Archives for 

seo

The Most Entertaining Guide to Landing Page Optimization You’ll Ever Read

Posted by OliGardner

Landing pages rule. Blah.
Homepages suck. Blah.
Do some A/B testing. Blah.
Base your optimization strategy on customer feedback. Blah.

All of those statements are true. But they sound boring and being boring is lame. It’s twenty fourteen and I refuse to be lame.

If you want to be a non-lame marketer, it’s really easy. Read this post, have a laugh, and treat everything I say as gospel.

Be warned, however, that I may descend into telling bad jokes in the absence of witty metaphor and charming anecdotal rhetoric.

The experienced adult readers amongst you might remember that “Shit. The condom broke!” moment. Yeah you do. You might also remember that it felt like a good time to run a test. #STDsArentFunny. Perhaps. But, as we go through this epic journey together today, I’ll show you exactly when and how you should really be testing.

But first. The best 7-part list of bullet points you’ll ever read.

The start of the best part of your day begins now with this table of contents:

  1. First I’ll give you the only rationale you’ll ever need to explain why landing pages are to marketers, what Immodium is to an astronaut with diarrhea. Essential.
  2. I’ll prove why context – not content – is king when it comes to conversion.
  3. Following that, I will make you fall in love with forms. FYI, it’s really, really hard to make form love a “thing”.
  4. Mid way through we’ll sip some Canadian Club, get our Don Draper on, and learn how to write copy like the Mad Men (and Women).
  5. “Paint me a pretty picture Johnny!” “Screw you mommy. Design is not just rainbows and unicorns!”
  6. Is it greedy to want a second helping when you’re an orphan? Not if you have my name. (It’s Oliver in case you’re confused). Always ask for more when it comes to conversion .
  7. And finally, I’ll put my art critic hat on and rip into some landing page examples, both good and bad.

Challenge laid down. Challenge accepted (on your behalf).


Chapter 1: Why landing pages rule, and why you should never send campaign traffic to your homepage

If I’ve got your attention thus far, it’s probably because you can’t bear to tear your eyes away from my enchanting prose.

The only important word in that sentence is ATTENTION.

Attention is a state of mind that you can’t assume your visitors will even enter if you don’t give them the right conversion experience.

A good conversion experience is one in which your visitors are compelled to pay attention and ultimately interact with your conversion goal – clicking the Call-To-Action (CTA).

A bad conversion experience is one in which your visitor is compelled to run away.

There are three sides to attention that we need to consider:

  1. Capturing your visitor’s attention

  2. Maintaining your visitor’s attention

  3. Focusing your visitor’s attention

Your ad covers point #1, and landing pages are the answer to solve numbers 2 and 3, so let’s start with number 2.

Genius Insight #1: attention ratio

Pay attention as I set the scene.

Let’s say you’re running a marketing campaign for a promotion:

“50% off Miley Cyrus Twerkout* DVDs”

* I’m claiming a ™ on that brilliant piece of branding.

Got your attention, right?

Well, let’s see. What is attention ratio?

quote-bubble-attention-ratio.png

(Tweet this quote)

With that in mind, consider the two diagrams below. The first is a typical homepage, and the second is a campaign specific landing page.


The Homepage

On this homepage, your Twerkout campaign is represented by “promo 2” highlighted by the red circle.

The rest of the page is comprised of a few other Miley promotions, some tour dates, navigation, a general brand proposition about how Hanna Montana is no longer a thing, a photo slider, footer navigation and many other page “leaks”.

If you send people to your homepage – from a paid ad, email or social media – the intended campaign conversion goal has to fight to get their attention with all of the other interactive elements on the page.

A typical homepage has approximately 40 links.

In the example opposite there is actually a total of 56 links, therefore:

The attention ratio is 56:1

#puke

Hey, don’t just take my word for it. This overstimulus has impacted many other people’s lives according to Princeton University wuuut!

Princeton neuroscientists found out the more stuff you have around you, the more each piece of stimulation competes for “neural representation”–that is, your attention.

Back to our scientific marketing experiment. Let’s now consider the Twerkout promotion on a dedicated, campaign-specific landing page.


The Landing Page

On a campaign-specific landing page, the entire page is focused on only one thing, the Twerkout DVD campaign.

The messaging is very tightly related to the campaign goal and has only 1 interactive element – the CTA.

The attention ratio is 1:1

#slapmyassandcallmemileythatsgood

Let’s look at an example of someone doing this right. Salesforce is a company with an incredibly complex product offering. Their website is a cacophony of possible pathways.

salesforce-hp.jpg

If you dig deep into the site, their primary goal seems to be to get you signed up for a product demo. Not surprising given the complexity of their software.

So what happens when you search for Salesforce in Google? The first organic result will take you to the homepage. But the first paid ad (right at the top of the page) takes you to a different page entirely. Presumable because you typed in their name and are showing a level of prior knowledge.

The page you arrive at looks like this:

salesforce-lp.jpg

It’s a great landing page. Entirely focused on a single goal. To get you to watch a demo of any of their products. The headline and CTA could use a bit more mention of the purpose of the page (watching a demo). Also, take a look at the button. It’s the same colour as the form container. DON’T DO THAT! Use some contrast Salesforce.

Aside from those things, it’s a really nicely designed, focused experience.

One last example. Where would you look/click in this situation?

peacock1.jpg

How about now?

peacock2.jpg

Got it? Never feed your marketing traffic to a peacock, unless you’ve poked his eyes out.

The feather ones, not his actual eyeballs! Wow, you’re sick.

Genius Insight #2: conversion coupling

You are now 50% of the way to being smarter than 98% of all marketers.

(In good company)

Synergy. That’s what I’m talking about. Uck. What a gross word.

Here’s the second piece of most of almost everything you need to know to be the cleverest person in the room at any marketing conference. Try saying that fast.

quote-bubble-converson-coupling.png

(Tweet this quote)

In more detail it’s comprised of one or more of the following:

  1. Message match: Matching the copy of your ad to the headline of your landing page.

  2. Design match: Matching the design of your display ad to the design on your landing page.

Let’s look at the good and the bad of them.

Message match

To expand, message match is the idea of matching the pre-click message to the post-click message on your landing page, with the goal of making people think they made a “good click”.

The messaging on the page reinforces the reason for their click, reducing/removing confusion.

