Landing Page Tests and Search Marketing

Posted: January 21st, 2009 | Author: Chance Barnett | Filed under: Marketing Strategy, Search Marketing | Tags: , | View Comments

My friend Susan Bratton has an amazing Dishymix Podcast and interviews the brightest and most interesting people you’d want to meet in business and technology. Susan and her husband Tim Bratton are Personal Life Media

Susan emailed and asked me to come up with a few questions for her upcoming guest Tim Ash of SiteTuners.com. Tim has written a book called Landing Page Optimizations: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions.

Knowing that Susan is a great interviewer, and having a particular fascination on the subject and a lot of current and future testing focused on landing page optimzation going on in my businesses, I came up with the following questions for Tim:

1) Page Focus: SEO or PPC? (The new answer: Both)

Are you seeing many online marketers developing landing pages that are both SEO and PPC optimized?

Meaning this- in the past, most direct and online marketers created targeted landing pages for keywords “in a vacuum”  with the sole goal of optimizing subscribe or sale conversion.

Now, with the growing and continued importance of quality score, page rank, domain authority, and the like from Google, things like your Minimum CPC (cost per click) can be lowered dramatically not just from boosting your CTR (click thru rate) on ads, but from on-page and site-wide factors.

Tim – have you been addressing the need for SEO “friendly” PPC landing pages? What are your favorite tips and techniques for this?

2) “Social Proof” Elements

The more I test elements of Social Proof, the more I find these as critical to include in any good marketing, including landing pages.

Examples of social proof elements are:

  • Written testimonials
  • Video testimonials
  • “As seen on” and similar endorsements lending credibility
  • Social/user generated content – communicating and demonstrating the value/experience of your site or service

An important reality in search marketing today is that consumers online have grown savvier, and thus it seems you can’t just throw up plain text copy and hope for high conversion based on people believing or trusting you.

People want PROOF, and they want it from other people than you- the site owner.

Tim- what are your favorite examples of success stories of using Social Proof elements on landing pages?

3) The Importance of Keyword Targeting

Some keywords perform. Other don’t. You’ll never really know which are which until you test and measure. But getting down to the single keyword level (both broad and exact match) is not easy, especially if you’re running thousands or tens of thousands of keywords.

I believe keyword targeting is where one of the top level leverage points in PPC marketing- and am reminded of it all the times when I see and hear people rebuilding campaigns and finding new profitable keywords.

Tim – how do you deal with the challenge of trying to drive your focus down the the keyword level, and customize landing pages for each given keyword?

What are your favorite tools and time savers?

Do you use any thing like a CMS (content management system) to help shorten the process of testing and iterating new pages.

Ok.

I’ll post answers to these questions if Tim addresses any of these on the show with Susan, and link to the show.

If they don’t get to the questions, then I’ll answer these in my own experience for you.

By the way- what questions do you have?