Project requirements:  Web Design and Development, Copywriting, Content Marketing, SEO

URL address: http://www.palmbeachcustoms.com

Project description: John Russo the owner of a car customization shop specialized in hi-end car customization and custom graphics commissioned us to make a website. The project included web development, ongoing content marketing and SEO. Since it is a car restoration shop we asked him to send us photos of car restorations he has done so we can make a story around them to show what awesome work he has done over the years.

The Homepage consists of a big content slider that shows images of the latest posts with custom excerpts of specific work as a content teaser linked to the full story. Under the slider we placed a Primary Services section consisting of four fields. Every field has a Learn more button that leads to a landing/product page of a chosen service. At the bottom of the Homepage we added a testimonial field for happy customers to share their experience with the quality of the service they got.

Since the website heavily relies on photos we also made a gallery with lots of photos of car restoration, custom graphics, bed lining, etc. that John Russo has made over the years in so people can see the quality of his work.

The site has a services-oriented navigation menu that is focused on providing the right info and help visitors become clients. Using the Contact forms and info, the site generates over 85% of the business John did since we built the site. The ongoing SEO and Content Marketing efforts help the site rank on top of Google for key search phrases potential clients use to find a reliable car customizations shop.

John is extremely satisfied with our service, and has also refereed us to several of his friends.

The post Web Design, Development, Copywriting, Content Marketing, SEO Services for Palm Beach Customs appeared first on WebMaxFormance.

Project requirements: Making a website for Moni ArtWork that will showcase her work

URL address: www.moniartwork.com

Project description: The requirement was to make a website that will serve mostly to showcase Monika’s artwork; photos, logo design, desktop publishing projects, etc. She wanted a clean and simple design, but unique and different then just a plain portfolio, to show off her work. For that reason we choose the koi style background, that set up the funky tone to the whole site but that is unobtrusive enough not to take the focus off her work. The Hompage is populated with recent posts that consist of featured image and excerpt. Every new post gets the first place on the Hompage to get the viewers full attention. All posts are also individually categorized and can be browsed through main navigation as well. Click the link to see first hand how the website works.

The post Moni Artwork: Web Design appeared first on WebMaxFormance.

Analysis Methodology

Evaluating the ranking potential for Sites A and B took into consideration their Backlinks and Content capital. Since I have no details about Site B’s traffic and costs related to building their ranking capital, I used three other sites that I am closely familiar with and know the content and backlinks capital as well as the dollar count for these sites to achieve their online capital and how much organic traffic they get. So the suggested dollar and content figures suggested below are interpolation between the statistics of the analyzed sites.

Site A Ranking Potential

The first step was to evaluate Site A Referral and Content capital and compare it to traffic estimates in order to get to a clear, data-based and actionable diagnosis.

Site A Referral Traffic

This startup’s website is relatively new. Registered in 2008 and with most of the backlinks fall in the personal profile links people shared on their other social profiles and blogs. Although the link count is substantial, these links don’t carry too much weight to counteract the bad press from Site B.

Site A: Plenty of links but not too much weight to them (Ahrefs)

The image above helps in seeing that there’s solid link density per referring domain (on average 50 backlinks per referring domain). With so many links it is safe to assume that the referring sites are affiliated to Site A, most probably websites/blogs owned by members of Site A. There is an interesting correlation between the number of referring websites (1300+) and the count of people that Tweeted/Liked Site A (ABOUT 1400) that backs up the assumption that these 1300+ people are responsible for 99% of all the web buzz around Site A. Google’s Panda and Penguin updates targeted sites that have unnatural referral portfolios, and this site got hit very hard, which is visible in the next image.

(NOTE: The Top Referring TDLs graph is logarithmically adapted so pay attention to the actual links count. There are 10 times more COM links than NET links even though graphically it seems like the COM vs NET difference is about 30%.)

Site A Organic Traffic

Below is an overview of the site traffic. Note that in 2010 was a good year for Site A. They got about 7000 (interpolated figure) monthly visits from Search, which dropped to 800 in 2012, and is now below 10 monthly visitors from Google.

Site A: Search Traffic hit a high and then Panda ate it all (Semrush)

Site A Wrap-up

This site has plenty of active members that are trying to pick up the pace but their activities were all wiped out by the Panda and Penguin updates Google implemented over the past year. Site A Management will have to undertake a paradigm shift if they want to make it online, starting with installing Google Analytics on their site and move away from simplistic marketing tricks that worked a long time ago. Site A will have to make heavy investments in Content Development to overcome the overly obvious disparity between Referring vs. On-Site activity.

