Search & Conversion helps website owners and search marketers guide the searcher from search engine results pages – both organic listings and search ads – to relevant landing pages and complete a desired conversion action, whether that means an e-commerce transaction, engage in a phone call, an email newsletter sign-up or filling out a lead gen form. Columnists provide tips for taking searcher intent through to the finish – with landing page testing and tuning tips, techniques for moving searchers through the conversion funnel and how to feed valuable conversion data back into search campaigns.

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A Visit From Saint Click & Landing Pages In 2012

Nov 30, 2011 at 11:33am ET by Scott Brinker

The holidays are a wonderful time for conversion optimization, especially for e-commerce. I hear that even Santa is willing to accept third-party cookies, if they're offered with milk. So in the spirit of the season, I thought I'd begin this column by sharing with you an adapted poem I first started playing with a few years ago, 'Twas the Moment of Click-Through (also known as A Visit from Saint Click). My apologies to the original classic. [caption id="attachment_102285" align="aligncenter" width="382" caption="Image from Wikimedia Commons: Cover of "Twas the Night Before Christ [...]

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5 Tips To Improve Conversions For B2B Sites

Nov 16, 2011 at 11:53am ET by Abraham Nord

As many B2B marketers have learned the hard way, the traditional methods of marketing to consumers are simply not effective in the business arena. The following 5 tips are proven, easy to implement landing page tactics that will help you generate more leads and improve lead quality. 1. Implement Clean, Clear Landing Pages The design of your website, microsite or landing page is critical to B2B search marketing success. Through extensive testing, I’ve learned that Web design that is often considered boring, uninteresting, or stale from a consumer perspective may perform quite well when targ [...]

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8 Ways Landing Pages Are Like A TV Sitcom

Nov 10, 2011 at 1:28pm ET by Brian Massey

Dan Harmon is the creator of the quirky quirky TV show Community (NBC). Harmon uses a unique circular device he calls an "Embryo" that defines the story arc of every show he writes. 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. [...]

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Rethinking The Marketing Technology Gap To Improve Performance

Nov 2, 2011 at 12:32pm ET by Scott Brinker

Last week, I heard Seth Godin speak to a group of agency executives about the future of marketing technology. Of course, if you follow Seth's blog, you know that he almost never talks about technology per se. But he does talk a lot about customer behavior, organizational behavior and how technology is disrupting the old patterns of those behaviors and enabling new ones. "Destroying the perfect to enable the impossible" is how he characterized it. He bluntly told the audience that ad agencies are on the verge of destruction. The old model of buying mass media to sell mass market products is [...]

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5 Quick Tips To Increase Your Online Sales During This Holiday Season

Oct 26, 2011 at 11:07am ET by Paras Chopra

The holiday spirit has kickstarted already. Agreed that there are still two months to go until Christmas, but the winter chill and the endless discussions about oncoming holidays are starting to grow. The holiday season also means you need to perform a job loved (or hated, depending on which side of fence you reside) by many: researching and purchasing gifts. In earlier days, options for gifts were limited to 10 or 20 odd items available at your next-door mom-and-pop shop. But these days, thanks to the hyper-connected world, you can find most exotic gifts online: from instant underpants [...]

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Why Search Marketing Silos Are Conversion Killers

Oct 19, 2011 at 9:06am ET by Brian Massey

[caption id="attachment_97297" align="alignright" width="205" caption="Courtesy bitzcelt via Flickr"][/caption] 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 [...]

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The Art Of Seductive Landing Pages

Sep 28, 2011 at 7:11pm ET by Scott Brinker

People don't just want to be educated about what you offer. They want to be seduced. Yes, seduced. Being seduced is an exhilarating experience. (If you haven't tried it yet, I highly recommend it.) Yes, we want to be educated and make rational decisions that optimize our goals. But we also yearn to be romanced, enchanted, in love. We seek brains and beauty. Is that an unrealistic paradox? It doesn't have to be. First, recognize that seduction is not synonymous with deception. Being seduced is fun. Being deceived is not. It's unfortunate that shady advertisers have conflated the two [...]

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Stupid Short URL Tricks: Content Swapping, QR Codes, Mobile Microsites & More

Sep 21, 2011 at 12:12pm ET by Brian Massey

[caption id="attachment_92872" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Short URLs keep old links from "going bad.""][/caption] 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 an [...]

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3 Approaches To Scaling Conversion Optimization

Sep 7, 2011 at 11:31am ET by Scott Brinker

Two powerful forces are crashing into each other in digital marketing — and conversion optimization is right in the middle. First: an ever-expanding explosion of digital touchpoints. Second: a wave of marketing technologies to address the challenges of scaling across those touchpoints. There's more than one approach to scaling conversion optimization in this environment, and they're not mutually exclusive. We'll examine three. The Explosion Of Digital Touchpoints The primary reason for this explosion of touchpoints is the continued migration of advertising dollars into online channels. [...]

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4 Areas To A/B Test For E-Commerce Websites

Aug 31, 2011 at 12:11pm ET by Paras Chopra

Out of all websites found on the Internet, online retail stores have the most potential for improvement through A/B testing. Amazon, Ebay and Etsy are just few examples of e-commerce websites that do a ton of A/B testing. The potential for A/B testing is enormous because of the sheer number of variables that these stores can experiment with: search results, product categories, pricing, product images, ratings, etc. Another reason why A/B testing is so important for e-commerce websites is because their conversion goal is not some indirect metric such as leads or downloads but a direct sale. [...]

