Servus! (That is Bavarian for “hello”.) It’s me again, Florian, the developer of SNIP Structured Data for WordPress plugin. This is the next update about my plugin journey. Wohoo! It’s my second post. I’m doing this be because I’ve read the book “Traffic Secrets” from Russel Bruson and he wrote that it’s a good idea to share my journey with my product.
You can read more about the why in the initial blog post where I’ve also shared my goal for the next six months.
Free Plugin Landingpage
If you can remember, my first todo was to create a better landing page. I’ve asked some of my mastermind buddies to review it. Before I share the end result, here is how it looked like before:
The Designers Review
My old friend Duke shared with me what he would do better compared to other plugins on the WordPress plugin repository that come up on top if you search for structured data. His main message was that the other plugins showed a lot of technical details. He liked my landing page more because I was a little more creative. The header image didn’t contain any technical terms at all like ‘JSON-LD’ (which the normal WP user understand anyway).
This – of course – brings me to the next question: Who is the ideal customer that I want to focus on? Read more about it below. Now here is what I came up with after his feedback:
Now the first thing he argued was the long arrow and the word “boost” which had way too many o-letters. So I removed those and designed a new arrow that breaks through the red header area. I’ve also whitened everything up so that it has more white space with the surrounding area.
Next he criticized the word “beautiful” which I replaced to something which sells a bit more. I came up with “eye-catching” after using thesaurus.com.
After that I’ve replaced the two iPhone examples with the graphics that I’ve made for my product landing page here on rich-snippets.io. The designer came up with the idea to show the transformation to the end user. So now the user gets an idea of what it looks like before and after using SNIP.
That’s pretty much it! I’ve also added the text “From boring to magnificent” because I thought it should hint the user to the before- and after-example.
For now I’m happy with the end result and I’ll keep it for at least four weeks to see if it converts even better.
The marketers review
As I wrote in my last blog post about my journey, I also got a review from an (offline and online) marketer who took a look onto my description.
The ideal customer
Of course, in our Slack channel we also came up with a discussion about the ideal customer as well and we decided that my target group (at least for the FREE plugin on wordpress.org) consists of more advanced WordPress user who earn a living with their WordPress sites. Therefore they need to beat the competition with their sites. However, I wouldn’t go so far as to say they were extremely technically skilled. So they’re no developers or something similar.
Even when I look at me (and I’m a developer myself) I install a lot of plugins just based on gut instinct. And – which I find more important – use the plugins which serve my needs quickly. I don’t want to spend a lot of time configuring it (but I love that I can changes things). That’s – by the way – the next thing I need to focus on, see below.
The message for the target group
What David (our marketer) said was that the description was way to technical. I took a look to my competitors and they ware also very technical. The reason for this is maybe that the whole topic is technical (because Structured Data belongs to technical SEO) and therefore only the developers are familiar with it. So of course it stands to reason that they use technical words. I would argue that, developers are not very creative when it comes to design. And text-design is also part of this. Just have a look at my previous text. I also tend to highlight the technical features. Weird…
So what I did was to take a look at the big players in the WordPress world. And as you can see on the landing pages of Yoast SEO and RankMath, they try to avoid very technical terms. Who wants to hear things like “Meta tags”, “AMP” and other stuff? Sure everything is important but customers want to see the end result. In addition, it is important to describe which pain point you are trying to avoid.
After all I came up with the following. Of course, nothing is set in stone and the text will change more often than one thinks.
Wow, it’s super long right? Of course it should give search engines a little more text to crawl. That’s why I’ve added some frequently asked questions as well. A lot is linked back to rich-snippets.io though.
What’s up next?
I’m happy that I’ve finally found the time to rework my plugin landingpage on wordpress.org. Hopefully it shows my future customer that I still push a lot of work into this plugin.
Next I need to focus on writing new blog posts as well. This will need to be preceded by keyword research. The other thing (that I’ve mentioned above) was that I need to focus on simplicity as well. For this I plan to start working on my SetupWizard again. Stay tuned!
Any suggestions regarding the plugins landing page on WordPress? Let me know in the comments.