Do Not Forget To Optimize The Thank You Pages On Your Website – 66

Here is the Transcript for Episode 66 Do Not Forget To Optimize The Thank You Pages On Your Website;

Jesse Dolan: Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics, where each week we bring you tips and tricks on how to get found online. I’m your host, Jesse Dolan, back with you here in this episode. Today we’re going to be talking about optimizing your thank you pages for your website.

So if you’re doing something with your website, maybe getting a service request online for a form submission where they have to fill out a form to request a service or request a quote, or maybe it’s an opt-in where they’re going to … you’re going to send them a PDF with some more information. If you have that function on your website to have a customer fill out some kind of a contact form, what you want to do is redirect them to a thank you page for the confirmation. That’s what we’re going to be talking about today, is that page, that thank you page that you’re going to route that traffic to on how to optimize it and take advantage of it.

Before we get into that, I want to mention as always our Free Instant SEO Audit on our website, localseotactics.com. Go there. Big yellow button. I mean, it’s not huge, but it’s yellow button up in the top, Free Instant SEO Audits. You plug in your page, you plug in your keyword, and you can get a quick SEO score basically for how good your page is for that keyword. I’ve mentioned before, but it does optimize or gives you I should say feedback on how to optimize the particular page. It’s not so much your website in general. So if you have multiple service pages, multiple product pages, use it as many times as you want. It’s totally free for each individual page and whatever keyword you’re attacking. So check that out, localseotactics.com and take advantage there.

So back for the topic here at hand is, again, optimizing that thank you page. First things first, if you don’t have a thank you page on your website, that’s where we’re going to start, why you should.

So there’s really two options after a client or a prospect fills out a contact form on your website. You can either redirect them to a thank you page. And I’ll use that term generically here to refer to whatever the page is that you’re going to refer to them to afterwards. Or forms. Well, I have the option to just put some text on the screen. So whatever page your contact form is on your website, and if you’re watching the video, I literally just drew a square. Like this is your website right here. On the contact form on your website, they’re going to fill out the information, hit Submit, hit Next, hit whatever the button says. And then that form is going to go away. And it’s going to have some kind of confirmation text. By default it’s usually: Hey, thanks for contacting us. We’ll be in touch shortly. Or you can customize it to be whatever you want.

The method we’re going to talk about here today is not having that confirmation text, but actually redirecting to a confirmation page. However, if your current content management system or your current website set up doesn’t allow you to have a custom thank you page that you redirect to, you can apply a lot of the same stuff here still within that kind of on-page text manipulation. So if you can’t push them to a new page after they fill out your form, and it’s just that where it takes the form down and puts the text backup for a custom message, still incorporates in the stuff we’re talking about here, it’s going to be better than nothing.

So first things first, if you don’t currently have a thank you page, you’re going to want to go create one. I like to just have the word thanks, or thank you in the URL itself. So if it’s localseotactics, it’d be localseotactics.com/thanks or /thank-u and just call my page that. I like to do that because I feel Google would kind of know the intent of that page if it crawled it, it knows you have a thank you page and it kind of knows what that is. And it’s just kind of a standard convention. However, you can really, you can call it whatever you want. It doesn’t matter as long as you know what it is and that you’re going to be using that later.

So create your thank you page, and then at some point you can do this at the very end, or you can do it right now. You are going to have to go back into the settings of that form. And depending on the content management system you use, or the type of form that you’re using in your website, like if you’re on WordPress, you can get gravity forms is a very popular plugin to allow forms, the process and function forms on your website. You have to go into the individual form and change the confirmation, the form submit confirmation to be a page. And there’s usually like a little radio box where you can switch from text to page. And once you click page, you can choose from the dropdown whatever page it is that you had just created.

So make sure at some point you do that. You’re going to create this thank you page. We’re going to talk about optimizing it and what to put on it. But at some point you do have to go back and tie it into your form submission to make sure that this is where customers go once they fill out that form, otherwise it’s all for naught.

So now that you’ve got your page created, now that you’ve got it hopefully linked to your contact form or the forms that you have, we’ve got to design the page. So first thing I like to do at least is just make sure at the very top you’re communicating thanks. Thank you for contacting us. Thank you for submitting. Depending on whatever it was the action that they took, put something specific and relevant so they know first and foremost that there was success, that their submission went through that, that they did it properly.

So thank you for contacting us should be kind of a big H1 headline, and then underneath that some kind of a text about what they should expect as the next action. We’ll be in touch shortly. A team member will be calling you. Again, it should be appropriate to the context of whatever the reason they reached out to you. Check your inbox. That PDF is on the way. Just kind of tie that up into a bow, whatever that process was with a quick headline, and then just a little text underneath that.

Now after this it’s kind of where … That’s kind of standard stuff. After this is where you can really optimize the page. And when we’re talking about optimizing it, it’s not so much like in a direct SEO optimization to rank the page. This is kind of more of a conversion, building your brand and really taking advantage of this page. One of the core things that we’re trying to avoid with this as having a dead end on your website.

