2017
2017
How Website Redesign Can Sabotage Your Paid Search PPC Efforts
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Join Chris and Matt for a thrilling discussion on “How your website redesign can sabotage your paid search efforts” by Pauline Jakober at Search Engine Land. TRANSCRIPT:

Chris: Hi and welcome to the SEO Podcast: Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burres, owner of eWebResults.

Matt: My name is Matt Bertram, the rebel.

Chris: The rebel! Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast, this is podcast number 398. We really appreciate you guys tuning in. As always we do have a tip from our previous podcast and– hold on, we gotta make sure the video’s up and running. We’ll get a thumbs up once it’s up and running. Turn to screen– thumb is up.

Matt: And the tip is, “Definitely use the countdown timer on Google AdWords.” Use the countdown timer on Google AdWords because you wanna create scarcity.

Chris: A sense of urgency.

Matt: And I am not doing this. So this is a tip I need to follow and test out, and I think that Chris made this tip for a reason.

Chris: So that he will do it.

Matt: He really needs me to do it, in front of 15 thousand people.

Chris: You can see a 28% increase in conversions with the countdown timer. So make sure you use it. Subscribe. Follow.

Chris & Matt: Boom!

Chris: Alright. So please remember we are filmed live here in Houston, Texas.

Matt: Yes sir.

Chris: And we actually have a review from somebody in Sugar Land, Texas, just around the corner. We had a good conversation with him. His name is Mack B, his review is of course…

Matt: 5 stars!

Chris: It says, “I discovered eWebResults podcast while traveling. Technology and more specifically the internet and social media seem to dominate the consumer’s attention, I began a journey of self-education on the–” I feel like this should be more flowing.

Matt: Oh this is storytelling right here.

Chris: Yeah, “Of self-education on the subject of SEO and found eWebResults to be both useful and easy to follow, even for a newbie like me. I’ve owned a website for many years, but have never had it generate leads for me and that is my short-term goal so I now subscribe and listen to eWebResults via Podcast on my iPhone.” Punch in the face to you Mack B.

Matt: Yes.

Chris: Thank you for that review, we really appreciate you, had a great conversation with you. So punch in the face to you. Listen, you’re probably here for some information. You probably might want a tip or two. You can go get, “5 online marketing mistakes that could tank your business,” all you need to do is go to eWebResults.com/

Chris & Matt: SEOtips.

Chris: You can stop the video now. And we got a great article today, right?

Matt: We do.

Chris: Yes.

Matt: Yes, it’s all about PCC taking over. Nah, just kidding. Just kidding.

Chris: Right up your neck of the woods. And we got a big announcement here.

Matt: Yeah, we have a big announcement, so you special podcast listeners stay tuned for another two minutes.

Chris: Yeah, and you guys who are tuned in, you got a good treat. Alright, here is what we’re gonna cover today, “How your website redesign could sabotage your paid search efforts.” This is by Pauline Jakober and you can reach her– her Twitter handle is @GrpTwentySeven spelled out T-W-E-N-T-Y-S-E-V-E-N, @GrpTwentySeven. So punch in the face to you Pauline. If you guys are in a position to, have an electronic device, what we’d like you to do right now is tweet #SEOPodcast and tag us in it, @BestSEOPodcast, @eWebResults, and also tweet Pauline to make sure that she knows we’re covering her article today.

Alright, so we run a contest, and that contest we run every single week. And the way the contest works is that… Okay. The way the contest works is if we get 5 shikos, what is a shiko?

Matt: A share, a like, and a follow.

Chris: If we get 5 shikos and we get 1– excuse me 10 shikos and 1 review, we’ll skip this section and we actually got the review, and we actually got the shikos. So we’re gonna skip the section.

Matt: Whoo!

Chris: Save it to the end.

Matt: Thank you!

Chris: We will say that if you want a website analysis, go to our website eWebResults.com.

Matt: And so, you guys noticed that there’s somebody else here.

Chris: There’s a third person.

Matt: There’s a third person here.

Chris: In the picture here. And we’re not speaking in the third person. There’s actually a third person, and so we’ve really kind of put together a really nice deal for our customers and ultimately– actually– it’s certainly gonna impact the information that’s coming out on the podcast. We’ve already talked about that. So this gentleman standing next to us, he is the preeminent SEO consultant in the city of Houston. How big is the city of Houston, Matt?

