In this session, Michel will discuss:

• The main traffic channels that truly move the needle
• What actually converts visitors (hint: it’s not just “more leads”)
• How to align usability, messaging, and strategy into one clear system

If you care about conversion, clarity, and real growth — this is worth the watch. To schedule a 30 min FREE consultation with Michel to create your own marketing strategy, email her at michel@cuecamp.com.

Watch the Webinar Recording:

View Slides:

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Why You Should Check It Out

• Link-Building Strategies: Proven techniques for acquiring quality backlinks that enhance your site’s authority and increase organic search visibility.
• Keyword Research: How to identify the best keywords for your business and incorporate them effectively into your content to drive targeted traffic.
• On-Page Optimization: The essentials of SEO, including on-page SEO and optimizing titles, meta descriptions, headers, and images to improve search engine rankings.

About the Speaker: Michel Ann Sharritt

Cue Camp, Founder and Vice President

Michel Sharritt, a leader in playability and usability, has over a decade of experience helping Fortune 100/500 companies like Microsoft, Disney, and Sony create engaging, accessible, and successful products. An expert in game design and user experience, Michel has presented globally and published extensively on usability, accessibility, and design methodologies.

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It’s important to know the fundamentals of Google’s search ranking system before we get into the strategies. At its most basic, Google searches the web for all the different pages available, then picks the ones it thinks best fit the particular search being asked. When it does this, it tries to evaluate not just the content of the page but also the reasons why that content might be a good fit. Five different “conversational” factors guide this evaluation. The first is relevance: Does the content match the searching user’s intent? Next is quality: Is the content informative, engaging, and well-structured? Then comes authority: How credible is the site? Often, this is determined by how many other trustworthy sites link to it. After that comes user experience: Is the site easy to use, mobile-friendly, and fast? And finally, what about engagement metrics: Are users interacting with this site in a way that suggests it’s a good fit for what they’re searching for? Focusing on these factors can give your site a better shot at showing up higher in Google search results.

How to Outrank Competitors: An SEO Primer

At the core of a prosperous digital marketing strategy, there must be Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. This is primer SEO for you:

1. Research Your Keywords: Unearth the search terms your ideal customers are using and blend them seamlessly into your content.
2. On-Page SEO: Dial in title tags, meta descriptions, headers, and images. More important, ensure that your content has a clear hierarchy and is effortlessly scannable for our friends at Google as well as for your humans.
3. Quality Content: Write something for heaven’s sake. Make it worthwhile, make it useful, make it easy to digest, and, for the love of all that is good, make it engaging.

Link Building Strategies

Links pointing to your content from respectable websites show Google that your content is high quality and trustworthy. Here are some ways to get those links pointing back to your website to help you outrank competitors:

1. Write for Other Blogs: Find reputable blogs in your industry. Write articles for them. Include a link back to your site in the article.
2. Work with Other Businesses: Find businesses in your industry or a related one to partner with. Work with them to cross-promote your businesses.
3. Research: Conduct studies that are important to your industry. Write articles about those studies. Do so in a way that makes them sound interesting and in a way that also makes them shareable.

User Experience and Perception

Your search rankings can be substantially affected—positively or negatively—by how users perceive your site. There are several ways to make a perceivable impact on how users interact with your website, and thus how they perceive it. First, see to it that your website is equally responsive on both desktop and mobile devices, as more and more people are using smartphones to access the internet. Second, check to ensure that your site is loading quickly. A variety of tools exist to help you identify issues and fix them, if any are found. Finally, have a look at your site from the perspective of a first-time user and ask yourself whether or not navigating through your content is a straightforward experience.

Local Search & Google My Business

It is vital for local businesses to optimize their websites for local search so that they can be found by prospective customers in their area. Here are several steps you can take:

1. Google My Business: Your listing can be a local search engine. Ensuring its optimization can push your appearance in local search results.
2. Local Keyword Usage: Google is smart but not necessarily as smart as your content. You need to signal to it that your content is about something locally relevant.
3. Customer Reviews: Good reviews don’t just help your business look good; they also can help place your business in local search results.

Social Media Tips

Although social media signals might not have a direct effect on SEO, these can drive significant traffic to a website and boost brand visibility. Making the most of social media is a worthwhile endeavor, and it’s possible by doing these three things:

1. Be Engaging: Share not just your content but also engage with your audience, and even have conversations with them. For some brands, it might make sense to only be present on one or two platforms. For others, six might be too many and one might be just right.
2. Be Promotional: Use ads to target specific, fairly narrowed-down demographic segments.
3. Be Collaborative: With whom and with what can you be a part of? Use your platforms to engage with the potential audience on the other end of your collaborators.

At CueCamp, our focus is on expanding the online visibility of businesses such as yours. We accomplish this, in part, through custom website design, but primarily, we engage in a much more detailed and exhaustive practice known as SEO. SEO—that is, Search Engine Optimization—can be thought of as a (more or less) scientific process. It involves (again, more or less) some fairly straightforward math and, more often than not, some “hidden” multipliers that many of your competitors either don’t know about or, if they do, aren’t using to their fullest advantage.

Prevent your competitors from getting all the attention. Reach out to Michel Sharritt at michel@cuecamp.com to set up your no-cost consultation. We’ll get you started on the path to much better placement in Google search results and much greater visibility online.

The post How Can You Outrank Competitors in Google Search Results? appeared first on CueCamp.

1. Find Your Best-Selling Products

First, conduct a bit of research on your business to find out what sells the best. You may already know this intuitively, but research into actual sales figures and profit margins will be of use. In certain cases, great-selling products or services may not generate income for your business due to slim profit margins. Alternatively, you may wish to prioritize other products / services with less traffic, but higher margins.

Additionally, consult your website and social media analytics to see what actually interests your audience. Particular landing pages or social media posts may receive more traffic than you realize, which is worth noting. You might start by examining a subset of products or services, focusing efforts to generate powerful landing pages that convert. Certain businesses (such as an e-commerce clothing store) may have hundreds of products with a different type of sales cycle. Understanding how and why your customers buy from you will help in the design of good landing pages. For example, an online clothing store with $20 items will have a shorter sales cycle than stores selling $1000+ items.

