Big website strategy mistakes by small businesses

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Form follows function is a principle that the shape of a building, a product, or even a website  should be fundamentally based upon its intended function or purpose.

To many small businesses rush to launch a new website without following the path of this principle, and the result can be a bad website that is damaging to the to the growth of the business. Worse yet, a website you’ve invested a few thousands dollars that doesn’t deliver against business expectations, or ROI.

For any entrepreneur or business owners,  the website should be at the core of the business.  Outlining a website strategy that aims to enhance the customer experience to shift brand preference, generate demand, convert top-of-funnel leads or pipeline acceleration, or even direct online purchases, must align to the over-arching business objectives.

Thus the principle of form following function needs should be rooted at the foundation of your new website. A beautiful website design, great aesthetics and minimal utility will only result in the website to become that shiny new object that makes the business owners smile, but fails with the who it matters most – customers.

A website designer with a customer-centric and UX approach to design will help you do just that, while a bad website designer will cost you a fortune and derail the market potential your website can drive for your business.

Before you partner with a new website designer, or reconsider how your website should perform for your business, we want to share the following insightful tips that we’ve found are some of the most common website mistakes small businesses make:

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10 web designer tips for UX and mobile design

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User experience (UX) in almost any industry website is primarily about enhancing the user (prospect, lead or customers) journey and experience, through to your ideal goal.

Whether that be enhancing engagement, purchase, clicks, content consumption, etc., in the end any UX web designers goal is to reduce the friction to enhance the users experience. Read more

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Impact of SEO on Google’s New Privacy

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Recently Google announced they’re would be making Search more secure. Secure in lament sense means rather than searching google’s engine from http://www.google.com, you may be searching Google via https://www.google.com (note the ‘s’ in http).

What does this mean and how does it impact businesses and their Search strategies, especially SEO. Google will begin redirecting users who are signed into their Google account (GooglePlus, Gmail, Calendar, Android, etc.) to their secure website vs. its open public website when a potential customer or users performs a search

Google has become more and more customized and personalized in their search results, thus now attempting to better protect its users (google account holders). This at first seems good, but for marketers, especially SEO experts and search engine marketers, its the start of a few problems. The first that we’ve come across is now that users who search under the secured google domain (as they’re signed into their google account), the analytics (ex. Google Analytics) will not show you the search terms and keywords that were used by the users / customers who arrived at your online business via the secured google search.

This creates a few problems for marketers and agencies such as broken transparency of the impact of their search engine optimization strategies, and the performance of the optimization. In other words, if an SEO expert optimizes an online business on specific action-oriented ‘buy’ keywords, and attains a stronger SERP (search engine result) position as a result, does the keyword a) draw the traffic to the site, and b) did it convert the visitor to a lead or customer. Under the new encrypted (secure) Google URL, the web analyst and conversion optimizer won’t have the full view on this any more.

According to Google:

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Tips: SEO Mistakes 101

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An SEO 101 topic, many times inexperienced digital marketers or webmasters  makes simple SEO mistakes that shatters an SEO campaign. Below are a few reasons why an SEO Campaign isn’t effective or note working, and how to fix it: Read more

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What’s the *#@! is inbound marketing and outbound marketing?

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In those kind words, it was still a good question someone asked upon me the other day. I’ll let the infographic describes it best (see below). Inbound and outbound marketing, their buzzy words the last few years yet everyone seems to have a slightly different response to it.

In my view, inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that a user or customer dominates or controls.  It  focuses on a specific and targeted group rather than the masses, yet its fair to say the masses can still be funneled through it (ex. websites and search).  Inbound marketing is essentially an online based marketing tool that has shown strong and effective results. Read more

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Fedex Usage of Social Media for Brand Crisis

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FedEx Bad Delivery Tosses Computer Monitor | Viral YouTube VideoRecently FedEx learned the hard way of social media power and consumer influence, and reciprocated the same to respond to a potential ugly crisis management situation.

Recently (December 19th, 2011) a YouTuber posted a video of a FedEx practically shot putting the delivery of  a new computer monitor to one of FedEx’s customers. Read more

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Tips: Bad Link Development

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Bad Link DevelopmentIt is true that all Link building or link development efforts will not contribute to great rankings. Too many spammy links can even get you listed out of the SERP’s (search engine result pages). The following helps the beginner understand link development tactics better off avoiding. Unless you’ve got an art for blackhat link development, see our other tips on building quality links.What is considered as a bad link? Read more
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Study: Mobile Marketing & Paid Search Advertising

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A recent study published projects mobile paid search advertising revenues in the US, which includes iPads and other tablets, could account towards 22% of total search revenues. (chart inside)

Published by Efficient Frontier (EFF) and Macquarie Capital, the study provides further insight into where businesses are shifting their advertising dollars; not just from traditional channels to online, but also how digital budgets are being allocated to each marketing channel. Read more

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Ready for Social Media Optimization?

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SMO (social media optimization), yeah, another acronym we don’t need, but a good comment to share from this years Ad Tech in New York, on social media marketing…

Just as business owners were getting a grip on the basics of SEO (search engine optimization), now they can add social media optimization (SMO) to optimize their brand for social.

“Just like you optimize for search, you need to optimize for social,” Dave Linabury, said director of interactive experience at Campbell-Ewald, speaking on a panel about social media. Linabury described the most innovative brands are beginning to audit their sites and finding new opportunities to encourage sharing of products, services, and content. Read more

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Why Create a Facebook Page for Business?

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Facebook is the largest one-stop-shop of consumers that offers small businesses the opportunity to target consumers at a granular and local level. Where better than to submerge a your business through a Facebook Business page to connect, engage, influence and make an impact with local consumers and customers.

Getting your business on Facebook and other social media properties as Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and others, all have their place and purpose. You here  business owner conversations at local cafes or seminars about getting your business needs to be on Facebook, starting with a Facebook Business page. But why? (see graph inside) Read more

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