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11.08.2016

6 min read

Impression Showcase: Split Tests, CRO and Curating Content

This article was updated on: 07.02.2022

Every two weeks at Impression, we set aside 30 minutes to share some of the great things we’ve seen in digital. This includes anything that other agencies and brands are up to, new tools, new techniques and what’s been working well within our own business and for our clients.

We share those insights with you, here! As always, feel free to get involved in the conversation by sharing the things you’ve been inspired by in the comments.

PPC and SEO: perfect partners?

With both PPC and SEO teams here in the office, we’ve always been keen to ensure both disciplines work together. Particularly when a client takes both services from us, we see it as an opportunity to learn from the data on both side and improve all round.

We’ve been working on various initiatives to help us do this more efficiently of late, including a WIP script which will extract data on the value of landing pages in both organic and paid listings.

SEER shared a wicked blog post on this topic recently, which we shared in our Showcase. Check it out here:

It’s something we do here already; you can use paid listings to test meta elements as well as landing pages. In fact, one of our clients saw a huge improvement in organic click throughs after they added the ‘trademark’ logo into their title tag – a simple update that was done because paid traffic CTRs were stronger with the logo too.

Distilled are working on their own split testing tool called Distilled ODN (Now SearchPilot) We’ll be checking it out over the coming weeks so stay in touch via our blog and social channels to find out more, or let us know what you think of the tool in the comments area.

Focus on conversion rate optimisation (CRO)

Not satisfied with simply sending traffic to our clients’ websites, we’re always looking for ways to improve conversion rates – meaning our clients get even more ‘bang for their buck’ as more of their existing traffic chooses to buy.

For us, CRO is an essential part of digital marketing. This month, we’re trialling CRO tool VWO (Visual Website Optimizer) to see how it can further improve our CRO processes. We’ve typically used tools like Google Experiments, Decibel Insights and split testing through ads to help us but VWO promises to give us even more scope for split and multivariate testing.

Edd’s leading the testing on this, so look out for his feedback in the coming weeks too.

Don’t neglect on-page elements

For us, the on page structure and content of your website is the foundation on which all of your digital marketing is based. If your site isn’t technically sound or lacks great content, you’ll struggle to achieve your goals, no matter how much off page work you do.

Pete brought a great case study to the Showcase today from his client, a local legal firm. While their traffic was up, conversions were slow to increase and in the case of one particular page, it was clear that the user intent for the target term did not match the offering on the page.

Using some simple on page optimisation techniques, he was able to turn the fates of the page around – resulting in a classic Impression upwards graph which shows significant ranking improvement, traffic growth and conversion increase.

We’d recommend to any webmaster, no matter how long you’ve had your site, not to neglect the on page. There was a really handy series of technical audit blog posts on Search Engine Land last month which you can check out here.

We also invest in a tool called OnPage.com (now called Ryte) which is one of a few tools that help us analyse on page elements. Pete mentioned their ‘OnPage Focus’ bookmark, which is a really useful tool if you want to better understand how your page is performing and how it compares to your competitors.

onpage focus

Fat Rank and SERPTrends – our newest Chrome extensions

We love a good Chrome extension and will always share anything we find that’s helpful in our roles. This week, (relatively) new recruit Charlie shared his favourite with us.

Fat Rank is a simple plugin that enables you to find out where the page you’re on ranks for any given search term, like this:

fat rank plugin

You can get Fat Rank yourself here.

We also like SERPTrends, which numbers the search results for you and shows how they’ve changed since the previous day, like this:

serptrends plugin

Content aggregation

Content aggregation and curation can be great ways of building relevant, useful and engaging content around topics of interest to your audience.

This week, I shared a blog post on the role of keyword rankings in SEO. This post came from a team chat we were having using our Teamwork Chat app. I was able to extract the opinions from that chat to create a really informative post, supplemented by outreach into the digital community which resulted in external contributions too. Those external contributors then helped me promote the post.

It’s something we do fairly frequently with a number of our clients, too. We put out questions and surveys to their audiences and create engaging, relevant, quality content around their responses.

Rebecca and Lauren have found another way of gathering great content to share amongst the team, in the form of Anders Pink.

This is a new tool from BuzzSumo, currently in Beta, which allows you to share articles and websites as a team. You can create pinboards, assign tasks, comment and much more. We’ll be testing it in the coming weeks so keep an eye out for our review. For now, here’s a screenshot from our Pro trial. If you use Anders Pink, let us know what you think!

anders pro