SEO, PPC and Beyond (Or Why Conversions Aren’t Just For The Religious)

We’ve already discussed the problem of bounce rate on websites and how it can affect your online success, but having people get to your site (and even stay on it) is not the end of the battle. Even if you’re ranking top in Google with veritable hoards of traffic swamping your site, that doesn’t mean an awful lot unless they start making purchases or otherwise getting in touch about your services. Conversion, in the end, is everything.

This brings us back to the concept of user experience – how people navigate and use your website, and how easy you make it for them to convert from idle visitor to eager buyer. There’s a lot to go into here but we can probably summarise into a few sensible pointers.

A wise man in the world of online marketing recently commented that you should never create a PPC advert which your site can’t cash, which is a very valid point on the relevance of your marketing to your content (and vice versa). I’d in fact take this a bit further and say that you should never create a PPC advert which can’t cause your site to potentially crash under the overwhelming amount of buyers and users which will come flooding in (although if your site is crashing under load you ought to address that too – more on that later).

Keep SERP presentation in mind at all times (your titles and descriptions for natural results as well as your PPC ad copy). Ideally your first on-page heading, opening paragraph of copy and first internal text link anchor should all be relevant, as should your page name in terms of the URL. Your search engine result should be showing what is on the page, not on another bit of the site you hope people will click through to. Anything less and all you’re doing is feeding up your bounce rate (he’s a hungry little scamp, that one). While there is plenty to be said for building brand awareness, when it comes to the bottom line I’d prefer to have fifty visitors who turn up and buy something than fifty thousand visitors who browse around and then leave without doing anything.

Don’t be tempted into the auto-generation trap of titles and keywords. Putting “keyword phrase” into the title isn’t much help when I’ve got dozens of pages with the same thing on the results page. Why exactly should I click on your page rather than someone else’s? The moment you appear in a search engine result, your sales pitch starts, so make sure you tailor your page copy and meta data accordingly.

Keep your navigation simple and easy to understand but don’t forget to have it lead people by the hand. Yes, it should do so gently, but it should still lead. Home, Services, Careers and About Us is generic, unhelpful and tedious. Give your visitors a clear path to a goal and make sure they can follow it without difficulty.

Get rid of PDFs! This is a cardinal sin often committed in the name of SEO and page ranking, but a sin it remains. Get that high quality copy onto the page, or failing that at least stop interrupting the user’s browsing experience. If you are committed to keeping the PDFs on your site, have them open in new tabs so they don’t barge into the front of everything else and lose the navigation and site framework for the user. Put links into your PDF which take users back to the site to continue their browsing. How about converting your PDFs into proper HTML but keeping a button on the site for downloading so that the inevitable “download and flee” crowd are still kept happy?

The same principles apply to external links, partnerships and social media. Same window external links essentially boot users off your site when clicked on – put them in a new tab or window so they don’t interrupt the experience when they are selected. Getting people to your site is no good if you then immediately direct them to leave it again. Digital agencies like eXtraSearch or Cornish WebServices can provide advice and consultancy on keeping visitors engaged as well as providing SEO and high quality copy-writing and website design and development services.

If you are experiencing infrastructure related problems, like slow loading times or actual site crashes due to high load, you probably ought to get in touch with some web testing experts and ask them to identify the trouble spots for you. I’d recommend SciVisum (I know, three plugs in one blog, how shameless) as they use an entirely user-experience focused methodology which actually runs like a mystery shopper on journeys through your site rather than fiddling about with repeated URL visits. They do 24/7 monitoring as well as load testing, so give them a shout and ask about their user journey testing. Don’t worry, I don’t get commission, I just think they’re awesome (and not just because I used to work there)!

These user experience fixes and ongoing monitoring aren’t actually that technical. You don’t need an SEO expert or even an exceptional level of coding genius to implement them, you just need to take a step back, stop thinking like an SEO and climb back into the shoes of your real visitors. Keep that copy relevant and that bounce rate down, and make sure the visitor numbers on your site are doing something other than showing large figures in your analytics data. Your conversion rate – and your business – will thank you.