Site B Ranking Potential

Now let’s take a look at the Referral and Organic stats for Site B and see what this bad-press website does right to outrank Site A for over two years now.

Site B Referral Traffic

Below is a screenshot with the Referrals vital statistics: backlink and social signals count. Keep in mind that the TDL chart below is logarithmically adapted and even though the COM backlinks seems to be only 25% larger than the NET link count, in reality there are almost 10 times more COM backlinks than NET backlinks.

Site B: Less link count, but higher quality and better dispersion (Ahrefs)

The link count is significantly smaller than Site A (over 50% less backlinks count), but the number of referring domains is 60% greater compared to Site A. So a simple math reveals that Site B has about 110% better backlinks portfolio which makes it significantly more natural and therefore resistant to the Panda and Penguin updates Google launched over the past year. The social signals are incomparably fewer (3458 for Site A vs only 41 social signals for Site B) but that seems to have very little effect on Site B’s strong position on Google.

Site B Organic Traffic

With a 110% better link portfolio, Site B will most definitely have better organic traffic profile too. Let’s just see if it will correspondingly be 110% better than Site A.

Site B: Content-rich and categorically better organic traffic

Here is the crux of the matter and what most serious SEO consultants have been talking about since the beginning of time (Google’s time, that is): Content rules. It is far more effective than link count and greatly overshadows social signals as far as organic traffic is concerned.

Based on comparative data from the three other websites, Site B gets roughly 220.000 (interpolated figure) monthly visits from Google.

Site B Wrap-up

Site B has a 110% more natural link and social signals portfolio. It is packed with content. It has a 560 times more content. Combined, the off-site and on-site activity works together to gain about 220.000 monthly visitors from Google alone.

How Site A can Outrank Site B

Let’s get the stats in one place:

Where stats get really interesting is with the crawlable URLs count. Site A has only 1 indexable page of 500 bytes. Site B has 483 Forum pages (with average 10 comments per page) and another 78 articles, adding up to 561 unique pages and 4800 user-generated content pieces with an average URL size of 7KB.

By extrapolating Referral and Organic stats from the three other sites, Site A needs to go after an aggressive Content Marketing approach that will need to counteract all the bad Referral practices (counteract Panda and Penguin) and only then try to outrank Site B.

Based on the extrapolations, the estimate is that over the next 12 months, Site A will need to get their 1300 active members to each produce 78 solid content pieces on Site A targeting the pre-selected keyphrases that they want to outrank Site B. That’s roughly 2 blog posts per week per member. In dollar terms, if Site A is to hire content developers, they would need to spend about $2 million in order to outrank Site B.

Interested in a competitive analysis like this one for your business? Contact me.

The post Using Online Competition Analysis In Search-Powered Economy appeared first on WebMaxFormance.

There are tons of sales stories to get you started with Facebook, here are a few that stand out:

There are close to 1 billion users on Facebook. Every American is on Facebook. Get your brand in front of them on Facebook and you’ll get tons of business.

Facebook is a must. It’s more important than owning a website. Nobody browses websites, everything happens on Facebook and if your business doesn’t have a Facebook Page you’re losing a lot of business.

You may have a Facebook Page for your business. My dog has one too. The point is to have tons of Likes. Otherwise, people won’t know you even exist.

So as a business owner, you’re faced with tons of day-to-day logistics and management headaches, and now you get bombarded with sales pitches from people promising you the moon, stars and every parallel universe out there for $299/mo.

It’s all in the way how data is presented to you and how you’re led to focus on the stats that may not be as important to you anyways. Here is a quick way of learning to peel off the sales lingo and see if your potential service provider understands what business benefits you get from being on Facebook.

Targeting

There are close to 1 billion users on Facebook. Every American is on Facebook. Get your brand in front of them on Facebook and you’ll get tons of business.

This sales pitch tries to use rough statistics and scale to convince you that your business must be on Facebook. For the sake of convenience, let’s say you own a car repair shop in Nashville TN. so we can go through the peel-off easier.

The problem with this pitch is that you don’t really care if there is 1 or 10 billion Facebook accounts. As a local business firmly tied to your address, you can care less for all the millions of people in India. They will never be your clients. It’s all about targeting, pre-qualifying users by geo-location, age, employment status etc. You don’t want to target your marketing efforts at people who live on a different continent, or to people that don’t even have a drivers license.

