Landing Page Design Tips - #seopodcast 214

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. Thank you, and welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our wonderful podcast. This is podcast number 214. Our previous podcast is 213. As always, we have a tip from our previous podcast, and that tip is make sure to include social media in your mobile marketing strategy. Yeah, you want to make sure that anytime you're doing mobile marketing, whether you're doing paid ads to a mobile or paid social ads towards mobile, include social media in that strategy. Why? Because most people are social on their mobile device, and so that's the perfect time to get some social engagement. If they've already clicked on your ad on their mobile device and you've got the conversion, first off, good for you, but since you've got that conversion and they're still on their mobile device, give them something socially that they can do, especially since the fact that once they finish with you, they're probably going to be social anyway. Yeah, they're going to the Facebook page as soon as, uh, and they're maybe on their own saying, I just bought this or whatever. So why not encourage them to do it? So definitely take advantage of social media usage in your mobile marketing strategy. Cool. Please remember, we are your friendly, local, neighborhood, top position snatchers. Yes. Where our mantra is. Don't be a douche. Don't be a douche. And it's just not a good look at all. It's a horrible look. And if you can, and if you have some sort of electronic device in front of you or around you, or I know you do, this is what you should do. You should tweet. Hashtag SEO podcast, uh, 214. Um, make sure you tag us in it at eWebStyle. You can even do this. Tag us at best SEO podcast. Um, that way we can follow you back and do all of our social stuff. Cool. Notice, notice the size of

that tier tattoo? I did. I did. I was disappointed. Oh, man. Yeah. It's been like two, three weeks since we've actually had a review. Uh, we had to dig one up from Romania last time. Was it Romania? I think it was Romania. Romania. Last time. Yeah. Lithuania. It was an ania. Some ania. Uh, so what you can do to help prevent these tier tattoos being applied to my face is you can, uh, write a review. Yeah. One great place. One place we actually are really promoting now is our G plus local page, which will soon have a vanity URL. Well, so yeah, so we're debating like, that could be blank stare. Well, the issue with they, they're, they're forcing the use of the plus sign in the vanity URL. Right. Which is okay. Yeah. Oh, I don't like it. Yeah. I understand why, you know, you're branding it. It's the plus. I get that. But, um, yeah. So we'll see. So we're, we're shooting for, we were hoping to get plus E web style and we could, um, it wants something else. So if we take the hyphen out, so we can get plus E web style with the hyphen, E hyphen web style. And then that'll be it. But if we want to take the hyphen out, do they want us to add something else? Is it a character issue? Well, you can put, no, it's not a character issue. It's a naming convention issue and, and they just, since our primary name is with the hyphen, if we remove the hyphen, then they want us to add some sort of identifier. Hmm. And so we're debating, do we add marketing? Do we add SEO? Like we've got different things we can go with. I want to try .com. What did that? I know. I thought about that. Plus E web style.com. All right. So for now, until we get our vanity URL sorted out, the best way to get to our Google plus local page. It probably still will be the best way.

Yeah. It probably will be. It's just to go to E dash web styles.com slash. G plus. And slash. G plus and slash Google plus and slash Google plus Google plus. All right. All of those will take you to our G plus local page. Make sure you're signed into your Google account and then leave us a review, please. The other thing you can do, it only has three steps. All you do is go onto iTunes, create an account, write a review. If you choose to send us an email podcast at E dash web style.com. Other things you can do. Actually, we have a reviews tab on our Facebook page. No reviews there. Yeah. There's one. There is one. There is one. I did see that. Yeah. Well, it's hard to see because if you're signed in as E web style, it doesn't show you any. And if you're signed in as a, as yourself, then you can see the one. Yeah. The way to write a review there is to go to facebook.com slash E web style and then click the little reviews tab. And that's all we got for now. We do have a referral program. If you've got an SEO client, you want to send our direction as long as they are a paying client, you will get paid some money, money. You can get a free website analysis. Go to E dash web style.com and anywhere on our site, you will find our form. That form says free website analysis. Fill it out. You can get a free webinar. So go ahead and do that now. Speaking of our website, I'm just excited about this. We're, we're getting steps and steps closer to launching a new site. Looking like we will have that done before the end of this month. And so I'm excited about that. We got select guys. We'll be sending out to, to hit the site up and go through it and, and, and, and get your feedback on it. And we do have an app coming soon. So we

