Landing Page – An active webpage where customers will ‘land’ when they click your ad. The web address for this page is often called a ‘destination URL’ or ‘clickthrough URL.’

Below is a list of 7 deadly sins for landing page designs. The list was taken from a webinar from Tim Ash, a consultant from Google.

Have you committed one of the “7 deadly sins of landing page design?”

1. Unclear Call to Action
   Ensure that traffic is sent to a page where the desired action is clearly defined. If you wish for them to book a room night, have a large visible button that allows the customer to book a room night.
2. Too Many Visual Distractions
   A page filled with too many visual distractions, whether its photos of products or flashing banners or AdSense ads, will likely not convert as well. Keep the page simple, clean, and to the point.
3. Too Much Text
   A landing page should not be text heavy. Keep sentences short and simple, and convey your message using bullet points.
4. Not Keeping Promises
   Your AdCopy says: Buy 2 get 1 free, but if this same offer cannot be found on the landing page, you are not keeping that promise. If you have an attractive offer in your AdCopy, make sure that it is easily found on the landing page.
5. Long Forms
   Keep forms as short and concise as possible. Only include fields where it’s absolutely essential for the existing transaction.
6. Invisible Risk Reducers
   If your business is accredited by the BBB, or if your website is hacker safe and tested on a daily basis, be sure to include these logos above the fold.
7. Trust Indicators
   If your business is highly rated or raved about by another company of trust, place that logo above the fold as well. For example, if Conde Nast named your hotel as one of the “Top 500 Hotels in the World”, adding this trust indicator will surely help increase trust, and hopefully conversion.

We are Google Adword Professionals and we can help you implement a successful search engine marketing campaign. Contact us through the blog or on our website, SalesOverNight.com. If you’re company is in the medical industry check out of dedicated medical marketing website, LEVELTWO | Medical.

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A few days ago Firefox 3.5 became officially available for download. The web browser world is constantly changing to it is important that you constantly check your business website to make sure that it is up-to-date and compatible with the latest web browsers.

That can be very difficult to do since there are so many different operating systems and each operating system has its own browser version. You may have a PC, but that means you are not able to test your browser on a Mac OSX Safari browser.

Well there is a great way to test your website’s compatibility using a free webtool called Browsershots.

Browsershots.org – Check browser compatibility accross multiple browsers from different OS’s.

Here’s two other websites that can help you test your website to make sure it is up-to-date.

Web Page Analyzer – Free website performance tool and web page speed analysis.

CSS Validation Service – Check your CSS and HTML documents with style sheets

If you haven’t downloaded Firefox 3.5 yet, we highly encourage you to do so. It’s a great browser and it will make your web surfing experience much better. Download Firefox here.

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Managing and optimizing your own website is a full time job. There are a lot of different monitoring points that you must keep a close eye on in order to fully understand how your visitors are reacting to your web design.

The most commonly known website analytics are visits and pageviews. These two stats are very different and each play a critical role in the visitor trending on your site.

For example, in the screenshot above, we can see that this website has a moderate number of visitors, but what’s even more important is the ratio of visits to pageviews.

So on average, each visitor typically views multiple pages before they leave the site. This is a great indicator that the information on this website is engaging since each visitor typically clicks several times during each visit.

But that’s just one way of verifying the visitor interaction. Another important metric is bounce rate.

While typically you want to see your charts trending upwards, this is one of the few graphics you want to see as low as possible because it describes the frequency of people leaving your site with no interaction. In other words, if you find that your site has a high bounce rate percentage, then it tells you that your visitors are not finding your site to be relevent, engaging, or it’s just plain confusing.

In the example shown above, you can see that the bounce rate is below 30%, so less than 1/3 of the visitors “bounce.” While each website is different, if you can drop your bounce rate percentage below 50% your business is more likely to see an increase in online conversions.

Do you have any questions about website analytics? Leave a comment below. We’ll answer all your analytical concerns! Or you can ask us on Twitter.

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We listed things every website must have, tips for landing pages, and ways to engage your readers, so now we want mash all of that up into a new idea, integrating your social campaign with your main website.

#1 – Add live streaming content to your website.
Your visitors want to know that what they are looking at is the newest most current information. Give your site a fresh look by adding an RSS feed from a continually updating data source.

For example: Add your Twitter feed to your homepage. Check out the Twitter widgets for an easy way to display your Twitter updates on your website.

BONUS TIP: Try adding an RSS feed from a popular news source that publishes content about your industry. Like Digg or CNN.

#2 – Add social features to your website.
Offer your visitors a way to connect and interact other than just a phone number or a contact form. While you may not want to offer comments on your site a good alternative would be to add a Get Satisfaction profile to your website. It’s a great way to help connect your customers to your business.

