--- title: Designing Effective Landing Pages for High Conversion Rates date: 2019-03-12T06:00:00-04:00 author: Sean Smith canonical_url: "https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-8/what-is-a-landing-page/" section: Podcast --- <!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-BEGIN\]\]>[Skip to main content](#main-content)![Isaac Rudansky](https://website101podcast.com/uploads/hosts/_200x200_crop_center-center_none/Isaac-Profile-Pic-2.jpg)Guest Isaac Rudansky Isaac Rudansky is widely considered to be an industry-leading expert on pay per click advertising, online traffic acquisition and conversion rate optimization. [ ](https://twitter.com/@isaacrudansky) Season 01 Episode 8 – Mar 12, 2019 45:26 [Show Notes](#show-notes) ## Designing Effective Landing Pages for High Conversion Rates LISTEN0:00 0:00 [](//dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/website101podcast.com/uploads/mp3/season-01/08-Isaac-Rudansky-Fundementals-of-Landing-Pages-master-final.mp3) Explore the secrets of high-converting landing pages, their importance in marketing campaigns, and best practices from industry expert Isaac Brudansky. ### Show Notes Isaac defines what a landing page is and when you would create a landing page for a specific campaign or market. We also talk about what makes a successful landing page, successful. - What is a conversion and the different typs of conversions that you may want to track. - A/B testing - Landing pages are best built in a landing page builder optimizer, not your website CMS - Call to action, goal of the page ### Show Links - [Landing Page Design (Udemy Course)](https://www.udemy.com/landing-page-design-best-practices/) - [Google Optimize](https://optimize.google.com/optimize/home/#/accounts) - [Optimizely](https://www.optimizely.com/) - [Visual Website Optimizer](https://vwo.com) - [Unbounce](https://unbounce.com) - [Lead Pages](https://www.leadpages.net/) - [Webflow](https://webflow.com/) - [Conversion XL](https://conversionxl.com/) - [Nielson Norman Group](https://www.nngroup.com/) Powered Transcript Accuracy of transcript is dependant on AI technology. **\[00:00\]** **Sean:** Hi, welcome to the website 101 Podcast. I'm Sean Smith your host and today I'm joined by Isaac Brudansky and we're going to be talking about landing page design. Isaac, could you introduce yourself? **\[00:13\]** **Isaac:** Sure, my name is Isaac Brudansky. First of all, thank you very much for having me here. I really appreciate it. It's always exciting to be on different marketing podcasts and shows. I'm the founder and CEO of Adventure Media Group. We're a long island based digital marketing agency. We work with lots of different types of clients on services like paid search management, PPC advertising, conversion optimization, landing page design, AB testing, Facebook advertising, display advertising, basically helping clients plan their digital advertising budget, figure out how much they should spend, where they should spend it, and then we go ahead and actually create those campaigns and spend their advertising dollars for them. So it's an agency. That's what we do. I also teach online. I have a few best selling courses on the topics of remarketing, landing page design, and Google ads, and actually Facebook Messenger marketing with a combined 105,000 plus students over the last couple of years. That's a big part of my career as well, something which is important to me, something which I focus a lot of my time on. That's basically what I do. I speak at different conferences here and there. I'm involved with different companies and different partnerships. Basically, it all revolves around helping people sell more off their websites, whether it's products or services, makes no difference strategically, but they both fall under our preview of services and client work that we do. **\[01:44\]** **Sean:** Wow, you have a very diverse portfolio of things that you're doing. It sounds like you're very busy. **\[01:50\]** **Isaac:** Pretty busy. **\[01:51\]** **Sean:** Actually, how I invited Isaac onto the podcast is I took one of his courses on Udemy, which I'll link to in the show notes, about online marketing landing pages. I was really blown away by the quality of it. I learned some from it, but for me what it did as a web professional, is it confirmed a lot of what I had learned intuitively over 10 years of building websites and things like that. Anyways, for our listeners, which my target listeners are small businesses that have a website, but don't necessarily know everything that's involved or how they can improve their website. What is a landing page? Exactly. Why should I have a landing page? Isn't my home page a landing page? **\[02:46\]** **Isaac:** That's a good question. I have a Facebook group that I interact with my students on. This was a question that just came up a couple days ago, which is that the landing page, Nomenclature, how people use the word, what it really is, it means a few different things, depending on the context in which you're using it and depending on what you mean by the word landing page. I'll walk through a couple different things that people refer to as landing pages. A landing page is at its core, is any page somebody is landing on when they first come to your site. So your home page could be a landing page. If you have an ad running or you have a Facebook post running, regardless of where that upstream click came from or where the traffic source was, somebody clicks a piece of content and that content redirects them to somewhere. Some page, it might be a home page, it might be a product page, it might be a blog post, it might be a Facebook page. **\[03:38\]** **Sean:** So even if somebody shares a page on Twitter or Facebook and their friends visit it, wherever they take their landing page. Wherever they end up landing pages. **\[03:47\]** **Isaac:** So if you and your friend are having a conversation about a Twitter post and you're discussing, no, I think you say, Sean, we should link this Twitter post to this blog post. That should be the URL that we put in our Twitter post and your friend says your partner says, no, I think