PPC For Mobile Devices and Multi-Platform Browsing

Tablet computers are on the rise. Whether you’ve opted for a gadgety iPad or a no-nonsense Asus tablet, it looks like tablet computing is here to stay. The recent proliferation of tablets is now starting to have a significant impact on the way people search, browse and shop online.

This of course means that tablet consumers are starting to have a significant impact on SEO, site design and online marketing. To reach and influence prospects using tablets and similar touchscreen devices, you need to ensure you have an understanding of when and how they use the web, and then adjust your marketing strategies to accommodate them.

Google thoughtfully released some search data by device in September 2011 which showed that the search volume on smartphones, tablets and desktop computers varies quite drastically over time of day. Tablets are now adding a new dimension to this variation and browsing habits are being altered by their size (an advantage over a smartphone screen) and portability (superior to many laptops and of course an inbuilt advantage over desktop computers).

Desktops are unsurprisingly used mostly during business hours while people are at the office or other workplace, with usage rising at around 9am and dropping quite sharply from 6pm onwards (with a slight increase around 8pm for the stalwart evening users). Smartphones, on the other hand, see increasing usage during the daytime but with big spikes during morning and evening commuting hours – one can only hope that all those users aren’t driving at the same time!

Tablet usage is another animal altogether, being largely non-existent in the morning and early afternoon, but climbing steeply in the evening. This turns out to be because tablets are overwhelmingly for personal entertainment or browsing use, rather than business. In fact one of their principle appeals seems to be as “portable screens” which replace other information or entertainment sources like books which are often associated with multitasking. According to a two week tablet interaction diary study by Google Mobile Ads, over 40% of tablet use occurs while watching television, eating, cooking, or even dressing! The study doesn’t mention bathing, going to the toilet or any other more intimate activities (fortunately) but that percentage would probably go up a bit if it did, particularly as waterproof tablet covers are becoming increasingly common!

Tablets are a little neglected over the week and tend to be used in short bursts for checking emails or social media, playing online games or viewing snippets of video on YouTube etc. On weekends, however, tablet use expands to a full-time activity; some people will watch whole films and television show episodes on their tablet devices. They are shut-ins, though – most people will leave tablets at home when they go to work in favour of a smartphone, but tablets are commonly taken as “full computer” substitutes on holidays and business trips. In fact the research shows that a lot of users will take their browsing experience across multiple devices before making a purchase decision; for example someone might search for a brand during the morning commute on their smartphone, browse the website on a desktop computer during their lunch hour and then go on to actually make a purchase on their tablet while sitting on the couch in the evening.

This clearly has implications for search marketing as all your potential customers must be seeing your ads and search engine results pages on tablets as well as desktops and smartphones. Google’s default AdWords campaign settings show ads on all three devices, but really if you are seeing significant traffic from different device users you ought to be creating PPC campaigns which are separated by device type.

Well why do that? Easy: your site landing pages will look different depending on the device. Everyone has just about got the idea of mobile sites which are optimised for viewing on smartphones, but now a new touch-friendly era of web design is just starting to find its feet. Your ads might be displayed to be too attractive (or not attractive enough) to mobile device users and bring the wrong sort of traffic to the page, which will skyrocket your bounce rate, so it is very useful to be able to tweak campaign settings for each traffic stream on its own.

This approach also lets your PPC manager carefully tweak your keyword bidding by device in order to obtain maximum ROI. If a conversion value is £x, you need your cost per conversion to be less than this to make any money but bids per device can vary – so a bid on a desktop computer might be <£x, which is fine, while a bid on a phone or tablet could be >£x, which of course is a problem even if it is driving traffic!

Try to visualise what your prospective customer is doing in the few minutes up to the point at which they have started searching. Are they sitting at a computer screen while waiting for World of Warcraft to load up (or snatching a quick search during their work lunch hour)? Are they sitting on a crowded train on their way to or from the office? Or are they reclining happily on a couch and watching MasterChef and debating the merits of a takeaway dinner?

