B (5:43)

Well, to that point, like there has to be like a point where it's just like, you know, it's like diminishing return of that. Like how could you guide someone? Is it more of. In your experience, someone has a limitation of what sources they would have, whether it's reviews, assets to use, whatnot. That's going to kind of like dictate how far to go in this aspect. Or is this something too that's like, no, by all means, like just keep digging up ways of doing it. Like what's. How would you kind of guide the audience of knowing what that sweet spot is?

C (6:17)

Yeah, I've never seen an instance where there's too much proof on a page. Only bad proof. Only bad proof. Right. Proof that no one cares about. Proof that. For example, a lot of questions I get, should I have video on the page? Well, yes, but is it good? Like the testimonials don't have to be well spoken presenters, but a testimonial video has to follow a certain format. I was here, now I'm here. These are my hesitations. This is what my life looks like now. Yes, I would recommend this. And so if you just have somebody going, yeah, it was good, that doesn't work. So yeah, to answer your question, then another question I get is, well, what if I don't have any proof? What if my client doesn't have any proof? Well, they do. You just have to manufacture it. You have to pull it out of them. And so there's like, there's like other ways to get proof. You just have to think, how can I show the dream outcome? It's not always. Proof is not always served up to you. On a silver platter as a marketer. Right. So for example, with other clients, when I've worked in campaigns, when they may be a bit newer, I'll do proof of product. So as an example, when we once did like an Ozempic campaign, then we use like, I think it was Rebel Wilson, Oprah Winfrey and someone else doing public testimonials about using that product. And I've done the same for like a matcha t. Like these are like back in the day. Right. But you can clout jack or you can use when I've done it for property investment companies, I've used screenshots from like the Financial Review or New York Times and showing those talking about the same thing that we're talking about. So, yeah, there's no such thing as too much proof. Just ship well.

B (7:55)

And I mean that actually perfectly lines up to. The next kind of question area is like, I think, you know, a better question than to that would be how do you determine, you know, good versus bad proof? And I think like, you already hit on probably like one of the elements where it's more of aligning to what the purpose is and like that again, to square one. Like the audience and what their pain point is. But like, would there be any guiding principles that you would, you know, someone could stress test whether or not, hey, we used a video here, but maybe it's something that should have been done through quotes or maybe they didn't have the summary pieces. Like, what potential, I guess stress tests would you have someone do to validate whether or not they're using A, the right type of proof and B, a.

C (8:50)

Good version of that proof one your brain. And when you look at it, does it light something in your brain? Are you like, oh, yeah, that's good. We're all smart marketers here. What's your gut feel? Do you think it's going to be good or not? Right. I have a lot of experience, so I can have a pretty good gut feel. For those of you who might be a bit newer and additionally to more experienced marketers, my thing is just always start minimum viable. I think what we do as marketers is we try and overcomplicate things and get things perfect. And I do this all the time. I'm like, oh, what if another marketer sees this? I'm gonna make it so good. I'm gonna make it so perfect from a marketer point of view, and it's gonna be sick. And then it's like, no one cares. So start minimum viable. And if you have testimonials like video testimonials, test them out. You can also for SEO, you can very cheaply test stuff on ads. I know this depends if your client side, agency side and what you can do, but you can literally run video testimonials as a view campaign. Watch how long people are watching for. Like you can watch the view rate, you can watch who clicks through on what, who's engaging what comments. Like, you can easily get like signals from other places. And oftentimes when we pull that kind of proof, we're just taking it from other channels. That's already working where we know it has worked in another facet of their marketing and they just didn't think to use it in their paid ads campaigns.

B (10:14)

That's like we kind of, I guess briefly touched on it yesterday, but I feel like that is such a great opportunity because just pace of results, like if I have minor things that I'm wanting to look at and the paid team will pick it up and kind of run it through, it's like that. It makes my life so much easier as an SEO and I think as a part of a business. As SEOs, we're completely reliant on all the other teams of execution. So it's like we need to constantly be looking for where is this shared overlap and how can I kind of join forces to get things through? Because if you're just pushing for it on your own accord, it's like you're only going to have so much impact or so much success through one set of efforts.

