Personas are different from demographics. Demographics tell you valuable things about ages and income brackets that you may or may not be able to influence on your campaigns. But personas tell you about motivations and behaviors that anyone of any income, ethnicity or age might have. Personas are based on how customers make decisions and what inspires them or drives them away.

Of course your products are aimed at a certain demographic. Most of the people who buy insurance, for example, are one kind of customer while those who buy apps to find the most active bar scene are another.

But do they make decisions based on “gut” feelings or tons of data? Do they grab whatever site is at the top of the Google results or spend a lot of time researching? Do they want content that’s just facts or do they want to feel like they know you a little before they give you their money?

Good questions. Personas can help, and because different PPC ads draw different searcher personas, your landing pages can speak specifically to that persona.

Let’s begin by saying that the last thing you want to do is cast a wide net for every searcher. Consider if someone says of a restaurant: “They serve all kinds of food for everyone.” You’re only likely to eat there if you’re too hungry to actually pick a place that serves Texas barbecue, has a romantic ambience or whatever you’re really looking for.

Or if someone says of a service company “They’re a general handy-man company.” You’re only going to hire them if you’re sure they can do the job, are cheap and can come today. Otherwise, you’ll probably look for a specialist.

Searcher Motivation & The Selection Process

It’s the same with landing pages. Before we do anything we should know who we are speaking to and start by asking, “Why would someone come to my site? What are the motivators?”

Take, for example, a tree-trimming company. Why would people search for this company?

• Commercial property managers might need pruning to keep trees healthy to protect the investment of property owners as well as protecting against falling trees that could incite insurance claims.

• Residential customers might hire you to keep their yards tidy, their trees healthy and their kids safe under the branches. But this won’t be just any homeowner. It will be a certain kind of homeowner who is meticulous and attentive to detail. This homeowner will have disposable income enough to maintain the yard.

• Both kinds of customers might call you when a limb has landed on a car or power line.

Those are the motivators. Now, what about the behaviors?

• Competitive customers are goal oriented. They know what they’re looking for and they choose it very quickly.
• Methodical customers are very deliberate and logical. They’ll only call you as a last resort and would rather get all their answers searching online without talking to you.
• Humanistic customers are the hardest to convert. They focus on relationships and how your offering will make them feel.
• Spontaneous customers make decisions very quickly. They don’t want to read a lot, they want all their main questions answered on a top-level basis and to then get on with things.

Now in an emergency like the fallen limb, most customers are going to streamline their decision process. They want to know how to contact you, whether you can solve their problem without creating any worse ones and if you can come today.

For those customers, you might want pertinent information above the fold of your landing pages. Information like 24-hour emergency service and the phone number could be at the top.

But what about for the rest of them? Competitive searchers may want to see a page of what other businesses or neighborhoods you’ve worked in. If you’re hired by Chichi Park in the Best Part of Town, that’s enough for them.

Methodicals want to know everything. They want to know if you’re bonded and insured, what your experience and credentials are, who you’ve worked for in the past, whether your rates compare and a lot of other information that they’ll measure against other information.

This landing page serves a spontaneous searcher with an emergency well:

This landing page would drive a spontaneous searcher with an emergency crazy. This is probably a waste of a click: 

For companies that rely on a lot of data or are results-oriented that have charts to show their increased value or documented results, methodical are the dream persona.

For many creative or humanist businesses, methodical are a nightmare customer and you may not want to focus much attention on creating pages of data or content for them.

Creative or humanist businesses focus more on “I’ll show you my personality and how I will care for your needs” and that’s what humanist customers respond to. If you have a humanistic-focused tree care company, it might emphasize environmental stewardship and safety of children.

Spontaneous customers just need the basic information fast without necessarily looking at data or paying any attention to your attempts to connect with them.

But that’s just the beginning of personas. Analytics can give you an inkling what personas are converting in the largest numbers on your site and help you further hone your design and content.

Choose the navigation, design, content, and images you will use based on the searcher personas you’ve decided are key converters and the biggest supporters of your business.

In fact, every part of your website, right down to the kind of action button you choose should focus on your personas.

For more on the four “Modes of Persuastion” I highly recommend the book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? by Brian and Jeffrey Eisenberg.

I was mistaken.

Rather than be exasperated by this, I saw it as a teaching moment for my prospect and for you.

If you are driving search traffic to an online store, online service, or subscription site, I recommend that you add some hacks to your website developer’s questionnaire (also called a survey or creative brief) so that your business goals are part of their design process.

Here’s how I would change the one I was given.

Know When You Are The Wrong Person To Ask

This is the most important realization you can come to: you are a business person, marketer or something else. You are not a Web designer. More importantly, you are not your Web visitor.

Don’t let your development and design team pass the buck. They should be asking you for information that helps them make a decision. They should not be asking you for that decision.

Don’t try to make decisions. Provide the information your design team needs to make good decisions.

Any time they ask you to make specific recommendations, change the question. All questions should ask you for information that informs their decision. If they are not willing to make such decisions, you best let them go about their business and find someone else.

Navigation Has To Make Sense To Your Visitor

The question of how your navigation should be laid out is not one to be decided by your personal taste or by what you believe is cool. Navigation has the burden of getting people off of the home page and into your site. Once a visitor is in your site, the navigation must anticipate their next question.

As such, you should add some questions to your website questionnaire.

Navigation decisions should be based on your visitors’ needs. How will they research your on your site?

Your main navigation should guide visitors to the things that move your business forward. These are the things you need your visitors to accopmlish to be successful.

Your sub-navigation, or side navigation should numerate the alternative ways of exploring your site. Usually, information on a commercial website can be categorized, so list your categories there. If there are a lot of categories for your visitors, you may need to have some sort of expandable navigation or use “fly-outs.” Otherwise, just list the categories.

