Hundred Dollar SEO

SEOmoz held a landing page competition. It was supposed to end in mid-August, but it had to be extended to reach statistical significance. Frankly this excites me, because my entry was the reason. Paul Robb and I were so close that it took almost 3000 visits per page to reach confidence that one performed better.

But why did two very different looking pages get such similar conversion rates?

First look at each of the top two:

• Short Page (my page)
  • 12.76% Free Membership, 2.41% Premium Membership
• Long Copy
  • 9.08% Free Membership, 2.55% Premium Membership

Both entries have a strong similarity, they both focus on diminishing anxiety by establishing the value of SEOmoz.

The long copy introduces a personal connection and an abundance of information to make the readers comfortable with the action of joining the SEOmoz community as premium members. Every word on the page gives you another opportunity to make your visitor feel that they are getting a valuable deal, the trade off is that the longer your page the more people that give up. But you can see that it does work, bringing 90 new members and 25 premium members for every 1000 new visitors.

The short page reduces anxiety by using very direct testimonials and creating a strong valuation on the action of becoming a free member, relying on latent conversions after engagement as a free member. This format relies on existing positive brand feeling or curiosity after initial sign up. In the end the short version produces 127 free members and 24 premium members for every 1000 visitors.

I like Will Critchlow’s description of my page:

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.

The high first step (sign-up) value is because of the one way out construction of the short page and value put on starting the process. The checklist displays the value of being a free member.

While my version does not exclusively target premium membership it gets many people past the first and highest barrier. Sites like SEOmoz have a business value in expanding their total membership. In spite of a slightly fewer conversions total return on investment is higher, including intangibles.

Long copy pages work for the same things that traditional print and direct mail campaigns work well for, a pure sale. Over the course of thousands of visitors you will see that slightly higher end conversion add up. On the other hand the short page has outstanding numbers for anyone who is running a lead generation campaign, if you are expanding a community or collecting contact information the short page offers you a much greater return. If you are making money from advertising to a community or from follow up sales calls the 12.8% sign up rate is where you will derive your value.

In either case both pages should be considered a first step, a platform from which you stage your next round of tests. Each of them has a performance indicator that can be improved. Further testing will help you keep on the road to higher profits.