Here’s an ad for a startup I’ll be working on after Unbounce:

If that link sent you to a homepage, the target headline may look something like this:

Get More Projects Done With Less Management

This may or may not be a good headline for expressing the brand value proposition, but it doesn’t match the ad at all. Result? Bad message match.

The correct headline in this instance would be:

Project Management Software Without Deadlines

Result? It matches the headline of the ad perfectly, and thus it’s great message match. Ding, ding, ding. Got it?

To build really strong message match, use the subhead of your landing page to reiterate the main point of your ad’s description.

This example introduces aspects of a concept called conversation momentum, which I’ll get to in part 2. But basically you can see that the subhead repeats the end of the ad description “Deadlines are dead.” and finishes the sentence like people do when they’re in the gushy part of a relationship “Choose procrastination instead”.

And it rhymes. #doublerainbow

Here are some good and bad examples of message match from the Google

Carrying on the thread, I searched for “Project management software for teams”.

Here’s what I found:

project-management-for-teams-smartsheet-good.jpg

Excellent match for the headline and the form header (Try it Free >> Try Smartsheet For Free).

Let’s do that again:

project-management-for-teams-intuit-bad.jpg

There’s no message match here. I was expecting “Project Management Software” and I got “DIY Custom Apps For Improving Team Productivity.”

Not to mention the attention ratio, which is a whopping 35:1 not including the 40 links in drop-down menus.

Take a look at the page if we remove all of the distractions:

intuit-lp.jpg

So much better! The Attention Ratio is 1:1 and it’s much clearer what you’re supposed to do.

And, going back to the ad:

Why shorten “management” to “mgmt” just to throw both Intuit AND Quickbase in there? To me, that’s brand overload. I like to think of paid ads that are not based on a branded search as needing an application of ” Message Before Brand.” Your brand experience will be introduced after they sign up or through the communication of your page copy. Throwing your name in the ad can waste precious space with a name that people might not be familiar with.

Now I say this based on most companies that don’t have a pervasive brand that could benefit from this tactic. If however you are doing TV ads and a lot of other brand exposure work, then this could be a beneficial tactic to catch people’s eye. But I’d rather add 2-3 more value based words in the headline and relegate the brand name to the 2nd or 3rd row of the ad.

Sidenote: I would love to know some results of this level of branding in paid ads if someone has tested it.

I dare you to search for something that is of importance to your life and do a clickathon. The experiences are shockingly shocking.

So that’s message match!

Boom. Insights. You’re so lucky to be reading this. Next.

Design match

This is one of the easiest techniques to master. Take the design on your display (banner) ad and repeat it on your landing page.

Deep breath.

This time I’ll start with the good side of the force. Example courtesy of RBC Canada via Facebook.

The Facebook ad:

The landing page:

Not only is the message match perfect (100% perfect – can perfect be less than 100%?), the design match also kicks ass. That little dude is following you around with his little sign, letting you know he cares.

HOWEVER. Take a look at the landing page in detail, the page does suffer from Attention Ratio deficiencies (7:1) and the CTA is horribly small. If you did a squint test (squint your eyes from a distance and see what stands out on the page) – you’d see the trust seal, not the CTA.

To improve this, the different options for applying for an account could be on the next page after the click has confirmed interest.

And the CTA would be a lot clearer if it was designed to be bigger with a strongly contrasting button color.

Brain break! Go smoke, pee, or text your life partner. I’ll wait ’til you’re back.


Chapter 2: Context is king, queen, emperor, and boss

The more testing I do the more I keep coming back to one central concept. Context. In this section I’ll show you a few examples of context in action.

But first, a couple of definitions with names that I invented. #yourewelcome #payattention.

2.1 Conversation momentum

The purpose of Conversation momentum is to remove the break in communication that can occur when the click is made. If you’re wooing someone in an email or blog post, it makes sense to continue to do so on the landing page.

You wouldn’t invite someone into your house then act like you had never met them would you?

A big portion of this concept is respect. Respecting the click, respecting the time you want your visitor to invest.

Imagine this line is in your email.

“Let me show you how our product/service can help.”

Sometimes a good way to preserve momentum is to express gratitude to your visitor for showing up.

“I’m glad you were interested in learning more about {words that were on the link}.”

Creating a delightful experience humanizes the relationship and shows you care.

It’s important to get to the point quickly (like a short email), but you should do so in a way that flows naturally.

“One of the important things to know about {words in the link} is that it can {establish the benefit}.”

Getting warmer.

“What our solution does is to make {words in link} much easier to do. If you want to take it for a spin, I’ll pay the first month for you. And I’m personally available if you fancy a chat about the best way to use it.”

How yummy is that?

Now consider the lame-o, commonplace, and rude approach:

“Let me show you how our product/service can help.”

“We’re the best {what we do} in the world. Sign Up Now.”

What? You stopped caring about me, and now you sound generic and only interested in yourself.

Conversation Momentum Case Study – Ecourse to landing Page

To show how conversation momentum works in action, take a look at the CTA in the top-right corner of the page below.

Establishing context

This page is from an 11-part course about landing page optimization, primarily written by me. It’s driven by an email drip campaign where I speak to people in a very personal way. So anyone who is on a course page has received between 2-13 emails from me. My mugshot is also in the sidebar of every page.

Sidenote: The course is now ungated (no form) so there are no more emails. But up until this point there were.

At first I was sending this traffic to a rather generic landing page that has our standard value proposition headline:

The conversion goal of this page was a simple click on the orange call to action.

To improve the sense of context, I made three changes to the page design, producing the version below:

ecourse-contextual-design.jpg

The changes were:

  1. A co-branded header. The idea here is represent the before and after of the experience. You came from the ecourse, expressed interest in Unbounce, and are now having Unbounce presented to you.

  2. A conversational headline that again connects with where you came from and introduces the purpose of the page.

  3. A personal message from me (the familiar face of the ecourse).

The result? a 77% lift in conversions.


ecourse-test-results.jpg

2.2 Context of use

Context of use can be defined as providing a visual demonstration of how your product or service will be used by a customer.

And I can’t underline strongly enough how important it is for conversion. Actually I can – how important it is for conversion << that’s not a link.

Here’s an example:

Think of that guy Vince from the Slap Chop and ShamWow commercials. Annoying? Definitely. A role model for your children? Absolutely not. Excellent illustrations of context of use? Mos def.

You know exactly how to use them and what the outcome and experience will be like.

