Tag Archives: web content

What exactly is a bad website & how do you fix it?

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On my way into work this morning, I passed a local computer repair shop and they have one of those messaging signs. This one said “we fix bad websites”.  Obviously that got my attention, but I am always on the lookout for such things as a marketing executive.  It did however get me to thinking, “what exactly is a ‘bad’ website?”

Is a bad website something that looks like it was built in 2001?  Is a bad website something that is so overwhelming with content that you “click off” the moment you get there because you don’t know where to start?  Is a bad website something that drives you no traffic on its own?  Is a bad website something that nobody can find unless they search for your company name?  Is a bad website something that makes you click 4 times before you get to what you want?  Is it when you go to visit examples of their work and they look old or in some cases you can’t FIND the references they give as “testimonials or case studies”?  Just what does a “bad website” mean and look like?

I would have to say all of the above.  You website is your only resource working 24/7/365 for your company.  It is also a lot of times your only chance to make that all important “first impression”.  You have 7 seconds for them to determine if they will “click off”.  You have to make sure you provide enough and the right content on your business site so they feel comfortable in one of three things – buying something (if you sell), filling out your form to talk to someone – or picking up the phone and calling you.  If you don’t give them what they need to do any of those three (refer to your sales process for what information is needed to get them to make a buying decision) – then you have a “bad website”.  PERIOD.

In a day and age where everybody says they can build your website, search optimize it, handle your social media, and drive you traffic – execution of those strategies makes all the difference.  Just because they “know more than you” doesn’t make them an expert in web strategy – talking the talk is much different than walking the walk.  Make sure you check out their site and the references they give you.  If their site does not have the work done that they are proposing to you and/or you find references to work that you don’t like – run.  If you don’t like their website (and just because it’s better than your current one, doesn’t mean you have to like it) keep looking.  When they are willing to tell you how they will do the things that will drive your website’s return-on-investment (ROI) to new levels (which is beyond just traffic) with specific steps and tasks and give you a list of people to call – follow up with references and ask how much VALUE they received – value being ROI, data, sales, leads, qualified traffic and understanding to move their entire business forward – then you have found someone worth talking to when it comes to “fixing bad websites”.

Analyzing your audience’s web habits to improve website performance

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How much actionable information do you have about your web visitors? Can you predict their wants, goals, needs and behavior? Are you using analytic data to improve website performance? Do you utilize any re-targeting, ad networks, Search Engine Marketing (PPC and Display) and social media to be collecting data across multiple external sites and clickstreams? If so, the potential to deliver targeted content and offers based on their previous behavior and referring traffic source is possible.

You can construct detailed matrix that serve up content based on the family of sites they have visited and the predicted traits and interests that visitors to those sites demonstrate. However, if the first known point of contact with your visitors is their arrival at your site, then predicting their targeted area of interest is a much more tricky proposition, unless you study your own analytics and data (Sitecore, Webtrends, Quantcast, Google Analytics, etc) to come up with them and improve website performance.

Do you perform any A/B testing of two broader offers or content paths on your enterprise level site visitors and see which performs better (ie they look at more pages or end up as a conversion more often).  That is a good place to start, but more organizations have never consider split testing their own website. Doing this would ensure no audience gets excluded or misdirected–and it requires less historical data to drive the offer but allows you to profile how each “path” behaves.

Coming from purchased media like PPC or Facebook, can also shed light into keywords that have “special” needs to be effective, landing pages that get them to take desired actions and demographic profiles of who is visiting based on reporting. Again, this allows you the create a profile on each type of visitor and adjust the “path” accordingly – which will improve website performance .

You tie all of this data together to make the necessary changes to your website and content, navigation paths to drive more usability, click patterns, desired “conversions” that you have established for your website and/or campaigns.  Interpreting data is extremely important to ongoing web success – find a resource to work with that understands this to help set benchmarks and foundational strategy and it will help educate yourself and give you insights to things you could use across all mediums with your marketing and advertising.

Social Media Strategy – trigger interaction & response

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You do not have to be consumer oriented company to be able to use social media to advance your Brand, thoughts, products, and engagement with your audience. There are plenty of people professionally that look for helpful information for their jobs and will share valuable information with their peers when they find it. It some cases, it is even “cool” to be the first to find a great deal or share relevant information for others.

In the B2B world, you can also help aggregate content for your customers, clients, and prospects, by being a filter for them. You can share relevant information with them that has already “passed” your approval or relevance rating. This becomes almost like a value added service for them. They turn to you, a trusted resource first, before they go hunting on the Internet. You want them to say – “if they haven’t said anything about it yet, then I probably don’t need to pay attention to it yet.” And any savvy Internet person can tell you that just because it comes up “first” on Google, doesn’t make it accurate or right.

