SEOmoz yesterday released the long-awaited results of their landing page competition where members of the community competed to create the best landing page they could for SEOmoz premium membership. Prior to the contest, the conversion rate was only 0.5% so they felt there was a lot of scope for improvement.

There is a small story in the great improvement the best landing page has offered - converting more like 2.5% of all visitors (and beating the next best conversion rate by a not-to-be-sniffed-at 7%). More interestingly for those of us ego-surfing this week (that would be me, then!) is actually that ‘nearly as good’ second place page - nicknamed ‘The Will Critchlow checklist’ internally at SEOmoz (which wasn’t designed by us, I hasten to add).

This landing page competition has some important lessons for all of us in the business of converting visitors into customers (and who isn’t?). SEOmoz had to keep the competition running longer than they had anticipated in order to get a statistically significant sample to differentiate the top two best-performing pages. These two pages had very similar performance, but are quite different in approach and execution:

The Will Critchlow checklist

The runner-up was a short-form page (by Carlos) with only two main elements:

1. a testimonial with headshot (of me!)
2. a checklist of benefits of premium membership

This landing page was incredibly successful at getting people into the sign-up funnel (at 12.8% vs 9.1% from the eventual winner) - probably (in my opinion, obviously without the benefit of additional multi-variate testing) because of the simplicity and short-form coupled with the confidence-giving testimonial (ahem). There is very little to do on this page other than continue through the sign-up.

Unfortunately (for this page’s author) a larger proportion of visitors failed to complete the signup process after starting on this page. It may be that this is not rectifiable and is simply a consequence of inviting visitors in too hard, but it wouldn’t surprise me if this could be boosted by bringing some elements of the eventual winner into the latter stages of the process - using the best of each technique to create a ’super-converter’. If I were Rand, I would next trial introducing some of the confidence-building elements of the overall winner (e.g. the large media organisation logos or a photo of Rand himself) into the later stages of the signup process.

The Scroll Forever

The eventual winner was a long-form page with a lot of text and many complementary confidence-building techniques (by inflatemouse) including:

1. a personal-sounding letter from Rand (+ photo)
2. press coverage with logos of well-recognised media organisations
3. quite a lot of ‘free’ information
4. a money-back guarantee
5. a requirement you to ‘invest in yourself’
6. limiting the offer to 7,000 people
7. requiring you to keep it confidential
8. a call to action of ‘enroll [sic] today’ - sounding like you are going to be learning and bettering yourself
9. examples of tools and other value-added benefits of membership

The long-form copy letter is a classic in direct marketing, and this is a great example of it - I think the only problem with it is that it doesn’t have my photo on it

So, as my loyal fans will know - I was over at Manchester this weekend for an SEO social gathering. Well, here’s the lowdown for anyone who wants to read!

Friday

So I arrived about 7 on Friday night at the Britannia hotel and wondered down to the hotel bar only to realise that the downside to being relatively new to the industry is that I didn’t recognise anyone. Thankfully, Rebecca’s comics from SEOmoz have educated me in the subtletys of DaveN’s dialect and I easily picked him out stood at the bar being loud. I shamefully introduced myself and admitted that I didn’t know anyone and Dave was kind enough to point out who everyone was - thanks Dave! I promptly forgot all the names but then got chatting to Dave and I felt right at home being from Yorkshire I think gives you a certain spin on life which I instantly got on with. He also told me all manner of interesting titbits about Microsoft’s plans for (further) world domination.

I then got talking to Simon from Pushon who’s Manchester SEO SERPs were suddenly overrun by all our blogs. Sorry Simon! Hope you’ll get your rankings back one day

We then moseyed on over to Sam’s chop house for some lovely food, I think at this point it’s worth mentioning that Colin (AKA four eyes) did a sterling job of appearing not to have a clue what was going on but at the same time making everything run like clockwork (we didn’t get a chance to chat until Sat but nice to meet you as well!). In particular I loved chatting on Sat when you told me all the great ideas you had for promoting your site then took a long swig of beer and finished with ‘but that seems like a lot of work, so I’m not going to’. Nice to see you have your priorities straight!

