If you are selling products online, you need to have landing pages instead of simply directing customers to your website’s home page. Why is this? It’s because your home page has to do many things – tell customers about your entire business and your entire product lines along with creating an atmosphere that tells the story of your business.

A specific product can get lost on a home page. Landing pages give you one place to direct customers to when they are searching for something particular. A great landing page creates a seamless flow to the product page from the ad or other point of entry that the customer used to get to the landing page. It should all feel like a natural extension of the same campaign.

Conversion rate optimization is all about finding out how to utilize landing page design to get people who visit your site and turn them into customers. But how do you do this? At eVisible, we use our years of experience to help customers develop powerful landing pages for their websites. Here are just a few of the practices that we’ve found can seriously improve a company’s website conversion rate:

BOOSTING CONVERSION RATES CAN BE A LAUGHING MATTER

Too many times, marketing experts translate their serious need to boost their conversion rates to the types of marketing they do. While it’s important to focus on letting customers know how you will solve their specific problems, this doesn’t mean that you can’t use humor to do it. In fact, when done correctly, a humorous marketing campaign can make deep connections with customers and lead to extremely successful viral campaigns.

Here are just a few of the ways that you can use humor in your marketing campaign with an eye on boosting conversion rates:

Use the truth: Customers often expect to get marketing speak and fluffy but pointless copy when they read a website or ad campaign. You can shock them out of this by appealing to them truthfully. Admit that your breath mint won’t cure athlete’s foot, make them wealthy or help them to marry a supermodel, but that it will make their breath smell better.

A matter of extremes: You can also take the opposite approach to attacking your conversion rate. Use playful exaggeration to showcase exactly how great your product is or counteract the claims of your competitors.

Two things that shouldn’t go together: Much comedy consists of humorous situations that arise when two things that should never go together suddenly come together. Think about Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” going somewhere like the opera. You can use incongruities to showcase key elements of your product.

The power of real people: Sometimes all you need to do to create compelling content is let real people be themselves. Some of the most powerful stories can come from customers or employees in unscripted settings talking about the strengths of your company and your products.

Parody for fun and profit: Don’t be afraid to make fun of elements of your business or your industry to make your point. Customers – even those within your industry – want to laugh at familiar things. They even don’t mind laughing at themselves if it’s done right.

Just have fun: Sometimes the best conversion tools are just plain fun. This can be a simple video game, a coloring book or some other fun gadget on your site that attracts attention.

SQUEEZE PAGES DON’T HAVE TO BE A DRAG

Squeeze pages aren’t listings for anacondas that are available to rent at children’s parties. They are landing pages that are specifically designed to solicit opt-in email addresses from potential subscribers. These emails can be used to send out newsletters, email announcements or prospect for new clients. However, just giving away some free information with the promise of more “if you send us your email” doesn’t work – people are just too jaded and protective of their privacy to give up their information.

Instead, you need to be sophisticated with how you construct your squeeze page. It needs to address a specific topic that you know your customers are interested in – in many cases, you want to propose a solution to a common problem. If you can back this up with specific numbers of how you solved the problem, this provides more credibility to your claims.

You need to construct the squeeze page thoughtfully. Start with a powerful headline that speaks to a customer’s problems. Add a call-to-action near the top that lets people know what to expect from the site. Informative videos can help to capture people’s interest. Make sure that you have several ways for people to opt-in at different points on the page. In short, give them a reason to opt-in and there’s a good chance that they will.

FIND YOUR UNIQUE VALUE PROPOSITION AND RUN WITH IT

Studies show that you only have 10 seconds to convince a customer to dig deeper into your website. This means that you have to hook them quickly if you want to convert clicks to cash. The best way to do this is to clearly communicate the Unique Value Proposition of your business – that is, what makes your company a clear choice ahead of your competitors.

How can you do this? Here are a few things to consider:

• Think about what you want customers to feel about your business and convey that immediately.
• Use language that addresses the customer directly and that avoids marketing slogans and jargon.
• Along with discussing the features of your products, lay out how these features will benefit the customer.
• Use real world examples of benefits and uses whenever possible.
• Don’t use tired superlatives touting your business – no one believes these things unless you can back them up with proof.
• Understand the problems that have led customers to search for your company and address these problems – and your solutions to these problems – head on.

Once you have a Unique Value Proposition identified, make that a key component of your entire website. From your home page to individual product pages, reinforce this value proposition over and over again. You should even do this on action pages such as shopping carts to ensure that you close sales. And make sure that you evaluate what your competitors are doing – if their value propositions are vastly different than yours, it’s a sign that either you or them are not connecting with your customers.

