I don't like the word "optimization." It has surpassed the level of buzz word and has officially been overused in every which way. While the word itself annoys me, the process of improving what you have to get more from it still rings true. I think we can all get onboard with the concept, but what about the process behind it? I am constantly surprised by the number of people that tell me their boss or client simply doesn't want to spend time on landing page optimization.
I've put together a little something I think explains the norm pretty well:
Instead they would rather work on increasing traffic to ugly unoptimized pages. While you would think selling LPO in-house would be an easy task, you would be surprised. Often I hear objections centered around lack of resources, inability to project return, and my personal favorite--"We simple don't have time to revisit pages that are already built."
Uhmmmm. Okayyyy.
So you, myself, and the rest of the cool kids know that optimizing your landing pages can be a huge win for your company, but how do you make the case for it in-house? It just so happens I have a few ideas for you on this. Below you'll find seven ways I've been able to convince clients and bosses to take a break from building up, and rework the foundation. Hopefully, you can use some of these the next time you are faced with what I call, "The Anti-Optimizers."
1. Evangelize the cause prior to starting. You know that old saying, "make the case before you need the win?" Yeah me neither, I just made it up, but it stands true in this case. For most things you want to push through in-house, you will see less resistance if you start talking it up prior to the pitch. For LPO in particular, I suggest sending out emails with links to good case studies that show the value of LPO, or possibly dropping stats in meetings about how simple tweaks can result in "X." Doing all of this before asking them to allocate resources can set a great base for future conversations.
2. Pull the numbers to make a case in-house. Call me a pessimist at heart but I love looking up crappy data. Yup it's true. The good news is we all have some of it to find. Your client, your company, whoever you are hoping to convince has data sitting in their analytics to help make the case for LPO efforts. The hard part is not necessarily finding the data, but relaying it in a positive light. You need to show all of the low hanging fruit around you.
Examples include things like showing industry standards for metrics like bounce rates or time on site, and then highlighting your own and the..uhmmm...discrepancies. Another idea is pulling your best converting pages, and showing what % of your site fails to perform at that standard or anywhere near it really. Those simple data pulls can go a long way.
3. Show potential successes. Okay for you optimistic, rainbow-loving, happy data people...this one is for you. Do the number crunching. Take the time to show what an increase in performance could mean to your bottom-line. The best way to do this is to show ranges. Show them what a 10% increase in X would mean, a 5% increase in X would mean, and what something as small as a 2% increase in X would mean (don't forget to stress "something as small" and pause for dramatic affect...it works). By highlighting the potential successes, you turn that negative conversation into an opportunity for growth.
4. Know the costs & resources involved. This is all about doing your homework. Just like any other time you try to convince someone to spend time or money on something, you should be prepared to give estimations. Whether you use a free tool like GWO, or another option that costs a monthly price, have those numbers on hand.
Also know how much design and dev time you will require for these changes and tests to get up on your site. You will be prepared for the questions, and hopefully put to rest any concerns about LPO wasting your company's money and resources.
5. Show competitors and their efforts. This one is another favorite of mine. Nothing lights a fire like showing people where they are losing ground. If you want to make a case for your company doing LPO, what better way than to show your competitor testing out homepages, landing pages, different buttons, colors, etc. It may take a while to snag the screenshots, but it is sooo worth it. Trust me.
6. Run a small test behind closed doors & preach results. This one is a bit of a gamble, mainly because it could totally backfire...but hey who doesn't love a little risk? Exactly. So get testing. Take one of your medium trafficked pages, and set up a quick A/B test. Change something drastic though--like the intention of the call to action, page layout and nav, or possibly the entire color scheme.
You may be thinking wouldn't this be more like a multivariate test, doesn't this get complicated? Well yeah, but you aren't really testing in hopes of finding out something revolutionary. Hear me out. This is what we call --down and dirty testing. Show two vary drastic alternatives for one page. Show Page A to 50% and Page B to 50% of your traffic , your results may not be the key to your company's success, but it will prove that different landing page experiences evoke very different actions by users. It's intuitive to us marketers, but sometimes people truly believe all pages are equal. Scary, I know.
7. Take ownership, start the ball rolling. This is my last and final idea for you...it's sort of like a virtual high five. When it comes to making the case for anything in-house, I find the most effective way to convince people something is worth doing...is by doing it. So go get started, get the specs written, or the test versions mocked up. Then pitch the four to six steps left, explain how the hard work is done, and it's time to push it live. Your drive for the project will be appreciated, and hopefully the ambition will be contagious.