A good PPC manager matches the ads to the people most likely to be viewing them in order to optimise conversions, so if you’re having trouble getting into the heads of those multi-platform search prospects then maybe getting a professional agency in to help out might be in order. Ready for the shameless plugging? Try eXtraSearch or Cornish WebServices, who are keeping an eye on all these new developments and clever techniques so you don’t have to!

Google Maps Ads: Why Hysteria Is Overrated

Google has recently added ads into the clickable bubbles for many places on Google Maps, stirring up a storm of controversy on what many people say is only the latest of many recent steps the search engine is taking towards Evil Empire Status.

This has raised the interesting idea of defensive ads. Many businesses are fearful that they will need to start upping their Adwords spend (or even starting a pay-per-click campaign when they had not in the past) simply to avoid having competitors appearing in their Maps popups. For non-profit organisations, this is complicated even further by the possible appearance of less-than-ideal ads which present opposing philosophical or political viewpoints. Take, for instance, this example which Search Engine Watch found on Blumenthal, of a gay rights advertisement appearing on the popup for the New York diocese of the Catholic Church. Awkward…

Which of course brings to mind the other problem with this style of ad, particularly applicable to Maps, which is relevancy. A competitor’s ad showing up on your Maps entry might be potentially troublesome and lose you business, but at least might be (hopefully) relevant to the search term put in by the user. Where things get more tricky is in cases like the above where someone looking for something entirely different is suddenly being told about a completely irrelevant service simply because it is a paid ad.

This is irritating to users and may well affect businesses in an unforeseen way – potential customers may look at the ad space on their Maps entry and assume the displayed ad to be in some way endorsed by the company, rather than one which has been paid for by someone else to show up. It is rather like letting people put ads in your shop window – if you didn’t like the ad, you presumably wouldn’t let it go up – but of course Google controls these “shop windows” on Maps which leaves businesses a bit stuck as they have no control over what they may be seen by some to be endorsing.

Are defensive ads the answer? Well, it is possible that they might be useful to some larger companies but on the whole it seems unlikely (at least to me) that many users who are searching on local business listings will click on a competitor (or irrelevant) ad. Most people tend to ignore ads unless they are relevant anyway, and more importantly someone who searches on Maps rather than the main search engine probably has a big geographical factor to consider when making their choice of product or service – they’ll go to your shop or choose your service because it is in their area of choice, not because they are looking generally for whatever it is they want.

Finally, consider return on investment. Adwords ROI is an enormous topic in and of itself, but centring on the Google Maps service simplifies things somewhat. Business listings on Google Places are still absolutely free, so for a cost of zero the potential to bring in even one or two new local customers is worth the effort of registering. For the time being at least, don’t fret over defensive ads unless you’ve got literally piles of competitors who are all in the same geographical area as you. Remember Maps searches are based on both need and location, not just keyword, and plan your online marketing strategy accordingly. Or, if you’re really panicking, give eXtraSearch a call and we’ll handle the planning for you (as well as offering a nice soothing cup of tea to calm you down)!

Virtual Learning Environments in Primary Schools

Although the idea of having Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) has been steadily growing in popularity over the last few years, the actual use of VLEs in many educational institutions, especially primary schools, has not really taken off. Ofsted blames a black of enthusiasm and peer support from teachers and learners for the lack of development on VLE initiatives, but there may be a wider issue to contend with, especially when it comes to how few primary schools have adopted VLEs as part of their everyday management.

VLEs are designed to allow learners and staff to access a wide variety of learning materials through specially designed computer systems. Resources commonly found on VLEs, especially in university and college environments, include notes and handouts, practice tests or exams, PowerPoint presentations, video clips and links to useful websites.

Ofsted’s report on VLEs found that they were still a relatively new concept which represented only a very small (and in many cases non-existent) aspect of learning. Colleges and universities were found to be making the most use of VLEs, while primary schools were lagging furthest behind.

The main problem in primary schools is the lack of a so-called “technology champion” – normally a key staff member who gets to grips with the idea, sees the benefits and works to help colleagues do the same in order to get whatever it is adopted in the school.

