#SEOPodcast287 - 5 Ways to Instantly Improve Landing Page Conversions

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I am Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast number 287. You may have seen a flash there. We've got photographers all over the place here today. As always, there is a tip from our previous podcast, and that tip is offer offline CTAs on your local landing pages to drive people to your physical location. Offline CTAs, what does that mean? Anytime you're doing anything online marketing, whether it's a paid ad, a social ad, or optimized post, or whatever it is, if you have a local location, a local spot that people can come to, maybe a restaurant, a movie theater, whatever it is, then online offer reasons or ads or CTAs to encourage people to come in offline. I don't know, maybe a coupon they can print to come in, maybe free tickets to something, maybe a discounted something or another for a specific recipe, or whatever it is, but use those people who find you offline who are doing a local search. Give them a reason to come visit your store. Now, the pro tip to that is when they get to the store, guess what you do? Send them back online. Send them back to leave you a review. Send them back to talk about their experience. Send them back to get another coupon. Yep, that works. All right, so that tip is, again, offer offline CTAs on your local landing pages to drive people to your physical location. Hey, we are broadcasting live here from Houston, Texas, and we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers. And our mantra is- Do not be a douche. Do not be a douche. It is not a good look. Not at all. Hey, we've got a great article that we're covering today. Yeah, great article today. It's five things- Five ways to instantly improve landing page conversions. Man, punch in the face to Zach Johnson

and the good folks over at Search Engine Journal. Man, five ways to instantly improve landing page conversions. It's a great article. Excellent. If you're in a position to, you have some sort of electrical device that enables you to do some sort of tweeting. I think they call it, the kids, they call it tweeting these days. What should they tweet? Well, unfortunately, they're kind of getting off of Twitter. Like, they Snapchat. Like, kids don't tweet no more. They don't Facebook. They don't, they Snapchat. Straight up Snapchat. That's what it is. They Snapchat and IG or Instagram. But for my fellas who are watching this right now, you should be tweeting exactly what you see behind us. Because it's hashtag SEO podcast. This is number 287. And be sure to tag us in it, at bestSEOPodcast, at eWebStyle. That way we can follow you back and do all of our social networking stuff. Cool. If this is the first time you've listened to our podcast, howdy. Welcome to the Texas SEO Podcast. Hi, y'all. If you've listened to this podcast before, you probably have an idea what I'm going to say. And it turns out I'm not going to say much. Because we do have a review and we got 17 followers on our best SEO podcast page. So, we're not going to tell you how to leave us a review. If you choose to, just go do it. What we will do is tell you how you can hunt us, stalk us, and harass us. And it's pretty easy. We'll start with, I don't know, Facebook.com slash. eWebStyle. Twitter.com slash. eWebStyle. YouTube.com slash. eWebStyle. Instagram.com slash. eWebStyle. I'll do it again. It's good. I wore it done. That was Instagram to the last one. Hey, if you're a PHP programmer or a WordPress, we'll say genius. Yeah. Genius extraordinaire. We are probably looking for you. Go ahead and submit an audio resume. The number for the audio resume is 713-510-7846. If you would like a free website analysis, all you need to do is go to

our website, e-webStyle.com, and click any page. We haven't added it to the homepage yet. Click any page. So, just skip the first page. You will find in the right sidebar a form that you can submit and get a free website analysis. We do not have any algorithm cataclysm today. So, I'm going to jump straight. This is the potatoes of our podcast. We'll get to the meat soon. And, again, the meat is all about conversions. Right? Conversions. Yeah, conversions. Vendipage conversions. So, I just got a couple pieces of news. Somebody got a patent for a 12-mile space elevator so that they can launch a spacecraft from a building that's 12 miles high. So, they just launch it from up there. Pretty cool, right? Yeah. So, just to give you a little... 12 miles. Man, that's a long... That's an ear-popping, harsh elevator ride. Yeah. So, just to give you a little perspective, the current tallest building is a half a mile. Wow. Yeah. So, that's 24 times the current tallest building. How do you build that? Like... Yeah. What kind of scaffolding? Yeah. Like... What kind of lunatics do you get to build that? At 10 miles, don't you... Do you start floating? Yeah. It's like... It's like... What happens? Yeah. At 12 miles in the sky. Like, does the globe look small? Yeah. Like, are you already in space? Like, what happens? Yeah. Yeah. Can you breathe? Exactly. It might feel like you're underwater. So, it's kind of... That's going to be cool. It'd be awesome if they could build it. I don't think we have... Get off on the 10th floor and grab your air pack. Yeah. You know, at the 10th mile. And take the other elevator. Hey, the elevator broke down. You're going to have to walk. Oh, God. This is my first day on the job. I quit. Yeah, I quit. And I'm not leaving because I'm not walking. Yeah, yeah. I'm not walking either way. Hey, I thought this was cool. I don't know if you saw this. Samsung is

