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The Most Entertaining Guide to Landing Page Optimization You'll Ever Read

The Most Entertaining Guide to Landing Page Optimization You'll Ever Read
The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz. Landing pages rule. Blah. Homepages suck. All of those statements are true. If you want to be a non-lame marketer, it's really easy. Be warned, however, that I may descend into telling bad jokes in the absence of witty metaphor and charming anecdotal rhetoric. The experienced adult readers amongst you might remember that "Shit. But first. The start of the best part of your day begins now with this table of contents: First I'll give you the only rationale you'll ever need to explain why landing pages are to marketers, what Immodium is to an astronaut with diarrhea. Challenge laid down. Chapter 1: Why landing pages rule, and why you should never send campaign traffic to your homepage If I've got your attention thus far, it's probably because you can't bear to tear your eyes away from my enchanting prose. The only important word in that sentence is ATTENTION.

How to Create a Powerful Landing Page in Under an Hour The vast majority of business owners, service providers and organization managers are highly aware of the importance of having an online presence. Setting up a personalized website and running a Facebook page are now an integral part of any business’ marketing strategy. However, not many companies and organizations make full use of the various opportunities the web has to offer. Creating a website is a crucial step for establishing a great online presence, but you could be getting more traction with additional online opportunities. What Are Landing Pages Good For? Landing pages look just like any other website but they operate a bit differently. What does this actually mean? In terms of content, the landing page has one simple message to convey. The ultimate goal of a landing page is to make viewers click. How Do Landing Pages Actually Work? In order for the landing page to actually fulfill its purpose, you need to drive traffic into it. Creating a Landing Page with Wix

How To Collect Email Subscribers With Landing Pages That Convert At 50% Using a dedicated landing page for an email marketing list can lift conversion rates up to 50%. That’s an impressive figure! Better yet, a landing page per list, or per campaign, gives you the power to maximize the effectiveness of each individual funnel. This means you can play with all of the elements from the moment the customer hits your landing page to the moment they receive and react to your emails. Perhaps best of all, dedicated email landing pages allow you to use all of the great conversion optimization techniques that usually apply to your landing pages, so you can use the same tactics in relation to email marketing. This post shares examples and provides guidance on how you can use dedicated landing pages to increase your subscriber conversions rates. The Rise Of The Dedicated Email Marketing Landing Page Take this example from Unbounce for its dedicated educational course on better landing pages: The three tips below will help you nail this strategy the first time around. 1. 2.

How Many Landing Pages Do I Need on My Website? Do you have a landing page on your website? Of course you do.Landing pages increase conversions, generating leads and sales for your business.But do you need more landing pages?Studies have shown that business websites with 10-15 landing pages tend to increase conversions by 55% over business websites with less than 10 landing pages. And those with more than 40 landing pages increase conversions by over 500%.Do you have the right number for your website?

Six tips for landing page user optimization that will drive conversions Published on Whether a given landing page explains demand for business’ services or acts as a search-friendly hub that lists your products and services, it’s crucial that it is optimized to its full potential – not only to show up and compete in search engine results pages but to also retain visitors and minimize your overall bounce rate. So how do you optimize your landing pages? Some might think that satisfying Google’s technical SEO guidelines is the ultimate be-all and end-all of optimization. But let’s take an even further step back: The whole reason you want landing page visibility is because you want people to find these pages and do business with you. First, we’ll take a look at why considering the user and investing in content marketing is essential to optimizing your page for maximum visibility – whether through paid or organic search – and then we’ll jump into six tips for landing page optimization that will appeal to your target audiences. 1. 1. Are you online to sell? 2. 3.

Should I have two websites or one for SEO reasons? I met a criminal defense attorney while camping at San Elijo State Beach who asked me whether or not it is better to have a few smaller websites rather than one for search engine optimization reasons. I am often asked this question so I thought I would blog about it. The general premise to be that the more websites you have the more success you might have in the search engines. In other words, you might be found in either more places or take two (or more) spots in the top 10 results of a particular keyword. My knee-jerk reaction is that it is better to have one website and promote the heck out of it instead. From a purely technical/logistical/cost perspective the reason I say to have one website is because I find most customers have enough trouble simply building and maintaining their website and two or more becomes a heap more trouble. The primary goal of an search engine (especially Google) is to hands-down have the best search results for a given query.

