Brice McBeth is the founder of Reap Marketing, the only digital agency that hired itself to build an e-commerce business and optimize its own conversations by over 950% on its way to creating a multi-million dollar store that disrupted the salon equipment industry.  Brice also wrote about his journey in his book, Salon Chairs Don’t Sell Themselves which is a fascinating read. He speaks and provides education on the topic of Conversion Rate Optimization to help companies, like us, get better results from their current marketing efforts.   On today’s episode, Brice explains the difference between conversion rate optimization and search engine optimization and why you need to be thinking about both.  He shares a shocking statistic, that typically 99% of your online shop visitors aren’t buying from you and why slick and sexy websites don’t always sell more of your product.     I wanted to let you in on a secret.  We’re going to be doing a free online masterclass with Brice next month, where we’ll talk about why SEO is a hoax and he’ll teach us some unconventional ways to use great content to get more customers.  If you want to be notified about the details when we open registration, head to tradeshowcamp.com/join and make sure you’re on our mailing list. ON TODAY’S EPISODE: A common misconception people have around digital marketing The difference between search engine optimization and conversion rate optimization The industry standard for conversion rates on eCommerce sites The concept, four pillars of optimization, developed to help guide people through discovering what is going on with their website What prompted  Brice to do a live case study & how he landed on salon furniture as the product The first steps he takes to ensure that a site is focused more on the conversion aspect than about the aesthetics Why he had to forfeit some of the aesthetic of the Standish site for functionality The common fears of his clients as they make changes to their sites to increase conversions conversions Brice’s book, Salon Chairs Don't Sell Themselves The most important data points to collect through Google Analytics What surprised Brice most through the testing they ran on Standish How to determine a reasonable amount of time to test something on your site Brice’s advice for increasing CRO on your website The services that Brice offers & how you can work with him KEY TAKE-AWAYS: “CRO and SEO are two different things and they shouldn't be confused with each other.” - Brice McBeth “SEO refers to the practice of writing content on your website for the purpose of getting indexed by search engines like Google.” - Brice McBeth “CRO refers to the process of exploring ways to get more people or to convince more people who are already on your website to do business with you.” - Brice McBeth “There's not really just one definition of what a conversion is, but certainly getting people to engage and become a customer is the endgame.” - Brice McBeth “It seems we sort of glorify this serial entrepreneur, but it can be really difficult, and we forget to glorify the people who can keep it real and have a good of work-life balance.” - Brice McBeth “Nobody comes to a marketing agency and asks for ugly website. Has anybody said, "Hey, I want my website to look just like Wikipedia's website"?. That would be amazing, but you're talking about one of the highest converting websites on the planet.” - Brice McBeth “As long as you know beauty isn't the only purpose driving the design, you can usually get the job done.” - Brice McBeth “We had to really kind of take a hard look at that [the Standish site] and kind of change the aesthetic and forfeit some of the aesthetic for functionality and something that was a little bit more familiar for our audience. “ - Brice McBeth “It [Salon Chairs Don’t Sell Themselves] is definitely a story of the journey that we went through to optimize our own conversions and sort of the pitfalls we fell into along the ways and how w