Adam Gregory: All right. Welcome to the Best SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing and Marketing to Niches. I’m sure everyone’s wondering why they don’t hear Chris, that’s because he’s out of the office this week.
Matt Bertram: Traveling.
Adam Gregory:
That’s right. He did a really cool thing to his family, surprised them, flew on the plane all the way to New Jersey with them just a few rows behind him-
Aaron Weathers:
They had no clue.
Adam Gregory:
… Made it off the plane, got in the car, had no idea, surprised his family. Really cool story.
Matt Bertram:
And this is the voice of.
Adam Gregory:
And of course the voice of Marketing to Niches. It’s me your-
Matt Bertram:
Co-host.
Adam Gregory:
… Military marketer-
Matt Bertram:
Okay, okay, What-
Adam Gregory:
… And former 82nd Airborne Division member.
Matt Bertram:
And your name is?
Adam Gregory:
Adam Gregory, those of you who have seen me or know me, yes. I am the public relations director here at eWebResults.
Matt Bertram:
And he is the one on all of our news letter emails, our infinity drip that goes out, he’s got great stories, definitely check it out and sign up for our news letters. This is Matt Bertram here and I’m here with-
Aaron Weathers:
Aaron Weathers. Fastest marketer in the world.
Matt Bertram:
Fastest marketer in the world.
Adam Gregory:
Fastest marketer in the world.
Aaron Weathers:
LAN speed.
Adam Gregory:
All right.
Matt Bertram:
He wears a Flash shirt a lot around here, so everybody’s got their persona.
Adam Gregory:
And I just noticed that on the podcast with Chris, you have a Flash shirt on. Okay, so today we’re going to be going over an article Neil Patel wrote back in 2011.
Matt Bertram:
Why are we using an article from 2011?
Adam Gregory:
Well, it’s a good question.
Matt Bertram:
Well, Neil Patel is awesome, one, and we’re number two behind him but no.
Adam Gregory:
No, this article is really good, it’s got a lot of really great bullet points, and it really sets you up for success when building your landing pages.
Matt Bertram:
What he didn’t mention is it’s ranked number one for Google when you search for landing pages.
Adam Gregory:
True.
Matt Bertram:
So it’s still a very awesome article in Google’s eyes and in ours.
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah. Relevant, and we have our own updates for 2018.
Matt Bertram:
Yes we do, towards the end we’re going to have our checklist that we use with all our clients, so stay tuned till the end.
Aaron Weathers:
Yes.
Adam Gregory:
All right, so let’s go ahead and dive in, those of you that aren’t familiar with the landing pages, you’re about to get very familiar with it. So a well designed landing page can create, it can greatly increase conversions for your PBC or email marketing campaigns. Rather than directing visitors from those sources to your general website you can direct them specifically to, sorry, to a specifically designed landing page that steers them in the exact direction you want them to take.
Matt Bertram:
So we’re going to talk a lot about landing pages, there’s the long form sales copy, there’s the squeeze pages, and we’re just going to really go through the basics of what a good landing page is.
Adam Gregory:
So everyone starts somewhere, so what’s your goal of your landing page is kind of the starting.
Aaron Weathers:
The goal of the landing page, it depends on what kind of business you’re in, you could be in e-commerce, you could be a service based business for your local, or you could be a national type business where we do financial services, or you could have a product that you’re selling. So there’s a lot of different type of landing pages, one we’ll specifically talk about today is a squeeze page or just gathering leads.
Matt Bertram:
Why don’t you give an example Aaron, of maybe one where you would use long form sales copy, I got some ideas too, and then also for some squeeze pages that you’ve had a lot of success with. Aaron is one of our conversion specialist here, he’s weaving in and out quickly with his marketing and-
Adam Gregory:
Using his football moves.
Matt Bertram:
… Collecting those conversion. But why don’t you talk about the difference and what kind of landing pages do better for different types of industries? So people have an idea when they’re building their own landing pages potentially.
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah so there’s a lot of different offers that we done, one that we really like right now are free reports and free guides. And if you have a local business out there, I know we have a lot of local businesses online, and you’re using free consultation, we just want to recommend you try this strategy of using a free guide. And so instead of saying, “Call now,” or if you have a home remodeling company and you’re talking about free consultation, one thing that you can do to get more leads is use the ultimate guide to remodeling your kitchen or something like that, and we saw a lot of good results with that.
Matt Bertram:
Yeah. So really what’s going on is, you’re having to elongate your funnel right? Because there’s a lot more noise in the space and so free consultation is really a big jump, you have to pick up the phone, you have to call, or you have to fill out a form, and you might not be ready to talk to somebody as if you’re looking from the leads or the prospect stand point, you’re still in the information gathering phase and you’re collecting data, right? That’s the perfect time to position your company and get you in the lead’s mind first as they start doing this research, as you’re the one providing value, it creates some reciprocity.
Matt Bertram:
We can talk a little bit about, and we have in the past, the remarketing, the email marketing that you need to attach to it, to really build these funnels. But you need a lower barrier to entry as you’re collecting information because people are becoming a lot more cautious of where they put their emails online. I just got hit with a couple of emails from people where I had to go to a checklist, and it was a email overflow or something, and I had to do a CATCHE or whatever they’re called.
Aaron Weathers:
CAPTCHA.
Matt Bertram:
Yeah, to actually send the email.
Aaron Weathers:
Wow.
Matt Bertram:
So people are trying to prevent a lot of the mass emails that are going on, and they want to know that you are invited to be on the list, but really creating that lead capture on the front, and we’ve seen a lot of success when you’re just not getting the leads you’re looking for.
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah, it really does definitely put you in the position of an expert, and then you have an opportunity to follow up with a really high value content in their email, with videos as well, with the retargeting. And so it enables you to not compete, when they’re ready to buy, on price. So, that’s one thing we tell our clients, “You don’t want to compete on price and you don’t want to be a bottom feeder when it comes to that, you want to get paid what you’re worth,” and so one of the ways to do that is to establish yourself as an authority with great information, and to let them know that you’re the leader in your space.