Back at the hotel Fri evening I got chatting with Jason Duke (of general fame) and Denise (from Propellernet) when my eyes got opened to a whole host of black hat ideas I’d never thought of. I’m also humbled to say that most of them were outside of my reach! It was quite an experience speaking with Jason, not just because of how MUCH he talks (a lot!) but also how intelligently he talks. A really nice guy too (even if his tactics for clearing a crowded seat were left of left-field!).

As people got tired and went to bed I got chatting with Ben from Conversion Rate Experts who I recognised when he said he ran a site with a squirrel on it (check the site out for yourself!) and a few other guys who’s names I can’t recall!

4am and it was time to call Friday a day!

Saturday

Predictably I didn’t get up early on Sat but had a wonder round Manchester and eventually ended up at the pub where everyone was congregating. Again, the firs thing that I realised is that Dave is loud! He showed me photos of the hilton which quite frankly kicks the Britannia’s ass.

Saturday afternoon was a much more relaxed affair with I imagine people recovering from Friday night. Still, I met up with a local SEOer called James (who I can’t link to since he forgot all his business cards - again, drop me a line or a comment and I’ll link over to you!) from Leeds. Next SEO event in Leeds anyone?

I also met up with some cool guys from Isreal who worked in-house for 888.com. I felt a bit bad since I was wearing a Full Tilt t-shirt at the time no hard feelings guys!

There was a bit of a group discussion about geo-location which I found pretty useful between Colin, myself and Sean Carlos from Antezeta. Sean is based in Italy and had some great ideas and seemed to be enjoying the easy Italian SERPs and living a nice lifestyle. Good work!

Then James and I got chatting with Cheryl and Nicola who work in house for a big financial company. Unfortunately that was about the last time I talked shop for the weekend. Fortunately, Cheryl and Nicola were a riot and were really good fun to hang out with and educated me on the fact that they are in fact the Original SEO Chicks. Sorry girls. Let the catfight begin!

Over an appalling thai meal (I’m not giving them a link due to their poor service) we had a riot and I met Rob aka evilgreenmonkey. Who we tried to persuade to play poker but he was having none of it. Shame on you Rob having worked for Partygaming I would have thought you’d be up for that!

After that it was more drinking in the hotel bar with James, Nicola and Cheryl. Some really good folks there and a good time had by all.

All in all, a fantastic weekend and met some great people. Thanks to Colin and anyone else who helped organise. If there’s anyone I’ve forgotten or if anyone wants to upload some photos (I didn’t take a camera so have no evidence of the weekend!) then drop me a note in the comments and I’ll link you up. Here’s to next time!

edit: I’m still sleepy from the weekend apparently, forgot to mention that I was surprised at the lack of traditional white-hat SEO agencies there (which is the category I’d place myself in I think…) A lot of people seemed to be either one-man bands, in-house SEOers or blacker than black blackhats. Still, as someone pointed out, the north of England is the blackhat hotbed of the world. Turns out it’s true!

edit no 2: A few people I’d missed the first time around! Stephen from Boney Toad was one of the guys I met Fri night and Zwart on Sat afternoon. Great to meet both of you guys!

No, it’s not because they paid us. No, there’s no crazy reciprocal linking going on. It’s because we love experimenting here at Distilled and we’ve recently been running a bit of an experiment involving Borkowski.

Borkowski are a UK based PR and publicity stunt company and as such we thought they’d take our experiment in the light hearted nature it was intended. Thankfully they did but we’re dropping them a link anyway to keep our part of the deal. In fact here’s another! (mmmm linky goodness)

Sorry I’m being so secretive, I can’t really go into details about what the experiment entailed just yet but watch this space!

All in all, this one went quite well. This is what the office usually looks like after one of my ‘experiments’:

It was just over a month ago that I wrote about our book giveaway - where we promised to give away two copies of Avinash’s book (Web Analytics in an Hour a Day. As I wrote on the 3rd August:

we are offering a couple of free copies of Avinash’s book to lucky Reputation Monitor subscribers. We are going to pick two random subscribers on Monday 3rd September (a month from now) - one drawn from all subscribers on that date and one from everyone who signs up between now and then.