Matt: Fourth biggest city in the country.

Chris: Fourth biggest city in the country.

Matt: Probably third, yeah.

Chris: So one of the nation’s best SEO consultants and we’ve just started working together.

Matt: So you just go to Google if you’re in Houston, type in SEO Houston and just check for someone that’s three times on the first page.

Chris: Three times.

Matt: Three times on the first page.

Chris: That’s him standing right here.

Matt: Yeah. And his name– if you do that, you’ll know who it is, if not, just check the press release next week.

Chris: Yeah. Person: Thank you guys, I appreciate it.

Chris: Alright, alright. That is some exciting news. Alright, so I wanna stay really focused on our news today. And we’re actually gonna do something that’s pretty important.

Matt: Yes. This is some seriousness.

Chris: That’s pretty important. We usually don’t get this serious I think.

Matt: “The audio’s too low.”

Chris: “The audio is too low.” I can make a quick adjustment. Do that. Recording devices. Properties.

Matt: Intermission, intermission, intermission, intermission.

Chris: That should be better. We’ll make sure that that’s better. Alright, so we wanna talk about net neutrality. So if you go to our Facebook page, Facebook.com/

Matt: eWebResults

Chris: You will find a recent tweet that talks about five calls, like making five calls for net neutrality. They’re working. By December 14th, they’re gonna have a vote and try and repeal the existing net neutrality rules. This is not a good thing. We don’t believe this is a good thing. So a little bit farther down in our Facebook feed, you’ll actually see an article that gives you kind of five things that you can do. So not just those five calls that came from that list, but five things that you can do to impact net neutrality and have an impact on the people who are voting on net neutrality.

Matt: This is a big deal.

Chris: This is a big deal.

Matt: This is a big deal. This is gonna affect everyone’s business that’s in online marketing space, across the board.

Chris: Yup.

Matt: So this is not a good thing.

Chris: This is not a good thing. So an example– so you may be wondering like what is net neutrality? And all of these political things tend to get like double negatives to understand what it means. And really what it means is keeping the net equal, an equal playing field for all players, as an example. And I think we talked about this in the last podcast. Just wanted to cover it a little bit more. Let’s say I’m a big–

Matt: Yes, fat cat.

Chris: I’m a big fat cat and I own a media company and I’m delivering video through the internet, so ISPs get involved.

Matt: See that’s why. I’m against the empire.

Chris: And he’s the rebel.

Matt: I’m against the empire.

Chris: And he wants to deliver media through that same internet. If that media– if the ISP, Internet Service Providers, have the option of selling me bandwidth. Then because I’m a fat cat, just because– not because I’m better, but only because I have money, I’m able to do things that Mr. Rebel here can’t do.

Matt: I can’t do. Yes.

Chris: And so it no longer levels– the field is no longer level. It favors people with money. It’s not skill, money. Alright? Not saying that people with money don’t have skill, I’m just saying in this case, it’s a pure cash favorability. So we wanna avoid this. Some examples where net neutrality has been– where they fought for the little guy, AT&T at one time was forcing Apple to block Skype on the iPhones. I don’t know if you know that? And this is like AT&T just trying to remove the apps so that people have to use their network instead of using the internet in that situation.

Matt: Monopolize.

Chris: This is really interesting. So Verizon– this is a little bit longer, not that long. During oral arguments in Verizon vs the FCC in 2013, judges asked whether the phone giant would favor some preferred services content or sites over others. If the court overruled, the agency’s existing open internet rules–” that’s net neutrality. Verizon, their counsel, Helgi Walker had to say this, and I quote, “I’m authorized to state from my client today that but for these rules–” so unless these rules where in place, “we would be exploring those types of arrangements.” So they would be favoring the fat cats and trying to generate extra cash. I don’t begrudge them that. What I do begrudge is where that cash starts to impact the opportunities for the little business. So go to our Facebook page, Facebook.com/

Matt: Facebook.com/eWebResults! There’s a lot of stuff on Facebook guys.

