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!

How do you make your PPC landing pages jump off the screen?

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.

That title is a trick, I’m mostly a beginner myself when it comes to multivariate – it was basically beyond my reach before Google decided to eviscerate the proletariat and release Google Website Optimizer tool (GWO) – killing offer all competitors with another amazing free app. Love to hate those guys.

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. [Read more...]

PPC isn’t only about the pre-click world, but the post-click world – the world of what users see and do after they’ve clicked on your ad and you’ve paid a provider like Google Adwords.

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 – [Read more...]