Search Marketing Sage

As a designer, I sometimes feel at the mercy of my copywriting marketer counterparts. I wonder how much influence design can really have on the conversion rate of a landing page. Don’t people just need to be informed and persuaded by excellently prepared and relevant copy?

Not necessarily. Visitors are typically not willing to spend more than 4 seconds to decide if your page, company, or product is a good fit. They won’t scroll and they won’t read. They will scan the content and if they don’t see what they’re looking for, they simply hit the back button and move on to a competitor. So with only 4 seconds of influence, the design and layout become more important than ever.

Of course, creating a beautiful user experience has always been (or should be) the goal of any web designer. But how can we influence conversion with aesthetics to achieve the perfect landing page design?

In line with the rise of mobile devices, mobile apps are becoming more and more prevalent and with every passing day the competition is getting steeper. If you have a mobile app, what measures are you taking to promote or increase downloads? PPC may not be a route that you originally worked into your strategy, but Google AdWords offers unexpected ways to help advertisers promote their mobile apps, and, in turn,  increase app downloads.

Mobile App Extensions

Ad Extensions are offered through Google AdWords as a way to allow advertisers to show more information in addition to their traditional text ads. This helps provide searchers with more information, but also helps the advertiser take up more real estate on the search engine results page (SERP), drawing more attention to their ads.

Mobile App Extensions in particular are a new feature from AdWords, available in a full, global release to advertisers that have upgraded to enhanced campaigns. This will enable a link to download your mobile/tablet app to accompany your ad, with both Android and iOS as available options depending on the type of app you offer. This additional link would point to a deep page on your site, where searchers can download the app.

App Promotion Ads

You know what makes me cringe? Yes, Dance Moms.

You know what else? Wordpress blogs that lack some of the easiest things to make them more search engine-friendly.

WordPress is my favorite blogging platform, and for 2 BIG reasons:

1. You don’t need to be web developer/programmer/mathematician/rocket scientist to set up and maintain a blog on WordPress.
2. WordPress is flexible, with thousands of plugins available to help you customize and improve your blog.

WordPress makes it super-easy for you to do almost anything with your blog – including optimizing it for search. Here’s a checklist of 5 things you can do right now to make your WordPress blog SEO-friendly: