Turbocharging Website Conversions - #SEOpodcast 250

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burrus, owner of eWebStyle. I am Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition. This is podcast number 250. 250. 250. 250. 250. That's a lot. That's a quarter of a hundred. That's nice. A quarter of a thousand. A quarter of a thousand. Thank you. Yeah, because a quarter of a hundred is less than 250. All right, so my math is not working together today. We have assessed that. Thank you guys for tuning in. We are broadcasting live from Houston, Texas. As always, there is a tip from our previous podcast, and that is create separate AdWords campaigns for mobile ads. Yeah, you want to take the time to do that, right? I understand that when you're in AdWords and you're trying to cross all these T's and dot all these I's like creating separate campaigns for mobile ads, it could be time-consuming. But at the end of the day, it's just best practice. Because what happens is people on a mobile device tend to react differently. They search differently. They respond differently than someone on, let's say, a tablet or a desktop search. And so that mobile user is likely to convert faster, they're likely in a purchasing decision. I read a stat that 40% of Walgreens searches happen from people inside the store. Wow. Think about that. And so you want, when you're doing ads for a mobile search, you want to include words like tap and things like that because those are the actions people will take. And if you're using the same campaign, right, then you really can't do that. And so yeah, so create separate campaigns for your mobile ads. Yeah, and go check out the last podcast. We went into a lot more detail. Please remember, we are your friendly local neighborhood Top Position Snatchers, where our mantra is. Don't be a deuce. If you're in a position to please tweet now, you should tweet. What should they tweet, Chuck? You

should tweet us at eWebStyle, at BestSEO Podcast. This is the SEO Podcast, so that's hashtag. That's what I was looking for. Yeah, yeah. Hashtag SEO Podcast. This is number 250. And like I said, tag us in it, at eWebStyle, at BestSEO Podcast. That way we can link back up and do all of our social stuff. Excellent. If you have listened to more than one episode of our podcast, please do us a small favor. There's a number of them that you can do. One of them has three steps. It is, go onto iTunes, create an account, write a review. If you choose to, and hopefully that review will be five stars. If you choose to, please send us an email, podcast at e-webstyle.com. And we'll make sure to read that on air. I do have a review for today, so there is no tear tattoo. Next, you can go to our G Plus Local page, write a review there. We've made it incredibly easy to get to our G Plus Local page. Simple. Just go to e-webstyle.com slash Google Plus. Or slash Google Plus. Or slash G Plus. Or slash G Plus. All of those will take you to our G Plus Local page. When you're there, do three things, please. Do three things when you get there. First off, leave us that five star review. That's like most important. Five stars. Definitely. After you leave a review, then give us a plus one and put us in a circle. That way we can, you know, send you some information when we do post on G Plus. Next, you can get to our Facebook page, facebook.com slash e-webstyle. And there you can figure out how to write a review. It's not that hard. And please give us a five stars review. And next, we've got Stitcher. We also want five stars on our Stitcher. I'm getting tired of saying that. Just go to stitcher.com. If you can't find us real easily, the quickest way I've figured out to find it is go stitcher.com space SEO Podcast

Under the Secrets of Internet Marketing. That will take you right to our listing. You can click the Write a Review button as simple as it can be. If you are a world class expert at WordPress and or at PHP, we're looking for you. If you want to work with world class experts, give us a call. Submit an audio resume, 713-510-7846. We do have a referral program. You refer a paying SEO customer. They pay us. We pay you. And get your free website. Go to our website, e-webstyle.com. You will find a place to submit for a free website analysis. I said free website, didn't I? I meant free website analysis. That's the part we don't want to leave out. It is actually a SIVO analysis. SIVO stands for Search Engine Visitor Optimization. It covers both search engine optimization of your site and understanding how people who arrive- Yeah, instead of the conversions, right? After that traffic gets there, what does that traffic do? Do they do your CTA? We talk about that as well, what changes you can make on your site to get your conversions higher. There are a number of ways you can stalk us, haunt us, harass us, pursue us. And they include Facebook.com slash e-webstyle Twitter.com slash e-webstyle YouTube.com slash e-webstyle Instagram.com slash e-webstyle I think we got them all. Yeah. All right. Let's just keep on blowing through this. Let's get into a little bit of news. Microsoft cut 2,100 employees. A lot of those were related to the Nokia acquisition. So not surprised. iOS came out. They cut 13,000 though, like this year so far. Yeah. So it's 20,100 was just the latest cut. Latest batch. Latest round. Yeah. 13,000. Wow. iOS 8 is out and it's encrypted. So they're saying if you have information that's just on your iOS 8 device, even if Apple gets a subpoena from the police, they can't even get that information. You've got to have your password and it's encrypted and all that stuff. I guess that's good. I thought this was pretty interesting

