As part of our SEJ interview series, I caught up with Jonah Stein of ItsTheROI to discuss conversion rate optimization.
Jonah has 17 years of online marketing experience and specializes in ROI driven SEO and PPC initiatives for both established brands and startups.
I took this opportunity with Jonah to ask what are some of the signals marketers should be looking for from their visitors in order to better optimize their landing pages.
Hear his response in the video below:
Here are some key takeaways from the video:
- Google has gone to great lengths to explain why they can’t access data from social media sites, they say they can’t see these social signals because they’re behind firewalls. However, what they’re leaving out of their explanation is that they have all kinds of instrumentation in place to see where traffic is coming from and where it’s flowing to. Because of this they actually get a ton of great data from Facebook since they can see what users are clicking on and what content they’re spending their time with.
- Jonah says too many people in the search industry are paying attention to external factors, and leading themselves to believe that on-site SEO is dead. But anybody who lands on your site is a user that has the potential to provide positive or negative data.
- Instead of focusing on the percentage of people who do exactly what you want them to do while on your site, Jonah suggests to step back and realize that every visitor comes to your site with their own intent.
- If you optimize for only the 4 or 5 percent of people who end up converting on your website, you’re totally leaving out the other 95% of people who came to your website wanting to do something else. That’s why Jonah says you should optimize your site with every user in mind and value all of your traffic, not just the percent that converts. If you do this then you’re getting a lot closer to what Google is looking for and what they judging sites on.
- For many sites, the search engine is the front door. People usually don’t come to your site by typing in the domain, they come to your site because they searched for something that lead them there. If your visitors are landing deep into your site, you should be paying attention to what your top landing pages are and what percentage of those you even think about on a regular basis.
- Jonah says many site owners are surprised when you tell them what their top landing pages are, and few of them even care because those particular pages don’t convert. But if you’re optimizing for the user intent you can get a lot more value out of those pages.
Please visit SEJ’s YouTube page for more video interviews.
Category
SEO
