In our previous article on creating a strong email campaign, we went over some strategies to craft enticing subject lines and engaging email content. While these pieces of content are the core elements of an email campaign, they can go much further if you supplement them with a few additional techniques. From email tracking to calls to action and brand consistency, below we’ll discuss how you can fine-tune your email campaign to maximize its engagement and conversion.

Email Tracking

You should be tracking as much information about your campaign as you can, and a great place to start is pixel tracking. Pixel tracking allows you to see if someone has opened an email or not, and if they have, it lets you know how long they were on the page. This is done by using a small pixel hidden in the email that tracks if it is viewed. You can use this tool to track how many people are using a discount code or to determine which of your email headers and content has the best results when it comes to opening and read through.

Calls to Action

Crafting the Call

One important part of great email marketing campaigns is having a call to action—a place where you ask your customers to take a specific step as the result of your email campaign. This might be as simple as having them visit your online store, buy a ticket for an event, take a survey, or anything that you hold as a goal. Ask yourself, “What do I want the readers to do?” and use this to craft a response. Keep it simple and brief with actions like “Shop Now”, “Purchase Here”, “Donate Here”, or “Please Take Our Survey”.

Building a Landing Page

If you are looking to do something unique, consider crafting a landing page that takes your customers directly to a unique page on a website. There, you can have unique content crafted specifically for the purpose of your email campaign. For example, you can create a survey landing page that directs anyone with positive results to a link where they can leave a review. On the other hand, if you do not want to use a landing page, you can use something like a specific discount code that can be tracked. The more the sense of urgency you create, the more effective your campaign can be.

Brand Consistency

Keeping it Simple

Your emails should also have brand consistency, which is where graphic design can play a huge role. Make sure that your email templates make use of your brand’s colors, fonts, and overall visual style. If you want to include infographics, make sure they adhere to your brand’s design aesthetic as well. You want to make sure that you do not have differing colors or bizarre logos that do not fit the spirit of your company.

Using the Fundamentals

Don’t forget to consider fundamental design principles as well. You want to make sure that your emails present information efficiently and in a pleasing manner, visually guiding your customers from the header to the content and finally to the call to action. You can also use stock images in the email as long as you make sure they also fit your brand guidelines for maximum effectiveness.

There is a long list of things to consider when it comes to effectively creating an email campaign that elicits the response you want. An effective email campaign should grab the attention of customers right away, inspire them to take action, and retain their interest throughout the duration of the campaign.

In this two-part series of articles, we will go over a few key strategies that will help ensure you have the most effective campaign and the highest conversion rate possible. Below, we’ll begin with the email content and subject line.

The Subject Line & Pre-Header

Crafting the Subject

One very important thing you will want to focus on is the subject line and the pre-header. The subject line is used by every email provider, so you will want to make sure that you find an effective way to condense the essence of your email into just a few words. Generally, people will decide if they want to open the email or not based on the subject line. So the goal is to catch their attention and keep it without seeming spammy or unprofessional (i.e., avoid using all caps, punctuation, and other over-the-top tactics).

Tracking the Subject

You should also be keeping a list of all your email subject lines used so you can track which ones have the largest impact and what times are most effective to send them out. Many experts find the early morning to be the most effective, because that will allow your message to be the first thing your customers read in the morning when they get to work and check their email.

Considering the Pre-Header

Another item related to the subject line is the pre-header. Many email providers such as Gmail place this element next to the subject line to provide customers with more information (this is the little grey text next to the subject). The pre-header can be especially effective on mobile devices, where notification bars can also provide a little more information on the content through the pre-header. It should let readers know exactly what to expect.

The Content

Creating Customer Engagement

The content of the email itself should also be tracked, as it is one of the most important components for anyone that has clicked into the email and is deciding what their next step will be. Create content that you would want to read yourself, and consider the specific interests and sensibilities of your customer base. You will want to make sure that you decide exactly what your content will be ahead of time, whether it’s a deal of some sort, a special availability, an event that is ongoing, or a new product or service.

