Social Websites Get Better Results
Socially interactive websites generate more referral traffic. So much of website maintenance centers on attracting and keeping a steady, growing stream of visitors from your target market going to your website. Your goal is to get them to interact with your brand and generate revenues. Therefore, everything about your offers and calls to action should be about strengthening your relationship with customers, prospects and other users of your website. When you think about it, everything positive in your business is the result of a relationship that enabled a transaction or other favorable initiative to happen. As business relationships are also social relationships, how do you go about nurturing your social relationships with your web users? If you’re one of the B2B holdouts who still thinks social engagement of a business audience is all fluff and of little real impact, consider the fact that Google and the other search engines favor websites with more social referral traffic and rank them higher. This is because people who click shared links in social media are opting to consume the message based on its relevance to their specific interests. Google raises your website’s authority as a trusted resource in your category when people recommend or share your page links. Jayson DeMers writing recently in Forbes makes a few points on why a socially active Internet presence is so important for today’s businesses. “Social media is useful because it encourages more external sites to link to your content, and the more diverse external links you have, the more authority you’ll gain in Google’s eyes. Of course, the catch to this is that you have to have high-quality, authoritative content to begin with. Otherwise, you’ll have nothing to use to attract links.” We couldn’t agree more, which is why we’re so big on blogging and dynamic content. You need to give visitors fresh, relevant content to keep them coming back and a blog offers fertile ground on your website for that very purpose. DeMers goes on, “Social sharing contributes to a brand’s authority much in the same way that external links do. To search engines like Google, any indication of a verifiable external source validating your brand or your content is grounds for an improvement in domain authority. So, if you can get five people to share your Facebook post, that’s great, but if you can get 1,000 people to share it, that’s even better. Likes, shares, favorites, replies, and retweets all count toward this increased authority.” Maintaining lively social action on your website will continually send diverse visitors back and forth between your social pages, your website and the outbound links to which you want to associate your business. Backlink traffic from desired sites to your website can be pure SEO gold. When you devote effort into building social capital from your brand into the content on your sites, visitors will always have something new to check out and additional messages of yours to share. Then it follows that the more targeted website visitors, the more chances to convert them to paying customers. Keeping your website socially interactive takes commitment just like any other worthwhile marketing endeavor. It begins with having a social media strategy that’s congruent with your overall brand strategy and business goals. Your website should have its social share links displayed with the appropriate emphasis, depending on what type of business you’re in. For example, some websites show live feeds of their Twitter and Facebook page posts. Effective ways to make your website social Lisa Parkin writing in the Huffington Post Business blog offers 4 powerful ways to attract social web user interaction. We highlight them below: Highlight top survey results – People want to know what others think and generally trust reputable consumer opinion survey data. They are apt to share it socially, especially when it validates their ideas. Install social commenting tools – This may seem like an obvious step, but many website owners never get to it. Naturally, 2-way conversations are what stimulate even more social interaction. Include user content – Contests and promotions are fine but a powerful method of showcasing user content is allowing product and service reviews on your website. It provides users a real glimpse into your strengths as well transparency into any weaknesses – areas your customers can help you improve. Make it easy to subscribe – Web visitors should see that you offer valuable information and updates. Make it simple for them to get it. For example, offer users the option to provide their email address OR sign up via Facebook. Parkin offers this key piece of advice as an ideal to shoot for when designing your social website and maintaining its content: “When a user comes to your site, it’s important that any piece of content is one click away from being shared on social media.” Perhaps not every piece of content on every website should be so fluid, but the more easily shareable, the more people will share, and the more links clicked. We can add a last word by saying that building a strong social following on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, your blog and with email is a whole other vitally important effort which goes beyond today’s post topic. However, if making your website more social has been one of your marketing goals, Parker Web Services has the technical know-how and development experience to customize and maintain website content, including strategically embedded social media, on almost any currently supported platform. Feel free to contact us at 1-877-321-2251. Parker Web prides itself on providing a top-notch website experience. Schedule a call today.