Now, what with two new employees starting on the 3rd (more on that subject soon) and our upcoming office move (also more coming soon). The draw was slightly delayed. But don’t panic - the terms stayed the same, so the pool was of everyone who was a member on the 3rd September.

So who are the lucky winners who are going to receive a copy of the book?

The winner from existing subscribers is Jason West of websalad. Congratulations Jason! We’re now going to have to work out how to get a copy to Aus. Maybe we’ll order a new one from Amazon…!

The winner from new subscribers is Kathy Mosesian. I think Kathy might not be in the UK either, but we’ll work something out!

We also have a bonus winner: Madeleine McMillan (who writes at EngageMC) upgraded during August and won herself a surprise copy as well.

Congratulations to you all. I hope you enjoy the book and get a lot of benefit from it.

We still have books left, so don’t forget that anyone signing up for an agency account from now until we run out of books will also get a free copy.

We’re enjoying being a part of Avinash’s effort to spread the word about good web analytics and do a bit of good at the same time:

100% of the author’s proceeds from the book will be donated to charity. The proceeds will go to The Smile Train and Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), to assist in their efforts to make our world a better place.

Update: I now have a link for Madeleine and also heard that it’s her birthday! What a nice coincidence…

SEOMoz have released another beautiful piece of linkbait. It is both beautiful to look at and very nicely executed: SEO quiz. But then I would say that because they have played to my ego perfectly. I got 93% making me an SEO ‘dark lord’:

SEO Dark Lord - 93%

Are you an SEO Expert?

I’m not too disappointed to have missed out on full marks (OK, I’m a little disappointed), but of the questions I got wrong, one had the following in the explanation:

This is a tough question, and the answer is even somewhat debatable

Needless to say, I would debate that one…

Another was on the definition of SEO versus SEM. There were two sensible answers (one having SEM as a superset of SEO including PPC and one having SEM effectively meaning PPC). I have heard it used both ways and picked a different one to the ‘mozzers.

Ah well. It’ll do.

Ok, so assuming that you’ve kept abreast of my recent posts about Facebook public profiles (and you’re not sick of reading about Facebook) read on! (if I keep up at this rate I’ll overtake Andy Beal as unofficial facebook rumour blog!)

I logged into facebook this morning (as every self-respecting citizen should) only to discover the following box on top of my news feed:

And expanding the ‘read more’ tab gave me this:

Now - the part I find most interesting in this is: “In a few weeks, these public search listings can be found in search engines like Google”. Now, depending how you read this, it might be taken to mean that once you activate your public listing option then a few weeks later it will be indexed by Google. Or, it could mean that in a couple of weeks Facebook are going to be implementing some kind of internal linking structure such that these public profile pages actually rank in Google. Wow. They took my advice! (or stole my idea, whichever you prefer! Incidentally, Muhammed Saleem has a good post explaining how every man and his dog has a claim to have invented some part of Facebook. I guess you can add my name to that list as inventing their SEO strategy :-p )

I’ll be keeping a close eye on this one - it’ll be interesting to see what happens and which way they go. Currently, my public profile still isn’t very public - the only search that it shows up for is [tom critchlow facebook] and even then it’s 3rd!

Update: Danny from SEL has written a great piece on this topic, check it out here. Also, John Battelle raises a very interesting point - if all these public profiles DO begin ranking, will Google onebox them? So many questions, so few answers!!

So a few weeks ago I ran a little experiment where I allowed my facebook public profile to be indexed by the search engines, I dropped a few links to it (from this blog and from my Sphinn profile) and then watched it outrank my profile page on the Distilled site. I was shocked by how quickly it ranked and how highly it ranked (although after seeing wikipedia all over the place I can’t say I was that surprised…).

Here’s my first post about it

Here’s my follow up after I’d spotted it ranking

And now, I just checked again (yeah, I’m vain. Deal with it.) and my facebook public listing is nowhere to be found. That’s odd, I thought. Maybe Facebook has removed my public profile or perhaps it’s fallen out of Google’s index. I checked and nope, the page is still indexed and listed in the index.

A google.co.uk search for tom critchlow (my facebook page nowhere to be found)

A google.co.uk search for tom critchlow public profile (again, nowhere to be found)

A google.co.uk search for tom critchlow face book (you’d really think it’d be there for this one!)