That’s context of use. Check out this next case study:

Context of use case study – landing page templates

We all know that research is key when beginning an A/B test. It can tell you when you’re delivering the wrong marketing message, and it provides insight into opportunities that could change your business.

So, I did some research.

I wanted to know how people were interpreting and reacting to the landing page templates page on Unbounce.com, so I added a Qualaroo survey widget to the page to ask a simple question:

What do you think of our templates?

  • They look great: [ text box for extra info ]
  • I don’t understand how to use them: [ text box for extra info ]
  • They don’t meet our needs: [ text box for extra info ]

I ran this survey for about two months, and received 1,771 responses.

Analyzing these responses I spotted 3 consistently recurring questions from the freeform text entry fields that appeared when you submit a response.

The most common questions were:

  1. How much do the templates cost?
  2. Where can I download them?
  3. Can I use them in Wordpress?

millionaire.jpg

Wuuuuut?! They exist inside the Unbounce product. You can’t buy them, you can’t download them, and you certainly can’t use them with Wordpress!

Epic fail followed by big opportunity.

Clearly visitors (a large portion of whom were arriving via organic search), were getting an entirely incorrect impression from this page. They didn’t understand the context within which you can use the templates.

How do you fix a broken experience like this?

First, let’s take a look at the original page:

Templates right?

Sure, but for what? In what? How much what?

When someone arrives on your landing page, the first thing they do is to look around and subconsciously ask for help.

“I know why I came here, but I’m not sure where I am or what this is.”

Your job as a business, is to understand the mindset of your potential customers when they arrive at your landing page, and communicate appropriately.

In this instance, like I said, there are a large number of organic search visitors showing up who have absolutely zero context. They searched for “landing page templates” and are thinking about templates and templates alone – not restrictions of where or how they can be used.

To answer the questions of these visitors, we created a two-step diagram to illustrate context of use:

The context of use we designed for this circumstance worked as follows:

  • You can view the template library in the app when you choose to build a new landing page.
  • When you choose a template, you are taken to the page builder where you can customize and edit it.

Test results

Page A [Control] – No context of use
The conversion rate for people who see the templates page is 2.1%.

Page B [Treatment] – With context of use diagram
The conversion rate of people who saw the new version of the page was 3%, a conversion rate lift of +43%.

EPIC WIN! 43% Conversion Lift in New Account Trial Starts

A really impressive result. But this type of number is thrown around all the time. What does it actually mean to a business? What is the impact on revenue?

Impact on Revenue

To figure out the affect this win had on the business I took into account all of the relevant numbers.

  • Additional new trial starts (NTS) per month due to this test — 120
  • NTS over 12 months — 1440
  • Average lifetime value of a customer — $706

Incremental impact on revenue based on a year of extra acquired customers:

1,440 x $706 = $1,016,640

That’s what happens when you help visitors to understand where they are and how the world works while they are there.


Chapter 3: How to make friends forms and influence people

“I f**#ing hate forms! They ruin everything.” — Denis Suhopoljac

That was the reaction from our art director the last time we designed some landing page templates.

Unfortunately, forms are a landing page staple, and because they represent your conversion goal, your ability to understand their nuances is the key to success.

You should remember this statement:

quote-bubble-friction.png

(Tweet this quote)

Friction is the barrier to entry (effort) that your form presents to your visitors. Friction falls into two categories and has one solution:

3.1 Perceived Friction

This is the shock factor of suddenly being faced with a long form. The perception of having to fill out such a long form can be daunting and cause people to change their mind. A solution to this can be to either shorten the form or split your form over more than one page.

3.2 Actual Friction

This is the time and trouble it takes to actually *fill in* the form, and it can cause pretty serious abandonment issues if it’s not considered. Things that can slow down – or cause frustration during – the process of form completion include:

  • Too many open-ended questions that people have to think about.
  • Dropdown menus that don’t include a viable option for the visitor. An example of this is the commonly asked “What industry is your business in?”. If there isn’t an answer available and you don’t provide a way out (like an “Other industry” option) then frustration can occur.
  • Captcha security input fields. This is when you have to read strange looking words or letters and type in what you think they say in order to proceed. Anyone not hate those?

3.3 The solution: reducing friction with conversion lube

You probably thought that was a passing reference. Nope. Conversion lube is whatever you can give to your visitor to ease the transaction.

Method One: Ask the data for help

One approach to improvement is to analyze the results you get and adapt your form accordingly. When looking at your form data, ask yourself:

  • Are a high percentage of dropdown results the first option in the list? If so, you should try to make the answers as short and clearly distinguishable as possible. If people can easily/quickly read the option that applies to them without lots of hunting/scrolling, they will be more inclined to select it.
  • Are the responses to open-ended questions actually real answers? Or are they nonsense (such as “asdfasdf”) designed to get through the form as quickly as possible? If so, you should make the questions more direct and easier to answer. Examples would be: “Tell us about your biggest marketing problem” (requires a short story as an answer) vs. “What is the biggest barrier to your marketing success?” (which could often be answered in a few words like “Not enough traffic.”).

Method Two: Apply some balance

“The prize” is the incentive you offer up in exchange for personal data. Your goal is to balance the size of the prize with the amount of friction.

There are many incentives for a user to give up their personal information: Digital documents: Ebook/whitepaper/report, webinars, newsletters, consultations for professional services, discount coupons, contest entries, free trials, product launch notifications.

The rule here is: Don’t be greedy.

Only ask from your visitors what you would be willing to give up if the roles were reversed.

Okay, be a little more greedy than that, but not much.

For instance, if you will be sending an automated newsletter to registrants, email or email/name are all that’s needed. Whereas if you have a product/service that requires a follow-up sales call, you would want more information to qualify the level of interest, and sometimes extra friction can actually help to remove the looky loos from your funnel and improve lead quality. Like I said, it’s a balancing act.

When in doubt, don’t get ahead of yourself. Remember that you should always start by asking for a kiss before trying to take it a step farther.

I just got a sad feeling.

I don’t think I’ve done enough to make you fall in love with forms.

You should take a trundle over to this page where it’ll all fall into place.

How to design the ultimate lead gen form

Now we’ve covered some of the theory behind forms, you might be wondering exactly how to go about creating a rockstar form. We can do this by designing our form as if it’s the only thing we’re allowed to put on our page.

