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Creative, Culture, Marketing, SEM, Website

The Three Reasons Your Landing Pages Don’t Convert

Landing pages are still the most important pages on your website. They are the funnel that allows you to convert your ad traffic and social media traffic into paying customers. landing pages are the pages that showcase your value proposition, your product and close your leads. These landing pages are the life blood of your business. At Retaliate1st, we specialize in developing landing pages that convert, that achieve their goal. We want to showcase the landing page mistakes we continually see, so that your business can thrive.

Why Your Landing Pages Don’t Convert

Too Many Options

Barry Schwartz wrote about the paralysis that sets in in many shopping situations in his book the Paradox of Choice. He uses the example of a man shopping for shampoo at a grocery store. He is faced with hundreds of choices – for dry hair, for brittle hair, for oily hair; olive oil base, coconut oil base; flower scented; and just about every color imaginable. This leads to frustration, and often people with either simply leave the store, or buy the closest option and later be unhappy with it.

Now, take a look at your landing pages. Are they leaving your customer in the isle frustrated because there are so many options they’re not sure which to choose?

If so, narrow it down to one choice (two, maximum).

What’s the goal of your landing page?

Email opt-in? Make sure the opt-in form is easily accessible, easy to read, and has a strong, clear call to action.

Do you want phone calls? Make your number big and visible and clickable.

Would you take either a phone call or a web form opt-in? Make it clear that either option gets them the same result: contact, free estimate, discount, services, etc.

Too Many Visual Distractions

It can be tempting to overwhelm your visitor with slick graphics. You may think you’re helping them find their way to your CTA.
But, there is a point where the graphics cause confusion.

When using infographics, pictures, video, or graphics, make sure they are absolutely essential to achieving the page’s goal. If they’re not, cut them. You can use them elsewhere (Thank You page, in email marketing, on blogs or pages).

Customer Centric Landing Pages

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. They’re asking “What am I supposed to look at?”

If your landing page is littered with graphics, it will confuse them. This includes going overboard with exotic background colors, text colors and fonts, and headline sizes. Keep it simple… white background with black text is still the best option because it’s easiest to read.

Entry Pop Ups

Pop up windows upon entry are, unfortunately, overused. Some sites will display the pop-up every time you refresh the page, visit a new page on the site, and every time you vist the landing page, even if you’ve already opted in. IT can be frustrating for your user, especially if they’re viewing your content on mobile.

Your better option is to use an exit pop-up. At this point, on a true landing page that you’ve driven traffic to, if they’re leaving, they’re gone. An exit pop-up is a last-ditch effort to salvage the lead. It can work fairly well, and will increase your leads significantly over time.

October 22, 2016/by chris

Analytics, Digital, Marketing, Mobile, Website

5 Best Tools for Tracking Your Website’s Performance

In 2016, we have to track everything and that includes your website’s performance. The performance of your website is critical to measuring your business success. We have to be able to see how it is converting your customers. Is your website driving them to your store, or convincing them to be buying online.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps like those on CrazyEgg or Tableau, help you understand the way your customers are seeing your website.

You’ll get readouts on where their cursor lands, where they’re clicking (or trying to click), how long they’re viewing various parts of your website, and where they head for the door.

This is key because we all develop our business site’s with our knowledge of the products or service. Sure, we may try to introduce the connect to the new client, but having a true “beginner’s mind” is difficult.

Heat maps help us see what our customers see, where they go, and what they want, then adjust our business site to fit those needs. You’ll learn where to place your best content, which images are drawing attention, and which elements need to get the boot.

Analytics To Track Performance

You can also measure which elements on your site is distracting your visitors, pulling them from your main message. This is impossible to know without testing, so heatmaps provide real-time tracking that can increase your leads and sales.

Google Analytics

Nothing new here, but Google’s tracking is still number one. While it’s not 100% accurate, no tracking system is. But, you’re getting data from the biggest search engine on Earth, so the numbers are reliable.

Understating how to get the most out of Google Analytics is a science unto itself. If you have the budget for it, hire someone who can break down the numbers program in your goals (conversions, sales, etc.). and navigate the more intricate areas of the system. It will pay off with more traffic, more leads, and more sales.

Note: if you have an SEO frim running your site, they probably know analytics pretty well. However, make sure they know that your goal is to make money and grow your business, not perseverate over a .003% decrease in top exit page numbers (everyone has an exit page).

Site Meter

A lesser version of Google Analytics, but allows for easy print out of 3-D graphics. This can be useful when presenting numbers to investors and bosses, and cuts out the leg work of taking Google’s stats and turning them into charts, graphs, and other visuals.

Google Alerts/Social Mentions

If you are looking to track your brand building, invest some time in Google Alerts and Social Mentions. Both will let you know when your site, business, or brand has been mentioned in articles, blogs, or on social media.