Most VLEs are designed for use by secondary or higher education institutes, with large amounts of storage, complex timetabling systems and a relatively streamlined appearance. This makes “off the shelf” VLE solutions eminently unsuitable for primary schools. Aside from the fact that most VLEs are priced out of the range of the average primary school due to the extensive features and storage (essential for secondary and higher education, but unwanted price padding for primary), their interfaces and functionality are fundamentally unusable by 4-11 year olds. What use is a VLE which the pupils cannot access?

A primary school teacher does not want to add VLE updates to his or her already extensive workload. Who wants to enter a big list of marks twice? The mark of a proper primary school VLE is that it should simplify the job of the teacher while being easily accessible to pupils and parents. Big buttons, colourful graphics and easy-to-understand instructions are needed for younger students. Simple and easy administration which reduces workload rather than increasing it is needed for teachers and school admin staff.

Consider a primary school teacher, Miss Thompson, with a class of thirty pupils. Each time she wants to set homework for them, even a simple task like practicing spelling, Miss Thompson has to photocopy thirty task sheets, pin them into thirty homework books, and then later trudge through twenty-nine or twenty-eight returns books to see who has failed to return their work.

Most VLEs will then also require poor Miss Thompson to log in and do electronically the same thing she just did by hand in order to keep the admin system up to date. Her workload has been increased, if not doubled, by the new technology, so she is quite justified in not being a big fan of it! What’s worse is that none of her pupils or their parents bother looking at the VLE because it is far too complicated and looks like it was designed for a university, what with all the greyed-out buttons marked “timetable” and “practice exams.”

Now let’s compare Miss Thompson’s experience with a different VLE, which is not an adapted or trimmed down version of something originally made for secondary education or universities and colleges. This is a primary school VLE, designed and built carefully from the ground up to meet the needs of primary school pupils, teachers and parents.

Instead of wasting her time and school money on photocopying piles of homework (much of which will amazingly be “lost” during the complex expedition from the classroom door to the pupil’s home), Miss Thompson can send the document to her entire class with only a couple of clicks. At home, the children are happy to log onto a system which has big, colourful buttons, themed class images and a simple interface which a modern six year-old (and even his or her slightly less modern parents) can understand easily. As each pupil completes the homework assignment it is recorded in the VLE so Miss Thompson saves another half hour of sorting through paperwork. Even better, school department heads and administrators are able to look through class performance to see where issues may be arising and nip them in the bud. Little Susie hasn’t done her homework for a whole week? Time to check up with the parents before she starts to fall behind.

Suddenly a VLE seems like a sensible idea, and even a desirable asset for a primary school. Freeing teachers up from the time-consuming admin and paper shuffling in favour of letting them (gasp) focus on their teaching? Maybe it is time to start a trend after all.

If your UK primary school is at wits end trying to find a VLE which will help your teachers do their jobs rather than double their workload with unnecessary administration, visit www.schoolvle.co.uk to discover a virtual learning environment designed by an award winning web company specifically to meet the needs of a primary education environment.

Bye-Bye Yahoo Site Explorer

After uncounted years of loyal service, Yahoo has today closed down Yahoo Site Explorer in favour of a complete move over to Bing (boo, hiss). While Yahoo claim that the new Bing Webmaster Tools features have been upgraded to provide comparable service, it seems (ahem) unlikely that the same level of competitor backlink data will be available.

As of today, there are in fact no major search engines in existence which show all the links to any site on the internet, as Google has purposefully refrained from reporting all the links on Webmaster Tools for yonks now.

While the shutdown is sad news indeed for internet marketers and SEO folks like myself, there are some alternatives out there such as Blekko, a small search engine which provides an seo link for pretty much all its search results. Blekko’s SEO tool shows a pretty impressive variety of information including inbound links, duplicate content, crawl stats and co-hosts, and of course the thing which stands out here is that this information is available to anyone, rather than just verified site owners (pretty nifty for checking on the competition).

There are also tons  of free tools which can provide detailed information on backlinks, domain authority, pagerank and a wide variety of other commonly used online marketing metrics. My personal favourite is Open Site Explorer from SEO Moz but you can also use Majestic SEO’s Site Explorer, and there are probably others out there too (feel free to combat my ignorance in the comments).

