Chances are you may have heard of the Butt-Brush Effect, from Paco Underhill’s seminal work, “Why We Buy.”

A brief synopsis of the Butt-Brush Effect: Underhill observed women shopping for neckties at a department store (not in a creepy way, he was conducting research). He noticed that the racks were really close to the entrance and at peak times, women looking at ties might get brushed from behind by a passer-by. When that happened to one of the women, she would almost immediately stop shopping in that section and either go to another or just leave the store.

This is a phenomenon that occurs frequently in stores, but what about online? Is your website guilty of creating “butt-brush” moments of anxiety for your customers? Does your website violate your customers’s sense of security, comfort and control? Here are five common examples of online butt-brush moments that you should immediately purge from your website:

Pop-ups

I’m not talking about the standard spammy pop-up ads. Obviously those are bad. They’re so flagrantly bad that there’s no point in discussing them. I’m talking about the well-intentioned pop-ups like customer service chat windows or moving-target survey solicitations; obstacles that interrupt the persuasive momentum of focused shoppers.

Be extremely careful in how you use chat windows. While they can be helpful for visitors that are genuinely lost or confused, don’t interrupt a focused customer on a path to their destination. Be selective about the pages that can trigger a pop-up. Check your analytics data for high exit rates and restrict the use of interruptions to pages that are already failing.

A similar problem exists for survey solicitations. There are ways to invite visitors to take a survey without taking the entire screen hostage. A tool like KissInsights allows you to ask survey questions with a noticeable but modestly placed question box. With this type of approach, you don’t risk frustrating your website visitors to gather a little intelligence. You still want the sale, after all, right?

Hey, get out of my way. I'm trying to give you money!

Auto-play music and video

Sometimes this works for shaping the conversation and producing the outcome you want from your website visitors. For a LOT of people, it’s on par with dumping a bucket of cold water on them or – wait for it – unexpectedly smacking them on the butt.

We’ve all seen it: your default action when a video starts playing without your permission is not to watch, but to turn it off and reestablish control of your experience with the website. Make your video conspicuous enough that people will choose to start it on their own. Assuming control over your visitors in this way is bad manners.

Mind your manners. Let your visitors choose whether or not they’ll watch the video.

Kanye thinks your video is one of the best ever, too, but don't interrupt your visitors to show it.

Dramatic changes in design between pages of your site

This often occurs when shoppers go from a custom landing page to the main website, or if your website uses a third-party shopping cart with low customization capabilities.

Consistency in design is a strong comfort signal to shoppers as they progress from one page to the next. Abrupt changes to the site layout, color scheme, images, font styles/sizes, etc., can spook customers and cause them to abandon the buying process. Make sure that you maintain visual consistency from start to finish in order to keep customer anxiety as low as possible.

Concealing shipping costs until late in the checkout process

Shoppers  aren’t stupid. If your shipping prices are really high, shoppers are going to abandon the buying process regardless of whether you show them shipping price in the shopping cart or on the last page of the checkout process.

When you withhold this information on the shopping cart page, shoppers aren’t thinking, “Oh that’s OK, I’ll just keep going and they’ll show it later.” They are thinking, “Yup, the shipping is a rip-off. If it wasn’t, they’d show it right away.” It’s an instant red flag that will have your customers on high alert for the remainder of their experience with your company.

As online shoppers get more savvy, your only hope is transparency.

What other “butt-brush” moments have you noticed in your own personal experience? Please share in the comments and help us all improve the experience we provide to our customers.

Your Website and the Butt-Brush Effect is a post by SEO expert Josh Summerhays. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Is there any more common, sad experience than a business owner or marketing executive rolling out a new website with great expectations only to see its performance fall flat?

If you find yourself in this leaky boat, here are some possible reasons your website is missing the mark with your target audience:

1. Your Website is a “Me Monster”

This is perhaps the most common error, and it’s probably not your designer’s fault (unless you’re the designer). The big mistake that leads to this is assuming that your audience is just like you. It’s not.

Look at the copy on your site – does it make you sound like a “Me-monster”? Your copy should be speaking to your audience, addressing their needs, engaging them in an organized conversation. Narcissistic copy is death to conversion.

2. You Won’t Shut Up.

Your product is the greatest thing since Easy Cheese. You’ve articulated every single reason, often in true “Me-monster” fashion. The problem is, your visitors won’t read long, verbose paragraphs. It takes too much mental exertion.