#3 – Add social buttons to your website.
A critical component to facilitating an online conversation about your services or products is to offer your visitors a way to easily share your content with others. An easy “email this” button or bookmark button might be the difference between a visitor sending your website to a friend or adding it to their own social bookmarking site. Try addthis.com, it is a clean easy to install button that features all of the major social bookmarking sites.

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1. Privacy Policy
Your visitors need to know that they can trust you. Let them know that their personal information can be trusted with your company. The Direct Marketing Association has a privacy policy generator. http://www.dmaresponsibility.org/PPG

2. Contact Us
This shouldn’t even be on this list, but it’s surprisingly easy for the contact information to be lost in the shuffle. With all of the spambots roaming the web, we recommend that you use a form rather than placing your email directly on your website. Here’s an easy form generator. http://www.bravenet.com/webtools/emailfwd

3. Search Box
If you have a lot of pages on your website you’ll need an easy way for your visitors to find exactly what they are looking for. Make sure that the search box is easy to find and on the home and landing page.

4. Website Analytics
You’ve got to know what your visitors are doing on your site and where they are coming from. There’s no reason not to have some kind of analytics tracking software on your site. http://www.google.com/analytics

5. Newsletter Sign Up
If you’ve got a blog or a newsletter then offer a call-to-action for your visitors to subscribe to your weekly or daily content. Feedburner has an great RSS to email feature. http://www.feedburner.com

6. Search Engine Optimized Copy
If you don’t understand how to optimize your website for search engines it might be best to consult with a professional marketing company.

7. Social Media Share Button
It’s so easy to add these to your website there’s really no reason not to. While some of your visitors may not have any idea what these buttons are for, it’s worth adding these buttons for those visitors that do use them. Try http://www.addthis.com

8. Trust Seals/Testimonials
This is a great way to establish a different kind of trust between your company and your visitors. Take a look at our blog post How to Make Your Website More Trustworthy.

LEVELTWO & LEVELTWO Medical

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Finding a search marketing company is easy. Just do a quick search and you’ll find tons of companies demanding that they are the best. So you’ve find ‘em, the hard part is choosing which marketing agency to use for your search marketing campaign.

We’ve put together 10 questions to ask your search marketing company before you sign that contract. You’ve let the salesmen do the talking, now it’s time for you to ask some questions of your own.

1. Does the contract include ongoing maintenance? The search marketing world is always changing and if you stand still you’ll get left behind.
2. Are they certified search engine marketing professionals for the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN)?
3. Each campaign should be custom tailored for each client. Ask them if they use any template campaigns.
4. Ask if they use any blackhat tricks. Blackhat are methods that are not honest and could result in getting your website banned.
5. An honest search marketing agency will never guarantee conversions, only a specific range of traffic increase can be guaranteed. A well planned campaign will yield a return on investment, but there’s no way to predict the level of activity.
6. Ask to see example campaign landing pages or websites. What’s your first impression? Would you buy it?
7. Do they offer on-demand campaign reporting or do they email you a spreadsheet once a month?
8. Do they make use of multiple search engines? A strong SEM campaign will be diverse.
9. Be wary if they say “yes” to everything. A successful search campaign requires a minimum level of investment. If they say that $200 a month will get your website ranked first in Google you might want to get a second opinion.
10. Do they track everything about your campaign? This includes the number of people who see your ads, the number of clicks, what they do once they reach your landing page, and how many of those visitors fill out a form or call your phone number. Call tracking is key to search engine marketing.

Honesty is the best policy. We know there are a lot of other marketing agencies out there, but no matter who you choice it’s important that you are informed about what you’re getting.

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In marketing (online and offline) there are three basic questions that must be addressed when you are trying to sell a product or service. If you don’t address these basic questions, your website will not be successful.

1. What is it?
2. How can I use it?
3. Why do I need it?

Surprisingly, there are many websites and marketing campaigns that don’t answer these three simple questions. No matter how good your product or service might be, no one will buy it unless you present your message in an easy to understand way.

Here are a few tips to help you more effectively broadcast your marketing message through your website.

1. Micro-message
   Learn a lesson from the success of Twitter, keep your messages short and to the point. Explain “who you are”, “what you’re selling”, and “why they need it” as quickly as possible. Save the longwinded descriptions after they click through to the next page.
2. Multimedia
   Hire a marketing firm to create a 30 second video that explains your products. Even better than short micro-message is a short micro-message that I don’t even have to read!
3. Tunnel vision
   If you offer wide variety of products and services then you should compartmentalize each vertical. Present the visitor with a few options and let them determine what they are interested in and then you can provide more detailed information about the product or service.

A website is never finished. As you draw more visitors you should monitor how they react to your web design. Track where they are leaving your website and make changes to try and curb the visitor drop out. A good website can be your best salesman.

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Tip #5 from our post “Effective Landing Pages, 7 Tips” talks about making your website trustworthy. It’s easy to put a short privacy notice on your contact form that states that you will never share their information with anyone, but to really make your site trustworthy it’s going to take more than just a promise. Even if your customers are purchasing a small dollar item, having a crediable third party verify the security of your website will help increase your conversion rates.