If you don’t hear key concepts like the number of people on Facebook from Nashville, percentage of car owners, frequency of Facebook mentions of “car repair shop in Nashville”, don’t close the deal because chances are you won’t get quality service from that marketing agency. This is not to say that you won’t get ANY service. Sure you will get SOME benefits, but in this tough economy remember that good is the biggest enemy of great. When online, strive for perfection.

Channeling

Facebook is a must. It’s more important than owning a website. Nobody browses websites, everything happens on Facebook and if your business doesn’t have a Facebook Page you’re losing a lot of business.

This sales pitch goes after the way traffic flows on the net. You’ll notice absolutes like “nobody”, “everything”, “everybody” etc. These are generalizations that you as a shop owner in Nashville should not deal with. The underlining principle in this sales pitch is that the sales agent has mixed up who owns what and why. The website for your business (assuming you have one) is in your hands. You own it. You don’t own Facebook. Your website is all about getting found on the net and lead the web visitors to call you or stop by at your shop. Facebook’s role is to get tons of activity every day so that they can sell Ads to businesses like yours.

While you do want a Facebook Page, this page is NOT the end in itself. It’s just one venue/street that people can use to get to your website. THAT is what you want to achieve with your activity on Facebook. If the sales agent doesn’t understand how web traffic flows and why it’s crucial to get traffic to your website you don’t want to do business with them. Period.

Effectiveness

You may have a Facebook Page for your business. My dog has one too. The point is to have tons of Likes. Otherwise, people won’t know you even exist.

Sales agents that go after simple metrics to showcase success underestimate your intelligence and the complexity of the web. You know full well that you can’t pay your bills with Facebook Likes. So why should you care about a service that offers you “Get 1000 Likes for $100″? The number of Likes you get on your Facebook Page has no measurable business benefits for your car repair shop.

A better option is to count the number of Shares instead of Likes on each post you make on Facebook. Likes will never make a message go viral. Sharing (quoting you) is the coveted thing on Facebook. But in order to be quoted, you will need to share smart things. If the sales agent doesn’t understand the importance of Shares and tries to get you on simple Likes count, walk away. You will spend your money and end up with Likes from people who live in India and will never become your clients.

A Sentence to Remember

The point of Facebook is to serve as a channel of getting pre-qualified visitors to your website where solid content will encourage them to call or visit you since you are the best and most reliable car repair shop in Nashville.

Get More Marketing Info

The post How to Recognize a Good Facebook Marketing Service For Your Local Business appeared first on WebMaxFormance.

So, instead of blaming it on the world, here are a few things that we can all do in order to leverage the Web and grow our business.

The image below is a result of a research done by one of the best ever marketing agencies that focus on blue-chip international companies. (If you’re an owner of a company that can spend tons of money on online marketing, Meclabs is the place to go). For the rest of us, it’s time to separate the sheep from the goats in Online Marketing, and find a company that will provide measurable dollar results.

Rule of thumb: if you’re being sold an idea of purchasing 1000 backlinks for $50, or 10.000 Facebook Likes for $100, walk away. Links and Likes arent a currency accepted by any bank anywhere in the world.

So, let’s get started with the image that summarizes the survey of 995 Business to Business service providers (read: folks that know what they’re doing when it comes to marketing).

The Big 3: Keyword Research, On-Page Optimization, Content Marketing

As the image reveals, the least effective online activity is:

• PR (also known as Article Submission Services),
• meta-data optimization ( eg adding meta-description to pages),
• Social Media Integration (basically placing Share/Tweet/Like buttons on your site)
• XML Sitemap submitting (map of your website to help Google discover all pages on the site)

So, where should you put your marketing dollars?

3. Keyword Research

Thanks to some major breakthroughs in the way search engines work, single-word searches are a thing of the past. Two-word searches too. This is why some argue that researching for keywords is a waste of time. To a point, this is true. However, 3-6 word searches are the norm and you do want to know what search phrases are popular and competitive.

While keyword research on “Dentist” or “dental services” may be a waste of time, doing a research on long-tail phrases like “nice dentist in Chicago” or “kids dentist in Chicago” can help you learn how your potential clients think and search online. The competition for nice dentist Chicago is over 13 million websites, while kids dentist Chicago gets only 1.5 million. So why pick a fight with13 million competitors when you can take the route of lesser resistance and go against 1.5 million?