Finally, to help refine your list, a business SWOT analysis can highlight both successful and problematic areas to change. A SWOT analysis looks at Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats: serving as a lens to examine your business. A brief analysis of these four categories reveals products or services that need attention and a marketing redesign. In addition, opportunities for growth are typically revealed that can help improve your digital marketing efforts.

2. Design Attention-Grabbing Landing Pages

Following the analysis done in step 1, you can focus on designing landing pages that grab the attention of your customers. The SWOT analysis (from step 1) will clarify the unique value proposition of your business. Leveraging what sets you apart from your competitors will dramatically improve your marketing. Drawing the attention of your clients to these unique properties will show why they should buy your product or service. Focusing on what it can do for clients (from their perspective) supplies a compelling reason to make a purchase. Be sure to present a powerful, unique value proposition.

For example, when Apple, Inc. releases a new product, they market it clearly with their users in mind. Rather than listing out technical specs first, Apple makes use of vibrant imagery from actual product usage, showing us what the product can do. For instance, iPhone marketing will headline how it is capable of low-light photography, and show crisp images taken in low-light. These may include someone blowing out birthday candles in the dark or sitting around a campfire at night. These contextual examples help people imagine what owning the new product might be like. Concrete examples show users what they can do themselves with the product.

Other phone manufacturers may try to tout superior hardware in their product (such as the camera’s F-stop or shutter speed; or more powerful hardware specifications). However, Apple creates a compelling reason to buy through examples of use, using storytelling and vibrant imagery. Finally, a clear call-to-action is presented: a button to ‘buy’ the product. This enables users to enjoy the described benefits of ownership, as conveyed by their marketing and storytelling.

3. Create a Powerful Call-to-Action for Lead Generation

A good strategy for designing landing pages is to place yourself in the shoes of a typical customer. Make sure that marketing content speaks to your customer’s goals and desires. Do not communicate from your own perspective. Tell a story or show an example of a client using the product or service to communicate from their perspective. Rather than starting with what you offer, addresses how you meet their wants and needs first. This helps prospective clients imagine themselves using your product or service while raising social capital.

Once you’ve created compelling landing pages for your top products or services, what can you do to raise conversion rates? Analyzing your marketing for clear calls to action will shed light on whether you are compelling your audience to take further action. Frequently, we want customers to make a purchase. However, most business models and sales cycles are not this straightforward. Often, businesses want their prospects to ‘take the next step’ and reach out. This may be requesting users to send a message or call the business. If this is the case, the call-to-action should be as straightforward and simple as possible.

What is the End Goal for Lead Generation?

For each landing page, decide on the best ‘next step’ for your sales cycle and for lead generation. Then, focus on making that process as simple as possible. In other words, analyze the landing page at a macro and micro level to be sure the process is easy. Want users to reach out? If so, a short form at the bottom of the page may be best for lead generation. Asking users to fill out a long form will probably cause many of them to fall off the bandwagon. Too many form fields can cause users to question why so much of their personal information is needed. Or it may simply annoy them by having to spend too much time filling out the form.

To conclude, this step should focus on compelling your prospects to act and making that action as easy as possible. Analyzing the user experience (UX) of the landing page is an excellent way to see what needs improvement. Streamlining your landing page UX and fixing issues will result in better lead generation. Business processes might be considered as well, including how transactions are managed. If users fill out a form, who gets it? Integrating forms with a CRM tool (software for customer-relationship management) could be a smart decision. A good place to start might be with a free UX audit from CueCamp.

4. Analyze & Create Resources of Interest

Take a multi-pronged approach to your digital marketing and create interest by offering resources to potential customers. Using the list generated in step 1, think about any resources that might help your customers engage with your business. For instance, a marketing company might realize that their audience often wants to learn about email marketing basics. In this example, creating a short guide as a downloadable PDF will capture prospects. Asking users to fill out a short form (name, company, email address) will capture leads for future prospecting.

Downloadable guides, e-books, blog posts, interactive workshops, and how-to videos are a handful of resources that you can use to generate interest. These efforts support a digital marketing strategy that makes an effective use of your website as a lead generation machine.

5. Newsletters and Social Media Posts

A monthly newsletter with valuable information or discounts may be a way to stay connected with customers, without overwhelming them with too many messages. A proper balance of touchpoints, with high quality information, is key. Email newsletters can offer resources of interest, upcoming sales, or industry news. In cases, segmenting your email marketing list will allow more personalized, customized email marketing to your audience. For instance, if you own an online clothing store, emails might be personalized based on gender, shopping habits, or other interests. As shown above, emails can be sent to customers that did not complete their purchase with an incentive to do so. An analysis of your marketing strategy and business objectives will clarify the type of resources you can offer for the highest impact.

Similarly, social media can be an effective way to draw people to engage with your brand. Like newsletters, a suitable amount of content for your business will help generate quality conversions. Posting low-quality content daily can overwhelm those following your brand, causing users to unfollow you on social media. Alternatively, posting too infrequently can cause a loss of interest. Analyzing your business objectives and designing a social media strategy to create a buzz for your business will draw prospective clients to your website. Additionally, hashtag research can separate your audience by interest, demographics, and location: enabling you to deliver personalized content to their social media feed.

6. Use Paid Ads & SEO for Lead Generation

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is concerned with optimizing landing pages (and websites) to rank highly on Google search. According to Google, the first five organic search results capture over 67% of all clicks. If your website ranks below the first page or search results, SEO can help improve your search rank to capture more traffic, which leads to more sales. Further, SEO drives 1000%+ more traffic than organic social media, according to BrightEdge. Optimizing your website for keywords of high relevancy has a drastic impact on the traffic driven to your business website from search engines like Google.

The steps outlined above support an overall content marketing strategy, which aims to drive quality traffic to your website and drive business growth. Besides organic search rank, you can place ads on Google to get to the top of search results. Likewise, social media ads on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn will generate prospects and drive traffic to your website. Enabling retargeting / remarketing on your paid ads will push ads to users that previously interacted with your brand. Retargeting users is based on their analytics data. These users are more likely to convert based on their earlier interest in your brand.

Summary

Digital marketing efforts are driven by both quantity and quality. Focusing on both the quality (your website / landing page user-experience) and quantity of leads (your inbound marketing efforts) will generate success. To make your website a lead generation machine, the six steps described in this article will help you reach that goal.

