5 Conversion & Experience Optimization Techniques You Can’t Overlook by Alexander Kesler #306

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebResults. I am Charles Lewis, your client results advocate. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast number 306. You would see that if you were actually watching this podcast instead of just listening. But, you know, we'll tell you how to do that in a little bit. As always, we have a tip from our previous podcast. And the tip is promote 1CTA and have prominent info displayed above the fold on landing pages. Anytime you're using a landing page, that means you want somebody to take a really specific action. So give them 1CTA, push them to take that 1 action, you have a higher chance for conversions. Conversions, alright. Please remember, we were filmed live here, or broadcasting live here in Houston, Texas. And we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers. And our mantra is... Do not be a douche. Don't be a douche. Hey, we've got a great article to discuss today. Man, go ahead and give a punch in the face to Alexander Kessler. He says, five conversion and experience optimization techniques that you can't afford to overlook. Five of them. So we'll dive in and hammer each five and see what we think about it. We've got lots to add to those. If you're in a position to have some sort of mobile device and maybe even a computer that enables you to tweet, what should they tweet? Well, first off, if you're watching, you know what the tweet is behind me. Hashtag SEO Podcast. This is number 306. Be sure to tag us in it, at BestSEOPodcast, at EWebResults, that way we can follow you back and do all of our social networking stuff. Alright, if this is the first time you've listened to the podcast, howdy. Welcome to the podcast. We're glad you joined this. Appreciate you for joining. We're going to get into some good information after the potatoes. We'll get into the meat. Side dishes

first. If you've listened to this podcast before, you know what is not coming next. We actually had 51 likes on one of our pages. Punch in the face to Daniel, our new content and marketing person who wrote awesome posts and it went viral. So, that's what's up. Punch in the face to Daniel. So, the way it normally works is we would describe to you how you could leave a review. If we get a review and more than 10 likes on any one of our social media platforms. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever it is. Then we'll skip it. We're skipping it today. What we will say is we'd like you to shike us. Yeah, shike us. Share and like everything we do. And the places that you can do that are, say, I don't know, YouTube.com slash. E-Web Results. Instagram.com slash. E-Web Results. Facebook.com slash. E-Web Results. Twitter.com slash. E-Web Results. All of those are places that you can shike us in some way or another. What else do we have? Hey, I got out of spot here. If you are a PHP genius or a WordPress guru, we're probably looking for you. Please submit an audio resume. Call us. 713-510-7846. We do have a free website analysis. You can get that free website analysis on our website. E-Web Results.com. You will find it. We make it quite easy to find. And we have a new look and feel. It's on the way. I've seen the mock-ups. We've been hammering it out internally. Yeah. I think you guys are going to be pleased. So, matter of fact, those who happen to go check out our site, look at it. Because just understand we're about to roll out a new one pretty soon. And I'll be coming back to you guys looking for some feedback. Absolutely. We got any AlgoCat today? We got AlgoCat today. We do. Yeah. Cataclysmic algorithm. This is huge. Like 9.7 Richter scale. This is big. It is time for the favorite segment of the show. The Algorithm Cataclysm. Oh, that special attack is

just arm's length. So, dig this. So, we already know about Panda, right? Right. And for those who don't recall or don't remember or don't know, Panda algorithm update was an update that Google rolled in specifically targeting low-quality pages. Pages that had thin content, duplicate content, bad content, and things of that nature. The Panda algorithm was purposed to get those type of pages out of the Google index. Right. Right. And then there was a lot of people who had bad content. Algorithm rolled out. They lost their ranking. They dropped off of the face of Google. Luckily, if they were able to fix that content issue by the time the next Panda refresh happened, then they got their ranking back. Well, Google took it a step further two weeks ago and officially made Panda part of the core ranking signal. Ongoing algorithm. So, now it's always running. Yep. What does that mean? That means for you, for us, and anybody else out there creating web content, make sure your content is not duplicated. Make sure that your content is original, relevant. Make sure that it's not thick, exactly, not thin pages. Make sure you have multiple types of media in that content when possible. Like, I don't know, six, seven, 800 words, videos, images, that sort of deal. So, that way, your pages won't be penalized. That way, you actually have a higher ranking. And more importantly, the people who find those pages can actually engage with you more. So, Panda is running full-time, fix your content. Nothing worse than landing on a page with thin content. You're like, okay, where else do I go? Exactly. Also drives bounces. All right. So, I do have a little bit of news. I just thought this was interesting. I think Obama passed a bill or something for $4 billion in funding for self-driving cars. So, pretty cool. That's pretty smart. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. It's coming. Yeah. Google working on it. Nissan working on it. These guys are already in development. Yeah. Let me, you know. Why