When listing your categories, don’t forget “Most popular,” “Featured Items,” and “Editor’s Choice” categories.

If you have more than two pages on your site, go ahead and include site search. Those visitors who know what they want will use this feature and they will have high expectations for it’s accuracy.

Kill The Slideshow

If there is anything that will define your character as an online marketer, it is your ability to do something that is the opposite of what everyone else is doing because the data tells you so. Such is the case with the homepage slideshow.

In test after test, this little bit of interactivity has shown to reduce conversion rates. Yet it is used on websites all across the Web. This simply means that most marketers aren’t testing this feature.

Nonetheless, there are signs that this feature is falling out of favor with traditionally high-converting websites like keurig.com, proflowers.com, Raoman’s, Woman Within, 1-800-PetMeds and the site that never resorted to slideshows, Amazon.

The Slideshow can be expected to reduce conversion rates. Pick one and go with it.

How can something so universally accepted reduce conversion rates?

We think it works like this: The automatically rotating slideshow creates motion on the page. Our brains are designed to react to motion, and just as we’re getting into the other elements on the page, the hero shot moves, breaking our concentration. We can never really digest the home page because we keep getting distracted by motion, and we totally miss what we were looking for.

Don’t be lazy. Do the hard work of picking one message for your site.

Alternatively, change the rotation rate of your slideshow to once per day (that is 86,400 seconds, if that is how your questionnaire asks). A daily rotation offers variety without motion.

Social Media Icons Are For Rock Stars

If you’ve paid good money to get searchers to visit your site, why send them off to a social media network? Are you really so attention-starved that you need likes, fans and followers instead of sales?

Most knee-jerk designers will assume you want social media icons on every page of your site. You don’t, unless you are a rock star, celebrity, or run a social network.

Don’t send your expensive search traffic to some social network. It probably won’t ever come back.

It is the “Thank You” page that is the right place to ask people to pimp you on social media. They’ve just bought your product or subscribed. They’re primed to share their brilliant action with others. Hold off until this point.

The only exception to this hack is this: If you are really good at converting social media fans into record sales, TV viewers, or movie tickets, go for it. Otherwise, keep your hard-won traffic on your site until they buy, subscribe or register.

Sell  Buyers Something Else

When is the best time to sell somebody something? The answer is, “Just after they have bought something.”

That’s right. There is no better time to offer something more than when someone has just “bought” something from you. Clearly, they are “buyers,” right?

Thank You pages are a great opportunity to offer something else to your best visitors: those that buy.

By “buying” I mean that they’ve paid you in money or have paid with their contact information, in the case of a lead.

You don’t have to offer them something more to buy (but why not?). Now is the time you can ask them to share with their social networks; to friend, fan or follow you; to download something; to join a mailing list, and more.

Why bother? You got their money, right? Well, the thank you page is the most effective place to :

1. Increase your average order value by selling related items
2. Open different communication channels for their next purchase
3. Do something extraordinary to put an exclamation point on the purchase
4. Minimize buyer’s remorse and the accompanying returns
5. Teach them how to use your product successfully
6. Get referrals

I could keep going, but that’s for another column. So, how much time are you spending on your “thank you” pages?

Capitalize On Your Errors

It is hard to be perfect. Sometimes we ask searchers to come to pages that just don’t exist; or they existed once, a long time ago. This doesn’t mean that we need to spit in their faces. Perhaps we can still help them with their problem.

This is the job of the error page.

Every error page is an opportunity. Don’t screw up a second time with a lame page.

First of all, the term “404″ should not appear anywhere on your error page. Instead, you should present a helpful resource coupled with a polite mea culpa.

Your 404 page should act like a homepage. If you have a site of any heft, offer a search box. Provide links to the things that you would offer on your home page. However, don’t send these visitors to the home page. You must apologize first.

Nobody Wants To Contact You

If the best thing your design firm can come up with is “Contact Us” just walk away. Instead, look at the question introduced above: “List the three most important things your visitors must do on your site.”

Create a separate page for each of these.

A Contact Us page is the least interesting lead generation page on the Web. Try something else.

They may include things like:

• “Find a store nearby.” If this is the case, a map would be nice.
• “Get a quote.”
• “Ask a question of our knowledgeable experts.”
• “Subscribe to our free newsletter.”

In other words, everyone is trying to solve a problem, and their problem is not “I need someone to contact me.” No one wants to contact you – nor do they want you to contact them.

Ask More Of Your Web Design Firm

In all fairness, most Web design firms are responding to the desires of their clients, who are not focused on their visitors, but on their own egos. The market for websites that are driven by the whim of their owners is hundreds of millions of dollars larger than the market for those who are visitor-centric.

Success and high conversion rates go the to the visitor-centric, not the ego-driven. Which are you?

I like to believe that most designers want to do do well by their customers. If you are the kind of marketer or business owner that asks more of their design firm, you might find yourself with a site that serves your visitors (and your business) well.

Traditional design is different from designing for dollars.

My partner Joel Harvey is fond of saying, “My favorite part of a design is the money.”

He’s been part of many a web design project. His perspective comes in response to the number of times he’s heard things like:

“I want the design to pop!”

“I want my site’s design to be groundbreaking like nothing else out there!”

“Let’s turn it up a notch on the design.”

“I want the site’s design to reflect the high value of our product.”

In and of themselves, none of the above statements are unworthy pursuits.

But if your goal is to increase conversion and fill your coffers to the brim, you will fall woefully short if you believe that web design alone can do the heavy lifting of convincing your visitors to take action.

A while back, a client sent us a couple of different mocks of some new designs they were entertaining. They ask which one I liked. The first thing I said is I like the one that makes you the most money. Up until that time their team was arguing over color palettes, white space,and rounded edges.