it's better to go to a service category page to attract to more bottom of the final people. So this is the URL that I want to put in the post. So what you both are doing or having a discussion or a disagreement about what landing page you should use for your Twitter post. Now that's a very technical description of what a landing page is. Like it's just a very technical thing. It's a URL that directs people to a page. That's a landing page from any marketing campaign. But that's not how typically people use landing page in the discussion. Because in that definition of landing page, a home page of a landing page, any page of a landing page, any URL could be a landing page if it's being used in any sort of marketing campaign. Okay. What most people refer to landing pages are is standalone pages specifically built for a specific marketing campaign. **\[04:59\]** **Sean:** So this would be like a page that maybe is not in my main navigation and its focuses to get some sort of conversion from the visitor. **\[05:10\]** **Isaac:** Correct. Now for example, let's say here's like a really typical use case for landing page in that, under that, you know, understanding. Say you're a local plumber, right? So you have your basic website built out. You have a service section for your plumbing services. Your cleaning services. You might have a few different service pages for specific one-off services that are smaller than a full job or whatever it is. You have your contact information. You have a home page. You have a team page. You have a testimonials page. Great. Now say you're running, let's say you're a local plumber in New York. And you see, you service Williamsburg in Brooklyn. And you happen to see from your Google ads campaign because you're running ads from Google to your website. You've been sending all the traffic to your service page about your plumbing services with the contact form. But you see a lot of people in Williamsburg who are searching for local plumbers. So what an agency like Iris might do or what you might want to do is create a specific landing page for that campaign for the sake of being more specific to the visitors of that page. So if you know with certainty that a lot of people are coming from Williamsburg, that area, you might want to have a page that specifically talks about people in Williamsburg and testimonials from customers in Williamsburg. Because the more relevant you could be to what a person is looking for or to the environment and talk about the environment that that person is in, the better chance you have at converting that visitor if you're speaking to them more directly. So that's really the typical use case of landing pages that are talked about in the web marketing world is creating specific pages for specific types of content. Another use case of a landing page is say, let's, we could stick with our same example. You're a local plumber. Now you have a partnership with a big plumbing supply company that's local to you. So you've been a good buyer. You've been like a buyer of that plumbing supply store for a long time. Let's call it Sean's plumbing co and that supplier has given you good discounts because you're a long time buyer and you have this sort of a superclos relationship where you say I'll continue I'll exclusively buy all my supplies from your factory or your warehouse as long as you help refer customers to me. So Plum Sean's plumbing supply co puts up on their website, their website, which is, you know, not your website. A link to, you know, customers of ours, this is our recommended vetted plumber certified licensed. We use them for all our projects, whatever they're promoting. And they have a call to action. See Sean services. So they go to your, they link in that page to your, let's say service website. **\[07:59\]** **Sean:** Right. To my, to my specific landing page where I'm going to provide copy and visuals that are targeted to visitors coming from that link. **\[08:09\]** **Isaac:** Exactly. So you might want to build instead of sending them right to your service page. You might want to build a landing page that says welcome customers of Sean's plumbing supply co. We're happy to have you here. We have special discounted rates on our plumbing services just for you guys. And then again, you become more relevant. You become more specific. You have the chance to capitalize on a lot of these different principles of persuasion, like urgency and understanding. And it's just being more relevant, more specific. The, with ecommerce, com websites. It's this idea of standalone landing pages are not typically as common because you're sending people to product category pages or product pages or maybe blog posts, you know, depending on. But you're, but it's really more focused on on lead gen companies. So if you're generating leads, let's say you sell services or even if you sell products, but you sell your conversion action, your primary conversion action on your website is a form submission or a phone call. That's where landing pages and specific landing pages really come into the picture. In a much bigger way. So that's the basic idea of a landing page. It's from a technical perspective. It's any page that your visitor is landing on from any marketing campaign or any upstream click. Where it's used for the web marketing world is this concept of building these standalone pages built for conversion, built for higher relevancy. If you know certain characteristics and attributes about the customer beforehand, and those might, you might not have those pre-built pages part of your primary navigation, like you said. And through your marketing campaign, some of these opportunities will be uncovered and then you can go and build those specific landing pages. **\[09:44\]** **Sean:** Wow, that's a lot of detailed information. Thank you so much. So I've got a plan to have some landing pages and it could be, it'll be targeting a specific user. What are the requirements of a good landing page? What should I have on there? **\[10:08\]** **Isaac:** So that's a good question. And I would, I would reverse engineer it a little bit. There's no. And this is something