not? Support it. Yeah. And remember, a couple of podcasts ago, we talked about how Google was upset that California said all self-driving vehicles have to have the ability to control the vehicle. Mm-hmm. So, and Google was all upset about that. And it turns out their own data supports that they needed it. They said there were- Of course it did. Data doesn't last. Numbers never do. So, there were like, I don't know, some 13 incidences in all this time, right? So, it was a lot of time. It wouldn't have been that many accidents. But 13 times where the driver took control. So, some number of times- Just stop an accident. Well, just because they felt it was unsafe. Okay. And then they run analysis. So, they run, what are those? Some sort of- Scenarios. And in three of those cases, it would have caused an accident. Right? So- So, note to self. I think a couple of them- Vehicle meets live driver. They did say that a couple of them would have been- Two of them would have been cones, and some of the others would have been more serious. Yeah. Cone is there to implement what could be serious. So, I'm going to take that as all of them. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well- If you hit the cone, then that could have been a person. Let's put it this way. If they were all- Were just cones, I'm a little unsure about the ability to tell the difference between a cone and a short person or child. I just know cones. My daughter plays AAU ball. Yeah. You go around the cones. Yeah. You hit the cone, you start over. You start over. So, yeah. And this is just the last piece of news I got. You know, everybody's switching, one, to compact fluorescents, and then into LEDs, right? Yeah, yeah. Because they're so much more energy efficient. And it's so great that we have universities out there, because I would have said, ah, it's great efficiency. We don't need to do anything with it.

MIT has actually come out with- Of course it was MIT. Incandescents, of course, that are as efficient as LEDs. It's pretty amazing. Interesting. Pretty amazing stuff. Yep. Got some more marketing, internet marketing-related news. So, Periscope user? I've watched one. Not a Periscope user. Yeah, one. So, the issue- Hey, it's on my phone. Well, good. Twitter's on your phone, too, right? Yes. Okay, great. So, dig this. Periscope owned by Twitter, right? They- It's a streaming service that you can stream from your phone, for those who don't know. Well, the issue they had was that if you wanted to watch those streams, you had to go to the Periscope app to actually watch them. Right. Well, Twitter just infinitely increased the engagement by making those live Periscope streams available on your Twitter timeline. Wow. Yeah, it was necessary. Great power move, Twitter. Kudos to you for doing that. Smart. It was necessary. Yeah. Dig this. So, all my WordPress users out there, they just released 4.4.1, and they said it, immediate download recommended. It actually covers a security and maintenance release, which fixes the flaw that could allow a site to be compromised by a cross-site scripting vulnerability. Wow. Update WordPress. Yeah. You know the rules first. Back it up first. Make sure you're good. Then update it so you can be safe. Yep. Lastly, I kind of dig this. This is another Google Maps feature coming to Android. They're going to predict where you want to go next. So, think about if you have things saved. Like, on mine, I got eWebResult saved as work. I got my home address saved as home. Right. Mom's address saved as mom. Mom, yeah. Exactly. And so, what Android is going to do when you're using Maps, depending on where you're going, it will give you an alert with the notification, the traffic, and everything else for one of your saved destinations. Hey, it's going to take you 30 minutes to get home. Right. And go this way because there's traffic. That's kind of cool, Google. Nice. I just