When I reminded them about the bigger goal, their conversation evolved. In a clock tick, we were all discussing the quality of content on the pages rather than the design elements. When their offer and call to action were right, everyone seemed to forget about the trivia of the actual design.

Designing For Your Ego

Another client brought to us a new landing page campaign they had just launched and were baffled and disappointed in the early results.

They went on to explain that they thought this was the best designed landing page they had ever done. They had just hired a new graphic designer that ‘got it’, and even the CEO was impressed with his work. One problem, their paying customers didn’t seem to agree.

No doubt, the design was gorgeous. Rich colors, curvy rectangles, sexy images, even the header and body fonts were crisp and clean. So why wasn’t this campaign working?

We had them show us their most recent successful campaign. The design was a tad dated, and compared to the new landing page it looked like a high school hobbyist in the company basement eating Cheetos and suckling energy drinks.

Still, by comparing we immediately saw the problem with the new landing page.

The copy on the old page was much better. The headers screamed the product’s value proposition and benefits. The body copy answered relevant questions, and helped the reader imagine themselves buying the product. The call to action button was big, bold, and in your face.

The new page looked stunningly attractive but said very little. To add insult, the hot shot designer was a minimalist and had an aversion to big gawky buttons, so his primary call to action was tiny button that blended in with the hero image, and , by design, was easy to ignore.

We instructed them to use the old page copy on the new design (they had to make a few adjustments to make it all fit), and we asked the designer to create a bigger and bolder call to action button.

They obliged us and that new design finally beat the old landing page, but only slightly.

How Much Time Are You Spending With Your Designer vs. Your Banker?

So my lesson is this. Beautiful, eye-popping design and effective, profitable web design are two different things. And it always seems easier to mistake those eye-popping designs for profitable ones.

Some companies spend more on design than they do on organic SEO, and almost all companies spend more on design than on Conversion Rate Optimization. Search engine spiders don’t evaluate site design, only content and links. And I have yet to see a company design their way into a better conversion rate and better RO.

Some companies spend way more time going back and forth about a design element than they do actually testing it. Makes you wonder how far ahead of your competitors you could get if you spent more time and resources on conversion optimization and testing.

So when considering a redesign of your entire site, of a successful landing page, or even a banner ad, do the following:

• Ask and list what about the page experience(not just he design) works? Keep those in the new design.
• What about the experience doesn’t work?
• Why do we want to change this(especially if it working)?
• Before you launch a radically new design, test what you believe is NOT working about the current design.

Above all, use web designers that deeply understand the web and principles of conversion. Otherwise they are just an artist, and the value of an artists works usually increases only after their demise. Can you wait that long?

Photo courtesy ilco via sxc.hu

Photo courtesy FastCompany

It’s easy to think that our search visitors aren’t coming with any brain at all. How can they possibly decide against what we have to offer? If they weren’t going to take action, why click on the ad?

It turns out that they do have brains, and the people at NeuroFocus know. They use neuroscience to see these brains at work with amazing brainwave measuring devices.

They’ve watched brainy humans as they surf the Web, and we can all learn something from what they see. Their findings can be found in a new report The Premium Experience: Neurological Engagement on Premium Websites.

What They See In Brainwaves

When you’ve studied a whole bunch of brainwaves, you apparently start to see patterns – at least these folks do.

There are three responses that they can recognize when test subjects visit a webpage. When deciding what to put on our landing pages, it may be helpful to consider how well our pages will deliver these responses.

Attention

They can detect sustained focus and shifts in focus when people are looking at a site.

When we design landing pages, we seek to sustain our visitors’ focus and avoid page elements that cause it to shift. This is why we remove things like site navigation, images that move, and make the most important parts of the page the most visible.

Emotional Engagement

This is the intensity of a persons emotional response. These folks apparently can tell if the response is positive (“approach motivation”) or negative (“avoidance motivation”).

This is something that good copywriters can accomplish with headlines and text. It is also why we try to avoid stock photography, as it generally offers little emotional juice.

Memory Retention

Detects when visitors find something that is personally relevant. It is “activated automatically for experiences that are personally meaningful and provide an opportunity for learning.”

It is important that your landing pages carry on the message that made the searcher click on your ad or organic listing. This response bears out the importance of teaching the visitor something along the way.

Sizing Up Sites

The NeuroFocus people wanted to know how these three response metrics – Attention, Emotional Engagement, and Memory Retention – changed when people visited different kinds of sites.

They chose three sites: The New York Times home page, the generic (non-personalized) Yahoo! home page, and the test subjects’ Facebook news feed.

NOTE: Facebook was a cosponsor of the study.

The Relationship Between Attention & Emotional Engagement

All three sites garnered high attention scores. However, their emotional engagement scores were significantly lower. The study authors point out that in general, there is an inverse relationship between attention and emotional engagement.

This is interesting.

All of the pages required a significant amount of attention due to the number of choices and items on the page – including ads. The amount of energy it takes to process all of this detracts from the emotional engagement.

This reinforces a truism of landing pages: if you want to engage a visitor emotionally, keep it simple and help them digest your page visually.

The Facebook page had the highest level of emotional engagement of the three.

The Relationship Between Relevance & Memory Retention

Of the three sites, the generic, non-personalized Yahoo! home page scored lowest on the memory retention scale. The study concludes that Facebook and the New York Times score high for different reasons.

The Facebook page scores high on memory retention because of the personal significance of the content. The  New York Times page, on the other hand, scores well because of the new information it offers and opportunities for learning.

In other words, brains find relevance in personal content as well as new, informative content.

This may not be a great surprise, but it’s reassuring to hear it directly from some real brains.

Priming Visitors

The NeuroFocus people also wanted to know how these sites primed visitors, making different messages resonate with them. They exposed test subjects to three “messaging words” before and after viewing the sites and measured how much these words resonated with their brains.