Incorporating a multi-pronged marketing approach across social media, search engines, and paid ads will drive new prospects to your website. What happens once they reach your landing page is up to you, and the user experience provided on your website. For a user experience analysis of your website, you can request a free audit from CueCamp.

Depending on your business, a range of marketing touch points are needed before a prospect becomes a qualified sales lead. When possible, personalized content of high relevancy is more likely to convert a prospect. High-quality content, delivered on a regular cadence, results in a website that will engage your prospects. Crafting a content marketing strategy to achieve this goal will turn your website into a lead generation machine.

Written by: Matt Sharritt, Ph.D., Founder, CueCamp

The post 6 Easy Steps That Will Make Your Website a Lead Generation Machine appeared first on CueCamp.

User-friendly Experience + Simplified Buying Journey = More Sales

For the business owner, a well-designed e-commerce platform allows them to run their business easily, and can help streamline daily operations and customer service calls. Following are some tips and best practices to follow to help grow both organic traffic and sales conversions.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and UX

User Experience and SEO are critical components of any e-commerce site, especially as industry verticals are becoming more competitive. Digital advertising prices continue to rise and generating organic traffic is essential. In addition, cross-functional expertise is required to build a website that has good UX and SEO, as these fields continue to overlap. Google algorithms are becoming better at reading page content, placing priority on well-designed content that is not artificial. Prior black-hat tactics to raise search rank, like loading page footers with keyword-dense text, are now causing page ranks in search engines (like Google or Bing) to drop. Driving organic traffic can feel daunting and will take time, but will pay-off in the end with good SEO practices.

Website Sitemap

Part of good UX and SEO involves a well-designed sitemap. A sitemap reflects the website page and navigation structure, and hierarchically organizes website content. Adding a sitemap to Google Search Console is important for any e-commerce site, so that search engines crawl and understand product information. Google will be notified to any changes that you make to your site, which should happen on a frequent basis so content does not become stale. A sitemap not only makes the new content you post discovered quickly by search engines, but is reflected in the website navigation to users (helping tell them about the content on your website).

Simplify Page Content (and Clutter)

Clear, simple to understand content can raise engagement with your audience. In many instances, “less is more” – as said by Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, a German-American architect that pioneered the minimalist movement. Your website visitors appreciate you communicating your message in a simple, yet efficient manner.

Similar to a cluttered advertisement, websites with distracting content, too much text, or an unclear message will lose their effectiveness. Over time, more and more things fight for our attention, and the average user has a shorter attention span. Users are willing to spend less time figuring out what you’re trying to get across, so get the job done with simple, clear messaging on your website. Design each page using proper keyword research and ensure landing pages have a clear engagement goal in mind so that your content has a purpose.

Optimizing Website Structure and User Journey

Supporting the intentions of website visitors is critical to raising conversion rates. Whether the goal is to sell a product or communicate an important piece of information, users should be able to fulfill their needs as efficiently as possible when using your website. If a product is difficult to find or a message becomes muddled, conversion rates will fall.

Part of optimizing the user experience (UX) of a website is to ensure that different types of users (personas) are able to achieve their goals efficiently: whether it be completing an action or finding information. A well-designed navigation structure will help the user journey, so that users can find what they want in the least amount of clicks (and with less confusion along the way).

Make Sure Your Site is Responsive

More people are becoming accustomed to purchasing groceries, clothing, home décor, and vehicles in the comfort of their homes. According to Forbes, Cyber Week had 62% of traffic coming from mobile in 2018, and fifteen percent of orders of were placed on mobile phones over the Thanksgiving holiday. Other sources place over 60% of website visitors (and climbing) using a mobile device like a phone or tablet. With this in mind, websites need to use a responsive design to be sure that content is optimized for mobile devices. The lack of an intuitive UX can result in user frustration, causing visitors to leave before completing a purchase on a website.

Website speed

Website performance contributes heavily to page rank and SEO, as well as usability. Research by Google describes how sites appearing on page one of Google display content in 1.19 seconds on average, while those on page two display primary content in 1.29 seconds. Some tools that can help you gauge and improve your website speed are Website Grader by HubSpot, Google PageSpeed Insights, and Pingdom Website Speed Test.

SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate

An SSL certificate authenticates your website to encrypt data that is being transferred from a website to users. SSL certificates ensure that a website is secure when visitors make purchases, which is important is the growing age of e-commerce. An SSL certificate encrypts sensitive user data, such as personal bank information, phone numbers and addresses.

Google Chrome, the most-used browser, has begun notifying users when a website is not fully secured with an SSL certificate. Fully encrypting data using SSL will provide users the best, most secure experience: ensuring that sensitive data is transmitted securely between the browser and web server. In a world where data breaches and security are becoming commonplace, users will trust and show loyalty to brands that value their privacy and sensitive information: highlighting the need for SSL certificates on websites.

Conclusion

Optimizing your website has a powerful effect on your marketing effectiveness, as well as your bottom line. Increasing conversions on your website, whether serving a goal of purchasing products or communicating information about your business (in a clear, efficient manner) will attract new customers and build loyalty. By optimizing the user journey for your website, different types of users can be served in a more effective manner.

The skill sets involved in designing a website continue to broaden and overlap. Experts in development, graphic design, SEO, UX, marketing and content writing need to know how their design decisions impact other areas of design. For example, designing a page around a keyword (SEO) impacts the website structure (UX), written content, and image content on the page (which can also impact website speed). A working knowledge of these fields is required to balance design decision trade-offs to make websites more effective, and this expertise can yield powerful improvements. In many instances, a simple analysis of a website by an expert can present some low-hanging fruit, which can have a huge impact on results.

To gauge how your website currently measures up, and identify some low-hanging fruit that can improve your website, request a free website marketing analysis from CueCamp. This report is in video form, generated by CueCamp’s team of experts to show the user-friendliness and marketing effectiveness of your website. Start out on the right foot, and reach out today.

Authors: Shannon Olear & Matt Sharritt, Ph.D. (CueCamp)

The post Boost Store Profits: E-commerce Experience Optimization appeared first on CueCamp.

Visual / Content Trends

Clean-lines and simple designs are still being used across several industries, but the use of shapes in web designs will be used more in the future. From a design perspective, this will help draw a consumer’s attention, as it is unexpected and differentiates the brand, given typical design aesthetics we are used to seeing. In the coming year, a rise in animated content, bold colors and fonts, and video will dominate website marketing trends.