So if your yearly marketing budget is $10.000, make sure you spend about $1000 on keyword research. Otherwise you may pick a fight you cant win.

2. On-Site Content Optimization

Publishing content is just half the story. There are elements on the website that need some tweaking too (keyword stuffing is not one of them) so that your website is user-friendly and makes the best out of every article on the site. Some of the on-page optimization steps to think about:

• meta-elements on images and media (image description, title, ALT)
• using subtitles and bullet lists to improve readability (not to stuff keywords in H-tags)
• Keep things simple when possible (if you can say it in a sentence, dont use up a paragraph on it)

From that $10.000 budget, make sure you invest about $2000 for optimization of existing content. If you’re just starting up, throw another thousand at keyword research and go for longer-tail keywords too (4-6 word phrases).

1. Content Marketing: Excellent Bang For The Marketing Buck

“Fool’s gold” marketers will never ever recommend going after Content Marketing. Why? Cause it’s hard work, and a lot of it. It actually requires great writing skills, people skills, psychology and of course solid knowledge in the subject area. You don’t want artists to sit down and write texts on mechanical engineering.

What is Content Marketing?

You’ll hear folks saying that is just a fancy name for Copywriting. It is… and it isn’t so.

Content marketing IS copywriting for the web, but that’s where similarity ends. Content Marketing is a very complex process of creating new content (texts) for your website where the content marketer recreates Your brand and Your voice on the web. When a visitor comes to your website, a solid text welcomes the visitors and helps them in answering several key questions:

• Understand what kind of a business is behind the site
• What services/products you offer
• Is there something she’d benefit from
• Why she should do business with you and not with your competitor

This is why Content Marketing is so effective. It basically turns your website into an excellent sales agent that’s available 24/7, ready to take in new visitors and help them understand that Your company is the best option for their needs.

Why Content Marketing Gets You The Best Bang For The Buck?

It’s all in the numbers. For technology-based businesses (computers, cell phones, IT stuff) articles have a relatively short lifetime of about 2 years, after that it’s outdated and nobody finds it useful. For non-IT businesses where changes aren’t so  fast-paced, your content can have a shelf life of up to 5 years. In counseling/training/dental/legal areas it can go even up to 10 years!

Let’s do the Expenses breakdown from a real-life case (automotive industry):

• Cost of a single article: $150
• Estimated Article Lifetime: 4 years
• Daily visitors on article: 5
• Conversion rate: 1%
• Profit per client: $20

Here’s how the math works out:

• 73.000 visitors (multiply 4 years with 365 days, with 5 daily visitors)
• 73 clients (1% of 73.000, or one client every 3 weeks)
• $1460 profit (73 clients, each bringing $20 profit)

Not a bad way to spend $150! Now if this car repair shop publishes one article every week, pretty soon they can get a client every day. There is literally NOTHING else you could do with a $150 that will bring back ten times as much over a period of 4 years.

If you need more info, feel free to contact us.

The post The Top 3 Online Activities That Will Get Your Business Growing Again appeared first on WebMaxFormance.

Yet from the entire survey responses, many report that they do use social media to promote their business at the moment. A lot of them actually.

Search Engine Land

From the chart we can see that from the 23 listed social media sites, only a handful get little (below 10%) attention. Most of the businesses are familiar with social media marketing opportunities, and seem to be using them to some extent.

The top 3 positions, unsurprisingly, are set aside for

• Facebook, 70% of businesses have used it to promote their services,
• Google, 55% of businesses use it for promotion
• LinkedIn, 52% business owners use it to spread the word

In other words, two out of three business owners are on Facebook, and every second business owner is active on LinkedIn. Not bad. To my surprise only one out of three business owners is active on Twitter and local sites such as Yahoo Local, CitySearch and YellowBook. One in 5 uses YouTube (read: Video Marketing) as a marketing venue.

So what are we to make out of this data, really?

Social media activity advice

Facebook activity is closing in on the critical mass of 80%, when statistics analysts say a Disruptive Event occurs. In other words, we’re about to see Facebook as the no-brainer social activity for anyone doing business today. LinkedIn is still far away, but its demographics is almost 100% business-oriented, so from a business density point, it may acually be the most importtant social activity for business oriented people. So make sure you join us all on LinkedIn and make the best of it. Look me up, I’m an open networker.