Matt Bertram:
And if you’re ever thinking about running a special or something like that, some kind of discount, I would encourage you to run some kind of bonus, or add on, or value ad, as opposed to devaluing the product.
Aaron Weathers:
Right.
Matt Bertram:
Right?
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah.
Matt Bertram:
Adam, I don’t know if you want to kind of talk to this a little bit, maybe long form sales letters versus short term sales letters, as far as being the online sales person and covering all the objections and why a long form sales letter would be more effective.
Adam Gregory:
Sorry, I’ve got nothing else to go this far down so I’m confused on the question, are we talking about forms? The long somebody?
Matt Bertram:
So I’ll just jump in here-
Adam Gregory:
[crosstalk 00:07:34].
Matt Bertram:
So, when you’re talking to, so we’ll take a break, we’re going to forget this piece and it’s going to be not edited.
Adam Gregory:
No I’ll edit, I’ll know when you want to edit.
Matt Bertram:
So what I’m talking about is long form sales letters, so I’m talking about affiliate sales, affiliate sales funnels, where when you’re talking about a product that you’re trying to sell online. You know how you can direct mail pieces, you get 10, 15 pages in the mail and they answer every single question, right?
Adam Gregory:
Yeah.
Matt Bertram:
So there’s a differentiator between squeeze pages to get their information and provide something of value, one of the tricks there is make sure, this is what I heard out of a conference, I actually included this in my book, it was so valuable. Was, any piece of content you offer in a lead capture, make it good enough that someone should pay for it, right? Make it as good of a offer as you can, of something of value that they would be willing to pay for and you’re giving it to them free, that’s how you got to think about it. But when you’re talking about long form sales letters and you’re talking about affiliate marketing, that’s going to be our next podcast that we’re going to go into some of the things we’re doing on affiliate marketing, because there’s a ton of money out there, and there’s a lot of people doing really great things in multiple different niches.
Matt Bertram:
But really you have the squeeze pages, but then you have the other extreme and you have a long form sales letter, and when you’re looking at it and Aaron I know you can speak to this, why is long content convert better typically? Right? So that’s the debate, well short because people have a short attention span, the study by Microsoft that says it’s less than a gold fish kind of thing, right? So why wouldn’t short win all the time? Why would you need to use long form sales content?
Aaron Weathers:
So the reason short content doesn’t win all the time, and why long form sales letters are so good and they’re used a lot especially in info products is because, the short copy doesn’t give them enough information typically to gather a sale, to catch a sale. There’s authority question, there’s credibility questions, there’s trust questions, who are they speaking to? There’s all these different parameters and questions you have to answer and objections that you have to get over. The reason a long form sales letter works so well is because it wipes away doubt, that’s the focus of it. And so a lot of people when they see a long form sales letter, or a long video sales letter, if they see those they say, “People aren’t going to read this, people aren’t going to watch it,” the fact is for the most-
Matt Bertram:
If they’re your customer.
Aaron Weathers:
It they’re your customer-
Matt Bertram:
Your prospects.
Aaron Weathers:
There are people who will read every word and you are correct there are people who will not read the whole thing, but they way it’s formed, it’s formed in a easily digestible way so the bullets and the checks are what they read the most, they’ll skim over it, and when you have the right information highlighted on the sales letter, if they can hit seven or eight or ten bullets out of the 15 pages or whatever it is, it gives them a good gist of what’s in it and it builds that trust and value.
Matt Bertram:
And moving into clear call to action on those long form sales letters. In that long form sales letter, there are short call to actions attached on top of each other, and it’s trying to hit a different kind of the disc profile, we’ve talked about it, you got the dominant personalities, you got the information, the social.
Aaron Weathers:
The data.
Matt Bertram:
The data driven. So you’re trying to hit all the concerns that someone has, and then you’re like, “Are you ready to buy now? No? Are you ready to buy now?” And you keep going with it, and so it really depends on what your objective is.
Adam Gregory:
All right. And so, obviously clear call to action, we hit that. Simple, let’s talk about simple.
Matt Bertram:
Well, clear call to action, I think we should go back to that for a minute, okay? Let’s talk about a clear CTA, and what in your mind is a clear CTA?
Aaron Weathers:
A clear CTA is, well on your landing page ultimately you have one goal, one goal, that’s why Adam mentioned a little bit earlier that you don’t want to send them to your website, because you have a whole menu, you have buttons at the bottom, you have all these different content, learn more buttons and everything.
Matt Bertram:
They’ll get distracted.
Aaron Weathers:
Right, you get distracted, easily get distracted. Especially if you have a “Pretty” site, you get distracted easily.
Matt Bertram:
Oh man. That was a-
Aaron Weathers:
Pretty sites don’t convert the best but a clear call to action is you have one goal and the button is focused on that goal, and so the call to action says something like, let’s say, “Send me my free report,” and I’m talking about buttons now, the button says, “Send me my free report,” it says, “Yes, send me the coupon, I want this coupon.” The button text is focused on what the customer gets when they click the button, and so it’s not submit or-
Matt Bertram:
Talk in terms of them.
Aaron Weathers:
… Subscribe me, yeah talk in terms of them. So you just want to make it clear, you want to make the button contrast color so it really stands out, like an orange or a gold if you have heart tones on your site.
Adam Gregory:
And it’s definitely the most important part of your page if I can say so, I mean you talk about wanting, I mean you want people to click that button and so you want it to stand out and you want it to be focused on, is see all these pages and I think that everyone’s bad about doing this, “Call us, contact us.” You want something that sticks out at you like, “Speak to a SEO specialist today,” or-
Matt Bertram:
“Get your problem solved,” or.
Adam Gregory:
“Get your free form right now.”
Matt Bertram:
“Yes, my kitchen needs an upgrade.”
Adam Gregory:
Yeah, you want-
Matt Bertram:
Yeah, and that’s what you want them to click that button.