If you can get your people to interact with you, you can get valuable information about their habits, wants, desires, and interests. If you can get them to follow you or be involved, you can help your message get in front of thousands with a single click or post because it will not only reach your direct followers, but also post to their network of people because they are following you.

You can choose to have different message via each social medium (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, etc), or choose to broadcast your message, which will allow your audience to follow you via the medium they like to use the most and you still get your message out to the masses without requiring them to visitor you website. That is power and potentially all from a single article or click.

If you don’t know where to start or what you should be doing we have several tools on our website to help and we have created an great tool for measuring social media success and value of social media efforts to your organization. This will help you determine which social media efforts should be continued by your organization and give you some ways to help measure return-on-investment.

Social Media allows you to listen like never before & respond appropriately

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Social Media has made it easier than ever for consumers and business people to get their opinions heard and get them into circulation faster than ever before. It also creates challenges – like should you listen? or what should you respond or how do you get quality responses and exposure?

You have all heard the phrase that the “squeakiest wheel gets the grease”. These are the people who will be everywhere just posting about their experience – especially if it was not a good one. Does that make them less credible? If they are an active poster and only have “complaining” on their mind, they are already less credible and you cannot be worried about everything they say. You should also look to see if they have people agreeing, “liking”, or responding to their posts. If they do, then you have to take action.

If something positive happens, respond and ask for more by more people. If something negative happens, address it and find a way to take care of it – then ask them to post (or update the previous post) after you fix the problem about how you took care of it. Actually have your customer service people ask if you can share their experience with they solve or problem or get a rave from an interaction – it will go a long way to helping you have an unlimited supply of content to use for your blog, Facebook, or social media channels.

Build your brand around building your community of followers and dialogs – the ones utilizing social media are most likely to share experiences and they will be most likely to share – giving you further reach through their network and you definitely want them on your side.

Using Your Web Analytics To Make Actual Business Decisions

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I have spoken with a number of people who have websites, and some who even have Analytics. (usually Google Analytics, because it costs $0.00) One of my favorite questions to ask is “what do you most enjoy looking at in your analytics that helps you?” and usually the response to this unfortunately is “how many people are coming to my website.” That’s all and well and good, but lets take a minute to look at the concept of “Segmenting Your Data”.

I doubt that you are looking at an overview dashboard and are actually going to figure out anything you’re ready to make a decision on. So what should we as internet marketers be looking at that will actually help us make decisions.
I often speak with people who are spending a gob of money on various online marketing opportunities, and I want to to see if what they are getting for their hard earned money is actually worth something. Lets take this a step deeper. One example is to look at conversions rates and/or goals (if you’re using Google Analytics) and segment by either the traffic sources and/or the campaigns associated with those traffic sources. If you’re not passing in variables for traffic source, medium, and campaign with your various advertisers(for example, a banner ad) I would recommend starting to do that right now. The variables below apply to Google Analytics, and are very useful when passed into your destination URL’s:
  • utm_source=
  • utm_medium=
  • utm_term=
  • utm_content=
  • utm_campaign=
And this would be an example of using these variables to establish where some traffic actually came from using our website. bevelwise.com/?utm_source=ourblog&utm;_medium=textlink&utm;_campaign=using-your-web-analytics. What this will do for measurement, is assign the following variables when you click as such:
  • source=ourblog
  • medium=textlink
  • campaign=using-your-web-analytics
You could then reference all the clicks that came in through any campaign online/email campaign to goals that you have pre-determined and set up for your website and use them to further drive your marketing objectives and strategies.
Getting back to the concept of segmenting you would always want to be drilling down into your data and breaking out specific variables and sections of that data that mean something to your business. Having someone who is experienced with reading your web analytics is just as important as having a CFO that knows how to read a balance sheet and it can help produce better financial results. I’ve heard someone say before, “oh we know what our website is doing, because we put analytics on our website.” Interpreting those analytics and helping to make actionable decisions for your organization involves much more than knowing the basics of what analytics tells you. Do you know what areas of your website’s content is delivering the best results? Do you know where your advertising $$ are being best spent?
Bevelwise does seo from grand rapids, MI which includes Google Analytics measurement and will put our skills up against anyone out there in the Midwest. Would be happy to help you with your search engine optimization, web strategy, web analytics and all marketing from a measurement perspective. You will get insight to drive all your marketing initiatives if your website done and measured correctly.

Is it Social Media or should it really be Public Media

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The term Social Media is not really accurate any more. Why? Because we have moved well beyond “social” into doing business. You want information to get into the marketplace, just turn to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, etc – and you can get it out to the masses more quickly than ever. Another reason, all of the a four mentioned have more value that being social if you use them right.

