HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE’S USER EXPERIENCE
by Samantha Arigapudi
Would you stay on a site that’s hard to navigate? How in the world do you get to your cart? Where are the product reviews?
Failure to find what you need means the company lost your business, business that could have led them to more customers and brand ambassadors. User experience is key not only to building your brand but building your sales. If you don’t have the resources to do a complete redevelopment, you can adopt these simple and affordable steps to improve your website’s user experience on the path towards effective digital marketing.
Lead the Way: Easy-to-Use Navigation
Your website should reflect your business plan and vision for your company, meaning it should be clear and organized. Your navigation bar and menus are the landmarks of your site. Instead of burying important information and calls-to-action, provide the tools consumers need to get to where they need to go.
If you’re unsure of where customers are clicking out, run some research and follow the purchase process. Where are customers getting hung up? Maybe a friendly CTA (call-to-action) or redirect is the best way to get them back on track.
Short Attention Spans: Measure Load Speed
Vine, a six-second video feed, is the perfect example of the short attention span we’ve developed in recent years. With a world of information at our fingertips, we’re anxious to access every tidbit right away. Which means, if your page takes more than three seconds to load, you’re in trouble.
Some of the ways to fix your load speed include:
- Indexing your content database (organize content into relevant categories)
- Eliminate unnecessary tracking codes (stick to the important analytics)
- Use Google Search Console’s PageSpeed Insights Tool (get a specific look at what’s slowing down your site)
Google knows how impatient web surfers are and takes page load speed into consideration, especially when it comes to SEO rankings, so use their tools to your advantage.
Keep It Consistent
A consistent layout is reflective of your brand. Is it hodge podge with inconsistent messaging throughout? A consumer might think your brand and customer service is the same way.
Bring credibility to your company by using consistent brand images throughout and using a similar page-to-page layout. Be sure to place attention on your calls-to-action by placing them on the same area on every page.
These are just a few ways you can improve your website’s UX. Still not getting the attention you deserve? Contact us at Globe Runner for a quick, free website audit.
USING MARKETING AUTOMATION FOR ECOMMERCE 10 BEST PRACTICES
Marketing automation has become a buzz word online and with anything related to SEO marketing, but do you know what it really means and how best to use it? In a nutshell, marketing automation helps streamline, automate and measure marketing tasks and workflows to increase operational efficiency. In an even smaller nutshell, marketing automation helps companies effectively market on multiple channels such as social media, websites, and emails and automate tasks that would otherwise be repetitive to a human being. With this in mind, here are ten best practices for using marketing automation for ecommerce.
- Study Your Data
Understanding your customer’s hesitations is a great starting point to knowing how your customers need to be served. For example, are customers leaving items in their cart? Consider a, “Fetch Back,” email sent to a prospect that has an abandoned shopping cart. Knowing why there are abandoned shopping carts in the first place and determining if the problem is technical or due to site design can really help you get to the root of the issue first.
- Understand the Buying Cycle
Customers do certain things in a certain timeframe, and 9 times out of 10, they don’t know that they’ve fallen into this buying habit. Understand this funnel process by looking at it backwards. What steps are customers having to take? Is there a catalyst along the way that’s pushing customers to buy? Focus on these “assists” and top performing interactions to find the holes—places where you may need marketing automation to intervene and connect with the customer. Perhaps an email or something more personal.
- Key is in Keyword for a Reason
Revenue generating keywords are your best friend. They help build your site, your reputation and your business. Find these keywords to see why customers are coming to your site. Use these keywords in your emails or social media to draw more attention while building your credibility.
- Be a Collector
Collect contact information as much as possible and weed out the good from the bad. This is one of the best ways to ensure that you can touch base with loyal customers and build new ones.
- Be a Tracker
See where a buyer’s curiosity takes them by tracking their clicks. This can also help with your messaging in your marketing automation; do they click on your blog? Your contact page? Tailor your content to pique your customer’s interest.
- Keep it Real…time Communication
Did you know that 90% of ecommerce leads go cold within just one hour? Again, maybe someone left something in a cart then got distracted. Remind them of their pending purchase with a three-step sequence, without harboring on being annoying. A customer service email should be sent within an hour, an email reminding them of say, their abandoned purchase, should be sent within 24 hours and if you have a coupon to add to your sale, send it within 72 hours as an incentive email.
- Always Offer Customer Service
Marketing automation often seems like a one-way road. Instead of talking at your customers, start a conversation by asking fun and shareable questions. Even more important is offering customer service and ways to reach you should they have questions or need help.
- Be Diverse
Don’t just stick to emails. Make use of social media and other outlets so you can cross-sell and up-sell in very strategic ways.