and didn't realize that on an Android you can change your keyboard. Right? My kids do it all the time. All the time. So do they do it to yours? No. They're not messing with you? I can't see that happening in your house. Don't touch my phone. But their phones, yeah. Like my daughter uses the, how was her phone? Minecraft. But she's an Android phone but she's using the iOS keyboard. Keyboard. Okay. So iOS, the new version, you can now change the keyboard. There's like eight apps out there. I thought that was pretty cool. And California approves first tests of self-driving cars. I think this will be great. I'll get rid of all this, you know, can you text while you're driving. Oh, of course you can. You're not even driving anymore. Hey, and I don't know, if you guys get a chance, go to a website called realestateoushow.com. I was actually on the radio this last Sunday with EL and Brian and, what was the other guys? EL, Brian, and another guy. What's his name? What's his name? What's his name? It's funny because on the website, he's the guy who's shaded out. They haven't got a picture up. So they say he's in the witness protection program. So how ironic it is that I forgot his name. It's crazy. So go check it out. I think you can find the link to the audio file there. I was discussing things that you could do as a realtor from an internet marketing perspective. So that was really good. And we have something before you get into reviews or should we do a review now? All right. This is a really good review. I really enjoy it. Yeah. So this is from Helena Ulstra. Here we go. This was on Google Plus, on G Plus. Given these two guys five stars because they are smart. And that looks like it's in all caps. All caps. Smart. They asked for Google Plus reviews of their podcast knowing that it actually is creating SEO benefits for their SEO

business. Huh. Never thought of that. Google is showing eWebStyle the company as a five star SEO company in SERPs, search engine result pages. When in reality, people... Yeah, that's the event I gotta go to. People are... Let's see. When in reality, people are just praising their podcast. Which, by the way, is genius as well. They don't really generate any original content themselves. I do beg to differ on that one. We'll discuss that in a second. They simply read you an article by someone else. That being said, I still listen to it because it's good information that they read you. That we read to them. The biggest lessons you can take from these guys is taking a step back and looking at what you're really doing, creating relevant content. What they're really doing. Oh, what they're really doing. Creating relevant content that has value without having to do much legwork or research themselves. Again, we'll discuss that. As SEOs, isn't that what we all really want to figure out how to do anyway? Hopefully, that didn't come off as too bitchy guys. Slaps in the face. Expecting one back. Slap to the face? Yeah, that hurt. Yeah, I don't know if that's the equivalent to a punch. Yeah, that's... I don't know. That's worse, I think. Is it? Certainly if it's in public. So, Helena, here's a couple of... For punching the foot. For slapping the foot. For slapping the foot. For slapping the foot. For slapping the foot. Yeah. Thank you for the review. Awesome. Great analysis. I would say we actually do create content, our own, from time to time. And even when we're doing articles, we're contributing to those articles and discussing those articles. That is what is called original content. Yeah. Helena, it would be, frankly, it would be lame if we just went and picked random articles and then got up here and read them and then took credit. Yeah. I actually don't pick random articles. I just query several hundreds of articles all week to get to the one we

