January 2012 Archives

Written by Ron Jones

So you have a great website that is loaded with great content but is it not converting and most of your visitors leave your site within the first 60 seconds. If this is the situation you are in, you might have a site that isn't friendly enough to your users. In other words, it isn't easy to navigate and find information within your site. As you can see from the chart below, the more problems you have with usability, the more you will see your visitors slip away.






Website usability is a common concept among web designers. Successful designers understand the interaction with the site's users and then develop a site around that understanding to provide a compelling user experience. Have you ever been to a website that seemed to anticipate what you were looking for and provided you easy access to that information? This is a site that integrated usability best practices into the development of their site.

It is generally known that people visit your website with a specific task in mind. If they can't find a path that leads them to a solution within the first few seconds, they will leave just as quickly. So what can you do to fortify your website and fix usability issues you might have? I have compiled a list of tips and resources to help you enhance your site's usability.

Use Keyword Phrases That Your Audience Is Searching On

One of the first things site visitors look for are some visual clues that help them feel they have landed on a site that will help them solve their problem. Keyword research can be a formidable tool to help you understand which search phrases your target audience is using to find you.

Armed with your researched and targeted keywords, you should make sure they are prominently placed on the landing page. This will help your visitors feel they have landed on the right page. For instance, if a person searched on the phrase "budget cruise ships 2011" and landed on a page that had a heading "Your Guide to Budget Cruise Ship Vacations for 2011," do you think they will linger? Of course, because they will quickly recognize the same keyword they used in their search and feel comfortable spending more time looking around.

Consistent and Intuitive Site Navigation

People are impatient and hate learning new things. Look at your site navigation and see if it follows a normal browsing design. Sometimes we try to be too clever with our navigation to show off our creativity at the expense of good usability, which then confuses our visitors and keeps them from the content they are looking for.






I remember a few years ago renting a car and as I pulled up to the gate to check out, I couldn't find the button to roll down the window. Finally I had to open the door to communicate with the security person who was checking me out. They pointed out that the button for the window was on the middle console near the armrest. Who puts the window button there? Some people may ask the same kind of question when they get to your website. If you follow a normal navigational structure, people will intuitively know how to find information on your site. Try to get too creative and you may just be creating a barrier between your audience and the information they seek.

Here are some navigational elements to consider:

• Menus. Put menus where people expect them (either horizontally at the top or vertically on the left). Also, keep them in the same place on all pages.
• Main menu options. Limit the options for the main menu to no more than six. Too many options can confuse visitors. Make them simple and to the point.
• Home page. Should be a portal with limited information that can quickly point your users to the information they seek. There is no need to overload the home page with extra information about each topic of your site.
• Secondary content. Privacy policy, shopping carts, and sign-in should be separate from the main menu but still easy to find.
• User-friendly buttons. Should be ultra-easy to find and very meaningful to the visitor. It should help them quickly identify where they need to go.

These are just some of the basics. However, there are many more nuances that you should consider. I would suggest taking a look at Dr. Pete's page on Strategic Web Usability for some more great ideas.

Optimized Content Strategy

Content as you know is really what visitors are after in the first place. Your focus should be on mapping this content to your site structure to make it easy to find. Again, your home page isn't the place to put all of your content. It's the directory that contains simple and clear messages that lead the way to elaborate subpage content.



 Again, with keyword research, you can identify the most popular search terms, which also represent popular content. Then you can segment this content into meaningful categories. These categories represent subpages that you can populate with rich, quality content. For more information, you can see this column on "Steps to Building a Successful Site Architecture".

There are many aspects to building a site that is easy to navigate and provides compelling content that is easy to find. Things like site load time and forms that are easy to fill out.

See the full story at: www.clickz.com

For more information about website design company and web development company, just visit us at www.7strategy.com

Written by: Gregg Stewart

Small and large brands today often ask about the company website's relevance and importance. At one time, the website served as the foundation of all online marketing efforts. With the rise in importance of social platforms like Facebook, some now wonder: how important is the company website? Since Google Place Pages now dominate the top search positions, many also question whether they should abandon their SEO efforts aimed at elevating search positions for the website.