are looking for people who want to test the app and give us some feedback. You know, some people kinder, gentler people, cause we know we're going to have some mistakes on it. So, uh, we want to make sure that we get those from, from people, get those straightened out and then, uh, you can be part of the e-web beta team. Yeah. And I think we started, uh, iPhone first. Yeah. Um, so yeah, if you're on an iPhone and you're interested in beta testing our app, uh, send us an email podcast at, uh, edadswebstyle.com and then, uh, we'll get back in touch with you when we get to that time. Actually either one, cause Apple and Android are going to come out almost back to back. So that'll be great. All right. A little bit of news. Uh, Google maps, their users, the amount of users on Google maps dropped and it was a significant number according to this article. I'm not even sure I believe it. Uh, they were talking about the title of the article is Apple gets the last laugh because remember when they came out with their new iOS six or something or the new iPhone. Yeah. They changed their map provider. Well, yeah, they changed the map provider. It was all jacked up. So then they rushed to get Google on there and Google left turn by turn off because they wanted people to drive people to Android, blah, blah, blah. Um, so now they're saying that the, the, the Google app users, Google map users barely went up and, uh, and a lot more users are out there using them. I don't know. Well, I think, I think the discrepancy came from the networks changing. For example, I had a, a navigation app app icon on my Android device and that opened up Google maps and processed the navigation. Now that option isn't there. You have to go to the Google maps, you know, and actually do that. And, you know, people like, I know friends of mine who, who

didn't understand that go to maps, type in the address and then you'll get a navigation option and you'll still get your turn by turn. And instead they just stop using it and switch to something else or switch to something else or bought a Tom Tom or whatever. And so I think that sort of deal contributed to the decrease in usage. Yeah. Google is certainly known for not, uh, advertising their new features. Hey, that's our, that's our blank stare, the, the missing bar on Google. We'll get to that. Uh, let's see. Google play music is going out onto the iOS operating system. Google play kicking the sins. Yeah. I'm like, look, I was a big, you know, all in, you're all in. I was like, man, I'm not going to use iTunes no more. I'm going all in the Google play because it was cool. And a desktop version allowed me to upload my whole library, access it from my tablet, access it from my phone, from your other desktop, from other anywhere I could get online. But then the app version on my mobile device, my GS3 is now a paid app. What? Paid app. No, no, no. Really? Mine isn't. Mine is. I don't know why. And so I immediately went on a, and so I can't, I can't access my playlist. I can't access anything. That's weird. Yeah. So that's weird. Maybe, hopefully it's just an anomaly with this situation and they'll freak it out. But yeah, I can't access it. Yeah. That is a kick in the shins. Hey, Amazon did their first original series. You know how Netflix did original TV series. This one's called Alpha House. You know, I believe that the more people out there making creative content, the better. Yeah. From, I think creative content will get better. I am also very frustrated because I think there's so much creative content out there right now. I mean, there's hit shows, like mega hit shows that I just don't have time to even watch. So this is just another

venue of shows that try it free. Try it free. Well, I don't want to, I was already using it free. I don't want to have to try it free. I think it stays like that. So, you know, free 30-day trial, then $9.99 a month starting December 15th. Kicking the shins. Now, I don't know why, maybe I haven't tried mine in a while. That's probably what it is. Now, this is really cool. Speaking of Google Maps, you know, Street View. Mm-hmm. I think Google has done a lot of really dynamic places. They've done like the Grand Canyon. Mm-hmm. Great Water Taino. They just finished Venice. Venice Canals. Right? That's pretty cool. So I had this, like, picture of, you know, all the cameras on one of the gondolas and the guy singing Italian music as the Google Street View is going through. No, it's just a dude with a backpack. So, you know what else they did? What store was that? They did a store. And from Street View, you can see what's in the store, what's on the house. Oh, wow. Yeah. It was a huge department store, like a Sears or something. And I was saying that to you. It was pretty cool. That's pretty cool. And finally, Candy Crush has 500 million. The article was something about Candy Crush trying to go after the, you know, looking past the first mega hit. So whoever wrote it, you know, looking for another app, I didn't realize they had 500 million downloads. And apparently this thing's popular, like insane. You were saying you know someone who plays. Yeah. I'm married to her. She's an addict. Candy Crush addict. Sorry, sweetie. We'll get you some therapy. By the way, there's an app for. All right. Now, what's interesting about Candy Crush, though, I want to see if it's going to outlive the kind of buzz that Angry Birds had, right? You don't hear people talking about Angry Birds anymore. Right. But at one point, that was the game. Well, remember even like last Christmas and last