So fare-thee-well, Yahoo Site Explorer, great backlink information source now of yesteryear. Thou art gone, but shall not be easily forgotten.

EU Changes eCommerce Trading Laws

A new form of EU consumer rights legislation came into force last month which has particular relevance for online retailers (or indeed any websites engaged in eCommerce activities). By October 2013 all member states governments must be implementing the new rules at a national level, but what does it mean for you, the online retailer?

The key changes which website managers need to take into account are

• Pre-checked tickboxes which opt customers into additional products or services such as warranties, newsletters etc, are now banned.
• Customers can now withdraw from a sale within 14 calendar days rather than the previous seven days rule. Additionally, when a merchant has not clearly informed the customer of their rights to withdraw from the sale the cooling off period is extended to a full year.
• All total costs including VAT, shipping etc must be displayed (particularly relevant for ticket sellers, low cost airlines and other “hidden cost” sellers).

Top ten new benefits for consumers:

1. No more hidden charges and costs on the Internet

Consumers will be protected against “cost traps” on the Internet. This happens when fraudsters try to trick people into paying for ‘free’ services, such as horoscopes or recipes. From now on, consumers must explicitly confirm that they understand that they have to pay a price for goods or services.

2. Increased price transparency

Traders must inform consumers of the total cost of the product or service, as well as any additional fees. Online shoppers will not have to pay charges or other costs if they were not properly informed of them before they place the order.

3. Banning pre-ticked boxes on websites

When shopping online – for instance buying a plane ticket – you may be offered additional options during the purchase process, such as travel insurance or car rental. These additional services may be offered through so-called ‘pre-ticked’ boxes. Consumers are currently often forced to untick those boxes if they do not want these extra services, but now pre-ticked boxes are banned across Europe.

4. 14 Days to change your mind on a purchase

The period under which consumers can withdraw from a sales contract is extended to 14 calendar days (compared to seven days legally prescribed by EU law today). This means that consumers can return the goods for whatever reason if they change their minds. There are also additional features to this aspect of the change.

Extra protection for lack of information: When a seller hasn’t clearly informed the customer about the withdrawal right, the return period will be extended to a year.

Consumers will also be protected and enjoy a right of withdrawal for solicited visits, such as when a trader called beforehand and pressed the consumer to agree to a visit. In addition, a distinction no longer needs to be made between solicited and unsolicited visits; circumvention of the rules will thus be prevented.

The right of withdrawal is extended to online auctions, such as eBay – though goods bought in auctions can only be returned when bought from a professional seller.

The withdrawal period will start from the moment the consumer receives the goods, rather than at the time of conclusion of the contract, which is currently the case. The rules will apply to internet, phone and mail order sales, as well as to sales outside shops, for example on the consumer’s doorstep, in the street, at a Tupperware party or during an excursion organised by the trader.

5. Better refund rights

Traders must refund consumers for the product within 14 days of the withdrawal. This includes the costs of delivery. In general, the trader will bear the risk for any damage to goods during transportation, until the consumer takes possession of the goods.

6. Introduction of an EU-wide model withdrawal form

Consumers will be provided with a model withdrawal form which they can (but are not obliged to) use if they change their mind and wish to withdraw from a contract concluded at a distance or at the doorstep. This will make it easier and faster to withdraw, wherever you have concluded a contract in the EU.

7. Eliminating surcharges for the use of credit cards and hotlines

Traders will not be able to charge consumers more for paying by credit card (or other means of payment) than what it actually costs the trader to offer such means of payment. Traders who operate telephone hotlines allowing the consumer to contact them in relation to the contract will not be able charge more than the basic telephone rate for the telephone calls.

8. Clearer information on who pays for returning goods

If traders want the consumer to bear the cost of returning goods after they change their mind, they have to clearly inform consumers about that beforehand, otherwise they have to pay for the return themselves. Traders must clearly give at least an estimate of the maximum costs of returning bulky goods bought by internet or mail order, such as a sofa, before the purchase, so consumers can make an informed choice before deciding from whom to buy.