Connecting

This would indicate a predisposition toward socially-oriented messages.

For-Me

Did the site make visitors more likely to resonate with the word “FOR-ME?” This would indicate the visitor is open to messages that are personalized.

Advice

This would indicate a predisposition toward informational messages.

It is probably no surprise that Facebook visitors resonated more with the connecting message after viewing the site, but had the smallest response increase to advice. The New York Times had the smallest increase in visitors’ response to connecting. Yahoo! showed an average increase in all three areas.

They were all seen as “For-Me” sites by the test subjects.

The study goes on to expand these metrics for men vs. women. It also compares online advertising to TV-based commercials. I’ll let you explore these on your own.

Lessons Learned

You don’t have to study neuroscience to understand some important relationships between our search ads and the sites to which they lead.

1. Our ads will prime our visitors for a certain kind of message on our landing pages. Ads that ask visitors to “join” might do well to include social proof on their landing pages, for example. Ads that offer something educational for the searcher should avoid talking about the product or company on the landing page, and keep it to For-Me benefits.

2. If we want our message to have an emotional impact on the visitor, we should keep things simple. This may be why home pages perform so poorly as landing pages. It takes too much attention to process these pages to gain an emotional connection.

3. Relevance is the key to memory retention. If we are remarketing to those who abandon, we want our ads and landing pages to have personal relevance or opportunities to learn something new.

NeuroFocus: The Premium Experience: Neurological Engagement on Premium Websites

Sometimes, our visitors don't care enough to choose what they want.

There is a certain sound a teenager makes when confronted with a choice they aren’t interested in making.

It is a sonic mix of indecision, ambivalence, condescension and that sound your finger makes when you pet a frog.

It is less committal than a shrug, less positive than a “Yes,” less negative than a “No” and is designed to prevent any decision whatsoever from being reached.

It comes out something like, “Meh”

Parent: “Would you like tacos, pasta or steak and lobster for dinner tonight?”

Teen: “Meh”

It is a word so flaccid that it doesn’t even deserve any punctuation. A period would clearly be too conclusive.

If you’ve done any testing at all, you know that your search traffic can give you a collective “Meh” as well. We scientists call this an inconclusive test.

It occurs when you put two or three good options out for a split test, drive search traffic to these options and — meh — none of the choices is preferred by your visitors.

Whether you’re testing ad copy, landing pages, offers or keywords, there is nothing that will deflate a conversion testing plan more than a series of inconclusive tests. This is especially true you’re your optimization program is young. Here are some things to consider in the face of an  inconclusive test.

Add Something Really Different To The Mix

Subtlety is not the split tester’s friend. Your audience may not care if your headline is in 16 point or 18 point font. If you’re getting frequent inconclusive tests, one of two things are going on:

1. You have a great control that is hard to beat, or
2. You’re not stretching enough

Craft another treatment, something unexpected and throw it into the mix. Consider a “well-crafted absurdity” a la Groupon. Make the call to action button really big. Offer something you think your audience wouldn’t want.

Segment Your Test

We recently spent several weeks of preparation, a full day of shooting, and thousands of dollars on talent and equipment to capture some tightly controlled footage for video tests on an apparel site. This is the sort of test that is “to big to be inconclusive.” However, video is currently a very good bet for converting more search traffic.

Yet, our initial results showed that the pages with video weren’t converting significantly higher than the pages without video. Things changed when we looked at individual segments, however.

New visitors liked long videos while returning visitors liked shorter ones. Subscribers converted at much higher rates when shown a video recipe with close-ups on the products. Visitors who entered on product pages converted for one kind video while those coming in through the home page preferred another.

It became clear that, when lumped together, one segment’s behavior was cancelling out gains by other segments.

How can you dice up your traffic? How do different segments behave on your site?

Your analytics package can help you explore the different segments of your traffic. If you have buyer personas, target them with your ads and create a test just for them. Here are some ways to segment:

• New vs. Returning visitors
• Buyers vs. prospects
• Which page did they land on?
• Which product line did they visit?
• Mobile vs. computer
• Mac vs. Windows
• Members vs. non-members

Measure Beyond The Click

In an email test we conducted for a major energy company, we wanted to know if a change in the subject line would impact sales of a smart home thermostat. Everything else about the emails and the landing pages were identical.

The two best-performing emails had very different subject lines, but identical open rates and click-through rates. However, sales for one of the email treatments was significantly higher. The winning subject line had delivered the same number of clicks, but had primed the visitors in some way making them more likely to buy.

If you are measuring the success of your tests based on clicks, you may be missing the true results. Yes, it is often more difficult to measure through to purchase, subscription or registration. However, it really does tell you which version of a test is delivering to the bottom line. Clicks are only predictive.

Print A T-shirt That Says “My Control Is Unbeatable”

Ultimately, you may just have to live with your inconclusive tests. Every test tells you something about your audience. If your audience didn’t care how big the product image was, you’ve learnd that they may care more about changes in copy. If they don’t know the difference between 50% off or $15.00 off, test offers that aren’t price-oriented.

Make sure that the organization knows you’ve learned something, and celebrate the fact that you have an unbeatable control. Don’t let “Meh” slow your momentum. Keep plugging away until that unexpected test that gives you a big win.

Photo courtesy duchesssa

Your blog is like a volcano, visible to search engines, interesting to readers.

The Conversion Rate is calculated as the number of conversions – leads, sales, subscriptions, trials, etc. – divided by the number of visitors to the site from organic search traffic, paid search, referrals, email, etc.

Thus, your conversion rate can be improved in two ways: get more of your visitors to convert (the top), or reduce the number of unqualified visitors. With changes to the algorithms of the Google, a blog turns out to be a great tool to do both.