Landing Page Best Practices: Remove Distractions, Be Bold & Tell a Story TweetTweet Last Friday, Oli from Unbounce & Peep teamed up for the second episode of Page Fights where they tore apart contestants landing pages & give them actionable advice & best practices on how to make their landing pages better. The winner of Page Fights gets 1 free year of Unbounce’s Pro 99 account, a half hour private consultation with Peep & free early membership into the ConversionXL self study course. In this second episode, they reviewed 5 different landing pages with the page owners & went into more detail than Peep normally does in our regular website reviews, so hopefully you’ll find more value in it. In case you don’t have time to watch the full 39:00 minute video, I’ve included the main takeaways as well as included links to helpful landing page best practice content from here & around the web. Finalist 1 – Paul Jarvis, Write & Sell Your Damn Book What’s interesting about this page is that it uses powerful copywriting to draw visitors into the page. Oli’s Feedback: Takeaways

Take the #CCPhotoADay Instagram Challenge! Visual content is one of the easiest and most effective ways to connect with your audience online. Whether you’re showing off a new product or taking people behind-the-scenes of your business, images can help you connect with your audience and show them what makes your business unique. Best of all, sharing photos and videos has never been easier. If you’re on Instagram, hopefully you’ve already seen how effective it can be in showcasing your business and connecting with customers. To help you get started, we created our 30 day Instagram challenge! How it works: We brainstormed a list of 30 ideas for a month’s worth of inspiration. Make sure to use include the hashtag #CCPhotoADay in your caption as well — you can search this hashtag to see what other businesses that are taking the challenge are up to. After completing the challenge, you’ll have a great bank of content and valuable insight into what content your fans and followers are most interested in. Looking for inspiration?

10 brilliant examples of landing page design A well-designed landing page design can make the difference between a user buying into a product or losing interest. Here are 10 websites that get it right. There are plenty of rules and principles of great design but when it comes to a website's landing page, it is almost an exact science. It's about 'conversion-centred design', or using the design of the landing page to persuade a user towards a particular action. The first, and arguably most important, task is to find a clear USP (unique selling point) for the product or service in question, and then use the landing page design to focus everything on one primary call to action (CTA). This might be getting the visitor to register their details, say, or make a purchase there and then. Clear, succinct headers and sub-headers and punchy, easily scanned bullet points are the order of the day. Read all our web design articles here 01. Bear CSS is a tool to help web designers generate CSS more quickly and easily based on their existing HTML.

Constant Contact Data Reveals Direct Correlation between Email Campaign Effectiveness and Number of Images and Text Lines Featured | Constant Contact Media Newsroom WALTHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--What makes a small business customer click on a link when reading an email has been revealed. The latest research from Constant Contact®, Inc. (NASDAQ: CTCT) uncovers the ideal number of images and lines of texts small businesses should include in email marketing campaigns to optimize click-through rates. “Click-through rates are perhaps the truest measurement of the quality of an email’s content and its effectiveness as a marketing tool,” said Christopher M. Industry Deviations Considering that many nonprofits have email subscribers who are volunteers or active members, nonprofits generally enjoy higher click-through rates from their email subscribers, many of whom also exhibit a preference for more text and images: Association click-through rates don’t drop off as quickly as other industries, with click-through rates remaining consistent between 20 and 30 lines of text. About Constant Contact Constant Contact helps small businesses do more business.