Halloween, like that was the big costume and that was the big, Halloween was a big, you know, gift item to get Angry Bird things. My kids are playing that now. They're just starting to play. So they're not, they're not very good. They're three and a half. They're, my son just launches it into the dirt. Yeah. And he loves it. He'd do that for hours. Although it makes sense. Yeah. I think I'd throw birds into the dirt for hours. If I was doing this myself, that's what I would do to her. All right. All right. So that's kind of a combination of animal cruelty and Jenga. All right. We want to give a punch in the face to Steve Stewart. He hit us up this morning. He hit us up this morning, finding out when our podcast was going to be on. We let him know. And then right when we were going on air, he couldn't be here because he had to go pick up his daughter. So, all right. Punch in the face to you. Make sure you listen out. And thanks for listening. And that is the potatoes of our podcast. Time to get into the meat. Definitely. So I was on Search and Journal today. I'm going to give a punch in the face to Jeff Kenyon. Jeff put out an article, a great article about landing page design, inspiration, SEO, and UX user experience, and how they work together. And so he had several points in the article about optimizing a landing page, but also making sure that the user has a great experience. And so it was pretty decent. But he left off a few things that I feel are extremely important in regards to a landing page, which we'll add. So one of the key statements he made was that both SEO and user experience are important elements for every site and should be embraced. And I totally agree with that. A lot of the problems people have is that they do one or the other. They will focus

on the user experience, making sure that their user lands on the site, can find what they need, and have a great experience. But they lack SEO efforts, and so the users that they do get to the site are minimal because the site's not optimized. Or vice versa. They optimize the site extremely well. They get lots of traffic, but the user experience sucks, and so they don't get conversions. And when we're talking about a landing page, and so you have to do both extremely well. So why? Well, because for a landing page, let's say this is a landing page for a paid ad, and we use that as our kind of ongoing example. In regards to your quality score, that landing page needs to be optimized. Yep. Right? And so you want to make sure that you have the right things in place. Secondly, if this is a paid ad, that means you paid for that click. And so when the user gets there, it's imperative that they have a great experience. That's the only way you're going to get the conversion. And so SEO and user experience definitely most go together. He goes on to say every page needs striking headline copy pictures to interest the readers. And that's a given, right? The striking headline copy must be in place in order to captivate somebody to take that click. So one of the things he says is make it easy to understand, right? So people shouldn't have to struggle and figure out what exactly it is that they're looking for or what they're supposed to do when they're on your site. Make it extremely easy to understand. You want to, his second one is make it easy to scan, right? Because as people who search the web, we don't read, we scan. I read for research purposes, but when we're just looking, we're scanning. So we can find something to read, right? And so when you scan, people scan, they look at images, they look at videos, they look at bullet points. They look at

regions. Exactly. Certain logo area, you know, sidebar area. They look at certain, yeah, regions on the page. And so you want to make sure that you are aware of where your hotspots are and then make sure your user experience captivates that. So make it easy to scan. Like I said, instead of big blocks of text, use bullet points if you can. You can see that on Google Plus pages now, right? Everything's broken up into sections. And so you can actually have a lot of stuff that you can scan, possibly with an image, possibly with a title, real quickly instead of stacking it. Pretty smart. Definitely. He says this third one is use a clear call to action. And I think this is key. A lot of times people will develop a landing page and the call to actions isn't necessarily clear, right? Do you want people to call or do you want people to fill out a contact form? Do you want people to subscribe or do you want people to download something? Whatever your action is, just make sure it's clear and concise. And so that way that user knows exactly what you need them to do and that'll help them convert a lot easier. And then his last one is optimize your page title. And I think he put emphasis on that because page title's important for a couple reasons. One, that user needs to see it and understand it and that'll let them know, yes, I need to click here because this page will likely contain what I'm looking for. Another reason that page title's important because it's a page title. This is, we're talking SEO. Yo, this page title should be keyword rich. It should have your target keyword in it and somehow message the user as well. Yep. So make sure you optimize your page titles. So those were the four points he had. What I'm adding to this is you should have an extremely focused landing page. We need like bonus noise. Bonus noise like a whoop. Whoop, whoop.

There you go. You need two of them. Yeah, so bonus, two of them. There's our bonus noise. Whoop, whoop. That indicates an SEO bonus. SEO bonus. Whoop, whoop. Whoop, whoop. It's an extremely focused landing page. What do I mean by that? I mean like if you have, if you're selling a specific product and somebody has done a page search and you paid for that click and you took them to that page, that page should be about that product. The first thing they should see is the confirmation that they're at looking at that product. Yeah, that's extremely important because what you don't want to happen is to pay for a click and somebody spends your money and they land on your site and then they bounce. Put this in context. And say you land them on that page, they look for that product and they see three different products. What happens if they're scanning? They don't see that product. They just notice the other two. Even if that product is one of them. Yep. They just notice two. Boom. You got to bounce. Right? So spend the time to make sure that that landing page is only about that product. And that's about campaign organization, continuity, and spending the time on that landing page. Yeah, at the end of the day, you want continuity from search to the click to the landing page. And frankly, if your landing page is not your homepage or something like that, then you want to make sure that your landing page has the same color scheme and branding and things like that that your company does. And so that way you won't lose anybody because your branding is different. So definitely you want to have some continuity. Here's another SEO bonus. SEO bonus. SEO bonus. Woo! Woo! I don't know how many times I can do that. Not without laughing. So your landing page should be designed for your target demographic. What does that mean? It means if you're selling gummy bears, right, and you're selling them online, your site