Bold Colors & Serif Fonts

Bold colors are on the palette: offering marketers a way to brand their company in a way that sticks out to consumers.

Large, chunky fonts seen in decades past are resurfacing, providing a way for marketers to differentiate themselves and their brand. Serifs, or decorative stroke that finishes off a letter, are trending upwards in web marketing. As screen resolutions rise across mobile devices and desktop screens, serif fonts are becoming more popular. Sans-serif (no serifs) fonts were the trend of years past when screen resolutions were not as high, and these fonts looked better on lower-resolution displays (making them cleaner and easier to read).

Animation / 3D View

Animations on your homepage create visual interest that can attract and engage consumers. Besides the resurgence of animated gifs, micro-animations will continue to grow in importance: especially for e-commerce websites and the fashion and décor industries. For example, consumers may want to see a 360 degree view of clothing, jewelry, or home décor. Consumers want to see the entire look of a piece they are buying. Augmented reality apps are on the rise, allowing users to visually see paint colors, furniture or other items placed in their home by overlaying the product using a smartphone and its camera.

Raising Engagement with Video

We know that everyone’s attention span is directed towards animated visuals and video, as animation is a great way to capture attention. Videos provide a source of information and guidance that lead to higher conversion when done appropriately. Video content needs to be part of your marketing strategy in order to capture consumer’s attention, while providing rich, engaging content. Typically, less than one-minute videos are recommended across both website and social channels to get a message across efficiently.

Security and Performance Metrics

Data Security

Google Chrome, the most-used browser, will notify users when a website is not secured with an SSL certificate. These requirements will continue to tighten, notifying users when they visit a website that is not fully secured. Just having an SSL certificate is no longer enough – all resources on a web page (images, form data, etc.) need to be transmitted securely in order to pass muster. Fully encrypting data using SSL will provide users the best, most secure experience: ensuring that sensitive data is transmitted securely between the browser and web server.

If you have a website or plan to launch one soon, be sure that every page on your website is secured using SSL. Not securing your website will not only negatively impact the user experience, but will also lower search rankings for the website. In this day and age, consumers are concerned about privacy issues. Maintaining a secure site is important so that consumers feel that they can browse and purchase items from your site without compromising their privacy. According to CA Technologies, 86% of those surveyed value security over convenience when purchasing a product. 78% of those interviewed felt that high security of their personal information was of primary concern. Privacy is a requirement for customer loyalty: making security of critical importance.

Mobile-First Design

Mobile visitors have already surpassed desktop visitors across the web, making it even more important for your website to be responsive: available to users on both platforms. Responsive design allows content to scale and lay-out differently based upon the size of the screen in which the content is being viewed. This trend towards mobile will continue , making a mobile-optimized website a necessity.

Website Performance / Speed

These two items are the most important when it comes to SEO, page ranking and usability. Research provided by Google earlier this year outlined that sites that appear on page one of Google display their primary content in 1.19 seconds on average, while those on page two display primary content in 1.29 seconds.

Some tools that can help you gauge your website speed are Website Grader by HubSpot (shown above), Google PageSpeed Insights, and Pingdom Website Speed Test.

Search Trends

As previously mentioned, website speed is important not only for the user experience, but also for search rankings. Besides page speed, voice search, and a trend towards user-friendly content, will be seen as search algorithms are better able to process human language.

Voice Search

Voice Search will see an increased share of search queries on search engines such as Google. With the increased usage of bots and intelligent devices in the home, people will use technologies like Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant to look up information. This preference will raise the rates of search queries using more natural language, as opposed to keywords. For example, a traditional search for “Chicago weather” might be replaced with “What is the current weather in Chicago?”, and could yield different search results depending on the algorithm and website SEO.

ComScore put out a study in 2019 that half of all online searches will be voice-based by 2020. Anticipate that Google will be changing with the times and changing their search algorithms, which will impact your search campaign strategies that you go to market with today.

Search Algorithm Changes

Google search algorithm changes can have a major impact on the SEO of websites, and the ranking achieved on Google. In the past, websites would focus on adding as many keywords as possible (for example, listing towns in a page footer) to attract as much traffic as possible. However, Google search algorithms are getting better and better at ‘reading’ content in a fashion similar to users, and interpreting what your content actually says. This reinforces good copywriting practices, and creates a better user experience (UX) for your users.

Conclusion

With a new decade upon us, we will see the rise of new technologies and a continuation of some existing trends within digital marketing. Unfortunately, the days are gone where a sole webmaster can handle the wide variety of expertise involved in creating a well-designed website. A combination of overlapping skills is required: in addition to programming, graphic design, SEO, security, social media marketing, content writing and user-experience expertise is needed.

To gauge how your website currently measures up, a great way to measure its effectiveness is to request a free usability analysis from CueCamp. This report is in video form, generated by CueCamp’s team of experts to show the user-friendliness and marketing effectiveness of your website. Start out on the right foot, and reach out today.

Authors: Shannon Olear and Matt Sharritt, Ph.D. (CueCamp)

The post Website Trends: Marketing Opportunities to Maximize Growth appeared first on CueCamp.

What happens when you visit a site like this? In most cases, you end up leaving the site within a few seconds of arrival. The frustration makes it unbearable to stay on the website. However, websites like this exist because web designers made typical usability or web design mistakes.

So far this year, CueCamp has conducted over 1500 website reviews. Our team sees several common usability mistakes made time and again. We want to share with you a short list of the top errors we see in hopes that you can learn from others mistakes.

Web Design Mistakes

#1: Too Much Stuff

Imagine a new user arriving on your website for the first time, and consider the first impression they’ll get when visiting the homepage. The homepage should contain a few lines of content telling users what the site is all about. Visitors who can’t readily understand the purpose of your website within a few seconds will leave.

One of the biggest mistakes we see is cramming way too much information above the fold. Websites with tons of images, text, ads, and animations will take a while to load, and they’ll confuse your visitors. Your website will look crowded and confusing to users: so avoid busy designs and keep it simple.

#2: No Style Guide

The confused website is one which features a variety of typefaces, images, colors, and themes, none of which relate to each other. This occurs for a number of reasons. It can happen when you don’t have a good handle on your branding. You can easily fall into this trap when you like too many design templates and want to use them all. It can also happen when you’re trying to convey too many ideas at once. When designing a website, choose one theme, one logo, and one typeface. Create a style guide and stay with it across all aspects of your website.