present to you today. Then I read it. I mark it up. I give our input. I disagree. We agree. We make changes. And repurpose it. And then give that original author their credit as well. Yeah. So, please don't feel like we're just reading an article because I think you guys are smarter than that. Not just you, but all of our listeners and that would be kind of lame to just do that. Right. And a great analysis. I like it. We certainly do get benefits from it. And that isn't the intent. We're actually intending to get good reviews for our podcast. Yeah. That is a side effect. It's the podcast that we're promoting. We're certainly aware of it and don't really. In fact, for the very first time it was mentioned in a sales presentation that I did the other the other day where I was like, oh, you guys have like 54 five-star reviews. I was like, yeah, thank you. Yeah. That's for our podcast. They're mostly for our podcast. Yeah. There's a couple of customers in there. All right. All right. So thank you. Punch in the face. Slap in the face. Whatever you prefer, Helena. Thank you so much for taking the time to write that lengthy article. And we could actually read it and comment it on it. So it's our original content now. Exactly. Yeah. I could repost that and make a whole blog post out of that. I'm just saying. I'm just saying. All right. So that is it. You got some other stuff? I got some quick news. So Facebook rolled out a new feature. Okay. This almost could have been AlgoCat but I just didn't, well I guess Facebook would be considered a search engine. But they rolled out, so if you are a Facebook page manager, like us we do social media marketing and so maybe you're in a position where you're managing multiple Facebook pages. Multiple pages, yeah. They rolled out a toggle feature. Okay. So if you're on whatever page you're on, if you're posting,

right next to where you click post to make it live, there's a dropdown where you can toggle between which account. Do you want to post it as a WebStyle.com? Do you want to post as Chris Burris or Charles Lewis? Do you want to post as, okay. Very cool. Any of our clients or anything like that. So I thought that was pretty cool. Yeah. I didn't have to, you know, click the dropdown at the top and go to a different page and then choose and then do all of that kind of stuff. You know what's crazy is, and this will solve some of that, but still, if I select myself, so now I'm using Facebook as myself, and then I try and get to my eWebStyle page, it's not easy. Like you have to, I have to type it. Like what I end up doing is, oh, I want to comment as me on something here. I copy the URL, I change it to me, and then I paste the URL. That's kind of crazy. Like searching eWebStyle as me doesn't get me to my eWebStyle page. Yeah. You know what I don't like? Is that they give you, well now with this new one, there's a third way to change places, change pages. Right. But each option does it differently. Right. If you select a page from the left side menu, you can post as that page, but your avatar is still defaulted there. Right. And after you leave that page, you may redirect back to your original posting. Wow. If you lose it from the upper right hand side. Right. Then the image changes to that company. And it locks in. And it locks it in as that one until you change it back. Yeah. I've never used the one on the left. I've always used the one in the upper right. I'm sure there's other people who have always used the one on the left. Interesting. Yeah, so that's the news. And then I do have some punch in the face. This one

goes to Mega Bytes. Hit us up on Twitter. This is Mega Bytes. Mighty Bytes. Sorry. Mighty Bytes. Yeah. At Mighty Bytes. B-Y-T-E-S. He says I'm at eWebStyle. Just listen to your podcast on foolproof content marketing, content writing tips. Great work. Punch in the face to you, Mighty Bytes. Appreciate your support. All right. That is the potatoes of the podcast. Time to get into the meat. Yeah. So, put an article. All right. And this one, cool. I found it on Search Engine Journal. This one was by a guy named Rohan Iyer. Punch in the face to him. Great article. Five back-to-basic tricks to turbocharge your website conversions. Hmm. Five back-to-back tricks to turbocharge. Keyword. That's what made me click the link, by the way. Yeah. Turbocharge is the word that got me. Turbocharge your website conversions. So, pretty good article. And so, let's dive right in. He starts off by saying, we know average website conversion rates hover between 2 and 10 percent, depending on the industry. And to some people, that may be kind of low. Right. 2 or 10 percent. Wow. You think you have more than that. Now, that's actually a pretty good number. Yeah. And what I realized yesterday evening was that on average, between our top SEO clients, average conversion rate is about 8 percent. Right. And so, we strive to keep that high. Right. Right. We want people to get conversions. You don't want to be in that 2 percent range. For sure. Unless you're a personal injury attorney, you know, and all you need is one of them. And then you're good for like the next six months. Yep. And so, maybe. So, number one, he says out of these five, these are five back to basic tricks to turbocharge your website conversions. Number one is design and UX. UX being user experience. Right. He goes on to say, choose a color palette for your site. Let's talk on design and stick to it. Splashing color arbitrarily not only kills your site aesthetics, but also does nothing to focus

