7 Steps to Marketing Web Design Success
The web has been around for over 15 years and today a website is more than just an online brochure but an overall content hub for your customers. Research and “word of mouth” is done by visiting your website. Yet, design trends and need change all the times and something that was appropriate in 2008 may not be appropriate in August 2010. Something that was put together quickly but lacked strategy may also not be providing you the customers you need.
But when redesigning your website, there are a lot of considerations, including these seven tips for web design success.
- Investigate What Your Current Site Visitors Are Doing. – Use tools like Google Analytics, omniture, Verify, and examine and test your current site. I was shocked to see on a recent client’s site that more than 1/3 of all of their traffic comes from Macintosh users and on another client’s site, the most popular page was the Contact Us page. There is no real way to know this without checking the actual data – and it’s there and it’s valuable.
- Record All Incoming Links to Your Current Website – It is tedious and time consuming but do you want potential customers to turn away because instead of getting to your site, they got an error page. Instead of ranking high for your ideal keyword, you rank lower because you lost link bait? Links are currency and valuable and take care to keep them!
- Define Your Target Audience – The “P” in the POST method. Different users use the web differently and they have different needs. Make sure you are addressing their needs.
- Carefully Consider Your Theme and “Look And Feel” – Your offline and online marketing collateral should match and be consistent. Your website should look modern and not like something that belonged on GeoCities in 1994. Nor should it be so full of Flash that no one can actually use it.
- Define Your Strategic Goals – Looking like someone else isn’t really going to help you. Instead of trying to “keep up with the Joneses,” “Document the purpose and quantifiable goals for your redesign.” Think about what is actually going to be different after your redesign. Are all aspects of your redesign in-line with your goals?
- Focus on Content Creation – Content is still king. How will your site incorporate content? If you have a flashy design but two sentences and a bunch of misspellings, or it’s stale, how is that going to help you? Consider future growth areas as well. Test your content with your customers. Consider a blog. You need more than just an About Page and Contact Us page (though they are important). What are your customers looking for that is useful for them?
- Choose Keywords Carefully – SEO isn’t just about keywords. Make sure that your site uses appropriate keywords that fit your branding, describe your product or service, and that will help you in the search engines and fit with your audience’s needs.
Will changing hosts cause any SEO concerns?
GoogleWebmasterHelp answers the question: Will changing hosts hurt my search engine rankings?
Five Things to Do When Developing a New Website
The world has moved online and, despite the explosion of mobile marketing and social networking, your website is an even more important component of your marketing strategy and brand identity than ever before. Yet, many companies still have sites that look like they were designed in 2003 or earlier.
There are a lot of things that go into web design – usability, content writing, SEO, SEM, functionality, content management systems and IT decisions. But there are a few easy things that everyone who has a company and a website needs to know about today. Before you sign a contract with a web designer, here are five things to discuss. Here are five things every company needs to do when developing a new website:
5. Meta Description – As with titles and links, Search Engine Optimization is a complicated process, which factors in many considerations. Good SEO is also not enough to get your site found and building customers but best practices are a minimum. It’s important to learn about these factors when designing your website. But as soon as your website is live, there are a few things that you need to learn how to do and evaluate on your site.
One of the major things that you need to check that each individual page has a unique metadescription. A metadescription is a short (ideally 154 characters or less) description of your page. It’s not visible to your reader, but rather written in your XHTML code. If you’re lucky, and one of the reason to include it, instead of trying to guess what your page is about, Google and other search engines will use your meta description in their site description.
For example, when searching for “brand development”, the focus2 agency has no metadescription and when there results appear in Google’s search results, I have no idea what they are about – and therefore am likely to search elsewhere.
Note that this isn’t just about SEO. Focus2 still showed up on the first page of Google when searching for brand development, albeit at the bottom. Other pages that have metadescriptions appear on the second, third, even thirtieth page. Although maybe this company would have ranked higher had they had a compelling metadescription on their page. But it’s not helpful to their potential customer.
Alternatively, look at the first result. Even though it’s not what the whole site is about, this insider page shows up as the first result in Google. More importantly, the reader learns more about the topic of the page.
The same can be seen when searching for CRM system. Without a meta description:
With a meta description:
4. Title – Does your page title adequately reflect your content or is your homepage title “Homepage”. If your title of your landing page is “homepage” well, your readers don’t know what your site is about and you certainly aren’t showing up in search engines.
Do each of your individual pages have unique titles or is every page the same, repeated title? Besides not being helpful, duplicate titles (and duplicate metadata) can hurt your search engine rankings. Yes, it means that every single page – including individual blog posts, about pages, and boilerplate content – needs to be unique and original.
3. Links – Are people linking to your website? While link exchanges reflect the worst of the web, and hark back to banner exchanges at the birth of the Web in the early-1990s, the more quality links your site has, the better ranked it will be in the search engine. Consider press release distributions, finding like minded trade groups, blog aggregators, and partner organizations, and asking them to link to your site. Start building quality links – and don’t stop.
However, don’t rely on the low-wage, offshored labor that promises you 25 links for $10, frequently found on eLance and other services. That’s link farming. Those links may include links to black-hat sites or other low-quality sites and may actually do more harm than good. Farms are for growing food, not website traffic.