Get to the point. You can provide more info further down the page for the detail-obsessive, but most visitors want to be able to scan your page to easily figure out what’s in it for them and if it’s worth the cost. Be quick about it.

3. You Chose Form Over Substance

Did your designer talk you into a shiny designy navigation that follows a crazy curvy line around the middle of the page? Or using only symbols and pictures instead of text? Those are SO cool … but regular people can’t figure them out.

It’s OK to be innovative, but not at the cost of clarity and usability. Make sure your site adheres to commonly accepted conventions of website design. Put the navigation in a familiar place, make it look like navigation, make links look like links, etc.

4. You Jumped the Gun with Your Offer

Some Web marketing wannabe masquerading as an expert told you: “Every time you ask for a click, you lose 50% of your visitors.” Thus, you put your form at the top of your homepage, before visitors get to read anything about your offer. If your visitors don’t know what they’re signing up for, you don’t stand a chance of converting them.

Organize the sequence of information on your website. Make it convenient to buy/register/whatever, but don’t preempt your visitors’ ability to learn what they’re getting into. You’re not worth a leap of faith to them.

5. You Leave Visitors Hanging

Every page on your website should have a purpose, should be driving towards a next step. Your visitors expect this. They expect to be held by the hand, guided towards the ultimate outcome on the site. Not forced, not manipulated or restricted, but guided.

What they don’t expect is to be left at a dead end. They’ve read your copy and are ready to either learn more or engage you more intently, but your page has no call to action. Don’t do this to them.

There’s always a next step (even after they buy, but that’s another post), so make sure that every page on your site tells visitors what’s next and provides a way to move in that direction.

6. Your Product/Business Doesn’t Provide Value

It sounds like a throwaway list item, but it’s still happening – people are treating the Internet like a shortcut to making money. Never has that been less true than now.

If your product doesn’t fill a unique need in the marketplace, you won’t be able to persuade people to buy from you. The modern consumer can sniff out a pretender like a rotten egg.

7. You Aren’t Split Testing

Split testing elements or pages of your website is the only reliable way to improve your website’s ability to convert visitors to buyers. Guessing at improvements might work some of the time, but you’ll never be able to quantify the effect of your changes.

By employing valid split testing processes and embracing a long-term commitment to the effort, you will be able to compound incremental increases in your website conversion rate into something remarkable and meaningful for your business. Either you’ll do it, or your competitors will. Your choice.

7 Pitfalls that Will Devastate Your Website Conversion Rate is a post by SEO expert Josh Summerhays. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

This is part three in a series of four posts on understanding the realities and challenges of split testing to improve your website’s conversion rate. If you missed earlier parts in the series, you can read them here:

• Part 1: Traffic considerations
• Part 2: Choosing meaningful tests
• Part 3: Executing your test

Can you measure the results of your test? Does your test’s performance metric(s) matter?

In addition to limitations in creating and displaying test variations, you also need to make sure you can identify meaningful metrics and measure them accurately.

Generally speaking, the further your test is from the point of transaction, the more difficult it is to identify and isolate meaningful, reliable performance metrics. Offer pages, product pages and shopping carts are the most commonly tested because it’s easier to measure the results and the results usually relate directly to revenue or leads without subsequent influence from external factors.

Once you move out to the homepage, category pages (eCommerce) or information pages, your most reliable metrics become intermediate metrics, usually click-through rate to a desired page or pages. You should still measure sales or leads, but I’m not out to confuse anybody, so I’ll forgo the explanation of this until another time. Suffice it to say things get more complicated, so lean mostly on your most immediate metric for tests like this.

Despite these challenges, you shouldn’t be discouraged from venturing into split testing. In fact, now that you understand the challenges, your chances of success go way up. Go forth and realize the full potential of your website.

Split Testing – Knowing is Half the Battle, Part 4 is a post by SEO expert Josh Summerhays. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

This is part three in a series of four posts on understanding the realities and challenges of split testing to improve your website’s conversion rate. If you missed earlier parts in the series, you can read them here:

• Part 1: Traffic considerations
• Part 2: Choosing meaningful tests

Once you have enough traffic to the page you’d like to improve through testing, and you’ve identified a potentially impactful test to conduct, you’ve arrived at the point which website conversion optimizers really earn their stripes – executing the test.

Once you have good testing ideas, you have to bring them life. Be prepared for technology to sometimes get in your way.