Website Content Maintenance: Fresh, Frequent & Fashionable
Fresh, relevant website content increases targeted traffic naturally. Who wants a stale, 3-day old bagel for breakfast when there are fresh ones coming out of the bakery just this morning? Your local café is serving them up with a variety of your favorite toppings – daily, and that’s why you go there. Stop to consider the stale content that has been sitting on your website since it was launched. Are you one of those business owners who launched a nice new site, complete with your first 2 or 3 blog posts, then moved on? If your most recent blog post or content update is dated, say February, 2014, your site is stale and probably getting very little attention from your target audience. Your site basically died last year if that’s the case. What has your company been doing for all this time? What about your social pages? What exactly is your online presence saying about the relevancy of your company within its industry – today? Consumers as well as business people have insatiable appetites for new information that can help or entertain them. Hunger for knowledge needs to be satisfied frequently. Stale websites, like stale bagels, just don’t attract customers hungry for a fresh serving of something good. When returning visitors come to your website, looking for what’s new and find exactly the same content as their last visit, you’ve just given them permission, if not encouragement, to visit your competition’s websites. They’ll visit your competitors to find out what’s new in your market! Make your website the authoritative source! To be a leader in your market, or the thought leader in your industry, your website needs to reflect your genuine professionalism. Our slogan applies here: “Keep your website as professional as you are!” A big part of website professionalism is publishing industry-leading information – regularly and often enough. Google and other search engines rank your website based on how often you update your content as well as the quality of content in your updates & posts. Matt Richardson, writing for Formstack, explains how search engines like Google work. “Search engines send “spiders” or “bots” around the web to “crawl” sites’ contents and follow their links, noting any changes along the way. These spiders come around on a schedule. If your site gets crawled, say, once a week and they notice a consistent change ever time, they’ll return more often. Hot, frequently updated sites like big news sites will get crawled multiple times per hour. If they don’t see changes after repeat visits, your site appears inactive and they’ll come around less often.” Here’s a real kicker: “If you aspire to show up in searches for the latest trends, but haven’t been updating or blogging consistently, your rankings may lag behind by up to several weeks. This is one reason why blogs are so important for SEO. Blogs let you post a regular stream of content relevant to your topic and search terms.” Because blogs are the most common way organizations keep their audiences informed on a frequent basis, Google has been steadily adding weight to blog content. They’ve designed their sophisticated algorithms to find web searchers’ information based on the contextual, situational and relational quality of the content. In simple terms, Google wants to serve up fresh and valuable content to its searchers. Out of date content is irrelevant, and because it’s easily detected, Google will screen it from top search results. It’s easy to understand why quality of content is important. Now you know why frequency of updates is just as crucial to a visible and high performing website. Blog and news pages are your social share points! When people find links to your website content in social shares and then click them, it tells Google and the other search engines that your site is attracting attention and this validates referral traffic. Social referrals are a strong indication of being an authoritative resource – people are willing to refer friends and business associates to your blog article or website because it proved to be valuable for them. The search engines index social media content on popular social platforms, like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Google, in particular, has made it very clear that they’re giving more weight to social media signals, both from your company’s own social media pages and other accounts which are interacting with your brand and linking to your site. Social media are great places to engage and introduce your brand to new people, but from there you need a way to “leave the party together.” Your website is the best place online for a more “intimate” relationship. Posting valuable information to your blog gives you a place to which you can readily invite visitors – a place where you control the message and conversation. Your blog is a great platform to share videos as well as written articles. A blog is also a great enabler for the content marketer. It provides you and ideal mechanism to publish content worth sharing socially. You can keep it fresh, relevant and entertaining to your specific audience. Frequency is your friend. Now the question becomes, how often should you post new content? Matt Richardson offers broad and general guidance. “It’s hard to prescribe an exact formula and depends in which medium you’re posting – on your site, on your blog, or on your social media profiles. For blogs and website updates, generally once a month or more can be adequate for a small business, unless you’re expected to always keep up with the bleeding edge news…” In reality, many small businesses have increased blogging frequency to weekly or semi-weekly with positive results and no complaints from followers. Your SEO Consultant or Website Maintenance Provider should be able to provide further guidance based on your unique situation. Consult with them or Parker Web Services to get recommendations on frequency of website/blog updates as well as what kinds of content to post. For most businesses, Social