2. Mobile – The Internet isn’t just for the Personal Computer anymore. It’s gone portable. With the iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Nexus, Nokia phone, Symbian, WebOS, Android, or other mobile operating systems, the Internet has gone mobile. A recent Nielson study has shown that 43% of all mobile phone owners are able to access the internet with their handsets, with about 29% of those now actively using the internet via their phones. Additionally, smartphone users are most prominently using their smartphones for searching, with 73% of mobile internet users having conducted an internet search on their mobile. The iPhone and iPod Touch, which have been around for almost three years now, have roughly 85 million users. At the same point in their histories, Netscape and America Online (AOL) had just 18 million and 8 million users, respectively, according to ReadWriteWeb.
1. Usability – How do people use your site? Is it easy for them to find what they are looking for or do they have to click through a variety of menus to find their information. If your potential customer can’t find what they are looking for quickly, that potential won’t be realized and the sale won’t be made.
Conduct usability research, invite others to try to perform tasks, and think about what tasks your potential customers will perform.
Inbound Marketing – It's Not Just Social
What is digital marketing? Is it just social media marketing? NO! When looking at marketing today, a better way to look at things is to look at the old way of doing things — outbound marketing — and compare that with the new way: inbound marketing.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound Marketing is NOT social media. Social media is one component of Inbound Marketing
How does inbound marketing differ from outbound marketing?
Outbound marketing is “traditional, old-style” marketing. It is:
- Flyers
- Sales calls (cold calling — you know, those annoying sales calls that always come at dinnertime!)
- Junk mail
- Anything that is directed out at you, that you didn’t seek out
Inbound marketing is about getting found by customers. It includes:
- Creating videos that customers want to see
- Writing blog posts and maintaining a blog that talks about subjects that people want to see, subscribe to, read, and interact and engage with
- Participating in the conversation about your brand and its principals on microblogging and social networks, such as Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
- Creating useful content that people want to read and engage with
There are three key components of inbound marketing. They are:
- Content: This is the substance of any inbound marketing campaign
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): This makes it easier for your potential customers to find your content. Today, content isn’t king but rather optimized content is king.
- Social Media: Amplifies content
As you can see, social media’s sole purpose is to amplify and promote the optimized content that is being created in the first two components. Most of an inbound marketing campaign’s time should be spent on content creation and not sending content via social media. We will shortly post on how much time is required on a daily basis for anyone who wants to engage in inbound marketing.
According to HubSpot, “When your content is distributed across and discussed on networks of personal relationships, it becomes more authentic and nuanced, and is more likely to draw qualified customers to your site”
Search Engine Optimization and the New Face of Inbound Marketing
I recently attended SphinnCon Israel, the second SphinnCon SEO conference (both in Israel), which included several top SEO figures in Israel, including representatives of Google, and the United States, organized by Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz.
SEO – Search Engine Optimization or, in short, how to get to the top of Google – is an essential component of the Inbound Marketing toolbox. But it’s only one part of the marketing toolbox.
If you have a brand today, presumably you have at least one web property – website, blog, social media page, etc. But what good is that if no one can find it?
A beautiful and attractive website will not get you customers if your customers can’t find it! Your website that you are so proud of with it’s Flash animation and music was not a good investment since it’s barely indexed in Google. Your site that has beautiful images (but haven’t entered in “Alt text” so that the search engines know what it is) will not help you get found. Your site, with the same title on every page, and the same content as several other sites, will not bring you sales or leads because you’ve been penalized for duplicate content, will not bring in sales.
This won’t get you found and getting found is an essential part of Inbound Marketing.
This is where SEO comes in.
So you spend thousands of dollars on an SEO consultant who isn’t concerned about content and marketing or outsource your site or SEO to some guy in India for $200, right? WRONG!
Even if you rank #1 in Google for all your targeted keywords, if one look at your website leads your potential lead running away, than you’re investment is a waste. $200 investment by an Indian freelancer that you found on elance is still a wasted investments when it turns your customers away.
So, that is why SEO is important and why conferences like Sphinncon exist and why SEO is one (of many) components of your Inbound Marketing strategy.
Because you need to get found.
And you need your visitors to stay on your site and convert to leads.
Reputation Management & The Digital Age
Negative reputation management and crisis communications has always been important components of strategic communications. With the recent rise of user-generated content, however, the tactics to deal with these important communication challenges have changed.
A recent eMarketer post asks the question “how can you use social media to fix campaigns that don’t click with your targets?” How can you react to negative comments about your brand?
As the graph demonstrates, while direct engagement is still the most popular option (although this could be over the phone, e-mail, SMS, social networking sites, or other channels), other important methods to control your reputation online are also popular.
33% of respondents chose to take this negative feedback by improving their product or service. This is one of the tremendous underreported benefits of social media and online marketing. Social media channels provide a cheap way to engage in consumer research and brand monitoring, helping product creators understand usability and what customers want.
24% encourage others to speak more positively. This ties in with the 12% that create content to try to push content down on the search engines. The best response to a negative comment on Amazon.com, Yelp, TripAdvisor, or other user-generated review site is often a real, honest positive review.
17% issued and distributed press releases or comments to address issues. This also can tie in with the 12% that create content to push negative results down search engines as online press release services can be very useful SEO tools.
14% attempted to get the negative comment removed by the publisher or blogger. Unless the content was blatantly false, this is probably the least effective manner as most publishers would not be likely to remove their content. But there are occasions in which it is appropriate.
12% engaged in SEO – Search Engine Optimization – as part of their reputation management plan – and tried to push the offending content down in the search engines. People today search for information via search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Thus, if you can push negative information down, via search engine optimization strategies, than this can be an effective way to control how your brand is viewed. This is one of the newer options in the crisis communication and reputation management toolkit.
What do you do? How do you handle negative online comments about your brand? What do you think of these responses?