For the last 20+ years we have watched the Web Design and SEO industries evolve, as well as watched how small business operate inside that ecosystem. It is always striking to me how many people tell me about their cousin who builds their website; their niece that is an expert in Instagram, or their receptionist who runs their website in their spare time at the office. I get that there are a myriad of tools and products that allow business owners to feel empowered to build or manage their own websites, but just because you can pull you own tooth, should you.
There are a lot of pitfalls out in the digital world that allows Google to disqualify your site from being on the first page, or even being included. And some of that is not the small business owners’ fault, in the vein that their choices are made on good faith or rather, believing the vendor they choose being transparent/or covers the bases in their programming.
SEO and Web Design: Together Forever
These two items are always interconnected. This is not my opinion. It is a fact. Yet, when I look at a site built by a ‘web designer’ or online design too like WWWS (WixWeeblyWebSquarespace) This group combined accounts for at least 10 percent of websites that are improperly coded to have success on Google. I often find some of the most basic elements missing or misused.
Noindex is NoFriend (if you don’t know what you are doing)
The visual site builders often mark a website as noindex. What that means to Google is do not index this website. In other words, do not include this website in your directory. Places like Squarespace are doing this without most website owners even knowing the sites are being coded like or having the technical knowledge to fix it. They say they have done this so as to not create duplicate content. And although the premise is correct, the situation arises because of how online site building tools are structured to start with that is the real problem.
Yet, all these online site building subscription services tools are just this, a way to put a brochure website with little expectation that the website will ever rank well. If your goal is just to have a website, without traffic, this is an okay way to handle it this, but if your expectation is to have any speakable presence in the Google Maps, Google My Business or organic search results this is not the way to do it. In this order the noindex bug affects these design tools the most:
Squarespace, Wix, WordPress.com and then last is Weebly The best and quickest advise I can give you is to use WordPress (the .org/free version). If you use these tooks make sure you remove any of the no index language.
H1 H2 H2 H4 is a design element no more
Some of us are old enough to remember when sites were written by hand and H1-H6 meant something. When I teach web design Houston classes often tell me that they thought the H1-H6 tags were only put there to help with the web design process and are shocked to learn there is another and more appropriate use for them. Rather the H1 tag harkens back to the days of print when we would put a headline to very large to stress it’s importance. For example, when my Houston Astros won the Series a few years ago the word CHAMPS was the equivalent of the H1 tag in web design world. You are stressing this and in no other place is there and H1 tag on that page.
But now rather, people seem to be using H1 in multiple places on a page because it makes the font large (a web design element) and therefore dilute their message. Or they use No H1 tag simply because they don’t know any better and avoid it. This is one of the most important things you can do to help your website rank better. The answer is 1 H1 tag per page and make sure it contains the keyword you want to Rank on.
Title Tags – Remember Title Tags are one of the most important elements. Home does not a title tag make. And far too often it is was we see on we do an audit on a website. Better yet, its just the name of the business and not what you do.
Robot.txt is an important file to help Google know what to index and what not to among other things. We often see this improperly formatted which usually translates to telling Google not to index a site. *Note Google is phasing out noindex on 9/1 for depreciated code.
Sitemaps – Set up Search Console. Submit your sitemaps. It’s pretty easy and often overlooked
Meta Desc -ls a must to help Google understand what you think your website is about. Omitting it just ceding territory to someone else. Ceding is bad.
Schema – This is a toughie to explain because it involves coding and often not something most small businesses know how to do. The best advice is to find a plugin that will help format it for you. Include the local one for your address for sure
AMP – make sure you have AMP pages on your website. Again easily fixed with a plugin.
NoIndex – Make sure that is used properly
H1 Tags – Using them as design elements
As a small business owner these factors will help your chances of getting on the front page. Picking a company to do web design that is not on top of SEO practices can have a huge negative impact on visibility. Using a site building service can also have a huge negative impact and most small business owners are unwittingly falling into these traps and negatively impacting their businesses.
The concept seems so simple, doesn’t it? Backup your website. In addition to web hosting, we also register domains and have been with Tucows for nearly 16 years. About two years ago they asked us if we would be willing to handle all the people that have bad web hosting companies and domain resellers that don’t handle their responsibilities to customer properly. So we agreed.
Since then we have seen and heard some of the craziest domain and hosting screw ups. This morning a gentleman called Bernie called, and Bernie lost his domain because of one of these bad domain resellers and that’s how he ended up on our phone. Very long story short, he spent hours building a website for his church only to have that website just vanish. So I thanked him for today’s blog post idea. Why and how anyone should back up a website.
So first let’s establish why backup your website. It seems so basic I shouldn’t need to say it. However, there are a few circumstances that should be considered. First off as I am saying have a backup, I mean outside the web host or your office building. Having a backup on the servers hard drive does not count. Having one in Dropbox/One-Drive
So here are a few reasons why you need a good backup:
#1. Most web hosts do not back your website up, especially low-cost solutions
#2. Your web hosting company goes dark
#3. If your web host has a copy, their version may be corrupt, or doesn’t include recent updates.
#4. You need a copy if you ever want to move elsewhere
#5. Acts of God, think tornado or Explosion. You need an off-site backup
The first three items are the issues we normally see. Something bad happens and bam the website is gone. It is one of the reasons that I don’t like the wix/weebly/web people either. You cannot back those sites up to move your site elsewhere. It puts anyone at the mercy of their web host.
On alternative that I talk a lot about Wordpress and WordPress hosting. And that too has its own set of issues, but I think this makes a far easier set of circumstances. The first thing to understand is the difference between hosting a WordPress site (.org) vs. Free WordPress (the .com site). If you build on .com, you are using a free version that does not allow some of the most popular
If you build on .com, you are using a free version that does not allow some of the most popular plugins, but it’s a great learning tool. The only issue is when your ready to graduate the site can be moved via importing and exporting posts. The .org version allows you to have cool tools like the Updraft Plus backup solution. That migrates your site. Migration moves the site in tact, where as the import/export function will only keep your content.
Updraft is really a great tool. It allows you to backup your site prior to making changes. It also allows you to easily restore a site if you make a huge mistake. I found this out the hard way when I tried to change the theme on this site and blew up my navigation. Had I taken my own advice I could have easily reverted the site. Instead, I had to get my system admin involved to help me recreate the parts of the site that got decimated.
If you aren’t running a WordPress site you need to investigate what backup methods are available. I am a big proponent of using Dropbox as an offsite backup solution for both Computer and a website. It can be as easy as downloading your files to a folder that will sync with Dropbox.
And if your a mid-size or large corporation, you should have a disaster recovery plan. Again Explosion or Earthquake. Flood or Failure of hardware. As I type this you would again be surprised at large corporation that does not have proper backup systems in place. One system we are high on is Datto. It allows quick server restores in the event of failure. But there is a cost and many businesses shy away from it.
As I am sitting in my office, I hear my staff on the phone with yet another person without a backup asking if we can help them move their site. We have no problem doing things like this, but the reality is if people would simply have a backup, their lives woudl be much easier.
I got this question from one of my students. It was a question where I could just reply “Yes,” or I could seize an opportunity. At its core it’s a web design question, but also has pretty deep implications for SEO if done properly.
So here is the challenge. He has a long bulleted list that has some definitions on it. And if you put that page into mobile, it would be too much time is his fear. Now his question went on to ask if he should make a page for all the bullet points, and the answer, of course, would be yes. But to me it realistically wasn’t related to the bulleted list and mobile. You should always have a page that is like a table of contents type page or a bullet list that further develops those topics.
This goes back to how to structure a website really, and how to write a topics page. So here is an example of something I did. I wanted to let Google know that this customer was a moving company in Houston. Google was getting confused over this site because it also offers storage services, but not like a storage locker facility, and they also offer nationwide moving which keeps shifting the focus some, and it makes some issues because it’s diluting what Google feels the main purpose of the site is about. To start to sort this out, I went in and added a moving services page that looks like this:
Under each of these topics are a whole section, and then each of those become their own set of sub-topics that allow me to send the right information to Google to help it be less confused on what this company does. What this does is set a course for Google to follow with the proper reinforcement.
As search gets smarter it becomes more necessary to make sure you have topics that clearly set up a structure for the website. This is something many designers do not account for. So for George, the right answer is please shorten the definitions on the page next to the bullet points and then build a real substantive page of content that corresponds each of your bullet points, and make sure you link them to appropriate well-written pages that support the bullet point.
Beyond the obvious, the other thing this does is create a strong interlink set of pages that will allow Google to understand what the nature of your page is, and why it is important. We discussed why site structure is important in a previous blog, and this is a great example that supports this answer.
I always say my customers make the absolute best blog ideas and the best training experiences for the minions. Case in point, one of our very old customers called me today to tell me that their site isn’t ranking any longer and wanted to know why. Now they on and off had employed us to do SEO, at least two tours of duty on this site. I think the last time we touched the site was maybe in 2011. And we all know how much time had passed and how rapidly Google continues to evolve.
As I like to say, SEO is no longer a stand-alone event. And, I really don’t think you can do ‘just’ SEO any more. The proper term is Digital Marketing. I will keep saying it. But for someone calling on the phone to look at a site that hasn’t been properly maintained in about half a decade, how do you encapsulate that?
So I put together a list that may offer some solutions. Understand that this is written for a site that used to rank but doesn’t any longer, so it assumes there is proper title tags.
#1 Content
Well, of course, you had to know this was going to be my first item. But, it’s not sufficient to just say add content any more to a website. It has to actually be good content, written properly, and not just keyword focused. I know many of my old timers heard about keywords and adding keywords. And, why keywords are important, but I’ve had to adjust that over time. Just like the writing you see here. I dare to say none of it has been keyword oriented, but more thematic and helpful.
To my mind, this is how you pick up links properly. It also is a great way to build engagement and get people clicking on your site.
#2. Google Analytics
Yes, this may be a little of an odd thing to put on this list, but you would be surprised how long-time site owners still do not have Google Analytics on their website. The old log file readers like AWStat and Webalizer just don’t go far enough anymore to make a reasonable guess at what really is happening with your website.
If someone asked me now, I would not say I was overly concerned with the pure number of visits, and I’m more concerned with how those folks got there and what is the intent of the user. Am I meeting the needs of the user, and are they doing what I want them to do, like buying or contacting me? I can’t adjust pages people are landing on if I don’t understand. And if I don’t have my conversions set up, I’m not able to track the success or deficiencies of my website.
Overall I don’t see how it would be conceivably possible to run a website without Google Analytics at this point in time.
#3 House Keeping
I know, another very odd duck to see on a list, but if you don’t keep up with the security of your website, you may just find out that people are exploiting it. That can happen from various directions, but it’s incumbent on the customer, not the web host to patch WordPress installs. I can’t tell you how many times people call me to tell me their website isn’t working, and it’s because they have not patched a plugin or WordPress core.
Lots of bad things happen when you don’t keep your site up to date. And that just doesn’t go for WordPress. Magento has a bad record, and Joomla, we tell people yes we will host it, but you are on your own because of how insecure it is.
The problem with not monitoring or maintaining your website properly is that as things happen to it that you are unaware of, the site becomes damaged. Just like house neglect is never a good thing.
#4. Webmaster Tools aka Search Console
Why they changed the name has yet to be made apparent, but if you do not have a webmaster tools account set up, set it up. It tells you all sorts of neat stuff about your website, so when you’re wondering why it is not ranking, it will help you understand if the site is hacked, or if the site has bad quality because 404s are not handled right. Often it can help you find improper use of 301s and 302s. Frankly 302s are devastating and should NEVER be used, and someday I will address that too. It also will help you make a list of links and then allow you the opportunity disavow bad links (which is the next topic). Also, make sure you set up proper sitemaps in WMT.
#5 Links
Not keeping up with your once-ranking website also may be caused by bad links. We now live in a world where links can hurt you just as much as they can help you. Here we audit our sites constantly to unearth bad sites linking to us. It’s not easy, however, it needs to be at least checked. If you see a bunch of Chinese sites linking to you and you have no business in China, it’s a safe bet there is an issue with either bad link building, bad webmaster or neglect.
#6 Bad Webmasters
Yes, bad or incompetent webmasters can really screw up a site. As I was talking to the minions on this topic, Christina minion said to me this is why you tell us ‘know who you’re getting into bed with.’ Yes, that is the exact reason that you don’t just trust your website to anyone. Understanding how to run a website and understanding how to care for a ranking website is often an art form. Unless your webmaster has extensive tech skills and understands how to structure and work on a ranking site, they can do a lot of damage.
I admit this is one of those things that rub me the wrong way. If you don’t think our company is the right company for you, we are fine with that, but more times than not I have the new, less qualified and often cheaper webmaster standing on my doorstep asking me how to perform the job they were hired to do. If you find yourself in that position, it probably means you have the wrong person for the job.
Bad web designers are very hard to spot. But they are lethal to a website.