9. Better consumer protection in relation to digital products

Information on digital content will also have to be clearer, including about its compatibility with hardware and software and the application of any technical protection measures, for example limiting the right for the consumers to make copies of the content.

Consumers will have a right to withdraw from purchases of digital content, such as music or video downloads, but only up until the moment the actual downloading process begins.

10. Common rules for businesses will make it easier for them to trade all over Europe.

These include:

A single set of core rules for distance contracts (sales by phone, post or internet) and off-premises contracts (sales away from a company’s premises, such as in the street or the doorstep) in the European Union, creating a level playing field and reducing transaction costs for cross-border traders, especially for sales by internet.

Standard forms will make life easier for businesses: a form to comply with the information requirements on the right of withdrawal;

Specific rules will apply to small businesses and craftsmen, such as a plumber. There will be no right of withdrawal for urgent repairs and maintenance work. Member States may also decide to exempt traders who are requested by consumers to carry out repair and maintenance work in their home of a value below €200 from some of the information requirements.

Video SEO, or Why Google Loves Cinema

Most online marketers and site developers don’t bother with search engine optimising their videos if they have any, considering it a “nice to have” rather than a critical component of site content. Less than one fifth of marketers will bother putting keywords in, and someone who enters in proper metadata, captions and annotations is a rare animal indeed.

Unfortunately, if you want to show up high in search engine rankings you are potentially missing out on quite a lot of SEO juice if you leave your videos languishing as raw content. Videos are in fact more than fifty times more likely to appear near or at the top of Google search engine rankings thanks to Google’s “blended search results” which shows images, videos, news, recipes (and much else besides) on the standard results page. Google adores videos – nobody seems to know why right now – whether they are embedded into sites or just linked in from YouTube.

The added advantage of all this is of course that with so few marketers taking advantage of proper search engine optimisation for videos, optimising your content gives an excellent ratio of proverbial bang to proverbial buck.

If you upload your videos to YouTube you should be fine, although don’t forget to put in sensible descriptions and titles. Google crawls YouTube quite regularly so your media will be found without too much trouble. This is fine if getting people to watch the video is your primary aim, although if you are trying to get people to visit your website via the video then the “via YouTube” techniques is probably sub-optimal at best

Your alternative is video SEO, a set of techniques which ensures that Google will find your video content, index it successfully and display it when appropriate keywords are entered as search terms. Submit your videos to Google using a video sitemap to make sure it can be found (on the whole Google can miss flash media and quite a few other video types if left to its own devices), and optimise the title to be keyword rich and relevant without sounding spammy. Titles are the primary way Google matches up videos with search keywords, and it is especially fond of videos whose titles match the title of the page they are on as this shows the content is relevant rather than just “media stuffed.”

For the foreseeable future video SEO looks like it is going to be pretty sure thing, so my advice would be to jump on the bandwagon early and start optimising your content. Any decent search engine marketing agency (and – shameless plug ahead – I’d recommend both Cornish WebServices and eXtraSearch UK as excellent examples of the breed) should be able to give you more specific tips and tailor an end-to-end SEO strategy for you to boost your site up the search engine results pages.

Fraudulent Agencies and Other Insects

Although a wise and anonymous man once said never to blog in anger, sometimes it can be worthwhile to make sure a post is sufficiently impassioned when commenting on a sensitive subject, so forgive me if this one turns into a rant!

Today’s topic is the abuse of power, specifically when agencies and developers who distinctly lack a moral backbone (amongst numerous other attributes which I won’t go into so as not to offend more sensitive readers) and take great advantage of less technologically able clients for profit. This amounts to theft in a far more real sense than most people realise, not to mention souring the reputation of the precious few (or so it seems) digital agencies who earn their pay and genuinely do their best for their clients.

We recently took on a client who has been chewed on and spat out by at least three or four of these charlatans and is at the end of his tether. In desperation he has been paying quite large sums of money to advertise on various directories and local listings, which unsurprisingly have been generating barely enough business to pay for themselves. After hearing his story – a one man band from the definitely non-Internet savvy generation – I cut his spend in half to get him onto a proper SEO service with us so he could generate some real business for a decent ROI.