Offhand, I’d say half of my otherwise good testing ideas don’t fly due to the technical limitations of the website. I may not have to abandon an idea altogether, but often the ideal test just isn’t going to work like I imagined.

For example, we recently launched a test of a client’s shopping cart that materialized much differently than I had intended.

My original idea was to test a two-step checkout process against the current one-step checkout. However, the client’s shopping cart platform did not provide for two versions of the checkout process to exist at the same time, so we had to get creative.

Since the shopping cart and checkout elements were both contained on a single page, we added a “Checkout” button (previously not included) and anchored it to a spot below the fold where only the shipping/billing forms and purchase button were visible. In effect, we simulated a two-step experience on a single page.

This test hasn’t reached a conclusion yet, but we’re encouraged by the results to this point.

It’s important to be flexible and creative in designing a test treatment rather than chaining yourself to a specific mental picture of how your treatment needs to look.

Split Testing – Knowing is Half the Battle, Part 3 is a post by SEO expert Josh Summerhays. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

This is part two in a series of four posts on understanding the realities and challenges of split testing to improve your website’s conversion rate. If you missed part one of the series, you can read it here.

Once you’ve determined that your site gets enough traffic to support a reasonably short testing cycle (if it’s going to take six months, you may want to reevaluate your test), you’re ready to flesh out your testing ideas and go for it. A word to the wise, however:

Coming up with ideas is the easy part. Coming up with good ideas is a little bit harder.

When you catch the bug and get excited about split testing on your website or external landing pages, it will be very easy to jot down a lot of ideas for things you’d like to test.

As you’re compiling these ideas, make sure you’re focused on improving the user experience rather than hoping that “different” will magically equate to “better.” Lance Loveday, conversion expert and co-author of “Web Design for ROI” calls this “testing among good options.” Unfocused testing wastes valuable time and opportunity, so make your tests count!

One of the most common examples of unfocused testing is changing colors – button color, logo color, general Web page color schemes, etc. Once in a while, a color test may be appropriate and effective, but this is the exception rather than the rule.

A good example of an exception in this case would be if the color of a button impedes the ability of a user to easily recognize it on the page or read the button’s call to action. I recently discovered some yellow buttons with white text that were somewhat difficult to read without squinting. In this case, it would be wise to test a darker button color or text color to see if darker buttons would produce a significant lift in click-throughs.

However, it’s a good bet that this sort of test would not be a good idea if you’re thinking, “I’m tired of this light blue. Let’s spice things up and try a deep red instead.” Changing colors purely on the basis of personal aesthetic preference is not likely to make an impact on your website conversion rate.

The Takeaway

You’re more likely to have success testing intelligent changes to elements of your website that have a significant impact on the user experience: your headlines and messaging, page layouts, calls to action, and other elements that impact a visitor’s perception of your benefits and ability to fill needs and add value.

Split Testing – Knowing is Half the Battle, Part 2 is a post by SEO expert Josh Summerhays. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

I get energized when clients and my SEO colleagues catch the vision of split testing changes to a website. The potential for conversion rate increases is huge, and it’s also great fun!

It’s not all rainbows and fluffy bunnies, however. There are challenges that can sabotage otherwise promising split testing efforts. Awareness of these challenges will help you avoid some of the common pitfalls.

Here’s Part 1 in a four-part series:

Your website needs robust traffic to support a reasonable testing cycle.

If your website is brand new, it’s likely that you don’t have enough traffic to make split testing worthwhile. The more time it takes to complete a split test, the less valid your test result is likely to be because external factors can influence results.

These external factors are things like shifts in market demand (seasonality is a common example of this) and external media factors.

Want to know how long your test might take to reach a valid conclusion? Here’s how to figure it out:

1. Figure out how many test combinations you want to run. If you want to test one variation, that’s two combinations because you always test against the current version.
2. Calculate how much traffic per day passes through the test page. More traffic means the test will take less time, everything else being equal.
3. What percentage of traffic do want to include in the test? Exposing only a fraction of your traffic to the test will reduce the risk of your test negatively impacting revenue, but also increases the amount of time needed for your test.
4. What is the current conversion rate of this page? Whatever your success metric is, you need to know the performance benchmark you’re trying to beat.
5. What is your expected rate of improvement? The improvement needs to be high enough to have a measurable impact on your business. If a 10% improvement doesn’t offset the cost of executing the test, you need to aim higher.