#7 Social Media
So this person that called me yesterday asking why her site wasn’t ranking anymore, and telling me how she hired a PR Firm to do her content also hasn’t posted one single item since 2014. For the seasoned Digital Marketing pro, you may have rolled your eyes. For the rest of you, social media is imperative, and far too often social is not done properly or overlooked.
I admit that I’m not a social person. I could sit in a house by myself for hours and read or play video games and not interact with another human and be perfectly happy. But when it comes to the health of my website, what I know is that I can no longer ignore social media, and I’ve been really pushing Twitter in my Houston SEO classes. Yes, I typed that right. In fact, I have a 2-hour seminar next week that explains how to do social properly. Gratuitously, you can see our class schedule here.
#8 Blogging
Yeah, so this has now changed. Blogging for SEO used to be way different, but now, to have a sustainable site, it is not possible to avoid this or not do it right any longer. One blog every 6 months really isn’t going to cut it, but neither are BS blogs that just reiterate a keyword, which is how we used to teach blogging.
Now blogging must be real. Blogging must be authentic, and it must be relevant. I used to prescribe to a short and punchy blog, but now, if you have something to say, say it. For example, this post is at 1336 words right this second. It is not set in stone, and there are some time considerations with this post, so it’s not an article. It’s also got my opinion throughout it.
When I teach I often say the blog is like the op-ed page of the newspaper or your website. It lets your readers see how you think and how knowledgeable you are. You know those bad web designers, they could never have a blog like this, one reason is because they don’t know enough.
#9 Old Brown Sweater
One last reason to have issues is not to have a modern web design. Old date websites telegraph bad things to your end users. This will lower your engagement and really stop people from doing business with you. Millenials are particularly suseptible to this.
So, 1518 word story short, if you are not actively working on your website daily, or at minimum weekly; if you are not doing the things outlined here in their totality and every facet then you are at a severe deficit, and if your site ranks it’s probably a fluke or a niche in the modern age.
So I started out today like any other normal day. Got up, looked over our sites. I talked to a few customers. Had a meeting over our new logo and then logged into webmaster tools. Eh or should I say Search Console. I went to one of my favorite places to identify issues with a website, Content Keyword. And the one for this site let me know that everything we well with the site. Google understands what my site is about, thankfully.
But what do you do when it’s not as clear-cut as this one. And how do you diagnose and fixed those issues? I found one of our sites though that didn’t look as nice and neat as this one does which prompted me to lift the hood and start seeking what possible causes are.
Google amasses this information based on what you tell it about your site is about. Create 1000, pages that say Sorry No Blah Blah x 3, the word Sorry ends up being on your list of Keywords and what Google thinks your website is about.
So how do you find the causes of some of this? We started to click through the front side of the website to try and find where the issues are hiding. But it’s amazing to me what happens when you strip all the paint off a website and see what it looks like Naked. So the next thing we did was to open firefox to see what our website looked like.
Firefox provides a great tool, as simple and retro as it may be to look at a site and see what it looks like in its rawest form. Simply download Firefox. And then go to the view menu and pick page style and turn off all the style on the website. This gives you a very different viewpoint as to what the website will look like. Now for my discussion I’m going to use Cigars International as my test site, mostly because it does so much correctly and having the style sheets off on the site only reinforces that.
So here is their site with the markup turned on, and the markup turned off.
Yes the writing is tiny, and if you want to expand this, please do this yourself, but here is the take way. They constructed the navigation of the website to reinforce that they sell cigars and that they are the expert in cigars. They put the word Cigar at the end of every brand they sell. They set up their tabs up so they could make huge submenus and that there could be huge reinforced navigation. And set this up in a non-spammy way.
Now how I know they did this correctly is because of the terms they rank on. They rank #1 on Cigars, and all of their internal links keep Googles attention on that. When they decide to deviate from that topic they do so by maintaining a clear, consistent navigation that keeps reinforcing the term cigars regardless of where the end user clicks. Because CI has done an excellent job in creating their site, and reinforcing what they do they can add other things and make it work for them. The navigation is intuitive and reinforces the overall objective.
I am a firm believer of picking the biggest guy in the pile and then working to beat them. So yes just like it’s my life goal to beat Godaddy at web hosting some day, for me beating CI is just as much on my radar. Yes, the site is large and yes it does have links, and that’s another one of its strengths, but that doesn’t mean I don’t try to beat them. And for all website owners, one of the quickest fixes you can do is reevaluate your navigation. Bad or screwy navigation, can negatively impact a site.