Retaining Customer Engagement

If you can regularly create quality content, email services like Gmail will push your emails to the top of your customers’ inboxes. Your customers will make it a habit to click the email blasts you send if they know that they can always expect something unique. If you can provide a way to track the effectiveness of this content, even better.

The Template

You will also want to use a consistent template for your email campaigns that includes links to your social media accounts. This will provide further connectivity and increase the overall effectiveness of your email campaigns. This template should provide contact info as well as a call to action for your customers to take advantage of whatever you are using your email campaign to promote. This will ensure that you don’t waste any conversion opportunities.

Templates are also an excellent way to create consistent branding in your email campaigns. We will be taking a closer look into this in our next article, which will cover brand consistency, email tracking and calls to action.

Looking for a better way to promote your business? Consider contacting tekRESCUE today to see how we can help!

Does it matter where we come from to get to where we are today? When it comes to visitors to your website, the answer is a resounding “yes.” A website is like a storefront in a busy downtown intersection—each visitor could have used any number of roads to get there. As the owner of this storefront, you’d want to bring in as many visitors as possible, from as many roads as possible. On the web, however, it takes different design techniques to drive different types traffic, and if you haven’t been designing with each traffic source in mind, you may be missing out on all sorts of visitors.

Today, we’ll be going over these types of web traffic and offering some tips you can use to better design your site to generate as much traffic as possible of every kind.

Organic Search Traffic

The first type of web traffic we’ll be looking at is organic search traffic. These are visitors that entered keywords into a search engine and clicked on your site in the search results. If you want to design your site to drive as much organic search traffic as possible, this is where search engine optimization (SEO) techniques come into play. Your focus should be on telling search engines what your site is about, and convincing them that your site is a relevant source of information for that topic.

You can give search engines an idea of what your site is about by choosing the right keywords and having those keywords appear in the right places. This includes page titles and headers, meta tags such as title and description, image alt attributes, and simply in the flow of your paragraphs. As we discussed in a previous article, quality content remains the best way to convince search engines that your site is a relevant, credible information source.

The biggest design challenge here is to design for search engines without sacrificing your goals of designing for human visitors. A site stuffed to death with keywords may generate a lot of search traffic, but no visitor will stick around long if the site isn’t designed first and foremost with people in mind. Incorporating your keywords in a way that feels natural and organizing your site’s content clearly will appeal to both the bots and the humans.

If you want to learn more about SEO in-depth, check out some of our other articles on this topic. We’ve covered it pretty extensively on this blog.

Paid Search Traffic

The second type of web traffic on our list is paid search traffic. Organic search traffic gets its name because it happens automatically: a search engine recognizes your site as relevant to someone’s search and feeds it to them on its own accord. Paid search traffic, however, comes into play when you pay for an ad to run on a search engine.

Ads can be very effective, as they usually appear at the top of search results and make your site very visible. This doesn’t guarantee traffic on its own though. To optimize the amount of traffic you get out of a search ad, your best bet is to design your ad with attractive copy that will draw visitors in and convince them your site really is relevant to their search.

An effective paid search campaign doesn’t end with the ad, however—the page that visitors end up on when they click your ad is equally important. Your goal is to lower bounce rates, or the rate at which visitors leave quickly after making it to your site. Designing an attractive, well-written, easy to navigate landing page is a great way to keep these bounce rates low and draw in new visitors from a search ad campaign.

That’s all we have time for today, but these are only half of the web traffic sources we want to cover. Come back next month to read part two, where we’ll be going over referrals and direct traffic!

Ads are made to generate business, at the end of the day. It can be hard to know which one will work best. That is why you use A/B testing. In this series we’ve covered a few ways to track ad performance, but another thing to consider is overall conversion.