Geo-localization of websites

Localization seems to be a concept that only a third of the business population understands and uses. Google has implemented localization pointers in their ranking algorithm, but it seems that businesses aren’t overly interested to use this change and make a stronger claim on their geographical location. As people get more search-savvy, search queries have grown from 3-5 to 4-7 words per search query. These extra words are likely to be geographical in nature. So, perhaps we should all make it a conscious effort in 2013 to make our websites more geo-sensitive.

Video Marketing on the daily menu

Consider this: In SEO, it takes only 10 businesses to have a better ranking to push your website onto Google’s second page of search results. If you take in consideration that only 20% of people ever dare to use YouTube and similar video marketing sites, it’s easy to put two and two together and realize that video marketing yields tons of SEO ROI. Videos are also a lot mobile-friendly than text, so by doing video you’re also getting points on Mobile Marketing. There are tons of video options where you don’t have to stand in front of the camera. Make sure you use Video Marketing.

Need help with your Social Media activities?

Get More Marketing Advice

The post The 2013 Social Media Marketing Plan for Small Businesses appeared first on WebMaxFormance.

A few days ago I got an email from Linkedin saying You’re in the Top 5% most popular people on Linkedin. This email resulted in plenty of negative buzz on the net like “yeah I’m in the top 5%… me and 10 million other people”. But I’d like to use all this buzz and drip some positive thoughts on the matter and answer a friend’s question an associate sent me:

Hello Igor. Congratulations on your wonderful achievements in LinkedIn, and can you please guide me how to do the same and make the most of profile in it? Thank you.

But before we get going with the 3 points, let’s start with the end in mind. The goal with your Linkedin profile optimization is not to outrank everybody else. The goal is to get noticed by PEOPLE, not search engines. So your metric should not be ranking, but how many connections and relationships you build from now on. Nobody cares about Ranking. Focus on building relationships.

Try avoiding the attitude this guy has:

1. Optimize your profile for specific keywords

When you create your profile, you want it to be about you, but also about the people who will be reading it. For example, if you run a business and you want more people to find your car repair shop, make sure you have keyphrases like Car Repair Professional, or Certified Auto Body Technician and so on. Help people find you by adding some content to your profile and use the industry keyphrases wisely.

A great way to start your keyword research is by checking out your competitors profiles. The Jobs section is also helpful to find industry leaders and how they optimized their profile.

Over-optimization sucks, keep your profile readable

Social media is like a conversation… only it’s online. If you repeat the same phrase over and over, you won’t be taken seriously, and you’ll be very unpopular… and people will avoid you cause you’d look weird online. Optimization with moderation is the key.

If you over-optimize your profile by stuffing it with the same phrase over and over again, you may rank high for that phrase, but nobody will take you seriously. Here’s a screenshot of an over-optimized profile for “Social Media Marketing”

 The owner of this profile ranks high as a social media marketing consultant, but would you ever take him seriously? I don’t think so.

2. Showcase your expertise

When you build your profile, you will need to say something about your past and present activities, but avoid focusing on what tasks you did and focus on pointing out success metrics.

Instead of:
“I was responsible for the technical maintenance of the computers and network in my organization” try
“Worked as Network Administrator and cut maintenance expenses by 21% by creating a FAQ ebook for internal use.”
This will set you apart from all the other network administrators who only do what they’re told and don’t show initiative.

Bragging sucks, keep it down-to-earth

While you do want to showcase your professional and proactive involvement, you don’t want to sound too smug. There’s nothing worse than one-man-show folks who are excellent at what they do…but despise everybody else who arent as good.

Helping people see that you’re a team player will go a lot farther than bragging about being the best at what you do. Make sure you don’t spend too much time taking all the glory and blaming your team for the failures.

3. Show the world who you are as a person

Now that your Activities and Skills sections are all in place, take another sweep at what you wrote and make sure it sounds honest and real. You don’t want your profile to be one big bullets list. Let your character shine through.

Extroverts may find this very easy, but for us introverts it may be a challenge. Don’t be afraid to ask a friend to read your Profile and give an honest opinion. Also, try to make your text honestly communicate that your introversion is a sign of reliability and sound character. That way, you’ll be more valuable than any other chatter-box competing for the same client or for the same position.

Nobody cares about your dog, keep it business-centered

Extroverts usually fall in this trap of going too far with personal stuff. On Linkedin nobody cares about the new hat you bought for your dog. That’s Facebook stuff. Have in mind that your Linkedin Profile is closer to your CV rather than your diary.