A website is not just a magical sales tool. If you get it ranked in Google, that’s great. Now you can get traffic to your page, but your website has to convert. It has to sell. And that’s the purpose of it. It’s to act as an online brochure, unless you’re e-commerce, then you actually literally sell right through it. But if you’re talking about a local business or a service or things like that, it’s a brochure, it’s informational with the ability for them to then contact you and call you.

So in the spirit of not having your thank you page be a dead end where it’s just, Hey, thanks for reaching out. We’ll be in touch. If you can put yourself in the customer or the prospect’s shoes at that point, they’ve contacted you. Now they’re hitting this page and it’s like, “Okay, cool. I’m done.” Now, if you literally don’t want them to do any more engagement with you, if you don’t want them to check out another page in your website, if you don’t want them to be maybe up-sold or pre-sold on some kind of next stage of your product or service, if you don’t want any of that, then stop right there. That’s make sure you have a thank you page and that you kind of close the loop on that.

However, what we’re talking about in terms of optimization is doing those things that I just alluded to, is giving them that next step, helping your sales process along and providing them somewhere else to go to stay engaged with your brand. Some people like to push people over to social. So under your kind of thank you content, then you would have a area that maybe it’s the Facebook logo or icon or whatever. Click here to go check out our Facebook page or check out our Instagram or follow us on social. You have all the icons, things like that. You can take them off for your website and still kind of keep them in your brand’s sphere.

One example of what you might do there for, let’s say a customer contacted you to schedule a service. If you’re a plumber, auto repair, any kind of service provider, and then somebody is going to contact you to get a quote, get an estimate, or maybe try to book an appointment. They’re going to hit this thank you page. You’re going to say, we’re going to be in touch, and now maybe you have some kind of offer or subscription plan or something else you’d like them to opt-in to. Maybe if you offer instead of doing a one-off repair, join our flat rate monthly deal and for X price you get three repairs per month, or kind of whatever it is. If you have some kind of a program like that, this is a great time for you to promote it or upsell it, or at least plant the seed for your sales team and your customer care team when they do upsell it.

So you would say, “Thank you. We’ll be in contact.” And then have another section underneath that of, “Hey, save money next time,” or, “Save some money this time,” or, “Check out X, Y, Z for the future benefits you can have if you jump onto our super plus platinum program.” This is the great spot if you to do that. They’re engaged. They just sent it to you. They’re kind of excited they’re going to be hearing back from you or getting their problem solved. They’re kind of in a good mood. This is the perfect time to upsell them. It’s a lot different than your salesperson saying that when they call them back to book the appointment, or when they’re in the field doing the service. If you can warm them up to the idea right now, that’s going to be great.

So any kind of that program upselling kind of stuff that you can put on your thank you page, that’s excellent. And when I say that, I don’t mean just mention it, but click here to learn more about the program. Just because they already contacted you, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t want them to browse something else in your website to learn more. So if you have that platinum plus program page, click here, have a big button, have a graphic, whatever it is to kind of drive traffic. After they’ve contacted you for a quote, now, let’s learn about our platinum plus program page and carry them through that journey.

Another example. Let’s say, if you’re car sales, and somebody’s like booking an appointments maybe to test drive a car. There’s something else you want them to be interested. If there’s some kind of logic based on they were looking at this particular product. Is there an upsell? Is there an add-on? Is there something that’s maybe an upgrade? If they’re looking at a used vehicle that came in on a certain page and filled out the form, is there a new version of that vehicle? You can have them check out after they’ve requested information on the used one. Just again, some kind of, something else to promote, or give them different options and let them know that that kind of stuff is there. If they don’t click on it, they don’t click on it, but you’ve got nothing to lose. You’ve got them very much on an engaged page here with 100% focus.

Now, when you do this, you may have multiple thank you pages. And this is maybe a good spot to stop and talk about this. If you have one thank you page for all the forms on your website. Maybe you have multiple contact forms, your generic contact us. Maybe you have a get a quote or there’s a particular product or service they’re doing an inquiry on. If you have one thank you page for everything, great. That’s not bad. But don’t be afraid to have multiple thank you pages. You’re going to have to name them different and pick URLs that are kind of unique. But then that allows you to have a very specific follow-up message on that thank you page, depending on what it was that they contacted you about. So let’s, again, I guess, keep it in the car dealership and repair shop theme here. If somebody is contacting you about purchasing a vehicle versus getting their transmission fixed, a different request, a different upsell, if you will, on the thank you page for those would be ideal.

So put some logic into that. And again, don’t be afraid to have multiple thank you pages out there. The whole idea here is to match the customer with something else they can do on the journey here. So that’s only going to do good things for you.

