Last year, Darl Champion from the Champion Law Firm spent $55,000 on PPC ads over a 3-month period and only signed three clients.
Mr. Champion said he only got three cases, none of which were of any real value.
He went on to defend the company that ran the campaign saying they were a highly respected paid search agency, that came highly recommended and the problem could be the Atlanta market, name recognition, or maybe he just needed to spend more money.
However, in my humble opinion, the problem appears to have been the highly respected paid search agency, and here’s why…
The website is the most important part of any marketing campaign because it serves as the central hub for all your efforts.
This is where your traffic, leads, and clients all end up.
If everything else is set up correctly—and let's face it, setting up the PPC campaign and picking the keywords isn't all that complicated with the available tools—the website remains the crucial component.
Running Google’s Lighthouse tool (all these tests are done on mobile) on this site shows that the Largest Content Paint (LCP) takes 3.7 seconds…Google’s own test, conducted to discover why websites using their PPC weren’t converting well, discovered that if a website takes just 3 seconds to load it would lose 53% of its traffic.
- Amazon: Found that for every 100 milliseconds of improved load time, there was a 1% increase in sales.
- Mobify: Reported a 1.11% increase in sales for every 100 milliseconds improvement.
- Walmart: Saw a 2% increase in conversion rate for every one-second improvement in page load time.
- Cook: Observed a 7% increase in conversions for every 850 milliseconds improvement in load time.
So let’s say an attorney is spending $1,000 a day on a PPC campaign and getting 1 sale!
To double your sales you could double your ad spend or according to Amazon improve conversions by 100 milliseconds.
One way doubles your ad spend and the other leaves everything the same.
To calculate the expected conversion increase by reducing the Largest Content Paint (LCP) from 3.7 seconds to 0.8 seconds, we can use the data provided from the companies you mentioned.
Let's break it down:
- Amazon:
- Mobify:
- Walmart:
- Cook:
Summary of Expected Conversion Increase:
- Amazon: 29% increase in sales.
- Mobify: 32.19% increase in sales.
- Walmart: 5.8% increase in conversion rate.
- Cook: 23.88% increase in conversions.
By improving your LCP from 3.7 seconds to 0.8 seconds, you can expect a substantial increase in conversions, likely ranging from 5.8% to 32.19%, depending on which metric aligns most closely with your website's audience and behavior.
And in addition to this you would get an increase in rankings.
To start, larger sites tend to rank better!
A larger site will out rank a smaller site because with a larger site you're able to control the flow of your internal link juice and you’ve got more pages to receive external links.
A larger site will have a Higher Domain Authority!
Large sites have more pages to rank and tend to generate more links and achieve higher domain authority. When you have more page links to share and distribute, you have greater potential to earn a diverse mix of high-quality links.
And you have more internal link juice to control and this is important because for every keyword you bid on you should have a custom designed landing page specifically for that keyword.
Unless the first content paint isn’t in under a second and the Champion Law Firm takes 2.1 seconds for the first content paint so this will affect Google’s ability to crawl, index, and rank those pages.
Because Google has a Crawl Budget
The Crawl Budget is the number of pages Googlebot will crawl within a given time frame. If a page takes more than a second for the first content paint it can lead to a lower crawl budget, meaning fewer pages from your site get indexed.
Google doesn't have unlimited resources to spend crawling websites. That's why there are crawl budgets in the first place. Basically, it's a way for Google to prioritize which pages to crawl.
Google has a Crawl Rate
Crawl rate is the number of requests a search engine crawler makes to a website in a day and was introduced to reduce server overload.
If your site takes longer than a second for the first content paint, Googlebot will reduce its crawl rate to avoid overloading your server, leading to less frequent updates and potentially missing new or updated content.
Google has a Crawl Depth
If your site takes longer than a second for the first content paint the site may not have their deeper pages crawled and indexed, affecting the visibility of those pages in the search results.
Crawl depth influences how efficiently Google can index your content. Googlebot has limited time and server resources. Therefore, the number of pages Googlebot can crawl on your site during a specific time frame, is finite.
Google has a Crawl Timeout
Googlebot has a limited amount of time to crawl each page. So if your site takes longer than a second for the first content paint, Googlebot may abandon the crawl altogether, leaving your pages unindexed.
Core Web Vitals
In May 2021, Google introduced Core Web Vitals. You can check these yourself using Google’s Lighthouse tool. The first content paint needs to be in under a second to prevent crawling problems but the largest content paint needs to be under 2.5 seconds.