There, I hope these three points will help you get started on the right path. This is my recipe, it worked for me so I’m sharing it. I’d love to hear other recipes for Linkedin profile optimization, so feel free to share yours. We can all learn from each other. If you find my recipe helpful, don’t forget to share it too.

The post I’m on Linkedin, Now What? 3 Tips For Making Linkedin Work For You appeared first on WebMaxFormance.

• Should I own a website?
• Should I run a Social Media Marketing campaign?
• Do I really need new content to get visitors on my site?

To help you answer them, here is a short run-down through the benefits of adopting Social Media Marketing for your business.

Advantages Your Business Can Get From Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing will be the best of the best in online marketing at least for the next 5-10 years, and will constantly evolve and improve. More and more internet users will join the social sphere and almost every single one of them is going to have their personal profile on the top 10 social media web sites. Combined, these Top 10 social sites have over 2 billion personal profiles (and counting).

Do you think your business could find a way to benefit from these 2 billion social profiles?

Promoting Your Business with Social Media Marketing

Promoting your business online with the power of Social Media Sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. means promoting your business to millions of potential clients. Also, your happy clients can spread the word with a single mouse click on their social profiles.

With smart Social Media Marketing, your clients become your best brand evangelists, taking the good word for your company to people who don’t even know you exist, but would likely use your services.

That is why it is very important for your business to start using the power of Social Media Marketing.

Who will be your potential customers

Your potential customer can be any person out there in the world who has internet and has a personal profile on one of the well known Social Media Web Sites like the ones mentioned above. Can you even imagine how many customers are we really talking about? Social media encompasses the entire world,(about 2 billion personal profiles  and will soon be used by everyone at least a few times a day).  By using Social Media Marketing, you are taking your business to where people hang out and are in a generally positive mood?

Cream of the crop Social Media Marketing web sites

1. Facebook has hit an amazing 1 billion user mark which makes it the number 1 Social Media Web site in the world.
2. Twitter 500 million users
3. Google+ 400 million users
4. LinkedIn 200 million users
5. Pinterest 25 million users making it the fastest growing network ever (1000% monthly growth), making it a Marketing goldmine in 2013.

Why hire a professional

So why should you hire a professional instead of going to the dozens of social websites yourself every day?

A social media marketer is essentially the eyes, ears and voice of your company online. That means you need someone who can create brand awareness, deliver traffic to your website (u don’t have a web site?), and boost your business growth, all while keeping your company’s reputation spotless.

So, for business owners to remain competitive in today’s changing world, they must constantly fine-tune their marketing efforts.

Social Networks are free and appear easy to use and can level the playing field for business. However Social Media Marketing is a serious tool and requires a carefully constructed strategy and a professional marketer, who understands and can effectively, use the social sites.

Start using Social Media to your advantage.  If you don’t, businesses that do will continue to have the advantage over you and you will miss out on plenty of opportunities to get new clients and grow your business. Let a professional run your Social Media Marketing so you can focus on running your business.

The post Do I Really Need Social Media Marketing: How To Grow Your Business With Social Media appeared first on WebMaxFormance.

As the year picks up and we all make New Year resolutions and plans on how to grow our business, we all get in a frenzy to make an actionable plan and start implementing ASAP:

• I vow to get 10 new clients in the first trimester
• My business should get on top of Google search results by the end of this year
• I want to triple the size of my email list
• My new website should bring me 10 new leads each day

But sometimes, it happens that we jump in the frying pan before we take care of the small stuff. Quick decisions result in web texts that sound quite differently from what we intended… and the result is not so desirable. Some practices have become so prevalent that people don’t even stop to think about the message words communicate to web visitors, and email signup forms end up as brash and insensitive as US Army conscription posters:

Unintentionally strong wording is a signup killer

Here’s a good example of how even professionals can make mistakes in optimizing the Email Signup Form so that it captures the attention of many, and convinces many of them to sign up.

Call To Action: Make it Actionable & Desirable

Why This is Not a Good Email Signup Form?

1. The Email Signup Title

In email signup forms, the first thing that people should see is a client-oriented, value-packed Title. As any other web element, the Email Signup Form should be able to create a small dialogue so the visitor gets engaged and starts thinking of why he/she should sign up at all. The best way to start a dialogue is with a question, so the Title could be a short question that gets web visitors thinking in terms of  “What’s in it for me”.

