[Build Backlinks Online] Remove Unnecessary Steps & Win More Links, Shares, and Conversions - Whiteboard Friday

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Remove Unnecessary Steps & Win
More Links, Shares, and Conversions - Whiteboard Friday'


Posted by randfish

When creating a product, website, or communication, including a simple user
experience is key to success. The easier you make the A to Z process for a user,
the more likely they'll be to accomplish the plan you spent time and resources
putting together piece by piece.

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand walks us through user experience and the
actions that we can remove from our processes in order to drive more
conversions, earn more links, get more social shares. Simplicity, FTW!






This week, we've added a still image of the whiteboard for easier viewing. Do
you find this addition helpful? Let us know in the comments!



Video Transcription


"Howdy, SEOmoz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This
week I want to talk a little bit about user experience and the actions that we
can remove from our processes in order to drive more conversions, earn more
links, get more social shares. Let me show you what I'm talking about.

In this first example, embed codes, a lot of websites use embed codes all over
the place. SlideShare is a good example. When you get to SlideShare, you find a
particular presentation, and then you can copy and embed that onto your page.

Bitly is another good example. When you go to Bitly, they've got a little copy
and paste sector. You paste in a link. It turns into the short Bitly link. You
grab that out.

All sorts of things do this. YouTube does it. Vimeo does it. Any type of
infographic that's embeddable, they all have these embed codes.

Embed codes are a phenomenal way to drive links, especially to content that
people are likely to put on their own sites. The problem becomes when you make
that a multi-step process. In fact, we've seen research and data from several
sources now, saying that if you can make this a single click on here, and it
says "copy to clipboard"' automatically, as opposed to popping something up like
Bitly has started to do, or having to grab the entire embed code, Ctrl A, Ctrl
C. I have to copy it myself, that actually will drive more embeds, meaning more
links to the places you want with the anchor text that you want.

We remove an unnecessary step, that secondary piece, and make it so one click
right in here with you cursor gets you copied to clipboard, a transitional
message or a temporal message that pops up that says, "Copy to clipboard," or
says below here, "Copy to clipboard." Now, all I have to do is paste, and I'm
done. Very, very simple. Very easy.

Number two: Shorter, more action-oriented emails. We send a lot of emails. We
send emails for outreach. We send emails that are in newsletter format that are
trying to drive actions back to our websites. We send emails to try and get
shares from our friends or our network, those kinds of things. All of these can
be made more concise and more actionable. I see a lot of challenges when we sort
of go, "Oh, I'm going to start with some nice fluffy introduction. Here's who I
am. Here's more about my company. Oh, and now here, here is the final action.
This is what I was actually trying to get you to do. I felt like for some reason
I had to do all of this."

Email is a medium where heavy communication is great between people you
already know, where there are lots of things to say, and you need to have that
more complex dialogue. When it's between new people, between strangers, between
someone you're reaching out to, I find that the most effective emails I ever get
from an outreach perspective are, "Hey, Rand. Love what you're doing over there
at Moz. Would you send this over to someone on your product team or someone on
your marketing team?" Or, "Hey, we have this app that we think would be great
for your events folks. Could you make an intro?" That is something I'm likely to
do very, very quickly. Or, "Just check out this new app. It does this." Great.
Really quick.

All the press release ones I get are like, "Such and such is a this type of
company, and here's all of this. Here's their latest press release. They raised
this round of funding. Would you be interested in writing about them or talking
to their CEO on the phone?" Dude, all you have to do is have that CEO email me
and be like, "Hey, man. I want to connect." I'll be like, "Hey, let's chat.
Sounds good. Sounds interesting,"' if it actually does sound interesting.
Shorter, more action-oriented emails.

Number three: Simpler sign-up forms. Oh, my goodness. You do not need to
collect all of this data all at once. I need name. I need first name and last
name. I've got to get this person's address, or at least the city and state
they're in, because of this. You can collect so much of this data in the
application later, as they're using it, if they're actually using it. You can
collect some of that from IP address, location sensitive IPs, those type of
things. You can tell the type of device they're on.

The thing is, as people browse the web more and more with mobile devices, this
guy right here, when I'm on here, I absolutely hate filling out forms. The most
I can ever do is an email and password field. A confirm password field really
gets me going. It's just infuriating because it's a pain to type those extra
letters, especially on something that doesn't have a full keyboard. If you can
remove those and ask for that later, remember even if they get their password
wrong and they forget it, you have still emailed them. You've got their email
address, and you've sent them an email. It says, "Hey, click here to confirm."
If they log back in, oh now the password is wrong or they forgot, great, you can
fix that later, but you've gotten that initial essential sign-up. That's what
you're looking for.