the user intentions on what's most important. And I totally agree. Look, if you're designing the site and you want the site to convert, if you didn't go to school for design or just not that great with design, let the pros handle it. That's my input into this article. Yeah. Let the pros design it. They understand design. They understand what people look at and they understand what works and what's aesthetically pleasing. And so, so definitely let the pros have. Number B in regards, letter B in regards to design and UX. In regards to the user experience, he says richer images. Allow people to zoom and use video if possible. He goes on to say, try and pick custom shots to give your site an exclusive look. And I totally agree with that. Matter of fact, one of the things I tell all our clients is get in the habit of taking pictures all the time. All the time. You're a service provider and you're going out to do a repair or installation or a quote or whatever it is. You're just going to provide a consultation. Take pictures. Before pictures. After pictures. During pictures. Product pictures. Happy client pictures. Just constantly take pictures. Pet pictures. Pet pictures. Next to the stuff you're working on. Never. Exactly. Just take pictures because what happens is those pictures you can use all over the place, right? Yeah. So maybe the ones that aren't that focused or whatnot or aren't that service specific will be great for social media, be great for tweeting and Instagram and things like that. And then maybe your high quality ones, customers holding things, which are also great for social, but will be great on your website. Service pictures and things getting fixed will be great on the website. And those by far are way more valuable than some stock photography that you find or not even stock, just some Google image search and images that you're probably using. So use original pictures when you can. Yeah. That's definitely will increase your website conversions. And

include people in the pictures whenever possible. Yeah. That customer in there holding your product, just bought it. Oh, and matter of fact, what I wrote down to that was get them to submit it. Yeah. If you can get that client to submit a picture and or video that they took of themselves using your product, that screams conversion. Customer loyalty, conversion, absolutely. Definitely. Definitely. Number two, speed. Speed. He says the average seconds for site load time is 1.87 seconds. That's average. We looked at site yesterday at 30 seconds. Yeah. Yeah. That seems a little fast. I got to be honest. Because I got a little timer in my browser and I don't see 1.87 seconds hardly ever. Interesting. So he said that was the average speed of Google.com. Well, okay. So, but that's not an average. Google is not an average site. But he said, Alyssa said that that was slow. Google's average is 1.87. But anyway. That's bizarre. Yeah. Yeah. I thought that was fast. Something's wrong. Something's wrong with that. They say, what is it? Three seconds on desktops people will bounce and six seconds on mobile. Yeah. You don't want to be 30 seconds. You don't want to be 10 seconds. Yeah. You don't want to have that site that's having great content but just taking forever to load. And so, I added, you know, what he says to strike a balance between high quality images that render well and well optimized images that take up minimal space on your server and load quickly. Yeah. Yeah. And I'll take it a step further. Optimize all of your on-page stuff. Like images, style sheets, consolidate those. Minify your JavaScript. No need to have several different jqueries going on. If you can consolidate those into one area, that makes your site load faster. If you're using WordPress, all those plugins that you're not using, get rid of them. Because some of them still load, even though you may not be using them, which makes your site load slower. So, clean your site up, clean your