Your form consists of the following elements:

  1. A headline to introduce the reason for the form
  2. A description with bullets to highlight the benefit and contents of what you’re giving away upon completion
  3. The form with descriptive form fields (original label names and questions can capture attention)
  4. A Call-To-Action
  5. Trust statements or links
  6. A closing urgency or context-enhancement statement

Below is a sketch of how a form designed using this method might look:

Lead Gen Form.png

How was that? All loved up on forms? Not yet? 

Maybe we need some real examples. Below are some examples of lead gen landing pages (#withforms) that I happen to like.

The short and sweet signup form

The ebook download form

The request a callback form floating over a guy’s crotch

The super-long form with a happy guy at the end

#formlove


Chapter 4: The Mad Men pitch – writing copy that converts

Your words are the first thing people pay attention to when the page loads, and the last thing they read before deciding whether or not they will complete your conversion goal.

You would be a mad man (or woman) not to heed this next piece of advice.

don-draper.jpg

(Tweet this quote)

Of course, that’s an exaggeration; you should at least spend 5% of your time writing the body copy of your landing page, but that grandiose statement should at least give you a sense of the relative importance of page elements when it comes to conversion rate optimization. For this reason, I’m going to stick to these two elements (headline and CTA) and try to get you outta here before the bell rings.

Start with your headline

Chances are you’ve had to go for a job interview at some point. Either that, or you’re an entrepreneur begging to be heard by either potential customers or potential investors.

Regardless, the most and ONLY important thing when you start a conversation with someone, is to get your foot in the door.

That’s what your headline does.

If you can write a headline interesting and useful enough to hold someone’s attention, you’ve got your foot in the door of conversion. Now that you’re in the elevator, you have those precious extra seconds to communicate/pitch your idea.

Copywriter Roberta Rosenberg offers this sage piece of advice:

Your headline has one job and one job only. To get your visitors to continue engaging with your message, increase their desire for what you’re offering, and motivate a Call-To-Action click.

That’s why when it comes to crafting effective landing page headlines, choose clarity over clever.

Clever calls attention to itself at the expense of the message.

Clarity smooths the way to conversion.”

I can verify the part about clarity over clever. Whenever we A/B test email subject lines, the clear version beats the funny or clever one. Stupidly, we still carry on testing them 😉

There’s an art to crafting an effective headline, but there are also some techniques and formulas you can lean on to help you get started.

To be very clear though. These are formulas for the construction of writing, not formulas for success – because there are no formulas for success. If there were, I’d be sitting behind a diamond studded Macbook Pro, eating beef jerky and telling stories about eating beef jerky while being successful…

Point being. Use these constructs to do exactly that. Construct your headline. The success depends entirely on your idea plus your will and enthusiasm.

So back to the writing:

Joanna Wiebe from Copyhackers suggests these headline writing formulas:

The Only Way to [Do Something Desirable] Without [Doing Something Undesirable]
The Only Way to Turn Off the Lights Without Clapping or Getting Out of Bed

[Do Something Hard] in [Period of Time] or [Promise]
Tune Your Piano in 15 Minutes or “Piano Tuner App” Is Free

[Do Something Desirable] Like [an Expert] Without [Something Expected & Undesirable]
Learn to Play Chess Like Bobby Fischer – Without Any of the Crazy!

They’re not going to work for everything, but they will get you thinking.

I often like to write the landing page value proposition as a sequence of 3 headlines split throughout the page, like a classic story arc of beginning, middle, and end.

  1. The main headline
  2. The reinforcement statement
  3. The closing argument

You can construct your story like this:

Statement of uniqueness
Backed up with a supporting statement to establish credibility

Expand on the experience
And explain how you solve a pain point

Close with urgency to encourage a call-to-action click

For example, if you are advertising a luxury resort in Costa Rica (cos like, we all do that right?), your 3 part headlines might read something like this:

The Only Luxury Rainforest Retreat in Costa Rica
Dedicated to preserving our wild jungle paradise

Indulge Your Senses in Our Hot Spring Jungle Spa
Without the crowds and distractions of the large tourist resorts

Escape to Costa Rica for a Luxury Experience in One of the World’s Last Remaining Rainforests

What this does is provide big bold statements for people who are quickly scanning your page.

You can see how it’s broken down in the screenshot below:

pura-vida.jpg

And don’t bother asking where the Pura Vida resort is.

I made it up.

You’re welcome.

Now write your call to action (CTA)

As Mr. Draper and I pointed out earlier, your CTA is of prime importance because it represents the final tipping point between the success and failure of your campaign.

To click, or not to click. That is the question.

You can break a CTA down into many factors, such as:

  1. Description (being explicit about what I’ll get)
  2. Actionable phrasing (using verbs like ‘get’)
  3. Possessives (choosing ‘my’ vs. ‘your’)
  4. Subtext (supporting information)
  5. Urgency (a reason to act now)

To expand on that. I’ll rattle off a paragraph of words that you should memorize while holding your breath:


Every time you add a button to your landing page you need to write down exactly what will happen when the button is clicked, then write those words on the button. It should be specific and driven by the desire to click it. Add words like ‘Get’ at the start to amplify the fact that you will get something by clicking it. Use ‘my’ instead of ‘your’ to personalize the connection. Tell people how long they have to click the button to encourage them to do it NOW! And provide extra context and detail in subtext either inside the button or as an addendum beneath it.

Here’s an example call-to-action based on these 5 factors:

Call To Action.png

Breaking the button apart you can see how the components work together in beautiful harmony.

  1. Description: “Get My Free SaaS Project Management Guide” – Describes what you’ll get by clicking.
  2. Actionable phrasing: “Get” – Describes that you will receive something.
  3. Possessives: “My” – Personalizes it.
  4. Subtext: “A quick 5 minute read with 10 top tips!” – Lends extra benefit to the offer as it’s easily digestible.
  5. Urgency: “Every day you don’t implement these tips you’re losing productivity and money” – Connects with the pain of your prospect and how the offer will help them more if they get it now.

Okay, I get the structure, now how do I write the CTA copy?

Michael Aagaard from ContentVerve.com recommends asking yourself 2 questions in order to optimize your call-to-action copy:

  1. What is my prospect’s motivation for clicking this button?
  2. What is my prospect going to get, when he/she clicks this button?

Genius takeaway number 412:

A call-to-action that conveys the value of your offering and its relevance to your prospect will lead to more conversions.

Whoa there, horsey!! You need to resist the “Let’s just test 10 different CTAs” syndrome. I’ve been there and it’s dangerous. Your CTA is also one of the most sensitive and impactful places to play, both in the positive and negative directions.