#3: Inconsistent Layout

Consistency is one of the most powerful usability principles. When things always behave the same, users don’t have to worry (or spend valuable resources thinking) about what will happen. This allows them to focus on your content instead. Users should know what to expect based on earlier experience. For example, each internal page of your website should maintain the same location of the main menu on each page, and the content of the main menu navigation should be kept consistent.

Our team runs into this issue frequently. We visit a few internal pages and see that the main menu might move from the top of the page to the left side of the page, or the page content might move to a different location. This confuses users by forcing them to reorient themselves, finding where items are now located on each page. This is distracting attention away from the page content itself. Users expect common things on websites and expect to see those items on your website: such as a company logo and main navigation menu at the top of the page. Users form their expectations for your website based on what’s commonly found on sites all over the web. If you deviate far from common practices, your site can be harder to use and users may leave.

#4: No Call to Action

Your call to action is the gateway to your business. It guides your visitors to act: Click here! Get a coupon! Learn more about this product! Obviously, it’s very important that your call to action clearly tells visitors what they need to do to take the next step. There should be enough information that visitors know what they’re going to get from taking action, and what information they need to provide.

The content on your website should be written in a way that gives useful information while drawing the user to some call to action.  Make sure your call to action is concise and leads customers where you want them to go: allowing them to take the next step in engaging your business. The biggest key is to keep form-filling to a minimum and be sure to give users time to become familiar with the benefits offered before a call to action appears.

#5: No Contact Information

Hard to find contact information is one of the most common yet critical of the web design mistakes. When visitors decide to make a purchase or use your services, lead capturing is crucial. It’s imperative they have the necessary contact information as soon as they decide you’re the right company for them. If a visitor has to search through your site for contact information, he or she will likely get frustrated and leave. Your “Contact Us” page should always be just one click away, or your information should be at the bottom (footer) of every page.

From a marketing perspective, you want to make sure that users who visit your site can easily get in touch with you. Your social media outlets should be listed on your website with your contact information to lend credibility and build trust. Your contact info (address, phone, email, etc.) should be easily accessible, such as in the footer of each page.

How to Fix Your Web Design Mistakes

Try to audit your website by imagining yourself as a new user that has never before visited the website. Your website is a representation of you and your business. If you present a trustworthy online image on your website, you will struggle to gain new leads. By giving your users multiple ways to engage the business, you are giving users options to interact and building trust by showing you have nothing to hide.

Check in with us next week when we reveal the next 5 common usability web design mistakes that businesses frequently make on their websites. In the meantime, if you would like your website reviewed, please visit CueCamp and request your free marketing analysis video. You will receive a 5-10 minute video that analyzes the usability and marketing effectiveness of your website, delivered within 48 hours.

Written by: Michel Ann Sharritt
Posted by: CueCamp

The post Part 1: Are You Making the Biggest Web Design Mistakes on Your Company Website? appeared first on CueCamp.

HTTPS isn’t like other ranking factors. Implementing it requires complexity, risks, and costs. Webmasters balance this out with benefits that include increased security, better referral data, and a possible boost in rankings.

Google’s push for HTTPS adoption appears to be working. A recent Moz Poll found 24% of webmasters planning to make the switch.

SEO advantages of switching to HTTPS

In addition to the security offered (which we’ll discuss below), there are additional SEO benefits for marketers to take advantage of.

1. More referrer data

Whenever traffic passes from a secure site to a non-secure site, the referral data gets stripped away. This traffic shows up in your analytics report as ‘Direct.’ This is a problem because you don’t know where the traffic actually comes from.

If you use HTTP, traffic from sites like Hacker News shows up as ‘direct’, because Hacker News uses HTTPS.

Fortunately, there’s a simple solution: when traffic passes to an HTTPS site, the secure referral information is preserved. This holds true whether the original site uses HTTP or HTTPS.

As more and more sites make the switch, this becomes increasingly important.

2. HTTPS as a rankings boost

On one hand, Google has confirmed the ranking boost of HTTPS. On the other hand, with over 200 ranking, it’s likely you’ll find the effect of any ranking influence to remain quiet small.

In fact, a recent study by Search Metrics showed no detectable advantage to sites using HTTPS.

Like most ranking signals, it is very hard to isolate on its own.

In fact, don’t expect HTTPS to act as a silver bullet. If rankings are your only concern, there are likely dozens of things you can do that will have a bigger impact. Here are several:

14 SEO activities more impactful than HTTPS:

3. Security and privacy

Many people argue that HTTPS only provides an advantage if your site uses sensitive passwords. That’s not exactly true. Even regular boring content websites can benefit from SSL encryption.

HTTPS adds security in several ways:

• HTTPS verifies that the website is the one the server it is supposed to be talking to,
• Because HTTPS prevents tampering by 3rd parties, it stops Man-in-the-middle attacks, making your site more secure for visitors.
• HTTPS encrypts all communication, including URLs, which protects things like browsing history and credit card numbers.

My advice is this: Make the switch if doing so is reasonable for your business. Security and trust add to the small ranking gains, making it worth the effort if you can.

Challenges to overcome with HTTPS

1. Mistakes happen

Moving your entire site to HTTPS requires many moving parts. It’s easy to overlook important details.

• Did you block important URLs in robots.txt?
• Did you point your canonical tags at the wrong (HTTP) URL?
• Is your website causing browser bars to display warnings that frighten people away from your site? (Side note: That’s the very first article I wrote for SEOmoz!)

While rare, these problems do happen. Moz has spoken privately with webmasters who have seen both rankings and conversions plummet after implementing HTTPS.

In most cases it’s a simple fix, but beware the risk.

2. Speed issues

Because HTTPS requires extra communication “handshakes” between servers, it has the potential to slow down your website – especially on slower sites.

Add to this the fact that speed is itself a ranking factor, especially on mobile.

The good news is, if you follow best practices your site should be more than fast enough to handle HTTPS. New friendly technologies like SPDY offer you the opportunity to speed up your website more than ever before.

3. Costs

Many webmasters pay between $100-200 a year for SSL certificates. That’s a significant amount for small websites. It’s also a barrier that most spammers won’t bother with.

