Locks and Arrows: notes from seeing Brian Massey speak at SEO Austin this evening on making landing pages

• at a shopping cart page, visitors respond well to the symbol of a lock for security
• having an arrow pointing at the button that a visitor is to ultimately click does not hurt
• you do want to draw the eye to the button – make the button a color that is not anywhere else on the page – red has some negative connotations, so maybe not red
• move the value offer into a heading and keep a call to action at the submit button
• qualify yourself with numbers, numbers of customers, numbers of meals served, etc.
• make halfway transparent or grey images that might compete with the button
• put logos of some of your customers on the page to qualify yourself
• do not put links to your Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn page on a landing page, these are great at a confirmation page, but you do not want to give persons going to your landing page a reason to leave
• do not drive ads to a homepage as the goal of a homepage is to move traffic away to other pages (where the goal of a landing page is to keep the visitors there)
• a sandwich page is an SEO-friendly landing page with a bunch of copy that visitors will want -followed with perhaps a call to action at the base
• phone numbers are trust builders
• there are services such a Mongoose Metrics which provide separate phone numbers for different landing pages so that, if you are trying to drive someone to call a number instead of clicking a button, you can track how successful you are
• it might be wise for a small business to just get a second phone line for their landing pages alone
• Google Voice and Google Phone and Skype might be good, affordable resources for enumerating phone numbers that are kept specific to landing pages
• duplicate content traditionally makes for bad SEO, but a guy in the audience asserted that it is OK to have separate mobile and regular web sites
• do not talk about yourself, tell the visitor what is in it for them
• B2B and B2C are not that different as business people are people too – do not try to write Styrofoam corporate talk for B2C as this does not work
• testimonials are good trust builders, but here again, they should be real testimonials, probably long and certainly substantive, as opposed to something fake that a copywriter wrote on behalf of a client and then got approval for
• unbounce.com is a resource for building landing pages through a third party and it supports A/B variations
• Welcome is not a very good headline :P
• Google has a ranking for every page and part of that ranking is defined by load time
• do not get too attached to your creations in this space