So take heed of this next section.

Unexpected CTA conversion killers: the power of negative suggestion

Something I see a lot of (and something I highly recommend) is subtext beneath a button. A little horse whisper to encourage the click. These can range from privacy statements to special offer reinforcements.

However, there is a certain type of statement that you want to avoid at all cost.

I’m talking about the “insert a negative word that I wasn’t even thinking of” type of statement.

Consider this scenario. You’ve filled in a form and are about to click the button, when all of a sudden, your eye sees the word SPAM! Albeit in a well meaning way:  “We will never spam you.”

“But I wasn’t thinking about spam until you pointed it out! Now I have ’cause to pause™.’ “

Man, I’m getting good at trademarking awesome terms!

What this does is place a seed of doubt in people’s minds at exactly the wrong time.

In an A/B test performed by Michael Aagaard, the inclusion of the word spam bombed conversion rates by 18.7%.

Another example is shown below where the phrase “No Gimmicks” is written right beneath the CTA.

tacoapp.jpg

I don’t think I’ve used the word “gimmick” in a sentence in years. Yet now it’s playing in my head and I’m wondering why I’m having second thoughts.

Removing the word “Gimmicks” resulted in a 25% lift in conversions!

hore-whisperer.jpg

Be careful how you supplement your CTAs, and please, please, please, test any changes to avoid an unexpected dip in conversions. I’ve been there and it sucks trying to figure out why your business is suddenly experiencing a negative reaction to something you can’t explain.


Chapter 5: Design theory in 3 minutes

Remember little Johnny from the intro? Don’t get me wrong, I like unicorns and rainbows as much as the next guy – especially double ones. But they have their place.

When people think that design is just pretty pictures. It twangs my sciatic nerve.

quote-bubble-design.png

(Tweet this quote)

As the bloke who’s seen more landing pages than anyone on the planet, I’ve seen my fair share of design trainwrecks. Designs that are so offensive that for some sadistic reason, I love them more than the good ones.

I love critiquing landing pages because it engages my altruistic side. It’s the design equivalent of puppy rescue or freeing Willies.

Oh, right, I said 3 minutes. Okay, let me give you some Conversion Centered Design theory in 150 seconds. Go.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the post, design is all about attention.

Your ad captures attention, your headline maintains attention, and your page design focuses attention. As such, your goal with design is to draw attention to the most important element(s) on the page.

Read faster dammit!

Principle #1 – Directional cues

There’s no doubting the power of the image below. It’s an iconic example of the power of directional cues. Uncle Sam is not only staring right into your soul, but he’s pointing at you to reinforce the word “YOU”. Or “Me” from a more user-centric perspective.

Here’s another example, this time from the UFC:

And an example from a brick-and-mortar business:

And an example on a landing page (remember why we’re here, Oliver).

As you can see, they leave you in no doubt as to what the purpose of the page is.

The secret is to *combine* design elements so that once you’ve shown people the way via directional cues, the place where you’re pointing also has clarity of communication.

There’s no point in having the president of your chess club invite people over for a game of Monopoly. The carpet doesn’t match the drapes.

Principle #2 – Encapsulation

You can think of encapsulation as creating a window on your landing page where your CTA is the view. It’s most effective when used to highlight a form #formlove!

Check out the landing page below. What stands out? The form. How hard was that? Pretty damn hard if you look at most people’s lead gen pages.

It’s easy. Just wrap it up…

“If you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it” — Beyonce Knowle

Principle #3 – Contrasting colours (Hey, I’m Canadian, we use u’s)

Unless you live in a hole, you’ll have read about a boat load of button colour A/B tests. Red is best, green is for go, orange is inviting. Horse excrement. All of it.

It’s as easy as this: Look for the dominant hue of your page, and pick its complement for your CTA. You can see it applied twice in the previous example, where the form container is in very stark contrast to the page and the button then contrasts with that.

If you need help with contrasting colours, check out this colour wheel from Tiger Color Lab:

Find your dominant hue and look opposite.

The photo below – which I took on the summit of a barren hill during a lightning storm in Yellowstone – illustrates the power of contrast to suck in your vision.

In the interest of bringing Canada and the U.S. even closer together, here’s the word “colour” written as “color”. #borderlove

quote-bubble-contrast.png

(Tweet this quote)

Principle #4 – White space

Space things out. And because you can use any colour you like, not just white, it’s not as racist a name as it seems. Maybe we should say add gaps. There you go. Gaps.

Look at the photo below:

Your eye is free to wander, floating over the image, until it rests on the subject. The Elk in the lower right corner. And then you go “Ahhhhh.”

In landing page terms, I like the next one for it’s clarity (but it suffers from terrible attention ratio).

Two Columns, a smiley face and lots of gappage. You always need content, but that doesn’t mean you can’t space it out.

And now this:


“You found it!”

Yes I did. By searching for “worst landing page ever.” #truestory

Add some gaps, people.

quote.png

(Tweet this quote)

What I mean by that is that by applying these Conversion Centered Design principles, you are focusing attention on your call-to-action. This makes it easier to spot how strong or weak your CTA copy really is. After all, there’s no point in drawing attention to something that’s inherently lame.


Chapter 6: Please, Internet, I want more conversions

Get this. I’m at a wedding in London in the 70s. I’m 4. My mother turns to the person next to her after noticing I’d wandered away from the table. “I should go grab him!” she says. “Let him play” is the reply.

A moment later, another lady at the table says, “Look at that boy on the stage!” – pointing at a kid standing up there, hands held out in front of him in a bowl shape – “he should be called Oliver.”

“He is!!!” my Mother replies looking horrified.

That actually happened. No word of a lie. I’ll give you my mum’s phone number. 

Told you there would be charming anecdotes.

What’s my point? Isn’t it enough that you’re all like “I’m listening to Oliver Twist’s life story!”?

I’ll make it easy for you. You should behave like you are Oliver Twist (me), and ask for something more after every conversion.

When you acquire a lead – when someone fills in your form – the results you can get by asking for more will blow your mind. Or refill your bowl of gruel.

Your marketing doesn’t end with a conversion. Where there is intent there is opportunity.

Post-Conversion Marketing (PCM)

The act of asking for – and getting – more from your leads, is known as post-conversion marketing. It’s the process of continuing the conversation with your new lead on the confirmation page they see after filling out your form.

