Who would think something exciting would happen on Dec 28th, after all most people are on vacation no?
Todays caller inspiration was in from a few designers that were tasked with redesigning one of our clients websites. Par for the course, I got the call after the redesign asking about SEO. That is never a good thing really because of how much goes into design verses impact on the SEO.
When I first looked at the design, if this was years ago, I don’t think i would have cared. I overall did not like the site. In the past it would not of mattered what I thought. However, because conversion, and bounce rate are coming to the forefront of things, this was something I now needed to be concerned with. The overall user experience of this page was going to be pretty lacking.
First off the page looked nice as an ad slick. But for a website, not so much. The page was hard to read, lacked clear direction of the purpose of the page. And, what it really didn’t do was lead users to making a purchase. Sometimes in an attempt to be artistic, the website sometimes loses focus; we have about 8-15 seconds to captivate and stimulate the visitor into engaging with. This was a great example. Nowhere above the fold where there clues to what the client does. Nowhere about the fold was their visual clues that this was actually an e-commerce website.
Beyond all of that the website had a black background. Now in this SEO world of having to worry about the end user I had to address color because the last thing I want is a website that will increase my bounce rate and not convert.
Before I go on. I want to clearly state I love Darth Vader. I wear black as one of my daily colors. Heck it’s easy to match. But for a website. I changed ACTWD’s color to white back in 2001 after every complained they couldn’t read the site. And there in lies the take away.
But lets talk some turkey here; How does a black background convert over a white background website? Well of course an A/B test is always a good place to start. But, in lieu of that, on average, two exactly the same pages with just one having a white background and the other having a black background, white wins by at least 10 percentage points.
Psychology also goes a long way in selecting colors for a website. Who is your audience? Women tend to shy away from websites that are grey orange or brown yet react very favorable to blue purple or green. Men on the other hand like blue, green or black and dislike brown orange or purple.
The color blue is one of the best colors to use. It coveys trust and is a common color across brands. Paypal, Capital One, Chase Bank and even Facebook all are blue.
Avoid the color yellow like the plague. It its unsettling and often agitates the user and it even makes babies cry. Some brand managers use yellow to convey fun, but often they fall short. Having an anxious user on your website is not going to help the sales process.
Orange is the New… …. … Black. No I don’t mean the TV series, back in the early days of the internet many people had black websites. Orange is a real up and comer these days. It is fun and Amazon uses it. After all anything Amazon does when it comes to conversion should be copied. There is no better authority on conversion. And I shouldn’t need to say more than think orange my friend think orange.
And then there is White. I know white truly is not a color and more a lack there of. But it is so impactful. It gives the user the perception of space and makes them feel like they can breath on the website. White space and the effective use of white is just so elementary and do overlooked. Clutter and darkness is very bad for sales (remember that).
Learn to use color properly. It’s one of the largest contributors to a successful website and when in doubt test your outcomes. Don’t let a designer dictate. Many are very good, but I am really of the opinion that most function on an art level and not on a conversion level. To Right-Brained some say. I will say the people I met with today, they were pretty awesome because they listened, made adjustments and were responsive and not crying because I hurt their artistic feelings! I really respect that. Bottom line: Learning to use color properly will help you gain lots of the best color of all …GREEN!
So lets go back in time a bit. Google announced they were going to give a ranking bonus for any site that used HTTPS and forced all occurrences of their URLs to it. It didn’t sound right to me at the time because Google usually doesn’t announce things so that for me should have been my first indication that something was odd about this.
As most of you know we own a hosting company as well as a digital marketing agency so it gives us a bit of a leg up on understanding how things are implemented and what their impacts may actually be. Things that sound good on paper sometime in reality are not. And this is one of those items I suppose. So I went to talk to my system admin his first reaction was how it was going to slow up the load time on a site unnecessarily and the have sites that get huge page views a day. So needless to say i had a very unhappy system admin.
I am glad he balked so hard at this because it allowed us to slow down, not just charge into a pool because i was thinking about how we wanted to implement and if the lift would be enough to off set the hardware costs for the busiest of customers and such. So a funny thing happened while i was thinking about this.
As you most of you know i do a lot of lecturing on SEO and in Houston, I have a pretty big following and my classes started having people who had websites that took huge dives in traffic. They came to the class to find out why. As I started to talk about encrypting the website (using SSL), hands starting going up saying that their sites started tanking after the switch to https, in other words, forcing all pages to be encrypted.
The biggest issue was the forcing of the HTTPS and 301 redirecting the main HTTP connection on Port 80 over the the encrypted port on 443. As most of you know Google had discretion as to whether or not they honor a 301. In our experience only 80 percent of the requests get honored and it is why if possible I don’t treat the 301 as a magic cure all for anything i want to do to a website. Rather, we advise making every effort to keep an existing URL in tact and not change it when making any platform type change to a website. This is a very long way to say we decided not to advocate forcing the use of the https switch.