Traffic Analyzers

We went over using unique domains to track ad effectiveness in the last article, but for those using mainly online ads, there is also the option to use a traffic analyzer on your site. This is something often done for those using SEO, online ad campaigns, or marketing in general. When using this method, you can actually see the URL of where people came from when they clicked on your website. So if they came from a friend’s site, you will see that. If it comes from a specific ad, there are ways to check that. And many ad networks also provide analytics, which can be utilized to get exact information. This is helpful because, while together you are selecting the best content for your ad, on the back-end it still must be decided where the best place to put those ads will be. But there is more to an ad campaign than just seeing how many visitors you get. That is why it is also important to go over cost-per-click, and ultimately cost-per-conversion.

Tracking Conversions

Ads that generate customers is the ultimate goal. One way to do this is when someone visits one of your “advertisement domains,” track what they do on your site with a cookie. This will tell you if they ended up contacting you or buying a product. Data analytic software can tell you where they came from, but this will tell you what they did when they arrived. If you are using unique URLs and numbers that are only advertised on that one ad, there is an easier way using simple arithmetic, though it is not for tracking precise customers. So if you have 20,000 people viewing your ad, 500 people clicking on your site, 50 contacting you, and 10 of those buy products or services, then you will have actual numbers to compare with other ads.

Weighing the Best Ads

From there, you need to decide how that ad network charges you. Some do cost-per-view, and they charge a set amount for every thousand clicks. Other sites charge for every click you get. So one may charge you $5 for every thousand views, meaning that 20k views is $200. And cost-per-click may be 15 cents per click, so you pay $75 for those 500 clicks. Potential customers, the 50 that contacted you, can be hard to quantify. But the 10 who did buy something are much easier to quantify. If half of them bought a $100 product you have, and the other half bought a year of your lawn mowing service for $100 a month, you are looking at $6500. This data tells you several things. One, that cost-per-click will be cheaper in this instance. Second, that the services you should be advertising are the lawn mowing, not the lawn mower itself that you sell. So now you will know this ad works, and what you should focus on next time. If another ad had twice the views and clicks, but half of the results, that tells you to stop focusing on that ad. A/B testing is truly a process of elimination.

If you would like more information about how to use conversion rates and analytics in your marketing campaign, contact tekRESCUE in San Marcos, TX.

Do you remember the ad for Head-On? “Head-On–Apply directly to the forehead.” It likely qualifies among the top of the list for most annoying ads. But guess what? People remember it. And it is guaranteed that the process to choose that specific ad was a meticulously researched decision. A/B testing is creating several different ads, so that you can compare them. This first article will go over ways to test the results.

Tracking Sources

An old trick, when TV ads dominated the center of any marketing campaign, was to have several different phone lines, and for each type of ad or channel being used to have unique contact information for each ad. Originally it was numbers and P.O. boxes for each one. And eventually, starting in the mid 1990’s, having unique website names along with phone numbers became a tracking source.

Using One Website to Track Ads

Using a Subdomain to Track Unique Ad Interactions

Examples: ad1.tekrescue.com, ad2.tekrescue.com, ad3.tekrescue.com

Using subdomains makes people more likely to enter in the entire domain name as it is, compared to entering entire domain folders (tekrescue.com/example), so you can use one website for all of them. But instead of “ad1”, name it something related to what the advertisement is showcasing. For example, seo.tekrescue.com, search.tekrescue.com, or google.tekrescue.com. This way it isn’t implied that you have a huge amount of different ads because you’ve used “ad41” and avoided giving away how many ads there are.

Using Domain Folders To Track Analytics and Conversion

Examples: tekrescue.com/service1, tekrescue.com/service2 or tekrescue.com/searchcoupon, tekrescue.com/seocoupon

The reason that coupons are used here as one of the examples was that many readers will often ignore anything after the slash. So instead of example.com/free they will just remember “example.com” if they visit the site. But a coupon gives them a reason to go to the specific page you wanted them to visit.