offering trial uses of their phone on any network. All you have to do is be an iPhone user. And for $1, they'll let you try a Samsung Edge for 30 days. Oh, the S6 Edge. The Galaxy Edge, yeah. That's aggressive. I'll take it. I mean... Yeah. Got to woo them away from Apple. Bravo. Like, you know, nothing wrong. Especially with Samsung and Apple. They've already been shooting shots at each other for the past five years worth of advertisements. And so, yeah, why not? $1. Give us a try. And then I thought this was cool. I don't know if you watched John Oliver. He's on HBO. He came out of, I'm trying to remember his name, John Stewart, and then Stephen Colbert. And so, he's on HBO. He does some amazing stuff about kind of commentary, political commentary, humor commentary. But he went after churches that are just after money. And his segment... There's a whole bunch of them. ...is genius. Mm-hmm. And it wraps up with him creating a church according to his lawyer's guidelines and asking for you to send money, right? But this is all spoof. Stephen Colbert did this back in the day. He created a political PAC and raised thousands of dollars of which he could do anything with. Yeah. And it was without... And it's real and totally fake. And it's just a mockery. Like, there was one TV evangelist who was like, so, one day I went in and I bought a, you know, a $3 million plane, cash. And you guys are all hating on me right now. So, just to let you know, three weeks later, I bought one three times more expensive, cash. So, don't envy me, or something like this. And I was like, um, wow. Yeah, that was a legit example he was giving. Oh, he actually showed them the video. So, dig this. If that's the same preacher, Creflo Dollar, he... Oh, that was a different one. Okay, where he pulled his people to get the cash to go buy the jet. Yep.

Yeah, and was pushing them hard. Yeah. And then they called these seeds of, uh, plant these seeds. $1,000 isn't enough to get that house, so just send it to me. That'll be planting a seed. Oh, man. Oh. Yeah, yeah. It's pretty good. Fortunately, it's a lot of it out there. If you get a chance. I actually, I record that show, I TiVo it, and watch it, and it was so hot that some people on my Facebook page had already posted it before I had a chance to watch it. Okay. And that's what I was watching with you, and I mentioned that I got to share it, you got to see this. Okay. It's brutal. Yeah, send it to my letter, check it out, because I talk about that frequently, about you got to beware. You know, all churches need money. It's just a building. They have lights. They have AC. They have utilities and expenses, but there's one thing to keep the church going. It's another thing to make the preacher rich. Yeah, to buy a plane for the preacher. Yeah, exactly. It's just a little odd. And then finally, we do have a review. The review is looking for- I was going to go five stars, but that don't look like five stars. Yeah, it's only three stars. So like, three stars. It says, looking for a podcast on Pinterest. So it's from LTL, Limited Time Listener. Yeah, sorry, I can't hope you did. Yeah, well, he did. He said he found our podcast while searching for something to do with Pinterest. Ironically, it seems you have duplicate content on number 138 and 142. One being titled Duplicate Content, and the other Pinterest. Maybe you could fix it. So we take these things very seriously. We went in, and we looked, and we listened to it. I thought maybe the same audio was on 138 and 142, but it's different audio, and everything looks right. So Mr. LTL, hit us up, and you can email us, podcast at e-webstyle.com, and let us know- What

content are you referring to? Yeah, what are you talking about? Send us some links if you can. Yeah, even better, because I'd love to- Fix that. Yeah, fix it. If indeed there's a problem there. Exactly. Appreciate your review, though. Thank you. Very cool, and I think you've got a little bit of potatoes, a little bit more. A little bit of potatoes, not much, a little bit of potatoes. One, WordPress 4.3 is available. Okay. And so they made some pretty cool features in there. One of the main issues people were struggling with WordPress was the customization and the usability of the menus. Right. So now they've vastly improved menus and how you can adjust them and make the pages show and drop-downs and everything else. That's really the biggest rollout as part of 4.3, and I want to give a punch in the face to Declustered Marketing. Hit us up on Twitter, at DeclusteredMKTN. It says, at e-webstyle, you have an awesome podcast. Thank you for your hard work. Appreciate you. Punch in the face to you. Thank you for tuning in. Tune in again. Keep tuning in. Excellent. So that is the potatoes of our podcast. Time to get into the meat. Yeah, so like we said earlier, man, I want to give a huge punch in the face to Zach Johnson and the good fellas over there at Search Engine Journal. Zach posted this article, five ways to instantly improve landing page conversions. Five ways to instantly. That's what made me click, Zach, just so you know. It was the word instantly that was like, okay, let me see what this article is about. To instantly improve landing page conversions. He softened off the article by saying, in this world of online marketing, it's all about adapting with changes, tweaking your business, and analyzing the results. Zach, you're absolutely right. You must test and measure. Like, no matter what type of online marketing you're doing, whether it's SEO, whether it's pay-per-click, whether it's some email marketing, whether it's some video marketing, whether it's content