Aaron Weathers:
“Yes my kitchen need an upgrade.” Also, this is a book, me and Matt read this book, this landing page book a while back, but it talked about visual cues and it had this thing in there where they placed a picture, the picture that they placed was of the person looking at the button.
Matt Bertram:
These are some pro tips right here guys.
Adam Gregory:
Wow.
Aaron Weathers:
And they said it increased conversions because of like, “Hey, what’s the person looking at?” And then they’re looking at the button.
Matt Bertram:
Yeah, so second ranked was looking at you, first rank looking at the product, always have a picture of the product of whatever they’re going to get, increases conversions a ton, but that was a old school, what was it? 2002 book or something?
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah.
Matt Bertram:
But it was just foundational stuff, it was great, we loved digging into that stuff here at eWebResults.
Adam Gregory:
All right, so obviously a clear call to action is most vital, and then moving on, simple. Have a simple landing page, it doesn’t have to have all these crazy buttons and you want the focus to be on them getting what they came there for, I mean that’s really the best way to say that.
Matt Bertram:
Yeah I think simple is best, the clear call to action, or the clear concise copy as we are moving through Neil Patel’s article. I think we’ve elaborated on that already getting here, but there’s one goal of the landing page and it’s to get the person’s information, and they need to understand what they’re getting in return for their contact information, so.
Adam Gregory:
And of course when you’re asking for that information, this is where I think we’ve, I don’t know how the best way to say this but you don’t want, you’re not trying to get all their information, you’re looking for name, email, and maybe even phone number, and that’s.
Matt Bertram:
So we have some clients right now that are, [crosstalk 00:15:35] that’s what I was trying to go to here, that we’ve done too well with their SEO. We’re ranked number one for, what is it? 493 terms? And we got a client that’s getting wat to many leads, and we’re having to figure out a way to filter the leads. I was actually on a profit plan with another client, I use it as an example because it was a similar format, and they were in New Orleans and they’re like, “You’re ranked number one for New Orleans,” that’s for the search term, and so he was getting too many leads and really Aaron I know you can speak to this, the friction that’s created with each form that you have.
Matt Bertram:
So with this guy we adding, for this client we’ve been adding tons of forms and filtering it, and then we can also talk about the hyper local pages that we’re building but really he’s got too many leads so we’re doing the reverse, we’re adding more and more forms, and making it harder and harder to know that the person’s serious, to get their information. But most clients are looking for more leads right? Or before they start working with us, but speak to that.
Aaron Weathers:
Sometimes I really have the big clients just have the form fills that you need. A point I talk about clients with is, a question that I actually have with is, excuse me, I ask them, “So how often do you talk to your clients? How often do you talk to your clients to get a sale on this home services, local services or anything like that?” A lot of them say, “Well I talk to my clients every time, every sale I make is over the phone,” and so I say, “Then do you ask these questions over the phone?” We’re talking about their form, maybe the form has 15 fills or something like that, address, zip code, first name, last name, email, phone number, everything.
Matt Bertram:
Middle name.
Aaron Weathers:
Middle name. Middle initial.
Adam Gregory:
First bone child. Dog’s name.
Aaron Weathers:
And so I ask them, “Do you ask these questions when they’re on the phone?” And they tell me, “Yes,” and so what I tell them and what I’m telling you over the cloud, in the cloud, people in the cloud, is that you can ask these questions after you capture the lead, you can ask them over the phone and you can even follow up by email after you get the lead, and ask them those questions in an email. If you really want to get really fancy then you can create a multi-step form, so you can create name, email, phone, they fill it out and then after they click they go to another form that collects more information. And then there’s forms where you can do that and even if they don’t fill out the rest of the information, you still get the name, email and phone. So those are a couple different strategies, Matt I know you have some insight on that as well.
Matt Bertram:
When you’re talking about forms, there’s actually a ton of research and products out there of different forms that work differently, having that load bar at the top of how much far-
Aaron Weathers:
Progress.
Matt Bertram:
The progress report, also there’s forms that show you one field at a time, and there’s a lot of different things that you can do to capture and also it’ll lock in the information so if they half fill out the form, you can still have their information, so you want to ask for the pertinent stuff first. But one of the things that’s debatable is combining the full name, right? Combining the full name. Now, if you’re really sophisticated and you’re sending email drips on top of that, and you need a form that has the first name, or if you do need the zip code to sort by depending on what you’re selling, sometimes you do need more forms. Right?
Matt Bertram:
Sometimes you maybe don’t need their address up front, sometimes you do, sometimes you need their credit card information, it depends if you’re e-commerce or you’re services or whatever it might be. So you got to really decide what you need and that goes back to the planning stages, but everything you do and every extra bit of effort that you ask for the client, there creates I think it’s 23%, I don’t know where I read that but it was 23% friction. So-
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah, for every fill that you add, so imagine that, I just gave you a tip, pro tip for sales, boost your conversions by 20% by eliminating a fill today.
Matt Bertram:
There you go that’s the tip. So we have a couple clients that we started with just the email, or maybe we did the name and the email and the phone number, and then we dropped it down just to the email, and then we got tons more leads, and then they’re like, “Well, we don’t know who these people are and we can’t access them,” and then we add the forms back and it was really interesting to see the data trend when we went down to email, we tripled, quadrupled the leads. Then when we went back up to the name and you’re like, “That makes that big of a difference?” So when we’re doing all these kind of split tests, you’ll uncover some really, really interesting information out there related to forms.
Adam Gregory:
And again, the caviar of everything is, the best thing that I can say is that this is based on your business too. I mean if you’re a local business and you’re selling a local thing obviously you may want more stuff on your forms, but if you’re needing an address and you want zip, address, city, state, just-
Aaron Weathers:
Apartment number.
Adam Gregory:
Apartment number, just put address. To me that makes it a little bit easier.
Aaron Weathers:
A little bit easier.