Using Different Websites

Using different websites can be a great option to make sure you know the true source of web traffic. You can either have identical sites and just change the branding, or have each different domain redirect to your main business domain.

Using Identical Sites

The first method would be using “techdoctor.com, PCfix.com, and ComputerRescue.com,” having one for each ad, and each website is pretty much the same except for the title and branding. The customers would stay on that URL.

Using Redirects

The other option is having “codingking.com, webdev.com, and appbuilders.com,” but they all go to the same website. Either it redirects and they end up at tekrescue.com instead of what they typed, or they end up at tekrescue.com, but the browser reads “webdev.com” as the URL they entered.

What These Methods Achieve

The reason you use these different domains is so that each ad has a unique domain. That way you can take the guessing out of which ads work best. If one of your ads is proven as 200% more effective than the second most effective then you know to focus on that ad and similar ones. And it doesn’t just have to be online ads you track with this. You can also have domains and numbers for newspaper, radio, TV, and local ads with unique domains.

If you would like more information about tracking your marketing campaign results, contact tekRESCUE in San Marcos, TX.

Your landing page informs what your purpose, services or offerings are. It does this by walking them through the purpose of the organization, into the general services or purpose behind them, and then into the application of those services. Then depending on the organization, there should be an area for a contact box, an estimate form, or a number/email address to connect and interact with you, the owner. We have previously covered these things, but today we go over other potential sections.

There are other things that can be optionally included, such as a small about us page, a testimonial page, or a small portfolio page. These can be smaller than the rest, or all included together in a row. But if you do include an About Us section on the landing page, and also have a separate stand-alone page for About Us, include a link to the full section. Just include the most important information to your brand. This might mean saying how many years you have been in operation, why you started, what you do, the years of experience on your team, how you’ve helped people and any anything else that you as the owner and operator find to be the most important pieces of information.

A testimonial page can be effective, especially with a proper landing page. If the website kept the visitor there and gave them the information or answer(s) they needed or got them interested, then some well placed examples of real customers that benefited from your help can be great to give them reason to contact you or buy your product. A great place to get testimonials is from asking people who have already left you positive reviews on Google or Facebook for a website testimonial. Or just ask their permission to use their review. The effective use of one should add to the flow of the landing page, informing, driving traffic and connecting your potential customers.

If you “create” anything, than a portfolio page would be well-advised. Whether it is your photos you’ve taken, the buildings you have built, whatever it is you create, if the website is mainly about that, then you should definitely consider adding it to the landing page.

There are types of websites that may differ from this formula, however. For example, a personal resume website wouldn’t need to list out the services they offer. And a personal resume website doesn’t always need multiple pages, the landing page may be enough. For that, the idea of breaking down categories into sections, and having an intro and a contact section still stand. But instead of what listing “Catering, Menu and Online Ordering” as your sections, you can have “Resume(employment history), Portfolio, About and Contact”. If you do not have a portfolio, instead you could have a section for skills or references. And an online sales website, may want to use their intro section to advertise flash sales. If you are hosting a non-profit, it will not be your services you will advertise for sale. But rather, the good your organization does, and what donors can expect their money to be used on.

Designing a website correctly can be difficult, but with the proper team behind you it should be able to generate customers and visitors alike.

In this series, we continue our look at what makes an effective landing page. We have previously gone over design philosophy and the intro section. In this article we cover listing what you do, and contact forms. Basically how to inform and connect to your potential visitors and customers.

Sections for Listing Your Services

Landing page designers can set this up in several ways. One way is to have one initial section with a row of images and descriptions of what you do. Then from there one option is to have an individual section for each type of service. For example, Lawn Maintenance could have one for lawn maintenance, lawn design, and cleanup service having their own section.

Alternatively, you could skip the general one that lists all, and just have each category have it’s own section. If you do a huge range of things, then find ways to break them down into categories. Then each category can be used to go into the specifics that they fall under. You should use each section, essentially, as advertisement and a way to provide a reason that people should hire you. This might mean describing how it can help build your business or help your customers.

