Up to this point, we have focused on providing visitors with scent and relevance by maintaining continuity from an ad to the landing page. But how harmonious are the different elements on the landing page? Is there a congruent theme and message throughout the page and on every page throughout the site?

Visitors move to the knowledge stage of building trust the minute they land on your website. If your landing page does not address their questions, you have not succeeded in building trust. Congruency means maintaining a single harmonious message within the same page while answering the personas’ different questions. For the value proposition to transcend to visitors, every element on a single page has to support that value. Very often you’ll find that a site will have many competing messages on one page, or you’ll find a site in which the copy, images, and elements do not work together to fulfill the value proposition. The lack of congruency increases visitors’ anxieties and leads to more friction. Friction results when two forces collide. Online, the two forces colliding are the visitors’ anxieties and your landing page elements. The more friction that results from this collision, the more likely it is that visitors will abandon the site. It is impossible to completely eliminate friction, and every transaction will have some degree of it.

How can all the elements on the site support the present congruent message?

Every page on the site should serve two purposes:

• Support the overall value proposition of the site

• Move visitors toward the primary conversion goal for that particular page

When elements on the page work harmoniously toward these goals, you will achieve congruency. As you evaluate different pages on your website, you should ask the following questions:

• What is the primary conversion goal for the page?

• Do the different page elements (copy, images, and design) support the primary conversion goal as well as the value proposition of the site?

• What page elements are distracting visitors from the primary goal or from the value proposition?

• Do the different elements present a single congruent message?

• Are the different elements relevant to each other?

Figure 4-19 shows the organic results for the term “pest control.” There is enough continuity from the search term to the description displayed on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Figure 4-20 displays the page we landed on when we clicked on the ClarkPest.com organic result. Continuity is definitely lacking from the search results page to the landing page. The page is also not harmonious, as it lacks one consistent message throughout.