PCM in action – What should you do?

Imagine this scenario in your head brain.

Dude fills out your form to download an ebook about snowboard designs. You say, “Thanks dude! If you like that ebook about snowboard design, yo Continue reading →

A Product-Based Approach to CRO

Posted by CraigBradford

Before joining the world of digital marketing, I was a product design engineer. Most of my clients at Distilled are now CRO projects and I’ve found my background to be surprisingly useful. There’s a lot of overlap between designing physical products and designing websites that convert well. I’d like to share some of the research methods that I use for CRO that I learned while designing physical products. I like to use a framework of Learn, Look, Ask, and Try.

I first came across this while at university. It’s the design research methods used by IDEO. They released this as a pack of playing cards. In their own words:

“IDEO Method Cards show 51 of the methods we use to inspire great design and keep people at the center of our design process.”

There are 51 cards each with a research method that belongs to one of the above categories. The cards have since been made into an app. I find it useful when trying to come up with new ways to get customer insights. You can download the app here

Design methods in the learn section are about analyzing the information you’ve collected to identify patterns and insights. One you might not have heard of is error analysis.

Error analysis

In simple terms you can think of error analysis as going around your site and saying “what happens if I do that?” In product design you might hear this called failure mode effects analysis (FMEA).

“Failure modes” means the ways, or modes, in which something might fail. Failures are any errors or defects, especially ones that affect the customer.

Effects analysis” refers to studying the consequences of those failures.

While a lot of FMEA is overkill for designing a website (hopefully nobody is going to die if they click the wrong button) I think the principles can be used to help proactively find faults. Every website is different so you’ll need to think of your own scenarios but here are some to get you started:

  1. What if I use my email instead of username to login?
  2. What if I press the back button in the checkout funnel?
  3. What if I need a refund?
  4. What if I want to get the product delivered to my work address?
  5. What If I order the wrong product?

You can see that these potential errors can be a mix of usability and customer service. The point is to be proactive and anticipate what could go wrong. You can then fix true errors (things that are just broken) or put processes in place to ensure mistakes can be fixed easily when they do go wrong.

Extra tip

Google analytics has a great report that can help you find some of the most common errors or problems. Look at the reverse goal path report and pick a goal (for example people reaching the thank you page).

The report will then show you the most common routes that people take on their way to that page. The image below shows this report on one of my client’s sites. 

I’ve had to blank a lot out for privacy reasons, but the point can still be seen: Out of the top 10 routes to the thank-you page,

  • 4 included people visiting the terms and conditions page, and
  • 2 included people visiting the FAQ page.

What are they looking for? If we can find out, we can make that information clearer and hopefully stop them having to go to those pages. Which brings me to my next section:

The “Ask” section is pretty simple; it’s about asking people to explicitly tell you what they do or do not like.

For the terms and conditions example above, the solution is an easy one—live surveys. I’m sure everyone has heard of Quaraloo by now so I’m not going into detail on this. The solution is to ask people that leave the funnel via the T+C page what information they’re looking for using Quaraloo. Once we find out the reason, we can add that information to the pages leading up to the conversion and hopefully reduce anxiety and distractions leading up to the purchase.

The real research method I want to talk about for this section is extreme user interviews.

Extreme interviews

Any golfers reading? If so, you’ll recognise the image below as the famous Big Bertha.

Source

Big Bertha is one of the bestselling drivers, so how did Callaway come up with the design? They did it by focusing on a particular demographic. While competitors were all focused on asking golf players what they wanted, Callaway focused on a different set of users. They surveyed non-golfers. More specifically they wanted to know why people who loved sports, could afford to play and already belonged to country clubs chose not to play. In other words, why do people whom on paper should like and play golf choose not to?

By interviewing lots of people who fit that criterion, they were able to find the answer. People don’t want to feel embarrassed. If you’ve ever tried golf you’ll relate to how frustrating and embarrassing the first couple of years are, especially if you’re used to being good at other sports. This is where Callaway gained their insight and competitive advantage.

It turns out that consistently making contact with the face of a small driver is hard, really hard. If you fail, the ball can end up anywhere. Callaway decided to focus on the need of these people (people that should play but don’t) by designing a driver that had a massive club head and huge face. The result was it was much easier for beginners to hit the ball and avoid embarrassment of constantly losing the ball. To this day Big Bertha is one of the most successful drivers on the market.

So how do we use this for CRO? Extreme interviews? Instead of just surveying the people that do buy from you, or that are familiar with your brand, survey two groups of users.

  • Experts: Repeat buyers or people that are familiar with your brand
  • Novices: People that have never been to your website but that at least understand what your product or service does.

The hard thing about this is recruiting these people. You can’t just ask members of the public; you need to ask people that are on your site. A tool I like to use for this is Ethn.io.

Ethn.io lets you recruit users for user testing and pre-qualify them. For example, in the above you can create a popup that looks something like this: 

Image source

You can then ask users a qualifying question and group them appropriately.

Fly on the wall

Your customers are liars. Harsh, but true. Even in the extreme interviews technique you might not get the right insights that you’re looking for. If you ask people why they don’t convert, they might not be able to tell you. There are two reasons for this:

  1. The reasons are subconscious so they actually don’t know the answer.
  2. They don’t want to tell you for fear of embarrassment.

That’s why using the techniques in the look category is a great idea.

Here’s a scenario. Imagine for a second you gave someone this: 

Source

If you were to ask someone how they would open this package, you’d likely get a sensible answer like “I’d use scissors”, but as soon as you leave the room and they don’t think you’re looking, you’re likely to see something like the scene below:

Source

If you’ve ever tried to open one of those blister packs, you’ll know how annoying they can be to get into. They’ve led to the many injuries and the emergence of the term “wrap rage“.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is you can’t always trust your users to tell you all of the reasons they don’t do the things you want them to.

In the offline world, designers use a technique called “fly on the wall”. This involves watching people in the environment or using the product that you’re trying to design. Sometimes the subject is aware that you’re watching them (shadowing), other times (ideally) they’re not (fly on the wall). Watch this scene from Madmen and you’ll get the picture:

So how do we do this in the digital world? We can’t sit over everyone’s shoulders as they use your website, but there are some tools that come close. Both of which I’m sure you’ve heard of.