Here is a list of 10 trust building components that will help reinforce the credibility of your website.

McAfee
A household name for online security, your visitors are sure to recognize this logo. They proactively secure systems and networks from known and as yet undiscovered threats worldwide.

TRUSTe
They outfit you with a privacy statement that fits your company’s needs. They also serve as a third party for disputes resolution processes.

VeriSign
Their Extended Validation product triggers new browsers like IE 7 to turn the address bar green when visitors view your site. Now that’s a great way to instill a since of trust!

BizRate
The best marketing campaign still can’t be the power of customer testimonies. BizRate will allow your customers to give store ratings and reviews. It’s a risk, but it could have a very large payoff.

Trustwave
They offer SSL certificates, PCI DSS Compliance validation, and a security seal for businesses.

If you decide to put one or more of these seals on your website or landing page, make sure they are above the fold. In other words, you want this seal to be one of the first things that your customer notices. As for payment security, it might be best to put them beside your payment button.

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Building the perfect SEM keyword structure is very important, but an effective landing page is essential to getting conversions. Here’s a short list of 7 solid tips to an effective landing page.

1. Multiple Landing Pages. Theme each landing page based on a tight group of closely linked topics. You may offer healthcare services, but each service needs its own dedicated discussion. You wouldn’t want to send people that are looking for a flu shot to the same page as people that are looking for back surgery.

2. Multiple Call to Action. People like to scan. I doubt you read every word of this blog post, so that’s why I’ve bolded the key points that I want to bring to your attention. Don’t hide the next steps at the bottom of your page, put some colorful (risk free) buttons at strategic places on your blog. Rather than telling them to “Buy Now”, offer them a “Free Quote”.

3. Folder and Filenames. Use the landing page URL to your advantage. Google Adwords will allow 1,024 characters for your destination URL. Put some keywords in your URL. Not only does it help your quality score, but your visitors will recognize the keywords in your URL and it will reinforce that this page is exactly what they were searching for.

4. Meta and Alt Tags. Put meta tags and alt tags on your landing page. Make sure the keyword meta tags contain your keyword as well as the description tag. Each graphic should also have an alt tag with keywords.

5. Truthworthy. If you are asking for their personal information put a link to your privacy policy. Make sure they know you will never give, rent, or sell their email address to anyone. Third party seals like Hacker Safe, Secured by SSL, BBBOnLine, VeriSign, or eTrust are always a good idea for ecommerce sites.

6. Clean and Tidy. As stated above, people don’t read everything, they like to scan. So make sure your content is scannable. Use headings, subheadings, and bolded words to break up the uniform paragraphs.

7. Follow up. Congratulations! You got a user to fill out a form, but don’t let it end there. Thank them, send a confirmation email, and point them to more points of interest like your company blog, a special offer, or other products that might interest them.

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A few of our clients have come to us admitting defeat after they took on the pay per click monster and lost. Reading blogs with 10 tips to success or watching how-to videos may help you get a grasp on pay per click, but until you get some real experience under your belt it can be really frustrating to build a successful campaign.

Let’s take a look at a few components of a pay per click campaign to better understand what this online advertising auction is all about.

Campaign Structure – Break your services or products into categories. If you are a computer repair service company then your divisions might be data recovery, antivirus protection, and hardware installation. The more you divide and focus each of your categories the better.

Keywords – This is the gas of a pay per click campaign. Basically you want to think about what your clients would type into a search engine if they were in the market for your service or product. It might be “computer harddrive broken”, but we’re talking about millions of people doing millions of searches a day so you have to use synonyms and try and cover all the different ways someone can search those same keywords. A couple examples might be “pc data loss”, “laptop hard drive not working”, or “harddrive repair”.

Also don’t forgot to throw in local search terms like “dallas harddrive recovery”, “computer repairman in dallas”, or “pc hard drive failure”. That’s an example of how many different keywords configurations there would be on one type of computer service!

Landing Page – After the person decides to click on your ad they are taken to a webpage that must be engaging and provide incentives for them to take further action like filling out a contact form or signing up for a newsletter. It’s also important for there to be relevant content on the webpage that relates back to the keyword and ad that the visitor originally clicked. If you dump all of your visitors to the same generic webpage it will result in a poor quality score.

Quality Score – This is the magical calculation that search engines use to determine how much you pay per click and where your ad ranks on the search result page. Each search engine uses a different formula and since the pay per click market is so dynamic it’s always affected by the other advertisers you are competing against.

We could keep going. Negative keywords, dynamic keyword insertion, display url… The complexities of pay per click marketing never end and unless you’re ready to devote the time to understanding this exciting marketplace we highly suggest that you seek the services of a professional. pssst! Here’s a good place to start.

Questions? Opinions? Leave us a note in the comment section or at social@ltwo.com

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