Web Page Speed for People and Search Engines
Help more people see your properly displayed website faster. Web page load speed has a major effect on how many visitors actually see and stay on your website. When someone clicks a link to your site they want immediate results. Waiting more than 3 or 4 seconds is too long for many people when their experience with other websites is virtually instant rewards for page links clicked. Take it from two of the world’s largest online retailers. Amazon reported a 1% increase in revenue for every 100 millisecond improvement in page load speed. That calculates to about $890 million in additional annual revenue! Similarly, Walmart.com experienced a 2% increase in conversions for every 1 second of web speed improvement. Slow Website Hazards Other studies have shown decisively how problematic a slow loading website is for today’s consumers and web searchers. Akamai, a leader in web performance technology reports the following: 47% of people expect a web page to load in two seconds or less. 40% will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load. 52% of online shoppers say quick page loads are important for their loyalty to a site. Speed should always be a key consideration for any work performed on your website. Page load speed not only impacts your online conversions when people find your site, but is also a big factor in how Google will index and rank your web pages so more people can find you. Having a first rate website and being easily searchable on the web is one of the best ways you can keep your new business pipeline full. Your search visibility and online rankings can be raised in a number of different ways. Ideally, all of them should be practiced as they will help you build authoritative status in the search engines. What is often overlooked in website development is proper code and programming that reduces server response time and greases the skids for search engines. Proper file compression, minimizing HTTP requests, optimizing images and other development best practices help pages load faster and display properly in all currently supported browsers. Having a website built by a first-rate developer is the ideal starting point for any website because from there we can focus on the critical aspects of on-page SEO including keyword research and content creation. The Value of Web Page Speed According to Brandt Dainow, a web analyst consultant at ThinkMetrics, “Speed seems to have been forgotten by the web design industry around the time broadband arose. Prior to that, in the 1990s, everyone was very aware that web pages took time to download and bore that in mind when designing websites. Speed was so central to design that major development tools like Dreamweaver kept a running total of download time in the status bar as you coded so that you could see the impact of your changes on the site’s speed. Designers didn’t like casting aside their lovely creations because they were too slow, but they accepted the commercial realities of the world they inhabited and learned to compromise between appearance and performance. “… While designers might have forgotten about speed, users haven’t. There’s a direct connection between website speed and the site’s appeal. Sites that render in under five seconds are four times more likely to get a conversion than sites that take longer. This situation is even worse in the mobile market. In mobile, the critical time span is only two seconds, and you will get 10 times more mobile conversions if you meet this limit. Since search engines want to send people to sites that people like, search engines reserve the higher rankings for faster sites.” When visitors land on your site, will it open immediately and provide a clean, intuitive user interface that functions as intended? Having a fast-loading website is like giving your visitors nothing but green lights on their cyber commute into your online city. All of the data paths are unclogged and standards based program applications work as they’re supposed to without “roadblocks” and “detours.” In short, you’re giving your visitors a great User-experience. You’re also telling search engines that you’re working with a professional development team. Your two audiences: human beings and search engines. It should be obvious to anyone why serving your human audience is important to your business. Most web designers tend to focus primarily on people-pleasing – the artistic elegance and visual aspects of a website, often at the expense of speed. Their first priority is to show the client a beautiful graphic design to get an approval. Once the initial design is approved, developers who code the site will judge its functionality from how it appears on their own device as they test for appearance. Are they also concerned with how fast it will load, look and function on someone else’s device? And very importantly, are they programming the site or using the CMS according to best practices for the search engines? Good website practices are all about building relevant, useful pages that load quickly and look good on all devices. An Easy Speed Test from Google If you’re a website owner, there’s an easy way for you test your website’s speed by entering the URL into the search bar on this page: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ The test will analyze the page you enter and provide a report of any problems along with recommendations for improvements. Should you be experiencing problems with slow loading pages, website error messages and low traffic volume, it might be due to improper development practices. The success of your online marketing will rest largely on your developer’s technical understanding of what affects server response time and page load speed. Your website’s maintenance service provider should be able to ascertain the efficacy of your site’s programming and help you improve both user experiences and SEO results. Do you have questions about the technical structure affecting the speed of your website? Feel free to contact us about a review
