Increase conversions by changing clever headlines to relevant ones

It may seem like making your web visitors chuckle with a clever headline will only help increase conversion rates. After all, if you put them in a good mood, they’ll likely see your call-to-action in a positive light, right? 

The problem is, not everyone in your audience is as clever as you are. While some may immediately get the reference, some may miss your point completely.  When the latter happens, your conversion rate takes a hit, while your bounce rate balloons up.

While clever headlines may help win some people over, relevant headlines come with additional benefits:

SEO

Some landing pages are perfectly suited for being indexed by search engines. These include pages that don’t have time sensitive data, or group-specific offers.  SEO’d landing pages can help you increase brand awareness and increase leads/sales.  Writing headlines that include relevant keywords help the search engines properly index you.

Clarity

A clear headline is one that can be understood immediately by everyone who reaches your landing page. This is important since you have mere seconds to capture the attention of visitors. A clear, benefits-driven headline will work well to capture the attention of your visitors.

Concise

Having a concise headline is important because visitors will only skim your page before deciding if they should stay and learn more. Capturing them with a short, sweet headline keeps them longer and increases your chances for winning the conversion.

Call-to-action

A relevant headline is the start of the path towards your call-to-action. 

No doubt, headline writing can seem like an art. It has to include relevant keywords without being too wordy. And within those few words it has to capture the attention of your visitors and draw them towards your call-to-action. The good news is, online testing allows you to try a variety of different headlines on portions of your traffic to see which one works the best to increase your conversion rates. 

Effective web page headline writing is part art, part science, and all about relevance. 

Fantastic 5: Online Marketing Reads of the Week

It’s Friday already? Wow, where did this week go? I’ve been reading through some interesting new marketing reports, a few of which I’ve listed below that I think you may like.

Oh, and we recently did a webinar on the Power of Post-Click Marketing. Flip through the slides if you missed the webinar or want a refresher!

Report: Marketing Wisom for 2011 | Marketing Sherpa

MarketingSherpa released their marketing wisdom report which is compiled of tips and lessons from marketers who want to share their successful strategies from last year.

Marketer tools fall short for campaign optimization | BtoB Mag

Forrester recently put out a report showing that marketing decision makers feel that current tools aren’t advanced enough for campaign optimization. What do you think?

How to track content marketing lead conversions | Mongoose Metrics 

Mongoose Metrics offers three ways to convert leads from your content marketing efforts using web analytic and phone tracking data.

The what, why and how on low search volume keywords | PPC Hero

Caleb writes about what you should do when Google brands some of your keyword phrases as low search volume, and suspends you from using them in AdWords.

Report: Bing-Yahoo Missed Opportunity for Marketers | MediaPost

A new Search Market Report shows that paid spend is increasing, and that the Bing-Yahoo integration provides an interesting opportunity for online marketers. The article suggestions developing and testing new ad creative/copy for Bing-Yahoo, and watching their conversion rates carefully.

Hope you all have a great weekend. And don’t forget to tweet me links to your favorite posts @ioninteractive! 

5-Part Creating Effective Landing Pages Blog Series

In this five-part blog series on creating effective landing pages, we look at how to incorporate concepts like online testing, user experience (ux), social media and SEO into your landing pages to put together a high-converting program. 

Part 1: Why conversion rates are more important than click-thru rates

Are you still using click-thru rates as your core metric? Learn how you can correlate your online marketing activities to ROI much easier by tracking conversion rates.

Part 2: How to get your landing pages ready for testing 

It’s not uncommon to hear conversion-oriented marketers say test, test, test but before you start testing, you might consider making sure these four UX (user experience) items are taken care of. Not doing so can throw off your true conversion rate.

Part 3: Developing long-term relationships with landing page visitors

Don’t let your relationship with a visitor end once they’ve converted. Continue the relationship by using these tips for getting social with your landing page visitors!

Part 4: When should your landing pages be SEO-friendly?

Not all landing pages should be optimized for the search engines, but many of them can be. Check out this post for more on when to create SEO-driven landing pages.

Part 5: How many landing pages do you need?

This number will be ever evolving. Check out this post to see why!

For more easily digestible advice on landing pages, flip through our presentations. And please let us know what you think. Send us a tweet @ioninteractive! 

When should landing pages be SEO friendly?

Do you know when to optimize your landing pages for search?In Part 3 of the Creating Effective Landing Pages blog series we discussed creating social landing pages, but social media shouldn’t get to have all the conversion fun. Now we get to discuss how SEO can get in on the game.