On the other hand, it’s completely possible to switch to HTTPS for free.

4. Not everything is ready for HTTPS

Sometimes, things don’t play well with HTTPS. Older web applications can have trouble with HTTPS URLs. (Fortunately, Moz updated Open Site Explorer just this year.)

If you run AdSense, you may see your earnings fall significantly, as Google will restrict your ads to those that are SSL-compliant.

Even Google’s own Webmaster Tools doesn’t yet support HTTPS migration. The world may be moving toward 100% SSL encryption, but in the meantime be prepared for growing pains.

Growing number of sites using HTTPS

Lots and lots of sites use HTTPS today, but most restrict usage to checkout and registration pages.

Very, very few sites use HTTPS sitewide.

According to the latest statistics from BuiltWith, only 4.2% of the top 10,000 websites redirect users to SSL/HTTPS by default. While that number appears small, the percentage drops to 1.9% for the top million sites.

This number is likely to increase in the very near future as more websites pursue adoption.

SEO and HTTPS best practices

This post talks about the SEO implications of switching to HTTPS. If you are looking for a technical guide, there are several we’d recommend:

• Moving Your Website to HTTPS / SSL
• Switch to HTTPS Now, For Free
• HTTPS for WordPress
• How to Deploy HTTPS Correctly

What type of SSL certificate works best?

Companies offer a myriad and confusing array of SSL certificates. The two primary ones to pay attention to are:

1. Standard Validation SSL – Standard level of validation. Typically cost between $0-$100.
2. Extended Validation SSL – Offers the highest level of validation and often costs between $100-500.

From a rankings point of view, it makes absolutely no difference what type of certificate you use. For now.

John Mueller of Google has stated that Google doesn’t care what kind of SSL certificate your website uses, but that may change in the future.

From both a security and user experience point of view, the type of certificate you choose can have an impact. Consider how different certificates alter how your website appears in the web browser address bar.

The green bar associated with extended certificates communicates trust, while the warning symbols associated with errors can cause worry with visitors.

SEO checklist to preserve your rankings

• Make sure every element of your website uses HTTPS, including widgets, java script, CSS files, images and your content delivery network.
• Use 301 redirects to point all HTTP URLs to HTTPS. This is a no-brainer to most SEOs, but you’d be surprised how often a 302 (temporary) redirect finds its way to the homepage by accident
• Make sure all canonical tags point to the HTTPS version of the URL.
• Use relative URLs whenever possible.
• Rewrite hard-coded internal links (as many as is possible) to point to HTTPS. This is superior to pointing to the HTTP version and relying on 301 redirects.
• Register the HTTPS version in both Google and Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Use the Fetch and Render function in Webmaster Tools to ensure Google can properly crawl and render your site.
• Update your sitemaps to reflect the new URLs. Submit the new sitemaps to Webmaster Tools. Leave your old (HTTP) sitemaps in place for 30 days so search engines can crawl and “process” your 301 redirects.
• Update your robots.txt file. Add your new sitemaps to the file. Make sure your robots.txt doesn’t block any important pages.
• If necessary, update your analytics tracking code. Most modern Google Analytics tracking snippets already handle HTTPS, but older code may need a second look.
• Implement HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS). This response header tells user agents to only access HTTPS pages even when directed to an HTTP page. This eliminates redirects, speeds up response time, and provides extra security.
• If you have a disavow file, be sure to transfer over any disavowed URLs into a duplicate file in your new Webmaster Tools profile.

Tips for FeedBurner and RSS

Many sites still use FeedBurner for RSS feeds. Unfortunately, Google stopped supporting it long ago and FeedBurner isn’t compatible with HTTPS.

If you use FeedBurner, you’ll need to migrate your RSS to an HTTPS-compatible service. If you’re technically competent you can do this yourself, or FeedPress has a very inexpensive RSS migration solution.

Migrating social share counts

When migrating to HTTPS, you often want to preserve you social share counts. These are the numbers that display in social share buttons.

These counts don’t impact your rankings (as far as we know) but they act as strong social proof, and it’s frustrating to migrate a page with thousands of tweets and likes only to see them reset to zeros.

In fact, some social networks will transfer the social counts through their APIs, but it may take weeks or months for them to show up correctly. Here’s a list of what does and doesn’t eventually transfer over:

• Facebook: Yes
• Twitter: No
• Google +1s: Yes
• Google shares: No
• LinkedIn: Yes
• Pinterest: No

If you want instant karma, Mike King wrote an excellent tutorial on how to preserve your social share counts by altering the code of your social buttons. We used this method on Moz when we migrated from SEOmoz in order to preserve the counts on our content.

Example button codes to preserve social shares (edit for your site):

<div class="fb-like" data-href="http://moz.com/blog/10-tools-for-creating-infographics-visualizations" data-send="false" data-layout="box_count" </div>

<a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-counturl="http://moz.com/blog/10-tools-for-creating-infographics-visualizations" data-url="https://moz.com/blog/10-tools-for-creating-infographics-visualizations" data-count="vertical" data-via="moz">Tweet</a>

<div class="g-plusone" data-size="tall" data-href="http://moz.com/blog/10-tools-for-creating-infographics-visualizations"></div>

Keep in mind: This only displays social shares from the URL you dictate. Because of this, it doesn’t update your counts with any new social shares. This works best with content like older blog posts that are likely not to get many new shares.

If you expect your content to continue to earn social activity, you may simply want to let the numbers update naturally over time.

Making the leap

Much of the web is now moving towards SSL encryption, and within a few years it may even become the default. SEOs, consultants and agencies that become experts know may be rewarded as the popularity of the protocol grows.

Will you make the switch to HTTPS?

Written by: Cyrus Shepard, Moz
Posted by: CueCamp

The post The Big List of SEO Tips and Tricks for Using HTTPS on Your Website appeared first on CueCamp.

Our view on social’s role in content marketing is threefold:

1. Social should play a key role in informing content strategy
2. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn and so on are all valid platforms that should be used as part of your content strategy
3. Social media (particularly Facebook) has a unique ability to amplify your content placed on other channels

Social Media’s Role In Informing Content Strategy

Social data is an absolute core component of creating a content strategy. From deciding what to create content about, to the weighting of that content within your overall plan, the data you can pull from social should be integral to your thoughts.