Adam Gregory:
Okay you being the business owner you’ve got to do a little bit more sorting, but wouldn’t it be worth it to spend a few extra minutes sorting to get that lead-
Aaron Weathers:
Instead of-
Matt Bertram:
It depends on the value, yeah. It definitely depends on the value of the [crosstalk 00:21:21].
Aaron Weathers:
Than putting address, city, state.
Adam Gregory:
Zip code.
Aaron Weathers:
Zip code.
Matt Bertram:
Yeah. And if you have big ticket items you can always hire a admin to follow up on the back end, to collect all this information or have some kind of follow up form like you talked about Aaron.
Aaron Weathers:
Yes.
Matt Bertram:
What’s the next section? Design considerations? Is that the next section right there?
Adam Gregory:
Yes. Design, so the design of your page is just as important as the copy. Good design supports the call to action while a bad design detracts from it, this is why when it comes to landing pages less if definitely more, the simpler your page, the design, the more likely it is to convert. And I mean it speaks for itself.
Matt Bertram:
Yeah, there are definitely some good pictures here in this Beginner’s Guide to Landing Pages by Neil Patel but Aaron why don’t you talk about some of the, you’ve been building a lot of landing pages here recently, why don’t you talk about some of the different formats when you’re building out the landing pages, some of things that maybe you do or some of the things that you look for, or there’s a typical structure when you’re building the landing page of what you’re trying to achieve.
Adam Gregory:
And not to cut you off either, maybe go into a recent client that we had who was wanting to try to convert a certain ethnicity of people and doing the colors differently and stuff like that, and how everyone’s different.
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah, just like we talked about, you just really want to take in everything into consideration. Here’s something you might not have thought of, was checking out your analytics, why check out your analytics? I mean why should I check out my analytics? Well what you want to know is, and this is for designers, graphic designers, your marketing team out there, the reason you want to check that is to see where your traffic is coming from. So typically landing pages are created on desktop, you see the landing pages on desktop, you see things above the folds, everything looks pretty, but then when you click over to mobile.
Matt Bertram:
Oh man. Oh man.
Aaron Weathers:
The mobile version is not what you would expect and the desktop version might be optimized for conversions but the mobile version isn’t optimized for conversions. Go into your analytics and you see you get 70% mobile traffic, you’re saying we got this great landing page, it’s not converting, and it’s because the mobile version didn’t have a click to call button, or the mobile version had these designs elements that were out of whack and the form was at the bottom of the page and it didn’t have multiple opportunities for the call to action. So that’s another pro tip, check your analytics, see if you’re getting more mobile traffic than desktop traffic and I know Matt has good data that Google’s rolling out on mobile, to support that.
Matt Bertram:
Yeah, there’s definitely a lot out there, it depends on what platform you’re using too. Some platforms you have to build out your mobile, everything’s going to be mobile first. Some will intelligently build it mobile, and you really got to look at that because what converts on desktop does not always convert on mobile and it doesn’t look the same, and you might need to add some more buttons, you want a conversion button or something to recapture every couple scrolls when you’re looking at mobile, there’s great stuff out there. Neil Patel’s Crazy Egg, you got Lucky Orange and you got Hot Jar out there that you can put on these sites to see what’s going on there. But if you can go into a little more detailed menu, you going to have really some good lay outs that you tend to go to when you’re building these landing pages. Some you got a video lead capture, some we got additional content, so go into that a little bit more for people out there that are building their own landing pages.
Aaron Weathers:
So if you’re building that landing page out right now and you have a free report or free guide, really no matter what it is, just some tips on the headline that I’ll cover are you want to call out your audience. And so if you’re talking about soccer moms or you’re selling to military people or you’re selling to dentists, let’s say you’re B2B you’re selling to dentists, you going to say something like, “Hey dentist were you in the military?” Or you would say something lie, “Hey soccer mom,” you want to call out your audience in your headline and then go into what the free report is about, or then go into what the service is and have the features and benefits about because when somebody lands on your page they want to feel at home. Another easy way to do this is to have your city on it, so we’re in Houston, our headline probably have something in Houston, see what best businesses are doing for their marketing in Houston or something like that.
Aaron Weathers:
And so when they land on your page you’re going to have a Houston image or a video is really good, I know a lot of you out there aren’t using video, you need to use video. If you have a video you can shoot the video in the front of a popular landmark in the city. And so when people watch the video they recognize that landmark and say, “Oh he’s in Houston he
[crosstalk 00:26:33]
.”
Matt Bertram:
And you’re shooting it with your phone, is okay too, right?
Aaron Weathers:
Shooting it with your phone is definitely okay.
Adam Gregory:
Another example is we have a client from New York and as I’m going through his website and doing his audits, I’m realizing he has nothing that says he’s from New York. I added a simple picture of the Statue of Liberty.
Aaron Weathers:
There you go.
Adam Gregory:
The New York sky line, these work.
Aaron Weathers:
Yes they do.
Adam Gregory:
His page views are up, I mean just-
Matt Bertram:
Going back to some simplicity right? When you’re selling on the internet, people forget this, it’s a one-on-one sale, right? So the long form sales letter is your sales person, they have to answer every objection, right? And also people like to buy from people that are near them or close to them, they’re definitely-
Aaron Weathers:
That they can relate to.
Matt Bertram:
That they can relate to, there’s a lot of data to suggest that even by location, right? Or liking the same sports team or whatever it may be, that’s why sales people when they go to someone’s office they try to connect with them right? It’s the same thing with the internet, whatever you are you want to business with like minded people and they want to do it with you, so you got to create that experience that they’re going to be familiar or relatable to. I think what you were talking about, about the different locations is absolutely important and also the head lines too. If they don’t raise their hand and you don’t call out, and they don’t read your ad and click on the link to the landing page, that’s why advertising doesn’t work. 80% of advertising doesn’t work because no one even read the ad, right? Because you got to catch them with that first line and I know a lot of copy writers out there that spend a predominant amount of time coming up with the right-
Aaron Weathers:
Headline.