I think of Firefox as a flashlight. Mistakes happen gradually over time. And it becomes a slow drip of things, and it’s not readily apparent. I think over time, website owner fiddle with things and inadvertently cause themselves grief and by simply turning off the stylesheet, it can quickly shine a light on a few issues that might not have been picked up otherwise.
Things too look for when a style sheet is off are:
The size of the graphics your site is loading
The order in which your feeding google information
Any strange word sets that you wouldn’t notice normally
Make sure you understand what webmaster tools and the Content Keyword is telling you and make fixes based on fact.
The way and the amount of anchor text. Does it reinforce what you do?
I keep being told that SEO is voodoo or magic, and really all it is is common sense. Some day in the not too distant future I”m going to write out some of that common sense. But for now, if you sell cigars, please make sure you title your cigars, with the word Cigar in your title, not just Nat Sherman Host and not just random words. You will havea great content keyword list and Google will completely understand your website.
Although web designer and web developer are often used interchangeable, they couldn’t be more different than an apple and a banana. Sure, both involved setting up a website but that is where the similarities stop. Web Designers are more artistic and graphical, where web developers are the programmers that make the web work.
Initially everyone who could operate a website, was a web designer. Heck our company name started as Acreative Touch Web Design (ACTWD). There were easy to use software like FrontPage or you could simply write a little HTML code and that was that. But as time has gone on and the internet is more sophisticated, these rudimentary methods have transformed themselves in one of two ways.
The web designer has become a graphic artists, and is exactly what the name implies. They are involved in the pretty. They help develop the brand and feed the development group to make sure that the website has a wow factor to it.
The other type of web designer is someone with a computer that knows how to use Dreamweaver or can manipulate WordPress to some degree and build a website. Those people are also called web designers. They are often cheaper and normally work with small business owners setting up a website, For someone looking for a brochure website, these type web designers are okay. But for someone who wants effective vehicle to market their business they probably need to make a different decision.
Really option one is the first step in having a website built. But sadly most small business and inexperienced business owners pick option two not understanding the scope of the job. Then they bemoan the quality, functionally or effectiveness of their website. We work with a lot of web designers though our web hosting company and we appreciate the job they do. For the most part, their customers only need the brochure type website with no expectation for the website to rank.
So what exactly is a web developer?
This is what most businesses actually need. Sure it costs more but these folks write the code that makes the web run. Every time you place an order on Amazon or push the link button on FaceBook, a web developer wrote that. These folks should not be confused with a computer programmer, that’s Bill Gates or maybe Linus Torvalds. Web Developers program websites. They set up the technical interactions that a website needs to interact with Google properly. They understand that you don’t just take down all the pages on an existing website. Moreover those pages need to be redirected.
Web designers and web developers are two different jobs but they should work together. When planning a website its always advisable t first work with a designer to get the blueprint for the developer. Then move to a developer. It is common for larger firms to have both of these disciplines in house but it is incumbent on the business owner to find out if that is the case by asking the questions.
Few Guidelines to help choose designer vs. developer
These are questions we would recommend asking to determine which path to take:
Do you want a brochure/business card on the internet? A place to send people if they ask (designer)
Do you want a shopping card or a way for clients to interact with you on the internet? (developer)
Do you want a marketing campaign including SEO, SEM with lead tracking? (developer)
Do you want a shopping cart? (most cases developer)
Do you have any custom requirement for you business website? (developer)
Do you need graphics created? Do you have a Brand (designer)
How long have you been in business?
Who is your biggest client?
How many sites do you simultaneously work on?
These few basic questions should start to help clarify the picture what the scope of the job is and who to hire. But most of all this should highlight the fact that there is a world of difference between a web designer and a web developer.
So we met a web designer that says image size doesn’t matter anymore in terms of SEO. Interesting thought. Well let’s look at that idea some and then we can see what the reality of that statement might be.
When we are talking about SEO let’s keep in mind the majority of our focus is on Google these days and it’s most likely going to continue to be since they deliver the majority of traffic and control the biggest market share when it comes to search engine traffic.
So ask yourself this, If Google does not care about how big your images are why do they have a Google site speed tool that concerns itself with how fast a site loads? You can see how this tool function for yourself by following this link https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ . This tool is designed to give you insight in to what you can do to speed up your site. So it would make sense that large images that slow down a site might not be the best idea. Load time has been a ranking variable and continues to be one.
