Sam Cooke once said that the best things in life are free- the flowers in spring, the robins that sing, and free consulting at Search Engine Strategies Toronto. Okay, he didn’t really say the last one.

This year, SES Toronto is on fire with express and site clinics. You now have the chance to review your site with top industry experts and get solid actionable recommendations… you know, the kind of stuff we don’t all have a budget for.

Site clinics will take place on Day 2 (June 11th) and include:

Search Ads & Landing Page Clinic

Moderated by Bryan Eisenberg, yours truly and Mona Elesseily will show you how to carry out your promises from ad to landing page to ensure a smooth visitor experience, increase your relevancy, and boost your conversions.

Tough Love: Get Your Site Tuned Up

Let experts Jonathan Allen and Dawn Wentzell give you a little tough love about your site in a session moderated by Mike Grehan. They may be tough on you, but you’ll love the tips and tricks you learn in this session.

Here are the express clinics lined up:

• Express Search Usability Clinic
• On-The-Spot SEO Site Review
• 3 Steps to Conversion Nirvana
• Landing Page Improvement Clinic
• Socializing your Website
• If Links are Votes… Is your Site on the Ballot?

These clinics are free for anyone to attend and require no appointments. Best of all, they’re spread out throughout the 2 days, which means you can go to all of them if you choose to.

If you’d like some suggestions for sessions to attend, check out Andrew Goodman’s blog post: Red Hot Topics at SES Toronto 2010.

And While You’re There…

Make sure you stop by the Acquisio booth to say hello and pick up one of our famous t-shirts. People who wore Acquisio t-shirts during SES New York have reported having better social lives, getting promoted at work, and being offered free drinks… no, seriously, see for yourself:

See you in Toronto!

a. By giving your visitors cheesy 3D glasses? Everyone looks sexy in those.

b. By designing with animated Gifs, CSS sprites, and excessive Flash?

c. By optimizing your landing pages with the 3 Dimensions of the conversion trinity developed by Bryan Eisenberg?

Did you guess right? Fresh off Bryan Eisenberg’s online presentation 2 weeks ago where he introduced his conversion trinity; a simple but very effective way to optimize your PPC landing pages by examining the following 3 dimensions:

1. Relevance: Focusing on understanding the intent of your visitors and delivering the most relevant content for their needs.

2. Value: Making sure your visitors understand the value of purchasing from you.

3. Call To Action: Making sure that your visitors not only know what action they should take next, but that they feel comfortable taking it as well.

To put this more in perspective for you, I’ll show you how we’ve used the trinity internally to develop a landing page for our new free eBook: You Know You Need a PPC Management Tool When… (see my analysis below the graphic.)

1. Relevance

We’re in the business of PPC, talking about PPC to the people who like PPC.  Think of it the same way you would about your keyword targeting and ad placement.

Just like  a PPC ad, when a visitor clicks on your offer, you’ve only done half the job by making it compelling enough and click-worthy. Finish off the job by making sure that your landing page not only matches the offer, but reinforces it. This offering is about a free eBook and so is the landing page.

Besides, you don’t really want your ads looking like this:

You want them to look more like:

2. Value

I’m sure your offer is unique and valuable, but what are you doing to convey that to your visitors? This is where your unique value proposition (UVP) needs to be prominent on the page to remind your visitors of why you’re not only a relevant, but the best solution for their problem. This where you also get to harness the power of copywriting to convey the value of your offer in an easy way that stands out.

In this case, Acquisio’s UVP (PPC management software for agencies) is loud and clear at the top of the page. We’ve also used concise bullet points that first communicate pains the visitors can relate to, then benefits they can use to overcome their problems.

3. Call To Action

Nothing is worse than a visitor bouncing off your page because they didn’t know what to do next. It’s your job to hold their hand and guide them throughout the whole experience, until you lead them to the action you want them to take.

To ensure that, we’ve designed our call to action buttons using action verbs with implied benefits that are relevant to the offer. “Get Your Copy” vs “Submit” or “Download”.

Finally, a little scent doesn’t hurt. We’ve made sure our e-mail blast and landing page are not visually disconnected by using the same template, pictures, and wording.

