While many consumers may be keen to jump straight in and give you their details without a moment’s hesitation, there are those who will look a little deeper at the tone and design of the form itself. It’s these kinds of consumers who are unlikely to convert, and therefore it’s these kinds of consumers who need a little more encouragement at this stage of the buying cycle.

We’ve put together eight tips for webmasters eager to draft up great-looking landing page forms that will blend seamlessly into the design of the site yet still encourage the user get in contact with your company.

1. Make the form as simple as easy to use as possible. This is often easier said than done but crucial if you’re to encourage the user to choose you company over your competitors.

1. Ensure that your form is bright, bold and eye-catching. The aesthetic appeal of the form really does matter and it should be designed to fit in with your site’s existing branding.

1. Similarly, make sure that the look and feel of the form is consistent with the rest of your website. If users land on a page that doesn’t meet their expectations, they’re not likely to stick around, and a landing page optimisation form that sticks out like a sore thumb smacks of unprofessionalism.

1. Consider your audience at all times. If you’re a high-level service provider targeting multi-national corporations then keep the style of the landing page chic and professional; if you’re a local nursery wanting to appeal to young families, design a landing page that’s bold, quirky and fun.

1. Make sure the form looks clean and uncluttered. The user won’t want to feel overwhelmed when they land on the page, so widen your side margins and use whitespace to your advantage!

1. Keep all important information and calls to action above the fold of the page at all times. Contact numbers should be displayed as prominently where possible, too.

1. Lay out the information logically and consider the visual cues that your landing page has to offer. Typically, the user’s eyes will fall in a ‘Z’ pattern down the page, searching for the information that’s most relevant to them and acting upon what they see in a matter of seconds. If in doubt about the effectiveness of your landing page, always ask colleagues or impartial individuals their opinions and get an outside perspective on what you have designed.

1. Avoid integrating pop-ups or pop-unders into your landing page. The user has already followed a promotional message to reach this point in the cycle – they don’t want to be inundated with more sales spiel.

We’ll also be publishing advice for those of you looking to optimise your PPC landing page forms fully to increase conversions, so be sure to check back to our blog next week for part two of our landing page optimisation tip sheet.

Each week I will be providing you with my digital marketing Top Tips on how your online business can stay ahead of your competitors! We look after some of the biggest clients on the internet, here are a few of them: promocodes.co.uk, luggagesuperstore.co.uk, voijeans.co.uk, partybritain.co.uk and spabreak.co.uk for more examples please see our case studies.

1.    Blogging

Creating a Blog on your website is an essential part of your online marketing strategy and vital to keep your visitors engaged with news about your business. Your blog is like a newsfeed, so it’s essential to create unique interesting articles which contain links to relevant pages back within your website. If you copy and paste another article and re blog it, remember Google could penalise your site for copied text. As a general rule of thumb only use 1 link per 100 words, this will help Google crawl for keywords associated about your business. A perfect example to see how it’s done is by clicking on the words that are underlined within this article. Remember to update this as much as possible and I would suggest you spend 30 minutes daily doing this task which will benefit your websites online presence massively.

2. XML Sitemap

Your website is like a book, your menu bar is like a contents page so this needs to be clear and simple so that your visitors can navigate around your site and look at pages. You may already have a site map on your website which is like an index page in a book. By creating an XML sitemap which is tailor made especially for Google, allowing it to crawl/read your keywords on all your pages. Please see our website for an excellent example of an XML Sitemap.

3. Google Analytics

Any one that has an online presence for a personal website, small or giant online business should have Google analytics. It’s a vital part of your marketing strategy and its one of the most powerful web analytics tracking solutions that will help you understand customer trends visiting your site. This will help you improve and implement new strategies for customers to purchase or contact you resulting in a conversion. In addition Google Adwords (PPC) customers can even see their Analytics data from inside their Adwords account, plus Google Analytics is free for anyone to use.

Step Up

Google is the search giant; there is no dispute about that. However, we all know that Yahoo have been slowly declining and have been in need of a comeback. This alliance could be exactly what Yahoo needs to begin to bring back higher user activity on their site. Especially since Yahoo site explorer went down, which was a tool that displayed incoming links, this tool was heavily used by SEO ‘s around the world. Now the alliance has been formed, this could be Yahoo’s big break.