Chris: Sometimes the rebel has to catch up. Go there and one of our first links right now is five calls, it gives you like the number you can call to have an impact and we recommend that you do that. And by the way, punch in the face to Mike Simon, he’s with MyShipleyDonuts.com. He kinda reached out to me and said, “Hey, I kinda think you guys should discuss it,” and he was absolutely right, so punch in the face to you Mr. Simon.

Matt: He’s one of our clients.

Chris: Yes, one of our great, wonderful clients. That is all the news that I have for today. So that represents the end of the potatoes.

Matt: And it’s a big deal, it’s a big deal so please take action.

Chris: It’s a big deal, yeah.

Matt: Go out and vote.

Chris: And it is now time to get into the meat of the podcast.

Matt: Yes.

Chris: Alright, who else is here? We got some– Steven! Thanks for tuning in, punch in the face to you. Again, here’s our article, “How your website redesign can sabotage your paid search efforts,” by Pauline Jakober. Jakober. I’m probably mispronouncing that. Alright, so here’s what Pauline had to say. She said– Pauline, “PPC agencies–” her own PPC agency – so she’s the owner of an agency – most declined a project because the website that they were making the proposal to was so bad– has this ever happened to us?

Matt: No, because we build landing pages and we don’t need to use your website.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah. If your website’s that bad, we’ll still take the work. We’ll just– and we find landing pages weren’t better anyway. But I get it, right?

Matt: Yes, yeah.

Chris: Because there was a time in the agency – quite a while back – where we really wouldn’t drive traffic to a particular website. And we still won’t, we just make the landing page so that we can drive traffic and generate value really quickly. Alright? So when they announced that they were gonna do a website redesign, they said, “Okay, great.” They’re gonna actually take that account and talked about: is it good news if you’re doing a redesign for your website, for your paid search efforts? And the answer is maybe.

Matt: You gotta be careful about how you do it, and Google– make sure you fully build out what you wanna do before you throw it up.

Chris: Yup.

Matt: Don’t continue to make changes, it confuses Google, they don’t like it.

Chris: So she gave five, and actually listed the sixth but in some follow-up text. I felt the sixth was worth mentioning, so we’re gonna go through these six things, and these are, “How your website redesign can sabotage your paid search efforts.” Alright, there’s paper flying all over the place. Number 1 is your “Phone number.” Matt, where should your phone number be on your website.

Matt: All over it.

Chris: All over it.

Matt: No, up in the upper- right hand corner, I think is a good place to be for it.

Chris: On the workstation, yeah.

Matt: On the workstation. Maybe further down on the page, like when they’re looking to click on it if it’s on mobile, if it’s mobile-friendly.

Chris: Right up at the top, yeah.

Matt: Right up at the top or every two scrolls, yeah.

Chris: Right, yeah. So what can happen when you’re doing the redesign is: the new designer– and we bump into this every now and then, where the designers are very aesthetic and not very results focused, they remove the phone numbers. So that’s something that you should do. What we like to say for our clients: there should never be an extra step, right? So if they land on your page and you want them to make a phone call, don’t make them scroll, don’t make them click the Contact Us page, give them the phone number right there.

Matt: Yeah. I mean, I think that that’s a debate internally, is the aesthetics versus the conversions. I think that there’s a good balance but also you want to make the page familiar.

Chris: Right.

Matt: Okay? So high converting landing pages, is good to follow that model ‘cause people know where to go find stuff. Because you gotta think about anybody that’s landing on a landing page through PPC, or SEO, or something like that. They’ve never hit your page before. It’s like dropping somebody out of a parachute in a foreign land, and you gotta give them kind of directions on where you want them to go.

Chris: Yup. Well, you kind don’t want when they land onto your website, for it to feel like being dropped in a foreign land with a parachute.

Matt: Well, at least if there are signs, yeah. And you want it friendly, actually yeah, so that’s a good point. You want the ads– anything that they’re looking for in the ads, or the offer, you need to have that on the landing page or the website where you take them to.

Chris: That’s the continuity.

Matt: Yeah, the continuity.

Chris: The continuity we talk about, like if somebody searches for something and he sees an ad with that something in it and probably an offer, and then when they land on the page they need to see that search phrase and that offer right away.

Matt: Yeah, it’s really important for bounce rates– conversions.