There are two ways SEO and CRO should work together. The first is easily explained in one line by Tim Eschenauer of Austin & Williams in his most recent SEO blog post, “I say stop focusing on rankings and start focusing on conversions.” Basically, you can rank first for all of your most relevant terms, but if you can’t get the conversion it doesn’t matter.  This is a perfect example of how SEO and CRO must work together; SEO gets you the traffic and CRO converts the traffic into business.

The second way SEO and CRO should work together involves landing pages.

In most cases you’re going to be setting up landing pages for your ad campaigns; however, that doesn’t mean relevant organic traffic should be kept out. Your main business objective is to get as many conversions as possible, and if you’re doing SEO on your landing pages correctly, this traffic should be just as relevant as your campaign traffic. Just be sure to keep data on the two separate in your analytics as they may behave differently once they land.

The only times when it wouldn’t be a good idea to send organic traffic to your landing pages is when you’re promoting “limited-time offers—or offers applicable only to a specific segment of your audience” says Scott Brinker, ion’s president and CTO. Otherwise, get your long-term landing pages indexed as quickly as possible.

So, how do you make SEO-driven landing pages? Much like you would create any SEO web page. Christine Laudebnstein, a marketing copywriter at Wordstream says making sure your landing pages are keyword rich is important:

This is also crucial for ranking high in natural search engine results. When your keywords appear in key fields like the page’s headline, subheads, and main content, it’s more likely that the landing page will show up when those keywords are searched. You can also put keywords in picture captions, calls to action, and meta tags. Of course, it’s important not to overstuff your page with keywords, as the repetition could annoy readers and appear spammy, undermining your SEO efforts.

While CRO and SEO have developed into two separate industries, they have the same purpose in mind: connect traffic with relevant content.

In the next (and last) part of our Creating Effective Landing Pages series we’ll answer the question, “just how many landing pages should I have?” 

Conversion Rate Optimization for ALL!

This is a guest post written by Kate Morris. Kate Morris is an SEO Consultant with Distilled Consulting. A regular speaker at PubCon and Affiliate Summit, she shows her passion when speaking of the balance between SEO, PPC, and all other parts of search marketing. She blogs regularly at SEOmoz.com and Search Engine Journal.

I’m here today to announce that every page, no matter it’s status in navigation or if it has a prime spot as a campaign landing page, deserves the attention of a conversion rate optimizer. Yes, I said it. Every page. I’m calling for no more discrimination based on class or status. The day has come and 2011 is the year that all pages focus on CONVERSIONS!

Step 1: Every Page is a Landing Page

There are no more classes of pages, it is time to teach your staff and customers that all pages are created equal. They all have a right to earn conversions and pull their own weight for the benefit of the entire site. Paid search landing pages, affiliate pages, and even marketing landing pages (highest class, we know) are now on the same level with the formerly considered lowly pages of the About Us page and News, plus many more forgotten pages.

Step 2: A Chance to Prove their Worth

Give all pages a call to action. Think about what your visitors might want and need when and if they land on that page from a search engine, and then give them a way to do that. All pages, like all forms of marketing, deserve their chance to show how they can help the bottom line.

Case and point: RateGenius Auto Loan Refinancing

They saw their conversions from their second tier GAP product page, which previously did not have a conversion point, quadruple in one month (yeah one to four, but still!!!). They are pioneers in this movement, and that secondary product page is now getting more love and attention than ever.

Step Three: Leave No Conversion Untracked

Most importantly track what these pages and new conversion points are doing so that credit is given where it is due. Think about the old saying “if a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, did it still fall?” If these pages are given calls to action but no way to track the action how are they ever going to earn their spurs. Track all actions, everything you see as a “win” in connecting with the end user.

Step Four: There is No “War” with SEO

The entire site has seen the search engine optimization specialist, every page large and small that is publicly available. They might have missed the landing pages before, but are revisiting any of those that might benefit the site in the search engine indices. We all know that not all campaign pages need to be optimized or included in the engines, but all pages should have a once over from the conversion optimizer.

This ladies and gentlemen, pages great and small, is a day that will live in infamy (ok, maybe that is a stretch). The day that we make it known that all pages deserve attention from a conversion standpoint. The day that CRO and SEO are on the same page and the same level. No longer will we put one before the other.

As webmasters and marketers, we stand up today and put an end to discrimination. Pages and optimizers unite!