another thing that people often confuse. There's no rules for best practices. I mean, there's, there's, we'll take it from, we'll take a step by step. You have concepts of yes, your landing page should be readable and we'll talk about, I could talk about it a little bit more detail. It should be clear. It should offer the information that the people are looking for. But what you, and I think that sort of intuitive advice that most people could probably come to on their own. Sure, a lot of people look for an easy formula for a high converting landing page. They look for, oh, I should have this size text at the top of my page. I should have my form over here. I should have this many fields in my form, et cetera, et cetera. That's what people are really looking for. And that doesn't exist. There's no rulebook that you could copy and create a landing page that's going to convert every time. So what I say, what a good landing page should do is it should convert your visitors at a higher than average rate. That's a successful landing page. A failing landing page is that it's converting visitors at a lower than average rate. And just to step back for a second, a conversion in case anyone's confused with that terminology. A conversion refers to any, a conversion refers to any action that's useful to you that ultimately leads to revenue. So people typically conceptualize that as either a sale or a form submission or a phone call, right? Those are those bottom of the funnel conversions. But a conversion could also be somebody viewing your store locator page. A conversion could be somebody who views your about us page, right? You might have data that indicates that a person who has been to some of these more, let's say deeper pages into the hierarchy of my site. Those people are more likely to convert than a person who just looked at our homepage. So you might be tracking that as a conversion action. You might, if you have a good understanding of your numbers, you'll be able to tie a specific dollar figure to how much a view of a specific page in your site is worth. So those are non-conventional conversion actions, but it's really important, this is a little bit tangential, but it's really important for people to start looking at these micro conversions, tracking these conversions that are, that are preliminary conversions, that are secondary conversions that are, that are like sort of stepping stones to your, to your main conversion, which either, which would either be an online sale, a form submission or a phone call, because you'll get a lot of good data. And then depending on what type of marketing campaigns you're running, if it's, if it's Google ads, you'll be able to feed these engines more conversion data. That's meaningful because it helps those engines optimize campaigns to get you better results. Okay, so moving back, so that's what a conversion is. It's any action that generates revenue on your website, but typically people are going to be thinking of conversions as something which directly generates revenue, whether it be really a linear revenue, revenue related action like a sale, like an online checkout, or like a sales form or a form submission. So a good landing page should be converting those visitors. That's what a successful landing page does, and it's, it's very simple, like there's, there's not two ways about it. There are either successful landing pages or failing landing pages. There's no in between. It's good or it's bad. It kids not okay. **\[13:28\]** **Sean:** Can we jump back a second? I have a, I'd like to get a little bit of a clarification. Sure. A minute or two ago, you said something about a good convert a good landing page converts at higher than average and a bad landing page converts at lower than average. How do I know if my landing pages are lower than average other than looking at my personal average? **\[13:55\]** **Isaac:** Is there an industry average that I can look at? No, there's no, there, there's some industry benchmarks, but they're too vague and they're too broad for them to be reliable. The only thing you should, the only measure of successful landing pages if it's outperforming your previous version. Now there is, there is an absolute truth like you, there is, there is a real average. Let's say, let's say if you were to isolate variables and you say, okay, I'm in this industry in this niche with this type of customer with these demographics, you're not the only one doing that. So if you pool together everyone else is, but you're just not going to ever have that data. So there's no point in trying to hunt for it. I mean, there's always, you could get anecdotal data if you have friends or you know other people, you can get a sense of what their conversions are costing and you know, someone and so forth. But the page should really be converting at better than your previous version. And it might be, this might be your first landing page, in which case, you'll only know how good it is until you, and we'll, we could talk about A.B. testing because that's one of the elements of a good landing pages being actually, it was going to ask her like, so I'm a new business. I've got my first landing page. **\[15:01\]** **Sean:** You mentioned A.B. testing, but how long should I run a page before I start doing the A.B. testing? How long should I run it before I have a baseline to measure against whether it's performing well or performing poorly? **\[15:16\]** **Isaac:** So I would recommend A.B. testing immediately. So if you're getting enough traffic and you know, even if you're, even if you have a very low amount of traffic, you could still run an A.B. test. But even in the very beginning, you design a page, you design a landing page. Well, there's two things. Most, most companies have a website, right? So we're talking about, let's say we're talking about Legion, go back to our plumber. You'll typically have a website that has a few pages. And now you might be building out a landing page. So right away, you could test the conversion rate on the landing page against. How your actual website has been performing and you should remove branded traffic from that