Shadowing: Usertesting.com

I like usertesting.com but my one complaint is the sample of users is unlikely to be representative of your customers. Even if you select the options like low level of internet experience—the fact they are on a UX testing website already puts them above the average internet user. They’re also not your customers. One way around this is to combine Ethnio with uerstesting.com. Recruit real users then set them tasks using usertesting.com or just watch them live using some kind of screen sharing tool.

Fly-on-the-wall: Clicktale

Clicktale might be above many peoples’ budget, but if you can afford it I’d recommend it. Clicktale records anonymous sessions on your website. Obviously it would take a long time to watch all sessions, but you can segment by things like location, browser, or even sessions that had errors. Using these tools you can dig into why certain segments of traffic may not be converting as well.

Another tool that I’ve heard of, but not personally tried, is http://www.uxcam.com/ It’s like Clicktale but with a specialization in mobile usability testing. I spoke to the founder at one of our meetups about a month ago and was impressed by the features. It’s also still in beta so it’s free at the moment if you want to give it a try.

Empathy tools

As a product designer, your most powerful tool is empathy. If you can empathize with your customers and understand what they really want, you’ll create great products. The best way to empathize with your customers is to do what they do—try it.

In the offline world, product designers go to great lengths to understand users. For example, when designers are creating a product where the primary audience is the elderly, they might use empathy tools like those shown below:

The image above is a picture of me with coins strapped to the back of my knuckles. This can be used to simulate the limited dexterity that can come as a result of arthritis.

Source

The designers in the image above strapped up their legs using a kind of split. Again, this one done to simulate reduced mobility when trying to climb stairs.

Finally and probably the one that could most easily be applied to the online world is a pair of empathy glasses. These can come in various types depending on the condition you want to simulate. If you want to get an idea of how various eye conditions can affect vision, look at the side-by-side comparison of healthy eyes to advanced stages of cataracts and glaucoma below. You can see the tools here: Cataract simulator, Glaucoma simulator.

Cataract simulation

Glaucoma simulation

So if you’re not designing a website for the elderly, can you still use this technique? Absolutely. I like to use “scenario empathy.” This works by enforcing criteria on your users under test conditions, the most popular being a mix of:

  1. Time: You have six minutes to book a flight to London. GO!
  2. Money: Find the best product X for under $50.
  3. Product criteria: Find me a hotel that has a spa and is dog-friendly.
  4. Technology restrictions: You’re on a mobile with a slow edge connection.

You can then mix any of the above to create powerful scenario simulation. If you can make someone that’s short on time, has a low budget, really specific requirements and a slow connection happy, chances are the rest of your customers will also be happy.

That’s it.

In summary, there’s a lot of research techniques out there that can give you excellent insights about why your customers aren’t converting. Try them out; don’t just stick to the same techniques that you see on CRO blogs all the time.

For more ideas, take a look at the presentation I gave a few weeks ago at our meetup. Also, for those in the UK, I’ll be presenting on a similar topic at Measurefest this week.


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Continue reading →

Help S.N.A.C.K.S.: Frequently Asked Questions about Moz Local

Posted by JoelDay

Greetings, citizens! It is we, your help team, here with what we’re hoping will become both a regular occurrence and household name.

This is Help S.N.A.C.K.S.

What does S.N.A.C.K.S. stand for, you ask? Well, we don’t know yet, but we’ll be dishing out tasty morsels of knowledge and answering some of the more common questions we hear. (If you have an idea for what S.N.A.C.K.S. means, leave it in the comments. The one with the most thumbs up gets a pretty blue Moz shirt plus a special prize!)

For our first installment we’ve decided to focus on the latest addition to the Moz family: Moz Local!

If you’re not familiar with Moz Local yet, take a moment and watch this video.

For some extra help,  we’ve selected two of the most common issues we hear about on the help team.


1. Why isn’t my upload working?

Moz Local uses a special combination of magic and alchemy (okay, it’s really just a CSV file) to upload your listings. You may even already have one of these handy, as Google Places uses the same format.

If not, we provide a template you can use here: CSV Template & Guidelines. Most of the fields are pretty standard, but lets walk through a few sections that can cause a bit of confusion.

Categories

Moz Local provides a list of categories to choose from here: Categories

When entering your categories you will need to make sure you ONLY include categories that fall under the Moz Local heading. These are the categories that overlap all the different partners. This allows us to send the data out all at once without undue delays.

Here’s the fun part: I know right now you’re saying, “But Joel! I run a museum dedicated to the 1976 Burt Reynolds classic Gator. I need the category ‘Air Boats’ and it’s not listed!”

Never fear my mustachioed curatorial professional. We recognize that sometimes you just have to get more specific to define your business to potential customers. That’s where the column Category Overrides comes in.

This gives you the option to provide additional categories for specific directories. For this you get to use the oft-overlooked pipe character “|” to separate the different engines (look just below backspace).

For the owner of the aforementioned Burt Reynolds museum who needs to enter “Air Boats” for Acxiom you can enter this:

acxiom:Air Boats|acxiom:Alligators

That can be adjusted for any of the options listed that categories page.

If you’re not sure what to put for your category, read up on the category research page here: Category Research.

Description

The description in the CSV needs to be at least 250 characters. This is because some directories have a required minimum and that’s the lowest that will meet all of their requirements.

We recommend typing this directly into the CSV to avoid any non-ASCII characters. It is possible to paste your descriptions in as needed, you’ll want to prepare those in a plain text editor to avoid any issues with character sets.

If you run into this error you’ve got some non-ASCII characters at work that you’ll need to remove.

Hours

OK, so now that the Burt Reynolds Gator Museum has their description and categories, it’s time to let the people know that the no mere hours can contain the awesomeness of Gator McKlusky. That’s right, They’re open 24 hours a day.

As described in the Help Hub, the format for hours is one long string, with a number representing the day of the week (day 1 is Sunday), and colons separating the various components. That’s pretty simple for a regular business, but what about a non-stop party like the Gator Museum? If your business is open 24/7, just put in midnight to 11:59 p.m. every day. It should look like this:

1:12:00:AM:11:59:PM,2:12:00:AM:11:59:PM,3:12:00:AM:11:59:PM,4:12:00:AM:11:59:PM,
5:12:00:AM:11:59:PM,6:12:00:AM:11:59:PM,7:12:00:AM:11:59:PM

2. I’ve uploaded and published. What’s next?

Alright! So the Gator museum is submitted. The Google Places matched and it sailed through the validation! What’s next?