Here is a little screen cap of what this Google tool has to say about the home page of southwest airlines.
As you can see there is a whole section dedicated to optimizing images and the tool will even tell you the savings you will get by downloading the file that it produces for you which you can take and upload to your site to help speed things up.
So just based on this data alone I would venture to say it’s pretty safe to say that Google cares about the size of your images.
So why would they care you ask?
Well large bloated images slow down a site’s load time which when it comes to crawling the site slows down the spiders which is bad for search engine spiders and uses more of their resources then necessary.
Google is foremost concerned about their customers and the experience they will have when they use the search engine and follow a search result. What does that mean to anyone trying to rank in the organic Serp’s? Well it means that if you do not conform to providing the user experience that Google wants their customers to have you will get pushed out of prominent search results.
User experience has become a ranking variable and if your site experiences an excessive amount of bounces because let’s say your site images do not load fast enough and people click thru to the site and then leave because its taking too long to load you will be impacted.
Therefore, if the spider comes thru and sees excessively large images likely you will not ever get top rankings because Google will try and provide the best user experience possible and since they know people do not wait around for sites that load slow you will likely be dinged from the very beginning and never rank just to avoid a bad user experience. Let’s say you do get some rankings, be prepared to lose them once your bounce rate goes up because of excessive load times.
The struggle to offer quality images as well as good load time has been a real dilemma for about as long as the internet has been around. It’s especially difficult when we are talking about product images. Everyone knows users want to see good quality detailed images of products they are going to buy.
So how do we achieve the best of both worlds then?
Well the answer is use compression software
Get a web developer or a plugin that can help compress larger images
Reduce your image sizes by optimizing them before they go on the web using an image tool.
Isolate larger images to product pages and use thumbnails on pages and click thru to a larger image to reduce the initial load time of a page. Once someone clicks on a larger image they expect to wait a bit to get the detail they want.
Us the images the compressed images Google gives you.
Just remember the biggest part of all of this is user experience. If the user does not have a good experience using your site those signals will come thru to Google and good rankings may soon be lost.
So use your own best judgement and think about the logic of why larger images are not the way you want to go unless they can be isolated.
Also keep in mind that not everyone even in America has access to a high speed connection and therefore what maybe just a short 5 second delay could be as long as 20 to 30 seconds to someone else and as we all know the attention span on the web is not very long.
I got a tweet from my friend Tom, who is also an anchor here in Houston, about the Nest/Revolv problem that will present itself today. And although I don’t know someone in this exact situation, there is such familiarity with this situation. Even the players are the same for the most part. And why do I as a digital marketing company even have an opinion on a thermostat/home automation company? Fascinating topic really.
For those of you that have heard me speak, one of our biggest hot buttons is warning :::cough::: I meant to say educating, students on the evils of using third party systems to run their websites. And although Revolv is not a web platform, the problem that results is the same.
The nutshell issue is that Alphabet, you know them as Google, bought Nest in 2014 and they have made a BUSINESS decision and will effectively disable a product that consumers purchased with a promise of a lifetime subscription. I stress the business decision, because this is the fundamental problem I see. Companies start up a certain way, and then when they are sold, business decisions are made that may not reflect the original promise of the company.
Often when I teach my SEO Digital Marketing classes here in Houston, I meet people who tell me how great SquareSpace, Shopify, WeeblyWixWeb (sic) are. They all want to tell me how easy they work. Or how they can drag and drop, and it’s all most cool. Millennial students are the most mesmerized by all of this. I always ask them that if Shopify decides tomorrow that they want to become a retail energy provider that sells electricity and get out of the e-commerce business, where would that leave your business? Most dismiss me. You know that would never happen. If only that weren’t the truth.
Way back when, we all blogged on a third-party platform named Blogger. It was awesome, and then Google, now known as Alphabet (yes the same people that bought Nest) came in and purchased Blogger. We SEO types used it, and recommend it, and then one fateful March day we all got an email that said Blogger will no longer be allowed to post to websites using FTP and that all the posts on Blogger now belonged to Google. It was a business decision, and woe to us who didn’t fit into the new business model. We all basically lost or blogs and had to start fresh with a new up and coming software called WordPress. But at least we owned our own files and no one was claiming the content and ideas we produced.
