lost opportunities.

Typically, there are two formats that searchers will use when they’re looking for a local business — (1) they will search by the business name and location, and (2) they will search by the business type and location. So, since most users are seeking local businesses by the business name and the category, it’s extremely important to include all three of these in your title tags.
For example:
“Pet Supplies: Kelley’s Pet Shop, Cleveland, Ohio.” “A Spanish Restaurant: Mallorca, New York City”
This title would more closely match user searches for “pet shops in cleveland” and “spanish restaurants in new york city”.

When trying to determine what business type to use, it’s important to use the words that you think people will most likely by typing into the search engines. For example, if you are searching for a business in the yellow pages, it may be listed under “Plumbing Contractors”, but most users would most likely just be searching for “plumbers.” So it’s good to keep that in mind.

This article suggests some easy guidelines for your title tags. They are:

1. Your homepage title tag should be a combination that includes the Business Name, the Business Type, and the Locality.
2. Should the name of your business come first or the type of business? The first thing you should list is the term that users will be seeking most. Display your name first if the majority of your business comes from existing clientele, or if you’re located in a small town where most people already know you. Display your type of business first if you are trying to attract more new customers.
3. The shorter the better. Try to avoid throwing in too many terms.
4. Your title tags should be different for every page on your site. Your homepage should include the entire name, including the business type. The rest of the pages should use just the business name combined with the name of the individual page on the rest. Ex: “Mallora Restaurant: Menu”, “Mallorca Restaurant: About Us”, “Mallorca Restaurant: Map & Directions”, “Mallorca Restaurant: Contact Us”.
5. Sometimes a business will carry a certain product that users may be looking for just as much as the business type. If you can include these product keywords in an effective way and without making your title too long, you should do so. Examples: “Rachel’s BMW Car Dealer in Dallas.”
6. Most businesses need to use their city name for the locality name, but there may be times when a nickname would be more commonly be typed in by the user seeking a business in that location. “Indy”, for instance, or “Nob Hill Neighborhood”. In New York, users have increasingly moved away from typing in “new york city” in favor of the shorter “nyc”.
7. Keep nonessential terms out of the title. Also, avoid special symbols such as trademark characters or copyright characters. Those can be shown somewhere else on your site. Having too many unnecessary terms and content in your titles will hinder your titles from matching exactly with a user’s query in the search engine.
8. Do not include street addresses in your titles. Some optimization experts have recommended this, but it does not help in most cases. Users do not tend to be looking for a specific address when searching for a business. So those extra words just distract the search engines from determining the main idea of the site.
Forming good title tags for local business websites is very important to improve your site’s ranking, and it’s easy to do. Doing this can result in a significant improvement in your business. Try it out!

I just read a column about paid search from Search Engine Land. The article asks you to think about paid search and how you would describe it.

In paid search, every minute counts. Every day, every hour, every minute matters and costs money. It forces search marketers to take advantage of everything they can—ad copy being among the most important. Is your ad copy being fully capitalized on? If not, this article suggests “kicking it up a notch.”

Ad copy is the most important aspect of paid search. Once you’ve got it down and mastered, you’re good to go. If you don’t have it down pat and you fumble it, your competitors could be given the advantage over you—definitely not what you want!

Many search marketers seem to rush into ad copy and come up with text that is lacking—even though they know how important it is. Why do they do this, you ask? Do we really know? Maybe it’s because they feel comfortable and at ease using the medium, and they are just trying to get something done and “out there.”
Whatever the reason is for the rush to come up with ad copy—the result is that “sub par ad copy can only lead to one thing: sub par campaign performance.”

But not only can it affect your campaign performance, poor ad copy can also affect your quality score which can end up costing you more money.

Nowadays the relevance of your landing page and ad copy, along with the click through rate of your ad all factor in to your quality score (determined by whatever engine you are using). This can affect quite dramatically how your campaign performs, and in the end drive your costs up.

So, it’s important—now more than ever—to get your ad copy right!