Google provides a free test duration calculator that does the complex math for you. Just punch in the numbers to see how many days your test will likely have to run. If you need to decrease the duration, you can choose to run fewer test combinations or increase the percentage of traffic included in the test.

Split Testing – Knowing is Half the Battle, Part 1 is a post by SEO expert Josh Summerhays. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

I review several websites every week, analyzing them from the perspective of usability and overall ability to converting traffic to customers/leads.

While a fair amount of businesses out there are getting their act together where online user experience is concerned, I’m constantly amazed by the huge amount of low-hanging conversion optimization fruit still out there on the Dubya-Dubya-Dub.

So I wanted to do you all a favor and give you a quick checklist of simple changes you can make this very day to make life a little bit (or possibly a lotta bit) better for your website visitors, allowing them to more easily give you money:

1. Remove distracting internal links

The fun thing about working with a whole bunch of SEOs (I’m the Conversion guy, remember) is that I get to throw out conversion tips that make SEOs nervous. Part of my job is to point out where SEO tactics are snuffing out conversion, and this is a frequent offender in that regard.

Not all internal links are distracting and should be removed. That would be ridiculous. However, sometimes marketers overdo it and start linking instances of their keyword in places where you wouldn’t want people clicking away from a given page.

Unsurprisingly, some of the most egregious offenders are SEO providers. A cursory examination of the top 10 Google results for any SEO-related keyword will reveal some overzealous linking practices that will have the humans visiting your site – you know, the ones with money to give you – scratching their heads.

For example, one company’s homepage (no screenshot – it’s not how we roll) talks about performance-based SEO work, but before you can even finish one sentence, they have a text link (“guarantee services”) to take you away from the page. Are they really in that big of a hurry to usher me off the page? Of course not – it’s for SEO value, but it’s also potentially tripping up visitors and raising questions that don’t need to be asked, like:

• “Am I not already reading about your guarantee?”
• “Is this guarantee different than the one you’re telling me about?”
• “Is this going to be that complicated that I need to read about this now before I finish on the homepage?”
• “I’m bugged. What should I get for lunch today?”

Here’s a simple test to see if you might have done this inadvertantly on your website: go read your website copy. When you get to a text link in your copy, ask yourself:

• Is this link interrupting the conversation?
• Is it well-timed?
• Is there a more useful place for this link on this page?
• When I put this link in originally, was I in a linking frenzy?
• Do my visitors need the information on the other end of this link before proceeding?

The answers to these questions should indicate whether this link might be counterproductive for your visitors.

Once this post makes it through editorial, it may have a bunch of links and make me look like an idiot, but I’m saying it anyway!

2. Strike down the CAPTCHA

The technology exists for you to filter leads in the background and eliminate spammy leads from your database automatically.

So why in the name of the Ringling Brothers are you still making your site visitors – who have money to give you – jump through hoops to prove that they are humans and not spambots?

Take down the CAPTCHA. Now. Please. Deal with a sprinkling of spam leads until you can get a better solution in place. Your conversion rate will thank you.

3. Link your header logo to the homepage

I still see sites that don’t do this. Huge mistake.

Clicking the logo to get back to the homepage is a usability convention that people get. It’s big and it’s always there. If a visitor wants to switch gears, it’s the easiest way to reset his/her approach to browsing your site. If someone gets stuck and your logo isn’t clickable, it may be the last straw that gets him/her off the computer and looking through the fridge, muttering in frustration.

You might be asking, “Why is this so important? Isn’t it enough to have a “Home” link in my navigation?”

My reply is, Why not do it? Some people will use the “Home” link, but a large portion of your visitors will expect to use the logo. You win both ways, and your site design doesn’t change a bit.