Chris: Number 2 is, “Trust symbols.” So you might ask, what is a trust symbol? We had a debate right before this podcast. Some examples are: BBB, Avvo if you’re an attorney, review badges, testimonials are trust symbols, right?

Matt: And we went a little crazy with trust symbols with our developer and we have them all over our page right now.

Chris: All over.

Matt: On the right hand side,

Chris: On the top.

Matt: At the top of every page.

Chris: Maybe at the bottom.

Matt: At the bottom of some of the pages, but it’s great, right? It shows off our expertise, people understand what it is. Hasn’t hurt our conversions at all, we’ve actually got some bumps from it. But trust symbols need to be in your repertoire.

Chris: So on what pages should trust symbols be?

Matt: Wherever anybody’s gonna land.

Chris: Yeah.

Matt: Yeah.

Chris: If they’re gonna land there and you want to build trust, then you should have a trust symbol.

Matt: And you know, like either above the fold or right below the fold, or in the header, it just depends on your situation.

Chris: Intersperse some testimonials throughout the content, yeah.

Matt: On every page, it’d be great to have a testimonial.

Chris: That’s the answer I was looking for! Every page! Ding Ding, Ding Ding. Next is number 3, “Tracking codes.” This is, “How your website redesign can sabotage your paid search efforts.” Have we ever experienced tracking codes disappearing and data disappearing? Have we experienced that?

Matt: They’ve gone awry a few times.

Chris: Yeah. So as a PPC kinda expert who puts on the data hat and digs in, and then you see that the data’s all wrong, how does that feel?

Matt: Well you know, you have incomplete data to make the best decision, right? And you know, we use CallRail and it’s fantastic. You can tie the keyword to the time when they called, and you can better know what you’re doing, you can record your calls, the customers love it. You know, the didn’t ask me to say that, but they’re a really good service.

Chris: Yeah, CallRail is good. So she says that the codes that she’s most concerned about – and us, we agree – Google Analytics code, remarketing code, website call metrics code, right? So that’s the CallRail code, and then the AdWords conversion code. She missed one.

Matt: Okay.

Chris: Facebook Pixel.

Matt: Well, of course. You need Facebook Pixel linked in, it’s always good if you’re doing account based selling. I was actually– the thing that was most interesting to me was– where was it? You had it highlighted on your page. When we were talking about the remarketing.

Chris: Oh yeah.

Matt: I think you need to–

Chris: You wanna talk about that a little bit?

Matt: We had a little internal debate there.

Chris: Right. So, one of the things as we’re looking at a website, we’ll use the Google tag plugin or add-in for Chrome, and it’ll tell us if it’s got Analytics or the remarketing code or not. And Matt was like, “Well you know, I’m actually driving remarketing ads from the audiences I’m building in Analytics. I don’t actually need the AdWords code.” And sure– so we had a little debate. I was like, “I don’t know if that is possible. I don’t believe–”

Matt: And I was like, “I am doing it. I am doing it right now. I know it works.” People are like, “No, you can’t run remarketing without the remarketing without the remarketing tag.” So just know that there’s different way to do things, and not to say any one of them is right or wrong. I mean there’s best practices and what you should do is just standardize whatever you’re doing internally.

Chris: And we would recommend to use to Google Tag Manager too, to really manage those. Right? That’s a nice easy way to do that. Alright, so number 4 is, “Thank-you pages.”

Matt: Yes.

Chris: And we got three kind of reason to have Thank-you pages, really important.

Matt: Upselling.

Chris: That’s very specific. Yeah, lost opportunity. So what they’ll say – and this has happened with some of the plugins that go into WordPress -somebody will redesign a website and now when you submit a form, instead of the form kind of landing on a Thank-page, or doing anything useful, it’ll just say a small little text in a green box. And we’ve probably all have seen this – or not seen it, is kinda the point – is, “Thank you for submitting your form.” And it really needs to go to a landing page for three reasons. You were gonna say something?

Matt: Well I was just gonna say, that’s a good opportunity to– you know, the fear of loss, or whatever it is after someone buys something, right? The fear or the regret of–

Chris: To manage the buyer’s remorse.