marketing, whatever you're doing, you have to test it and measure it. If you want it to be successful, if you want it to grow, and if you want it to continuously get better, then you must test and measure it. Because if you don't, then you end up just doing it, and it may work marginally. Yeah. And if you haven't tested, then you may think marginally is pretty good, when marginally could really be bad. And so the only way you'll know that is if you run that ad, or run that promo, or run that content, or run that point of view, or run that color, or whatever it is you're testing against another one, and so that way you can see which one works better. So just a note, so there is a difference between advertising as an expense, and advertising your thought process shouldn't be that advertising is an expense, because an expense is just something you pay for, and you have to pay for, and you can't necessarily track an ROI. Yeah, shipping is an expense. Yep. You know what I'm saying? Ordering, catering for your business meeting is an expense. Lights are an expense. Rent is an expense. Right, because you can't make income. Of course, you can't make any money if the lights aren't on, or the internet's on. It's a necessary expense, but it's an expense nonetheless. And advertising, and especially, well, online marketing or traditional advertising, it's an investment. You should be tracking it, and you should, you know, we say in the podcast, which is now, we say, don't throw money against the wall and see if it sticks. Track it, monitor it, and then make decisions based on it. Yeah, definitely. So, one, number one, he says, in regards to five ways to instantly improve your landing page conversions, number one, he says, mess around with the colors. And I like to use the word mess, because he's absolutely right. Knowing where everyone has these ideas of what colors work and what colors don't work. It's orange. You

think it's green? I think it's orange. I think it's yellow. Yeah. Maybe it's red. Exactly. It could be purple. It depends on the other colors. It depends on the other colors. But more importantly, it also depends on the industry. Right. It depends on the industry. The target market. Yes. It's a lot goes into play with that. So, you can't just automatically assume green means go. All the buttons need to be green, because it's going to make people go. Right. They could go away. Frankly, that may not be what you want. Matter of fact, he says, the colors of your landing page and call to action play a huge part in your conversions. With those examples. He said, the color blue creates a sensation of trust and security, while red increases the heart rate and provides a sense of urgency. May be right right there. I'm pretty sure some research went into that, and I agree. I understand how red makes you feel a certain kind of way. Now, how that transpires in regards to a CTA or a button, it could have an adverse effect. Right. Red could literally make them stop. Right. Like, oh, red, stay away. Or, red could be exactly what they needed to click. Could feel like a commitment. Exactly. Like, I know it's a button, and it's red. And it's red. It's important. It's powerful. It's red. I'm not ready for that. I'm just, you know, I'm not ready for that commitment. Exactly. And so, you have to test and measure. Yeah. I would run that landing page with one red one and one orange one. And then, 30 days later, with one green one and one orange one. And then, 30 days after that, with a blue one and an orange one. The orange one being my constant. Yeah. You see what I'm saying? And the orange one probably being the first one we use with the design. And so, we can test and see. And with every 30 days or two weeks or whichever time period you set,

whichever one converts the best, then you make the right adjustments. We can give you this pro tip that your buttons probably should stand out from the rest of the design. Definitely. If you have a blue design, you probably don't want a blue button. If you've got an orange design, you probably don't want an orange button. So, make it stand out from that because then it's going to stand out. It's going to stand out more. Can you click it? Definitely. Number two. Two. He says, bring a time sensitive call to action. Bring a time sensitive call to action. Urgency. Yeah, that's a great one. He says, this brings a sense of urgency, like a countdown clock or offering only, like a limited number of supply. He says, it's a silly tactic, but it still works extremely well. Yeah. He's right. Anytime you can use emotion, in this case, time sensitive is FOMO. That's a fear of missing out, right? Anytime you can evoke that emotion, whether it's fear or whether it's love, get this because it's going to do this for your love life, or whether it's anxiousness or whatever that emotion is, when you can tie in an emotion to a specific call to action, then you have a higher likelihood of people acting on that emotion and taking the action that you want them to take. So, consider that when coming up with verbiage for your call to actions. And I'll say this, not just a call to action, but if we go back a step to, let's say, your ad text for your paid campaign, that's a good place to start driving that emotion. Yeah. And so, if your emotion is going to be fear, then your ad text should speak into that. Then, after they click and- Don't miss out. Yeah. Exactly. After they click and they get to your landing page, then you should reinforce that with some appropriate visual and similar text. And then, of course, the action that you want them to take. Number three. Three. He says, know