There’s a whole host of great tools you can use to get insight in-house, such as:

– Followerwonk: Followerwonk allows you to analyse any Twitter audience by age, location, and bio word clouds to give you a flavour of your audience. Combine this with the most influential followers and see who they are and what you do to give yourself a headstart

– Unmetric: Unmetric allows you to track your competitors social media content and get alerted when there are spikes in engagement levels, allowing you to react or use historical data to plan future activity

– Twtrland: this tool allows you to delve into the Twitter data of any profile to see their most influential tweets, top followers, and basic demographics

We use a mixture of these tools, and some of our own data sets to really understand a target audience in advance of planning content. Outputs from various tools are used as part of the idea creation process, such as this Followerwonk word cloud of the bios of @datifyuk followers for instance:

Or this Socialbakers data based on the top Facebook interests by market, and the age split of people interested in Bollywood in New Zealand:

When you start adding of all of this data into the mix you can start to take intelligent decisions about your content marketing to make it more effective and relevant for your target audience.

Use Social Platforms As Part Of Your Content Strategy

Many brands will see their content strategy as having two sides, on-page (website), and off-page (guest posting/outreach led). Social often gets missed as a crucial part in between. Not only can social help you identify who to outreach to, but should be used as a platform for your content to drive engagement with your brand.

Your Facebook or Twitter updates should form part of your overall content strategy, and tailoring your content across various channels with a focus on social will always be beneficial. In Moz’s recent search rankings factor survey the majority of search marketers surveyed felt that social signals, and in particular the overall influence of Google +1’s on rankings would continue to increase in the future, again showing why social channels should be integrated into your strategy now.

Regardless of which channel works best for you, having a presence across each is important, even if only to own your brand name and keep people aware of you across their chosen channels. Google Plus is a good example of this – the users numbers are high, but interaction levels generally low (outside of the digital marketing community!). However, due to the increased importance Google are likely to place on this as a ranking factor for your content and therefore your site it is crucial that you keep this channel burning with your social content even if only with a few updates a week of content amended from another platform such as Facebook.

Amplify Your Content

Where social really can benefit your content marketing efforts is in putting your content in front of new audiences that are highly relevant and ready to engage. Whether your social audience is big or small, with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn you can now amplify your content through native paid means to reach new audiences at a relatively low cost compared to other channels.  At Datify, we do this for nearly every piece of content we create to ensure that reach is good when our clients have invested.

What’s more, the targeting across all three of these channels is very detailed, with Facebook in particular having multiple targeting levels that can enable you to find your perfect audience in this environment. This can enable you to create an initial buzz around your content, or keep traffic sustained after the initial outreach push.

Being able to target people who engage in other topics in your niche, who are in the right location and the right age grouping is a great opportunity, and can be very cost effective if managed correctly.

Whilst Matt Cutts has denied Facebook and Twitter’s social sharing signals are included as major ranking factors, they are still important as part of your content marketing efforts. Driving increased traffic to the content you create not only generates social shares, but also has the impact of creating ‘earned’ links, brand interactions and the potential for new business.

Facebook is particularly strong for amplifying your content. By using Power Editor you can ensure that your content is only seen in relevant News Feeds of the exact type of person you want to be viewing your content.

Summary

In summary, don’t think of social media as a completely separate discipline to content marketing – in fact, don’t separate the two at all. Social media should be completely integrated into everything you do – from informing your overall strategy, to being included as a platform to think about, and to increasing the distribution of your content.

Embrace social, particularly the paid amplification piece, to ensure that you can drive content marketing success for your clients.

Written by: Ben Harper, socialmedia today
Posted by: CueCamp

The post The Role of Social Media in Your Content Marketing Strategy appeared first on CueCamp.

Moreover, “highly prototypical” sites – those with layouts commonly associated with sites of it’s category – with simple visual design were rated as the most beautiful across the board.

In other words, the study found the simpler the design, the better.

But why?

In this article, we’ll examine why things like cognitive fluency and visual information processing theory can play a critical role in simplifying your web design & how a simpler design could lead to more conversions.

We’ll also look at a few case studies of sites that simplified their design, and how it improved their conversion rate, as well as give a few pointers to simplify your own design.

What is a Prototypical Website?

If I said “furniture” what image pops up in your mind?  If you’re like 95% of people, you think of a chair. If I ask what color represents “boy” you think “blue”, girl = pink, car = sedan, bird = robin, etc.

Prototypicality is the basic mental image your brain creates to categorize everything you interact with. From furniture to websites, your brain has created a template for how things should look and feel.

Online, prototypicality breaks down into smaller categories. You have a different, but specific mental image for social networks, e-commerce sites, and blogs – and if any of those particular websites are missing something from your mental image,  you reject the site on conscious and subconscious levels.

If I said “Online clothing store for trendy 20-somethings” you might envision something like this:

image credit

This follows the “online clothing store” prototype so closely, that it shares many attributes with the wireframe for an online clothing store that sells hip-hop clothing.

image credit

Neither  lacks originality, and it’s unlikely they “stole” from each other. Instead they’re playing into what your basic expectations are of what an e-commerce site should be.

What do you Mean By Cognitive Fluency?

The basic idea behind cognitive fluency is that the brain prefers to think about things that are easy to think about.

That’s why you prefer visiting sites where you instinctively know where everything is at, and you know what actions you’re supposed to take.

“Fluency guides our thinking in situations where we have no idea that it is at work, and it affects us in any situation where we weigh information.” – Uxmatters.com

Cognitive fluency is an stems from another area of behavior known as The Mere Exposure Effect, which basically states that the more times you’re exposed to a stimulus, the more you prefer it.

image source

Again, the rules are the same online.

It’s “familiar” for blogs to have opt-ins on the right sidebar, or e-commerce sites to feature a large hi-resolution image with an attention grabbing headline & the company logo on the top left hand side of the screen.

If your visitors are conditioned to certain characteristics being the standard for a particular category of site, deviating from that could subconsciously put you in the “less beautiful” category.

Here are a handful of e-commerce sites. See if you notice any similarities.

Warning: Whatever you do, for the love of GOD, don’t take what I’m saying as “do what everyone else is doing.”  If you’re not careful, you could really hurt yourself that way.

It’s important to know what design choices are prototypical for a site in your category, but it’s more important to find evidence that supports those design choices resulting in some sort of lift.