I’m fond of saying that blogs are like volcanoes. Volcanoes can be dormant, like some websites. Changes to Google’s algorithms don’t favor these sites in the rankings.

Other volcanoes, however, erupt regularly. They continue to pour forth content like magma, growing larger and more prominent over time. No one forgets these volcanoes exist because they don’t let you forget. They are a font of information and insight. They are “blogcanoes”.

Google Studies Blogcanoes

Google is like a team of seismologists who study volcanoes. They exist for blogcanoes. Just as seismologists keep track of changes that indicate activity in volcanoes, Google keeps track of changes in information and content.

Your readers are drawn to blogcanoes by the “show” put on as content bubbles out like fiery lava; the better the content, the better the show. Relevant is more and more critical to setting up your visitors to convert.

Google is constantly tweaking its algorithms to give searchers information in real time.

It made several major changes in 2011 toward that end. Not every kind of information gets this ongoing attention. But companies staying on top of the volatile flow of change, blogging about new products, services, trends and issues, will be on Google’s watch list and your prospects’ itineraries.

An active volcano, with content flowing and forming a new layer, then flowing again, rises and looms larger and larger in the picture. By the same token, a blogcano rises in Google’s results and customers’ awareness.

The Google team isn’t interested in big, dead rocks that don’t contribute new information.

“That Volcano still there Joe?”

“Yup.”

“It doin’ anything?”

“Nope.”

“Okay then.”

The Google team gets excited about volcanoes where tectonic plates are shifting, and content magma is being forced up through channels. Google loves an active volcano that constantly belches out relevant, optimized, red-hot content magma.

Google Prefers Mt. Blog To Mt. Vesuvius

In November, Google announced it had tweaked its algorithms, again, to make sure that when searchers type in a query, they get the most up to date information. The new Refresh algorithm endeavors to make sure that information that’s updated regularly is ranked high.

Not every topic needs constant updating. Information on the War of 1812, for example, doesn’t change a lot. But the business and tech world, the world of social media changes rapidly. That’s one kind of information Google wants to keep fresh, which helps customers stay on top of those trends.

If you type in “The importance of content conversion” you want recent blogs and articles, not something published in 2008. Let’s say you are the magma chamber of a blogcano, responsible for generating  content. If you’re producing relevant information, your post is likely to be listed ahead of information that came out a year ago, a week ago, or an hour ago even if it doesn’t have hundreds of backlinks.

The new algorithm also makes sure information that must be kept current, like election results or news of a merger, will be listed according to the latest update.

If you type in “election coverage” you’ll get coverage of elections in 2012, not 1971. The same holds true for recurring events, like the Olympics or SXSW.

What Is The Sulfur Content Of Your Blog?

Google doesn’t love just any old content lava. Different kinds of volcanoes spew different kinds of lava. Some are nutrient rich and some are just rock. Last year, Google came out with its Caffeine Web Indexing System which could crawl and index the latest information on a huge scale very quickly. But that inspired some sites to crank out content of very little value that was attached to ads.

The content rose to the top by being fresh and full of keywords, consumers clicked on the ads, and voila, the spam sites made money. Google wanted to clean out those sites to make more room for blogcanoes that helped internet users, not spammers. So Google updated its  algorithms again, waging war on the lower quality spewing of sites like content farms and going after site hackers.

That doesn’t mean your lava always has to be prime original content. Often, you can enlighten your customers by commenting on others’ content, called “curating content.”  This information can come from other bloggers, reports, studies, white papers and articles. As long as you give credit where credit is due and the content is relevant to your audience, you’re still serving as a valuable content provider.

The important thing is to have someone in your organization staying on top of news, trends, issues and insights both within your organization and in the arenas your customers focus on, then keep content about those topics flowing.

Google’s new algorithms will recognize your content as contributing to the conversation and you’ll show up a lot more in search results, be found more easily by customers, and achieve higher conversion rates.

Treat Your Blog Posts Like Landing Pages

The key to increasing conversion rates is to treat the pages of you blog like landing pages. To stretch this blogcano metaphor to the breaking point, it’s like setting up a gift shop on the slope.

Your blog pages need to provide a next step for your readers. Calls to action in the content as well as alongside it can offer more informational products for lead generation, links to your product and category pages, and teasers for your offerings.

Think of it as advertising on your own site. Unless you’re the New York Times, you don’t have to separate your journalistic content and promotional content. The right balance will be relevant to the reader and will make your cash register ring as well.

To affect both sides of the conversion rate fraction invest in blogs are relevant to your prospects and focused on what’s happening now.

It maps the “hero’s journey” of the primary character through his or her 22 minute sitcom quest. It ensures that each episode of his show has all of the elements needed to be successful.

The journey of his characters are like the journey searchers will take after they click on your search ad or organic listing. Use this simple tool to ensure that your  landing pages have all of the elements of success.

Dan Harmon's Embryo ensures that stories for is TV show have all of the key elements.

1. They Are In A Zone Of Comfort

It is important to recognize that, before a searcher comes to your landing page, they are in a familiar, comfortable world. Keep in mind that you are not yet a part of that world.

Just because they may click on your ad or search listing doesn’t mean that they are comfortable with you. You are a stranger, outside of their comfort zone.

2. But They Want Something

There is a reason – a trigger – that causes a person to open a browser and enter a search term. Something has happened in their lives, and they are now looking for a solution.

Understand your market’s triggers and you will create ads, descriptions and landing page copy that resonates with them.

Empathy is a great tool when you want high conversion rates.

3. They Enter An Unfamiliar Situation

Your landing page is unfamiliar. You have brought them to a strange place, a place they may never have seen before.

Work to limit the vertigo that this may cause.