Whether you’re currently running some ads you can evaluate, or thinking about creating some new ones, make sure you keep those 3 dimensions in mind to create relevant, valuable, and actionable landing pages that pop off the screen for your visitors.

• Keyword evaluation
• Keyword structure
• Landing page optimization

Listen the podcast interview (5 min.)

Marc was interviewed at ad:tech 2009 NYC by Brian Eisenberg for Webmaster Radio.

I’d like this to be a follow up to my previous post where I tried to show the essentials of photoshop for beginners, specifically with respect to creating basic layouts for landing pages. It’s really intended for people who need to create (actually be the creative person behind) the landing page elements themselves, even if they can’t do the final design.

Via the process described in that post you can start throwing together different landing page layouts with photoshop. In this post I’d like to talk about how the different elements you’re creating on those pages can be swapped out with multi-variate testing software, and you can easily do more than just test one page against the other (that would be A/B testing), you can try combinations of different elements and work towards one, superior landing page.

So the meat of things here is the process I go through to define a multivariate plan:

Step 1 is to design the layout of the landing page. If you want to test multiple layouts, I would suggest designing two layouts with the same message, offers and calls to action, then doing A/B testing between the pages. Multivariate works best if it is kept as simple as possible, and one aspect of simplicity I like to employ is to try and test elements against one another, while controlling for the effect of the layout simply by keeping it static.

You might already have a landing page that you want to improve. Either way, step 2 is the same, so let’s say you’ve got a page like this:

Step 2 is to break the page up into different ‘elements’ that might be worth testing. You have to use some intuition here, any localized thing is fair game: images, paragraphs of text, calls to action. The level of granularity that you go to is up to you, but be warned: The more elements you want to test on one page, the longer it will take to get any meaningful results. If you have loads of traffic (tens of thousands of people a day) then you’ll be able to test a lot of elements in a fair amount of time, but if you only get a few hundred people a day to the page you’re testing, it could take months before you get results. The lesson? Keep it simple stupid!

GWO allows eight sections on a page to be tested. That’s not very much I hear you say, but noooo, each of those sections can have 127 different variations tested, with GWO maxing out at 10,000 combinations.
What counts as a combination? Everything. Let’s do the math: if you have two headlines on a page, plus two images, plus two calls to action, and for each of these headlines, images and calls to action you want to test three variations, to calculate variations you multiply the number of variations per section by one another, three sections of three variations each is:

(3 x 3 x 3), that’s 27 combinations.

And with that lesson learned, let’s patently ignore it and cut a page up into loads of elements:

The above step I do in tandem with the copywriter and designer, and I like to have the developer who is going to cut the page into HTML to be present also. The copywriter (slash marketer of the product, hopefully) is the one who will really know if a textual element is in need of testing. Some text elements are obvious test candidates, like headlines and calls to action, others not so obvious, like fine print or sidebar content etc.

Sit down with the copywriter and determine which elements on the page deserve to be tested. Then send them off with the task of coming up with as many different versions of each textual element that they think is worth including in a test. A lot of copywriters love this, because while they’re used to having to make a judgement call between two pieces of text based on intuition of what may work better, they now have the option of writing each element a few ways and simply going with whatever works best. This can be really freeing for a writer.

The same is true for the designer, who hopefully will welcome the idea of trying a few different images and learning from what works best. Most of the time we don’t spend a lot of time testing small graphical elements and instead concentrate on the larger or more obvious ones. This is the appropriate place to start, but if you’re further down the multivariate testing road, you might start to get a little more granular with the level of graphical element you test. For example, in the above image I place the ‘submit’ button within the form ‘element’ – if after you’ve tested for a while and are confident in some of the other elements on the page, you may wish to run a new test that makes the ‘submit’ button an element unto itself, then you could test different text like ‘click here’ or ‘order now’ or things like the color, size or placement of the button.

The reason I like to have the HTML programmer in the room while doing all of this, is because they are going to have to cut the page up, and to do so properly for GWO, they have to understand something: each of the elements that we want to be a ‘swappable’ thing in GWO, absolutely HAS TO BE a contiguous (uninterrupted) block of HTML code. In order to ensure this is the case, the HTML programmer has to know which sections of the page are designated as an ‘element’.