Matt Bertram:
Right headline. I mean you do a really good job with that Adam, with the emails that you send out, they’re all just off the wall and they stand out of the standard email, and it grabs your attention and they click on it and then they move into the email. So then you have an opportunity to share whatever it is you’re going to share because if they never clicked on it or never saw it, it all doesn’t matter.
Adam Gregory:
At all.
Matt Bertram:
And it can be as good as it can be.
Aaron Weathers:
The headline is just to push them to the next piece, headline makes them watch the video, the headline makes them read the next bulletin and so on.
Adam Gregory:
And I’ve got to give Aaron credit for the subject lines because he definitely taught more about making that headline, because at first it was just kind of like, “Whatever,” and then you realize it when you do, for instance an email that went out yesterday about toddler torture.
Matt Bertram:
Careful.
Adam Gregory:
It’s not about toddler torture it’s about not giving marsh mellows to kids, so.
Matt Bertram:
That study, I have heard that study in marketing a lot of the times.
Adam Gregory:
But the headline worked, I mean when I saw it, the evils of toddlers’ torture and I’d forgot that Aaron had written that email, and I was like, “Wow, wait, what?” But it-
Matt Bertram:
The open rate’s really high on that, yeah.
Adam Gregory:
Yeah, it got me to click so maybe sometimes you have to push the boundaries maybe sometimes you don’t but you’re right, you’ve got to have a headline that stands out.
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah, just to add one more thing about the relatability of landing pages, and this is for a lot of national companies, if you’re doing a lot of volumes, this is check your analytics again, this is a pro tip, write this down. Check out where your page views are coming from, and I’m particularly talking about what city because if you have high page views in California or you have high page views in Texas, or in New York, or the largest city Chicago, or whatever, you might want to consider a landing page that has a local phone number on it.
Matt Bertram:
Yes. Oh my gosh, everyone wants to go to the 1800 number to look bigger than they’re at and it has the reverse effect. Unless you’re a really big company get local phone numbers in each area, you’re going to have a higher conversion rate.
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah, and you can buy them for a few bucks and forward them to whatever one number but it really gives you the familiarity in the city, so check your analytics and see where your page views are mostly coming from.
Matt Bertram:
So I’m jumping back into the article here and he’s talking about, Neil Patel’s talking about removing navigational elements. Okay, so you don’t want them to get distracted right? I actually read, I think it was a blog post, I wanted to say it was a study, a full on study, but it was a blog post talking about a guy that was doing some data research and moving the navigation from the top of the page to the bottom, a reverse navigation. So it’s you get the message that you want to get, you capture their lead information and then now it’s if they want to keep going, where do they go at that point?
Adam Gregory:
You got to keep scrolling for that.
Matt Bertram:
So they’re scrolling to the bottom. Now the debate was the familiarity is, a lot of times we lay out landing pages because people expect certain things to be in certain places, right? You expect to click the logo and it goes back to the homepage, so there was some debate there but really if you were trying to accomplish a certain goal, and with landing pages we are, having a reverse navigation, having it at the bottom. Also Google does want a certain amount of things, they want a about us page, they want to know you have a real location, you want to have a privacy policy, that sort of thing, and Google will show your ads more and that’s something that could be a limiting factor potentially. More important for us, for landing pages but still with your ads, sometimes if it’s a iffy topic Google will slow share it. I don’t know what the right word is, views-
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah, on Google we want to put a little navigation at the bottom, privacy, policy, contact us, about us.
Adam Gregory:
So this next one, I see this a lot and I think even we were falling into this, is you want your landing page to still be a part of your website, you don’t want this super awesome landing page and then they click to your website and they’re like, “Well what happened here?”
Matt Bertram:
There’s got to be some congruency. For sure.
Adam Gregory:
Yeah, there is and I think even we were in that boat.
Matt Bertram:
Well we had awesome landing pages and we had a five-year-old website. I mean so we did an update now if you go check out eWebResults.com we got-
Adam Gregory:
No, and I think it was perfect, now we have our landing pages and match our website, and that’s what you want, and so when they go to your landing page and then they do decide to click back and visit through your website and they’re like, “Well what’s this? What did you do here?”
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah, meeting expectations, what they would expect the website to look like from the landing page and relaying that trust and-
Matt Bertram:
That’s the same thing with sales, don’t present yourself as who you’re not because people are expecting when they contact you or get you, so this is the thing that I’ve seen a lot, people have super clean awesome websites right? And then someone calls in and they don’t have a script, its kind of all over the place, that experience is not what they expected of a clean organized website and it turns prospects off really rapidly, so.
Adam Gregory:
So long page versus a series of pages.
Aaron Weathers:
Long page versus a series of pages.
Matt Bertram:
Let’s see what Neil Patel tells us about that.
Aaron Weathers:
Yes.
Adam Gregory:
Yes. So there’s a question out there about whether it’s better to use single page for your landing page, that requires scrolling, or if it’s better for visitors to just go through a series of short pages. Many sites generally have multiple pages of short content, that phone visitors from one step, to the next step, to the next step, and so on, all on the process. This has its advantage of getting users in the habit of moving from one page to the next, which can get them in the right psychological frame of mind to convert. The downside to the many slides is that they work best for conversion funnels that need a lot of content.
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah, and I think if you’re not educated, if you have a high ticket item or something like that, you could use a mini website, three, four pages. We’ve been experimenting with that a little bit, it’s working fine, and actually we are experimenting with that in some sensitive niches. And so when you’re talking about sensitive topics we can’t necessarily talk about the direct product, so we’re talking about issues and questions surrounding that product and ultimately giving the visitor the opportunity to click to the actual product page and then convert from there.