Some tips the articles offers to help improve your ad copy:

1. Define your audience. As relevance plays a huge role in how well your paid search campaign performs, it is imperative to know and define your audience and what language they speak. Consider that you have to map the keywords you have chosen to the landing page you have created, and then create ad copy that maps the two together. Make sure you choose the most relevant keywords possible. Use relevancy as your ultimate judge on whether or not to target a keyword if you are ever in doubt.

2. It is critical that your keyword, messaging, and goal are aligned. Make sure that your keywords are in line with your message, and that it is aligned with the buying cycle of your prospects.

3. Leverage other channels. Look beyond search to improve your ad copy. Choose the keywords, copy, and messaging that generate the best response rates, and then use them in all your online channels. If you are finding that some keywords or messaging are resonating better with your audience in your paid search campaign, work that into your offline messaging, as research shows offline channels are a powerful driver of search. Leveraging keywords and messaging from other channels will provide help improve your quality score and ensure consistent messaging.

4. Test and refine. Testing is vital to improving your ad copy, so you need to have a strong and sound testing and refinement plan in place. There are several tools available to help with testing. But whatever test you choose to use—A/B testing or multivariate testing—make sure you have appropriate control groups set up to compare against, and create a testing calendar. Testing quickly and your ability to act on the results can have an enormous impact on how well your campaign performs.

Many factors can affect how well your paid search campaign performs, but ad copy is at the top of that list. You should be fully capitalizing on it—especially in today’s super-competitive marketplace. Check out your ad copy in your campaigns and figure out whether yours needs to be “kicked up a notch.” It could help you immensely.

Good stuff!!

SES Toronto was June 16-18, and while I didn’t attend, I have been reading up some of the reviews and feedback from the event. I found a review of SES Toronto by Andrew Goodman. In his review, he discusses things that he learned during the conference.
Some questions that were discussed while putting this year’s program together were “are many of the core search marketing tactics old and tired? Is a new approach needed? Should the focus on search be abandoned in favor of Web 2.0—with more emphasis on social media?
Andrew Goodman’s main point is that the fundamentals still really work. The “core stuff works” and has tremendously evolved, and it is still extremely important. He said that session after session proved without fail that we are underinvesting in and underestimating the enormous power of the core search tactics—linking campaigns, content strategies, relevant analytics, paid search, conversion optimization, etc.
He’s basically saying not to quit the traditional search engine optimization techniques that really work in favor of the Web 2.0 buzz that’s been floating around lately. Many search marketers are jumping ship and experimenting with social media—Facebook, MySpace, YouTube videos, etc. Goodman says in his article, “Building the marketing sprinkles on top of your meatball sundae won’t get customers into the basic navigation towards key objectives.” This isn’t to dismiss the huge influence of social media, but it probably won’t get conversions from your customers the way a properly optimized web site would. There’s a reason these tactics have stood the test of time.—they work! Don’t discount proven techniques.
Sounds like SES Toronto was a really great experience with much offered and much learned. Hopefully, I get to attend this conference next year! 

Hello. I just finished reading a very interesting article about Google’s AdWords and the 2008 presidential election. This election year, more than any other previous election in history, search advertising will influence the vote. Some even say that spending on ads will either make or break the election.
Peter Greenberger, Google’s political ad man was interviewed about this presidential election’s tie to paid search ads. He believes that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was actually hurt by failing to consitently use search advertising through the primary season. He also believes that the success of both Barack Obama and John McCain winning the primaries for their respective parties was due in large part to savvy search advertising. The McCain and Obama campaigns have driven users looking for information about the candidates to their official Web sites through sponsered links. Once these users are taken to the official campaign Web sites, they donate money, volunteer, or register for newsletters.
So the two candidates for president are set to spend more money on search advertising, than any other political campaign in history.
Every presidential candidate in the 2008 primary election season, on the left and on the right, used Google AdWords. Certain candidates understood the importance sooner and began using it much earlier than others, but they all used it. Obama was very early to start this stategy. He stuck with it and was able to build a huge list of supporters. Hillary Clinton’s campaign started it later on in the season, and ending up cutting it off during the last two quarters of 2007, during which time both Obama and McCain’s campaign continued to use Google AdWords. The Clinton campaign then decided to relaunch their AdWords campaign once the primaries were already well underway. This, argues Greenberger, had a huge effect on how many smaller donors they could count on. He says they “had already dug themselves into a huge hole.” Clinton stopped and started her AdWords campaign several times before she really realized the benefits of it. By that time, could it have been too late? Both McCain and Obama understood early on the importance of using paid search ads. It is not a coincidence that the two savviest presidential campaigns with Google have won the primaries for the party and are now the candidates for President of the United States.
Even when John McCain’s campaign seemed over and during his darkest days, his campaign continued to spend money on Google Adwords. Even when the polls showed that interest in his campaign had slowed, he was still ready to capture interest through paid search ads.
Both candidates have used a very aggressive keyword strategy. There has been a deliberate attempt to geo-target and expand the electorate. Obama’s campaign used geo-targeting to users in Texas during the Texas primary. When users searched for voter information, they were shown an Obama ad. Greenberger believes that this stategy will be used often during the general election, especially in the swing states.
It’s going to very interesting to watch!!