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Identifying Images That Don’t Convert: The Caption Test

Aug 25, 2011 at 8:51am ET by Brian Massey

In my column on the Landing Page Battles of the Flat Fore Headed, I deride stock photography as the result of lazy designers. I was asked on LinkedIn by a reader if all stock photography was bad. Obviously, the answer is "No." 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 litt [...]

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Conversion Optimization In The New Marketing Landscape

Aug 10, 2011 at 12:56pm ET by Scott Brinker

Maybe I'm biased, but I see conversion optimization as the epitome of the new marketing: an agile blend of analytical experimentation, creative content, engaging user experiences, and performance metrics. Those principles are applicable in almost every corner of the marketing department these days. With that in mind, I'd like to share with you two "big picture" stories about the evolution of marketing that reveal just how valuable a conversion optimization worldview has become. The Marketing Technology Landscape First, there's the marketing technology infographic that I published on my b [...]

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Unconventional Opportunities For Conversion Rate Optimization

Aug 3, 2011 at 9:27am ET by Paras Chopra

In my last article, I talked about three low hanging opportunities for conversion rate optimization. The easiest elements on your site to help increase conversion rate are headline, social proof and call-to-action buttons. There are, however, numerous other ignored opportunities that marketers seldom look at with an eye to increase overall sales and conversions. In this article, I am going to talk about five of those ignored opportunities that you can exploit to see a boost in conversion rate. 404 Error Pages Error pages are perhaps the most neglected aspect of a website. Microsoft est [...]

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Landing Page Battles Of The Flat Foreheaded

Jul 27, 2011 at 9:44am ET by Brian Massey

[caption id="attachment_86968" align="alignright" width="297" caption="We've identified the cause of flat forehead syndrome. It's landing page development."][/caption] If you run into a marketer with a flat forehead, odds are that they have been working on landing pages. Landing pages are are a fantastic conversion tool. Because they are so often tested, we know a great deal about what is likely to work on a landing page. Unfortunately, managers and designers prefer their own rules. You can show them all the data, studies, and Search Engine Land articles you want. They stil [...]

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Looking Up The Funnel: Web Conversion Strategies By Traffic Source

Jul 20, 2011 at 11:28am ET by Aaron Bradley

Many marketers start their conversion optimization efforts by looking at the behavior of a visitor once they arrive on a website. Which buttons are effective in attracting clicks? What type of product images encourage cart additions? What messaging seems to work on a particular landing page? But a journey down the conversion funnel always starts elsewhere: the display of a banner ad, the entry of a search query, the appearance of a link - even a blank browser window poised to accept a type-in address. In short, not all traffic to a website is created equal, and these individual sourc [...]

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3 Dead Excuses For Badly Designed Landing Pages

Jul 13, 2011 at 11:33am ET by Scott Brinker

Landing pages almost have a tradition of bad design. After all, it's easy enough to slap a headline, a few bullets of text, and an image next to a form and — voilà! — you have a landing page, right? "Landing pages" have proliferated as a check-the-box feature: sure, we do landing pages. The problem is that most of these are bad landing pages. By "bad," I mean three things: (1) they look amateurish, lifeless or downright ugly; (2) they fail to provide holistically compelling content; and (3) they aren't very effective in winning over customers. Correlation is not necessarily causatio [...]

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How To Increase Organic Keyword Conversions – Part II

Jul 6, 2011 at 2:22pm ET by George Aspland

Previously in How To Increase Organic Keyword Conversions, we covered how to use Google Analytics to determine the entrance pages people are landing on after clicking through from organic keyword listings in search engines. We showed you how to look for typical issues with entrance pages that hurt conversions such as files with no navigation, old webpages still live with broken images and links, pages that have been moved or deleted resulting in Page Not Found errors, and entrance pages that are not the best place for people to enter a site after searching on a specific keyword. Here, w [...]

5 Ways To Jump Ahead In Your Industry

Jun 29, 2011 at 2:47pm ET by Brian Massey

We frequently hear about the consumer brands that dominate their markets. Amazon controls 25% of all Internet commerce. Zappos grew to a billion dollar company in ten years with its Web-friendly business model and rule-breaking culture. But who holds the dominant Internet-driven position in your slice of the economy? Is it you? It could be. Right now, plans are being laid in almost every industry segment to leverage the Web and rule the roost. Over the next few years, one company in each marketplace is going to use the Internet to dominate their competitors, steal market share and enjoy [...]

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The Anatomy Of A Compelling Call To Action Button

Jun 22, 2011 at 8:22am ET by Aaron Bradley

In the vast majority of cases, the path to a conversion starts with the click a of button. The most compelling offer in the world will not result in a website goal being completed unless you can successfully entice a visitor to hover over a button and tap their mouse. Accordingly, the biggest single thing a webmaster can do to improve conversion rates is to modify the wording, appearance or behavior of a button. Thankfully, one of the easiest website elements to test is a button. Technically, buttons are usually discreet image files that can be swapped out with hardly any code modification [...]

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How To Track Social Conversions On Landing Pages

Jun 15, 2011 at 12:09pm ET by Scott Brinker

Earlier this month, Google released Google +1 buttons for websites. This seems like a good occasion to celebrate social conversion on landing pages — and provide you with the links and sample code to implement it in your own post-click marketing. By social conversion, we mean a social-oriented action that a user takes on one of your pages: clicking a Facebook Like button, clicking a Twitter Follow button, or clicking a new Google +1 button. For example, any of these buttons: In some cases, this may be the primary call-to-action for a certain landing page: you deliver meaningful cont [...]

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