Well there you go. Hopefully you can use some of this the next time you run into a wall. LPO is no longer a side project we run when we "think something is wrong," it should be an ongoing process at every company. If you spend time driving traffic to your pages, you should spend time improving those pages.
Do you have a favorite tool or tactic for awesome LPO? I'd love if you left them in the comments below! We can all start sharing the LPO love together, group hug anyone?
You may have seen the recent string of posts about SEO vs. Social Media, starting with this effective, but poorly argued controversy-bait, which was excoriated by Elysia Brooker and Hugo Guzman, then followed up with a more nuanced view by Darren Rowse. While I'm not particularly interested (nor do I think there's much value) in re-hashing or arguing these points, I did think the topic warranted attention, as it brings up some excellent points marketers should carefully consider as they invest in their craft.
We Search for What We Want + Need
The search for information and answers has been essential to humans since time immemorial. And there's no sign that our latest iteration, web search, is losing any steam:
Even as we've reached a maturity point with broadband adoption and online population, searches are rising. We're not searching less every month; we're searching more.
Search is an intent driven activity. We don't search casually (much), we search to find answers, information, goods and services to consume. The power of search marketing - whether paid or organic - is simple: Be in front of the consumer at the time of consumption. There's no more effective time to be present and no more effective way of knowing what is desired. All the social graph analysis in the world won't tell you that Sunday evening, I got fed up with my current selection of footwear and, after some searching, spent a few hundred dollars on Zappos. But being front and center when I queried mens puma shoes brought them some nice business.
We're Social to Discover and Share
Social media - whether it's Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Reddit, StumbleUpon or something else - is about connections, interaction, discovery and distraction. We hardly ever use these portals as a way to find answers, though they certainly may provide plenty to unasked questions.
Social media marketing advocates often make the case that social is how we find out about new products on the web, but, at least so far, the data doesn't back up this assertion:
However, I am strongly inclined to believe the claim that social media is how we find out about new content on the web, particularly when we're not seeking something in particular (as with a search). Blogs, pictures, video, research and the like are surely seeing an increased share of their visits from social, and that branding exposure is definitely valuable.
Some recent GroupM Research helped to shed the light of data on this supposition, noting that:
The click-through rate in organic search results for users who have been exposed to a brand's social marketing campaign are 2.4X higher than those that haven't; for paid search, it showed a jump from 4.5% to 11.8% (in both cases, this is for branded queries)
Consumers using social media are 1.7x more likely to search with the intention of making a list of brands or products to consider purchasing compared to those who do not use social media
Based on the information in this report, it’s reasonable to argue that social media marketing can increase the quality of leads (and not just the volume). It’s possible to hone in on, and understand intent through search and how social media exposure affects that intent. And as people are exposed (and I would say involved with – since exposure sounds like you’re just broadcasting stuff at people, which isn’t what social media is about) to social media their intent is more focused and driven towards lead conversion
That's the kind of social media marketing value I can get behind. Get exposed to potential customers through social so that when they build their consideration set, search and purchase, you'll have a leg up on the competition.
What Drives Traffic (and Converts) for Whom
It pays to understand the bias of this flare-up's instigator, and I've got plenty of compelling data myself to see his perspective. Last weekend, I started publishing content on a personal blog - no domain authority, no links and little chance of performing well in search. But the results from social media - Twitter, Facebook and Hacker News in particular - are fairly remarkable:
The search traffic demand, all 78 visits, was generated from the articles that went popular on Twitter & HN. The site itself still doesn't rank for its own name. Yet, social media sent 22,000 visits over 9 days. No wonder bloggers, in particular those that monetize through advertising, sponsorships and other traffic-driven systems, have a proclivity for investing in social traffic. Perhaps it's not so crazy to suggest on Problogger.net, a site about growing blog traffic and improving monetization, that social can be "better" than SEO.
I'd still argue that overall, referring traffic of all kinds sent from social, particularly from the largest network (Facebook), are a tiny fraction of the traffic Google refers each day. But, social does eliminate some of the inherent biases that search engines carry and let content that appeals to social users flourish no matter the site's ability to grow its link profile, make content accessible to spiders or effectively target keywords.
Now let's look at an example on the opposite end of the spectrum - conversions for a B2B product.
SEOmoz's PRO membership may not be a good investment unless you're a marketer actively engaged with SEO, but given that both the search and social traffic our site attracts likely fall into this intent group (interested in SEO and likely to be in web marketing), a comparison seems fair.