Matt Bertram:
Yeah. I mean we’re building these blog silos to a landing page which is really working well to get more exposure to the client, so for all you out there sometimes a landing page for B2C, really for B2C, ad words to a landing page. And remember, you can buy the right kind of traffic but man you got to work on that optimization, lead capture for the campaign to work. It does work a lot of times right? For certain industries, other industries it’s a lot harder, you have to provide supporting content. And so a lot of times these funnels, you’re just seeing what’s above the surface you’re not seeing all the things that are happening underneath it. And we’ve really been working out to build a number of these full sales funnels, and I mean they’re beautiful, we get them work and they take a minute to get all the infrastructure built but when we get them, we’re hitting people multiple ways, we’re running them through different scenarios as far as the customer journey and really a foundation, a three blog set with a landing page tends to work pretty well. So.
Adam Gregory:
Pay attention to the fold. Well there’s a lot of debate as the most importance of the fold and web design, landing pages are one area where the fold is important.
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah, so you really want to have your most important information at the top, don’t waste space, that’s what I like to say, with your headline, with your words, don’t waste anytime with extra wordy content that doesn’t direct the visitor where you want them to go. So, there are a lot of times when you’re writing copy or there’s this thing where you write the copy and then cut out 50% of it, and then you have the copy that’s going to convert. And so don’t waste anytime with extra with copy or extra pictures or design elements that don’t need to be there, just get to the point and with the above the fold content, a lot of times you might have to check it out on a couple of different browsers and a couple different types of computers, brands of computers, because based on your monitor size and stuff like that, the above the fold content might be a little different. So if you have your form or your call to action button close to the bottom, on some browsers it might not show above the content so you just want to make sure everything is there.
Adam Gregory:
And talking about the call to action button, this is moving a little bit forward, still talking about the folds but more below the folds, you want those buttons, almost one control but don’t get out of control on those buttons, I’ve seen some websites out there that are crazy.
Matt Bertram:
Maybe three scrolls is good, every two to three scrolls you want that, you really want the lead capture above the fold on every opportunity, on desktop sometimes if you have additional information you want to kind of peek it above the top to let them know that there’s more to come, but really above the fold you want to be really clear of what your messaging is, what you’re asking about, or what this page is about, so they’ll keep reading. And so you have to be strategic with above the fold and below the fold and there are definitely strategies for both.
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah, and just another thing about being clear, above the fold and with that headline and everything like that, here’s a saying, you want to explain it in a way where a five-year-old can understand what it is you’re selling or what it is you want them to do. So a lot of times when we’re looking at clients’ landing pages, and based on what they’re selling it’s super vague, it’ll be more like a branding, something that brands them, “Water is special,” and you’ll be like, “What does that mean?”
Matt Bertram:
You don’t know if it’s a pool company, a water company, or-
Aaron Weathers:
A filter.
Matt Bertram:
Also with your logo same thing, you want to be really clear five seconds, you want to know what your site’s about and what you’re about, and really graphical presentation of certain things, like the B2B logo or something like that, the trust symbols will help give them a feeling that they’re in the right place and whatever they clicked on is the right thing. Guys, I got another meeting I got to run to so I know you all will wrap it up well and be excited all you out there in podcast land, we have a great checklist that we are going to go through here at the end, so talk to you all later.
Aaron Weathers:
See you later. See you later.
Adam Gregory:
Later Matt.
Matt Bertram:
I got to go market to a niche.
Adam Gregory:
All right, so next in the list, minimal images and large fonts, declutter your pages.
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah, declutter your pages, lets move on, we want to be clear and precise, don’t do too much.
Adam Gregory:
Something Neil Patel says in his article, he talks about utmost one, maybe two images. I mean obviously you want to have one really solid image, and I think too you could go past two images, you could do three or four depending on what the content is. I know that you recently built a page for some chiropractors and it’s got multiple image on it but it’s broken up.
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah it’s not overly image heavy because pictures can say a thousand words but at the same time on the landing page, the words are a little bit better, in my opinion. Some people might disagree but the words are better on a landing page and so you do have those design elements, like the pictures, to give them ideas where they are in the right place. And so you can use those but use them sparingly, really want to have them hard hitting bullets so people can take the next step.
Adam Gregory:
And next, match the look and feel of your email, so if your landing page is tied to an email campaign you want to make sure that, that landing page echoes the look and feel of your email. Aaron you may have a little bit more.
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah, I don’t have a lot on that, I actually like to send very simple emails, my email strategy is a little bit different, we like to send non-picture pitched email, coded emails because in our experience, our email subscribers and everything like that, it feels more personal. And so when you have all these design elements and this goes into simple and clear and concise. When you have all these design elements, it can sometimes seem salesy, so we have some of those, with the design elements, the pitched email, and all of these different things, the pictures. But we also like to send just text-based, regular, person-to-person, I’m sending a friend an email template as well, I’m sending my friend an email and as well, so we like to use-
Adam Gregory:
And I want to steal a pro tip, Aaron gets full credit for this, but something Aaron told me when I first came to work here, about sending emails, about being more personal is, “Hey, at the end of your email write the sent from iPhone.”
Aaron Weathers:
Sent from iPhone does work, if you don’t have an iPhone you probably shouldn’t use it but it does work, that’s a little hack. Actually I go that from somebody else on YouTube and he was like, “When people were filling the form online,” his auto responder said, “Sent from iPhone,” and it’d be 2:00 in the morning. So it was a one, two liner, “Hey I’ll get your thing when I get up in the morning, it’s pretty late,” and it would say, “Sent from iPhone,” or something. And it got a great response because it seemed personal, that’s a little hack you probably don’t want to use that too much.
Adam Gregory:
All right, and then use the tools available. If you don’t want to use a website designer for your landing pages, there are great, great websites out there, Unbounce, ClickFunnels.
Aaron Weathers:
Lead pages, Instapage, find the one that best fit you or you use all of them in some capacity and they all have their advantages and disadvantages, but check out some of those, those can help out a lot. Also, landing page builders that integrate with your website or drive themes, OptimizePress, Infusionsoft, landing page builders like that, that have a little more functionality outside of just a stand alone landing pages. But they’re all great and they definitely have their pros and cons with each of them.