Also what we found is that there was a loss on link juice. People naturally link to HTTP whether they realize it or not. When you say www.seo411.com your browser reads that link and sends it to the unencrypted version of the website, which is standard. Review your link profile and you will see that links are not to your encrypted site site, but rather your standard plain old standby http. So inevitably link profiles were disrupted for a site when a site is unnaturally forced into a HTTPS state.
Needless to say there was a lot of issues and the idea on Google’s part may not have been well thought though.
Well that was were my original post was to stop. I was again as with most things I do, was answering a question I received Friday and I said the the person, thanks for the blog post.
Google must of gained access to my correspondence and displeasure with the entire thing, because I just received an alert saying that they were going to start favoring sites that could be reached via HTTPS. They added a few conditions. They include things like your page has to be coded right; you have to have a valid certificate and a few other techie type things.
This move is at best puzzling. Maybe Google’s departments don’t talk to each other. But by forcing HTTPS on all web pages, it makes websites far slower because each file has to be encrypted prior to delivery. Things that make the web faster, they are slowing down by this move. The other thing that bothers me is that our busier sites will now require a high availability designation or need to be clustered depending on the platform. It’s a lot of extra horsepower and they are somewhat taking the decisions out of the site owners hands by priority indexing the HTTPS version of the site.
I don’t know if any one noticed but Amazon took off their forced HTTPS designation especially during this time of year. And as I tell customers who ask questions: What does Amazon do and that usually will give you the right answer for your question. I this case only the check out process is encrypted as it should be.
Overall, this is an improvement over the previous iteration of the HTTPS credit, but its still putting an big onious on the backs of IT departments to keep websites running quickly especially for mobile, yet encrypting them which intrinsically slow a website down regardless of the processing power.
On my Santa wish list. Being we now have privacy protected can we have our keywords back Mr. Santa Google.. pretty please?
Everywhere I go I hear this questions. It’s from perspective clients. It’s from speakers at Chamber for Commerce meetings. It’s from ‘internet experts.’ So What is the ROI on social media. My personal opinion is that it is not the right questions and the superficial answer in most cases is $0. Its about the brand and community you can build first and foremost. Leading with ROI sets the project up for failure. Its somewhat an old school world way to gauge this.
The first issue I see is there are a lot of people that have no idea how to do social media correctly. There are few prevailing reasons why this is.
- Most companies know they have to have a social media presence but cannot see how to make that fit their particular business. This seems to be a common theme. Engineering firms seem to be particularly problematic. But what about a doctors office. Or a dentist. Or a Cigar Shop conversely has a much easier path because of the built in community.
- My pet peeve is when companies hire 20 somethings and feel they are an expert. Now in some cases, they may be however, when I see a kitten bemoaning work or cute animal pictures with quippy sayings or obscure hashtags that are ineffective, it becomes fairly clear that the level of social media panache.
- Stopping and starting is also a huge issue. I see so many people start ‘doing’ social and then stop. Just like in a business, you have to consistently participate. I know that there are many things business owners need to do but your almost better not to do anything rather than running your social media campaign like a Katy Perry song.
- Treating Social as a one trick pony is also bad. I had someone tell me today the his entire marketing strategy to tell people what he does is social media. He’s not doing SEO. He’s not doing SEM. He’s not doing any branding.
- Stop telling people to buy your product. Ever see the annoying guy on TV that says buy my product. That is the quickest path to have someone unfollow you and defeat the purpose of a building an audience.
So why should you have a social media plan. The one thing I try to impress on my students is that social is part of the the entire digital marketing strategy. So as I write this blog, it is a prime example of how this should work. This post will go out on social channels and if you as the reader deem it as a good piece you will share it on your social media. This will send signals to Google that the content of this article is worthy to be shared. As a result they will reward my site.
I often tell the story of when I asked my business partner two write me a page about schema. Well at the time we were one of the first to be talking about this so we picked up multiple shares on the page and we picked up links from multiple websites legitimately. This is how things should work. A link from a highly prestigious website has quantifiable value, but if i want to rank on a highly competitive term and that link is helping supporting that term. The what is the ROI.
Most businesses need to focus on building community and creating signals to support their marketing efforts. Yet very few know that because these elements are presented in a vacuum. Social is one function. SEO is another and Branding a third discipline and that is no longer the case. Each one of these elements need to be present for the digital marketing arm of the business to be successful.
One company that runs their social media perfectly is Williams-Sonoma. Their posts provide multiple paths for community building. They understand the brilliance for marketers that social media is. The people that like you give you a path for you to communicate with them at will and they don’t betray the trust always providing useful information that has products appended to it as an after thought. If you want an ROI this is where that sits.
If your a service the way to come up with the measurable value of Social is harder, however if you have any spend on web marketing, social must be done right for all aspects to work right. In other words, build a community.