LCP
One of the key components of Core Web Vitals is Largest Content Paint (LCP). Google considers an LCP of over 2.5 seconds as needing improvement. LCP measures the time it takes to render the largest content element visible in the viewport.
Google has clearly stated that your site should achieve an LCP under 2.5 seconds to avoid performance issues. If your largest content element takes longer than this to load, it indicates a problem that could negatively impact your SEO rankings.
Optimizing for Core Web Vitals, particularly LCP, is crucial for maintaining and improving search visibility.
And Then You Have User Experience and Engagement
Google’s own research indicates that bounce rate increases dramatically as page load time increases.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate almost triples when page load time exceeds three seconds. This means users are more likely to leave your site before it fully loads, negatively impacting user engagement metrics that Google considers in its ranking algorithm.
And You’ve Also Got User Experience and Session Duration
Search engines like Google look at user engagement as a signal when ranking websites because they want to send people to websites that provide a great experience. The longer someone stays on and the more pages people click on is an indication to Google people are enjoying their web experience.
Now this site doesn’t have W3C valid Code!
A study by Jakob Nielsen found that websites with valid code are more likely to provide a positive user experience. Because valid code is more likely to be rendered correctly, faster, and with fewer problems in browsers.
How can a professional web developer introduce a website that doesn’t meet all the standards?
One error can cause problems with the search engines ability to crawl the site, make it not work correctly in a browser, as well as make it non ADA compliant.
What Makes a Good Website
If you are a coder and someone asks you what constitutes good code then you have to say the quality of the code.
The way you establish the quality of the code is that it meets all the standards and doesn’t have any errors. The way you find errors is by validating the code and if you can’t validate the code how can the developer be sure he didn’t forget to close a tag?
And this site is NOT ADA Compliant!
The Reason Your Website needs to be ADA Compliant is because it's the law. Fines can run $50,000.00 per problem and lawsuits can run you $100,000.00 or more.
And you can get sued and fined over and over again until you fix the site.
There has been a steady increase in lawsuits for non compliant websites as well as government fines. And the business owner is solely responsible for making sure their website is ADA compliant.
And Not having an ADA compliant website means you're turning away a lot of people.
In 2010, 8.1 million Americans were considered blind or unable to see, 7.6 million Americans had difficulty hearing, and 19.9 million people had difficulty lifting or gripping objects like a touch screen, trackpad or computer mouse.
And while this is getting longer than I had hoped it’s hard to stop without talking about the hero image.
Over 90% of people will leave a website in the first 15 seconds if the hero section isn’t designed to grab their attention.
The website owner believes they are the hero of the story!
However the website visitor doesn’t care about you, your ratings, past clients, or education because in their head they are the hero of the story.
You need a powerful hero image and a call to action that forces the visitor to click. A hero section that convinces the visitor that their life would be better, happier, and more productive if they just clicked the call to action.
And it's got to be done in an area the size of a business card.
Which means your hero image should focus on the main keyword of the page, clarify the offer, enhance the flow, nod at your Call To Action (CTA), show your benefits, answers some questions, and paint a picture that puts your customer in the center of it, playing the part of the hero.
And giving too much information in the header can cause information overload.
You’ve got less than a second to convince someone they’re in the right place. To do this you have to be extremely clear about what you're promising.
Once you’ve communicated the promise, it’s your call to action job to deliver on that promise.
It’s the website's job to keep and Direct the Flow of the user's Attention!
And to prevent scrolling your website needs to be designed to show the visitor as the hero of the story.
Because people will always see themselves as the main character in the story of their lives. This means you have to position yourself as the guide to the hero and the problem as the villain.
To convert the hero into a potential client your website needs to convey Empathy and Authority. Which means connecting with your potential client emotionally while showing authority.
Step 1
- Decide who should care and why?
- What do you want people to do?
- What are the goals of the website?
Then all that information has to be broken down into a sentence with a call to action that represents the goal of the page, along with an image that is powerful and creates an emotional reaction with the visitor.
And you don’t want just one landing page, all the people coming to your site are not the same so your landing pages should not be the same.
Each landing page should be designed for a different group of people.
And then for each group you need a page for the people who have just become aware of your product or service. They may hear about you from your advertising, social media, or even word of mouth and you need a landing page for each of those groups.
Some already know about you and are interested in learning more.
While others are ready to take action. You need a landing page for the different personas, age, sex, and demographic. Each landing page is designed to move them on to the next stage.
And then you study your stats and do split testing to find…
- Where are the bottlenecks in your sales process?
- Where do you tend to lose track of potential customers?
- What specific actions typically result in a sale?
You look at the stats, tweak your landing page, fine tune them and run the campaign at the same time.