Marketing Analytics for Measuring Performance

For small businesses, especially those involved with content marketing, this is also a great way to easily monitor the web for those who scrape your site and repost your content. Rather than you taking the duplicate content penalty, you’ll know where it is and how to get your stuff taken down.

Marketing Grader

Hubspot’s tool isn’t a true analytics tool, but it can help monitor your overall digital marketing and website efforts.

It will track progress on social media integration, SEO, blogging, and lead generation. The system scans your site and gives you a grade.

Checking in with this tool every quarter is a good way to measure overall progress, and can give you a glimpse into what the competition is doing.

October 2, 2016/by chris

Digital, Marketing, Website

5 Steps to Take If Website Hacking Occurs

Hacking is usually thought of as happening on an international level. Spies from another country trying to hack the mainframe of America’s national security system. It’s all pulse-pounding, underground, Lisbeth Salander stuff and very scary, right?

Actually, hacking occurs on sites of all sizes and hackers are looking for personal information, banking info, or are just malicious.

And, there are also pissed off or scammy outsourcers that can take your site down. There have been countless cases where a small or medium business outsourced work, the outsourcer put in a back-door entrance in the company’s hosting account, then attempted a virtual hold-up, asking for more money than promised or your site will stay down.

For even small businesses, hacking can cost tens of thousands of dollars in business.

No matter how it happened, here’s what to do if you’ve been hacked.

Stopping Website Hacking

Contact Your Host

If you see that your site is down, is re-directed elsewhere, or is displaying content that isn’t yours, you’ve been hacked. If you suspect that it could be a freelancer or employee, contact your host. Their techs will be able to close any entrances to the inside of your site, keeping the hacker out.

They can also take your site offline temporarily, and put up a simple landing page with phone number, if needed. This can lessen the damage of your site being down.

Gather Your Info

If you have a web team on staff, get them on it. They’ll be able to access the site through FTP, hosting, and CMS logins. These are critical, as these give your tech team the ability to get inside and fix the damage.

If you don’t have an in-house staff, find a well-reviewed local service provider, preferably one with both designers and developers on staff.

Utilize Your Back Ups

Hopefully you’ve been backing up your site daily, or at the very worst, weekly.

If you run a WordPress site, there are a number of free back-up plugins. These can be used to automatically back up and store your site’s info (away from the site, so it’s safe in case of attack).

Have a Team To protect Your Website

If you don’t have tech people one staff, find a reputable freelancer or service provider to take your back ups and re-build.

Check Your Lead Flow, Bank Accounts, and Phone System

Make sure that your bank accounts haven’t’ been hit, your lead flow or customer-tracking info is safe (good time to change the password and call the software provider to make sure no one is getting in).

Clean Up and Recover

Even if your site was damaged, it can be re-built. You should not only be keeping back-ups of the site itself, but keep all content (articles, text, pictures, video) backed up on hard devices (flash drives, external hard drives, etc.). This allows your web developer to re-build even if data was lost.

Now’s the time to make sure all passwords are changed (these should be changed regularly).

October 2, 2016/by chris

Content, Marketing, SEO, Website

Getting Your New Website Ranked

Promoting your new business website can be a daunting task and having your product or service found by potential clients is the number one priority of new businesses. There can be no cash flow, no earnings, and no profits without customers. Getting your website listed online is key to establishing a new customer base and brining in a steady flow of leads.

Getting Your New Business Website Listed

Organic Search Results

Organic search simply means a website being found through a non-paid search. If you type “pizza delivery Philadelphia” into google and wait, you’ll find 7 – 10 listings. The listings are ranked by google in order of importance to the customer and need.

Dominating organic search through search engine optimization (SEO) is a huge undertaking. It works best when left to a professional. There are a number of things you can do to get the ball rolling:

Index Your Website

Check whether your website domain or URLs is listed on the Google by visiting google.com/addurl. If your site’s URL is not already listed, add it to Google. Many platforms, like WordPress, do this automatically for you, but it’s best to always check. This can speed up how fast Google finds out that your business exists.

Optimize Content

The next step is adding some relevant content to your website in order to make it more search-friendly. You should add text, images and video to your site. Focus on the keywords that people might use to search your products or services. The more relevant your website content is, the higher it will be listed in search results.

Optimizing it can be tricky but to start, just provide valuable information about your product or service, as well as ways to contact your or order from your website.

Paid Search

If you want more control over how quickly your business appears on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, you utilize paid-search advertising, also known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM). The most used is Google’s pay-per-click program that allows you to write ads that will drive customers to your website and unlike running ads in a magazine or newspaper, you only pay for these ads when someone clicks on it, taking them to your site. This can keep costs down, and allow you to keep track of what’s working, and what should get the ax.