- Be Mobile
According to Litmus, 53 percent of emails are now being opened on a mobile device. Make sure that you incorporate responsive design into your eCommerce email marketing strategy.
- Have a Compelling Call-to-Action (CTA)
Don’t defeat the purpose of marketing automation. Sure it does the work for you but you need to give it legs with a strong CTA. Use your subject line, images, and copy to communicate a single, compelling CTA. More than one and you may frustrate your potential buyer.
What are your marketing automation tips and have you found works for you?
HTTPS SECURE WEBSITES HELP TRUST AND SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS
Back in 2013, Google quietly moved to secure search, passing less keyword referral data to website owners. Now, Google is officially recommending that website owners move their websites from http to https, making their websites secure. If Google can trust your site more, know that it is secure and you’re the one who posted content on it, then your site could rank higher. Google is “starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal.”
Because of Google’s official stance on https and their calling for “for HTTPS everywhere on the web”, starting today, we are recommending that our clients begin moving their websites from http to https. We realize that this, in many circumstances, is a big undertaking, will have an additional cost, and will take some time to complete. However, over the long run, will be beneficial not just because it could increase your website’s search engine rankings.
Even if you do not sell products and services directly on your website, your website should be secure and use https rather than http. John Mueller, from Google, had this to say about why all websites should use https, even if you’re not selling products on your site:
Some webmasters say they have “just a content site”, like a blog, and that doesn’t need to be secured. That misses out two immediate benefits you get as a site owner:
1. Data integrity: only by serving securely can you guarantee that someone is not altering how your content is received by your users. How many times have you accessed a site on an open network or from a hotel and got unexpected ads? This is a very visible manifestation of the issue, but it can be much more subtle.
2. Authentication: How can users trust that the site is really the one it says it is? Imagine you’re a content site that gives financial or medical advice. If I operated such a site, I’d really want to tell my readers that the advice they’re reading is genuinely mine and not someone else pretending to be me.
On top of these, your users get obvious (and not-so-obvious) benefits. Myself and fellow Googler and HNer Ilya Grigorik did a talk at Google I/O a few weeks ago that talks about these and a lot more in great detail: Google I/O 2014 – HTTPS Everywhere
Even though your website is merely a “content website”, the trust that is given when your website is valuable. While Google has been using Google Authorship to convey some trust factors, overall I believe that we all should secure our websites; and Google, like a lot of us, want to see more trusted, secure websites. It’s just better for the entire web community as a whole to have secure websites.
I can personally tell you that as someone who has worked a lot to clean up link profiles of websites, I see quite a few hacked websites with links embedded by someone other than the site owner. By making your website secure and using https, it will be that more difficult for someone to hack into your website.
The Cost of a Secure Website
The cost of a secure certificate for your website can cost as little as $89.95 for two years. Dotster is currently offering secure certificates through Geotrust for $89.95 for two years. Godaddy offers certificates for $69.95 per year. I realize that this isn’t very cheap, but if you have an online business, then it’s imperative that you protect it–so moving your entire website to https from http is a good move. Now we have another reason to make this move, which is the potential for better search engine rankings in Google.
How much would it cost you if your website wasn’t secure and it got hacked or your website visitors started seeing rogue ads on your website? It could cost you business, and your site would be trusted less.
Google is offering a new support web page that explain site security and gives you the best practices when setting up HTTPS. In some cases, you may need to move to another web server, one that supports HSTS: “Use a web server that supports HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) and make sure it’s enabled.
This mechanism tells the browser to automatically request pages using HTTPS even when the user enters http in the browser location bar. It also tells Google to serve secure URLs in the search results. All this minimizes the risk of serving unsecured content to your users.”
Bill Hartzer is Globe Runner’s Senior SEO Strategist. Follow him on Google Plus.
GOOGLE ADDS KNOWLEDGE GRAPH DROP-DOWN WITH COMPANY DATA TO SEARCH LISTINGS
Google has recently added a drop-down to the search results listings that include Knowledge Graph data when you click the drop-down. Here’s an example of the new drop-down:
Previously I have only seen Knowledge Graph data included in the right sidebar when you search for a company name or brand. But, now there is a small drop-down next to the site’s URL, as shown above. When you click the drop-down, it looks like this:
The data is clearly from the Knowledge Graph, although for the Marriott Hotels example above there is no source shown. I was able to see that for another query, related to software outsourcing, the data comes from Wikipedia:
The good news here, I suppose, is that it’s not huge major brands like Marriott that this is showing up for–it’s other companies that are now being included with this new Knowledge Graph drop-down in the search results. So, there’s a chance that if your company is included in the Knowledge Graph (like being in Wikipedia or Freebase.com), then there’s a chance that your site will get a drop-down like this, as well.