First, I did some prep work in our Google Analytics account by creating an advanced segment called "social traffic" that contains any referral source with "twitter," "facebook," "stumbleupon," "linkedin," "flickr," and "ycombinator" - these represent the vast majority of our social media sources. Next, I compared this traffic quantitatively with our search referrals over the past two weeks:
Social Traffic - 26,599 visits from 30 sources
Organic Search Traffic - 102,349 from 20 sources
I then compared the percent of these reaching our landing or purchase pages for PRO membership. Here's organic search:
And here's social traffic:
Here's what I see:
4.5% of organic search visitors considered a purchase
1.3% of social traffic considered a purchase
While I can't disclose full numbers, I can see that a fair number of search visits converted vs. zero for social.
In fact, looking at the entire year to date traffic to SEOmoz from social sources, it appears not 1 visit has ever converted for us. Social may be a great way to drive traffic, build branding and make a purchase more likely in the future, but from a direct conversion standpoint, it doesn't hold a candle to search. To be fair, I'm not looking at full life cycle or even first-touch attribution, which makes this analysis less comprehensive, though likely still directionally informative.
Takeaways
Given the research and data here and in the posts/content referenced, I think we can say a few things about search and social as marketing channels:
There shouldn't be a VS.: This isn't about pitting web marketers against each other (or perhaps, more accurately, themselves, since our industry survey data suggests many of us are responsible for both). There's obvious value in both channels and to suggest otherwise is ideological nonsense and worse, self-defeating.
Search Converts:$20 Billion+ isn't being wasted on Google's search ads - that sucker send intent-driven, focused, conversion-ready visits like nobody else on the web.
Social Has Value: Those exposed to a social campaign are better customers and prospects; making social not only a branding and traffic channel, but an opportunity for conversion rate optimization.
SEO Is Hard in the Early Stages: Without a strong link profile, even great content may not perform particularly well in search results.
Segmenting Search and Social is Key: Unless you separate, analyze and iterate, you're doomed to miss opportunities and falsely attribute value. I'm particularly worried about those marketers who invest heavily in social to the detriment of SEO because the immediacy of the rewards is so much more tangible and emotionally compelling (He's following me on Twitter! We have 200 Facebook fans!) - make sure appropriate effort goes where it can earn ROI; it's our job.
I'd love to hear more from you on this topic, too.
There has been quite a lot of discussion lately about the use of rel=canonical and we've certainly seen a decent amount of Q&A from SEOmoz members on the subject. Dr. Pete of course blogged about his rel-canonical experiment which had somewhat interesting results and Lindsay wrote a great guide to rel=canonical. Additionally, there seem to be a few common problems that are along the following lines -
When should I use a rel canonical tag over a 301?
Is there a way that the rel canonical tag can hurt me?
When should I not use the canonical tag?
What if I can't get developers to implement 301s?
I'm going to attempt to answer these questions here.
The 301 Redirect - When and How to Use it
A 301 redirect is designed to help users and search engines find pieces of content that have moved to a new URL. Adding a 301 redirect means that the content of the page has permanently moved somewhere else.
Users will probably never notice that the URL redirects to a new one unless they spot the change in URL in their browser. Even if they do spot it, as long as the content is still what they were originally looking for, they're unlikely to be affected. So in terms of keeping visitors happy, 301 redirects are fine as long as you are redirecting to a URL which doesn't confuse them.
What it does for the search engines
In theory, if a search engine finds a URL with a 301 redirect on it, they will follow the redirect to the new URL then de-index the old URL. They should also pass across any existing link juice to the new URL, although they probably will not pass 100% of the link juice or the anchor text. Google have said that a 301 can pass anchor text, but they don't guarantee it.
In theory a search engine should also remove the old page from their index so that their users can't find them. This can take a little bit of time but usually can take no longer than a few weeks. I've seen pages removed within a few days on some clients but its never set in stone.
Where is can go wrong
Not knowing your 301s from your 302s
The classic one which I've seen more than once, is developers getting mixed up and using a 302 redirect instead. The difference with this is that a 302 is meant to be used when content is temporalily moved somewhere else. So the link juice and anchor text is unlikely to be passed across. I highlighted an example of this in a previous blog post, if you go to http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/ you'll see a 302 is used. I first spotted this several months ago and it still hasn't been fixed and I'd assume that this isn't a genuine temporary redirect.
Redirecting all pages in one go to a single URL
Another common mistake I see involves site migration. An example being if your website has 500 pages which are moving somewhere else. You should really put 500 301 redirects on these pages which point to the most relevant page on the new site. However I've often see people redirect all of these 500 pages to a single URL, usually the homepage. Although the intention may not be manipulative, there have been cases of people doing this to try and consolidate all the link juice from loads of pages into one page, to make that page stronger. This can sometimes put up a flag to Google who may come and take a closer look at whats going on.
