The team at RankScience recently shipped their new homepage based on new messaging that we developed with them, and we’re glad to be able to share some details behind the scenes. If you care at all about SEO, you should check them out — they’ll handily improve your organic search traffic with science, not guesswork.
The ‘before’ look
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The RankScience homepage before our engagement — Full Page Here
We work with a lot of technical founders and this type of homepage fits a particular pattern that we see everywhere. The core messaging tells customers what you built, not why they should want to buy it.
It’d hard to avoid this. In the case of RankScience, they’ve built a really inventive solution for SEO, and that’s what came to mind when they wrote their copy. Their current customers love the product, but we needed to identify a compelling framing of the value of RankScience to attract the next wave of customers.
Developing the new messaging
I met with the RankScience founders armed with pens, paper, and an empty text document and we worked on messaging for the entire day — we had a blast.
Michael recently wrote about the process we use at Reify to develop great copy, so check that out if you missed it: How to write persona-driven marketing copy that never misses its mark Yes, we used this process to write that headline.blog.reifyworks.com
We were focused on nailing the following messaging on a new homepage:
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A value-oriented headline
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A descriptive tagline for the product
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Show prospects why they should care about the general problem
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Show why RankScience is the best solution to the problem
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Direct prospects to their paid trial, where they can demonstrate impressive results
RankScience.com Today
The headline of “Grow your website traffic with A/B testing” speaks directly to the buyer and their goals. Want more web traffic? You’re in the right place.
“RankScience is a continuous-optimization platform that improves your website SEO through automatic A/B testing and data science.” is a clear description of the product.
We had an aha! moment together that led to this next section. I know almost nothing about SEO, but I’ve worked with several marketing teams that spent incredible amounts of money on Search Engine Marketing (SEM), basically AdWords and Facebook these days. I wondered… how big is the SEM market? Could we compete for that same budget? What are some key stats that could illustrate this overall picture?
[Paid search makes Google 52 billion dollars](http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/business-google.asp), and yet organic search is still responsible for 80% of web traffic. Ranking well for organic search isn’t easy, though. Google changes their ranking algorithms 600 times a year, so no matter what worked for you in the past, it’s unlikely to be as effective today. RankScience runs thousands of SEO experiments (A/B tests) to guarantee you’re using the best strategy that works for your website and your audience.
Next we have a section that shows how RankScience actually does its magic, so buyers can envision how this can work for them, focused on two key things — automation and optimization.
The last section on the homepage is aimed at building trust. Their target audience is a head of marketing, who relies on an engineer for the quick setup, and who gets their marketing budget from the executive team.
There are a few CTAs on the page, all focused on driving interest in a trial. Their customers see over 25% growth in website traffic during the trial alone, and their case study with Coderwall shows an improvement of 57% with just one A/B test. We went for the enticing “Let us show you what we can do” button text because this is a collaborative sale, not a self-service platform. Yet.
What do you think of this new messaging? How do you develop copy copy that you know your audience will love? We’d love to hear from you. Thanks to Ryan and Dillon, the founders of RankScience, for letting us share these details!