Adam Gregory:
And finally before we get into our check list, don’t forget to test these pages. You can create this great page, and it could just be the best page ever, but if it doesn’t work right.
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah, and here’s the thing you don’t want to, and this can happen really easily, don’t become complacent. And so a lot of times when you’re creating your landing pages, this has even happened to me, is when you create a landing page, and that sucker’s converting you’re like, “That sucker’s converting,” so you almost get a little scared to change anything, to update it to see if it converts better, but what you can so with all the tools we just talked about is you can just create page A, page B, and send some traffic to page A, and send some traffic to page B, and so a lot of times we’ll put a video on one, we won’t put the video on the other one, we’ll change the button color, we’ll have a different headline.
Aaron Weathers:
Now look, unless you’re sending 100,000 visitors to your landing page at a time, only focus on the big elements of the page, the headline, the call to action, maybe the video. All these small design elements, you don’t have to worry about those even when you change, the background color might help, but start with the really large elements and see what impact those have because those typically have a lot of impact. For most of you out there you probably don’t need to change small things like from white to light gray, those aren’t big changes. The headline, the call to action, those are your big changes so you can start there with the [inaudible 00:45:22].
Adam Gregory:
All right, now is the time we get into the eWebResults landing page checklist. Aaron, I’ll let you go ahead and take over from here.
Aaron Weathers:
eWebResults landing page checklist, we talked about a lot of these different things, I feel like I shouldn’t even tell you that you should go download on our website but I’ll tell you anyway, if you have a pen.
Adam Gregory:
And that’s right, he said downloadable on the website.
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah, so we’ll get that link for you definitely.
Adam Gregory:
Yes.
Aaron Weathers:
One, is my copy focused on benefits rather than feature? So actually, in Neil’s, we got to add to Neil’s because he didn’t actually say that in Neil’s. Copy focused on benefits rather than features, WIIFM them, that’s the term that we use at eWeb, it means What’s In It For Me? Don’t talk about all your products and all your awards and everything that you did, and all those different things, nobody cares, honestly they don’t care. Maybe subliminally or subconsciously they care but they don’t actually care. When it comes to the website they’re looking like, “Does this website have what I need? Send me the goods.” So focus on the benefits, this will get you more conversions in 10 minutes or less. Sleep more and spend more time with your family, any of those types of things instead of, “Best priced, we’re number one, bonded and insured,” don’t use bonded and insured on your landing page.
Aaron Weathers:
Two, does my landing page have great visuals and photos? We like videos of your people, your team, and whenever you can brand yourself with your people, your team, it’s great, you can also send them remarketing so they recognize you and your team. So use that as well, try to-
Adam Gregory:
Do you want to see a good example of this? Go to our website, we’ll pause for a second, eWebResults.com, look at the homepage and if you noticed on the little top slider-
Aaron Weathers:
Slider.
Adam Gregory:
… There’s a picture of the entire eWebResults team, I mean that something simple you can add to your website.
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah, have a team picture, at least on your about us page or your team page. Landing page have third party trust symbols, better business bureau, any organizations like the Chamber of Commerce that you’re involved in, if you’re involved in a local professional group, like the local dentist group or anything like that, you can add those logos to your page, people add industry groups.
Adam Gregory:
Yeah and correct me if I’m wrong but I’ve seen a lot of pages too, there’s a PR firm that I’m friends with and they show all the news agencies that they’ve ever been on, so you see ABC, NBC, FOX-
Aaron Weathers:
Right. As seen on can be good, partners you’ve worked with, all these different types of things, there’s a lot of different symbols that you could put on there, just have a few of them on there. And this is more fore a services industry that’s trying to get local leads, not necessarily for a squeeze page, but you can have as seen on squeeze page if you were publishing articles or anything like that. You can do that as well at the bottom, and that’s tip for[inaudible 00:48:33]. And so landing page testimonials or reviews, long page sales letters do have tons and tons of testimonials and reviews, if you could put a couple on your landing page like I said, this is a kind of a broad overview, depending on what type of landing page it is you can put a testimonial or two on your landing page. Out of all that Adam take on the next few.
Adam Gregory:
Okay, does my page have security symbols and privacy statements?
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah so 100% secure, Cambridge Analytica messed up everything for all of us and now they have pop-ups everywhere, you don’t necessarily have to have the pop-ups but have some type of security symbol and I was actually reading this the other day Adam, and there was this split test right? They did this split test and one of the split test, the text under the button said, “100% secure,” and has a thumbs up. And then the other text on the other page said, “100% will never send you spam,” or something, and the one that didn’t have the spam converted 20% higher.
Adam Gregory:
Wow.
Aaron Weathers:
And it was because, what they talked about in the, it might have been an article, what they talked about was when you said spam, it gave them a negative content. The awareness of I could get spammed-
Adam Gregory:
So I actually have a great-
Aaron Weathers:
It’s awareness.
Adam Gregory:
I have a great quick story, I know we’re running pretty long but there’s a patriot I follow on Instagram and he recently launched his site, and something he had sent, he put up was, “Hey sign up for my reviews, I promise not to spam you.” So I didn’t sign up for it because I was like, “Oh well,” because all it was, was, “Hey I’ll send you a link when my site’s launched, oh and you can start ordering.” And I was like, “No he’s going to spam me,” and sure enough I had friends that signed up for it and now it’s constant spamming, always. And so you’re right, I saw spam in my head-
Aaron Weathers:
The alarm is like, “Well I don’t know.”
Adam Gregory:
“I’m not signing up for this.”
Aaron Weathers:
Even though he said, “I won’t spam you.”
Adam Gregory:
I won’t spam you. Yeah.
Aaron Weathers:
It’s just that negative, where you bring up something negative which just make it like, “Oh yeah,” the awareness goes up.
Adam Gregory:
Because I’ve thought about that before, I promised, “We won’t send you spam,” but then its kind of I’m promising you but I’m not, but I’m really going to-
Aaron Weathers:
I though about it so don’t opt in. So, if you’re doing that you have your lock on there, put, “100% secure, if you have any questions you can contact us,” that’s something that we put under ours.