For example, in the Catering section, there may be 3 little taglines. One could advertise how many people you can service. The second could advertise how many options you can provide, and that you can provide to specific needs like vegetarian, seafood, brisket or options for anything in between. The third could advertise that you have a service area of 100 miles or that you could offer buffet-style.

Make sure to clearly mark each section so that visitors can easily differentiate between information they need and information they don’t. Sometimes it is best to also include a link for each section that has a corresponding page. Anything that needs to be tailored to the client can be directed to a separate contact page that is used for getting quotes.

Contact Box, Call to Action or Contact Info

The final thing that should always be included, is a means of getting in touch with you. Think of the rest of the sections as a way to lead the clients to the final goal, contacting you. The introduction tells the visitors about what your company does, the first service section will list off what you do so they can look for the one they need, and the following sections will go into more details over them. Then finally after they know what type of company you are, what all you do, then more info on what they are looking for, the final step is to put them in touch with you. One can do this in several different ways.

Most websites will have a contact page, so the specific section does not need to have everything the page does. For box and mortar stores, a phone number and a map would be best for the bottom of the landing page. But for someone who, for example, does construction, then at the bottom a small form for contacting you or getting a quote would be the best use of space, and maybe a number and an email address. If you are selling something digital, say an iPhone application, then a call to action is the best for you. “Click here to pre-order our app”, “Download Our App Today”, or “Experience X For Yourself”.

“First impressions are everything”, says the age old adage. When a customer visits your website’s homepage, they will immediately make a judgement call on if the website matches what they are looking for. This means that you have about 30 seconds to get and keep their attention. It’s like the internet’s version of window shopping. When you are in a mall, you are going to look into the window of a store to get the intent of what they offer and what they do.

A website should exist to inform and then connect visitors with you. This comes from our mission statement as a company to make technology that works for you and enhances your life. And our website design stems from this philosophy. It should be easy to use, simple, and elegant. In this series we will be looking at how to effectively use a landing page for increasing visitor interaction and retention and turning those visitors into actual customers.

What Should a Landing Page Include?

The first thing we will look at is what is important enough to include on a landing page, as the more cluttered the more likely the visitor will back out before they read the info that would have kept them on the site. Keep in mind that this isn’t a 100% rule, and that there will be exceptions. For example, there may be differences between what a restaurant, a non-profit, and a lawn care company would want to provide.

There are also different types of visitors. A returning customer may be simply looking for a phone number to call, or looking to order online. The landing page should make some consideration of that. This doesn’t apply to most businesses, but for those that it does should keep that in mind. For a phone number, that can be on the bottom of the page, but for quicker access be put on a page that has a link in the menu.

The Introduction Section

• Sliders
• Company Name w/ Background Image
• Logo w/ Short Description

The first section should quickly explain the type of organization you are and the types of services you use. This is the first impression, and it needs to be clean, uncluttered, and effective in communicating the core essence of your brand. If you decide to use a slider, then you have the option of advertising temporary sales and new offers and removing them later. The first slider can explain your company, the second and third the categories of services you offer(for a restaurant, 2 could be your menu or drink selection and 3 could be your catering), and then any temporary offers should be put last.

If you use a backdrop, venues should use a picture of their place of business, service companies can use a stock picture of their industry. Over the backdrop should be your logo, with a link to either get in touch or more about what you do. These images should be in line with the branding you use. Things a company should not put here, include overly specific info about employees, too much information, or cluttered sections explaining every tab. Instead of information about specific employees, you can have information about the company in general. There are some exceptions to this, which we go into in the next article.

If you’re looking for professional website design for businesses in Austin & San Marcos TX, consider contacting tekRESCUE today to see how we can help! 