What’s wrong with the “Submit to our Newsletter” title?

In this time where people are obsessed with personal value and most see themselves above the rest, the “Submit” word comes across as an insult. I remember a few months ago when Dr. Flint McGloughlin from MecLabs made a strong case against the S-word.

Submit… I will NOT submit, to you, your newsletter or to anything else!

Unfortunately, most of the email signup forms wear this undesirable title “Submit”. With such wording, this Title acts as a barrier, as a bounce-off for web visitors. Submit-based words cause people to stop looking at what’s after this word, and consequently, they won’t even consider placing their email to a site that asks them to Submit.

2. The Call To Action Button

Buttons are extremely important because they require a specific action, and in terms of value, web buttons are as important as cash registers at the supermarket because everything you do in a supermarket revolves around that crowning few seconds (or minutes) at the register, when you make the card swipe. That swipe, or in this case, the click on a button, is the culmination of this imaginary dialogue between the email signup form and your web visitor. So the button (just like the cash register) should be as friendly as possible, so people won’t be in doubt as to what it is they’re getting if they click the button.

A simple “Join Now!” won’t cut it. The first thing that pops into my mind is that famous the US Army conscription poster, and in combination with the S-word, the story that is being transfered to the reader on a sub-conscious level is:

Submit! Join Now, or else…

Call To Action (CTA) buttons should be value-packed so people feel more informed and justified to leave their precious email address. They should also be fancy and attractive to look at. Generic gray buttons are almost invisible to visitors, and many don’t even notice them. There are tons of studies about colors and how they affect human behavior. There are also anthropological studies that show how different cultures attribute different emotions to colors, so you will need to know who your target audience is, what kind of “vibe” you want to convey and match the color with your intentions. For the Western world, big red CTA buttons are conversion killers. Think STOP sign.

Anti-Spam Warranty, anyone?

Whenever we are faced with a signup form, one of the top questions that pop up is

“Why should I place my email here… what if they spam my inbox with tons of emails every day?”

The trick with email forms is that every element in the form must anticipate and appease anxieties people face when leaving their email on web forms. Fail to appease anxieties and very few people will sign up. But be careful, email signup forms are like make-up: less is more. Do appease anxieties, but don’t over-do it because then it will have the reverse effect. If there are too many appeasing elements people will feel confused and confusion creates anxiety. A simple “Spam-free updates” or “We won’t spam you, ever” will suffice.

Check your website and see if your email signup form is friendly for your visitors:

• Is the Signup Form Title conveying any value to my web visitors?
• Does the Title convey the right tone of voice I use when I talk to my clients face-to-face?
• Is the CTA Button descriptive and value-packed?
• Is the button styled properly so that visitors can spot it at first glance?
• Would I feel confident and at ease to leave my email to such a signup form?

The post How to Increase Email Signups With Simple CTA Wording Tweaks appeared first on WebMaxFormance.

Although landing pages are built to speak with the given Brand Personality and address any questions/issues/worries that the Ideal Client Persona would have, many times these preconceptions are misplaced and the landing page fails to make the best of all the visitors it gets. With each product page, designers and copywriters need to answer several questions:

• who is the ideal client,
• how they consume content online and
• what are the motivational factors

Based on these questions, copywriters and designers will decide on a landing page:

• short copy vs long copy
• graphics-heavy or minimalistic
• strong sales vs soft sales pitch

Ideal Persona Description

Here is a case study of a heatmap and scroll reach analysis of a product page for a laptop repair manual. In a nutshell, the Ideal Client Persona was set to be:

• early 20es, student age
• willing to research and read
• ready to experiment, a DIY person
• has emotional attachment to their laptop
• not willing to invest money in a new laptop

This page was built several years ago and up until recently the Conversion Rate was hovering around 2%. However, this rate dropped significantly and is now close to 0.5% which warranted a heatmap analysis to see how visitors engage with the content and to select elements for A-B split testing. The traffic hasn’t dropped, which can be interpreted that there is still interest for this repair manual, but something has changed in the Ideal Persona’s way of interacting with the page.

This is a long-copy landing page (asumption: visitors are OK researching and won’t have a problem reading through this long copy). So the very first question we tried answering was

Is long-copy product page engaging enough for readers to go through the entire page and get sold in the idea of buying this manual?