The website's role has changed - and it hinges on what stage of the purchase process, where and when, a consumer enters a site. Today, directional navigation and conversion optimization have become important. Customers and prospects take many differing paths to purchase, so a diversified, distributed, and integrated approach must be developed to maximize lead and sales volume.




For example, a consumer who has already decided she wants to purchase a widget from Acme Widgets may navigate to the site simply to find the closest location and store hours; we'd assign her to the "purchase" stage of the funnel. The most important thing for people like her is the store locator, access to local location pages, or Google Places. However, a consumer looking to compare Acme Widgets' new "left-handed smoke shifter" to Spacely Sprockets' "smoke diverter" is in the "comparison" stage and needs access to detailed product information, purchaser reviews, or shopping engines like NexTag. Now you start to see the pattern. The consumer's information needs have not changed; it is where the consumer is accessing the information that is important and more diversified.

The lesson? Now, more than ever, websites must become vessels of content that can be distributed across numerous platforms so that consumers working through the purchase process can access the information where they are seeking a personalized solution.

Building a Full Funnel Marketing Plan

Begin with an audit of all marketing and media vehicles that you are using. Much like building an editorial or messaging calendar, map your customers' information needs and label them by which stage in the sales/purchase process they cover. This exercise can be tricky because many marketing vehicles do not solely cover one purpose. For example, display advertising can be used as a top-of-the-funnel vehicle, serving to build "awareness" for your brand or business and retargeting can serve as a direct response "purchase" vehicle. In these cases, break down individual campaigns and discretely assign them to their main or primary purpose.

Once the campaigns and marketing elements are mapped, identify areas where you do not have content that addresses a particular stage in the purchase process. Keep in mind that each stage of the purchase process is important and works in an integrated fashion. I've had major national brands that were spending millions of marketing dollars on branding and "awareness" campaigns question why direct response vehicles like search and e-commerce shopping programs decreased in effectiveness when they paused their branding spending. It's difficult to assign a one-to-one relationship to the various funnel activities; e.g., a dollar in "branding" spend results in x dollars in purchases. All elements have an impact (positive or negative) and need to be stitched together in a comprehensive marketing plan and measurement program. Once this task is completed, you can get better insight into assigning attribution weights to the various elements. Now armed with your "funnel stage" audit, you can identify gaps and develop or redevelop content to cover these holes.

Back to your website. Understanding that consumers will access your site via numerous connections (paid listings, promotions, social platforms, etc.) and that these connections are now assigned to differing stages in the purchase process - are they joined to the correct website content based on their stage? One missed opportunity we see from most advertisers is the common practice of linking most or all content to the home page of their website, regardless of the specificity of the inbound link. In search marketing campaigns, the correct practice is "deep linking" or aligning landing content to the explicit keyword purpose or intent. For example, land a consumer in the e-commerce section if a keyword is combined with "buy" as part of the string or in the comparison section if the keyword string where "Brand A vs. Brand B."




Now back to your funnel audit, is your content in all the places where consumers seek out the differing purchase stage content? Having the website content tuned is good, but you need to ensure that you take a distributed approach so the content also exists where consumers are interacting with it. Conduct an advertising, business profile, and listing reach audit to make sure you have prioritized their most popular access points and that the content is aligned to their purchase stage. An example here is that a business profile of a comparison directory such as Yelp should contain lower funnel comparison and perhaps pricing information and be joined directly to purchase points (telephone, online purchase form, etc.) versus your Chamber of Commerce listing, which should contain more generalized content about your brand, years in business, etc., to establish credibility.

So is the website dead as a marketing method? No, but a website is not the sole content location that consumers use when making purchase decisions. A diversified, distributed, and integrated plan that takes advantage of the entire purchase funnel is the best way to go. Full funnel marketing is hard and detail oriented. But once its lessons are unlocked, the spoils of cost-effective sales leads are the reward.

See the full story at: www.clickz.com

For more information about seo services and internet marketing company, just visit us at www.7strategy.com

Written by: Ron Jones

I have come across many website development projects that seem to focus too much on the visual aspects of their website before they put any thought into the structure and information flow. By just inserting information design, sometimes called information architecture at the beginning of your process, you can dramatically change your website's performance. The benefits of a successful site architecture will not only increase visitor engagement but it will help you attract more of the right visitors. This process will also lead to higher conversions.