code up, and that will definitely increase the speed of your site. Number three, one CTA per page. A clear message construction. He says, while crafting your message, think what 30-second elevator pitch you'd give a millionaire. And I really like that because, on average, people aren't going to read much. Right. They may read your headline, and then they may read the first paragraph maybe, a couple sentences. And so, you really only have about 30 seconds to get their attention to keep them reading, to guide them down the path of completing your CTA or whatever it is. And so, yeah, think 30-second pitch in that first paragraph, and then maybe below that go into detail. Yeah. So, I said this, in regards to the one CTA per page, definitely for a landing page, right? Because on a homepage, you may need to have your newsletter subscription, along with your calling out CTA, along with your free consultation form. All that's necessary for a homepage. But, on a landing page, per se, if you want people to simply get a free consultation, and that's it, and they can either call or email for it, then make sure that's the specific CTA, that's what's there, and remove all of the other clutter. That way, you have a higher chance of getting that conversion. That goes back to the article we referenced, or the paper that we referenced, where they were selling jams on a college campus. Mm-hm. They sold four jams, and then the next day they sold 20 different flavors. And you would, your intuition says, if I've got 20 flavors, I'm able to appease more people. The reality is, they sold more when they only sold four jams. And the logic is, the more decisions that there are for me to make, the more no sounds easy. Yep. Definitely. Number four. He says, inspire trust. Right? And this is key, especially for an e-commerce site. If you want people to actually whip out that credit card. Matter of fact, he says, in an age where credit card

information is being compromised by hackers daily. You know, building faith in your brand is paramount. And so, you have to increase that trust. How do you do that? He says, one, you can use security seals, like, you know, Norton or VeriSign. Those are people used to those, and you see those, you think safe. Yep. I mean, although I think Home Depot may have that on their site. It wasn't that site they got hacked, so. Yeah. That's different. It was some in-store hardware situation. But, you have to increase that trust. And so, I think one of the ways you can do that, not only with security seals, is from testimonials and reviews. Because if you have real people who have video and testimonials, third-party testimonials, like Yelp or Gplus, about your site, about your product, about the ordering process, about how easy it was to use, then people will likely say, okay, I could make a purchase on them. Like this tip he gave. He said, if you have an online and offline retail presence, harmonizing the payments and payment methods between the two is absolutely essential. Yeah. I take it a step further. Not only is the harmonizing the payment methods, harmonizing the marketing total is paramount. Right. Over all. Yeah. If you're willing to come to your store and purchase, if you can guide them to an online page, they will convert. Yeah. They're comfortable in your store, they're familiar with the product, they're familiar with the service. As long as your site has the same look and feel, it's friendly, gives them that same feeling they have when walking through the door, then they will gladly buy from you on your site. Yeah. And not only give them similar payment options, but give them similar branding, similar marketing messages from both places. And I talked about this in a previous podcast. Yeah. You know, have signage and things in the store, and this is not part of the article by the way, but have signage and things in the store. Is this original

content? Oh, okay. That redirects people to online transactions. Hey, if you, you know, get the same product online with your next purchase for 10% off, or whatever it is, and vice versa, on your website. Redirect people online. Come into our store for the latest. Come into the store, print this and bring this and get that free, or you know, whatever it is. You understand your business and what you have to offer, but take advantage of it because it's the same customer in both places, and they're already spending with you. His last part in regards to building trust was have returns, you know, guarantees or free trials. They're simple to try, they're tested, they work. Yeah. Period. I totally agree. But I will say, as long as they have value, right, don't offer me, like I was signing up for something the other day, it was like a seven-day free trial. And I was like, well, I didn't even use this to day four. Yeah, yeah. You know? Yeah, yeah. And it takes 30 days to figure out if it's going to really work. A seven-day trial doesn't do nothing for me but put me in a bad billing situation because I'm going to be frustrated when I get charged. Yep. And so, you know, give some value with your free trial. Yep. You know, give with your guarantee, you know, and make sure it's a legit guarantee like ours. We guarantee that you will see an increase in conversions. Right. And web traffic. I just won't guarantee you number one first place president because... We're not Google. Yeah. Exactly. Number five. And this is the last one. He says, test obsessively and regularly. I like that. Obsessively. Yeah. Test and regularly. What may work for one type of business may be totally wrong for another type of business. And I totally agree. And so, if you're going to test obsessively, here's my list of things that you should test. Test your landing page layout. Right? Test how it looks. Does it work better with left-side