• Ensure that the headline of your landing page matches the ad that they clicked on.
• Clearly let them know that they are in the right place. If you have a familiar brand, display it above the fold.
• Write copy and choose images that address their issues.
• Use calls to action that offer to help them achieve their goal.

4. They Adapt

Help them get comfortable on your landing page.

Deliver content in the way that they want it. Provide copy for methodical readers. Offer images with captions for scanners. Provide testimonials and social proof for relational searchers. Offer risk-reversal and guarantees for transactional visitors.

Provide all of the information they will need to make a decision act.

5. They Get What They Want

Deliver on your promise. Every landing page fulfills a promise, a promise made by your ad or your SERP description.

This may sound obvious, but so many landing pages fail to address the specific promise of an ad. For example, ecommerce marketers offer a discount on a specific kind of shoe, and then take the searcher to a category page listing all shoes.

If you are using one landing page to service a variety of ads, you are probably not delivering on your promises.

6. They Pay A Price

Ask for the visitor to do something. The job of a landing page is to entice visitors to grow your business. This may be through sales, subscriptions, or lead generation. Clearly call them to act and ask them to pay with their money, their contact information or their attention.

7. They Return To Their Familiar Situation

After they have completed their purchase, registered for the webinar or requested the white paper, they go on with their lives. The confirmation page you present at the end of the process is the best time to get them to take you with them.

Ask them to join your social networks. Offer additional information to help them use a product they have purchased. Anticipate their next question and offer additional content to answer it.

Become a part of their familiar situation.

8. They Have Changed

We call it “conversion” because the searcher has become something very different. They are a customer. They are a prospect, They are a subscriber.

They are a part of your business and you are expected to deepen that relationship in a appropriate ways.

Treat them as the butterfly they are. Use social media and email to continue to interact with them.

Make Searchers Heroes

If you are cognizant of your search visitors’ journey, you can give them the best possible brand experience available: You have helped them complete their journey; you have made them a hero.

Image Source: Wired Magazine (October 2011).

Courtesy bitzcelt via Flickr

The conversion rate for your site is the number of conversions divided by visitors. Quality traffic is half of the equation (the bottom half). No matter how well optimized a site is, if the traffic isn’t qualified, conversion rates will falter.

I recently commented to Chris Robino* of SearchRanking.net that companies rarely get our conversion optimization team and search marketing team together. I thought this odd.

This hit a nerve with Chris. So I asked him to outline the problem and tell us how to best deal with it.

In a recent white paper, Integrating the New Digital Team, it was suggested that most companies categorize pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization in two separate departments: PPC as a marketing function, and SEO as a technical one. Most companies don’t even have conversion optimization defined, let alone a department to manage it.

How often do your developers and your marketing staff get together to review data, strategy and landing pages?

If the collaboration between the two departments is strong, you don’t have time to read this article, because your business is growing so fast.

For the rest of us, the disconnect between tech and marketing is killing our conversion rate. Translated into business-babble, “You are leaving money on the table.”

The Distance Between Us

These days websites serve many purposes, from marketing to e-commerce and complete SAAS businesses. In the beginning, most corporate websites were the digital equivalent of a tri-fold brochure.

As simple as a website was to build circa 1997, it was still considered development. If it involved code, instructions to servers, uploading, testing and so on, it was left up to the tech folks to develop, test and deploy. Marketing was in charge of design, copy and where emails or form submissions might go, but it was still a technical job to launch and maintain the pages.

In heady 2011, this is still the case for many organizations. Tech is in charge of developing, testing and deploying the website. Marketing still creates the design, writes the copy and receives the feedback.

It’s possible that new technology is just coming at us too fast. The digital age just hasn’t settled down enough for us to write the best practices when it comes to collaborating within our organizations. I don’t suggest using this assumption the next time you are talking to your boss about slowing sales.

Whatever the reason for the separation, the longer you place it behind several competing priorities, the more it can chip away at the website traffic you are working so hard to obtain.

Throughout the years tech has continued to evolve, but IT is still in charge of anything that involves, code, development, testing and deployment. Today that includes SEO and setting up analytics code.

Tech usually creates standard reports that marketing will get, but IT isn’t going to create the reports that marketing needs, and marketing doesn’t know the analytics solution well enough to tell them different.

What Are We Missing?

We recently took over a PPC campaign for one of our existing clients, and after two weeks of reviewing the Google AdWords, account we determined that the company managing the PPC campaign was classifying sales incorrectly.

The marketing company in charge of the PPC campaign classified an “Add To Cart” as a sale, so every Add To Cart was listed as a completed transaction and a sale on the report they sent to our client.

This went on for over six months and cost several hundred thousand dollars. We were not seeing the overall growth in our top line revenue numbers that the reports would have suggested.

What were we missing? It turns out that 4 out of 5 users that went to our “Add To Cart” page left before they completed the sale, which means marketing was reporting 80% more sales than actually occurred.

This is one of the most obvious examples of how disconnection between departments can be damaging to the bottom line. Here’s a less obvious example.

How big is our page size, and how does that affect our load time? Tech will know this, but who should they report that information to? This is the perfect example of how tech and marketing must communicate, and both departments need to understand what the overall online marketing goal is.

Dollars & Sense

Let’s just say for the sake of example that one of the goals is to increase the conversion rate from 0.7% to 1.0% within the year. Tech would constantly work on improving the load time of the site, optimizing the images, researching keywords and working with marketing to update the relevant content as often as possible.

Marketing would work with tech to write copy, find the best images that represent the product or service, and review the analytic reports for user statistics. Based on the data, marketing will edit content and message, create new landing pages and test everything.

These are the details, and this is the collaboration a company needs if the goal is to increase the conversion rate.

If tech and marketing were not working on the goal of improving the conversion rate, tech wouldn’t be as motivated to work with marketing to optimize images and load time.