where and why people are clicking. Know where and why. And so, this is for those guys who maybe have some access to heat maps and things like that. If you have access to that technology, it's not that hard to figure out how people are interacting on your pages, then the better. He goes on to say that the important thing to remember is that the only thing you want visitors to do at your landing page is to take action. This means you must remove any and all distractions from your landing page that could be an outlet for them to leave your site, such as a navigation bar, clickable logo. Or any outbound links. Um, Jay, I feel you. I don't quite agree. Now, I understand, especially from a paid perspective. Right. Paid perspective, definitely, we're going to shrink this landing page down to only the actions visible because that's what we want. And we're paying for that click. However, from an SEO perspective, when you have targeted pages and these pages are going to rank, then you want that page to be a page that's built to convert. It needs to be, it needs to operate like a landing page. Now, the problem with that is, in regards to what you're saying, is that, um, this page is on the site. Right. And so, the logo is available. The navigation is available. The sidebar is there. Which is why we put a sidebar on every page with the form because those pages will rank. Yeah. From optimizing this specific page. I'm not sending paid traffic to it. Right. This is just an SEO optimized page. And since it's optimized, I intend on it to eventually rank. And if it ranks- And that makes it a- Landing page. Exactly. Because if it ranks and people click on it, they effectively landed on it. And hence, I need them to convert. Yep. And so, I need to make sure my call to action is prominent. But since this page is also on the site, the navigation must be

there. Yeah. The menu must be there. And frankly, this page could be ranking for a term that's maybe secondary. Couldn't be exactly what they wanted. And navigation menu will come in handy at this point. So, they can go back and find what they were looking for. If I'm in research mode, right? Exactly. Then I want access to other information. I want access to it. I don't want to be stuck on this page and I can't navigate anywhere. I can't go anywhere. Please do not send me to the end of the internet. Exactly. And that's a bad experience for the Google user, by the way. So, I would say it's definitely smart to know where people are clicking at. If you can figure out that people come to your page and they usually, excuse me, click here and then they scroll and then they fill out a form. If you can understand that, then you know how to design your site and lay it out so all of those features are easy to access. But, if you're optimizing a standard site and all of these pages had a potential of being ranked, then you want to follow some design standards. Keep our forms above the fold. Make the phone number prominent. Make the navigation easy to use and user friendly so that way they can navigate. They can have a good experience regardless of what page they land on. Number four, he says, incentivize your call to action. Duh. You have to give people a reason to call. Call for a free consultation. Call for something. Don't just say call now. Don't just say call now. Unless there's some situations where that's okay. In the context of the other content. Exactly. Or maybe you're crowded. Like we have some sites where they say call today, but right next to that there's a whole other statement about why you should call today. And so, you know, but definitely don't just have your phone number there with no reason. Yeah. Right. You want to incentivize your call to

action. He says no one really wants to give away their email address in hopes to get more mailings or potential spam. He's right. Nobody wants to do that. And so, I'll say you have to add value. We have a client man punching the face of the Noble Money, Noble Mortgage and Investments. We added the pop-up to them. Right. For the newsletter. For the newsletter. We had to give you some great information on getting a hard money loan for free. Just give us your email address. Right. Or think about anybody out there who's interested in natural, you know, 100% Indian hair. Sign up for that newsletter. SilkyIndianHair.com. You can get 5% off your purchase just by signing up for the newsletter. Yeah. Okay. That's some incentives. That's some incentives. Or maybe even if you're in Houston and you like donuts, you've heard of Shipley Donuts. Punch in the face to MyShipleyDonuts.com. Sign up for that newsletter and you immediately get a coupon for free donuts and free coffee at your next visit. Wow. Right? Yeah. So, incentivize your call to actions. Give people a reason to call you. Give people a reason to fill out that form. Give people a reason to subscribe to your newsletter. Because if you don't, they won't. If you don't, they won't. Yeah. That's a good way to end that. I almost want to end the podcast right there. Thank you. Good night. And drop the mic. Number five. Split test everything. Yes. Man, great one, Jay. You must test. I was talking about that earlier. Testing and measuring. He goes on to say, no matter how many changes you make to your page, if you aren't split testing the results, there's simply no way for you to measure what working and what isn't. Yeah. And he's right. If you haven't tested, if you haven't looked at your analytics, if you haven't tried it against something else, then you really don't know. All you know is that it's working a little bit. Yeah. That's all you know. And maybe you can

