Ken Krogue was featured live on “The Pulse on Marketing,” an online news station powered by The Pulse Network, to discuss his controversial Forbes.com article, “The Death of SEO: The Rise of Social, PR, and Real Content.” Specifically, in the interview, Ken talked about the aftermath of the article and the “firestorm” of comments that…

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Can you lose a sale simply by having a bad Web offer?

I think we’ve all had the experience of following a link someone sent us on Twitter or Facebook only to discover that it’s just another poorly disguised attempt at hucksterism.

You land on the page and get bombarded by a long, endless page of marketing drivel, punctuated with flashing neon sign graphics, and a late-night infomercial vibe.

While most B2B Web marketers are much more professional in their approach than this, it doesn’t mean that the concept of “the Bad Offer” can’t apply.

No matter the context, a Bad Web Conversion Offer slows down the sale, gives potential buyers a bad taste, puts them off, or even sends a good buyer to a competitor.

So what makes a Bad Web Offer?

  • It doesn’t provide any value to the visitor.
  • The process to get the perceived value (the whitepaper, webinar, free trial) takes too long, or requires too much user input.
  • There’s no compelling difference between your offer and what they could get elsewhere.
  • The presentation is sub-par, unprofessional, difficult to navigate, or just plain boring . . . .
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Lots of great resources have addressed the question,”What, if any differences exist between the style and content of an SEO versus a PPC landing page?”

SEO.com states that a typical SEO and PPC landing page should serve the appropriate purpose, contain the right mix between content and call-to-action, and provide links to outside information and to the main home page of your Web site.

SEOBook.com says the only major difference between an SEO and PPC page is that the call to action should come early, and much more often on a PPC page— but that otherwise the concept is the same.

But how does this formula change from a B2C site, where the goal is typically an instant transaction, to a B2B company site, where a prospect’s buying decision may still be weeks or months away?

An outstanding article by Proteus B2B states that B2B decisions are “driven by risk and the avoidance thereof.” As a result, a B2B landing page must be more complete, holistically-oriented, and must present a clear, competitive, consistent message through content, style, and feel . . . .

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I’m going to share a little secret about a mistake we made about a year and a half ago when we redesigned our Web site.

On the surface it was a beautiful redesign. Oh, so very beautiful.

Slick, shiny, “the new hotness,” slick, and slick (did I mention it was slick?).

And it killed our Web site conversion rate.

After two months of awful performance, we finally bit the bullet and furiously rolled the old site back out, and started from scratch . . . .

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Click-through rate is one of the most important pay-per-click Web marketing metrics. But be careful not to correlate click-through rates with actual success.

For example, which is better? Getting 1,000 visitors to your Web site, and converting 50, or getting 300 people to your Web site, and converting 30?

The answer is that it depends on how much it cost to get those 1,000 visitors and 50 conversions vs. the 300 and 30, and the total sales each scenario produced.

And in our experience, getting 300 carefully targeted, ready-to-buy, high-value site visitors seems to be the better choice.

In other words, it’s not always about getting visitors to your Web site, it’s about getting the right visitors. During one three- or four-month period a couple of years ago, we were pulling our best SEO and PPC click-through numbers we’ve ever had. An influx in marketing budget dollars . . . .

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I just got back this afternoon from a great workshop on SEO techniques by one of our favorite partners on the topic, www.SEO.com.  I have tweeted a bunch of the epiphanies I gathered but one that came up that I get asked a lot about is the topic of this post: How to get the most…

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