How we made $1 million for Moz—with one landing page and a few emails When we first published this case study, Moz was called SEOmoz. Even though the company has since rebranded, the techniques described below are still as relevant as ever. In this talk, Moz’s CEO, Rand Fishkin, raves about the work we did, explaining how the money that we generated enabled Moz to develop from a membership site into a web app. Overview Moz is one of the world’s largest providers of tools and resources for online marketing. Nevertheless, in the first split test that Conversion Rate Experts conducted for Moz, we generated a 52% improvement in sales. Within the first four months of work, we increased annual revenues by $1 million. Phase I—analyzing the business and designing a more effective landing page We’ve all heard the business principle of “listen to your customers.” After all, it takes time, effort, and money to bring visitors to a website. Here are some of the methods we used to analyze Moz’s visitors: A wireframe of the page. The results of the split test. 1. 2. 3. 4.

Instagram Unveils Clickable Content and Carousel Ads: What This Means to Marketers | Simply Measured Instagram Unveils Clickable Content and Carousel Ads: What This Means to Marketers Kevin Shively Blogger Extraordinaire Simply Measured One of the most common complaints I hear about Instagram is that you can’t post links in the captions of your posts. Instagram Network Study | Q4 2014 To be fair, I hear that complaint mainly from those of you who are likely to read this post: Marketers who use the network for brand purposes. Last week, Instagram unveiled a new ad type that will allow advertisers on the network to include links and multiple photos in one placement, without losing the Instagram aesthetic that we’ve all come to love. We’ve heard from marketers that they want to tell sequenced stories in beautiful, compelling ways that lead to meaningful results for their businesses. How Carousel Ads Work The new ads offer a “carousel” feature that allow marketers to post more than one photo in an ad placement, that users can scroll through horizontally. Why Carousel Ads Matter to Marketers

Driving Landing Page Conversions: SEO Tells You Where, But CRO Tells You How A lot of marketing experts will tell you that SEO is the driving force behind conversions. I’m here to tell you it’s not. SEO can only do so much. You can spend a million dollars on your SEO campaign and rank at the top of Google’s search results for all of your keywords, but if people don’t convert, then your SEO efforts are ultimately worthless. You should, instead, start backwards and work on conversion rate optimization (CRO) before you even consider SEO. CRO is the process of optimizing your landing page to influence the most viewers to convert. Think of it this way. If your landing page is failing to convert visitors to customers, you’ll want to take the steps to ensure that your site becomes a more relevant, emotional, and interactive experience. 1. People don’t have the time or desire to read the hundreds of webpages they see every day. You can familiarize yourself with your target audience by conducting surveys and interviews. 2. Image Credit: Wikimedia 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

simplymeasured Storytelling is central to everything around us, but as social media marketers, we tend to put them in the backseat and let our agenda ride shotgun. I love a good story. I even love a bad story. Stories have an amazing ability to make us feel connected to each other, share experiences with one another, and entertain us…especially if they star Van Damme. I’ll be the first to admit, it’s tough to make room for storytelling in our marketing strategies. “Our users are busy,” we say. It gets complex, because this is all true…Our users are busy, and don’t want to waste their time with needless anecdotes. Why Stories Are So Important In Social Media This recent infographic from OneSpot may make your brain look prettier than it actually is…and your face isn’t that nice and shapely…but it does call out some important biological reactions caused by stories. Stories are the skeleton key to retention and connection, on a chemical level. This is why stories matter. Data is the Key to Development

From the Inbox to the Landing Page: Email Marketing Best Practices In Action When it comes to doing email right, there’s a lot to consider. And, whenever we’re analyzing emails for our email inspiration blog series, we’re always looking for what aspects of email marketing a brand got right (and what parts could use a little work). After reviewing dozens of emails, it’s time to sit back and reflect. Below you’ll find a roundup of email best practices in action—complete with plenty of examples! Is your “from name” recognizable and trustworthy to external audiences? Typically, you’ll find the names of companies, brands, or individuals here. In this example from Banana Republic, their brand name was shortened to “BR” in the from name, potentially causing confusion amongst their readers. A successful from name will be recognizable and relevant to your audience, imparting trust and a desire to open. In the examples below, each company used a straightforward approach—minimizing potential confusion and leveraging earned influence by simply using their brand name.

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