Your Call to Action Leads to More $ales
Help your website visitors take the actions you both want. Your key messages to customers need to be strategically placed throughout your website but that alone isn’t enough to generate a return from your website investment. It’s vital that you create clear and simple highlight messages suggesting the actions your website visitors can take to help themselves – Calls to Action. If your website lacks Calls to Action (CTAs), you’ve probably lost a significant amount of potential business volume, and you can’t fault your web visitors for failing to understand your superior value messages. You need to take the responsibility to lead them. Most people visiting your website are not full of initiative, eager to take immediate next steps after learning about your business. You need to be the natural born leader when you design your website and know how to lead your visitors to “do the right thing.” People behave a lot like cats when they’re online. They like to do their own thing, especially when browsing or shopping. People abandon shopping carts, neglect to sign up for your informative newsletter and they only skim your important blog for headlines or bullet points while ignoring your brilliant nuanced articles. They purposely avoid clicking that big obvious button unless they are convinced that doing so will reward them. These are just a few reasons why your website performance will fail if you fail to include CTAs where needed. Let’s take a look at what you can do to improve your website response rates, conversions and purchases. CTAs can be in a passive form such as having your phone number prominently visible. Your “Contact Us” page is a passive call to action. It’s there for any time someone feels like contacting you. “Help” and “Support” tabs passively call your visitors to action when they need assistance. Alternatively, CTAs can proactively prompt a specific act at a specific stage of a relationship. For example, do you want your visitor to learn more about a service, subscribe to a newsletter, download a white paper or go to your store and make a purchase? The traditional “sales funnel” is an effective approach to creating an urgency hierarchy in your Calls to Action. Illustrated below is a simple, generic sales funnel. Beginning at the top of the funnel, you gradually lead your visitor to convert to higher interest levels and ultimately a purchase at the end of the funnel. Much is written about how to create sales funnels. Our focus here, however, is to determine what you need to do to incorporate the right CTAs into your particular website. There are numerous types of Call to Action buttons, each with a different purpose or stage of a buying cycle (point in the sales funnel). We’ll cover the most common in hierarchical order. They are: Learn more – Takes visitor to a resource or landing page with deeper information and sometimes a further call to action. Sign up – Brings visitor to a web form, often to subscribe to a mailing list or register for a service. Download – In exchange for some basic information (always an email address) a visitor can download a file directly from your website. Here you have created a lead for your CRM database. Get Started Now – A direct link to a new client or consumer engagement area for visitors who intend to do business. Free or Trial Offer – Registers visitor as a “customer” or “account,” usually with a log-in expiration or a credit card charge if no further action is taken. Buy/add to shopping cart – The ultimate action taken by your website visitors (as long as they hit the “Approve Payment” button) to complete the transaction. Where in the sales funnel; at what point of decision are your visitors as they interact with your website and convert to sales leads or new customers? This will determine at what stage you would use each of the above CTAs. For effective Call to Action design, first determine the specific action you want your visitors to take and then make it compelling for them. Use compelling word choice – Write powerful, bold and simple instructions. Your exact words will have a big impact on conversion rates. Make the wording as simple and straightforward as possible and follow these guidelines: Use simple, direct language with as few words as possible. Use a large, bold font for the key words. Make your words clearly call for a specific action. You want your visitors to think as little as possible about their decision to take an action. Create and build urgency – A sense of urgency will displace second thoughts and minimize distractions. Remember this little gem: “The more opportunities you give them to stop and consider what they’re doing, the more opportunities you’re giving them to say “no” (Hongkiat.com). Give your visitors an authentic and compelling reason to act now! Prices do indeed go up, supplies can indeed be limited, trial offers do indeed expire and sometimes you really do want to build your portfolio of business and are willing to offer limited privileges to new customers. Now is truly the best time to act! Make those messages crystal clear! Icons and images work better than text alone – Your conversion links need to be crisp, attractive graphic symbols or icons that draw the eye and communicate a desired step. Dimensional colored buttons just ask to be pushed. Bright shiny icons demand a mouse-over and click. A good Call to Action button or icon communicates its own request to be clicked. Repeat and Remind – Appropriately repeated Calls to Action in strategic locations of your landing pages increase conversion rates. Notice in the examples below how simple, succinct and specific the Call to Action messages are. Notice the minimalist simplicity of Dropbox. It works for them. The Apple Watch provides an elegant and enticing (profitable) insurance upsell easily skipped at the consumer’s choice.