Posted by Mike Jessop in Conversion Optimisation | 0 comments
SEO, Landing Pages and A/B Testing!
SEO and Landing Pages go hand in hand when trying to create conversions. Not only is it important to get a page ranking on Google for high volume traffic, it is important to ensure that the page they click on has the best chance you have to getting a conversion. You could have a million visitors a day, but with an horrific landing page you needn’t have bothered doing any SEO.
Equally you could have 20 people visiting your site but if 10+ convert then obviously the page they are landing on is offering them the information/products the needed and therefore gave them the opportunity to complete one of your goals (Goals = Google Analytics). A good SEO strategy is often the balance between ranking well and having a perfect landing page. You cannot achieve both simply because customer usability differs from search engine best practice, the balance is the key to a successful strategy.
How can I achieve the right balance?
Here comes the interesting part……
Achieving the balance is a relatively easy thing to do, the only issue is that it is time consuming and inevitably a long process, with no easy way of testing any quicker. The simple ways are often the best, and this continues with A/B testing.
First of all……..What is A/B testing
A/B testing is essentially (I’ll save you looking on wikipedia) “a method of marketing testing by which a baseline control sample is compared to a variety of single-variable test samples in order to improve response rates. A classic direct mail tactic, this method has been recently adopted within the interactive space to test tactics such as banner ads, emails and landing pages.
Significant improvements can be seen through testing elements like copy text, layouts, images and colors. However, not all elements produce the same improvements, and by looking at the results from different tests, it is possible to identify those elements that consistently tend to produce the greatest improvements” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/B_testing
In Practice, A/B testing allows you to display 2 different web pages and monitor the results. Simply, you can optimize your pages within an inch of their lives, in order to find the best converting page. Google Analytics offers the perfect platform in which to execute this format of A/B testing.
Google Website Optimizer gives you an easy solution to find out the most effective page for your users.
With a couple of clicks and copying and pasting of code, you have a testing environment which gives you evidence about what your users like more, simple indications that people like one page more than another or simply people buy more on one page than another. This form of experiments can be done hundreds and thousands of times to denote the best way to set up your site.