should not be full of hard lines and earth tones and very manly. Your site should be probably purple and pink and kitty and friendly because that's what you're selling. And gummy. And gummy. Exactly. If you're targeting females and you're selling lingerie or whatever, then you want to go with soft lines and pinks and women on there. You don't want to go with construction dude because that's not your demographic. And so take the time to do that. That takes some resources to design a specific landing page, but it's well worth it for the conversions. Another SEO bonus. SEO bonus. SEO bonus. SEO bonus. Woo! Woo! Woo! Yeah, I think I'm going to laugh every time you do that. You should have access to the full site. We've seen places, especially on a mobile site or even desktop sites, a landing page where it'll be specific to a product, but they will, you know, remove the navigation, which is okay. We do that sometimes. But you must, and I repeat, you must give access back to the full site because they may very well convert on that landing page. They could fill out the form. They could like you on Facebook. They could buy this product, whatever it is. But if you don't have a way for them to get more information, like, I don't know, your privacy policy maybe or some frequently asked questions or maybe they want to see some videos or anything like that that's on your regular site. If you don't have those connected to your landing page, they can't get there. Right. So you want to make sure you give people access to the full site if and only if your landing page is not part of the full site. You know, what we're trying to tend to do here is design every page so that it can convert. Yeah. So essentially every page could be a landing page. And we don't really run into that option much because of that. But, you know, some people do. And the last SEO bonus.

SEO bonus. SEO bonus. Woo! Woo! Yeah. So the last one is get a mobile version of your landing page. A lot of people have some big graphic heavy landing page specific to one product. And that's okay for a desktop search, but that's going to really suck for a mobile search. Yeah. And so do a mobile version of your landing page. Why? Because Google says in about 2015, 80% of the searches will be from a mobile device. Yep. And with our current clients right now, when we look at, you know, analytics and traffic reports and things like that, most of them, you know, over 50% of their traffic is from mobile devices. And so you must have a mobile landing page, especially if you're marketing it. Yep. So that was all the SEO bonuses. Good article. I'll post it on Facebook. Hit us up. Tell us what you think about it. Cool. Cool. All right. We do have a little bit of what this Google's policy. So here we go. What? Yeah. Yeah. So this, this what goes out to Google for making changes and not really notifying people, like making the bar that existed on, on our Gmail. Really everything. And most importantly for us in our Gmail, there was a bar where we could click calendar and contacts and drive or Google, I mean, YouTube. And it just disappeared. There, no explanation, no little arrow, although there may have been a little arrow that would click through too fast to, uh, of where do we find those things? So I actually Googled, couldn't find any useful help and then started punching around. Charles took the more effective route and he just started clicking around and found it. Um, so come on, Google, give us, give us some warning. Send us an email. Your bar's gone. Here's why. Here's where it is. And they normally do a good job of giving you a pop-up. Little pop-up. Hey, this has changed. But yeah, we didn't have that experience this time. So, yeah. What? All right. This

has been the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. This is because of you guys. Yes. All of you all out there in 76 different countries. Downloaded about 9,000 times per week. Thank you so much. We said until the next podcast, my name is Chris. Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now. Slightly raised up eyebrow high. Slightly raised up eyebrow high. Slightly raised up eyebrow high. Slightly raised up eyebrow high. Slightly raised up eyebrow high. Slightly raised up eyebrow high. Slightly raised up eyebrow high. Slightly raised up eyebrow high. Slightly raised up eyebrow high. Slightly raised up eyebrow high. Slightly raised up eyebrow high. Slightly raised up eyebrow high. Slightly raised up eyebrow high. Slightly raised up eyebrow high. Slightly raised up eyebrow high. Slightly raised up eyebrow high. Slightly raised up eyebrow high. Slightly raised up eyebrow high. Slightly raised up eyebrow high. Slightly raised up eyebrow high. Slightly raised up eyebrow high. Slightly raised up eyebrow high. Slightly raised up eyebrow high.