What The Bing?

The question must be raised, what is in it for Bing? Well the most obvious reason would be a higher volume of search. Although Yahoo is on a downhill slope right now so the search volume required would not be that great. I think there are other reasons for this Alliance. Possibly Yahoo’s tech heads are better with PPC or may have a more technical algorithm than Bing.

Taking On The G!

Since Google is the king of search, I believe this is an attempt for the two engines (Y! + Bing) to team up and group together their current volumes of traffic and make an attempt to beat Google, this will be tough to accomplish straight away, any search engine to take on Google will not receive an instant win. So unless an awesome advance in the industry is made by Yahoo and Bing, then it will be difficult for them to overcome Google and become the top source of information on the web.

Conclusion

It is unlikely that we will be informed the true reason for this alliance. It is most likely an attempt to combat Google but the reason why they are teaming up is much more than we know. Yahoo are most likely part of this to bring themselves back from their decline. However the reasons for Bing to be a part of this alliance are unclear.

Hi and welcome to my Blog at SEO Positive, each week I will be providing you with my digital marketing Top Tips on how your online business can stay ahead of your competitors! We manage online marketing campaigns (SEO, PPC, Social Media and Website Design) for some of the biggest clients on the internet providing them with a healthy ROI (Return on Investment) here’s a few of them: promocodes.co.uk, luggagesuperstore.co.uk, voijeans.co.uk, partybritain.co.uk and spabreak.co.uk for more examples please see our case studies.

So you’re a Facebook user and would like to know how to get 50 FREE Business cards that costs you absolutely nothing that’s right not a penny just 5 minutes of your time!

Follow these 5 simple steps and receive 50 FREE Facebook Business Cards:

1. Log into your account.

2. You will need to be using the new Timeline profile for this to work, if not you will have to convert it.

3. Go onto your contact info in the about section in your Timeline profile.

4. Click on the Business Card logo.

5. Allow MOO Business Cards access to your information and then follow the simple steps.

Facebook has launched this to coincide with the new Timeline profile, allowing everyone to integrate more with each other’s details. So if you are considering starting up a business or already have a business and would like to take advantage of 50 Free Business Cards then why not it’s FREE!

And yes I can confirm it’s 100% free as I received mine today!

Written By

+ Dave Damhar

Before Google released this update, there were two choices, you could choose a radius, or you could attempt to draw the area that you want to cover. Obviously there are a lot of issues with this because it is fairly inaccurate because at the end of the day it is all down to guess work. Guessing is the last thing you should be doing with PPC and Google has finally recognized that.

With the new update, just simply type in the town or county you want to target and it will come up with something like this:

It shows variations of what you have searched for, so you can get exactly where your targeting. Not only that, but it also provides you with how many people are in that area, so you can see how many potential customers you are reaching out to.

Once you have selected your area, it will show up like this.

As you can see this is a very detailed outline of the area, which is essential to targeting the right locations.

Conclusion

This update to Adwords is brilliant for PPC managers because it allows for precise targeting, this isn’t just something for the PPC ninjas out there, it can be used by the average Joe due to its’ simplicity in how it is set up. The only problem I have found is that it cannot target the smaller areas, like an area within a city. I found this by searching for Broomfield, which is in Chelmsford, and Chelmsford does show up on the precise targeting locations, but due to Broomfields’ small population (when compared to areas like London) it does not show. Google has obviously targeted the areas that are worth targeting and I think the problem I found will rarely pop up. All in all, great job on the update Google, this will give Adwords an easier usability by far.

One of the modern marketing strategy that can be fused with a traditional marketing technique is Pay Per Click Advertising or commonly known as PPC. Every PPC consultant is aware of the fact that a PPC campaign would only be considered to be successful if it has a high conversion rate, that is, there are many visitors who will avail of the products or services being offered by the company. Of course, traffic is important in PPC however it is a lot more important if this traffic would convert or would avail of the products or services as offered in the target website. Advertising online is no different than the conventional advertising using the tri-media, that is print, radio and television. This is the reason why traditional marketing techniques if done correctly may help increase the conversion rate of a PPC campaign.