Number four: I know HTTP is a common protocol. So is GTTP, or at least I'd
like to make it one. Get to the point with your content. Get to the point. A lot
of the time, I see this stuff tweeted and shared on social networks, put on
Inbound.org or Hacker News, where it says, "Hey, conversion rate testing shows
that this performs better than that." Cool. Then, I have to scroll and scroll.
Where is that? Oh, there's the test. There's that test they were talking about.
It's way down deep in the content. I'm not exactly sure why, but a lot of times
with blog content, with even infographics, with videos, with stuff that we
should be sharing on the web and is good content, we're trying to say, "Here's
what I want to tell you, and I'm prioritizing that for some reason above what
you actually care about."

What you actually care about should be the primary and potentially only thing
on that page. If you really have stuff that you want to tell me, I will go
investigate. I'll check out your About page. I'll check out your product pages.
I want to see what your company does because it sounds interesting. You've got a
cool brand, and you've got a great blog post and that kind of thing. If you
really must, you can put it down here below the stuff that I actually care
about. I came to your site to watch a video I was told was awesome, to check out
an infographic, to see, to learn something about a test, to figure out
something, solve some problem. Deliver that to me upfront, please. That will not
only make me more likely to come back to your site in the future. I'll have a
positive brand association. I'll be more likely to share that content. Just a
beautiful thing.

Number five: You actually see this a lot, and I see tremendous effectiveness
when this is done, which is socially sharing links directly to what matters on
the page or on an individual site. A lot of times, there will be a product tour
section. Then, there's a video, a really interesting video or a demo. I'll see
the social shares that are most effective are the ones that point directly.
Sometimes, they have a JavaScript field in the URL that has a hash in it or a
hash bang system or whatever it is. Those people who share direct do better than
the ones who share the broad page. They've gotten into the process and dug
around enough to share directly that piece that I care about. You can do this
too.

In fact, I have recently seen a test where I essentially had been tweeting a
link to something like where we were competing against another company for which
company is better at this particular thing. I had been tweeting links to the
page. Then you had to scroll down the page quite a ways, and then there was a
little voting widget. Then I saw from the voting widget itself, there was
actually some hash URL that would link directly to the voting widget on that
page. When I tweeted that, it drove way more actions. In fact, like four or five
times as many actions. I think something over 100 votes, whereas previously I
had shared it a couple times and gotten like 15 or 20 votes from it. That is
definitely a way to show that tweeting directly to the thing you want people to
do, great way to socially share and to make those shares go further.

Last one, maintaining logged in state. Zappos, Amazon, all do this brilliantly
well. Google actually does a pretty solid job of it as well. They maintain a
logged in experience for as long as possible. Do you remember back in the day
with Twitter? You used to get logged out all the time. They just weren't
maintaining cookies and session variables and all that kind of stuff. You were
losing your log in. You'd have to log into Twitter, even though you clicked that
Remember Me button, you'd have to log in many, many times, every time you came
back.

If you have this "Please log in" system here, and it does it even though you
clicked "Yes. Please, remember me" down here, remember, please remember. Check.
You're killing your conversions. I don't just mean conversions in terms of
someone who makes a purchase. I mean someone who might have left a comment,
someone who might have participated in your community, someone who might have
shared something, someone who might have reached content they otherwise wouldn't
have, someone who might have been a lead for you.

Moz actually did this. We have this as a conversion killer, and we can show
the data. It was about 18 months ago, I think, that Casey and the inbound
engineering team did a bunch of work to make sure, that most of the time, you're
logged into your account. You wouldn't be logged out as quickly. I still find
some challenges with it, but it's way better than it used to be. The data shows.
You can see more comments per post view. You can see more people checking out
and filling out their accounts. All that type of activity, that UGC that's
driving long tail traffic, just a beautiful thing by maintaining this logged in
state.

All of these are specific examples. The big takeaway message here is you don't
need unnecessary steps. You don't need to be taking actions and requiring things
of your visitors that they don't need to do, especially with the rise in mobile
browsing and with the advantages that we've seen from web page speed increasing.
We know, as web users and as people who build for the web, that visitors care
tremendously about accomplishing tasks quickly. They're getting more and more
used to it on their phones, on their desktops, on their laptops, on their
tablets. We need to deliver that in order to be successful at marketing as well.

All right, everyone. Hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday.
We'll see you again next week. Take care."


Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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