data because branded traffic, which means people who are going to Google and or either coming directly to your site, because they know your site or they're searching Google for your company name. That's, that's traffic that's always in a convert very high because the person is looking for you specifically. Yeah, they know who you are already. And they're not exactly. So you have to compare the right types of data to each other. So if you're going to, so if you have your first landing page, you could use your first landing page to test it and use your, let's say your primary page that was on your site as a benchmark or as a baseline. But even if you're building a landing page to begin with and you don't have anything to compare to, it's always good to start off A.B. Test and you could A.B. Test a headline, let's say, A.B. Test and copy is the most important. You'll get the largest results, the largest bang for your A.B. testing book, I guess you could say, when you test copy. You know, people will love to test out this button color. But colors, you know, they don't really make a difference and you could, there are some very good evidence that points to a lot of these easy. The testing button colors and testing different images, those things are easy to test and they come natural to people writing good copies very hard and it takes a long time. **\[17:04\]** **Sean:** Oh yeah, one of my close personal friends is a copywriter and when he takes it on himself to adjust what I've written, the quality of my copy goes up immensely. Yeah, it's not easy. So like test copy and getting good at it. You can really see the change. **\[17:20\]** **Isaac:** You can really see a change you'll make, you'll have, you could see big differences in conversion rate. If you're able to give people the information they're looking for in a way that they're looking for it. So being readable and legible, all those, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot to talk about when it comes to copy. So we're not going to go into too much detail with with copy. But to answer your question, even on your first landing page, you really could be and should be A.B. testing right away. Yeah. **\[17:44\]** **Sean:** Okay, so A.B. testing. Now, obviously I could hire someone like yourself or another agency that does landing pages and paper click and things like that. But what if I don't have a large budget to pay for an agency and I want to do it myself? Is there an easy way for me to do A.B. testing on my own maybe through my CMS such as craft CMS or WordPress or expression engine or some other thing? **\[18:12\]** **Isaac:** Sure, there's a couple great tools for A.B. testing on your own. So if you're going to really be on a low budget, the best tool to use is Google Optimize. It's a free tool. You add a script to your website and it allows you to dynamically change different elements of the site. So I can go in and I can remove an entire content block. I can rewrite a headline. I can rewrite copy. I can change an image. I can change a form. I can do all those things. It's very intuitive. You know, click and drag and drop interface and allows you to then. I'll add it to the show notes. Yeah. And then it allows you to run as many variables as you want, but your simple A.B. test is a second variant against the control. And you could choose all sorts of different filters for how this test gets run. So I could say that only people coming from this location should be involved in this test. I could say that I want 70% of people to see the control or 70% of people to see the experiment design. I could do 50-50. I could split it up however I want. It's a really, really cool tool. It's free to use and it's very, very helpful. And they'll be the statistical engine behind it. You don't need to know your p-values or your confidence intervals. Google will tell you when you have enough statistical information to see if there was a winner or a loser or it's inconclusive. **\[19:25\]** **Sean:** Wow, that sounds really great. So you build your landing page in Google Optimize or it somehow overrides the copy that you've got in your press or craft CMS. Like how exactly you don't build landing pages in Google Optimize. **\[19:41\]** **Isaac:** Google Optimize is strictly just a testing tool. So if you have a WordPress site, great. Then you built a landing page in WordPress. I would recommend WordPress as a landing page builder. But unless you have your site built in WordPress, you add the Google Optimize script to the header section of your WordPress site. And then through Google Optimize, you'll be able to rewrite copy on the page and have that run as a second variable. **\[20:05\]** **Sean:** So in your Google Optimize control panel, you tell it what to overwrite. Like you give it a specific section of your landing page and say, okay, well, this is my headline. 50% of the time I want to say welcome visitors from Isaac's website. And the other 50% of the time I wanted to say welcome John or something like that. **\[20:29\]** **Isaac:** Exactly. Google Optimize becomes an HTML CSS editor, which is a front end view of the page. So on my landing page, I might have a header. I have a H1 tag. And that header is plumbing services, award winning plumbing services. So I can say for 50% of visitors, I'm going to double click into that H1 tag. And I'm going to I'm in my variable design or my experimental design. It's now going to say plumbing services trusted by over 3500 customers in New York in business since 1987. So whatever it is, is I want to see if that headline gets people more excited, at least to a higher conversion rate. And then I saved that in Google Optimize. And I'm able to set and I could change multiple elements on the page, which then becomes a multi-variant test, not an AB test, in which case you want to. You need to have more traffic in order to test multiple variables at once, but it could be sure and it could be done through Google Optimize as well. There are other tools that are more advanced that have more features. There's a tool called Optimize Lee, which is a very good tool. It's a paid tool and then also visual website