Google announced they were testing this back in January, but I’m personally seeing this much more now, so perhaps it’s now being rolled out to more sites’ search listings now.
HOW TO: FIND ALL THE POSTS BY A GOOGLE AUTHORSHIP VERIFIED AUTHOR; WITH ANALYTICS
Writers often write for more than one blog or website. Good writers are in demand, so they will tend to write for several different publications. When it comes to Google Authorship, those writers who have adopted Google Authorship and accepted it as the norm now will often verify their authorship on multiple websites. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to see just how good that author is? Wouldn’t it be great to see what other blog posts or articles they’ve written? Well, now you can search Google and find all of the articles that a verified Google Authorship author has penned. And, combine that with certain analytics, you can see how great their articles really are.
When an author verifies their Google Authorship, they must list the websites that they contribute to or write for in their Google Plus profile. If you were to go to my Google+ profile, you would see a list of websites where I have verified my authorship. I personally list a lot of sites, especially sites that I own, as well as my blog and the company blogs where I have written and write. But what if you wanted to see a list of articles or blog posts that I’ve written and verified my authorship? Let’s use myself as an example and I’ll show you exactly how to do that.
First, you have to find one of the articles or blog posts that I’ve written. That’s generally not very difficult, just find somewhere in the Google search results were my Google Authorship photo snippet appears, like below:
Next, you’ll need to click on the link where it says “By Bill Hartzer”, as shown below:
You are then taken to another Google search results page, where you have more posts that I have written. In the search box at the top, remove everything (the text) except for the author’s name. I have scratched out what you need to remove, in red, below:
Notice that the author’s name is in Blue in the search field. Once you remove the text and leave the author’s name, you can search again. Below, you will see the result of that:
As you can see, even though I searched originally for a post that appeared on the Globe Runner blog, you now see a search result that includes all of the posts where I have verified Google Authorship. And most likely, the “best” search result (the most appropriate one) will be the first one. And the better posts will most likely rank better in the Google search results.
So, what if we were to add in some analytics to these search results? What if we turned on a Firefox add-on that shows some stats and analytics about each of these posts? Well, let’s do just that. Here’s a screen capture of my posts and articles where I’ve verified Google Authorship and have the SEO Quake Firefox plug-in installed:
Now, we can see the posts where I am the verified author and you can see just well I write, how my posts tend to get links, and you can even see other data like PageRank, number of links to the post, and other interesting analytics.
Bill Hartzer is Globe Runner’s Senior SEO Strategist. Follow him on Google Plus.
GOOGLE GIVES WEBMASTERS BETTER SEARCH QUERY DATA IN WEBMASTER TOOLS
Maybe this is could be called a late Christmas present from Google, but the search engine is now giving website owners more detailed search query data. If you have verified your website in Google Webmaster Tools, then you’ll be able to log in, view the search query report, and see more accurate data.
Above is an example of the Search Query report in Google Webmaster Tools. To see this report, do the following:
1. Log into Webmaster Tools.
2. Click on the Search Traffic link on the left.
3. Click on the Search Queries link on the left side.
On the graphic, you’ll see a “Update” line. If you mouseover this, you will see the following:
“An improvement to our top search queries data was applied retroactively on 12/31/2013.”
According to the Google announcement blog post on the Google Webmaster Central blog, “The search queries feature gives insights into the searches that have at least one page from your website shown in the search results. It collects these “impressions” together with the times when users visited your site – the “clicks” – and displays these for the last 90 days.”
Apparently we were not seeing the actual number of impressions and clicks before (although I thought we were seeing that data). But apparently now, the actual data is presented here in the Google Search Queries report.
Bill Hartzer is Globe Runner’s Senior SEO Strategist. Follow him on Google Plus.
IS GOOGLE AUTHORSHIP PHOTO SNIPPET QUERY DEPENDENT, NOT CONTENT QUALITY OR AUTHOR DEPENDENT?
Google has recently confirmed, and Search Engine Land has reported back in December that Google “has applied a 15% reduction in the amount of rich snippets displayed in the search results.” Some have even called that an Authorshippocalypse is going on. Eeeek! Oh, the horror! There are changes going on.
So, many website owners and bloggers who have verified their Google Authorship are not always having their photo appear in the search results. Blog posts that show the author’s photo in the search results get more clicks. And even maybe less clicks for authors who have verified authorship and only have their name linked (but no photo) show up in the search results.
There are even times when someone has verified their Google Authorship but they’re not seeing a snippet at all show up in the search results (no photo and no name). If this is the case, the author can verify that Google Authorship is working by going to the Rich Snippets Testing Tool. Entering a URL will show whether Google Authorship is working or not.