Adam Gregory:
Do I have two or more visible call to action on my page? Your call now, again we talked about that, call now is okay but why not, “Speak with a SEO specialist right now,” or you want that to be-
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah, multiple buttons like we talked about and a couple of scrolls.
Adam Gregory:
Download this PDF, download 101 SEO tips, from my notes I think it’s a better internet marketing, I mean you want that so. Is my page optimized for mobile traffic? I think that’s kind of the big one, Google is a mobile first company now and however they say it.
Aaron Weathers:
It’s huge.
Adam Gregory:
You really do, and it’s almost working out for internet and marketing you can see, and I have three screens, and I’m on my screen all day, I don’t think about it a lot of the times. I’ll unplug and then I’ll go look at it on mobile, because when I’m not here I’m on mobile. And so I think you’re focused on building this great page your desktop computer, take a minute, I think Neil Patel said, his last tip was, if I find it, it was don’t forget testing. You want to test for mobile, you want to make sure it’s optimized for mobile traffic.
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah, next one, am I using bulleted benefits instead of large blocks of text? So we kind of talked about this earlier with the long form sales page, you want to have short punchy bullets instead of huge paragraphs, people aren’t going to read it, and when you have the bulleted benefits it’s easier to scan and it’s more likely to get read. So you want to have bulleted benefits that are easy to read, we use check marks a lot-
Adam Gregory:
And just to kind of add to this, as someone that’s written a lot of blogs and understands what Aaron’s talking about here is, there’s a great plug in that I use that kind of helps, Yoast SEO. And it tells you, “Is it readable?” And you want to make sure the others, I can’t think of the website but there’s a website you can go in and I think you told me or Sammy did, you can put your content in there and it tells you what reading level it is and.
Aaron Weathers:
Oh yeah, a Perry Marshall tool, a creator.
Adam Gregory:
That’s a great wat to do it because you want to break these up into, you don’t want paragraphs, you want maybe one sentence that’s no more than 20 words and hits a return key, that should be it, maybe two together but utmost. When he’s talking about that, the bullet texts and all that, you don’t want this, like you’re writing for English 101 again so.
Aaron Weathers:
Oh yeah, this is not a, what is it called? What was that book? It was the MTA or M, I can’t even remember the rules, all the rules you got to follow and stuff like that.
Adam Gregory:
As a journalist I know, I spent years writing for the army so.
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah, so next one is, actually this is a checklist so it says leave this box unchecked if your form button says, “Click here or submit.”
Adam Gregory:
Oh nice.
Aaron Weathers:
So if you have, “Submit,” on your form buttons, if you have, “Click here,” on your form buttons let me tell you one thing right now, you’re losing conversions, if you’re losing conversions you’re losing money ultimately, so you might want to change that. If you want to boost your conversions, I told you earlier, I gave you 20%. If you want to boost your conversions by 20% ask for less information, I’m saying if you want to boost your conversion by 20% change your button from click here or submit, pro tip.
Adam Gregory:
Am I only asking for the information I need on my form?
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah, so we talked about the form fills, I just kind of mentioned it right there. Only ask for the information that you need, as little as possible, and get to the next step.
Adam Gregory:
Does my landing page meet the expectations set by the ad or ads that are sending traffic to it?
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah, so this is important, this is a traffic study basically, you don’t want to have a landing page, here’s a good example. So a pet company, let’s say you have a pet company and you have a pet spray that gets rid of pet odors, let’s say dog or cat’s right? And instead of making a landing page for dogs and cats, you want to make a landing page for each dog and cat. So not both animals, you want to make one for dogs, one for cats, have your traffic split up, one for dogs and one for cats. And so that’s an example, so you don’t want them to be deterred in any way, “Oh this is for cats,” or, “This is for dogs.”
Aaron Weathers:
You want it to be like, “Hey, this is specifically for dogs, buy here,” wherever your landing page is. And so you want to make sure you’re sending the right traffic and it’s about the right topic, so pro tip in creating that, I know Adam hates, Adam doesn’t like PBC.
Adam Gregory:
No, no that’s a lie, I like it now. I like it. Okay I didn’t like PBC but I like it more now, I think I told you that, I think the last time we a podcast I said, “Okay I like PBC.” Because guess what, if you’re doing PBC you’re doing SCO and say you make it with SCO on top of page one and during the maps, and then you have PBC, and that’s three times for a space.
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah, you’re killing it.
Adam Gregory:
So that’s why I’m like, “Okay. Yeah, three is better than two.”
Aaron Weathers:
Yeah. So on the ads you probably want to use this, your ad headline can be used on your landing page headlines so it looks the same, it’s both congruent. So typically if you can match your headline on your ad with your keyword, and can match the headline from the ad to the landing page, it’s congruent all the way through and you’ll get better response and you’ll get more conversion. So the expectations of your ad, you want to hit the landing pages, if talk about 21 tips to better your swimming strokes, and then you hit the landing page that says, “Download this free brochure for a swim lessons,” that is just not going to match up and you’re not going to get conversion so make sure it’s congruent.
Adam Gregory:
All right, this does wrap up another episode of the Best SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets to Internet Marketing, as well as Marketing to Niches.
Aaron Weathers:
Marketing to niches. Hey if you’re on the Best SEO Podcast and you’re listening right now, we have a new podcast coming out, it’s called Marketing to Niches, and we are specifically talking about specific niches at a time, so we talk about lawyers, dentists, home remodelers, specific types of e-commerce, service professionals, all different types of niches on that podcast. We’ll get that link up to you soon but check out that podcast so we can give specific tips for your niche, that’s a mouthful.
Adam Gregory:
All right, well I am your military marketer Adam Gregory.
Aaron Weathers:
And I am the fastest marketer in the world.
Adam Gregory:
The fastest, he just ran out of the room and came back, that’s how quick he is. And again, this is the Best SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing as well as Marketing to Niches and.