With the right copy backing up your website, you have given your content a fighting chance to actually command the kind of influence that it has the potential to achieve. The internet is full of content that simply floats about without the slightest semblance of purpose or cohesiveness, and in that static noise of irrelevance and and aimless, copy that is both relevant and well-formulated manages to cut through with a striking level of conspicuous brilliance. Simply put, having relevant copy is necessary if you want have your website and the brand that it stands for done justice.

The exact kind of copy that you’re going to need in order to bring out the full power of your website to make an impact will naturally depend on exactly what category your content is in, but no matter what that category may be, there are a number of universal benefits that truly good copy will always bring to the table for those who are willing to either invest in it or learn how to create it themselves. The following are some of the biggest ways that well-written, relevant copy can help your website’s performance improve substantially.

More Enticement To Share Your Website’s Content

The stronger and tighter that your relevant content is, the better of a chance that you’ll have at enticing all of your visitors to share that content with their own social networks. Strong copy doesn’t simply tell the reader a message, but actively engages them to the point that they’ll feel compelled to talk about it. Relevant copy is the kind of copy that provides contextually fitting value, and with the presentation of that value comes the natural compulsion for all who find it useful to promote it to like-minded people.

Higher Conversions

If you want your website’s proposition to turn into sales, then you need the kind of copy that’s going to have a call to action with genuine impact. Relevant copy is effective at breaching the walls of well-developed skepticism that modern digital media consumers have and giving them the confidence to invest in new things. Through relevant copy, your content entertains, educates and resonates with the target reader before asking a sale; because of this, your power to see that sale get made successfully is increased tenfold.

Repeat Visitors Turning Into Promoters

The level of trust that relevant copy can inspire in your target readers isn’t just valuable in terms of your brand’s reputation, but also in terms of its objective monthly traffic. It isn’t just more unique visitors that you want, but a consistent follower base that regularly engages with your content and brings new unique visitors in. By developing a stronger relationship with your core followers through relevance, you’ll be turning those followers into promoters who voluntarily raise brand awareness and keep the website alive with constant presence.

Higher Search Engine Ranking

Naturally, a higher flow of revolving traffic and more links to your website created through sharing promoters is going to provide a good deal of high-value SEO power. The longer and more consistently that you employ relevant copy, the better of chance you’ll have to make your website visible on the front page for keywords related to its niche.

What is Conversion Rate Optimization?

Most people believe they need more traffic to their site in order to get more business, however this is not technically the case. If a business increases their conversion rate, they can increase profits without having to buy extra advertising to increase traffic. What is conversion rate optimization, or CRO? To put it simply, CRO is a system put in place to increasing the rate at which visitors who visit your site are converted into customers (or taking any desired action you may be seeking). Basically, by optimizing your website, you increase your chances of increasing conversions for whatever action you are looking for visitors to take; may it be purchasing your product, reading a blog, or downloading a file.

The nice thing about conversion optimization is that it doesn’t require huge changes to your site, like redesigning the whole thing or rewriting all the copy. Instead, it’s all about small changes made over a period of time that can lead to a major increase in your overall conversions. These changes may be something as simple as replacing an image, increasing font size, or even just changing up the wording to your call to action. Because of these change styles however, conversion optimization is more of a continuous, ongoing operation. It requires a lot of trial and error to see what changes work, and what does not. Don’t fret though if your changes cause a negative impact on your CRO because they can be easily reverted and you can move on to try something new.

Focus

When it comes to being successful in your CRO process, there are three things you should focus on:

• Focus on improving your overall product

• Focus on improving your marketing

• Focus on giving your customers the best possible experience

Simply put, in order to be successful and remain that way, you need to focus on the customer and continuous improvement.

The Customer

In order to be successful, you need to understand your customer. Why are they coming to your site? They must be at least somewhat curious in your brand or else they’d be looking at one of your competitors. Your job is to convert their interest in your site to them buying from you, or taking whatever action you are looking for. This is where you will use a persuasion process. This process has three questions you need to be able to answer:

• Who? Who are you trying to persuade? Do you understand your target audience? The more you know about your T.A., the easier it is to sell to them. You should be able to understand what they like, what they’re interested in, what their dislikes are, and so forth, so you can improve your overall product, marketing, website, and more!