The first couple of questions that probably pop into your mind are “how long will this take?” and “what are those weird little circles next to my listing?” The simple answer to question one is that it can take anywhere from 1-8 weeks for our partners to update the data we push to them. From there, it can take up to 3-6 months for them to send the updated data to other local data aggregators that work with them. So in a nutshell, it takes time to update one database, push that across their network and then feed the information to everyone else. To give you an idea of how extensive this process is, check out the  Local Search Ecosystem here in the US:

Now for those circles.

After purchasing, you see a series of circles next to your listings, which will indicate that listing’s current status with a given partner. There are four versions you might see:

The empty:

This circle indicates that we’ve pushed the listing to our partner, but they haven’t processed it yet.

The circle half full:

The half full circle means that our partners have accepted the listing data and are processing the changes on their end.

The full circle:

Yay, the listing has been processed with our partner! While things look like they’re done, it will still take some time for them to push the updates out to everyone else in their networks.

The exclamation:

This yellow exclamation mark means there’s something that requires your attention. In most cases it’s that Foursquare needs you to authenticate the listing. This will also come up to notify you if the listing is already being managed by someone else. In that case, we won’t push any updates to that partner.

To address the common Foursquare Authentication issue, just connect your Foursquare account. You can add more than one if you have multiple listings.

You can look at your connected accounts at any time.

Now just click the “Select an Account” button to connect to your Foursquare account.


I hope everyone enjoyed this deeper glance at Moz Local. Remember, guides like this and more can be found in our Help Hub.

The Help Team will be back soon to answer more of your questions with another issue of S.N.A.C.K.S.

Let us know in the comments if there’s anything you’d like us to dig into next time. We’ll also send out autographed pictures for anyone who wants one. 


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Continue reading →

Announcing the MozCon 2014 Community Speakers

Posted by EricaMcGillivray

Get ready to give some high fives, because I have some great news to share today: The four community speakers for MozCon 2014, July 14-16th in Seattle!

First, I want to thank everyone who tossed in their hat. It’s an incredibly brave thing to do, so pat yourselves on the back. We had 146 submissions this year—about 10 more than last year—during the week and a half that they were open. There were tons of amazing ideas, incredibly thoughtful sharing, and all around excitement. The selection committee all agreed that 2014’s pitches were the best yet. Though, of course, that makes the decision the hardest one.

Our four Community Speakers for 2014

In the order that they’ll be presenting at MozCon:

Mark Traphagen

Mark Traphagen

Google+ Game of Thrones: Claiming Your Kingdom for Brand Dominance
Be the ruler of your vertical by claiming uncharted ground in Google+ to dragon-power your brand’s Google influence.

Mark Traphagen is Senior Director of Online Marketing for Stone Temple Consulting and a sought-after speaker and writer on Google+ marketing and Google Authorship. He runs the largest Google Authorship community on the web, and offline, he competes in story slams, but never, ever slams a good story.

Stephanie Beadell

Stephanie Beadell

Bad Data, Bad Decisions: The Art of Asking Better Questions
Stephanie Beadell will discuss the power of surveys and how if you’re not asking the right questions, you risk making decisions on the wrong answers.

Stephanie Beadell is Director of Content Marketing at BuzzStream and was formerly head of Digital PR at SEER Interactive. She holds a Master of Science degree in Market Research from Boston University.

Zeph Snapp

Zeph Snapp

More than Words: Localizing Your International Content
Zeph takes you beyond the technical implications of international SEO, showing you real life examples of how to leverage your existing content in other languages.

Zeph Snapp is the CEO of Altura Interactive.

Justin Briggs

Justin Briggs

Talking Back to Conversational Search
Looking at how conversational search and the knowledge graph are changing how users search and engage with content, Justin will talk about implementing entities at an enterprise scale.

Justin Briggs is the Sr. Manager of Organic Marketing at Getty Images, a leading stock photography company based in Seattle. Justin has over 10 years of web experience, including seven years working in SEO and social media.

Honorable mentions go out to both Gianluca Fiorelli and Greg Gifford.

Get ready to cheer these four on, and make sure that you’ve bought your ticket to MozCon 2014, as they’re going quickly and will sell out.

Register today for MozCon!

I get asked quite a bit about how the community speaker selection committee process works, so I thought I’d shed some light on it for those who are curious. This year, there were a total of nine committee members. That’s a lot of people vetting your submissions. And you may notice that it’s the same number as a more famous fellowship:

The fellowship of the ring
You can make your guesses as to who correlates to whom on Moz’s staff.

The committee for MozCon 2014 consisted of:

I’m typically the one that does a first sweep through all the entires. I try to do a “blind” sweep through them to stay as unbiased as possible by not looking at names and emails, only reading the content pitch itself. We use a grade scale, A through F, and make notes on entries. (Sorry, person who submitted pretending to be Matt Cutts, you received the F. We did get a laugh, though.) From there, Cyrus, Danie, Jen, Keri, Megan, and Trevor jump in and they add their own grades and notes. Yes, sometimes we disagree! But most of the time, we’re all pretty close in what we think.

koala bear
One hopeful sent his pitch in letter format with a koala bear. Someone’s following my Pinterest account.

After that, it gets easier to narrow it down to 20 or so pitches. Both Trevor and I also make special notes on ones that we might want to grab for blog posts or Mozinars if they aren’t selected as speakers. When down to 20 or so, Rand and Matthew join in and give their thoughts on the top ones. We also start more extensively reviewing to see what kinds of presentations people have given in the past, if there are slide decks or video of them on stage, and what sort of other content they’re putting out there, like blog posts.

Once it gets down to less than 10, the choice gets harder. Typically there are one or two people that everyone is completely on board with. Then we discuss more about what we’ve seen from the rest and how the topic would fit into what’s already being offered at MozCon. Usually, there aren’t any “cons” to these fabulous folks, just lots of “pros.”

I reach out to the selected four first, to let them know and confirm that they’re still interested and able to attend MozCon. Then I have the somewhat sad job of telling the rest of the potentials that they weren’t selected. But it’s very important to inform everyone so no one is left wondering whatever happened to that time they pitched. (I know how frustrating never hearing back can be from the other side of a pitch.) Then I write this post.

Hope that added some transparency to our process!

A big thank you to all of you who submitted this year and congratulations to our four speakers for MozCon 2014! We can’t wait to see you all there.

Register today for MozCon!


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Continue reading →