Matt: Buyer’s remorse, that’s what I was looking for. And so it’s a good way to communicate with your audience and let them know something that’s going on, or give them a free gift, or use this opportunity to sell. But the thing that I was gonna say is, I’ve seen some recent pages of people using templates and not updating the Thank-you page. So it’s just like random–

Chris: A generic–

Matt: No, it’s just random text, like you know where it’s not those words or whatever?

Chris: Oh, lorem ipsum, yup.

Matt: And it’s like–

Chris: Go through the process.

Matt: Well, it’s a really important piece of the process that you don’t want to overlook.

Chris: It’s actually a conversion!

Matt: Right? If someone– the conversation’s not over when they buy or when they sign up, it just got started.

Chris: It may be just a good time to say, “Hey, like us Facebook,” right? Or something simple.

Matt: Yeah, or something. Yeah, absolutely.

Chris: Do something with your Thank-you page. So her three points were, ”It may leave visitors wondering,” alright? So I mentioned that that text sitting there, maybe they don’t even notice it. And you’re like, “Okay.” If you’re getting multiple submissions on a form, it may be that they don’t know they’ve submitted it.

Matt: Or yeah, the Thank-you page doesn’t come up.

Chris: Yup.

Matt: Yeah.

Chris: Next is, “it’s a lost opportunity!” We just talked about that. And finally, thank you pages are a great place to put a tracking code. We would actually– so you may have different Thank-you pages for different CTAs for your website. If you have different Thank-you pages, you can use those to remarket very specifically to somebody.

Matt: A micro goal, yeah.

Chris: Yeah.

Matt: Yeah. Well, finish that. That was– you were– sorry, you were on a roll.

Chris: Yeah, I was thinking about it and then–

Matt: Yeah, I’m sorry. I didn’t say anything.

Chris: So let’s say we know that they submitted the form from the PPC page, then you could remarket – in our case – remarket PPC. We do PPC, I don’t know. Everybody knows that.

Matt: We do PPC, yeah. We do website design. We do SEO.

Chris: So search engine optimization.

Matt: We do social media marketing.

Chris: So you can actually guide the ads that you’re gonna show them, based on the Thank-you page they landed on, alright? So that’s really powerful. In fact, you could have a general remarketing campaign and have the general campaign overwritten by the Thank-you page.

Matt: Think about email marketing, I know– we do email marketing too. That’s why we’re HubSpot certified.

Chris: Yeah.

Matt: But remarketing you can use as like a drip campaign for someone that you don’t even have their contact information from. That’s how you should think about remarketing. You can change what you hit them with, like it’s a really, really powerful tool. Saves you a lot of money if you’re wanting to spend a tight ad budget and really get a lot of value out of it.

Chris: It’s how you maximize the traffic that you’re currently getting.

Matt: Yeah. Yes, absolutely.

Chris: Alright, so number 5 – this is, “How your website redesign could sabotage your paid search efforts,” – is “Forms.”

Matt: Yeah.

Chris: So sometimes people get rid of forms.

Matt: Or too many fields.

Chris: This doesn’t happen much. What she mentioned is that somebody will replace a form with a link to the email address. Right, that’s a bad decision.

Matt: Oh man, okay yeah.

Chris: That’s a bad decision.

Matt: I’ve seen a lot of that, and we’ve done it before.

Chris: Yeah.

Matt: But here’s the thing, is when they go from a button to another page, you potentially can lose that conversion, your conversion rank goes down. You wanna capture all the information– so lightbox, or you know, just having the form or both, people like to fill out stuff differently.

Chris: That email– if it’s just the email link, will actually open up another software often, and that’s an opportunity to lose the page– to lose the visitor. And then yeah, you are right. With forms, if they decide to add more fields or if they make the form physically bigger. Know that the size, the physical size on the page of the form can impact how many people fill it out. You can have a three-field form, and it can cover a whole huge page, and people are like, “That’s too much information.”

Matt: So another kind of little service that I’ve used before is Typeform, okay?

Chris: Okay, right.

Matt: And so, how many fields is super important, right? But also, there’s starting to be a lot of testing on like when someone lands on a form page, they’re just afraid of filling it out.

Chris: Right.

Matt: And so there’s newer services coming out that basically ask you one question and then goes to the next question.

Chris: At a time, yeah. And now you’re 50% done, and then 75% done.

Matt: Yeah, and that really helps and just the style of it, of how it impacts it, increases conversions. So there’s a lot of cool stuff on that front coming out.