Step 1 - Identify Keywords

This first step of identifying high-performing keywords is essential if you wish to drive the right traffic to your site. Take the time to perform a thorough keyword research study from the beginning. It's a given that you will be using branded keywords on your site, but more importantly look for keywords that your target audience might use to find you. Use a couple of keyword research tools like Keyword Discovery, WordStream, or Wordtracker, along with the Google Keyword Tool to help you gather data on each keyword. Some things to look for and determine are:

Relevancy. How relevant are the keywords to your business and do you have (or will have) relevant content on your site for that keyword?

Specific or long-tail keywords. Very specific search phrases will attract people who are toward the end of their buying cycle and who are ready to convert. For instance, if someone uses the search query "laser printer," that would suggest they are beginning their research process and haven't decided on one yet. On the other hand, if they search using the term "HP Laserjet PRO P1102," that would suggest they know what they want and are ready to buy.

Competition. Find out how competitive the keywords are. Highly competitive keywords will be harder to rank for and may cost more to use.

Search volume. Keywords that have a high search volume represent a popular search term that many people are likely to use. Compare similar terms and see which is the most popular.

As you go through a keyword research study, you will learn more about potential visitors, what they might be looking for, and their wants and needs.


Step 2 - Map the Keyword Space

Categories will emerge from the keyword research, identifying different subsets of your products or services, or information that your potential customers would find useful. Those keyword groupings or categories will help you in identifying relevant pages of content you will want to build into your structure.

As you map the keywords you plan to use to relevant landing pages, you create a fluid connection to content that your visitors are likely to be looking for. It also helps you to perform a kind of gap analysis to identify subpages you might have missed.


Step 3 - Develop Your Site Architecture

The next step is to build out the architecture of your site. Most people refer to this as building a site map. A site map is basically a hierarchical representation of your site and all of its levels and pages. As you mapped your keywords into logical categories, you have already started this process. Continue to build out the rest of the site structure and make sure you include all of the information your target audience and each persona may be searching for.

Richard Baxter presents some very interesting arguments about how deep your site map should go. He makes a case that a flatter site architecture will be best for usability since it will take less clicks to get to the deepest level. A very good tip to consider as you build out the structure of your site.

Step 4 - Wireframe Prototyping

Now that you have a solid structure that outlines your site's content that is mapped to relevant keywords, you should start to develop your wireframe for each page. A wireframe is a simple representation of the content and navigation for a page on your site. It is not a sitemap. It takes each page on the sitemap and blocks out the placement of content and navigation as seen below.

If you wish to take this a step further, then you can convert your wireframe into a "clickable prototype," which is a website that incorporates the wireframe with clickable navigation and links to get a feel for how the website will behave and operate.

This is a good best practice, especially for large sites to work out the information flow and usability issues. You can even conduct user testing with a clickable prototype to learn where the problem areas might be before you start programming and coding the site. There are many tools to help you with this process. One that I have used is ProtoShare. It allows you to develop a sitemap, wireframe, and clickable prototype in the cloud and allow your team to work on these elements in an online collaborative environment.

Step 5 - Content Development

The final step is to build into the wireframe the actual content for each page. To bring this full circle, you should make sure the content uses the keywords that you have mapped for each page. Use the keywords in the body copy, text links, video and image tags, etc. This is all a part of SEObest practices. But, more importantly, it bridges the searcher expectation to relevant content on your site. So when your visitors arrive they will feel they have landed at the right place. As a result, you will find that you have more engaged visitors that will be more likely to convert.

Once this process is done, you should plan to add a visual skin to the site that is in harmony with your logo and other branding elements. A mistake many people make is to begin their process with the visual elements first as they design their home page. It is best to look at your site holistically and work out the information flow ahead of time.

I have used this simple process over the past 12 years with a tremendous amount of success. It will help you get into the minds of your audience and anticipate their needs. When they finally land on your site, they will feel right at home since you have taken the time to lay out the information just for them. They will reward you with higher conversions, lower bounce rates, and undoubtedly word-of-mouth praise through social media channels. A win-win for all involved.

See the full story at: www.clickz.com

For more information about seo services, web development companyand website design company, just visit us at www.7strategy.com