don't like you kind of reading my mind a little bit. I got a notification. I think it was today because I had actually put the address in which said, I need to leave now to get there, which gave me enough time to get there. You know, I've been complaining. I set my defaults 10 minutes and sometimes I'm late because 10 minutes in Houston is not enough time to get there. It's like 30 minutes. Yeah. So, that's all my news. Cool. All right. So, we have a couple of reviews to read here, as we mentioned, and a couple of patiffs. So, we got one punch in the face who's actually here watching us right now. It's Mark Bratcher. Thank you for joining us today. Hopefully, you're having a good time. He is with awardsbyallstar.com. So, go check them out. I'm talking about high-end awards. High-end awards. It's not your dollar store participant trophy award. I'm talking like college game day, crystal ball, championship trophy. I'm talking, you know, Oscar caliber, you know, I really won this and I paid a lot of money for it trophy. Something you would actually put on your mantle, not just to appease your children. Something you probably won't pass around. Frankly, you just need to look at this. Yeah, you can't touch it. You can see with your eyes, not with your hands. So, for those people out there, you got an important client or somebody like that, you want to give them something of value, try a high-quality, high-luxury award. Awardsbyallstar.com. All right, so we got a couple of reviews here. The first one is actually from a client. He actually initiated this review. It wasn't a request. We obviously really regularly request our clients to give us one. I know, he did it himself. Yeah. It's Brian Gulland-Smith. First punch-in-the-face Brian Gulland-Smith. The Lone Star School of Music in all three locations out there in Austin. Yeah. And, of course, the review was, Five stars. It says, eWeb results can help grow your business. I could just end

there, right? Yeah, that's probably, that's tweet-worthy. I have been with them for over a year now, and our business has doubled in size. Chris, Charles, and the rest of the team did everything from build our website to build our SEO. I know nothing about online marketing or building your SEO, so I let them do everything. They are worth every penny. Our SEO is improving every week, and our online marketing is impressive. I just did an online marketing campaign on Friday, and for the past four days, our staff keeps asking me, what did they do? Yeah, we sent out a newsletter. Oh, yeah. Yeah, our phones have been ringing off the hook, and we are gaining new customers every day. We are now the fastest-growing music school in Austin, Texas. I can't wait to see what will happen in 2016. Boom, boom. Look, we got to push a little bit of credit onto Brian. He runs a great business. Brian, dude, this is an awesome dude. It's nothing as an agency. There's nothing like a dude with a business owner who's sharp, who understands what he wants, and more important, who has the information you need. What does that mean? A lot of times, we deal with companies, and we'll say, great, I just need some pictures. I need some content. I need this, and they, blah. He don't give you anything. That never happens. Well, he not only gives it to you, but asks you if you need anything else, and it's with that type of owner, we can perform and double his client, his whole company size in one year. Yeah. Awesome. Punch in the face to you, Brian. We appreciate your business. Thank you for the five-star review, and thank you for being a great customer. Next, we've got Bob Russell. This one is also five stars. This podcast is excellent. Start from the beginning, and by the time you reach 300, your site will be on the first page if you implement what these guys say. Did I mention? It's also good

entertainment. I am in A spot. The letter A. The A spot. Oh, the A spot. On maps. Local listing. On maps. On maps. And number one, organic. The proof is in the pudding. Bob Russell, punch in the face to you. Thank you so much. And I know that actually we've been going back and forth with him, kind of asking some advice and some ideas that he might have to help us. So, punch in the face to Bob. Let me get a couple of tips in the way. These are punches in the face. This one, both of these come from Twitter. This one goes to OptiWebMarketing. They're O-P-I-T-I-Web, M-K-T-I-N-G. They say, at E-WebStyle, no better way to spend 30 minutes listening right now on Stationary Bike. Hashtag SEO. Hashtag Web Marketing. Hashtag Podcast. Punch in the face to you, OptiWebMarketing. Obviously, you're probably an agency. Hit us up. Let me know what you're doing, what you're working on. Be glad to talk to you. And this other one comes from Stuart Sampson. He's at Stu Sampson. He says, first time I watch live, I listen regularly, though. Have fun, guys. I'm cool. You checked us out live. We are having fun. That's for you. All right. So, now we're ready to get into, that is the potatoes of the podcast. Yeah, that's the potatoes. Time to get into the meat and take it away, Chuck. Yeah, so. I'll be over here. I'm going to tweet once when your phone vibrates. Don't worry about it. No, it's you. So, this one goes to, punch in the face to Alexander Kessler and the good folks over at Search Engine Journal. He posted this article, Five Conversion and Experience Optimization Techniques You Can't Afford to Overlook. New term here. We've been calling it SEVO, which stands for Search Engine Visitor Optimization. Yeah. Now they got conversion optimization. He's bringing up a new one, experience optimization. Okay, yeah. Same concept. We started at SEVO, right? But the concept is the same and the concept is really understanding what people are