One of the most helpful PPC campaign strategies is by utilising landing pages as a way to engage the interest of your traffic or potential clients. However, a mere landing page without substance would also be useless. This is where the traditional AIDA principle would come in. AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. In a landing page, observing the AIDA principle would help increase your conversion if done right of course. Let us break down what AIDA’s role is in PPC.

1.       Attention – this means that your landing page should grab the attention of the user, everyone knows that it is very easy for an internet user to navigate away from the site that he is currently viewing, therefore your design of the landing page should catch the attention of the user.

2.        Interest – Along with capturing the attention of the user or your landing page visitor it is important to also spark the interest of the user, catchy text or phrases may be used to accomplish this.

3.       Desire – your content information must arouse the desire of the user to get the product or avail of the services that your company or website is offering. Discounts, promos and reward points may be offered.

4.       Action – your landing page must also contain action phrases such as “buy now!” among other texts in order to engage the client to make the purchase.

AIDA principle is one of these traditional marketing strategies being utilised in advertising using the tri-media and which is also applicable for use in modern internet marketing , a technique that could prove to be useful in increasing your PPC campaigns conversion rate.

The difficulty of ranking in Google is one of the factors to consider as it would result to implementing the SEO campaign for a very long time and during such time revenue or traffic may not be coming in. This is why some internet marketers are utilising other forms of marketing their website and one of the most popular alternatives to SEO is using pay per click services where their websites’ advertisements may be displayed in a number of websites which has Google adsense installed, Google’s pay-per-click service is known as Google Adwords.

Google Adwords would of course require the users to pay for every clicks that were done on their advertisements and previously for UK users of Google Adwords there is a limited avenue to control their billing or expenditures, which sometimes results to going beyond the company’s pay per click budget for the month. This is why Google Adwords has already added a new Billing tab that would enable Google Adwords users to implement manual payments and also this feature has the ability to make the users capable of delaying automatic charges which is a very useful tool especially for those who are following strict internet marketing budget.

Adwords users such as SEO Consultants can also modify the billing for their PPC campaign and create different forms of payments which the user can switch to any time. The incorporation of Google of these PPC billing features as well as the incorporation of the location specific Adwords targeting feature makes Google Adwords a very powerful tool in internet marketing.

In the recent update that was released by Google in their Google Adwords service however, the search engine company has released their new Adwords interface in order to accommodate or allow internet marketer to be able to utilise a single negative keyword list across multiple campaigns. This will make it easier for internet marketers to incorporate negative keywords to multiple campaigns.

Another change that was implemented by Google is the modification of the Google Search ads display. It can be observed that the search ads of Google had some changes like that of a bigger space was allocated for a headline ad in order to accommodate the first line of description, ads being displayed in rows of three, and two description lines being merged into one for better presentation were among the said changes.

First Stop is the front-end part of a search engine, search engines may vary in design and in features but there will always be common features that may be found among all the search engine sites, and by understanding these similarities or common features one can readily interpret any results that may be shown by the search engine which may be relevant to the SEO research being conducted.

First part is the most common among all the search engines and that is the search box or sometimes called the query box. The query box or search box is where the users would enter or input their query strings or keywords, this is usually found at the center of the search engine and such location is common among all search engines.

The second part is the Search refinements or the specific search feature, this feature usually is found at the left column of the search engine results page and its purpose is to help users narrow down their search depending on the given category.

Another important part of a Search engine is the organic results page, this page of course would display the natural or organic search results based on the most optimised and relevant sites with that of the keywords entered.

Finally the Paid results page is also an integral part of the search engine page or results page, this is found usually at the top of the organic results list, this is because the search engines would give much importance to those that have paid for their site to be listed in page 1 of the most relevant keyword utilised by the user.

1.       A good pay-per-click company should have been in the field of pay per click for a considerable amount of time. This means that the length of service of the company in the said field must be long enough to consider them as authority in the said field.

2.       Company participation the industry, for a pay-per-click company to be reliable it must establish itself in the field of pay-per-click by actively participation in the pay per click industry. It must not only focus on clients but also focus on its establishment of its company identity by integration long term goals.

3.       A good pay per click company must  be able to offer a myriad of pay per click strategy combinations this is because of the fact that every website has unique pay-per-click needs.

With these three guidelines you are on your way to choosing the right pay per click company that would help you in your PPC campaign.