The first thing to do was check the website for junk code, and lo and behold the pages were stuffed with it. It would seem that the last “SEO agency” were little more than a link ring, who popped onto the site and loaded the footer with links to their other clients and then sat there twiddling their thumbs and gradually absorbing money.

After attempting to clean the code up via the FTP login, we gave up and decided to move the entire shebang over onto our proper SEO-friendly content management system. The client was quite happy with this, eager to get the thing working properly and bringing in customers, but when he approached his current hosting company to get the transfer details he was told rather brusquely that he needed to give them three months of notice or pay over one hundred pounds if he wanted to move to a new agency.

Now never mind the dubious legality of this, especially as a quick check on Who Is revealed that the domain in question was registered in his own name. Never mind that they did everything behind the scenes without keeping him informed and were now charging him an extortionate fee for something any rational and fair-minded company would do as a professional courtesy. The biggest gyp I have with this is that he has been horribly taken advantage of; it is quite obvious when talking to the client that his knowledge of the online world is limited at best.

What are your thoughts if you end up with a naïve or less than knowledgeable client? Here are mine: this one needs extra hand-holding, make sure not to use jargon terms, explain concepts in simple English, use physical real-world analogies to make sure he understands what is being done.

Here is the one thought these scum agencies seem to have: chingchingching!

So be sure to take into account some key considerations when your current agency, hosting company or developer start playing games with you and asking for extra sums of money, especially if you’re moving to a new agency or supplier.

• Who owns your domain? If it is registered to you, then you own it and you have a legal right to the access information.
• Your analytics data is yours. Data collected on your website is your responsibility and therefore also your property. You have a right to analytics access.
• You have a right to move suppliers. Check contracts carefully before signing – if you forgot, or if they slipped something past you, get some legal advice as clauses may not be enforceable if they violate basic consumer rights.

Above all, don’t be stung, especially with SEO agencies! The moment an agency starts talking about “guaranteed top spot in Google” or any words to that effect, run a mile. If they even began to know what they were talking about they would know that there is no way to guarantee a top spot thanks to the new local and personalised searching on Google and other search engines. “We build x backlinks to your site per month” (where x is a large number) is another one to watch for; this means cheap link farms with work outsourced abroad, and is worse than worthless (in fact since the big Google Panda update such farms will actually harm your site’s ranking, not improve it).

If you need some consultancy or advice from a legitimate SEO agency or developer, how about Googling for one? An SEO agency surely shouldn’t need to use paid advertising and email shots, so the best genuine agencies will be those that arrive at the top of the search listings. It is common sense, after all: they can’t get to the front page of a natural Google search themselves, how in the world will they manage to do it for you?

Bounce Rate Blues

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So your SEO is through the roof, you’re consistently hitting near the top on search engines, if not actually at the top. Your PPC is working overdrive and bringing tons of visitors to your site…yet your conversion rates still suck. A quick examination of your analytics data reveals why – despite enormously high numbers of unique visitors you’ve got a homepage bounce rate that would put a rubber ball to shame. So what’s going on?

Putting aside all the arguments about deep linking to pages in your site other than the homepage, which is more a site mapping SEO manager’s game (and not my principle area of expertise…yet, but watch this space), it might well be time to re-examine how you built the homepage itself. Good old index.html is more than just a placeholder saying hello which people click through quickly to get to the meat of the site, it is also a powerful advertisement which should hook visitors and draw them into the site, making it a valuable page in its own right.

Think of casual browsers as window shoppers. When you walk down a high street, chances are you don’t walk into every shop you pass and spend ten minutes browsing its shelves and racks to see what is on offer. Instead, you look at the windows to see what the shop sells, how it is presented and priced and if they have any special or unique offers currently available. Only if you see something of interest will you actually enter the shop!

Of course some big, well known brands can get away with pulling customers in on name alone but that isn’t always a possibility, especially for smaller companies, so treat your homepage or other site landing pages as shop windows. Dress them up a bit and use them as a showcase to convince customers not just that they want to buy an air conditioner (or whatever) but that they want to buy it from you. Yes, you! Of all the millions of websites selling their desired product or service (over forty million for air conditioners by the way, from my quick Google search) why should they choose to spend their hard-earned cash at yours?