doing when they get to your site and how you can best control their experience. Matter of fact, he starts off by saying most experts and organizations are making a shift towards optimizing the experience of customers across all interactions with both, with the brand, both online and offline. He's absolutely right, people. You must understand the user experience associated with your site, right? So, for example, maybe an e-commerce site. How does that user experience look? They search. They click. They find what they're looking for. They add the cart. They check out, right? Kind of five steps, four or five, maybe even three if you're using some one-page checkout feature. But understand what that experience is. Maybe a service provider. And so, what do people do? They search. They find. They see if you provide that service. Maybe they fill out a form or schedule an appointment or whatever that is. But you must understand how people are engaging with your site, what's making them actually engage, what's making them bounce. And so, that way you can more effectively market to them. So, let's dig in. His first one, point number one, he says optimize across all touch points. All touch points. Let's hang out there for a minute. When you talk about all touch points, what does that mean? I don't know. Chris is using a tablet right now. That's a touch point. I had a phone. It's a monitor behind us. Right? So, these are different touch points. Touch points being how people engage with you. Down to the point where it could be also traditional marketing. If you perform a radio ad and that person hears that radio ad, that's a touch point. Maybe you're running a TV commercial and they see that commercial, guess what? That's a touch point. And so, make sure you optimize across all touch points. Why would you do that? Because everyone uses each touch point differently. So, for example, if this is a desktop, then they're probably using the mouse and they're clicking. So, they can probably be a

little bit faster. They're on a mobile device. They're swiping and tapping. So, you must optimize for each touch point. So, I'll say this. Determine how people interact first. If you realize that more people are buying from you mobily, then optimize your experience for mobile devices. It's worth the investment. It's definitely not only worth the investment, but you'll get a higher return on that investment if you do this across all touch points. Matter of fact, in reference to that, he also dropped a sub point. He says, use personalization strategically. And I like this one. And what he really means is that is invest your time finding out how much about your customers. Then set to fulfill these needs and give them valuable information and how they can consume it. And he's right. If you don't understand how people are actually engaging with your content, how they're finding your site, how they're actually contacting you, then you can't really personalize your strategy. And so, you really need to figure that out. And you know what I like? I like, from a communication perspective, also personalizing it. So, you know, and we're kind of past those days of just high client name. I hope you're not sending out emails like that. We even passed the days of Hi, Charles or Hi, Chris. I understand you know my name. I like what Foot Locker does. Yeah. Foot Locker sends me an email that says, hey, Charles, you recently purchased blah. And I know it's just a data feed from my last purchase, but you just purchased the Jordan 24. Right. And the triple X's just came out the other day. They really did. We're pretty confident. You're interested in those. And based off your previous purchases, you probably want the black ones. Oh, really? No. I threw that in. Oh, okay. But that would have been kind of cool. That's the next level. So, how's that algorithm? He got every other color. Now, he needs the black ones or he always gets black ones and he gets the black