• What do you want? What action do you want your website visitors to take? This needs to be very clear. It can be something as simple as clicking on a link, or subscribing to a newsletter. You should be able to create a clear path for them to follow in order to take these actions. If you want to increase your conversion rate, you need to guide the customers to the final destination because if it is too difficult to figure out they may give up and move on to your competitor.

• What do they want? Now that you know what you want visitors to do when they get to your site, you need to understand what actions they want to take. In the end, the customer is the one who has overall control of their experience on your site, however you can occasionally steer them towards the actions you’d like them to take. If they have visited your site, they likely have a purpose for doing so, meaning they have an end goal in mind. It’s your job to figure out what this goal is. Once you have determined all the possible actions visitors may want to take, as well as their goals, you need to figure out a way to help them towards achieving that goal or action. It may not line up to be the action you wanted them to take, but it will help you have satisfied customers, which should in fact be one of your goals as a business.

In conclusion, conversion optimization is one of the most effective ways to gradually increase your profits from your website. It allows you to avoid spending more money on advertising in order to get more traffic by continuously improving your website so that the customer experience is improved at the same time. Think of it as creating a new lifestyle for your site, rather than one single change or push. If you are looking for help with improving your conversion rate, talk to the experts at tekRESCUE about the changes that can be made to your website!

The squeeze pages you use for offers must be perfectly-executed if you wish to convert sales. There are six tips in this article, and the article explains how you may use each tip to your advantage. You will find yourself earning quite a bit more money when your squeeze pages have been fine-tuned for performance, and you will be pleasantly-surprised as you make more money than you ever have in the past.

#1: Offer Less

You must not convince yourself that offering the world to a customer converts sales. You must offer a tangible sum for a new program, but you should not give your customers too much. They will be happy with anything you offer, and you will save money as you reduce the amount you are giving away on each conversion.

#2: Ensure The Page Matches Your Ideals

You cannot create a squeeze page that looks nothing like something your business would create. Your customers will be a little more than confused, and you will find yourself apologizing for the poor design of the page. Your most ardent customers will complain about the sensational design, and those who have not shopped with you before will assume your squeeze page is a phishing attempt.

#3: Use Fewer Fields In Your Forms

You must not force new customers to fill out a form that is a mile long. Ask for the least amount of information possible, use that information to convert sales and you will instantly see more people asking for information. The form fields will turn off customers who do not have much time on their hands, and the forms will begin to get out of control if you have not handled them properly.

#4: Use Splash Pages

Splash pages are much more desirable than pop-ups, and they look much more attractive. Internet users hate pop-ups, but they will accept a dedicated page for your new campaign. They will be taken to a new page on your website when they arrive, but an attractive page will help convert sales as you have shown that you worked hard on it for the customer’s benefit. Create better splash pages to avoid pop-ups.

#5: Write A Better Call To Action

Your call to action must work into your reward. You cannot ask your customers to be happy with the idea of being your customer. You must speak to your customers about the reward that they are receiving, and you must speak of the reward often. Customers enjoy receiving rewards, and your emphasis on rewards will help convert sales that you would not have seen otherwise.

#6: Track Your Traffic

Your squeeze pages must have tracking attached. You must learn how many people visit the page, and you must subtract the number of forms you receive from the total number of visits. You will quickly learn how effective the page is, and you will avoid problems with a page that does not produce the results you were looking for.

The six tips here will help you create squeeze pages that truly convert sales. You need not waste your time with antiquated ideas of marketing. Graduate to something new and different with each of the six steps.

Search Engine Optimization is an ever-changing field, and we do our best to stay up with the latest trends and changes to help ensure that we’re helping–not hurting–clients’ websites. We focus primarily on optimizing for Google because that’s where the lion’s share of traffic comes from. While Google’s exact algorithm is kept under lock-and-key, we know the basics that help a website rank better for desired keywords. We look at things such as on-page optimization, interlinking and crawlability, content freshness & relevance, the list goes on.