You should certainly use 301 redirects if you are moving your website to a new location or changing your URLs to a new structure. In this situation, you don't want users or search engines to see the old site, especially if the move is happening because of a new design or structural changes. Google give clear guidelines here on this and advise the use of 301s in this situation.
Expired Content
You should also use a 301 if you have expired content on your website such as old terms and conditions, old products or news items which are no longer relevant and of no use to your users. There are a few things to bear in mind though when removing old content from your website -
Check your analytics to see if the content gets any search traffic, if it does, do you mind potentially losing that traffic if you remove the content?
Is there another page on the site which has very similar content that you could send the user to? If so, use a 301 and point it to the similar page so that you stand a chance of retaining the traffic you already get
Is the content likely to become useful in the future? For example if you have an ecommerce site and want to remove a product that you no longer sell, is there a chance of it coming back at any point?
Multiple Versions of the Homepage
This is another common mistake. Potentially a homepage URL could be access through the following means, depending on how it has been built -
If the homepage can be accessed via these type of URLs, they should 301 to the correct URL which in this case would be www.seomoz.org.
Quick caveat - the only exception would be if these multiple versions of the homepage served a unique purpose, such as being shown to users who are logged in or have cookies dropped. In this case, you'd be better to use rel=canonical instead of a 301.
The Rel=Canonical Tag - When and How to Use it
This is a relatively new tool for SEOs to use, it was first announced back in February 2009. Wow was it really that long ago?!
As I mentioned above, we get a lot of Q&A around the canonical tag and I can see why. We've had some horror stories of people putting the canonical tag on all their pages pointing to their homepage (like Dr Pete did) and Google aggressively took notice of it and de-indexed most of the site. This is surprising as Google say that they may take notice of the tag but do not promise. However experience has shown that they take notice of it most of the time - sometimes despite pages not being duplicates which was the whole point of the tag!
When to use Rel=Canonical
Where 301s may not be possible
There are unfortunate situations where the implementation of 301 redirects can be very tricky, perhaps the developers of the site don't know how to do it (I've seen this), perhaps they just don't like you, perhaps the CMS doesn't let you do it. Either way, this situation does happen. Technically, a rel=canonical tag is a bit easier to implement as it doesn't involve doing anything server side. Its just a case of editing the <head> tag on a page.
In theory, both of these pages could return the same set of results and therefore a duplicate page would be seen. A 301 wouldn't be appropriate as you'd want to keep the URL in the same format as what someone has navigated. Therefore a rel=canonical would work fine in this situation.
Again, if this situation can be avoided in the first place, then thats the ideal solution as opposed to using the canonical tag.
When dynamic URLs are generated on the fly
By this I mean URLs which tend to be database driven and can vary depending on how the user navigates through the site. The classic example is session IDs which are different every time for every user, so it isn't practical to add a 301 to each of these. Another example could be if you add tracking code to the end of URLs to measure paths to certain URLs or clicks on certain links, such as:
www.example.com/widgets/red?source=footer-nav
When Not to Use Rel=Canonical
On New Websites
I've seen a few instances where rel=canonical is being used on brand new websites - this is NOT what the tag was designed for. If you are in the fortunate position of helping out with the structure of a new website, take the chance to make sure you avoid situations where you could get duplicate content. Ensure that they don't happen right from the start. Therefore there should be no need for the rel=canonical tag.
On Pagination - maybe! At least use with caution
This is a tough one and unless you really know what you're doing, I'd avoid using rel=canonical on pagination pages. To me, these are not strictly duplicate pages and you could potentially stop products deeper within the site from being found by Google. This seems to have been confirmed by John Mu in this Google Webmaster thread. He gives some interesting alternatives such as using javascript based navigation for users and loading all products onto one page.
Having said that, John Mu has made a point of not ruling it out totally. He just advises caution, which should be the case for any implementation of the canonical tag really - except if you're Dr Pete!
Across your entire site to one page
Just a quick note on this one as this is one way which using the rel=canonical tag can hurt you. As I've mentioned above, Dr Pete did this as an experiment and killed most of his site. He set the rel=canonical tag across his entire site pointing back to his homepage and Google de-indexed a large chunk of his website as a result. The following snapshot from Google Analytics pretty much sums up the effect:
Conclusion
In summary, you should use caution when using 301s or the canonical tag. These type of changes have the potential to go wrong if you don't do them right and can hurt your website. If you're not 100% confident, do some testing on a small set of URLs first and see what happens. If everything looks ok, roll out the changes slowly across the rest of the site.
In terms of choosing the best method, its best to bear in mind what you want for the users and what you want them to still see. Then think about the search engines and what content you want them to index and pass authority and link juice to.
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