A google.co.uk search for tom critchlow facebook (and now, proving that it is indexed and can still show for some queries here is my profile)

Now normally, to check and see if there is a penalty on a website’s rankings you’d run some searches for exact phrases in the title tags of some of it’s prominent pages. Unfortunately, I’m having difficulty finding an appropriate page to run searches on. The main facebook site still ranks for [facebook] and [face book].

Is there a penalty on Facebook? Do they care?! Well, probably not since they weren’t taking advantage of this before (see my earlier post) but I still wouldn’t be surprised if this resulted in a noticeable dip in traffic for them (assuming this happened across the board).

Anyone else have any public profiles indexed? Tried Googling yourself recently?

Following on from the comedy of Youtube advertising revenues, I thought I’d share a story about advertising pricing on a smaller scale.

We have considered advertising Reputation Monitor, our online media monitoring tool in PR Week seeing as it can be useful for PR agencies to monitor blog buzz on behalf of their clients. We have come to the conclusion for the time being that advertising in the magazine will not be cost-effective because of the number of hurdles to get from a PR Week reader to Reputation Monitor subscriber (not least of which is getting them to type in a URL and visit our website).

With that thought in mind, we decided to see what it would cost to advertise on their website - given that this would remove one hurdle, as the viewer would already be online and hence only a click away from our site. I therefore asked them to send across as much information as they could about visitors to their website and their interaction with the adverts.

I assumed that if you were selling online advertising, you would want to provide potential advertisers with a host of information, not least:

• Unique visitors
• Repeat visitors / number of visits per user / time to return
• Time on site / page impressions other interaction data
• Sources of traffic (including from natural search, by keyword)
• Clickthrough rates of similar adverts and effectiveness case studies for other advertisers

It turns out that they couldn’t supply me with very much of this data. I got unique visitors and total page impressions from a six month period (with no seasonality or trending). The only case study I got was a clickthrough rate of one advertiser and their total number of clicks. Perhaps I am expecting too much, but with 22 clicks in 2 weeks, I wasn’t all that impressed.

Given that during our experiments with paid search advertising, we think we need to spend under 50p / click (when someone has searched for a highly relevant term), it seems unlikely that we would be able to afford to pay more for a contextual advert… Being generous then, we could possibly offer £25 / month for this advertising. It doesn’t seem very likely that they’d be up for that considering the rate cards…

Is all magazine advertising like this?

Has it never really been good value for money to advertise with magazines such as this? Is it only now, with the advent of greater tracking on the Internet that we are realising? Or is it simply that they need to price their online advertising very differently to their print advertising?

I found a very entertaining story while catching up with my reading on searchengineland. While estimating the impact on Google’s revenues from introducing overlay advertising on Youtube videos, Mary Meeker, superstar analyst at Morgan Stanley, made a mistake in failing to account for CPM (Cost Per Thousand) impressions (she assumed that they were revenue per impression numbers). As Henry Blodget at Alley Insider points out that would leave

The original estimate was of an increase of $4.8 billion of gross revenue and $720 million of net revenue for Google. When the error is corrected, if the rest of the assumptions are held constant, these numbers become somewhat less impressive. Blodget puts it well:

What happens to Mary’s estimates when you do the math right? Well, that $4.8 billion of gross revenue becomes $4.8 million, and the $720 million of net revenue becomes $720 thousand. So if, as Mary suggests, Google can float ads on top of 20 million streams a month, secure a $20 CPM, and keep 15% of the gross revenue, the overall impact will actually be, as we suggested yesterday, immaterial.

The interesting bit comes, however, when she and her team learned of the mistake and included the correction in their calculations. All of a sudden, they weren’t happy with the rest of their assumptions (perhaps because it kinda changes their conclusions?) and so they changed ‘em….

With the error corrected but the new estimates plugged in, the Morgan Stanley position is that Youtube will generate $75 - $189 million of net revenue….

Now, Blodget is not blameless in over-hyping tech stocks (see first bubble). But then who is? I certainly held some shares that, how shall we say, underperformed. Nevertheless, this kind of finagling to get the answer you first thought of shows a weak analysis in my opinion and Blodget’s summing up is very funny:

We estimate that Google will generate $100 trillion of revenue in 2010. Or maybe $10 billion. Whatever.