Also, one does not really have any control over what can be said/posted about them or your company or organization. It is really “public” media. Word can spread at warp speed to the public, especially if people deem it to be interesting. Several companies, public figures, and celebrities have “social media” site about them that they don’t have anything to do with – but all go into controlling public opinion of them. Some have to spend significant time to control their brand out there. The bigger your “Brand”, the more time you have to spend in this space to control your Brand.

I could also see the term “community media” being a potential moniker as well. All of these tools we mentioned above really go into creating a “community” of people who are interested in similar topics, products, information – and they feed off each other. That is an effective strategy to utilize all of these mediums. Add value to your clients and prospects, filter information for them, be a resource and partner to them as much as a supplier or vendor.

Creating an effective social media strategy is all about the execution of it and understanding how each piece plugs into the overall picture. You should hire someone to guide your strategy, but the information and content really has to come from someone internal while the expert will tweak that content for maximum effectiveness through “public” media channels. That guide for most companies that would mean outsourcing as would not be near a full time position – the right partner should have some understanding of your business and industry in order to be most helpful.

Should I put my marketing dollars into Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising, or a blended online media strategy?

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How do you know if you should use Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Can I get better results from Pay-Per-Click (PPC)? These are the main two strategies in use today, especially for the small to medium enterprise. Both strategies are entirely different and it can be difficult to decide which one is best for you or how to combine both strategies for maximum effectiveness.

You have to determine what you are trying to accomplish via the web and your website. That will drive everything else. If you don’t have the right objectives for what you want to accomplish, then you can wind up wasting a lot of money trying to figure it out and feeling like all you did was “spin your wheels”. SEO and PPC are the best sources to drive you targeted traffic and only pay for targeted traffic, but you have to be intentional about them and what you expect from each.

SEO and PPC continue to grow as more and more people are using the Internet and become more web savvy. It is the best source for people worldwide to find information they want on a 24 hour basis. That will keep these two industries growing. Let’s back up a second and define these a bit closer for some of those people who might know much about these subjects. SEO takes place on your own website site. There are pieces and parts to a website that the Internet search engines, crawlers, and indexes look for to determine if your site is a good match for particular keywords and search terms. Most experts will tell you that parity has been reached in search, so now it comes down to the user experience and how fast a search engine gets you to the results and relevant content you were looking for.

PPC refers to advertising on a search engine that charges on a per click basis whenever a visitor clicks on one of your ads. The order of ads is an algorithm and Google (62% of all searches), Yahoo (20% of all searches), and Bing (formerly MSN and 10% of all searches) all use different ones to determine the best match. This will continue to change now that Yahoo and MSN/Bing have announced their partnership for search – so we are sure a new algorithm for these sites will emerge soon and cause another adjustment. The newest factor in the game for Google is what is known as quality score. It has always used this to rank your site and pages organically, but now it is a factor in how well your PPC campaign will perform. Yes, how well your landing page and it’s URL are optimized will effect what you pay per click, who shows up on the top of the list, and if you bid the most, you are not guaranteed the #1 spot. This is directly related to that “user experience” criteria.

SEO tries to change your overall search engine ranking by looking at your URL and analyzing all of the content on your pages and meta data (behind the scenes) to see how good of a match that page and your website is for a particular keyword or search phrase. This also needs to happen page by page – having the same information on every page or in every page’s meta data, will actually discount your URL to the search engines. It needs to be specific to what they will find on that page. Also, putting too many different items on a page will not allow you to optimize it to its full extent to produce maximum results. It will also not allow you to effectively optimize for each item because what you can do and the “space” available for optimization, do not allow for the words and phrases you need (for example, a title tag really needs to be less that 70 characters in length). SEO is also considered a long term solution. You cannot do it just once and let it go for 6-12 months. You should pay some attention to it monthly after your initial optimization takes hold (like 120 days after their first pass on your site). Consider this just like changing some of the content on your website, this will help the engines pay attention to you. Ultimately you would want your optimization to allow for you to not have to pay for clicks on your brand name and your top 5-10 keywords and phrases because you already have page one ranking for them. Be prepared for this to take 120-180 days to really start to show some results but that is based on where your starting point is.