optimizer. Those are two very, very popular testing, AB testing tools. **\[21:38\]** **Sean:** So these I just want to I've never heard of Google Optimize. So I just want to reiterate that it doesn't actually change the content on my website that's in my CMS control panel. It dynamically on the fly is adjusting it so that I can have the AB testing. And then I can look at the statistics or the reports and decide, oh, well, test B is work is converting better. So then I should update my website copy. And then I could turn off the testing if I want or I could test a different variable. This sounds really amazing. I'm going to go have to check it out because I I hadn't heard of Google Optimize. **\[22:20\]** **Isaac:** No, it's a really fun tool. It's a really, really fun tool and it's really easy to use. So I highly recommend it. **\[22:25\]** **Sean:** And there's other tools that you mentioned. They do similar things or advanced things, but they cost money. Is that correct? **\[22:32\]** **Isaac:** Yeah, visual website optimizer, VWO.com and optimizely both cost money, but they're both they both have a lot more features, but I would say for the vast majority of your listeners will have everything they need with with Google Optimize. **\[22:47\]** **Sean:** Yeah. And if you need more than you could update to a different service at a later time. **\[22:53\]** **Isaac:** Yeah, you could always you could always test other things. There's when it comes to software and then in the internet marketing world, there's there's always many providers. There's no best one. Each one will sort of offer a different range of features. A lot of them will be similar features. So I always recommend testing a couple and seeing which one you like. There's nothing wrong with doing that. **\[23:13\]** **Sean:** Absolutely. I'm 100% behind that. Also about a minute ago, you said you wouldn't recommend building your landing page in WordPress. Is that because it's WordPress or you don't recommend building a landing page in any CMS? And if that's correct, where would you recommend building a landing page? **\[23:34\]** **Isaac:** So I don't not recommend I'm okay with the idea of building a landing page in a CMS, but a CMS is really built more for building out a content driven site that changes dynamically. That's sort of the defining characteristic of a CMS WordPress is not a landing page builder. And when it gets into WordPress really is an open source content management system that is really good when you have lots of updated content on a regular basis. But there are a lot of tools have come onto the scene over the last few years that make it a lot easier for companies that don't have as much development resources or web expertise to create really good landing pages really quickly and test them. Do you have some examples? Yeah, so unbounds is a very good tool to use. Unbounds is one of our landing page builders of choice. It has built in A.B. testing features, which is great. It allows you to, like, say, if you want to do basic A.B. testing, you can do it with out Google optimized by creating a variant of pages directly within unbounds. And unbounds will rotate traffic to these different variants. And you could have fully different pages easily with these different variants. And it's again, it's a drag and drop builder. It's relatively inexpensive unbounds. There's a lot of cool features. And they have a lot of good data on how, you know, the unbounds team has used their data over the years to create templates that are going to put you ahead of the April just starting out of the gate. And then again, of course, remember that the most important thing is testing copy. It's very easy. People fall into the trap of testing meaningless things because it's easy and fun to test. It's easy to test button colors. It's easy to test layout. It's easy to test fonts and typography. But those things don't really make a difference. What really makes a difference is copy. And that's not a test. And no template in the world is going to help you write good copy. **\[25:27\]** **Sean:** Absolutely not. Would you say that copy would include visual elements that support your written copy or are you just just words? That's the only thing that's really helpful. **\[25:41\]** **Isaac:** When I refer to the copy, just just to words. That's what that's what that's copy. And I'm not saying the visual elements are an important like I know in my course, I talk a lot about that production quality is a big thing. But ultimately, those are like, you know, once you get your production quality right and it looks like a high quality site and you have some good visual elements and your paragraphs are broken up and breathable and there's and you have padding and whatever. So then, then it's just becomes like preference and past a certain point you're not going to be making your you're not going to be increasing your conversion rate by choosing a better image or choosing better color schemes. Like at a certain point, it's a professional looking site and your in your your visual elements are fundamentally good. They're not going to get that much better by testing those elements. What will be what's really going to improve your conversion rate is testing the information you provide, how you say it, what you say and where you say it on the page. That those are things that are going to really help your conversion rate. **\[26:41\]** **Sean:** So by where you say you are suggesting also testing the order of your copy, so moving, moving sections or paragraphs up and down the page. **\[26:51\]** **Isaac:** Correct. And then making sure you put the most important information to your visitors, higher up on the page and what is the most important information to your visitors. And here's a clue. Most people that are the ones who are writing the copy, they don't know what's the most important to their visitors. They think they do business owners think that they know what you know unless unless you're talking to a business owner who has done this experimentation and done this testing on his customers. And then he does know because he got real feedback, but 99% of