Marketing would select the best images, but they could compromise load time. Tech wouldn’t be as motivated to load new content to improve the rankings, or constantly review analytics and research new keywords.

If each department is splintered off into its own camp and motivated by different objectives, the company can still grow. But show me another statistic where you can grow annual revenues significantly without increasing the number of people who see your stuff?

Use your department’s subject matter expertise, but coordinate your expertise with everyone on the team, and make conversion rate optimization a critical factor in your online marketing plan.

The best examples of integrating the various teams within an organization are when everyone understands the goal. Other important factors include:

• That everyone understand the core goal
• The level of individual buy-in
• Agreement on how best to accomplish the goal
• Financial incentives if the larger group meets its goals

If your organization is dealing with the challenges of department politics and segmentation when it comes to improvement, start with a smaller project. Select a small project that involves multiple teams and keep constant and open communication throughout the project. Sometimes 1,000 baby steps can get you a lot farther than no steps at all.

The line between conversions and visitors doesn’t have to exist within your organization. In fact, if you separate search engine marketing and conversion optimization, you are probably impairing your ability to attract and convert prospects. Eliminate the IT and marketing silos to open up the promise of a high-converting website.

*Chris Robino is the chief digital strategist at SearchRankings.Net, a full-service SEO management company. Chris is a serial entrepreneur with seven start-up companies under his belt in 20 years. You can follow Chris at chrisrobino.com.

Short URLs keep old links from "going bad."

How many links are there still floating around the Internet pointing to old, outdated content? How many links are now returning 404 errors because the content has disappeared altogether? What can you do with your webinar registration links once the webinar is over?

The obvious answer is to change where the links point. While this can sometimes be done with redirects, we often don’t control the servers where our content lives.

Short URLs provide an answer.

Start by creating links to your content using a URL shortening service that lets you change the destination of their links. This gives you the power to change the destination on their service and all instances of a link across the Internet will be redirected almost instantly.

This is just one of many short URL tricks that are being made possible by more and more sophisticated shortening services. Here are some others.

Be sure to add your own in the comments.

Track Your Content Like 007

Some URL Shortening Services offer sophisticated analytics for the online marketer.

Homing devices are indispensible in the spy business. A good spook always has one ready at hand to drop in a target’s bag or stick to the bottom of a car.

Short URLs give us the power to add homing beacons to our links. Then, we can track them across the Internet as people click on them in their news feeds and email inboxes.

These homing devices are actually parameters added to the end of a URL. Analytics packages read them and use them to identify the source of incoming traffic.

Here’s a homing URL for Google Analytics:

http://searchengineland.com/library/conversion-science?utm_campaign=Conversion-Science-Column&utm_source=SearchEngineLand.com&utm_medium=link&utm_content=stupid-short-URL-tricks&utm_term=try+this+one

This URL is 206 characters long, so it’s not going to fit in a Tweet. Use it in an email or Facebook post, and it will tip off any perps who don’t want to be tracked. Plus, it’s just ugly.

The answer is simple: roll it into almost any URL shortener and voila! your homing device is almost undetectable. Try this one, but remember, we’re tracking you:

http://selnd.com/r09DJn

If you’re not into adding homing beacons to your links, don’t worry. Many URL shortener services will provide analytics data on number of clicks, sources of clicks, type of device used, geographic location and more.

Find Out Who Has A Crush On You

Popular URL Shortener Bit.ly can tell you who’s interested in you, or at least interested in your site. The service offers a feature that lets you know when someone else creates a Bit.ly link pointing at your domain.

Clearly, this is a sure sign of interest in you.

You can setup your own Bit.ly “Tracking Domain” by visiting their Account Settings page. You’ll have to verify your ownership of the site, but they offer several ways to do this.

Give Your Pages An Energy Drink

Got a hot product you want to share with the world? Well, we know that slow load times can cut your conversion rates taking money out of your pocket.

Remix service Bo.lt can help a little bit. Bo.lt doesn’t just link to your product page, it grabs a fully functional copy of it and gives a short URL. Bo.lt Co-CEO Matthew Roche claims  that their version of the page loads 15 to 45% faster. That may mean more sales for you.

Bo.lt also lets you edit your bolted page, so you can see if on-page changes will help your conversion rate.

Let People “Click on” Real Stuff

QR Codes let shoppers "click" on merchandise with their smartphones.

I live online, but I buy plenty of “real” stuff. People who sell “real” stuff can do stupid short URL tricks, too.

44Doors CEO Andy Meadows sees a QR Code as just another short URL. Yes, he may need glasses, but his just launched service, Capture provides QR Codes as well as a traditional short URL.

For example, you can “click on” a Kendall Jackson wine bottle right in the store and get information on wine pairings, recipes and more.

Other popular services provide QR codes as well.

These are accessed simply by appending “.qr” or “.qrcode” to a short URL. Try these from Bit.ly and Google:

http://bit.ly/cSlkkg.qr

http://goo.gl/SWofX.qr

Save On Business Card Costs

I designed a business card that can “go viral” at events. This is true one-to-one traffic generation.

QR Codes can automatically update the address book of our smartphones.

A single business card should suffice to traverse the most mundane networking event, unless some noob without a smartphone intervenes.

Special QR codes link to or embed a data file that many phones can instantly add to their owner’s address book.

Once this is done, the card is useless to them and can be passed along to someone else.

Since QR Codes are relatively new, it may even create a little scene and grab you extra attention.

Make Short URLs Longer

This may sound like a truly stupid short URL trick. However, when branding is important, using your own URL can be crucial, even if it uses a few more characters than alternatives.

Search Engine Land has a vanity domain – seland.com – that is longer than most, but puts their brand into every post and tweet that uses it. They use Bit.ly to host this domain, and if anyone tries to create a Bit.ly URL with a Search Engine Land URL, they are given http://selnd.com/cSlkkg instead of http://bit.ly/cSlkkg.