Remember that context matters just as much as content when it comes to landing pages. You need to make sure that customers understand exactly how your products will benefit them in real-world terms. Telling them how you can help them is one thing – showing them is something far more powerful. No matter how you attack it, a powerful landing page is the best way to show customers what you are all about.

Search marketing is about more than just achieving the highest page ranks for your web pages. Getting ranked on the first page of a Google search isn’t useful if a customer isn’t given a compelling reason to click on your link. This is one of the main reasons that doing semantic markups on your website is important even though they are not a ranking factor with Google.

A semantic markup is the adding of HTML markups to your web pages that give Google clues about the context of its content. In many cases, this takes on the form of rich snippets of text, photos and other information designed to give readers more information about what is on a particular web page and who is responsible for it. While it won’t result in a higher search engine results page (SERP) listing, it can play major dividends for your click-through rate (CTR). The reported increase in click-throughs for results with rich snippets is an average of 15 percent.

For this reason, adding semantic markups to your web is one of the steps that eVisible recommends for our clients. Our website development and consulting services go beyond just achieving better search results and focus on improving your ability to connect with new clients. Semantic markups are a great way to increase your visibility with little extra effort required.

If you are not doing semantic markups on your site, you need to start. Here are four of the most basic types of semantic markups that you should consider implementing right away:

Breadcrumbs

Think of breadcrumbs as a way to let web users quickly navigate your website. Instead of just your home page coming back in a result, end users can see links to very specific landing pages. This can direct them to the areas on your site you are most interested in showing off and cut down the amount of clicks between them and a sale.

Facebook Open Graph

An Open Graph markup allows you to connect your web pages to Facebook’s social graph. This means that you can control how your web page is displayed when a link to it is used on Facebook or other social media sites. You can create a headline specially designed for social media sites and choose which images will be used when your links are shared.

Rating and Review Information

Give potential customers an idea of what other people think about your business by including ratings and review information in the search results. The rich snippet information can also include the number of reviews – a higher number gives people more confidence – price levels and other product-specific information.

VideoObject Schema

People want to know more about videos that you create before they click on a search result to view them. Including a screenshot and some basic information (description, length, etc.) about a video in the search results can enhance CTRs.

In the modern online world, all businesses are global. Customers from around the world can visit your site, browse your goods and services and contact you for more information or place an order. When you construct your website and create an SEO strategy, it’s important to consider international factors, especially if you plan on doing a significant amount of business with customers from outside of the United States.

Considering the international reach of your site allows you to accomplish two things: you can avoid issues that might harm your site’s SEO in other countries and you can take advantage of opportunities presented by the international reach of your site. Businesses of all sizes can benefit from taking a worldly approach to their SEO audit and considering global elements. Here are some of the things you need to check when evaluating your global website from an SEO standpoint:

Targeting Languages vs. Countries

The world is increasingly becoming a melting pot, and this extends to languages. Many countries have more than one official language. Other countries – such as the US – don’t have an official language but might have many different languages spoken within its borders. Depending on your business goals, you will want your sub-directories, sub-domains and ccTLDs to either be targeted toward specific countries or specific languages, and you’ll want to have a consistent and simple way of doing this throughout your website structure.

In addition, you’ll want to make sure that you remain consistent through on-screen and meta content if you are structuring your pages by country or by language. For example, if you are targeting for languages, you don’t want to have country flags be the icon for making a selection.

Optimizing Structure for International Sites

Each international version of a website needs to have its structure analyzed thoroughly. Website owners need to make sure that it isn’t overly complex or have unnecessary directories while also making sure that the URL names are clear and in the right language for the target audience.

Alignment, Indexing and Crawling Issues for International Web Versions

To further ensure that your structure is correct on the International version of your website, you need to make sure they are crawled and indexed correctly by search engines such as Google – along with local search engines popular in the regions you are targeting. Make sure that you aren’t block language or country versions through your robots.txt or that you are redirecting all crawlers to one version of your site.

Hreflang Annotations

Incorrect Hreflang annotations can directly impact your international search traffic. You need to make sure that you are using the correct language and country code and that you are correctly cross-referencing similar pages on your site with content for other languages or countries.

Webmaster Tools Geolocation Settings

If you are using sub-directories or sub-domains instead of ccTLDs, use the Geographic Tools in Google Webmaster Tools to make sure that you are targeting the correct countries.

Cross-Checking Content

It’s surprisingly easy to have your localized website content be different than what you expect. Make sure that you check each country- or language-specific website version to make sure that the right content is being displayed.

Avoid Cross Linking

Remember that cross-linking pages on various versions of your site can lead to penalties from Google. Avoid doing this as much as possible.

No matter what size your business, if you need to reach an international audience, eVisible can help. Our Internet marketing firm works with companies of all sizes to find online marketing solutions to expand their reach and attract new customers.