The key to this is USPs, or Unique Selling Points. Don’t just tell people what you’re selling, tell them why they want it and why they want it from you as opposed to any of your competitors. Are you cheaper? Do you guarantee free postage or next day delivery? Does your service plan give free lollipops to everyone who signs up for the monthly billing option? That’s the information that will grip passing visitors and turn them from idly curious window-shoppers into genuinely interested potential customers, driving them out of the bounce rate statistics and into the sales conversion funnel where you want them.

How you present this information is of course an entire library in and of itself, but the most critical thing is to get it on there. If I had a dime for every website I see whose homepage is just a basic image splash (that most heinous of sins against both content and SEO!) or a boring intro blurb along the lines of “We sell air conditioners, which are things that make you less hot,” well…let’s just say I wouldn’t need to worry about my rent any more!

When Static Content Goes Wrong

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If a few missing product images can have a nasty impact on an ecommerce site, imagine what happens when entire swatches of static content go missing!

This is the scenario encountered by poor Mr Test this week, as well as by an unfortunate client at my old job. It turns out that all their static content for site.com, including images, stylesheets and a great deal of functional javascript, was kept on a subdomain at static.site.com. Which is all well and good, and perfectly fine practice until the third party that runs and manages the subdomain for you tries to pay for it with an out of date credit card and the domain is taken down along with all its associated content. For over twelve hours any visitors to the unfortunate site in question were presented with the barebones horror of a page that seemed to have been coded in raw HTML in Notepad, rather than the slick and happily functional ecommerce experience they were used to.

The call centre lit up like a Christmas tree, needless to say. A member of their technical team logged on to see what the fuss was about and is rumoured have aged forty years in as many seconds once he realised what had happened. The ecommerce director got wind of the situation and threw all his toys out. Chaos ensued. The domain manager committed ritual suicide. Several team members fled to Columbia to escape the wrath of the marketing board.

I’m fibbing, of course, because as it happens the client in question was running a dynamic user journey to monitor the site which included both basic page text checks as well as full content downloads (i.e. checking for OK responses from all the content referenced in a page, not just the page itself). As a result, when the static domain collapsed they were alerted within 120 seconds and immediately got to work resolving the problem. The domain manager did receive a spanking for not keeping his card information up to date, but other than that the problem was fixed inside a few hours, so instead of losing heaps of sales and brand image during core business hours the business only had to deal with half a dozen slightly disgruntled insomniacs who happened to be visiting the site in the small hours of the morning.

What’s worse is that many monitoring providers can be remarkably slack when it comes to checking page content properly. The other monitoring supplier for the client above didn’t detect anything wrong with the site because the tests being done on the page were basic at best – a text string check for the site name, and a response check to ensure an “OK” back for the page itself. No other content checks were being performed. The page was up, after all. Surely the rest is mere window dressing?

As has already been discussed, the presentation of a site is every bit as important as the content it contains – indeed, some would argue more so. Site presentation, styling and image is what will capture a customer and get them looking for content. No matter how brilliant and witty your product descriptions, if you don’t provide a clear graphical interface to allow the customer to browse, search and examine your products, chances are they won’t even try. In extreme cases such as this one, chances are that they would simply assume the site was “broken” and depart in a hurry for a competitor. Sale lost, money lost, and the site has immediately failed in its mission, which as always is to earn for the business.

Even non-transactional sites must be scrupulous in their presentation – in fact even more so, as they have nothing to offer but the information they present. There is no Buy button, no Order process, nothing but the site as it is, so it must be appealing to the eye and present itself as impeccably as a princess at her first ballroom dance. If the site looks poor, or experiences problems, the damage is not just in sales but in brand image, which can cripple a business offline as well as in the ecommerce world.

So don’t neglect any part of your content, static or otherwise. Remember, if your site ever looks less than delicious, your customers will be reluctant to take a bite and will in all probability take their tastes – and money – elsewhere.