C (11:07)

Yeah, basically I think that's a huge problem across marketing teams in general. Right. Like not sharing information and not helping each other. So when I was working agency side before running this agency, there might be a Google Ads team, an SEO team, a Facebook team, an ad account team, whatever. And nobody was a cross sharing what they're learning. And then when I was client side, I had to bring these teams together and make sure that what was happening on content, they were sharing their winning TikTok videos, the hooks, the angles, and the ads team were sharing their winning things and the content team were sharing their winning things. Because we all can learn from each other. Right? But to go deeper than that, then there's a huge disconnect between marketing and sales. And what's happening on the sales end is so important for us as marketers because we're just trying to enter that conversation. And so these feedback loops within a company are so, so important. If your client side, it usually starts with heads of departments actually sharing things if your agency side. I think it's more of a structural issue with teams and I believe in like the pod model instead of the different teams and having smaller agile teams that work together on client accounts because there's no information getting lost. But yeah, that's my two cents, my beefs. And I agree with you that we're not collaborating enough and repurposing what we're seeing working on other channels.

B (12:29)

Which yeah, I think it's always a good reminder that it's like, yeah, other people probably are faced with similar problems or challenges in this and it's the same way from the SEOs of like, oh well this could be better. Being able to also see of how, you know, we are also helping their initiative and their efforts is I think so impactful for really having this take flight. But we hit on kind of like the proof component. Anything else that we should kind of be thinking about as far as like having that perfect landing page?

C (13:05)

Yeah. So there's a couple more sections I'll talk about. Typically we have around about 10. I think we've gone over a few now. Another section that we typically always have is what we call the five to ten reasons why. This page is our digital appointment setter. Just answer the question why you now inputs and outputs. We get that from surveying and from social listening and from AI analysis of sales calls. How do they describe it? Cool. We put them into 5 to 10 reasons and that might look like something like 5 reasons why smart investors choose business X to invest in property Boom. Laying it out very simply for them in their language. That's another section. Another section is a comparison table. Sounds very simple but like no one really does it because you know they're going to be comparing you to something else. Like we exist in context. Doesn't matter if they're that problem or that solution or that product aware we spoke about in part one. But they're going to be comparing you to something. Now most of the time we overcomplicate this because we have the curse of knowledge and we are thinking they're comparing us to every competitor. That's not true. They're usually comparing us to inertia, AKA doing nothing. So what happens if you don't do any action or the old school DIY traditional way of doing something and that's actually typically what are your true competitive alternatives? So a very clear comparison table. Down the left hand side you have what we call the buyer decision questions. Okay, well what are the main problems? Pain points. Like what are they trying to look for then you have, you, you have maybe one or two other alternatives. Boom. Comparison table. And then at the very end of the page you have something that I call the page full stop. Why? And what is that? Well, when someone goes to your page, you're going to usually have three different users on a page. One is the word for worder. Every single word. They're going to read it from top to bottom. They are your ideal people. They're not everybody though. Like they look at it and they read it, they read it. Probably doesn't happen. Then you have what I call the skimmers headlines. That's why your headlines need to be benefit driven. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Whatever piques their attention, they'll get drawn into. Then again, I said this in the part one, I think because I've watched so many session recordings. You have your scrollers so straight to the bottom. And I do this, I don't know why, I just scroll straight to the bottom and I like and then I go straight to the bottom. So this full stop is for these people. And it's basically where you'll have like one panel, you'll have a headline, you'll have like your four to five, your three to five bullets and a call to action with a good image or something next to it. Why? It's basically doing a version of the above the fold at the bottom of the page, right? Because literally some people hit your page and then they just start, they just scroll to the bottom. So when you have that, you cater to all different types of users on.

