Posts Tagged ‘landing page’

PR For Small Business Starts With Your Own Web Site

Saturday, January 29th, 2011

Public relations is an area that most small businesses don’t address nearly enough. When it comes to an online presence, the emphasis in recent years has been on reputation management and social media marketing. Yet little things like your About Page and Your Contact Page can mean the difference between developing trust, and having visitors depart for other websites.

In most cases, About pages seem to be non-existent. Yet they provide a perfect opportunity for business owners to tell the world about their business. You can talk about your businesses history, what your vision is for the future, why you promote a certain brand of products, and who you are. In any language, that’s PR.

Chris Brogan wrote an interesting post on his site that addresses this very subject. While tongue in cheek, he made one important observation – his About Page was the most trafficked page on his web site. It didn’t matter which page they landed on when they arrived on his site, a lot of visitors clicked through to his About page.

Make your about page interesting and informative, and give it a bit of your personality – don’t make it dry and formal. Visitors want to know about your business, but they also want to know about the people behind it. If you have several staff members, write a bio on separate pages that are linked from your About Page, you’ll be surprised how often they are clicked on as well. About pages can work well to link to more important internal pages so put any relevant anchor text to good use.

Contact pages are another area that is often underused. If you sell products, set up a range of email addresses, three or four at most, that are labeled to address various areas of your business. Sales@, CustomerService@, Returns@, Inquiries@ – are just examples, but they can help your website look professional. They can also act as a filing system when it comes to receiving emails from customers or potential customers. A snail mail address, fax number, and telephone may also be appropriate for some businesses.

Optimize these sub-pages for your users’ benefit and your website looks more professional, and helps to attract more customers. PR doesn’t have to be off-site. It all starts on your own website.

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Posted in PR for Small Business | 4 Comments »

Google Analytics Annotations; One Useful Tool

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

The folks at Google Analytics are always trying to improve, and they usually find a way to do it. This time they’ve come up with a nifty little tool called Annotations. It’s simple, really.

Annotations allows any user with access to a Google Analytics profile to leave shared or private notes right on the over-time graph.

Why? Why would you want to do that?

Well, let’s say Bob in marketing decided to build a new landing page. He did and after publishing the landing page there was a slight drop in traffic to a previous landing page that had been doing well. If he was able to Annotate the exact date he created the landing page and the time it was published then you could see if there might be a possible connection between the publication of your new landing page and the loss in traffic to your other page. If the new page was published at 11:59 a.m. on December 26, 2008 and your traffic for the previous landing page begin to drop at 11:03 a.m. on the same day then you can determine that the publication of the landing page was not the reason for your traffic drop.

Annotations gives you the ability to make notes on key events in your marketing execution. Anyone who can access your Google Analytics account can make an annotation and that helps the whole team. Not a bad idea.

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Posted in Tracking & Analytics | 2 Comments »

How To Improve Conversion Rates

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

Conversion rate optimization is a fancy word for improving your landing pages to a point where you increase your conversion rates. It’s a process that involves testing and retesting until you get the right mix of elements. The parts of your landing page that are most important include:

  • Headline
  • Call To Action
  • Benefit Statements
  • Lead Paragraph
  • Images
  • Design

Headline

Your headline is important for a couple of reasons. Mainly, it’s because that is what gets your readers’ attention. If it fails then your other elements don’t stand a chance.

Another reason your headline is important is because if you optimize it with your keyword then you’ll increase your landing page’s optimization and that can go along way to increasing conversions.

Call To Action

The call to action is that part of your landing page that tells your reader what to do – download the e-book, buy the product, join the mailing list, whatever. You want the reader to do something. Tell them what to do and they’ll do it.

Benefit Statements

All selling is about the benefits. Sure, features are nice, but people want to know what your product will do for them. Tell them. And make it clear. But list your most important benefits first. And test the placement of your benefit statements to find the right place for the highest conversions.

Lead Paragraph

Do you have a strong lead paragraph? If not then you need to rewrite it. After the headline, this is the place where readers are most likely to bail. Don’t catch their interest and they’re gone. Make it good.

Images

Images are complimentary. They don’t close sales on their own. But the wrong image can driver readers away, or cause them to back out of a sale. Make sure your images go well with your text.

Design

A poorly designed landing page says “unprofessional”. If you want readers to stick around then give them an attractive look with well written and optimized content with a strong call to action. Don’t hit them with a crappy design.

Conclusion – Improving Your Conversion Rates

Conversion rate optimization is rarely about one thing. It’s about a combination of things. And they all work together. Test, retest, and test again. When you find the winning combination, you’ll know.

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Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 2 Comments »

PPC: Creating Relevant Landing Pages

Saturday, December 20th, 2008

If you`ve ever clicked on an ad only to end up on a website that appears to have nothing to do with what you clicked on, then you know how bad an idea it is not to optimize your landing page. Pay per click advertising can be very effective if you do it right, but even getting relevant traffic isn`t going to help if people are going to be confused when they reach the landing page.

For each targeted PPC ad that you put out there, you need to make sure that it leads back to a page that will give people what they want. For example, if you are targeting one ad at teachers and another at parents, having them end up on a page that appeals to firemen isn`t really going to do the trick.

Your landing page should also fit with what the ad is about. Using cryptic language on the your advertising will only result in a confusion once the person arrives at the landing page. The chances that they`ll click away are very high and you`ll end up paying for too many clicks that don`t give you anything in return.

Pay per click can be very useful. Just make sure that your landing page is appropriate for the ad and you`ll boost your conversion rate.

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Posted in PPC for Small Business | No Comments »