business owners that have not done this experimentation do not know the the core frustrations and needs and information their visitors for the first time coming to a site I look before. They're just they've been in their own business for too long. They know too much about it. They know about their products and services too well that they can't possibly write good copy for an uninformed visitor. Which is why good copy writing and good copy writing services are expensive and worthwhile. **\[27:50\]** **Sean:** Right. You, as you said, the owner of the business knows everything and they might end up speaking in jargon or just assuming knowledge and not write it down. Whereas your visitor will come in and look around and they might not find what they're looking for because you assume they already knew it. And this is why we need to come and get a copywriter or you'll discover that you're not converting as well because you've done this a B testing. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Okay, cool. I kind of want to go back a little bit to talking about using your CMS to build your landing page. Okay. So you mentioned that you don't feel like WordPress is a good solution for that or any CMS. Can you explain why you feel that it isn't like I've built a landing page builder for my own website. And I use craft and I find it's very flexible and allows me to drag and drop elements up and down the page, turn them on and off easily. Is this because WordPress can't do that or is maybe I'm just doing it in a way that's incorrect in your opinion. **\[29:11\]** **Isaac:** No, there's I mean, there's no correct or incorrect way. Okay, to me WordPress is going to take you much, much longer to actually get a functioning landing page in place. Then, then, then need be like unbounce. It will be extremely fast. It's built for this. It's the remember WordPress is not built for creating a quick landing page and testing copy. It's built to manage like WordPress is fundamentally built for bloggers. That's what it is. **\[29:40\]** **Sean:** Right, but I'm also talking about other CMSs. Yes, you have other. A droop oil or expression agent or craft or any other number of CMSs that exist out there. **\[29:51\]** **Isaac:** So any any CMS that exists, it's it's going to excel at what it's built to do, which is to publish posts and publish dynamic content content that's updated and changes. So all these CMSs will have a back end area where you could easily write your blog, easily write the content for a page, save it, tag it, have it part of a certain portfolio, have a certain part of a certain, you know, you have a certain categories. You then depending on the CMS and depending on the templates you're working with, I mean, WordPress is the most flexible CMS in the world. It it powers 20% of the entire internet. It's absolutely huge. It's absolutely enormous. And there's a lot of that. **\[30:26\]** **Sean:** That's that's true. It is huge, but I actually disagree on not being most flexible, but that's neither here nor there. **\[30:32\]** **Isaac:** WordPress has by far the most flexibility because it has the most applications that are written for it. So there's there's an almost an unlimited amount of third party integrations and extensions and apps that attach to WordPress. And a lot of CMSs that are out there are actually built on WordPress. There's a lot of companies that have built more simplified versions of CMS. They call it something different and it's really built on on top of the WordPress platform of some of those. But ultimately, if you're a Legion company and you want to make a landing page for a Google ads campaign and you want to run traffic to that page and you want to a test different variance, that's not what any CMS is built to do. What you want to do is find a landing page designer or landing page builder. Those are different tools. So unbounce lead pages. These are all built with the unbounce lead page lead pages click finals. These are all built with specifically with creating landing pages that convert in mind. Our favorite tool that we use now is called web flow. Web flow is started off as a landing page designer prototyping tool. It's extremely extremely advanced with on the design side. It's very easy once you get a little bit of a learning curve. It's a much it's a steeper learning curve than unbounce because it's not really drag and drop as much as unbounces. It's a response. It's built on a responsive grid. But it gives you an unprecedented level of flexibility and design. So you could design very high level interactions CSS HTML without having to actually write any code. It then evolved. That sounds very good for the doer yourself for web flows incredible. Web flows are favorite tool for landing pages even for we've actually taken large sites of hours of clients that were built on WordPress magento and moved them over to web flow. Web flow also has a CMS built into it. It's not built. It's not the CMS feature of Web flow actually came after we'll was launched. It's not built as a CMS. But it allows you to publish a blog. It allows you to publish products. It allows you to run a basic ecommerce store. But it's but if when it comes to like taking a blank canvas and putting together your own landing page from scratch to to look and feel how you want. Web flow to me is the best tool in the marketplace right now to do that. **\[32:49\]** **Sean:** What kind of features does web flow allow you to put on a landing page just via drag and drop. Not not I'm not talking about copy obviously it's going to have a rich text editor of some sort. **\[33:01\]** **Isaac:** So there's all the easy add in images and block quotes links to different things. You could you could drag in images. You could drag in custom HTML. You could drag in videos. You could drag in list items and rows and columns and all sorts of things. They have they have the entire gamut of building blocks for a page. But then it allows you then through the CSS editor which is not CSS is still all drag and drop to control things like padding and margin and your position and flex box and moving elements around the page and