Chris: And then Pauline, she went into this piece about how websites could get worse, and one of the things that she mentioned that I think is worth being one of her, “How your website redesign can sabotage your paid efforts,” is HTTPS.

Matt: Oh my gosh, that’s like number 1. Everything’s gotta be secure.

Chris: Yeah, if you’re on HTTPS and you redesign and they drop the ball and now you’re no longer on HTTPS, that’s a problem. Yeah.

Matt: Well you know, the thing that can tank– the biggest thing to tank–

Chris: Yeah, so–

Matt: Well, the biggest thing to tank, the HTTPS is where that little box to pop-up.

Chris: Right, right.

Matt: That little box to pop-up and for it to say, “Warning when you go to this page.” Like I can tell you, even when that happens for me, I have to go, “Whoa.”

Chris: “Whoa, do I really wanna be here?” Yeah.

Matt: Like okay, this is okay, ‘cause it’s scary.

Chris: Yeah. And our SEO consulting guru is mentioning AMP and HTML so we’re gonna have to bring him onto the podcast.

Matt: Come on, come on. Give you’re tip. He was wanting to give his tip. Sorry for all the distractions. Person: Talk into Matt’s chest.

Matt: There you go. SEO Guru: Alright. Okay, so I was dying here a little bit because they were mentioning things that could tank your rankings. If you redesign your site.

Matt: Here, just take this. SEO Guru: Yeah, there we go. That’s weird, I feel like I’m kissing you. Okay.

Chris: That was a little odd. SEO Guru: Yeah, that’s a little awkward, yeah.

Matt: Alright. SEO Guru: So basically if you have– if the site previously has AMP HTML, when you redesign the site, you could potentially lose a lot of traffic.

Chris: If you break the AMP? SEO Guru: Well, if they don’t implement the AMP, or if they don’t implement it properly.

Chris: Right. SEO Guru: Now two tips on implementing AMP properly is: make sure you have canonical links on every single page, every AMP page. And then also make sure that the proper structured data is on each page. And actually there is a third tip. And the last one is: read the guidelines for AMP HTML. All about JavaScript and the proper type of CSS. That’s a lot to be on AMP HTML pages. It’s all I got.

Chris: And he drops the mic and walk off the stage.

Matt: Alright thank you. Drop the mic, boom. Done.

Chris: Boom. Alright, so that was number 7. Make sure you implement your AMP pages in your redesign properly. Alright, so that wraps up the meat of the podcast.

Matt: Drop the mic.

Chris: So if you liked this podcast, we’re gonna ask you to share this podcast, to shiko this podcast. We are currently in pursuit of Yelp reviews.

Matt: Yelp reviews, please!

Chris: You guys have already helped us, in fact Mark– excuse me, Mack put his on Yelp so we really appreciate that. We’ve made it easy to get to our Yelp profile, all you need to do is go to eWebResults.com/

Matt: Yelp

Chris: And that will make sure that you get to our Yelp profile. Please, leave us a review and make it 5 stars! Alright, so please remember we were filmed here in Houston, Texas. Hey, if you’re looking to grow your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet…

Matt: The internet.

Chris: Call eWebResults for increased revenue in your business. Our phone number is 713-592-6724. We do have a referral program. We do all the services that we mentioned in this podcast. Every one of them and even Matt is going to add the countdown timer to the PPC, so all of them.

Matt: Yes. Yes.

Chris: So if you have a customer who’s interested in those services, you send them to us, they pay their bill, and then we pay you.

Matt: Also, we help other agencies double check–

Chris: White label?

Matt: White label, check their stuff. So if you have a smaller agency out there and you’re working in a particular niche and you just want some access to some experts to help you look at it, we’ve done that for a number of different niches and we can help you out too if you’re a growing agency out there. We’re friends, we love you.

Chris: Yup. We can work together.

Matt: Yes.

Chris: So we were filmed live here at 5999, West 34th Street, Suite 106, Houston, Texas, 77092. If you want an audio, video, or transcript of the podcast, you can get it at eWebResults.com. We are the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes, that is because you, you, you you you, all of y’all. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burres.

Matt: My name is Matt Bertram.

Chris & Matt: Bye bye for now.