A lot of designers make bad choices. Without doing the research, you could make them too.  For example, many e-commerce sites use automatic image sliders to display products, but study after study shows that automatic sliders tank conversions.

What Happens When You Meet Basic Expectations? – A Case Study

In the three images above, everything you’d expect from an ecommerce site is exactly where it’s supposed to be. Even if you’ve never been to the site, there’s inherent “credibility” to the design.

With a high level of fluency, a site will feel familiar enough that visitors don’t need spend mental effort scrutinizing and can instead focus on why they’re on your site in the first place.

When the experience is dis-fluent however, you feel it immediately. Take online tie retailer, Skinnyties.com, who didn’t really look like an e-commerce site until their redesign in October 2012.

Before:

After:

A few key changes that lead to huge results:

• Follows prototypical e-commerce layout themes
• Much more “open” with whitespace.
• Images feature a single product with high-resolution pictures & contrasting colors.

Check out the full case study on this particular redesign, as it shows what is truly possible when updating a site to “fit in” with current prototypical standards.

These are the results of the redesign are staggering for only 2.5 weeks after the launch:

The redesign itself, while pretty, isn’t doing anything groundbreaking. It plays exactly into the expectations of what a modern online clothing retailer should be. It’s “open”, responsive, and has a consistent design language across all of the product pages.

But when contrasted with the old site, it’s very clear that the lack of these common elements were preventing buyers from making purchases on the site.

What Visual Information Processing Has To Do With Site Complexity

In this joint study by Harvard, University of Michigan, and University of Colorado, researchers found strong mathematical correlations for “aesthetically pleasing” between different demographics – For example, participants with PhD’s did not like high colorful websites – but there were no guidelines that emerged for universal appeal.

The only thing that was universal was that the more visually complex a website was, the lower it’s visual appeal.

(Sidebar: if you wish to take the test, you can do it here)

Why Simple is Scientifically Easier To Process

The reason less “visually complex” websites are considered more beautiful is partly because low complexity websites don’t require the eyes and brain to physically work as hard to decode, store and process the information.

Watch this quick video about how the eye sends information to the brain for that to make more sense.

Basically, your retina converts visual information from the real world into electrical impulses. Those impulses are then routed through the appropriate photoreceptor cells to transmit the color and light information to the brain.

The more color and light variations on the page (visual complexity) the more work the eye has to do to send information to the brain.

“…the eye receives visual information and codes information into electric neural activity which is fed back to the brain where it is “stored” and “coded”. This information can be used by other parts of the brain relating to mental activities such as memory, perception and attention.” – Simplypsychology.org

Every Element Communicates Subtle Information

image source

This is why it’s important when designing a website to remember every element –typeography, logo, and color selection – communicates subtle information about the brand.

When these elements don’t do their job, the webmaster often compensates by adding unnecessary copy and/or images, thus adding to the visual complexity of the website, and detracting from the overall aesthetic.

Optimizing a page for visual information processing – specifically simplifying information’s journey from eye to brain – is about communicating as much as you can in as few elements as possible.

While that’s an article all on it’s own, consider MailChimp’s logo redesign as food for thought.

When they decided make the brand grow up, they didn’t add the usual “we’ve been doing email since 2001, 3 million people trust us, here’s why we’re awesome, blah blah blah”

Instead, they tightened up the writing, simplified the website – the top headline simply reads “Send Better Email” – and added an even simpler explainer animation of the core product.

Even though this was part of a bigger growth strategy, the results are still impressive, over a million new users have been added since June, when the new logo was first debuted.

 ”Working Memory” & The Holy Grail of Conversion

What all this simplicity is leading to is what happens once visual information finds it’s way to the brain.

According to the famous research of psychologist George A Miller of Princeton, the average adult brain is able to store between 5-9 “chunks” of information within in the short term, working memory.

Working memory is the part of your brain that temporarily stores and processes information in the course of a few seconds. It’s what allows you to focus attention, resist distractions, and most importantly, guides your decision making.

image source

Everything we’ve been talking about up to this point is to reduce the amount of “noise” that makes it’s way into the working memory.

On a “low complexity, highly prototypical website”, the 5-9 “chunks”  the working memory tries to process are things like guarantees, product descriptions, prices or offers. When the working memory can stay focused on fixing the problem, it will try and solve the problem as quickly as possible.

Deviation Causes Disengagement

When you deviate from a person’s  expectations – the price was higher than expected, the color scheme and symmetry were off, the site didn’t load fast enough, the photos weren’t high enough resolution – the working memory processes those disfluent “chunks” instead of what matters.

That’s because the working memory calls the long term memory to use what it already knows to perform the task. When the long term memory can’t aid in processing the information, flow is broken & the working memory disengages and moves on.

That’s why it’s vital you understand your visitor’s level of exposure – not just for sites in your category, but to websites in general -If you want to “hack” their working memory with design.

The blogs they read, the sites they shop on, their browser, age, gender & physical location, all hint at how  will impact their level of familiarity on first impression.

Conclusion

If the visitor can’t rely on their previous experience, they’re not thinking about how innovative your site is. They’re just left wondering why things aren’t where it’s “supposed to be.” Not the best frame of mind if you want them to buy stuff.

Bonus: 7 Things To Do When Planning A Simpler Site.

1. Research your audience and the sites they visit the most. Look for case studies on design changes from said sites & how those resulted in improvement is key areas.
2. Create a mashup of all those “working” components for your own site.
3. Obey the rules of cognitive fluency when you lay out your design. Put things where your visitors have grown accustomed to finding them.
4. Rely on your own colors, logo, and typeface to communicate clearly and subtly. Don’t add copy and/or images unless it communicates something your visitor actually cares about.
5. Keep it as simple as possible – one large image vs a bunch of little ones, one column, instead of three – utilize as much white space as possible.
6. Double check to make sure your site fits the public expectation in pricing, aesthetics, speed, etc.
7. Remember that “prototypical” doesn’t mean that every aspect of your site should fit that mold.

Don’t think of your site as some unique snowflake piece of art. Instead make it a composite of all the best stuff.

Your visitors will love you for it.

Written by: Tommy Walker, ConversionXL
Posted by: CueCamp

The post Why “Simple” Websites Are Scientifically Better appeared first on CueCamp.