 Okay everybody, we've had a lot of SEO talks during MozCon. Just a reminder that these will be available for viewing later if you purchase a ticket. So lots of SEO content, but if you own a business what about converting that SEO traffic? Because we often see a lot of sites that are able to build up lots and lots of traffic but they simply can't convert. So our next speaker, Joyce Colade, specializes in business to business SEO and convergence at mobility which is an awesome SEO and marketing agency. We've worked with them a lot at Moz as a matter of fact. The title of our talk is called Maximize Your Convergence, Harnessing Full Funnel Optimization for B2B Success. Please welcome Joyce Colade. One, thanks for being here. My name is Joyce Colade. I'm the SEO supervisor at Ability and today we're going to talk about conversion rate, particularly full funnel conversion rate optimization in the B2B world. So I wanted to start by sharing a quote from a book I read recently. It's called You're Not Listening by Kate Murphy. The quote is, the truth is we only become secure in our convictions by allowing them to be challenged. I think this quote really applies to conversion rate because conversion rate optimization should be a conversation with our users. Users are asking us a question and we need to provide a thoughtful answer. It is an asynchronous dialogue if you will. Before we dive any deeper, I wanted to talk a little bit about the challenges of the B2B world as opposed to the B2C world. So the B2C consumer on one hand usually makes a decision on their own or maybe with another person. The sales cycle for B2C is fairly short. The product has a low lifetime value because it's usually not too expensive and it can easily be replaced. And finally, in the B2C world, the market is fairly broad and we have a lot of options to choose from. On the opposite hand, for the B2B prospect, they will make their decision as a team. The sales cycle is fairly long, usually over six months. The lifetime value of the solution is really high because the solution is expensive and the learning curve is pretty steep and the market in the B2B world is fairly niche. But that doesn't mean it's not competitive because we know we have to compete with those B2B giants like Oracle and Amazon. So the goal of the B2B marketers, of the SEO marketers in the B2B world will be to attract users to the website, educate them, provide them enough resource so that they can make a decision and help them come back to the website to make a purchase. So let's start by talking about our first goal, attracting users to the website. My first recommendation is to leverage schema markup for B2B. I don't see schema markup being used very often on B2B website because schema markup is often used for product pages and it requires the price or reviews which are not often available on the B2B website. But there are a lot of other options for schema markup in the B2B world like the video schema markup or blog or career pages even or FAQ or Brent or well said blog already. But in this specific case, we use video schema markup and you can see for yourself on the left how much more our clients, how much more space they are taking in the search engine page result as opposed to Oracle on the right but does not have schema markup implemented even though Oracle is one of those B2B giants I was talking about earlier. So this client implemented schema markup in October of last year. And six months later, we saw an increase of 204% in impressions, 120% in clicks and 38% in organic traffic for the video pages only. If you wanna learn more about results from schema markup you can take a look at the link that I've put below on Ability's website. And we do a case study to see how schema markup can help you increase your keyword rankings. The other thing I wanted to share was metadata optimization and in particular auditing and optimizing the call to action in your meta descriptions. The goal here will be for you to understand the user intent and improve your click flow rate. Here for example, with this specific client my top performing call to action was a question which showed me that users were at the very top of the funnel. It worked well for us because the goal was to increase organic traffic and our ultimate goal was to create a glossary on their website but it might not be the case for you. While we're here, I did wanna touch base on learn more. I know it's kind of the default call to action and we have no judgment, I use it a lot too but the fact is that for this client to learn more perform really poorly it actually perform worse than having no call to action at all. So to recap, when it comes to attracting users to your website, my first recommendation will be to set goals before you are optimizing. Your optimization should not be the same wherever you want to increase your organic traffic or increase your conversion rate. Then also make sure to explore B2B schema markup opportunities. It will probably have great results for you too. And finally, make sure that you measure along the way so that you can correct courses if the results are not what you're expecting. Let's talk a little bit about our second goal giving users the best user experience and lead them to conversion points. So in this section, I'm going to share a test that I have been running with clients and hopefully inspire you to also test them on your website. The first test I want to share is testing the language on the CTA. In this specific instance, we tested download now versus free download. We wanted to make the CTA more reliable and that increased the conversion rate by 21.5%. A test that I do with all of my clients is also testing the color of the CTA to make the CTA more visible. So the former CTA, the original CTA was blue and our test CTA was orange. The orange CTA performed 22% better. The next test is still one of my top performing tests of all time. It was testing the type of resource we would offer on the blog. So the start CTA was contact us and we updated it to download a tip sheet to make it more actionable and the conversion rate went up 184%. We chose tip sheet because it was the top performing resource type and Google Analytics. So if you do run that test, make sure that you identify your top performing resource type before you get started. My next set of tests is really focusing