Paid search can wreck your business’ bank account. Especially, if you aren’t’ familiar with how to do it. A professional should be utilized herald if you have the budget for it, paid ads are a great way to get people to your site from day one.

Long term, you should utilize a mix of paid and organic marketing. This way you will capture the biggest chuck of potential customers possible and maximize the return on your marketing investment.

September 17, 2016/by chris

Content, Marketing, SEM, SEO, Website

Organic vs Pay Per Click Traffic

Which is better for small businesses, organic traffic driven by Search Engine Optimization (SEO), or pay per click advertising?

70% of the time, searchers are clicking on organic links. Some surveys have shown that 70 – 80% of searchers purposely ignore the ad listings because they feel that paid ads = them being pressured to buy once they reach the site

This can be an advantage. If you are having a sale, an event, or you are running a weather or time-dependent service, then focusing on the 20 – 30% of users who happily click paid ads can eliminate most of the information seekers and tire-kickers.

Organic Traffic vs PPC

But, long term, relying solely on PPC can miss out on a huge portion of your potential customers.

In many businesses, the close rate for SEO traffic climbs as high as 15%, while ad-driven leads close at less than 2%.

This varies by industry, but the numbers speak overwhelmingly in favor of organic traffic. The situation can flip when it comes to “emergency” services, i.e., plumbers on sub-zero nights, roofers during heavy rain storms. In those cases, they numbers even out. But, the rest of the time, organic heavily outperforms PPC.

Want the Most Leads and Sales? Use Both PPC and SEO

While organic out performs PPC in most cases, there are times when you need PPC ads to survive. The problem usually arises when small companies treat PPC as the holy grail, throwing money at it, hoping for the best.

The truth is that pay per click ads must be:

Highly focused – use them during the best times, then get out of the market. If you’re having a sale, launching a new product or event, or you are offering a product or service that tie-in with the weather, time of year, or new-event, use PPC to leap-frog your competitors.
Well written – most PPC ads are awful; poorly written and playing follow-the-leader. Would you send out a mailer that looks exactly like your competitor’s mailing? OF course not. Don’t waste capital on PPC ads if you’re unwilling to stand out
Used to boost organic traffic – when you’re first starting, it can take a while to get the SEO/organic search ball rolling. PPC is very useful during this time because it brings in much needed traffic.

Combining focused, well written ads with a strong SEO platform will have your business accessing 100% of your potential customers, driving in new traffic and leads year-round.

July 31, 2016/by chris

Content, Digital, SEO, Website

How to Improve Your Site’s Crawling Ability and Increase Rankings

Has your site been stuck on page 2 or 3 of Google’s search engine results pages (SERP)? Or, worse yet is it foundering in the great beyond of pages 4 through oblivion? Well that could be based on how Google is crawling your site.

Maybe you’ve managed to tweak your site and get it onto page 1, but you can never seem to nudge it into the top 5 results.

In all of these cases, a quick focus on both your on-page search engine optimization (SEO), content, and your site’s craw-ability will boost your rankings, and may even push you into the top three spots on page 1.

What is Crawling?

Crawling is a term for how search engines read a website. They send out bots that search or “crawl” through the content, internally, of every site on the web. The exact pathways are unknown, as Google never reveals all, but the basics are well established.

The good news is that many of the ways your site is crawled by Google are similar to how it’s read by your human visitors.

The bad news is that technical issues need to be turned over to a professional because they are complicated.

Internal Links

If you build a site that is easy for humans to read, Google will favor your website. In the early days of Google domination, a common theme was that Google liked to give a site the Grandma Test. Could the average grandmother navigate your website without becoming confused and frustrated.

This is still a good measure. And one of the ways to make your business’ site more Grandma ready is to increase interlinking.

Link internally on your site, from page to page
Make sure your home page is easy to find no matter where on the site the user is – no more than two clicks, one is preferable
Link to all email, phone numbers, and contact methods

Think of interlinks like tiny bridges. If your site is a huge park with lots of paths, small streams, islands of grassy land, it can become easy for someone to get lost. But, if you install enough bridges with good directions, it will be easier to find one’s way home.

The easier it is for Google Bot to crawl your site with well-placed interlinks, the higher it will rank your site. Good interlink pathways increases the number of pages the bot will crawl, increasing your Page Rank.

Detours Wreck Rankings

Do you hate driving through traffic then being forced into a detour without much direction for an alternate route? So does Google Bot.

Broken Links, 404 Errors (page not found) and dead-end links frustrate the bot, and your users. If you have 404’s fix them with good re-directs. Use Google Webmaster Tools to scan your site for broken links. Find them and either delete them or have them fixed with a re-direct.

July 28, 2016/by chris

Content, Digital, Marketing, SEO, Website

Using Re-Purposed Content To Boost Your SEO

Even business owners who’ve bought into the concept of content marketing often complain that creating all that content is a lot of work. Yes, it pays off, but even the most dedicated content marketing gurus can go through lulls. These are the lulls where fresh content is hard to come by. This is why re-purposed content can be critical to your content marketing strategy.