layering elements around the page and creating interactions and effects. All sorts of interesting things and it's it's really originally made for for creative professionals who are designing very high levels prototypes for the web. But it's also an all in one publishing tool so you could actually publish a live page on a custom domain. And then it doesn't have any built in a be testing features because it's not an a testing platform as is unbound and lead pages. Those are built for that like designing marketing pages. We've built as a designer. But then you would use something like Google Optimizer optimizes with your web flow page or your web site to test different variants of your page. Right. That sounds like a good plan. Yeah. We're in we we use we've used web flow every day here at our agency. We basically design every client website or landing page right now in web flow. **\[34:25\]** **Sean:** I'm definitely going to check that out is web flow is something that would be user friendly to an office somebody who is like a do it yourself. They're willing to pay for the service but maybe they don't have a large budget for an agency. **\[34:39\]** **Isaac:** So it's not it's web flow is not as user friendly. It's user friendly like as far as like you know soft online software goes. It's it's pretty intuitive. But there are a lot of features and there is a much steeper learning curve. It'll take more time than then putting a page together on unbound. So with unbound. It's the most beginner friendly. You could quickly go in there. Okay. Take a template really easy to move and change things around with web flow. There's a there's a very good training academy. They have a lot of excellent excellent training videos. But you do need to learn your basic principles of HTML and CSS because you're going to design successfully well flow. So you need to know okay what is the difference between relative and absolute positioning of an element. What does it mean? **\[35:18\]** **Sean:** Yeah, that doesn't sound like a do it yourself for kind of kind of thing. It sounds like you would want to hire a web developer or somebody who an agency that could help you out in that case. If you're using web. **\[35:30\]** **Isaac:** Yeah, I mean it really depends on the person. If a person is willing to learn a couple of these of these basic principles. Then web flow definitely is the type of tool that you could be designing pages on your own relatively quickly. If you're just looking for something that in one session you could you could you could go in. Get out with a landing page and something like unbound or lead pages would be a better platform for you. **\[35:52\]** **Sean:** Right. And for the listener. Isaac goes into detail about how to use unbounds in the UDEMI course, which I'll link to. It's really really well done. Very easy to understand how to go with that. Okay, so let's talk about the types of call to actions that are most common on that landing pages. I know you've touched on that a little bit. Is there any type of thing that I should include on any landing page I make or is it dependent on what I want the end user to do? **\[36:28\]** **Isaac:** It really is dependent on what the conversion action you have in mind. That's something which I talk about in the course as well as when you're thinking about designing your page you want to think about what is the end goal of this page. Every page should have a purpose every single page in your website every landing page should have a purpose and you need to define that purpose. So you need to understand what's the purpose of the page and who is the page for. So is the page for people who are actually in the shopping stage of the buyer funnel. You know that the typical awareness interest desire action sort of buying process and people conceptualize it differently and discuss it differently. But that's the basic idea. So is this landing page being built for people who are just becoming aware of this product or service and they're not ready to seek to a sales representative yet? Or is this page going to be visited by people lower in the funnel and we need to give them a way to contact us or speak to a salesperson and convince them to do that. And those two things will help inform your design. So who is this page for and what's the purpose of the page. What do we want that person to be after they come to the page or what do we want them to do. So all your calls to action should be written with that in mind. Your copy should be written with that in mind. The information you provide. So you might not necessarily provide a lot of different pricing detail or like onboarding detail if you're dealing with somebody who's just becoming aware of the service. You might want some more preliminary information about the value of the service or testimonials from other people who have used the service, things like that. Now somebody is much lower in the funnel understands the value. They've done that research. They want the service of the product. Now you need to convince them that this one, the one that you sell is the best one for them. Why maybe it's cheaper. Maybe it has a better warranty. Maybe you have a better track record, whatever it may be. So it's different information that's going to work for different types of people. And the cost to action there would be different. You know, maybe to somebody higher up in the funnel, the call to action would be to read us an additional post or to download a case study or to download a white paper or to sign up for the newsletter. That might be the goal of a page because you're not going to get somebody who's just finding out about the product most of the time to submit a sales form. The goal of person low-income testimonials. **\[38:43\]** **Sean:** You're new to my website. Here. Buy my service. It's only $5,000. You want to get them on the newsletter or the ebook that you've written or another blog post to pull them back and create interest and awareness of your expertise and knowledge in this particular. Correct. Your field. So let's say that I've got my website. I've done some landing pages. I'm getting some conversions, but