Other examples of longer domains include go.fidelity.com, go.bofa.com, and links.bbb.org. Organizations like these like to have short URLs as subdomains on their main domains.

If they used generic URLs, they might encourage phishers and scammers to use those same shortening services to pretend  they are Fidelity, Bank of America or the Better Business Bureau.

Make Dogs Talk

Shortening services are now putting all kinds of things behind their short URLs. With 44Doors’ Capture, you can build a mobile web page complete with images, video, social media links, lead capture forms and more. They provide instant comment forms and a mobile contact card.

How does this make dogs talk? Take a look.

http://conversci.com/PoorDog

I created this mobile microsite in a matter of minutes, and I will be able track how it is getting passed around, shared and if it is driving traffic to my author page.

This trend toward marketing services is just getting started in the URL shortener space, and we should see more interesting instant services in the future.

Why Use Regular URLs At All?

The short URL is becoming less and less important as services behind them become more and more sophisticated. For services like Bo.lt, Bit.ly and 44Doors Capture, the short URLs are a convenience that is fronting some pretty impressive capabilities. Given all of the stupid tricks URL shorteners can do, we will probably use real URLs less and less.

What are your favorite stupid short URL tricks? Tell us in the comments.

Disclosure: 44Doors provided a Capture account at no charge to the author.

So how do you determine what images are going to be effective and which are not? Which images are going to reduce the conversion rates of your landing pages and which will help instill confidence in the visitor to take action?

Unfortunately, I am not a photographer or graphic artist, so I really can’t critique images on their intrinsic value. However, I have a little test that I use to identify irrelevant images and photographs.

I call it “The Caption Test.”

The Caption Test

Most of the images used on a webpage do not have a caption. This is unfortunate, because readers who are scanning your page will read these, often more than will read your headline and certainly more than will read your copy.

Thus, captions are a great place to put offers.

Web images don’t have captions because there is no intelligent caption that could be written. If you tried to write a caption for many of the images on your site, you would be at a loss.

This is a sign of irrelevance.

A Tale Of Three Captions

An image should say something to the reader. What do your images say?

To tease out the relevance of a photo, graphic or illustration, I going to ask you to write not one, three captions for the images on your key webpages.

They are:

1. What the image should have said

This can be gleaned from any accompanying copy on the page. If one of your headlines would work underneath an image, your image is probably relevant. Of course, if your headlines aren’t drawing in the conversions, the image they inspire won’t be very effective either.

I’d like to find an image that said this:

“This column provides helpful tips and opinion to help you increase the conversion rates of your online marketing.”

How about an image of money flying out of a computer! Is that really what I’m saying?

2. What you thought it was insinuating

We tend to choose images that are subversive in their impact, as if we spoil the surprise if the image reveals too much about the product or service.

Images are often chosen that the designer believes are aspirational or stimulating. This technique may be acceptable for an article or blog post, but it is a waste of key real estate on a page designed to incite action from a visitor.

If I wanted to insinuate that pretty people read my column, I could put an attractive woman on the page, perhaps staring longingly at a laptop, the screen of which you can’t see. NOTE: both men and women respond positively to female images. I’m not being sexist.

Such an image may be preferable to a more negative image, but it will not make you believe that you will be more attractive if you read my column. Of course, you will be, because smart is sexy.

3. What the image actually says to the reader

This is a chance to underscore the way humans process images. A segment of your visitors will interpret images literally, another segment will attach meaning to images from past experiences, and yet another will ignore images that aren’t blatantly interesting or provocative.

Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes and be honest with yourself. What does this image really say to the reader?

The laptop with money streaming out of it makes a promise I can’t keep: “My column will make money flow from the Web for you.”

A beautiful woman supposedly reading my column makes a promise no one will believe: “You will be more attractive if you read this column.”

This is where we call “Bull” by putting ourselves in the readers’ shoes.

A Few Examples

As I said, I’m not qualified to judge images aesthetically. I don’t know if these examples are particularly good or bad. Instead, I chose some that are representative of images I see over and over again.

All of these are illustrative of those found on actual websites. You may have similar images on your site.

The Enigmatic

What the image should have said:

“We can answer your questions about which financial vehicles are right for you.”

What it was insinuating:

“You are probably confused, so you should start writing us checks.”

What it actually said:

“Little plastic people are terrible at designing stairs.”

Business Porn

What the image should have said:

“Our IT training provides guidance on how to effectively build, deploy, support, and improve services to enable your business.” (I don’t write this stuff)

What they were insinuating:

“If you pay for our training, you can hang out with young beautiful people. Like me!”

What it actually said:

“Don’t look away! Don’t look away! Look at me!”

NOTE: Beautiful people will seriously detract from the message on the page. We just can’t stop looking at them.

Hallmark Moments

What the image should have said:

“It’s easy to compare insurance plans, get quotes and apply online.”

What they were insinuating:

“Shopping for health insurance on our site makes you more attractive and happy.”

What it actually said:

“These people are having fun shopping for insurance. And if you believe that, have I got a policy for you.”

Nailing It

What the image should have said:

“Our computer is thin, light and easy to carry.”

What they are insinuating:

“Our computer is thin, light and easy to carry.

What it actually said:

“Look how thin this computer is. You can bet it’s light and easy to carry, too.”

A hat tip to Social Triggers, who pointed out this last one.

Your Turn

This is caption test is fun and can seriously improve the performance of your pages. Give us the link to images that you find—good or bad–and take a stab at the caption test. I may have a few captions of my own. I’ll share your images and captions on with my readers.

Post in the comments below or email to captions@conversionscientist.com.

Images used under license from iStockPhoto.