B (15:58)

A page, which is, I feel like with that you can then hone in on just those key aspects where it's like we know from the skimmers headlines, bullet points, those are gonna be the core areas of like focus scrollers. You know, there's an added weight now to that call of action at the very end kind of to it I mean every word or I don't know, maybe I'm a pessimistic, but I'd say there's not that many of them out there that read through absolutely everything. But by all means, if they do.

C (16:36)

In boomer, in boomer markets there's a lot of them. When you, when you market to boomers, they're usually very good. And this is where it's like you got to understand how your market, they love reading everything. They'll read stuff where you're like on your website where you're like damn, I forgot that was on there. And then you're more analytical people maybe like SEO People like that more analytical mechanic. They read everything because they're highly skeptical. So you just have to spook easily, understand they trust no one. So yes, that's the differences.

B (17:08)

Yeah, no, I think that makes sense. Well, in that same vein, would are. Do you feel like there's other parts of the page that maybe we've missed on that would also be like those kind of like high attention areas? So it's like not in the like entirety of the page, but just like other hotspots that's like. Yeah, that's also an area to double down on.

C (17:32)

Yeah, the, the other section might be your FAQs. Just having those on their sales FAQs. Again, that's great for SEO as well because you can stuff your keywords in there, but also you want them to be like sales FAQs. But to recap, it's the above the fold, the lead social proof as frequently where it makes sense. Using social proof with intent and then having that five to seven reasons why, having the comparison table, having the FAQs, the other section that might be valuable to people because this page is our digital appointment set up is just having who are we a fit for? And you literally answer the question who are we a fit for? And then you, because you understand the market, you understand the three to five archetypes, stereotypes, avatars, whatever you might call it. And then you just literally call them out. The person who wants this, the person having a problem with this, the person, blah. And then I would usually have a video testimonial or an image or something of the person that matches that on the page as well.

B (18:30)

That's a great point. And I guess for what it's worth on that, I'll speak for the SEO community. We don't need to keyword stuff anymore. We're past that. It was a weird, awkward phase, but now we're through it and yeah, now we're on to bigger and better things.

C (18:49)

You've grown out of it. Yeah. And that's ultimately if you can get those sections right on a page. And I genuinely, truly from the bottom of my heart believe that what I'm teaching should be standardized for an SEO page. If you can nail this for your SEO templates and then make it work with whatever your SEO superpower is, whatever your campaigns will go off. And not only will you like, you'll be ranking because I'm sure you're all really good at that, but you'll be delivering true business outcomes, which is what we have to do. You'll be helping more people from the market to take action and you'll be delivering much better business outcomes.

B (19:25)

And it's more and more the roles are blending over. So I think like SEOs need to know. Like to me it's like this ties into a larger conversation around more of like CRO work. And a good SEO today has to be proficient in influencing those elements because if you're not holding the user, if you're not, you know, sending them deeper into the website or converting them, that's also a signal to Google as far as whether or not you are satisfying the intent. So it's like if that is not yet a practice in your SEO strategy to work on these things, it definitely should be for the upcoming year.

C (20:11)

Yeah, agreed.

B (20:12)

But with that, that wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks again to Alicia Colonford from Persuasive Experience for joining us. If you'd like to get in touch with her, you can find a link to a LinkedIn profile in the Show Notes or going over to her company's.

A (20:28)

Website@ persuasionexperience.com okay, thanks to Tyson Stockton, our guest host. If you'd like to get in touch with Tyson, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile, our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter where his handle is TysonStockton. Or if your team is interested in SEO consulting or organizational education, you can always head to their company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O. Just one more link in our show notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter and you can even send us your top topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is benjschapp B E N J S H A P and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed. We're going to publish an episode every day during the work week, so hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. Alright, that's it for today, but until next time. Remember, the answers are always in the data.