Don’t let them go to the fridge! Link your logo to the homepage and give them another chance to give you money.

~~~~~~

SEO.com has a crack team of conversion experts that can help you convert more of your online traffic into sales – learn more about our conversion optimization services today.

3 Conversion Busters You Can Easily Fix Today is a post by SEO expert Josh Summerhays. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

If Internet buzz is to be believed, lots of marketers are getting excited about this Conversion Optimization stuff.

If you’ve been reading about conversion optimization and are thinking about trying your hand at optimizing your company’s website, let me give you one tip that will save a lot of head-scratching and staring at the floor whilst being grilled by your boss:

Be aware of how your changes may affect the way users perceive and interact with the rest of your site.

In more technical terms, you need to consider how different treatments affect the interactions between your test variable, the rest of that page, and the rest of the website.

Adjust your focus

Many marketers like to think in terms of headlines, images, copy, buttons, layouts. It’s an easy way to approach conversion optimization, but the real power is in the interactions.

Interactions are the relationships between elements on your site that combine to shape customers’ perceptions of your business and products, and influence them to take certain actions consciously or subconsciously.

In order to understand interactions, you have to – brace for the cliché – put yourself in the customer’s shoes. You must be able to experience your own website through the filter of your customers’ experiences and knowledge.

Hypothetical scenario: SuperDuperComputers.com

Here’s what happens when marketers ignore interactions when making website changes:

SuperDuperComputers.com is rolling out a new tablet PC and wants to spread awareness of the product to all online visitors. So they whip up a big banner and stick it on the homepage, front and center. It’s the best product in the universe. The executive team forecasts an increase in online revenue of 50%.

To the dismay of the friendly folks at SDC, site revenue only jumps 5%. Upon closer inspection, the new tablet PC produced the revenue forecasted, so what happened?

The new homepage banner was so flashy and prominent that visitors who would have otherwise clicked through and bought other products were drawn in by the tablet PC banner, decided it wasn’t what they wanted and then abandoned the site.

The marketers involved in this admittedly oversimplified scenario failed to consider the effect that the new banner would have on their other products. The new product would appeal to some potential customers, but certainly not all. Overemphasizing the new product distracted shoppers from finding their ideal solution. Both the customer and company suffered as a result.

The Big Takeaway

How do you avoid making this potentially fatal mistake with your own website?

Look at the big picture. Examine a particular page within the entire context how users discover and interact with it. If changing a particular headline, image or layout a certain way would negatively impact its relevance within the entire funnel, you have three choices:

1. Optimize the entire funnel – ads, inbound link sources (that you control, of course), and subsequent pages.
2. Make less dramatic changes to preserve continuity in the funnel.
3. Find something more flexible to test.

Have any of your tests produced big gains without disrupting vital interactions? Share them here!

Interactions – The Hidden Force of Conversion is a post by SEO expert Josh Summerhays. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

My head is still spinning from the awesomeness proffered at the inaugural Conversion Conference held last week in San Jose, Calif. Not only could I not share every bit of value (believe me, I tried – to the tune of 160+ tweets), I’m still distilling new insights from my scattered notes.

But, since I want to show you how cool I am for being there, here are my main takeaways:

The supply (and value) of conversion optimization (CO) best practices is limited.

If you’re new to conversion optimization, there is plenty to read, learn, and apply in a general sense. However, if you’ve been scarfing down CO goodies for a few years now, there aren’t a lot of new items on the menu that you haven’t tried.

I’m not saying that the CO field is getting stale. Quite the opposite—conversion optimization is a dynamic playing field wherein the majority of opportunity lies in the ability of a marketer to

1. Discern their customers’ needs and
2. Test potential solutions for those needs intelligently.

There are plenty of behind-the-times companies that would benefit from a shot of tried-and-true CO best practices, but the opportunity for huge growth lies in continual, smart testing. Learn definitively what works best for your customers, not just for the majority of other businesses, and keep trying to improve their experiences with your company’s website.

The opportunity to gain a competitive advantage through CO is huge … but going fast.

The secret is out about conversion optimization. It’s a lot easier to boost profitability by significantly increasing your conversion rate rather than cramming increasingly more traffic through the same mediocre website experience.

The proliferation of cost-effective, even free, analysis and testing tools has made CO more accessible and potent than it has ever been. If you aren’t getting on board now, you may find yourself hopelessly behind your competition a few months from now.

Conversely, if you establish a ninja-style culture of testing in your organization now, you’ll spin circles around your competitors and entrench yourself as a market leader.

You think you know your customers, but you don’t. You REALLY don’t.

Michael Summers and the great Jakob Nielsen threw a one-two punch that floored me.

What assumptions have you made about your customers and how they interact with your website? You think people get it because you get it.