on user experience. So here on the left side, we tested a form to have users had to fill a form to download the resource in a pop-up form and the test was redirecting them to a landing page with the form. So in both instances, users still had to fill the form but redirecting them to the landing page was less intrusive as just a more streamlining experience and redirecting users to a landing page led to a 33% increase in conversions. On the right side, we tested the look of the live chat instead of having just a link. We turned it into a CTA and that lets you a 63% increase in interaction with the live chat. I do want to point out though that just because a test is performing well on one part of the website doesn't mean that it's going to work as well everywhere else. Here, for example, we had the exact same test, live demo versus get demo. It worked really well on the home page and the conversion rate went up 157%, but it was pretty disastrous on the product page. The conversion rate actually went down 48%. Because the user intent is not the same on the home page and a product page, they are not at the same level in the sales funnel. So learn from my mistake and when you do a test, make sure that you test on every single page before you make a decision. So the next recommendation I would make would be to optimize your top-neve bar. The top-neve bar is one of your most interacted with elements on your website. So not optimizing your top-neve bar is actually a pretty big missed opportunity. In this specific test, we updated the background color of the top-neve. The original one was a city full gray and we turned it into a solid gray just to improve the design and that helped us increase the number of video views by 16%. Here, my next test would be to update to watch the video to a CTA, but you never want to run two A-B tests on the same element at the same time. Another easy way to increase your conversions is also to break down the resources in the top-neve to show the different types of resources. The original version just had resources and we broke it down to show the different types so that users would get immediate information and could just navigate to the type of resource that was interesting to them. That helped increase the conversion rate for content downloads by 101%, but more surprisingly, 98% new users went to the resource center. Finally, if you have a website that is more B2C or e-com focused and you know your top-performing categories or product, I would highly encourage you to put them into top-neve once again to show users immediate information. In this specific instance, the bottom version of the top-neve that shows the different category performed 23% better. So just to recap, when it comes to on-page user experience, remember that there is no one-size-fits-all optimization and make sure that you test everything before you make any implementation. My last goal will be to track the success of our optimization and encourage return visitors. So when I'm talking about tracking success, I would highly recommend that you are as granular as possible with your tracking. For example, if you are tracking resource downloads, don't just track resource download. Track what type of resource, the name of the resource on which page the resource download took place. If you're tracking video views, same thing, track the name of the video, how far along the users watch the video, all of that is really invaluable information that will help you increase your conversion rates. Here, for example, we are tracking the customer testimonial downloads and we started noticing a decrease at the end of 2020. So at first we are not too concerned because we are running into Q4 and Q4 is traditionally a slow time for a B2B, but the fact was that things did not get better at the beginning of 2021. So that's when we started, we decided to break down the resource top nav to show the different type of resources and a month for the month, we saw a 65% increase in downloads just for customer testimonial. Another thing that I love tracking is user interaction on the top nav. So I am tracking both, which links users clicked on in the top nav and on which page they interacted with the top nav bar. That also is a great source of information that really helps me understand the user experience, which page they interacted with the most, which page is not interesting to them. And by looking at trends, you can also decide to maybe update a link or remove something if you see that it's not performing well with your users. Finally, I would highly encourage you to audit your contents so that you can identify the best performers and prune your underperformers. In this specific instance, we knew that articles were the top performing resource type. We would always see the article pages in the top 10 lending pages, but what came as a surprise was how low the conversion rate was for the article pages, especially compared to the conversion rate for guides. Guides get a lot less traffic, but the conversion rate is at 7.5%. So if my goal was to increase your organic traffic, I would publish more articles. If my goal was to increase conversion rate, I would publish more guides. So just a few key takeaways from today. When you do conversion rate optimization, always keep the full funnel in mind. Your optimizations for top of the funnel users will look different from your optimizations for bottom of the funnel users. Make sure that you test and track everything and remember that there is no cookie cutter approach to conversion rate optimization. And finally, honesty and transparency are key. Just like with a lot of things in life, we have to be willing to honestly assess our performance and learn from our mistakes in order to get better. I will leave you with another quote from Kate Murphy's book, thinking you already know how a conversation will go down, kills curiosity and subverts listening. Conversion and optimization is a question, not a demand. We have to carefully listen to our users and be willing to adapt. So thank you again for being here today. It's really been a pleasure. If you want to talk about SEO, B2B conversion rate, you can email me at joysadabilityb2b.com. You can find me on LinkedIn or go visit Ability's website to learn more about our digital marketing services. Have a great rest of your day and enjoy the rest of Marscon.