navigation or right-side navigation? Does it work better with drop-down menus or fly-out menus? Does your CTA work better, you know, with a short form or a long form? You know, those sort of things. Test that. Test your button color. Right? Are you getting more clicks with a green button or a red button? Right. The green. In the case, go. People tend to go where there's green at. Right. It works that way. Yeah. Test your CTA wording. Right? Maybe instead of a free consultation, maybe it's a complimentary something. Right? But what it is, test the different words you can use, the different CTAs, the different graphics you're using the CTA. Maybe you're using images of people. Right. And so maybe you want to use a younger... People with pets. Yeah. People without pets. Exactly. Right. Different demographics, yeah. They talked about the direction that people on your landing page are looking. So versus having people take a portrait like they're staring at you. Right. Instead, have them looking at the product. Right. How much attention that draws to the product. Yep. I was like, that's awesome. And so test those sorts of things obsessively and regularly. A comment about obsessive testing, and I had a conversation with a business owner the other day. Owns, I think one of the berry pops, the yogurt stands. And he was running some ad somewhere, and he called it a failure. And I asked him, well, what's the lifetime value of a customer? And he was like, I don't know. And so if you don't know the lifetime value of a customer, you can't know if a campaign is successful. For instance, you know, it's a yogurt place. They're gonna come in and spend between $5 and $15, right? Yep. And if you only get 10 of them, and you just paid $500 for that ad, you're probably not thinking of running the ad again. But if you remember that a berry pop customer who comes today, comes in two months again, or next week, or whatever, and on average,

they come back five times. Mm-hmm. And they spend $15 each pop. It's clear. All of a sudden, this campaign starts to look attractive. Mm-hmm. And so it's not just obsessively monitoring it, but comparing it to the right information. Yeah. The first $15 purchase is not an intelligent comparison for an ad unless they only ever purchase once. Only bought for once, exactly. It's not like, you know, one of those one-off purchases where you don't, like a new roof. I was talking to a roofer in our B&I group. Yeah. This deal, he was like, yeah, you know, they're good for the next 30 years. Yep. Yeah, so it's a one-off. He has to constantly drum up new business. There's not a lot of repeat business. Yeah. And so, yeah. So, yeah, just test and measure obsessively. I think that's the takeaway from today. That's the takeaway from that one. Definitely. So, punch in the face to you, Rohan. Man, great article. That was on Search Engine Journal. Five back-to-basic tricks to turbocharge your website conversions. All right, got a little what? Got a little what? What? Yeah, this is what goes to, goes to Home Depot. I mean, like, really? In lieu of Target and everybody else who's getting their issue, I would think that all, you know, fortune companies and big brands that doing all of this. Are reassessing their credit card security. Yeah. Like, like. By the way, if they weren't, now they are. And so, what I heard on the news and what I read online was that it was their self-checkouts were the ones that got hacked. Oh, wow. That's just kind of clandestine cool stuff. Yeah. Like, probably an easy, like, ooh, self-checkout. Let's just hack those. Yeah. Stick a USB or something in there and hack it. That's, wow. That's interesting. Yeah. So, yeah. Home Depot. Get together. What? All right. This has been a SEO podcast number 250 broadcast live from Houston, Texas. What? 599 West 34th Street, Suite 106. 5999. Did I say? Yeah, you said 599. Oh, there's

another nine in there. Thank you guys for tuning in. You guys have made us the most popular internet marketing and SEO podcast in the known universe everywhere. Everywhere. Downloaded in more than 83 different countries. About 8,000 downloads per week. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Until the next podcast, my name's Chris Burris. I saw a blues. Bye bye for now. Slightly raised up eyebrow, high brow, head in my way.