Two important, and often-overlooked, factors for ranking are click-through-rates and bounce-rates. we’e going to explain each factor in-depth and explain why they’re important factors in Google’s eyes. Before we begin, put yourself in the shoes of those who run Google… Their end-goal is to provide users with exactly the content they’re looking for quickly. This leads to a good user experience, which brings people back to the search engine over and over. When people visit and use Google, Google can sell and monetize ad space in their search results, which brings in more money. It’s a win-win-win: The users win because they find the info they need, Google wins because they sell ad space, and advertisers win because they are able to precisely target people with a need they can fill. Let’s take a look at two quality factors that Google uses to determine how well the content they serve up is what people are searching for.

Click-Through Rate

Click-through rate can be described in straightforward terms: it’s the number of times a listing is viewed versus how many time it’s clicked. So this means that if you’re on the first page of a Google search engine results page (Google SERP) for a keyword that receives 1000 searches per month, and your listing is clicked 100 times during the month, you have a CTR of 10% (please note: to keep things straight-forward we’re assuming that everyone scrolls down the page to see all 10 results, so this example doesn’t factor in results that are “below the fold”). If Google starts to notice that a certain listing is getting clicked on more than the others (a higher CTR) it will often reward that listing with a higher position.

There are two important nuggets to take away from this.

The first: The Top 3 results for any keyword generally have an advantage over lower results. It’s no secret that the top three results often get the most clicks… think about your own searching habits–how often do you find yourself clicking on the first, second, or third result, instead of scrolling down to look at others?

The second: It is important to take the time to properly optimize your page titles and meta descriptions. The page title is the big blue link at the start of each result listing in Google, and is the most eye-catching part of the results (aside from pictures and star-ratings). The meta description is the snippet of text below the blue title and green URL. Many people don’t set these, so Google has to make do with pulling content from the page itself. This can lead to random snippets of sentences, truncated titles, random words in the listings and more–all of which can hurt your click-through rate.

Our Recommendation: If you use a WordPress site, be sure to install an SEO plugin such as Yoast on your site. When you’re editing your pages and posts you’ll be able to set the page title and meta-description as it will appear in Google’s SERPs. Make your headlines and meta-description content attractive and intriguing to entice visitors to click. However, don’t mislead people, because it can hurt the bounce rate, which we’ll look at next.

Bounce Rate

If someone visits your website by clicking on your listing in Google, skims the your page, decides it’s not what they’re looking for, clicks the back button, and continues browsing through Google’s results for a different site, Google takes notice. The act of visiting a page, then leaving without browsing other pages is what’s known as a bounce. High bounce rates on a page are a good indicator to Google that the listing doesn’t help people searching for particular information, so they’ll push the result down in the listings in favor of other pages with lower bounce rates.

However, what about pages that provide the exact information a user is searching for? What if they visit the page, are satisfied with the information presented, then carry on their day without clicking around more on your site? Fortunately Google is pretty good at not punishing pages for this type of reason. The algorithm looks at bounce metrics and visit duration methods across similar pages for similar keywords, so it is able to smartly identify about how long the typical visit/bounce-rate is, and adjust accordingly.

Our Suggestion: Ensure that the content on your landing page is entertaining or informative, and that it is engaging enough to keep people on the page for a few minutes, or browse around further. If you have a high bounce rate (install an analytics script such as Google Analytics or Clicky to view this kind of data), consider rewriting, adding more content or pictures… and video is a great way to boost retention and engagement!

If you’re looking for SEO services in Austin or San Marcos, TX, contact us at tekRESCUE to discuss your needs today! We’ll analyze your current site and make suggestions, and we’ll be happy to roll out tweaks and content that can help boost your website’s rankings in the search engines.