I think it’s a shame that this kind of tomfoolery isn’t more widely reported. At present, it remains a reputation issue within a relatively closed sphere.

Richard Tyler in the Telegraph reports on a call by Make your Mark and Enterprise Coalition Campaign. Apparently:

The Government should pay someone to set up a Facebook for entrepreneurs in order to help more young people turn their ideas into viable businesses.

This is apparently because:

too many young people say that they are keen to act on a business idea but then do not do so.

I don’t think this is a problem that is restricted to young people and I think that is only one reason why this is a really bad idea. Tyler skirts close to one of my reasons when he says:

The idea obviously ignores the fact that anyone could use the existing Facebook (or Myspace or Bebo) sites to create their own online community.

If there is a demand for a new site that is customised to the needs of small entrepreneurs, then I’m sure someone will step up to the plate and deliver one. If not, why fund one?

The report mentions that the government should be seeking to be involved because of the extent of “youth crime and alienation in parts of the country”. Now, if what we seek is a culture more like that in the US where enterprise is valued highly and where small businesses contribute a huge amount to the whole economy, then I think we need to encourage the ambitious kids, the smart kids that running your own business is a great alternative to the professions or going to work for large corporations.

I finished Rachel Bridge’s book How I Made It on holiday. In it, 40 entrepreneurs tell of their experiences of starting and growing their business.

I was amazed at the number who have done it without qualifications or after being sacked from a larger company. I think it’s awesome that we have an environment in which that can happen, but where are the others?

We’ve tried to take the alternative approach. Everyone involved in Distilled has very bright prospects elsewhere (there’s a scattering of high class degrees from top universities, very talented people and any for whom it’s not their first job left a great job to do this). Hopefully we’ll grow into just one example to help show the next generation of talented school kids that running your own business or working for a small growing business can be hugely rewarding.

Speaking of our experiences, and tying it back to the point above, I have always wanted our business to succeed because it is a good business, not because we got a hand-out or special support. My opinion is that most Government funding for businesses is unnecessary and wasteful - good business ideas will succeed without it and funding money either goes to businesses that don’t need it or it props up businesses that should fail. I would love to see the freakonomics guys look into whether that is the case…

Anyway, until I see some evidence to the contrary, my opinion is that the money would be better spent reducing the tax burden on start-up businesses.

Government and small businesses

Just to end my little rant, I still struggle to believe that in the time since we started our business, a supposedly pro-enterprise government has:

• removed the zero-rate corporation tax band
• increased the rate of corporation tax paid by small businesses
• increased the rate of corporation tax paid by small businesses again
• introduced ridiculous rules meaning that hiring employees is more expensive than it needs to be - something that is plenty expensive enough already

This is despite figures quoted in the report that show it is tough times for small businesses with out of a survey of 300 small business owners, an unbelievable:

49pc … making less than £10,000

(I’m pleased to say we make the cut on this one….!).

Maybe we’re asking the wrong question - are there any young entrepreneurs who fancy a try at running the country?

But is the underlying idea a good one?

None of my argument above means that the idea of a facebook-style environment for young entrepreneurs is a bad idea. It might be a great idea (or it might be dreadful) but either way it would be an interesting project for one of these young entrepreneurs (who will make a killing if it is a good idea). I think there is a lot of untapped entrepreneurial potential in this country but I do think there are enough entrepreneurs around to help improve that situation.

If anyone does build a tool like this (or one exists already), do let us know - it’s the kind of project we would gladly support (with a link if nothing else!).

The only reason the government needs to get involved in funding one, however, is if it’s a bad idea that can’t get off the ground on its own. I know I can get too free-market at times, but I don’t think there is any evidence that there is a market failure here (which would be the only good reason for needing the government to step in).

Other people’s opinion

I would like to hear others’ opinions on this. In particular, I’m going to ask the guys at Trovus who are experts in the uses of social media to give their opinion on:

1. Would a facebook-style resource for young entrepreneurs help? Would it be a good idea?
2. Does it need government funding, or if it’s a good idea, could it support itself?