At a recent webinar Rick Carlson CEO of SharpSpring talked with Neil Patel on conversion optimisation – in other words getting a positive outcome from engaging with your target audience. I wanted to summarise Neil’s thoughts here to help others consider his advice.
- Go Omni-channel – the number of platforms from which traffic can be sent has increased – if each one of them add 5% to your traffic and you can afford it – use as many as possible
- On content writing, leading global agencies spend 80% of their effort on the content headline
- How far should you go to find each 1% increase in traffic or conversions?
- Simply ‘all the way’ – if chasing cart abandonment adds a 5% increase in conversions, do it. If sending auto-respond emails to enquiries gives another 1% do that too. Keep mining for conversions and try everything
- Winning via original content is hard. Neil believes there are over 1 billion text blogs publishing content which Google will index.
- For your keywords, look at the top ten results and use those as a benchmark to compete. If you content isn’t at least as good or better you won’t rank with Google
- Search platforms have to give priority to their users experience – nobody will keep using their platform if the sites they send users to are poor – even if they are paid adverts. Search platforms will now rank the ‘user experience’, in other words the steps a person takes from their click, to the destination site and onwards, to decide which sites are ‘good’ for users
- Content tips
- Personalise content as far as possible – not easy with a big audience, but find ways to segment people and deliver content that appeals to their personal interests
- Educate: be generous with your knowledge, teaching and guiding has value
- Be conversational – treat the reader as the other party in a two way conversation
- Text based email gets better deliverability, by global email platforms (in his experience)
- Email
- Email which arrives in an Inbox which is never touched (opened, clicked, deleted) is down-scored by delivery platforms like Outlook, Gmail and others. If the sender keeps delivering email which is ignored, the delivery platforms begin to consider the sender as a spammer, and as a result your emails will not reach their recipient
- Maintaining ‘deliverability’ for a list is even more important than before, SharpSpring has tools to push senders towards best practise including the engagement score, positive opt-in, GDPR opt-in, automatic Unsubscribes and others
- Starting out on a conversion campaign
- Look for keywords with good search volume, more than 1000 a month – low volume keywords won’t generate traffic
- Look for higher costs per click – that means the keywords have value and ought to generate conversions (or clicks)
- The depth and quality of content works better than simple paid ads to landing pages – link the two in your approach
- Look for case studies on conversion optimisation from sources all over the web. Keep digging and reading and the best practise techniques will be evident – for free
- Don’t treat SEO as a one time short term win. It can take two or three years to see big long term gains
- Try everything – a series of small gains adds up to long term success
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