ones. Y'all can have that one for you. That's kind of cool. But the point is... You almost insert any color, right? I'd be like, yeah. Yeah. Those are what I'm interested in. But the thing about it is they referenced my favorite shoes. They referenced me by name. And more importantly, they had content that was related to me that I was interested in. Personalizing strategy. Yep. It works. Boom. Number two. He says, adopt a data-driven mentality and test. He says, if you want to succeed with conversion optimization, there's that word again, you have to become comfortable with collecting, analyzing, and understanding data and then make decisions based on it. He's right. You must test and measure, ladies and gentlemen. I think we... What's the phrase we use? Numbers don't lie. And don't throw money against the wall and see if it sticks. Come up with a plan. Have it organized. Look at the data before. Look at the data after. Yeah. Review your data constantly is what I wrote here. Or especially if you're in-house or maybe you're DIY or maybe you hired somebody internally. Look at your data. Look at analytics. Get familiar with it. How much traffic? What is that traffic doing? Maybe you hired an agency like us, for example. Then schedule time with your agency to review those numbers. Hopefully your agency schedules time with you. With you, yeah. If they don't, then you need to schedule time with them. Yeah, one of the things we do, for example, is every client gets not only weekly touch points of what's going on. They get a monthly conference, usually about an hour long. Well, we dive into the previous 30 days data. How did things perform? Then we strategize what worked, what didn't work. And then we plan for the next 30 days, schedule the next call, and do it all over again. Yeah. Why do we do that? So every month we can constantly see increase so you, the client, can be informed and we can be abreast of what's going on.

Adapt the data-driven mentality and test. He says, he's right. You must do it. Three. Number three. He says, use multiple landing pages. Duh. Kinda. It kind of depends. Yeah, yeah. He goes on to say, they allow you to... What do they mean? He says, well, they allow you to not only offer a customized product or service, but they also allow you to use different language and messaging. Okay. So he's right. Yeah. From that perspective, he's absolutely right. It really depends on your industry, on your product, on your service. Because what we've kind of learned is that as we build sites, we will make sure that forms are accessible across all pages, that phone numbers are always visible. Yeah. Because technically, if you have seven or eight pages, and we've optimized seven or eight of those pages, then any one of those pages could rank based on whatever the search is. And that makes it a... A landing page. A landing page. And since people can land on it, then we need to make sure that the call to actions and everything you would have on a standard landing page are also on your regular site. Yeah. That doesn't mean you shouldn't have a separate landing page every now and then. Sometimes it's necessary. Yeah. Sometimes it's necessary. I think you just have to really have an understanding... Depends on industry, too. Industry and your service. And what you're selling, yeah. If you've got, let's say, for example, a really high-priced product, yeah, then you want a separate landing page, no distractions, no interruptions, but maybe you're just selling widgets or something like that or data tapes. Plumbing service. It'll do something really quick and fast. Yeah, exactly. Then you may not need a full separate landing page. My toilet is shooting water into my face. I need a plumber now. Yeah, I don't even need to click. I may call you from the ad. Yeah. So, you know, it just depends. Number four. Four. He says, don't let forms become a conversion killer. He's absolutely

right. So, he goes on to say, in general, we always aim to have the lowest possible number of fields on a form. What this number is depends on factors like what industry you're in and what your goal is and so on. And he's absolutely right. So, forms, there's a lot of information, a lot of things that a form can do for you. There's actually the counter, which is, hey, I want to add forms to my page because I'm getting so many leads that I want to weed people out. We've had that before. Dude, I'm getting too many forms. I need to filter. Filter. So, okay, put budget. I'm like, no. Yeah. Normally, we're like, no. Hire a salesperson to manage those and then weed them out quickly. But things that you know about forms, and he's exactly right. You want to have as few items on your form as possible. There's statistics that say for every item you add to your form, you lose 10% of form submissions. Yep. So, that's a lot of form submissions. Not only should it be a form with not many items in it, the form should be physically small. It should just look smaller. Right. Even if you have, dig this. So, if you've got name, field, email, field, phone, and then field, it's really like six lines. It feels bigger. It feels longer. But if you have the field, and then inside the field you have the word name, then you have another field, and inside that field you have the word email, and another one with the word phone in there. Now, you've only got three lines. Yeah. A lot smaller form, less intimidating. I can fill this out really quickly. More importantly, those type of forms are proven to have a higher engagement rate on mobile devices. Yep. It's important. And here's one pro tip. We actually aren't doing this yet. It will be incorporated into our kind of next round of framework. Forgot password. Not underneath, but in the password field. Yeah, that was kind