say, it feels like it's working better now. Yeah. Because maybe you got more calls or something. Or you think you got more calls. Exactly. Or maybe you got more calls, but less form submissions. Or more form submissions, but less calls. Or even worse, maybe you're doing one form of marketing, and I say this because we dealt with a client who had the situation, and then you got another firm who's doing something else for you, and they're driving traffic, and you're getting phone calls because of your local listing, but you think it's your PPC driving your phone calls. And it's not that. It's the fact that now you just got to hire a local listing, and you're getting more calls. Yeah. And if you're not testing it, if you don't have someone, if not you, an agency like us, or somebody to look at those analytics, to decipher how you're getting goals, how you're getting conversions, then you won't know. And not knowing sucks. Yeah. So make sure you do that. I added this to it. Make sure you give enough time for testing. If you're going to split test everything, and we do mean everything, make sure you give enough time for it. Some people don't give enough time for the test. You change that color we were talking earlier from red to orange, and you only let it run for a day, you don't have enough. Like 20 people look at it. That's not enough data. Now, I would suggest if budget is available, of course, if resources are available, run a payday. Yeah. Let it run for two weeks. Drive as much traffic as you can with your budget, and then look at those results. Or maybe your site already ranks well. Maybe you're already getting a ton of traffic. Then great. Take advantage of that, run some different testing on that existing traffic. And so that way you can gauge which ones converted more, which ones didn't. Make sure you mark it up in analytics, right? Go into your analytics, choose, create

an annotation for the date. Hey, running this test here, and this is what I'm testing. And so that way in three weeks when you go and look at it, you can see when you started it and what you tested and what the control was and what the variable was. All right? Split test everything. He closes his article by saying, I'm going to have to go digital with this. I think I'm tired of printing papers. But he closes the article by saying, the success of your landing page and your campaign relies on you. He says, you must build out an effective landing page and continually tweak and split test until you find what works. And he's right. At the end of the day, you have to monitor, you have to test, you have to communicate with the sales team to determine the effectiveness. That's why with our process, one of the things we do is have a monthly call with each client. And the reason we do that is so I can talk to them and figure out what's working and what's not working. Right. Because on our end, if I'm looking at reports and I see, you know, your call tracking, you had 50 calls. I look at your goal completions. You had 75 forms filled out. It looks like a great month. But until I talk to you and you say, yes, 50% of those clothes are turning into new business or half of the calls we made were extremely qualified, then we'll feel good. Or you may say, you know what, Chuck? Had none of those clothes. Then the calls were all bad. That's information I need to know as well. So that way we can continue to test, make some changes, and then push for better results. And so if you don't have that feedback loop between the changes in the testing you're making and the actual results that are happening for the business, then you're going to miss it. You're going to miss it. This is an employee to have you

guys contact us. This is a ploy for all of our fans and listeners and watchers to really test, test your ads. Test what's working. Test what's not working. So that way your business is going to grow. Punch in the face, man. Zach Johnson. Great article. Five Ways to Instantly Improve Landing Page Conversions. Cool. That's what's up. Cool. We got any what news? Do I have any what news? I don't think I have any what news. No what news, no blank stare. We do have that what for the girl, but you can find her name. Yeah. She'll do what her next time. Yeah. All right. Well, cool. Hey, if you're looking to grow your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet. The internet. Call eWebStyle for increased revenue in your business. Our phone number is 713-592-6724. Remember, if you have a referral, somebody who's interested in internet marketing, you don't want to handle them, send them our direction. They pay their bill. We pay you. That's our referral program. Remember, I do, and we've skipped a couple episodes of the Creative Biz Ideas blog talk radio show. We will be broadcasting, not this Monday, but the following Monday, starting 730 Central Standard Time. So, from 730 to 830 Central Standard Time. You can find it at CreativeBizIdeas.com. Yeah. Best of you follow us. If you follow us, then Monday morning, we will usually tweet that out, and you'll be able to watch it. It's a nice reminder. Hey, I need to tune in to CreativeBizIdeas.com. Remember, we were filmed live at 5999 West 34th Street, Suite 106 in Houston, Texas, 77092. We are the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. That is because of all of y'all. Thank you so much for making us. Gracias. Gracias. Merci. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now. Balance check. Balance check. Balance check. One, two. One, two. One, two. You may know Half Steppin' SEO Podcast 287. Time to get it started. You might learn something. Today, man,

we're talking about page conversions. Tune in. Man, pay attention. Did I forget to mention? You should pay attention. And that's it. SEO Podcast 287. Let's go. Boom.