If you’re in a lull, don’t worry. Learn how to easily re-purpose your blogs, videos, and articles. You’ll have a never-ending stream of content for your site and your social media campaigns.

Here are three ways to easily re-use content without getting duplicate content penalties from Google:

Transcribe Videos

Transcription of your videos: long or short, self-generated or professionally made, gives you a great piece of SEO friendly content that would normally be lost.

If you have review videos, having them transcribed gives you a double dose of credibility and status.

Re-Purposed Content vs Fresh Content

Not only does the text from your videos give you fresh content, but it gives those with slow internet connections, or those who simply don’t like video content, a chance to read what your video was all about. You can add on to this, tying-in a strong call to action, or boosting thin areas with helpful explanations, or you can simply have the video transcribed, give it an SEO-solid title, and post it as a new blog, page, or article.

Having this done may seem like a lot of time-consuming work, however you can have the task performed on sites like Fiverr or Upwork. It will only cost a few dollars per video and leave you freed up to do more important tasks.

Turn Blogs Into Social Media Posts

Taking the best lines from your blogs and using them as text-content on Social Media is a great way to re-purpose content. You can generate several good posts from a single blog post.

You could also create a small graphic of the quote and then post a picture and text. Graphic “quotes” tend to be very sharable on Facebook and can give your new content even more life.

Use Blog or Video Content for Infographics

Infographics are popular because they deliver bite-sized chunks of info in a striking, visual package.

This helps you catch the attention of those who only scan information, rather than read it. This makes infographics ideal for your mobile marketing efforts.

Users seem to engage with infographics more frequently than text. This makes them very sharable and highly engaging. This will help your social media marketing efforts, and can help get your blogs and articles get shared more often, giving your SEO a boost as well.

July 24, 2016/by chris

Analytics, Website

What are your Business’ Website Goals?

Without Concrete, Measurable Website Goals, Your Site is Nothing More Than a Brochure Sitting Online.

In the early days of the internet, brochure sites were all a business needed to succeed. You put up a cheap site with Home, About Us, and Contact pages. If you were really cutting edge, a page that allowed users to purchased directly from your site.

The build it and they will come days are long dead. It’s now a must that your company’s site delivers value and information to your potential customers. This means that your site has to actually have an objective. And, that objective (or objectives) must be met if you are to sell products, generate leads, build credibility, or sell services online.

SMART Goals – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time based.

A Site With No Website Goals is a Site That Sucks

When someone wants to lose weight, they go on a diet. Most people make vague proclamations like “I want to lose weight,” “I want to get healthy,” or “I want to tone up.”

Then they proceed to fail.
Why?

How do you measure these website goals?

If you have a lot of weight to lose, you’re in it for the long haul….and you can lose steam along the way unless you have specific, measurable goals to shoot for.

The same goes for your website. Why do you have one? Why did you invest a good chunk of cash in building a site?

Because everyone told you that you should have one?

Because you want to show off your work (before and after pictures and videos, etc)

Are you simply listing your services?

Are you looking for more leads?

There is no wrong answer. And, in most cases, you’ll have multiple objectives. Though, one will always be dominant. For most businesses, that is generating leads or sales.

Choose the Most Relevant Goals for YOUR Business

You can have more than one goal (which can be placed on other pages on your site), but, there should be a primary goal. As mentioned above, that is usually to increase leads or sales.

Ideally, you want to bring people to your site from Google with a combination of organic (free) and Pay Per Click (paid ads) traffic. Once a customer lands on your site, you need to make sure it is set up to achieve the goal of turning them into a lead and getting them ready to be sold.

How To Map Out Your Website Goals

Accomplish this with high quality content that shows them what you do, how you do it, proof that you’ve done it successfully, and why they should choose you for the task.

From there, you can add your secondary goals. For example, if you want to give yoru scuomers visual proof that your service or product is the best, you’ll want a great portfolio page where you show off your best before and after work.
You will also want to build your credibility (review videos and testimonials), places you have been featured (newspapers, TV, magazines, trade papers, etc), and good reviews you’ve gotten from sites like Yelp or Angie’s List.

Build a Website Funnel to allow you to achieve your goals.

This can be spread out over a Reviews Page, your Blog and throughout your site. When you have multiple objectives, it is best to give each a specific page or blog post. A common mistake is to attempt to stuff multiple goals into a site’s Homepage. This is a hold-over from the days where users actually typed in a URL to reach a website. Now, they’re much more likely to find you through search, and will land on various pages on your site. Your Homepage can house your main objective, but give secondary and tertiary goals their own page. This will make your site user-friendly, and Google will reward you with higher page rankings.

July 10, 2016/by chris

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