Bottom Line of what you can expect

PPC:

  • Instant Traffic and results if it is done right
  • Pay for what you get – no residual effects
  • This is extremely intentional – to an industry, geographic market, product or service
  • Optimize for performance, negative keywords, etc
  • Can pause at any time so little risk
  • Typically done with lower budgets
  • Can control what it says, when and where it runs and to what audiences
  • Is now tied to how well your landing page and website are optimized with Quality Score
  • Once you reach your daily budget it shuts down
  • Easier to target a specific market or industry

SEO:

  • This is a marathon, not a sprint solution
  • If you are optimized, you will always rank for the keywords and phrases you want – it will never shut down or reach a budget
  • Results are harder to measure – because of all the ways to drive traffic
  • Need to set metrics and goals prior to starting it
  • Start with an amount to get started and have someone spend some time monthly continuing these principles if possible
  • Will need to update and change as strategies and search engines change their algorithms and competitors change their websites, PPC and SEO strategies
  • Allows you to rank for higher priority keywords and broaden your exposure through PPC
  • Delivers the most qualified traffic – this comes from people who are actively seeking out products and services that you offer and not just browsing the web.

So what should you choose?
Well, it depends on how much money you are willing to spend, what your time line is, your goals and how you want to measure results. It is easy to blow through money with PPC unless you test, optimize and pay some attention every month. Typically it will produce results in the first 30 days but you will always have to pay for them. If you want to position yourself for long term results and establish your presence to your target audience and market, then spending some time in SEO will help be your solution. SEO is more permanent depending on your strategy and will build long term equity for your website, PPC will drive results and help you be specific to a particular industry, geography, or time period. If someone finds you through organic/natural results, you typically have more credibility because that is harder to accomplish and anyone can “pay” for advertising. If you can do it, we would recommend balancing both of them. Set your goals and then allocate X hours a month optimizing your site and equivalent dollars to PPC, but always be evolving and optimizing.

Advertising of the future is interactive and location sensitive

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Dockers has an interactive ad which displays while an iPhone game (or possibly other apps) is loading. The ad, called “Shake down to Get Down”, asks the person to shake the phone in order to make the person on the screen dance. The screen focuses on the dancers shoes which of course are Dockers.

This serves as an increasing trend for organizations wanting people to interact with and be entertained by their brand. One of the first examples I can think of this new type of advertising is Burger King’s subservient chicken which launched in 2004. What makes the Dockers ad unique is how it is embedded as a part of another application and it is mobile.

The ad was built specifically for the iPhone which offer much more functionality than TV, paper, radio or websites. One of the more exciting features of using a mobile platform is location based ads.

Imagine this scenario: you are shopping in a store and you scan/take a picture of a bar code to lookup the price of the item on amazon.com to see if the price you are looking at in the store really is a good deal (available now with the iPhone and Google’s Adroid phones). Soon there after, you might receive a text message informing you that the store down the road has the same item for 10% less then prompts you for turn-by-turn directions on how to get to that store. I would expect to see this scenario take place very soon.

Other new opportunities are available with location and motion based ads such as…

    • A electronics company could display a new rebate enticing users to scan a barcode at a nearby store, then give you directions to that store.
    • A cruise line could offer deals for users in Miami and New Orleans due to proximity to their ships.
    • A soda company may create an interactive bottle of pop that is motion sensitive. The user can shake up the bottle and it splashes all over the screen.
    • A car rental company can determine that a user is outside their typical geography and serve an ad for extra insurance or a CPA ad for a discounted rate.

This is just the beginning as newer technologies become available that we carry around in our pockets. I can think of the new summer baseball movie may offer discounted ticket if you can swing your phone faster than 45 MPH (measured by an accelerometer like what is currently in the iPhone). Then after you try, show the next available show times of the movie for the 5 closest theaters near you.

Mobile is the advertising platform of the future as the viewers are more engaged. It is easy to walk out of a room or skip over a TV commercial with a DVR. Most people skip the first 15 pages of a magazine. Mobile offers tracking for easy ROI measurements, unlike print. And most importantly mobile users are not usually doing any thing else – their attention is focused solely on the device. It is coming soon and it will come fast.

via ReadWriteWeb

Free or pay for web content?

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There is the age old debate for publications whether to charge for content or make it free. Publications have thought they could make pay for content advertisement free and it would make up for the revenue that was lost from advertising. I believe it really depends on what type of content it is, how valuable that content it, is it readily available from other sources and how timely is that content.

I myself have never paid for content – other then by subscribing to a local paper, I have access to “breaking news” that I would not have had if I was not a subscriber. But that news we never earth shattering and there were other sources I could have got it from at relatively the same time.

As an example, I read an article in my marketing news that stated a study had been done on this and in some cases content can be paid for and it backed up my thoughts above. However It referenced The New York Times trial with this. They have a fee-based access to its editorial pages and had 225,000 subscribers. In 2007 they withdrew that fee. When that was removed they added 7.5 MILLION readers worldwide or a 64% jump in readership. They already had the highest unique vistor rate a month news content providers BEFORE that jum. That jump, just based on selling advertising – if they can fill their available online ad inventory should have generated MORE revenue that the subscriber base.

So if you ask me, free is still king for content, unless is it niche or not easily found through other sources.