I received a direct mail piece this morning advertising SMX East and it has a handy list of ‘6 essentials for search marketing success‘ on the front cover.

In the opinion of SMX, they are:
1. Increase traffic with SEM-aware design and copy
2. Save money by optimizing your SEO/PPC investment
3. Maximize natural search rankings with killer content strategy
4. Boost conversions by driving high-quality traffic to your site
5. Grow sales after selecting more effective keywords
6. Win business by outwitting the competition

Wait. Nothing about Conversion Optimization?

This is an indication that Danny Sullivan and the search industry still don’t understand how conversion decisions work (and we’ll ignore the fact that #5 is a subset of #2, #2 is a subset of #4, and #6 provides no value at all).

Please understand that getting a person to your site is typically less than 10% of the effort of getting them to purchase. If driving traffic is all you had to do, you would have a 100% conversion rate.

Think about this for a second.

Imagine I want what you’re selling

Imagine you sell iPhone accessories online. I happen to be searching for an iPhone screen protector so I see your Google ad that promises “iPhone screen protectors, best prices anywhere” from your highly optimized, relevant PPC campaign with SEM-aware design and copy. I click on your ad and arrive at your landing page.

Do you REALLY have what I want?

Okay, so I’ve made an infinitesimally small commitment to you - I’ve clicked on your ad. Congratulations.

But now you have to convince me to buy from you over all of the other iPhone accessory vendors that are open in my other browser tabs. You want me to do a bunch of uncomfortable things, like:

• Familiarize myself with your site’s unique=innovative=terrible navigation system
• Search through your list of products (because your landing page probably didn’t send me directly to the right one) to find what I need
• Read a bunch of copy about your company and product
• Scroll up and down to find the info I want (I hate scrolling and my wrist is starting to hurt)
• Figure how much you want me to pay
• Figure out whether you ship to my location and how much shipping costs (which I may have to go to the shopping cart to find out!)
• Enter a whole lot of personal information about me into a form (how do I know what you’re going to do with this?)
• Figure out why I keep getting an error message and kicked back to the top of the form (Oh.. I need a six character password that must contain a number but when the page reloads I lost some of the other info I’d already entered.. ack.. and why is the error message in a spot on the page that I can’t see without scrolling..)
• Give you my credit card number

Conversion Optimization does that

That’s a big job. And that’s where conversion optimization comes in. It’s the science and art of moving people through your conversion funnel to get more leads and sales from that expensive traffic you’re driving to your site.

I was at SMX West a few weeks ago and was surprised at how few of the SEM vendors knew about conversion optimization. We’re still in the early adopter phase and it will be exciting to see the lumbering behemoth that is the search industry understand that a purchase decision can’t be solved with an algorithm.

Our clients are now leap-frogging their competition by becoming more efficient with their marketing dollars. Conversion optimization is the right tactic to use now especially when few others are.

Note: For more information on how you can increase your conversion rate, contact one of our conversion optimization experts.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 11:31 am and is filed under landing page optimization, search marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.