You’re wrong. Most consumers aren’t wired to use websites the way we’ve decided to build them. Until you see people in action with your website and understand their thoughts and reactions, you will miss opportunities to deliver a more effective, helpful website experience.

Don’t just deal in averages from your data. Take the opportunity to engage in qualitative analysis to add depth to your analytics data, as well as break down your over-educated opinions about it.

In conversion optimization, the cool kids all say “gobbley gook” instead of “clutter”.

Tim Ash, conference organizer and SiteTuners founder, and Matt Mickiewicz, creator of 99designs.com and SitePoint, dropped “gobbley gook” in their presentations.

Inconsequential? I think not!

“Gobbley gook” is a much better descriptor of the absolute mess some companies make of their website and the confusion and frustration they heap on their customers.

Clutter doesn’t sound like such a big deal. Heck, I’ve got a little clutter in just about every personal space I own or occupy and it doesn’t seem to slow me down much.

On the other hand, gobbley gook gets in my way and makes life difficult. My little girl’s tricycle in front of the garage door? Gobbley gook. I have to deal with it much more quickly because it’s agitating! Your Web visitors can’t move the tricycle to get to your garage. They just bounce from your site and write off your company.

Maybe you haven’t started optimizing your website for conversion because the clutter doesn’t really seem that painful. Well, your would-be customers see gobbley gook everywhere and it’s bugging the crap out of them.

Start cleaning up the gobbley gook today!

Statistically Insignificant Slice of Wisdom From Conversion Conference is a post by SEO expert Josh Summerhays. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

As a conversion optimizer, I cringe at the phrase “best practice.” Best practices may be quite reliable when it comes to personal etiquette, getting dressed, driving a car, or skydiving, but in my line of work, you gotta be careful about putting too much stock in them.

My personal mantra when it comes to online marketing is, “Testing is the ONLY best practice.” What may work amazingly well for me may fail miserably for you. The only sure thing is to think your situation through, test your ideas, see what happens, then learn from it.

With that in mind, I wanted to look at some of the common “best practices” for high website conversion, then throw back the curtain to show you their warts. I’ve broken it up into four posts in order to give each best practice a bit more attention than if I jammed them all together.

For Part 1, let’s look at…

“Above the fold”

For the uninitiated, here’s how Wikipedia defines “above the fold”:

“Above the fold” is a graphic design concept that refers to the location of an important news story or a visually appealing photograph on the upper half of the front page of a newspaper. Most papers are delivered and displayed to customers folded up, meaning that only the top half of the front page is visible. Thus, an item that is “above the fold” may be one that the editors feel will entice people to buy the paper. Alternatively, it reflects a decision, on the part of the editors, that the article is one of the day’s most important.

This term has been extended and used in Web development to refer to the portion of a webpage that can be visible without scrolling.”

Since monitors come in a wide variety of screen resolutions, the location of the fold can vary widely, as opposed to the actual fold of a newspaper (one reason we should all agree to ditch the phrase in referring to websites, but I digress).

Generally speaking, designing a webpage with the fold in mind is a very good thing. Keeping your most important information (product benefits, calls to action, product images, incentives, etc.) above the fold ensures that it will be more readily seen or read by visitors. You don’t want to make customers work hard in order to learn how your product will benefit them, so it helps to put the good stuff front and center.

When to ignore it:

“Above the fold” has been taken to an extreme by some marketers who try to cram everything above the fold and end up with a cluttered, confusing webpage.

The space below the fold is not a black hole. Customers will scroll down to find additional information that they believe will be valuable to them. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that since your most important information is above the fold, you can get away with halfheartedly dumping the rest of your relevant page content below the fold because it doesn’t matter.

If you are as careful about constructing your below-the-fold content as you were about your above-the-fold content, you will gain more freedom in your design, the entire page will flow together more tightly, and customers won’t feel burdened by having to scroll a little bit.

Some landing pages perform extremely well with key content and/or calls to action located below the fold, because each element of the page has been carefully constructed to get customers more engaged in the experience and moving deeper into the content.

Consider this interesting case study from Conversion Rate Experts on behalf of SEOmoz. After a thorough study of the target audience and SEOmoz’s product, Conversion Rate Experts created a landing page that goes on for miles, but it converted over 100% better than the previous, short form page.

I’m not trying to make a blanket statement that long-form pages are better than shorter ones. The idea is to carefully consider the experience you need to provide on a given page. Don’t arbitrarily conform to a page layout. A page layout never sold anybody on a product (except maybe graphic design services).

If you make sure to consider the needs/questions/anxieties/motivations of your customers and organize your landing page or product page accordingly, customers will buy more frequently– whether they had to scroll or not.

Website Conversion Best Practices … and When to Ignore Them, Part 1 is a post by SEO expert Josh Summerhays. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.