of cool when I saw that. That's pretty awesome, right? And one more pro tip is put a percentage bar on the top of the form where it starts at 40%. So, 40% complete. Already, just by opening it. You open it, you're like, wait, I'm already 40% done. I just need to do this. They put name in, it jumps to 60%. They put email in, it jumps to 95%. 30% increase in form submissions. Just by letting people know that they're almost done. Yep. It's amazing how that works. Done. It's amazing how lazy people are. Oh, I'm almost finished. Yeah. It's total psychology, right? Like, I'm almost done. I might as well finish it. I might as well add this phone number even though it's not required. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Number five. This is the last one. He says, reduce distractions. He goes on to say, every marketing asset you should, every marketing asset you use should always have a clear end goal for each visitor who sees it. He's absolutely right. We got a client right now. He's the attorney, punch in the face of David Hunter. Two good folks over there in Sugar Land, criminal defense attorney. And this is a real example. You know, we were, based on what I said in point number three, we tried that, didn't really work with him. No. Right? This is one of those situations where having a separate landing page actually worked. Changed it. Instead of having his form and his menu and sub-nav and videos and everything else from our paid campaigns, we realized that we're getting a lot of traffic, a lot of time on site, no engagement, nobody filling out forms. Stripped it away. Gave him one big image, one landing page, one form, one call to action that said, contact me now, basically, and launched a new paid campaign, and all of a sudden he's starting to get in forms. Imagine how that works. Client got happier. Exactly. So, in certain industries, like legal and others like that, yeah, having a separate landing

page really, really works. In other more service provider industries, like, I don't know, plumbing or AC, roofing and things like that, you're probably okay to have it on your same site. It can still be a simple page, right? Exactly. But you want to make sure you have the regular components, a call to action, a unique selling proposition, if possible, a CCP, confidence and credibility piece. Builder piece. Yeah. Yep. So, in conclusion, he says, if you don't remember anything else, remember these two things. One, invest in learning as much as possible about your audience. Duh. Like, you should always be going through analytics, getting as familiar with your audience as possible. Pro tip here, get with your sales staff, get with the people who do customer service for you, get with those people who are in the trenches, your tech support guys, because they are face-to-face with your clients. They hear all of the objections and rebuttals. They can give you the best feedback about your actual client base. If you don't have that, then maybe check your search fields on your site. See what people are searching for on your site. Get a feel for maybe what they're looking for. And he also says, always be testing. And that's kind of our motto here. Test and measure and then rinse and repeat and test and measure again. And so, every time you get a good piece of data, make it the principle, change everything else, test again. Yeah. And keep doing that. So, man, punch in the face to you. Alexander Kessler, he says, five conversion and experience optimization techniques you can't afford to overlook. Great article. We'll post this online here shortly. And we've already reached out to Alexander, so he knows we covered his article. So, excellent. All right. Do we have any news? No wood news. No wood news. All right. Well, so this really wraps up our podcast. So, if you're looking to grow your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet. The internet. Give eWebResults a call

for increased revenue in your business. Our phone number is 713-592-6724. I can't say I had to put that over here. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Just right down there would be useful. Hey, if you have a referral. So, that's somebody who wants web design or internet marketing. You send them to us. They pay us. We pay you. That's our referral program. Really simple. Remember, we are filmed live at 5999 West 34th Street, Suite 106, Houston, Texas, 77092. A transcript of this podcast and video of this podcast are available on our website, eWebResults.com. Thank you guys for making us the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. Popular SEO podcast on iTunes. In the world. In the world. Thank you so much. It is because of you. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now. Balance check. Balance check. 3-0-6. Mic check. Mic check. Uh. Uh. SEO podcast 3-0-6. Going live. No edit. And no mix. And no tricks. Just information. So, tune in because you know it's quite entertaining. Ha-ha. Yeah. Podcast 3-0-6. Let's go. 3-0-6. 3-0-6. 3-0-6. 3-0-6. 3-0-6. 3-0-6. 3-0-6. 3-0-6.