Another good use of it is for affiliate. Depending on what your business is and your industry, maybe you already do some kind of affiliate marketing. But a real crystal clear example for everybody else is links to Amazon. You can go on to amazon.com and become an affiliate. And what that means is then when you promote a product via Amazon, like we are. We are an affiliate. If you go to our resources page, most of the items on there we are affiliates for. And what that means is when somebody clicks on a link from your website over to again, Amazon and buys that product off Amazon, you’re going to get a small commission. It could be 1%, 2%, 3%, nothing much. There’s no markup in the product. Amazon just gives you that commission for promoting the product through Amazon. You could buy it anywhere. You might as well buy it through Amazon and they reward you with helping that.

So your thank you page can be a spot to do that as well. It’s a very passive. It doesn’t require any extra work on your part. But if a customer does do that, then you’re going to get that affiliate commission.

So let’s just say a different example. If you’re a computer repair company and somebody contacts you about getting a quote to fix their computer. On the thank you page for that, you can maybe have a link to Amazon for a new monitor or a new mouse. I mean, something that you don’t sell. You don’t want to cannibalize yourself by pushing people to Amazon. But if you know somebody who’s contacting you for a computer repair, you know that they do use these other computer peripherals. And if you don’t sell it yourself directly, then throw a link out to Amazon or have a list of top five things we recommend to our customers. Just kind of get creative. Again, you don’t want to steal from yourself, but if you can promote them through Amazon or any other type of affiliate, this is a great chance for you to do something that’s relevant to the avatar or the demographic of that customer, and maybe reap the rewards yourself of course.

Last but not least in the different ideas we have here to help optimize your thank you page is to maybe use it as a two-part form. Depending on how big your initial contact form was, maybe you want some secondary information. A lot of people, we don’t want to fill out giant forms to get a quote, or to get a certain PDF we might want to download. And you can play with this yourselves, but maybe you’ll have more success if your contact form just has name, phone number, zip code, and then a paragraph text area for them to input their questions or comments versus having 17 questions and drop-downs and maybe requiring phone number, requiring address and all this other stuff. If you can think about what’s the most minimal information that you want to get and create your first contact form with that. So theoretically your conversions should go up because that’s a simpler form and a lot less barriers for a client to contact you.

Now, if you do have some additional information that you’d love to get, that thank you page can be a second page of the form, additional information. It’d help us if we could also know X, Y, and Z. So maybe you didn’t ask them for their address on their first one, just to keep the shorm forter … Keep the form shorter, excuse me. On that second page, you could have part two and just say, “Hey, we’d also like to know your address and your phone number, business name,” whatever else. You can get the idea there and have it be a two-part form, also very effective for lead generation. Not everybody’s going to do the second page, but anybody that does you know is a little bit more engaged and gives you the information that you need.

So that’s pretty much it. There is one little tease we’re going to leave at the end here. We’re going to be doing another episode that talks about Google Analytics and how to … a couple of things, properly set up your Google Analytics, but then how to use it. There’s a ton of information as it relates to SEO within Google Analytics that we need to be looking at to help guide us in our efforts on what we should be optimizing and where our traffic’s coming from and a whole host of things.

One of the cool areas in Google Analytics is setting up goals. And one easy way to measure goals is how many people are hitting your thank you page. If they’re hitting your thank you page, that means they’ve requested information, or they want to contact you in some way. And without getting too deep into it, like I said, this is going to be another episode we’re working on coming up. If somebody comes in through a certain landing page, you’ll be able to measure how many visits on your page result in a form submission, by being able to track 200 people a month come into my landing page and 15 hit my thank you page. That means you’ve had 15 conversions, 15 goals completed.

So there’s some pretty cool stuff within Google Analytics that you can set up once you start using thank you pages, to really know what traffic sources are converting, what landing pages are converting. And inversely, if you’ve got some landing pages that you think are pretty dang sexy that you want traffic through and that you expect to be working, but you’re showing that they’re not getting as many goal completions as your other pages, that’s also something very important that we need to know.

So stay tuned for that. We’re going to dive deeper into that. But creating your thank you page, that’s kind of the step one to allowing that to happen. So we’ll do that in a future episode. Here this week that pretty much wraps it up for this one. Let’s get into our five star review of the week.

I got a great five-star review here from No Hammer For 20, short and sweet on this one. Truly actionable advice. These guys know SEO and do a great job sharing good tactics. Thank you. That’s perfect. We do know SEO. We are by no means the SEO experts out there, but this is exactly what we’re trying to do, is actionable things that you can take and do to your website, hopefully without a ton of effort, or at least know what should be done if you’re having somebody else to do it for you and keep you educated.

I appreciate that. If you have left us a review, that’s awesome. If you haven’t, we would love hear from you. Go out to localseotactics.com. Go down to the bottom. You have the links to wherever you want to go. Apple podcasts, Facebook, Google My Business, your choice. We’d love to hear from you. If we keep getting them, we’re going to keep reading them, and we really appreciate it. So that’s it for this week. We’ll wrap it up. Thanks for tuning in. Catch you next time.