Google has bought many applications, including Urchin, which has become Google Analytics, which is slowly starting to have fees attached to it. And I guess the days of Urchin being the most awesome Stats program are long in the review mirror. They bought YouTube. In fact, the list is endless of web applications they have purchased. And as I type this, kudos to Mark Zuckerberg for refusing to sell them Facebook.
But the take away is the end user must understand the impact of working and dealing with third parties, that may just make a business decision and put you out of business. Understand that the cloud just means your renting someone else’s idea, and depending on how integrated you make it, your business may become completely dependent on it. No business is immune to being sold, and as the tech industry goes, sold to Google, and they can make any BUSINESS decision they want.
The next question I get is, well then what do we do? I have always recommended using WordPress. Yes, you have to maintain it, and yes, you have to learn it. But with a great web hosting company standing behind you that will help you (think ACTWD 😉 there is no reason why anyone should be using any third-party software solution that does not allow you to touch and know where your files live. If its in the cloud, some day someone may kick you off of it and your business becomes a casualty of a business decision.
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!
As you know I love to tell you my tales as I travel around town and meet new people. My newest story is about a website that had its traffic drop off by half over the last year. As everyone knows, that can be a deathblow to a business.
Often there is a desperation play to hire someone…anyone that sounds like they know what they are talking about to fix it. Most times they
make it worse. Often by the time the folks get to use they are 3-4 SEO firms down the road and we are the big gun they call in to fix it.
We have encountered many a site that has found itself in hot water. Commonly its links that have caused the issue. When I look at a small local business that has 15,000 links, it becomes an instantaneous red flag. Most normal small businesses would never have that. Usually we have to spend time on cleaning up those bad links and anyone that has ever done a link audit knows how time consuming correcting 15,000 links can be. I suppose I also don’t have to spend time explaining the implications of the SEO team who has created 15,000 spammy links in 2015. Every site we take over these days this is now the first thing we do. I don’t think you can do effecient SEO on a site with a bad link profile. Bad SEO firms don’t even know how to do this and honestly can do more harm than good.
The next problem we see is bad content which may caused the site to be Panda-ed. Yes, that is now a real term. It is when Google algorithmically penalizes a site because the content is thin or repetitive. So on the new , there were many pages on this website that were product pages with server specs on them. Pretty beefy pages in the word count realm, but pretty much a regurgitation of the manufacturers server spec pages. There were no usable pages that help buyers make informed decisions. These pages aren’t really repairable and it will take time to get good quality content in place to off set the issue.
There is no accounting for the quality of writing really. What one person likes another person complains about. But don’t hire writers over seas. Make sure you review the content your SEO firm is putting up to make sure they aren’t hiring writers over seas. There is a definitive way a person writes when English is not their native language. Google now has the ability gauge the quality of writing so bad writers beware.
And then of course there is the web design issues. There are so many designers that have no idea how to put a website together properly for SEO. What it really means is that they don’t know how to put a site for the end user really. Worse yet is there is the group that says they know SEO, but then build a website that although may have title tags, it doesn’t have much else.
It is always hard for me to have to tell someone …site looks great but its poorly assembled and then have explain how to fix it. Sorry you wasted your money. It seems to be an never ending battle. As recent as today, we looked at today, and there was no NAP on the site anywhere, yet they didn’t’ understand why they had no google local listing.
Fixing broken websites or algorithmically challenged sites has become something we all are faced with these days. I suppose its good that there are so many bad web designers out there because it means plenty of work for us good ones. But, if i could tell a consumer one thing, it would be to do their homework and make sure you know who your selecting to do your website and that cheap or inexpensive is not always better. A bad web design firm or SEO firm can do far more harm than good.
Got up, looked over our sites. I talked to a few customers. Had a meeting over our new logo and then logged into webmaster tools. Eh or should I say Search Console. I went to one of my favorite places to identify issues with a website, Content Keyword. And the one for this site let me know that everything we well with the site. Google understands what my site is about, thankfully.
Firefox provides a great tool, as simple and retro as it may be to look at a site and see what it looks like in its rawest form. Simply download Firefox. And then go to the view menu and pick page style and turn off all the style on the website. This gives you a very different viewpoint as to what the website will look like. Now for my discussion I’m going to use Cigars International as my test site, mostly because it does so much correctly and having the style sheets off on the site only reinforces that.
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.
My newest story is about a website that had its traffic drop off by half over the last year. As everyone knows, that can be a deathblow to a business.