Does Long Copy Work: Scroll Reach Analysis

Here’s a scroll-reach map showing how far visitors scrolled on the page:

The scroll reach is color coded, where red shades represent more attention (more time spent on page section) and yellow, blue and green shades represent lower areas of interest. The median fold line was set on 708 px, which points to a 15-inch monitor. The interesting find here is that people spent very little time above the fold, which goes against most of the preconceptions that everything above the fold gets extra attention.

The logic of this lack of interest above the fold is that we are no longer living in the Newspaper era and people are not afraid to scroll down to places that capture their attention. Another interesting point to make is that images aren’t always such an attention-grabber, nor are big chunks of bolded text. In fact, the bolded paragraph and product image got the least attention from the entire product page. Visitors spent only 1 second in the above-the-fold area. Even the comments got more attention than this prime area.

Although the preconception was that the Ideal Client will love to learn, the rather theoretical section of WHY this laptop failure happens got very little attention. At least it was less than expected.

Unsurprisingly, the Supported Models section got significant attention (people spent 25 seconds on average on this section). What is surprising though is that there is a very distinct attention dedicated to the first seven bullets. After the seventh bullet there is a significant drop in attention even though there are laptop models listed that are mentioned in the Title of the page.

Mouse-hover Attention Map

Another very important analysis is attention mapping. As standard eye-tracking is out of the question (it is extremely expensive), we used mouse-hover heat mapping. The assumption is that people use the mouse cursor while reading through web pages. The limitation here is that many visitors will only scroll through the page without ever moving the mouse cursor, which is visible on the image below as several vertical hotspots of attention.

So, what’s on this heatmap?

First, it is clear that a busy header is a deterrent. In this case, the book-shelf type of header design acted as attention competitor and there are even some clicks on IT-related books. This means that header clutter with competitive elements can lead people to think that there are clickable areas on the header. As “blind clicks” are actions without result, this may create some anxiety/frustration, which is a negative element in the conversion efforts of this product page.

The second conclusion is that brand-keywords attract plenty of attention. There are several instances where Toshiba and Maxim are mentioned, which are brands and it seems that peoples’ attention is drawn toward these brand-names. This is really not a big surprise since the idea was that the Ideal Client has some emotional attachment to their laptop, and therefore the brand.

The third conclusion is that the Supported Models section gets the most attention, and the attention winner is a paragraph explains the symptoms of the broken laptop rather than a listing of models. What is interesting is that these symptoms were listed as bullet points previously, but the list got very little attention while the same text in paragraph form took the gold in terms of reader attention.

The fourth conclusion based only on this heatmap was that images and social buttons next to the CTA act as click competition. In fact, there were more registered clicks on the product image and sharebar. This was a surprise as we expected that the product image will act as an attention anchor that will lead people to the Buy Now button.

However, when we took into consideration the time of each click, it turned out that all clicks on the Add to Cart button were done in the first 90 seconds even though the average time spent on the page was 228 seconds. In fact, the clicks on the product image and social buttons was done well after visitors went through the comments.

Attention/Heatmap Analysis Conclusions

1. People are not afraid of long pages and scroll through the entire page
2. Images and bold blocks of text aren’t always attention grabbers
3. Bullet lists should never be longer than 7 items
4. Busy headers should be avoided for product pages (headerless design of product pages may work better)
5. Brand names are attention grabbers, use them within the CTA
6. Bullet lists may not work better than paragraphs, people sometimes prefer conversational vs. preachy writing
7. Purchases happen in the first 90 seconds, without reading through the entire copy nor viewing any social proof

All this points to a very different Ideal Persona character map:

• Pragmatic: people that buy now are a lot more pragmatic than previously. They don’t want to know WHY their laptop broke, but HOW they can fix it.
• Critical: people don’t care about salesy bullet points and prefer correct subtitles with conversational explanations of the situation
• Shop-Savy: Long bullet lists don’t work. Stick to 7-item bullets or you’ll be seen as pushing it and turn out being boring
• Impulsive: People are less likely to spend time reading and are prone to make impulsive purchasing decisions
• Doubtful: Social proof doesn’t always result in more sales

All in all, over the past 3 years, it seems the collage generation shifted from inquisitive and trusting toward impulsive and doubtful. Regardless of the social implication of this kind of behavioral shift, this study points that as the customer base changes, so should product pages. The bottom line is that when clients change, the sales copy must follow.

The post By The Numbers: Improving Product Pages Using Heatmap and Scroll Reach Tests appeared first on WebMaxFormance.