I just came across this article on searchengineland.com this morning on landing pages, and since I just attended a conference on landing page optimization last week, I found it quite interesting and thought I would write about it a little here. It talked about how most landing pages are created and managed like it is part of the web site alone, when in actuality it should be thought of as a part of your web site AND as a part of your ads. So people should think of their landing pages as little of both instead of one or the other. This doesn’t always happen, but there should be some kind collaboration between the people creating the landing pages and the people creating the ads. This way there is some sort of connection between what people see in an ad and what they see after the click. The problem occurs when ads are developed and created at a much faster rate than new landing pages are developed. So companies have many ad creatives but a minimal number of landing pages. Your thinking of landing pages should be shifted to be more a part of your advertising. This article suggests changing your perspective from site landing pages to advertising landing pages. When you create your ads, you create your pages–you try to match them very closely so the ad placements now correspond to the landing pages. This way, the ad is view as the first step of the experience-one step in a sequence that has been carefully designed and executed. A good example given is snail mail. The outside envelope has limited creative space, just like text ads do. The goal of the envelope is to get you to look inside–this is sort of the equivalent of getting the click. The outside envelope and inside envelope are most usually designed together. They are part of the same marketing objective. If landing pages are thought of this way, building them as part of the advertising, this can help with your online marketing. The people creating and executing your ads ideally should be have the power to create, test, and analyze your landing pages. The goal being to launch a new landing page as easily as creating a new Google Adwords ad. Maintaining a high brand of standards in your landing pages is important, as well as making it quick and easy for a marketer, not a designer, to produce a quality landing page experience. Changing your thinking for site landing pages to advertising landing pages is a new way to think of both your landing pages and your advertising. Interesting stuff!

On another note, we want to congratulate our co-worker, Karen, who just gave birth to beautiful twin baby boys on Monday night. Congratulations, Karen!!!

Hey-I just wanted to write a quick blog about my recent trip to Jacksonville, Florida. I attended a workshop on landing page optimization put on by MarketingSherpa. It was a day and a half conference (all day Monday and half a day on Tuesday). I’m not going to lie–it was a LONG day on Monday with a ton of information thrown at us, but it was such great information that it was well worth it. I learned so much in a day and a half! The team from MarketingSherpa and Marketing Experiments that put on this workshop were so knowledgeable, informative, and helpful–they really made sure everyone was understanding what they were teaching, and if people weren’t, they went back over it. There were always people walking around to help someone with their own landing pages, if needed. Some brave people asked to have their landing pages optimized in front of the group, so we worked on live optimization of several landing pages together. They gave out such great information–of just changing one or two things on their pages–that could help increase ROI significantly.
We even had a test at the end of the workshop (I passed! WOOHOO!!) and became certified as a landing page optimization expert!
So even though this was a long day and half and a lot of work, it was so worth it, and i would recommend this conference to anyone who wants to learn how to improve their landing pages and in turn increase your revenue stream. It was fun, too!