I want more. Maybe I don't have the time to do it myself anymore. I'm ready to hire somebody. I've got that budget now. Are there anything I should consider when hiring a specialist? What are the things that a good firm that does landing form landing pages do? Are there any red flags? I want to avoid somebody who's going to be doing bad practices that are going to impact me poorly. **\[39:37\]** **Isaac:** Yeah. I mean, at the very least, you want to see what has your previous work. Do you have a portfolio of work? But more so, it's very easy to create a portfolio. If you're hiring somebody for a legitimate project and you're willing to pay, then you should absolutely ask your prospective designer for two or three references. Phone numbers, names, email addresses. That's a great way to weed out a lot of not necessarily bad people, but you're not going to be able to figure out really, are you bad or are you good? But the one thing that you could, we hear what I'm saying, there's a lot of people who don't have references, we're just going to start it, that are good. If you find someone like that, you've struck gold, but you can't expect to find someone who has no track record. It's sort of the cat 22 of new freelancers, but you're entitled to try to find the best work possible. So if you're willing to pay, you know, web design is there's a range of fees associated with it from, you know, you could hire people overseas that are going to be cheaper, that it's a different type of competitive market over there. And there's very good quality work to be had over there. US based designers are going to be more expensive, either projective per hour, but I strongly recommend asking for a portfolio of previous work that's live on the internet now that their clients are actively using, but also names, numbers, emails of two to three references that you could actually call on the phone and say, what has been your experience working with this designer? That's a great way to start. Absolutely. I know of no other way to really get a sense of the work of the quality of work before getting sort of getting into bed with a designer. But yeah, I would say take a look at their portfolio and make sure they're able to provide a couple of references. **\[41:26\]** **Sean:** Okay, so is there anything that a person in this field might suggest that I do that could be a red flag or is it just, you know, the references are the key thing here? **\[41:39\]** **Isaac:** I would say the references are the key thing. If a person asks for like, you know, the money upfront, that's a red flag. If you're being charged on a project by project basis, which I like, I don't like hiring designers or developers hourly, because unless I really trust you and I've never met you, I don't know you, it's hard, you know, it's hard to be able to really track your hours unless, unless I say I'm hiring you off upwork and you have thousands of hours under your belt. I'm not going to be able to do that with many good reviews, then I might engage you hourly, but I really try to ask designers and developers to quote me on a project. I say, here's what we want to do. This is what we want to accomplish. Give me a fixed quote for this project. I like that. I also prefer to go into it. Yeah, it's much better. So if it, so it's typical to, let's say, give a 30% deposit. If a designer or a developer asks you for more than that upfront, that's a little bit of a red flag. Okay, other than that, I'm not sure what would other red flags there would be. **\[42:44\]** **Sean:** All right, well, that's good to know. I mean, different industries, there's different kinds of red flags. Today has been really informative. You've really given a lot of information. Google optimized web flow unbounce, different ways to think about A, B testing. Isaac, this has really been fantastic. Do you have any final websites or resources that you would like to share? **\[43:12\]** **Isaac:** I would check out a couple of good resources is conversionxcel.com. That's a really good blog that has a lot of really great case studies about different testing. And then if people want to go, if people want to dive even deeper into research, they can check out the Nielsen Norman group. They are the pioneers of usability research. They publish a lot of really, really high level studies research reports on trends in web design and readability on the web and how. And usability on the web, very, very worthwhile. Check out some of their content as well. **\[43:46\]** **Sean:** Excellent. And everything that we've talked about, I'm going to add into the share notes. So it's easy to find. Isaac, last question. Where can listeners find out more about your website, your social media, the various courses that you've mentioned? **\[44:00\]** **Isaac:** Sure. A person could go to you to me.com, you d.m. Y dot com and search for my name. Isaac Rudansky. They'll see my courses there. Our agency website is adventureppc.com. Adventureppc.com. You can take a look at our services and our clients and our own case studies and our blog over there. And sometimes I'm, you know, try to be periodically active on Twitter at Isaac Rudansky. I s s. I s a a c Rudansky. R U D a n s k y. And that's it. **\[44:25\]** **Sean:** Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with me today. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Thank you for listening. Be sure to subscribe and share our website 101 podcast with friends and colleagues. You can find me at website 101podcast.com on Twitter. These are named at website 101 pod. Do you have a question you want to ask a topic suggestion or a guest host recommendation? Send me an email, Sean, S e a n at caffeine creations dot c a or visit website 101podcast.com slash contact and fill in the form. You can find me personally online at my company website caffeine creations dot c a c a f e i n e c r e a t i o n s dot c a. On LinkedIn with username caffeine creations. Hope you enjoyed this episode. See you next time. Close Transcript Have a question for Sean, Mike, and Amanda? [Send us an email](/contact). 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