Overall the process is simple (why did I even split it into steps if it’s only two steps? Don’t ask me, I just write here), all you need to start is a best guess at a landing page. From there, sit down with your designers and marketers, and be sure to include the HTML coder in the process at some point – they’ll have to add the GWO codes (or code for whichever multivariate software you’re using) to each element, so they need to understand the process as a whole. So no excuses, it’s simple, it’s free, and it will make you more money, by definition, so go get testing!

Well what happens post-click actually directly affects your PPC accounts – in the case of Adwords, your Quality Score, which dictates what your minimum bid is for each keyword, is affected by how well your landing page matches your ad, and also very likely by how often people abandon your site and return to Google.

Today we’re talking about creating landing page wireframes – well, sort of, not formal wireframes that big companies might need to use, with a million approvals from every person in the building and bureaucracy out the wazoo, but informal ones that anyone can make, and marketers at small to medium sized business could create. The idea is to put your idea down on paper, then formalize the messages a little in photoshop so that you can sit down with a designer and have a decent page created.

So grab the Adobe Photoshop file from the video and follow along: Download the PSD file

Now don’t laugh at my fake landing page! The whole point is that you can change it into absolutely anything you want, so if you don’t like it – good! Go and make it better!

Landing pages are an essential part of the PPC cycle, and it’s really very common that the people in a company who know their product or service best, the marketers, and those responsible for the PPC campaigns, can’t get a landing page properly designed in the way they’d like. So this video is a very basic introduction to the idea of creating a filled-in wireframe in Photoshop. We’re going to look at the concept of layers, we’ll look at shapes and how to resize and reshape them, and we’ll add text – with these basics, a simple landing page wireframe can be created, which any designer can work from to create an attractive page with the messages and path to conversion that you, the marketer, envision as best.

If you’re familiar with Photoshop already, you aren’t likely to learn anything new, but if you’re thinking ‘oh no I can’t use Photoshop’, but you really want input in your landing page development, this tutorial is for you. Armed with this knowledge and a starter Photoshop file, you can produce a sort of functional wireframe for your landing pages, then sit with a designer to have them create the beautiful page you actually want, with things in the right places, and calls to action perfectly positioned, etc etc – the first time.

The landing page creation process, in my humble opinion, should begin with a small marketing team who understands not only the website, but also their customers and how to lead them to a conversion. To begin with the team should identify and create/source the elements which may make it into the final page, either graphically or textually, including things like:

• Main Headline – Some text has to be the biggest, what should it say?
• Offers / Features – Short punchy headline style text needs to be brainstormed.
• Lists and bullet points – Whichever information lends itself well to bulleted lists should be worked out, again in a short and punchy manner.
• Short-copy / Long-copy – depending on the landing page type you’ll need either a little, or a lot, of text. I’m a fan of short pages, but I may not represent your audience, so if you need copy, long or short, write it out first, then later, during the design phase, you can find or create the appropriate space for it. If you’re unsure about long vs short, you may wish to try both and split test them.
• Trust symbols – In most cases trust symbols are a pretty important element to include, and sourcing them may take longer than expected if legal issues like logo usage come into play.
• Testimonials – If you’ve got them, flaunt them!
• Navigation – Marketers should decide which navigational elements will be presented on the landing page, and how prominent they are – I like to see a clear path back to the main website so those who wish to surf more don’t feel trapped – but who knows, maybe you’re selling closets to agoraphobics.
• Imagery – You’ll have to find legal imagery to use, and while this task is often left to the designer, that isn’t always the best idea. I like to see a marketer try to source a lot of potential images from a stock photo site then sit with a designer, present the examples, and discuss what they’d like to get out of the imagery.
• Contact form / format – is it a web-form? Is it an 800 number? Decide on all contact elements which should be present, and remember that doesn’t have to just be one, but it should always be traceable. If it’s a form fill-out you’re after as a user’s primary action, I’m a fan of putting the form right on the landing page.

I’m sure there are some essential elements I may have left out – these are really top-of-my-head examples of elements that could be included in a landing page. If you want some in-depth heavy thinking about landing pages give this Tim Ash guy a call, trust me. Not only does he have a six letter name, his landing pages are optimized too.