There appears to be three different “classes” of Google Authorship now:
1. The Google search result shows the verified author’s photo and name in the search result, like the one below:
2. The Google search result shows the verified author’s name, but no photo, like the one below:
3. The Google search result does not show the verified author’s name or photo in the search results.
There is some speculation out there as to why exactly the Google shows the photo of the author in the search results and in some cases shows the verified author’s name only. In other cases, there are no author details shown. So what can you do to “force” Google to show your photo in the search results if you’ve verified Google Authorship? Well, from what I can tell, it’s NOT the quality of your posts or content, and whether your photo appears is not dependent on the quality of the author.
From what I can tell, it’s query dependent, and not author or content dependent. Let’s look at some proof of search queries that show the same exact URL, the same exact verified author, but different search results.
Let’s look at an example of one particular search query (of one of my prior blog posts) that shows the author snippet but NO photo (look at the LAST search result shown below, it has no photo):
In the case above, you can see the search query, which, in this case, was “site:billhartzer.com”. So, it looks like this blog post, about anchor text and links, is NOT “good enough” to force Google to show the author’s (my) photo in the search result.
But wait.
Let’s do a search query for something else. Let’s use another search query to force this same exact blog post to show up in the search results. Let’s use something that someone would actually search for:
This just goes to show (or prove) that whether or not the Google Authorship photo appears in the search results DEPENDS ON THE SEARCH QUERY and does NOT depend on the quality of the article or the quality of the articles that the author writes (and posts).
Granted, in order to have your Google Authorship show up in the search result and have your photo show up, you have to verify authorship (that part is a given) and it has to be working properly. However, the quality of the content doesn’t matter. Google will, in fact, decide to show your photo in the search results based on the actual search query.
Added – January 8, 2014
Let’s look at another example of when the search query causes a photo to show in the search results and when it doesn’t show the photo:
In the case above, I’m not searching my site like I did previously. I searched for something that didn’t involve a search of my blog site. In the case below, however, let’s look at another query that is perhaps longer but still brings up the same “about” page on my blog:
So, these are two different search queries that pull up the same exact URL in the search results, the “about” page on my personal blog. It appears to me that whether or not the photo appears in the search result depends on the actual query. As Mark suggests below in the comments, since I’m using the same site to show the difference between a search query that has the photo and a search query that does not have the photo, this is not the Google Authorship reduction.
Bill Hartzer is Globe Runner’s Senior SEO Strategist. Follow him on Google Plus.
ULTIMATE GUIDE TO HIGH CONVERTING LANDING PAGES
A common problem we have here at Globe Runner SEO is optimizing one page landing pages. Our team did some research and decided to compile some information on how to achieve the best converting landing page. Here are some of our findings:
Anatomy of a Landing Page
We discovered this gem recently. If you haven’t seen this you must review this image. These guys at formstack break down the perfect landing page.
Must Read List for Landing Page Conversion:
We also found some great resources for information about converting landing pages. We compiled a short list (more to be added) of some great blog articles related to this subject.
- Landing Page Best Practices
- Search Engine Land: How To Create High-Converting Landing Pages
- Landing Page examples
Using Belcher Button:
One idea that we’ve discovered, recently among our team, is the idea of the Belcher button. The belcher button is a marketer’s dream design of a button. It producing insane conversion rates. We found an excellent video that breaks it down:
- Vidler video on Belcher Button
Examples of great one page landing pages
- PageMako
- Dropbox
WHY THE WORDPRESS “EXEC-PHP” PLUGIN IS A FORM OF BAD PRACTICE
It alarms me that often wordpress users will still use the exec-php plugin. It made sense when WordPress was fairly primitive and lacked functionality in terms of it’s templating system. Today, WordPress is fully enhanced enough that it should supersede the use of the exec-php plugin. Today, it should be avoided at all costs. WordPress is sophisticated enough now that you should not need to use such a plugin. It poses various number of risks.
The plugin itself allows you to execute php commands.
Utilizing such a plugin is typically bad practice:
- Causes PHP to be stored in the database
- Creates a developer-dependant workflow. Thus, it requires a developer to maintain it; not an end user.
- Difficult to debug php errors.
- Poses increased problems for scalability
- Introduces performance problems. A database is called to retrieve the php code and then another php command must be executed.
- Poses many security risks. If someone knew your wordpress password they could essentially turn your wordpress site / blog into malware.
Ways around utilizing the plugin would be just good planning, executing best practices of web development and taking the time to develop more robust solutions. Exec-php should be only used as a last resort for stop-gap ephemeral solutions.